Category Archives: Science

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Trying to Find Canned Still Water

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Plastic is pilling up on our beaches, plastic is killing ocean animals, plastic is not biodegradable. So I decided to look for an alternative to plastic bottled still water that I can toss into the trunk, the bottom of a canoe, or wherever, without fearing breakage. (Yes, I have a glass jug for work, but it is heavy and breakable.).

Alas, the local stores don’t carry canned water unless it is sparkling or flavored! Don’t tell me it is because people won’t buy it — Amazon sells it! And many brands are European. It looks to me like USA Corporate companies (except Amazon) just aren’t worried about the planet.

So far, the Internet has helped me with some information.

CanO – resealable or ring pull, spring water, London

Pathwater. – reusable, plastic screw top

Open Water – aluminum screw top, MBAquarium approved

Liquid Death – mountain water ring pull (try Walmart)

Blue Can – reverse osmosis filtered water ring pull

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Life 3.0

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If you’re interested in artificial intelligence (AI), I highly recommend that you read this new book Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark, a professor at MIT. His book is an easy read for the amateur and weighty enough for the AI students and professional. It explains (finally someone got it through to me) how neural networks work, how our mind learns and remembers and generally how machines can be built to mimic these processes. This is a realistic book, issues in the future are explained, not sidestepped. This is a science book that is not only important, but fun to read. I give it 5 stars!

 

“This is a conversation that everyone needs to join. But for them to join it constructively, we need to educate them about what the challenges and opportunities actually are. Otherwise it degenerates into the scaremongering that the British tabloids do. Ultimately, this is a very exciting opportunity. Everything I love about civilization is the product of intelligence. If we can create a beneficial superintelligence, we can help humanity flourish better than ever before.” — by Max Tegmark

“Worth reading Life 3.0 by @Tegmark. AI will be the best or worst thing ever for humanity, so let’s get it right.” — by Elon Musk in Twitter

“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.” – by Bill Gates

“If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.” – so said Voltaire

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No Is Not Enough – the book

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The new book “No Is Not Enough” by Naomi Klein should be read by all. It was rushed out in reaction to Donald Trump, but includes important comments about climate change and the anthropocene.

Because one of the most unjust aspects of climate disruption is that our actions as adults today will have their most severe impact on the lives of generations yet to come, as well as kids alive today who are too young to impact policy — kids like Toma (her son) and his friends, and their generation the world over. These children have done nothing to create the crisis, but they are the ones who will deal with the most extreme weather — the storms and droughts and fires and rising seas — and all the social and economic stresses that will flow as a result. They are the ones growing up amidst a mass extinction, robbed of so much beauty and so much of the companionship that comes from being surrounded by other life forms.

The above quote from the book is how I feel about my grandchildren (aged 12-19). Global warming, climate change, neoliberalsim, the USA oligarchy, Trumpism, all of these things are not their fault. The adults of the “western world” have effed up society and the planet so bad that I feel revolution will be the only way out. And these kids will be fighting the wars, unless we can help wake people up to the dangers.

Get a copy of the book, buy it, library it, borrow it. And learn more at

noisnotenough.org

theleap.org

“I’m not looking to overthrow the American government, the corporate state already has..” – John Trudell

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Noam Chomsky Interviewed at Google

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Noam Chomsky appeared at Google in Cambridge May 23, 2017, to speak to an audience of primarily Google staff. The video of the “Google Talks” event was published to YouTube June 5.

This discussion seemed to be more personal than I have heard Chomsky before. Usually Professor Chomsky is “on topic” all the time. The interviewer did a great job, acting like a student sincerely interested in Chomsky’s early life and how he became an activist.

Later in the talk, the word “internet” came up, more and more. Chomsky obviously uses Google products, but only mentioned Google Translate specifically.

He warned about using Artificial Intelligence for more than just data mining. AI should be used for more humanistic endeavors. Understanding ourselves, our species, should be the focus of our prime directive.

I enjoyed it and recommend that you take an hour to listen to a very open discussion: human existence should be our number one priority.

You can watch it by clicking here

or by going to www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C-zWrhFqpM directly.

You can also just search in YouTube.

Solving big problems is easier than solving little problems. – Sergei Brin

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Good Books

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If you are at all interested in anthropology or the lives of your Neanderthal ancestors, this novel will be an enjoyable read.  This reminds me somewhat of the old series called Clan of the Cave Bears, but it is much easier to read (and shorter). The author Claire Cameron acknowledges help from Yuval Harari and Ian Tattersall.

Perhaps this will be the first of a series.  I hope so.  I know I enjoyed it.  Thought provoking.  It is a “fast read” and holds your attention.  But caution is required, this is either adults only or at least older teens.

The book is about two women, separated by 40,000 years.

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Make a resistor hat and march for science

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Scientists and their friends need to stand up and demand evidence-based policy and facts. Science is not partisan. Protecting our world and the people in it is not a partisan issue. This is why I will march on April 22nd. I hope you join in the cause!

Check out this “show and tell” video about the Resistor HAT and the designs that were inspired by it.

You can get a PDF of the pattern by Clicking here.

Thanks to Heidi Arjes of Craftimism.com for making this pattern available to the marchers. BTW, don’t underestimate Heidi. She is a scientist in the Department of Bioengineering and Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University. Enjoy

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Human Existence Is in Peril

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Whitney Robson Harris (August 12, 1912 – April 21, 2010) was an American attorney, and one of the last surviving prosecutors from the Nuremberg Trials. He wrote the following piece in 2006 at the age of 94.

Given the issues that Donald Trump has brought to our country and our world, I think it is important that we remember that God isn’t going to come along and save us from him, after the fact. We are going to have to solve the Donald Trump issues ourselves. As my Dad used to say: “Get up and do it yourself.” We can’t wait, get involved now. Don’t wait until it is too late.

This paper has always impressed me. So I am sharing it now with a spirit of hope. Be sure to read the finale.

Human Existence Is in Peril — by Whitney R. Harris — June 2006

If we attempt to comprehend this vast universe with its millions of fiery stars and frightening dark holes, and say for comfort that only God could have created it, and therefore, there is a God, we default in our reasoning, for we are unable to answer the further question, “who created the God who created the universe?”

We do know that we live on Earth, spun off from the sun and, therefore, on a planet with a beginning. Moreover, we know that, once a fiery ball, the Earth has cooled and gained life upon its surface — static, nonthinking plants and mobile, thinking animals. We do not know whence came the first manifestation of that life — the tiniest amoeba — capable of discernible thought and movement. To ignite the spark of life requires the hand of God. Never mind the universe. Here on Earth, we find the quintessential role of God.

Hence, I believe first, that God exists.

Until this time at least, man has evolved far beyond any other animals on Earth in comprehension and intelligence. The carnivores exceed his strength on land; the amphibians surpass his power at sea. But man has the gift of reason, which enables him to dominate life on Earth — and the chance to survive as long as the solar system remains hospitable to him. That chance, alas, is not eternal.

And, thus, I believe human life is finite.

Within these limits of survivability man holds his destiny in his own hands. He has yet to prove his worthiness. In the last century, he destroyed more of his own kind in war and in merciless murder than in any other time in history. He is fated to acquire the capability of obliterating himself and all other life upon this planet. And he seems unable to appreciate the consequences of that power. The life that God gave to him may be by him destroyed.

And so, I believe human existence is in peril.

The challenge to man is to establish and to maintain the foundations of peace and humanity upon the Earth for the centuries to come that God has allotted him to live upon this planet. He must learn to end war and protect life, to seek justice and find mercy, to help others and embrace compassion. Each man must respect every other man and honor the God who made this incredible mystery of human life a reality.

I believe there is God,
I believe God is merciful and just,
But if man desires to destroy himself
I believe God will not save him.

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New films

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A couple of neat films have been released this week.

The first is short, about 6 minutes long, is from the American Museum of Natural History about human population growth over the last 200,000 years, called Human Population Through Time. It is a relaxing view.

Watch it by clicking here.

The other is from Leonardo DiCaprio as he explores the topic of climate change. This one is longer, about 1.5 hours, but I think it is well worth it. This is an excellent movie, in my opinion, and we should really thank Leonardo DiCaprio for the time and money he spent on this film.

You can see it by clicking here, to go to into YouTube

www.youtube.com/watch?v=90CkXVF-Q8M

or even watch it here directly.

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Don’t try to extend your life span, instead, improve your health span

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Dr. Vijg, an expert on aging at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, says humans will never get older than 115. The paragraphs below are from this New York Times article.

New York Times 06 October 2016, Science section

Some of those improvements have come from quitting smoking and having better diets. Antibiotics and drugs for chronic disorders like heart disease have also helped. But all of the improvements of modern life, Dr. Guarente and others argue, have not turned back the underlying biological process of aging.

Based on his own experimental research, Dr. Vijg describes aging as the accumulation of damage to DNA and other molecules. Our bodies can slow the process by repairing some of this damage. But in the end it’s too much to fix.

“At some point everything goes wrong, and you collapse,” Dr. Vijg said.

The best hope for our species is not to extend our life spans, Dr. Vijg argues, but to lengthen our years of healthy living — with healthy habits and perhaps drugs that can repair some of the cellular damage that comes with time.

“There’s a good chance to improve health span — that’s the most important thing,” Dr. Vijg said.

You know how…. the old standards do work. Watch your diet, do regular exercise, beware of stress (perhaps meditate) and visit your doctor at least annually.

“Your experiences today will influence the molecular composition of your body for the next two to three months, or, perhaps, for the rest of your life. Plan your day accordingly.” – Steve Cole

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Some thoughts from October 2016

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Random quotes from magazines.

Nature 20 October 2016 World View

It’s worth noting that a conscious superintelligent AI might actually be less dangerous than a non-conscious one, because, at least in humans, one process that puts the brakes on immoral behaviors is ‘affective empathy’: the emotional contagion that makes a person feel what they perceive another to be feeling. Maybe conscious AIs would care about us more than unconscious ones would.

There is a chance that the first superintelligent AI will be the only one we will ever make. This is because once it appears – conscious or not – it can improve itself and start changing the world according to its own values.

Science 21 October 2016 Science Lessons for the Next President

As the world warms, its oceans are swelling by an average of 3.2 millimeters a year; they have risen by nearly the height of a playing card since 1993. Some 40% of this increase stems from the physical expansion of water as it heats. The rest is mostly caused by melting mountain glaciers and retreating ice sheets in Greenland.

Because of regional geology, ocean currents, and shifts in gravitational pull caused by changes on Earth’s surface, such as the melting of massive ice sheets, the ocean does not rise evenly everywhere. Much of the East Coast is sinking as Earth’s mantle continues to adjust in complex ways to the disappearance of weighty ice age glaciers. …. These forces mean East Coast sea levels are rising at double the global rate, and at triple the average in Virginia and many points north.

Just a quote

“People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world.” – Pedro Domingos in his 2015 book The Master Algorithm

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January heats up

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The T-V and newspaper news outlets tend not to report news about Climate Change these days. I guess it isn’t confrontational enough. But the Nature magazine isn’t afraid to be non-confrontational! In this weeks Feb 25, 2016 issue, Nature told us about a report just produced by NOAA. I am setting here in 77 degree weather in Pacific Grove, CA in February during a supposedly super El Nino season thinking how I shouldn’t really be enjoying this. To relieve my guilt, I will pass this “news” forward.

Last month was the world’s hottest January since records began in 1880, and the ninth month in a row to break a global monthly temperature record, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported on 17 February. The average global temperature was 1.04 Celsius above the twentieth-century average for January, beating the previous record, from 2007, by 0.16 Celsius. In the Arctic, which was remarkably warm for the time of year, sea ice was at its lowest January extent since records began in 1979, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center.

I don’t need NOAA to tell me about February — I can tell this will have been a warm month too.

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Technical Words

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thinking in 2016 – second decade in the twenty first century CE (the first century of the 3rd millennium)

CRISPR is a genetic editing tool. The name stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. The CRISPR interference technique has enormous potential application, including altering the germline of humans, animals and other organisms, and modifying the genes of food crops.

(germline in organisms refer to those cells that may pass on their genetic material to the progeny. For example, gametes such as the sperm or the egg are part of the germline.)

In the current thinking, many people feel that using CRISPR to modify germline cells in humans would be wrong. The fear is that we would be stepping into the world of “designer babies”, especially where the rich “one percent” would be able to create a master race, similar to Hitler’s breeding program.

The alternate view is that we could use CRISPR to eliminate genetic diseases, removing BRAC1/2 cancer causing genes for example, from a family line. We could potentially stamp out many of our most formidable illnesses.

Using CRISPR to modify food crops is much less controversial. We could, for example, eliminate the spoiling/browning of apples, bananas and mushrooms. Or we could create drought tolerant plants, useful in the global warming scenarios.

My view? Go for it! Eliminate diseases and the need for deodorant, stamp out mosquitoes, and let me be healthier longer.

“The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism.” – Sir William Osler

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Gravitational waves detected just as Einstein predicted

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The news was announced today, February 11, 2016. The actual detection happened about 5 months ago. It took this long to verify what happened.

Just over a billion years ago, a pair of black holes collided. They had been circling each other for aeons, gathering speed with each orbit. By the time they were a few hundred miles apart, they were whipping around at nearly the speed of light. Space and time became distorted. In the fraction of a second that it took for the black holes to finally merge, they radiated a hundred times more energy than all the stars in the universe combined. They formed a new black hole, sixty-two times as heavy as our sun and almost as wide across as the state of Maine. Then space and time became silent again.

The waves rippled outward in every direction, weakening as they went. On Earth, dinosaurs arose, evolved, and went extinct. The waves kept going. About fifty thousand years ago, they entered our own Milky Way galaxy, just as Homo sapiens were beginning to replace our Neanderthal cousins as the planet’s dominant species of ape. A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein, one of the more advanced members of the species, predicted the waves’ existence, inspiring decades of speculation and fruitless searching. Twenty-two years ago, construction began on an enormous detector, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Then, on September 14, 2015, at just before eleven in the morning, Central European Time, the waves reached Earth. This morning, in a press conference in Washington, D.C., the LIGO team announced that the signal constitutes the first direct observation
of gravitational waves.

Above text quoted from The New Yorker Magazine. CLICK HERE to read the complete story.

You can see that super simulation of the block hole collision in the following Youtube video. Or CLICK HERE if you are viewing this in the email announcement produced by WordPress.

If you want to read more about this amazing discovery, CLICK HERE and you will be taken to an excellent web site called SXS which stands for Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes.

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I posted this here tonight because if this is true, this is one of the biggest “discoveries” of the last few years!  It needs to be remembered that some people really did notice.

My wife asked why it is important.  Well hey, if gravity really is made of waves, then maybe those people who saw flying saucers weren’t crazy after all.  Because of course they  would travel by skimming on the edges of the waves, just like surfers at the beach.  It would be much more efficient, and would not create as much pollution as rocket ships!  All we have to do now is figure how how to build gravity wave skimmers.

We should also be able to build “telescopes” that see gravity waves instead of light waves and then maybe we can see where all the dark matter is at in the universe.  We might even be able to “see” black holes!  Perhaps the edge of the universe would show up too.

The only creepy part about this is that those two black holes crashed into each other so long ago.  Like, what are they doing now?  The only disappointing thing is that the gravitational waves only travel at the speed of light.  This discovery won’t let us travel to Mars any faster.  No short cuts here….

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ISS – International Space Station

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We all can find links to the various video feeds coming from the Space Station just by calling up Google or Bing. But I wanted to be able to find these quickly, so I decided to drop them here.

Simple Tracker, locate it now:
www.isstracker.com

Live streaming with outside camera
www.ustream.tv/channel/live-iss-stream

This video is only available when the space station is in contact with the ground. During “loss of signal” periods, viewers will see a blue screen. Since the station orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes, it experiences a sunrise or a sunset about every 45 minutes. When the station is in darkness, external camera video may appear black.

Live streaming with outside camera in High Def (experimental)
www.ustream.tv/channel/iss-hdev-payload

NASA site: TV section
www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html