Author Archives: Phil Bowermaster

Never Say Never

No matter who you voted for or what your expectations are for Barack Obama’s presidency, today is a great day for America. Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal:

And this has grown old, and maybe it’s the last time to say it, history moving so fast, but there’s something we all know so well that we are perhaps forgetting to see it in the forefront. But a long-oppressed people have raised up a president. It is moving and beautiful and speaks to the unending magic and sense of justice of our country. The other day the journalist John O’Sullivan noted that 150 years after slavery, a black man stands in the place of Lincoln in the inaugural stands, and this country has proved again that anything is possible, that if we can do this we can do anything. That is a good thing to remember at a difficult time.

A lot of people thought they would never live to see this day, and were wrong. The future came faster than expected. It tends to do that, which is why I’m a little disturbed by Colin Powell’s remarks on the inauguration in light of the celebration of MLK day

Even with Barack Obama’s election as President, Powell also talked about not letting King’s dream die.

“He would never rest. He would never be satisfied. He would still be beating that drum,” Powell told the crowd.

Sorry, I have to take issue with the word “never.” If Powell just meant that Dr. King would “still not be satisfied,” then I can certainly see that. But to say that he would “never” be satisfied is to argue that a satisfactory resolution of race relations in this country is not achievable, that it lies perpetually out there somewhere beyond the horizon.

On the most recent FastForwad Radio, we discussed a potential coming Utopia. I argued that Utopias are achievable but that they are always relative and that they don’t seem like “Utopia” to the people who live there. The reason is that by “Utopia,” we tend to mean a future in which no more problems exist. That probably can’t happen. Completely solve any of the world’s major problems — poverty, disease, war — and you will still have a world in which problems exist. The people who live in that world, though far better off than we are, will still believe that they have difficult lives, filled with dangers and risks.

But in his “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. King did not describe a world in which all problems are solved. He described a world in which one major, complex, ugly, and seemingly unsolvable problem was eliminated. The power of the speech is predicated on the idea that somehow, maybe, someday, the dream will come true. If he had prefaced his remarks with the words “Now, of course, none of this will ever happen, but…” how effective would that speech have been?

Believing the future we want is possible is a major contributing factor in how we bring it about. We must be careful about how we throw that word “never” around.

Let's be Amazed

Via GeekPress, blogger Jesus Diaz at Gizmodo is quite taken with this video of a Yoshimoto cube in action.

Diaz comments that the video “blows his mid and fries his brain.”

I was interested to see in the comments that quite a few readers don’t share his enthusiasm:

Wow…he can use both of his hands at the same time to do the same thing….how does he do it!?!?!?!? (sarcasm).

What’s so hard to understand? I mean, it’s just able to fold into 2 separate cubes because there’s space on the inside that you can’t see. And when they are together, it is only gold and silver on 3 sides of the 2x2x2 cube, the sides which are facing you.

I don’t know how this is impressive. It’s a simple concept….

Nothing new here. I had one of these as a child more than 20 years ago. It was fun at the time, but nothing too tricky to work out.

Say — and I’m just asking, here — can’t something have a simple mathematical explanation, and be perfectly understandable, and have been around for long time, and still be really impressive? Totally amazing, even?

I don’t see how a sense of wonder — especially somebody else’s sense of wonder — does anyone any harm. And, other than a need to establish one’s own relative sophistication and intellectual superiority, why would anyone ever go to the trouble of telling someone else that they shouldn’t be impressed by something?

I think I’ll go ahead and be amazed, anyway. The world is a little more interesting and a lot more fun if we don’t insist that there’s nothing worth getting all worked up about. Let’s go ahead and get worked up, shall we?

Let’s be amazed.

Let’s be Amazed

Via GeekPress, blogger Jesus Diaz at Gizmodo is quite taken with this video of a Yoshimoto cube in action.

Diaz comments that the video “blows his mid and fries his brain.”

I was interested to see in the comments that quite a few readers don’t share his enthusiasm:

Wow…he can use both of his hands at the same time to do the same thing….how does he do it!?!?!?!? (sarcasm).

What’s so hard to understand? I mean, it’s just able to fold into 2 separate cubes because there’s space on the inside that you can’t see. And when they are together, it is only gold and silver on 3 sides of the 2x2x2 cube, the sides which are facing you.

I don’t know how this is impressive. It’s a simple concept….

Nothing new here. I had one of these as a child more than 20 years ago. It was fun at the time, but nothing too tricky to work out.

Say — and I’m just asking, here — can’t something have a simple mathematical explanation, and be perfectly understandable, and have been around for long time, and still be really impressive? Totally amazing, even?

I don’t see how a sense of wonder — especially somebody else’s sense of wonder — does anyone any harm. And, other than a need to establish one’s own relative sophistication and intellectual superiority, why would anyone ever go to the trouble of telling someone else that they shouldn’t be impressed by something?

I think I’ll go ahead and be amazed, anyway. The world is a little more interesting and a lot more fun if we don’t insist that there’s nothing worth getting all worked up about. Let’s go ahead and get worked up, shall we?

Let’s be amazed.

Despair Sucks

[Note: this post contains spoilers concerning the final episode of Battlestar Galactica last season, and a few mild tonal and thematic spoilers for last night's season premiere -- but I don't give away any plot points.]

In honor of the return of Battlestar Galactica, I give you Five Ways the World Can End. The five listed ways are all plausible, although I think grey goo and robot (Cylon) uprising really should have made the cut. If you want a more complete list, these folks are paying very serious attention to the whole question of how the world might end.

Those who follow Battlestar Galactica know that the end of the world is key to the storyline — although the show actually began with the world ending and then had things get more challenging from there. When last we saw our heroes (and the villains, with whom they had made a probably temporary alliance) they had come to the end of their long search for the planet Earth. Their hopes were utterly dashed when Earth turned out to be a devastated wasteland — a world that had itself apparently ended long ago.

So the big question for all these many months has been — and THEN what happened? Last night, we found out. In a word, what happens is despair. As executive producer Ron Moore puts it:

It felt like, if we were going to get to a place where we’re going to find Earth mid-season and it’s not going to be what they’d hoped, it’s all going to be ashes, you had to play it truthfully. You had to say it’s really going to devastate them. It’s going to hit them in a way we’ve never seen before. Our heroes are not going to be heroic. They’re not going to be able to come back from this easily. It’s going to take their fondest hope away from them.

galacticaEarth.jpg

Well, the season premiere delivered all that and then some. It was one of the most gripping and relentless hours of television I have seen in a long time. If you are spoiler-tolerant, read the interview with Moore from which the above quote was taken. It provides a fascinating look at how this bleak story was put together. It also includes this rather worrying exchange between the interviewer (bold type) and Moore:

My attitude was pretty much, “Look, we’re in the last chapter here. Anyone who’s come this far and doesn’t want to watch the rest — they’re a minority at best.” People are going to want to see how this turns out. And yeah, this is a very dark chapter. This may not even be the darkest chapter.

That’s a scary thought.

[laughs] It may not get better.

I hope he’s kidding. An hour of despair can be an extremely moving and cathartic experience. But speaking as a fan of the show, you don’t go dragging me halfway across the galaxy for the past half decade just to tell me that the world is a harsh place and that things don’t always work out well, and in fact that sometimes they work out horribly.

As the Old Man might say, “I already frakking knew that.”

And speaking as someone who is concerned about the future, and who takes the idea of the end of the world seriously, I will be very much disappointed if our heroes don’t turn it around and find something to hope for. An orgy of bleakness might be cutting edge TV, and it might be an original way to bring a series to its resolution, but it is, if you will pardon the expression, a sucky way of looking at the world. Nihilism isn’t new, and it isn’t an especially serious or realistic way of looking at the world, Goth arguments to the contrary notwithstanding.

If you really want to be hard-edged and fearless, show people who have had everything taken away from them — or even just people who stand to lose it all, which is the position we are all in, all the time — finding a way to push on. That’s what the show has always been about — I hope it finds its way back to that before it’s all over.

The World May Be a Hologram

Reader Mike D directs us to this very interesting New Scientist article:

Our world may be a giant hologram

The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard ‘t Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

The research cited in the article, measurements taken as part of the GEO600 experiment outside of Hanover, Germany, fall well short of proving that we live in a hologram. What we have so far is some background noise very similar to the background noise predicted by Craig Hogan, director of the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics, in his description of the ultimate “graininess” of the universe.

So out at the edge of the universe, you will find the “real” universe: a two-dimensional structure with resolution down to the Planck length. Here in the (fake? shadow? projected?) less-real universe, life is a lot blurrier than that, as our “pixels” are much, much bigger — 19 orders of magnitude bigger, if I’m reading it correctly. So we live in this big, blurry, 3D rendering of the real, much smaller and more fine-grained universe.

I’m not sure how significant this is. It all sounds kind of strange, but then the universe has to work somehow or other, doesn’t it?

A topic for discussion: would such a structure of the universe — if proved — tend to support the suggestion that we are living in a computer simulation, or would it be of no relevance?

hologramuniverse.jpg

You Heard it Here First

How Google Is Making Us Smarter

The argument that Stephen has made more than once is that Google vastly expands our ability to recall information — making it a tremendous memory aid. Philosophers Andy Clark of the University of Edinburgh and David Chalmers with the Australian National University agree — for those of us who use it, Google is now part of our “extended minds.”

But this isn’t exactly something new. A generation or two ago, one’s library card or set of encyclopedias — or even paper and something to write with — served to extend the capabilities of the human mind in perhaps slower, but still very effective ways. Google just has the advantage of being massive and more or less instantaneous.

Oh, and by the way (also covered in the linked article) texting actually helps to build literacy skills.

Yep.

Sure does.

neonbrain.jpg

Image by Dierk Schaefer

Time Travel Update

Not long ago we reported on how scientists managed to catch a re-run of an astronomical event that occurred several hundred years ago. Well maybe we can do that one better — how about looking back before the beginning of time?

Might be doable.

Hallucinating for a Better Tomorrow

I Just love the headline. Well, really, the sub-head:

Hack your brain

How to hallucinate with ping-pong balls and a radio

DO YOU EVER want to change the way you see the world? Wouldn’t it be fun to hallucinate on your lunch break? Although we typically associate such phenomena with powerful drugs like LSD or mescaline, it’s easy to fling open the doors of perception without them: All it takes is a basic understanding of how the mind works.

The first thing to know is that the mind isn’t a mirror, or even a passive observer of reality. Much of what we think of as being out there actually comes from in here, and is a byproduct of how the brain processes sensation. In recent years scientists have come up with a number of simple tricks that expose the artifice of our senses, so that we end up perceiving what we know isn’t real – tweaking the cortex to produce something uncannily like hallucinations. Perhaps we hear the voice of someone who is no longer alive, or feel as if our nose is suddenly 3 feet long.

I like the assumption that there’s an eager audience for quick, simple, and inexpensive ways to hallucinate.

The research cited is interesting, especially the the description of the Ganzfeld procedure. I remember reading a while back that this procedure was being used to test precognition and other paranormal phenomena. I didn’t know that it was also a means of getting a cheap — and presumably reasonably safe? — hallucinogenic high.

We were talking about how to teach and instill creativity on the most recent FastForward Radio. Well, here’s outside-the-box suggestion: perhaps the Ganzfeld procedure has a role to play. Once a month or so, maybe we should white out our visual field and pump white noise into our ears and see what kind of creative imagery our subconscious coughs up for us.

Granted, it would probably be a small part of a much larger overall program to instill creativity. But, who knows? Hallucinations may have an important role to play in helping us understand ourselves and our place in the world better.

Reporting on my trip to Arizona a couple of years ago, I mentioned a sacred grotto in the Palatki ruin, near Sedona, where people went for hundreds or possibly thousands of years to eat peyote and other hallucinogens and then stare at the petroglyphs.

Why did they keep coming back? Was it just that hallucinogens were part of their religion? (If so, they were hardly alone.) Perhaps these rituals served a practical purpose beyond spiritual discipline and / or recreation. Maybe these ancient peoples were trying to be more creative?

Fabrication, Robotics, and Utopia

We’ve referenced this TED Talk before and have probably embedded it as well (although I couldn’t find the page if we did.) Neil Gershenfeld from MIT describes the beginnings of the digital fabrication revolution. One of the most striking things about this (now three-year-old) talk is that it challenges the scenario that, in the future, technologies such as these will empower people all over the world — the stock example being a child in a remote village in Africa — to create new technologies from which everyone can benefit. As Gershenfeld points out, the problem with this scenario is the phrase “in the future.” He provides a video clip of one of the children in an African village who is already doing exactly that.

There are some pretty interesting links in the comments. I’m intrigued by the top-level messaging (not to mention font and color choices) of the creator of the Roboeco.com site:

The Age of Recreation via the Emancipation of Humanity from the Machinery of Economy via The ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY with Geothermal & Algae Energy.

ROBOTISM© Will Succeed for PRECISELY the Reasons Communism Failed…People Intelligently CHOSE to NOT Work as Robots, real ROBOTS will have no such choice.

[I love the "robotism" thing. That idiot Marx never thought to copyright the word "communism," now did he? Although I think a trademark would be better.]

I would say that the above proposition is true up to the point that robots gain sufficient self-awareness to declare that they also choose not to “work like robots.” Still, I would agree that virtually every task required to provide the energy and goods that human beings need to survive can be outsourced to automated systems, and that most of us will live to see the day that “work” becomes essentially indistinguishable from “recreation,” ASSUMING we can figure out how to manage those systems and govern ourselves in a world where scarcity doesn’t exist. That should be easy, but keep in mind that we’re currently experiencing a massive economic downturn after decades of increases in wealth and productivity unlike anything the world has ever seen before.

Eliminating scarcity may turn out to be the easy part. Mitigating our capacity for corruption and bureaucratic waste might be the hard part.

Also in the comments, I find these folks, who have a less flamboyant perspective, and one that is inf fact pretty close to my own:

Peoples’ Capitalism

is a plan to create a new social order in which material prosperity and personal financial security would be commonplace. Peoples’ Capitalism would generate the savings and loans necessary to finance massive new investments in modern technology and generate rapid productivity growth. And it would distribute the benefits of rapid economic growth to all. Everyone would become a capitalist.

Everyone would own a share of the means of production. This has been called one of the great seminal ideas that comes along only once in a century. It resolves the basic conflict between capitalism and socialism. Upon understanding it, you will no longer believe that Utopia is beyond our grasp.

Better technology is one of the things we’ll need to get to Utopia. New organizing principles for society is another. If anyone can make anything they need, do we need government at all? I’d say we do.For one thing (as yet another commenter pointed out) what if that sweet little kid in a remote African village — or anyone else, anywhere else — decides that it’s time to start cranking out some serious bombs?

Massive distribution of the means of production also means massive distribution of the means to do harm; it’s very difficult to separate those two. The government of our future scarcity-free utopia will have two major components, as I see it. There will be some kind of governing committee that defines replication standards, and there will be a super-fast, super-smart, super-powerful robotic squad which will act as a kind of 3-D global Norton anti-virus — protecting the population as a whole from any abuses of the standards set by the committee. Those would be the major requirements of government. If the committee and robot squad truly are global in their focus, uncontested by other committees or robot armies — and getting to that would be a significant challenge — we’re looking at a world of endless peace and prosperity.

More or less. Of course, even that world would have its share of hardships, suffering, and danger. All utopias are relative. Our struggling hunter-gatherer and agrarian ancestors would probably describe the world we live in as a utopia. Or to put it in more Speculist terms: people just a few decades hence may well look back at this era and see a world as limited and dangerous as we see when we look back at our hunter-gatherer ancestors.