Monthly Archives: January 2006

It’s a New Phil, Week 1

I’ve just had my first official weigh-in after beginning a weight loss program recommended (and supervised by) my primary care physician. I had my annual physical a couple of weeks ago and the scales showed an alarming 297 lbs.

Now please note that this was not alarming because of any specific health risks (the general risks associated with lugging that kind of baggage around being more than sufficient), but more because it put me three pounds shy of the big three-oh-oh, which is just not a respectable weight for somebody who isn’t starting for the NFL or who isn’t a Sumo wrestler and I must come clean — neither of those apply to me.

The plan the doc has me on is one of those moderate and super-sensible deals. I count calories, fat, and fiber (the latter being something of a mitigator.) I don’t currently count carbs, although the tools I have could do the math that way. I personally don’t want to go down that road again. As far as I’m concerned, low carb is a mirage in a desert of getting nowhere with diets. (Of course, your mileage may vary.)

One of the interesting features of the program is that I will be cutting my caloric intake further as I lose, so this could potentially begin a foray into the world of CR life extension, although right now — at 1500 calories a day — I think I’m still well north of any CR plan.

Still, you have to crawl before you can walk. And my first week of crawling has resulted in a 7 pound loss. At two-nine-oh, the big three-oh-oh seems a lot less menacing and I plan to see it quickly receding in the old rearview mirror.

More next week.

Stop Me if You've Heard This

Welcome, blonde joke enthusiasts. Say, before you follow the link below, why not take a look around The Speculist? Are you interested in the subject of life extension or alternate energy sources? We’ve got it! How about some really deep ponderings (part two here) about what’s happening with the universe? We have that, too.

Or maybe you’d like a quick summary of recent news related to the future? We’ve got it.

How about a round-up of 50 good news stories to brighten up your day? No need to be a stranger.

Paul Hsieh provides a link to what is reputed to be the funniest blonde joke ever. I’ll let you all be the judge.

Stop Me if You’ve Heard This

Welcome, blonde joke enthusiasts. Say, before you follow the link below, why not take a look around The Speculist? Are you interested in the subject of life extension or alternate energy sources? We’ve got it! How about some really deep ponderings (part two here) about what’s happening with the universe? We have that, too.

Or maybe you’d like a quick summary of recent news related to the future? We’ve got it.

How about a round-up of 50 good news stories to brighten up your day? No need to be a stranger.

Paul Hsieh provides a link to what is reputed to be the funniest blonde joke ever. I’ll let you all be the judge.

It's Hyperspace! Subspace! Warp Drive!

Or possibly just pseudoscientific rubbish which has somehow managed to attract government funding, perhaps via powerful magnetic fields:

The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft.

Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension.

Don’t get me wrong. Nobody is more eager to see three-hour trips to Mars and 80-day trips to Alpha Centauri than yours truly. I’m just not holding my breath, is all.

UPDATE FROM STEPHEN: Here’s a New Scientist article on the same subject.

[Dröscher] and Häuser have suggested an experiment to prove it.

This will require a huge rotating ring placed above a superconducting coil to create an intense magnetic field. With a large enough current in the coil, and a large enough magnetic field, Dröscher claims the electromagnetic force can reduce the gravitational pull on the ring to the point where it floats free. Dröscher and Häuser say that to completely counter Earth’s pull on a 150-tonne spacecraft a magnetic field of around 25 tesla would be needed. While that’s 500,000 times the strength of Earth’s magnetic field, pulsed magnets briefly reach field strengths up to 80 tesla. And Dröscher and Häuser go further. With a faster-spinning ring and an even stronger magnetic field, gravitophotons would interact with conventional gravity to produce a repulsive anti-gravity force…

Why not try it?

And here’s the Wikipedia article on Burkhard Heim. He’s the eccentric scientist who came up with the theory behind these proposed experiments. This theory is weirdly accurate at predicting particle masses.

It’s Hyperspace! Subspace! Warp Drive!

Or possibly just pseudoscientific rubbish which has somehow managed to attract government funding, perhaps via powerful magnetic fields:

The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft.

Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension.

Don’t get me wrong. Nobody is more eager to see three-hour trips to Mars and 80-day trips to Alpha Centauri than yours truly. I’m just not holding my breath, is all.

UPDATE FROM STEPHEN: Here’s a New Scientist article on the same subject.

[Dröscher] and Häuser have suggested an experiment to prove it.

This will require a huge rotating ring placed above a superconducting coil to create an intense magnetic field. With a large enough current in the coil, and a large enough magnetic field, Dröscher claims the electromagnetic force can reduce the gravitational pull on the ring to the point where it floats free. Dröscher and Häuser say that to completely counter Earth’s pull on a 150-tonne spacecraft a magnetic field of around 25 tesla would be needed. While that’s 500,000 times the strength of Earth’s magnetic field, pulsed magnets briefly reach field strengths up to 80 tesla. And Dröscher and Häuser go further. With a faster-spinning ring and an even stronger magnetic field, gravitophotons would interact with conventional gravity to produce a repulsive anti-gravity force…

Why not try it?

And here’s the Wikipedia article on Burkhard Heim. He’s the eccentric scientist who came up with the theory behind these proposed experiments. This theory is weirdly accurate at predicting particle masses.

Dean Esmay On the Singularity

Specifically, he describes how it relates to the Better All the Time view of the world:

People who suggest that it’s all fleeting and going to come crashing to a halt remind me of the people that Gregg Easterbrook identified in The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. By any measurable–I said measurable–standard, the human condition is improving in the vast majority of the world. You name it–health, lifespan, clean water, clean air, abundant food, leisure time, health, safety, security, mobility, education, it’s all getting better. Yet as this happens, people are convinced that things are getting worse anyway.

Methinks most of Kurzweil’s critics are guilty of a similar type of thinking: we can’t possibly be on such an amazing technological cusp can we? Surely something must make it all come crashing to a halt soon, right?

Need I say it? Read the whole thing.

Rose Bowl Final

Texas 41, USC 38. Vince young clinched it with a cakewalk 4th down touchdown leaving 19 seconds on the clock and USC unable to organize an effective response. The Trojans’ amazing winning streak, which started in 2003, comes to an end.

(I know, we don’t really cover this stuff here. But we’ve been a little one-note the past couple of days and I just wanted to mix things up.)

Tipler Weighs In

Frank Tipler has responded to Glenn’s post linking to my post about God and the Singularity. He writes:

I beg to differ with:

“PHIL BOWERMASTER writes on God and the Singularity. They’re not the same thing, he notes.”

The word “singularity” has several distinct meanings. P.B. is referring to a sudden and radical change in technology. But “singularity” also has a precise mathematical meaning” “points” where quantities diverge to infinity (or are otherwise not defined). The laws of physics tell us that the universe began in a singularity in this precise mathematical sense 13.7 billion years ago. This initial singularity is the Uncaused First Cause. Maimonides and Aquinas defined “God” to be the Uncaused First Cause. Hence, by definition, the Cosmological Singularity is God!

Several of those who responded to the original entry made similar comments, although without referencing Maimonides and Aquinas. Professor Tipler is correct to point out the referring to the predicted upcoming Technological Singularity as “The Singularity” is a subjective and arbitrary choice. However, at the risk of bandying cosmological ideas about with one of the authors of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, I would assert that it may be just as arbitrary to identify the singularity of 13.7 billion years ago as the Uncaused First Cause. If those who are now applying evo/devo concepts to cosmology are correct, the singularity that began this particular universe is just one of many in a developmental multiverse. As John Smart explains it:

In the simplest and most biological of these cosmological models, our universe’s genes self-organized, through many successive cycles in the multiverse, to produce the life-friendly and intelligence-friendly universe we live in today. This theory of intelligent self-organized design proposes that, analogous to living ecosystems, our universe’s “genes, organisms, and environment” encode deep developmental intelligence on a macroscopic scale, while they use primarily evolutionary and chaotic mechanisms to unfold that intelligence on the scale that we normally observe it.

So our particular universe need not be the (direct) result of an Uncaused First Cause, and that singularity of 13.7 billion years ago may or may not be correctly identified with God. However, if there is a larger universe that evolves increasingly intelligence-supporting universes, we do face the question of how that ever came into being. The first and perhaps greatest singularity, maybe the one that really deserves to be called “the singularity” is at heart a conceptual one, having to do with the discontinuity between nothing existing and something existing. Stephen has called this singularity The Miracle, and about it he writes:

There’s a central question that science cannot address. For all of us, believers and secularists alike, it’s “turtles all the way down.”

Whether you believe in God, believe there is no god, or remain undecided – there is an undeniable miracle. Why does anything exist at all? Believers say “God made it.” Yeah, well who or what made God? Secularists like to talk about the Singularity that caused the Big Bang. Okay, but where did that come from? If you say “Multiverse,” or even that intelligent universes spawn other intelligent universes (as discussed James Gardner’s book Biocosm) then that’s just another turtle.

So here, then, is that Uncaused First Cause of Maimonides and Aquinas. Or maybe it would be better to say where, then, is that Uncaused First Cause?


On an almost completely unrelated note, does anyone agree with me that Glenn ought to make an MP3 of his song about the Singularity available to a waiting world?

UPDATE: Upon closer reading, it looks like Glenn’s song isn’t so much about the Singularity as it is about Clarke’s Three Laws. Well, Criminy…nobody wants to hear that.

Never mind.