Do subatomic particles have free will?

If humans have the least bit of free will, then subatomic particles do too, claim two scientists. Read more here.

Why today's kids don't understand math

This is the NEW New Math, and it's no wonder kids have no understanding of mathematics.

By the way, this kind of complete obfuscation is taking place in every subject. Not just math.
And it's deliberate.
This is how you turn people into cattle.

Dean Radin, PhD, on psi phenomenon

Dean Radin is a scientist investigating the reality of psi phenomenon, and has some interesting things to say. It turns out that there is quite a lot of evidence for it, and it is starting to be less taboo, as a subject of study or even discussion.

If you want more detail, check out this longer lecture Radin gave at Google. It's quite good.

Nerd sniping

A New Marriage of Brain and Computer

This is a lecture given by Stuart Hameroff at the GoogleTechTalk series, regarding his theory on the quantum basis of consciousness. I have been increasingly swayed by the quantum-consciousness argument over the last couple decades.

Plasma life

Hot Gas in Space Mimics Life

"We have broken the speed of light"

This is what you get when you have the Autobahn -- no respect for speedlimits. A couple of German scientists claim to have caused light to exceed c.

We have broken the speed of light

Perceiving the truly alien

How much of what we see is actually based on "icons"?

"Chair", "person", "machine", "mammal", that sort of thing. I would argue a lot of our perception of the world is tokenized in this way. So what happens when you move into a world where literally everything is new, far outside our token-library?

Here's a fascinating account of one of the first deep-sea bathysphere dives, and how the view out its porthole affected the observer.

Architect Richard Gage analyzes the collapse of WTC 1, 2 and 7

And concludes it's almost certainly controlled demolition in every case. I found his lecture quite compelling.

Swarm Behavior article on NG website

You can find National Geographic's article here. I love this kind of stuff.

"Ants aren't smart," Gordon says. "Ant colonies are." A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest path to the best food source, allocating workers to different tasks, or defending a territory from neighbors. As individuals, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. They do it with something called swarm intelligence.
Where this intelligence comes from raises a fundamental question in nature: How do the simple actions of individuals add up to the complex behavior of a group? How do hundreds of honeybees make a critical decision about their hive if many of them disagree? What enables a school of herring to coordinate its movements so precisely it can change direction in a flash, like a single, silvery organism? The collective abilities of such animals—none of which grasps the big picture, but each of which contributes to the group's success—seem miraculous even to the biologists who know them best. Yet during the past few decades, researchers have come up with intriguing insights.

For All Mankind

For All Mankind is a wonderful documentary about the Apollo moon missions, which were an important part of my childhood.

You can watch it in 10-minute pieces by starting with the YouTube link to part 1 below, and then continuing with the subsequent parts (links included here, but also found in the YouTube sidebar). It's NASA footage you've rarely or never seen, and well worth watching. The audio commentary from the astronauts is also fascinating.

Oh, and ignore the viewer comments, they're full of "the moon landing is a hoax" nonsense. Just let yourself be mesmerized by the imagery, the words, and Brian Eno's haunting ambient soundtrack.



Part 1 (above) | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8

The challenge to the 'industrial gene' paradigm

The technologies we use have consequences, some of which come back to haunt us in dangerous ways. We dive in, thinking we know how deep the water is, but find out later we've waded in beyond our ability to swim. Genetic manipulation is a prime example of this. I'm no Luddite, but this is one technology we'd do well to stop tinkering with.

The New York Times has an article called A Challenge to Gene Theory, a Tougher Look at Biotech which hints at the beginnings of an awareness just how deep these waters are. They report,

Last month, a consortium of scientists published findings that challenge the traditional view of how genes function. The exhaustive four-year effort was organized by the United States National Human Genome Research Institute and carried out by 35 groups from 80 organizations around the world. To their surprise, researchers found that the human genome might not be a “tidy collection of independent genes” after all, with each sequence of DNA linked to a single function, such as a predisposition to diabetes or heart disease.

Instead, genes appear to operate in a complex network, and interact and overlap with one another and with other components in ways not yet fully understood. According to the institute, these findings will challenge scientists “to rethink some long-held views about what genes are and what they do.”

This idea, called the "industrial gene" theory, operates from an assumption that each protein in the DNA sequence can be associated with a gene, which is then expressed in a deterministic way, called a phenotype. It is a useful assumption if you're planning to do your own sequencing and patent the modification. But it may not have any basis in reality.

I remember reading about how genes store data a few years ago, I think it was in Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life by Jeremy Campbell, and it was stated that the genetic code is infinitely more complex than we'd initially thought. Rather than one gene being read once for a specific function, the same DNA sequences were being read many times, in many different ways, for very different functions. For example the protein pairs might be read "left-to-right, one-by-one" for phenotype A, but also "backwards, skipping every other pair" for an entirely different phenotype B, and so on. It seems very likely the information contained within the DNA is far richer and more complex than we are used to thinking about, like a protein hologram of unimaginable complexity.

I read that years ago, and yet it's mostly been overlooked or purposely ignored because it's not convenient for biotech industries, who prefer the industrial gene model and its legal protections.

In the United States, the Patent and Trademark Office allows genes to be patented on the basis of this uniform effect or function. In fact, it defines a gene in these terms, as an ordered sequence of DNA “that encodes a specific functional product.”

In 2005, a study showed that more than 4,000 human genes had already been patented in the United States alone. And this is but a small fraction of the total number of patented plant, animal and microbial genes.

In the context of the consortium’s findings, this definition now raises some fundamental questions about the defensibility of those patents.

It's not hard to see the dangers posed by uninformed meddling, then. We can create animals with greater resistance to infection, but what other phenotypes are we unwittingly mucking up? One can't mathematically predict what these genes will do because they're only the instructions, not the machinery that acts upon the instructions. You must let the embryos grow and then hope you didn't stomp on anything important in the process.

Such hubris has serious consequences. Have you ever heard of "terminator genes"? Here's an article about it from Time Magazine, called The Suicide Seeds.

This stuff is going to get out of hand.

Underwater camouflage

This is fascinating stuff. I've always been mesmerized by the octopus. Imagine what kind of language they'd use if they ever attained sentience!

The Human Behavior Experiments

(Many thanks to Andrew Meyer for giving me a working permalink to this documentary.)

The Human Behavior Experiments is a CBC documentary on research into how people can be manipulated into being shockingly cruel to one another. It begins with the famous Milgram experiment in 1962, in which two-thirds of the participants -- normal people -- eventually obeyed the experimenters' instructions to deliver what they believed were lethal shocks to other test subjects. Of course, the shocks and the screams weren't real. The real point of the experiment was to see how far people will go in hurting one another. Very far, it turns out.

The conditions for widespread cruelty can arise spontaneously, as was the case when many people watched Kitty Genovese get stabbled to death without coming to her aid. The conditions can also occur quite deliberately. This is what made the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps, as well as Abu Ghraib, possible. The photos from Abu Ghraib are eerily resonant with the famous Stanford Prison Experiment from 1971. Social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who devised that experiment, said,

When the images of the abuse and torture in Abu Ghraib were revealed, immediately the military went on the defensive, saying, "it's a few bad apples". When we see somebody doing bad things, we assume they were bad people to begin with. But what we know in our study is there are a set of social psychological variables that can make ordinary people do things they never could imagine doing.

We take our cues from those around us, and this seems to be very deeply wired within our brains. If no one rises up to stop an injustice, it can go on for quite a while before someone wakes up and realizes the gravity of the situation. In the presence of strong authority figures very few people will rebel, especially when they see their fellows obeying orders.

I believe the technology for producing mass obedience is far more mature than people realize. Like a snake charmer, the mass media has mutated into a hypnotic mechanism of control. It's not perfect control, mind you. Certainly there is educational and nonmanipulative content on the television, radio, in magazines, etc. But make no mistake: there is just enough control to blunt any serious questioning of authority. We are given the appearance of debate, of objection, to this or that policy. But it is simply theater.

For extra credit, and for specific examples of the manipulation I'm referring to, please watch Bill Moyers' excellent documentary Buying The War, as well as Robert Kane Pappas's Orwell Rolls In His Grave. Both can be seen online at the links provided.

Then you might just want to watch They Live again, for kicks.

Now for the good news. All we have to do is wake up. That's all. Just...wake...up.