Recently in Science & Technology Category

Eight weeks ago, I hosted Dr. Aubrey de Grey for his second talk at Google in Mountain View, California, a follow-up to his earlier Google talk in the SENS series, "WILT: taking cancer seriously enough to really cure it":

ABSTRACT

The intrinsic genetic instability of cancer cells makes age-related cancers harder to ... all » postpone or treat than any other aspect of aging. Any therapy that a cancer can resist by activating or inactivating specific genes is unlikely to succeed long-term, because pre-existing cancer cells with the necessary gene expression pattern will withstand the therapy and proliferate. WILT (Whole-body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres) seeks to pre-empt this problem by deleting from as many of our cells as possible the genes needed for telomere elongation. Cancers lacking these genes can never reach a life-threatening stage by altering gene expression, only by acquiring new genes, which is far more unlikely. Continuously-renewing tissues can be maintained by periodic reseeding with telomere elongation-incompetent stem cells that have had their telomeres lengthened in vitro with exogenous telomerase. I will describe why WILT may become a uniquely comprehensive anti-cancer modality, and the practicalities of performing it and avoiding side-effects.

Some weeks back, my (now) friend Dr. Daniel Kraft, a physician scientist at Stanford, came to Google at my invitation to give a talk, "Everything You Wanted To Know About Stem Cells... But Were Afraid To Ask":

ABSTRACT

Stem cell technology and the debate surrounding it has generated a great deal of excitement ... all » and controversy in recent years. The field is surrounded by misconceptions, hype and yet very significant potential. In this talk we'll cover: defining what are stem cells really and where do they come from... the differences between embryonic stem cells and 'adult stem cells' (i.e. derived from our own bone marrow, fat, umbilical cord blood, placentas and even our kids teeth) and emerging technologies to utilize these cells in powerful and novel ways. We'll cover current clinical uses of stem cells, ongoing clinical trials in regenerative medicine (i.e. using marrow derived cells to treat heart attacks, vascular disease, stroke and even diabetes), upcoming trials utilizing embryonic stem cells, and some of the likely near term and future applications as well as challenges remaining in order for this field to reach its full potential.

Aubrey de Grey gave a Tech Talk at Google's Mountain View campus this week, and I was privileged to attend. I've seen him give a longer, earlier version of this presentation before - at Stanford in June 2005 - and was impressed more than ever. Enjoy:

ABSTRACT

It may seem premature to be discussing approaches to the effective elimination of human ... all » aging as a cause of death at a time when essentially no progress has yet been made in even postponing it. However, two aspects of human aging combine to undermine this assessment. The first is that aging is happening to us throughout our lives but only results in appreciable functional decline after four or more decades of life: this shows that we can postpone the functional decline caused by aging arbitrarily well without knowing how to prevent aging completely, but instead by increasingly thorough molecular and cellular repair. The second is that the typical rate of refinement of dramatic technological breakthroughs is rather reliable (so long as public enthusiasm for them is abundant) and is fast enough to change such technologies (be they in medicine, transport, or computing) almost beyond recognition within a natural human lifespan. In this talk I will explain, first, why (presuming adequate funding for the initial preclinical work) therapies that can add 30 healthy years to the remaining lifespan of healthy 55-year-olds may arrive within the next few decades, and, second, why those who benefit from those therapies will very probably continue to benefit from progressively improved therapies indefinitely and thus avoid debilitation or death from age-related causes at any age.

What a day! Just as I'm getting ready to attend Aubrey de Grey's talk at Google, I find out that a martial arts training buddy of mine, Dr. Pete Lohstroh, recently left his research position at UC Davis to take a senior scientist position at Telomolecular Nanotechnologies, specializing in the application of nanocircles to telomere extension therapy (one of several approaches they're taking). Congratulations Pete!

Nanomedicine opens the way for nerve cell regeneration

"The ability to regenerate nerve cells in the body could reduce the effects of trauma and disease in a dramatic way. In two presentations at the NSTI Nanotech 2007 Conference, researchers describe the use of nanotechnology to enhance the regeneration of nerve cells. In the first method, developed at the University of Miami, researchers show how magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) may be used to create mechanical tension that stimulates the growth and elongation of axons of the central nervous system neurons. The second method from the University of California, Berkeley uses aligned nanofibers containing one or more growth factors to provide a bioactive matrix where nerve cells can regrow..."

Nanoparticles Delivery of 'Suicide DNA' Kills Prostate Tumors

"...using nanoparticles developed by members of the Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer, a team of investigators at the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research, in Philadelphia, has developed a DNA-based therapeutic agent that has the potential to treat both enlarged prostates and localized prostate tumors. When tested in mice, this new agent specifically targeted prostate tissue, producing no toxic effects in surrounding tissues..."

The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. It is an immensely exciting experience to be born in the world, born in the universe, and look around you and realize that before you die you have the opportunity of understanding an immense amount about that world and about that universe and about life and about why we're here. We have the opportunity of understanding far, far more than any of our predecessors ever. That is such an exciting possibility, it would be such a shame to blow it and end your life not having understood what there is to understand.

Richard Dawkins, from an interview with Sheena McDonald

I'm about a month late in actually publishing a mention of my friend (and Reuters reporter) Tom Burroughes' interview with Cambridge University gerontologist Aubrey De Grey, "Lifespans soon to be decades longer", which, interestingly, seems to have been syndicated on the Indian version of Yahoo! News.

Forwarded to me by Perry Metzger, and independently brought to my attention by Tom Burroughes, published in Science as "Cancer Regression in Patients After Transfer of Genetically Engineered Lymphocytes":

Using adoptive transfer of lymphocytes given after host immunodepletion it is possible to mediate objective cancer regression in patients with metastatic melanoma. However, the generation of tumor-specific T cells in this mode of immunotherapy is often limiting. Using a retrovirus encoding a T cell receptor, we report here the ability to specifically confer tumor recognition by autologous lymphocytes from peripheral blood. Adoptive transfer of these transduced cells in fifteen patients resulted in durable engraftment at levels exceeding ten percent of peripheral blood lymphocytes for at least two months post infusion. We observed high sustained levels of circulating, engineered cells at one year post-infusion in two patients, that both demonstrated objective regression of metastatic melanoma lesions. This study suggests the therapeutic potential of genetically engineered cells for the biologic therapy of cancer.

I have the full paper, forwarded to me by a friend, which I'm reading slowly.

Mac OS X has always had problems with name resolution... both DNS, id->uid, etc. It's all centralized to one service and that service is buggy.

I joined XXXXXXX this year, but before that I spent 1.5 years running a medium-sized (but international) Mac OS X network. Half the problems we had all were traced down to name service.

The situation gets better with each release, but there are some fundamental problems still. Mostly they crop up with you have LDAP enabled.

Whenever I see the spinning rainbow ball, and no network traffic and little CPU use, I just steam and sit there imaginging a little gnome inside my computer holding the ends of two cables marked, "Don't disconnect: name service conduit! important!" laughing as he disconnects them, counts to 300, then reconnects them.

We must find, and kill, this gnome.

Thank you for listening.

Tom Limoncelli, with express permission

Part of the human condition is that we make an emotional investment in our hardware. We allow a caliber, cartridge, or specific firearm to define us rather than the other way around. It is understandable, as many of us are happy to say we are a "Bud-man," a "Harley-man," a "Swaro kind of guy," or a variety of other tenuous ways of describing nothing in particular. Though we talk of "inherent accuracy" (a dubious concept, indeed), few would attempt defining it, only parroting that it exists.

We take the same path in using unsophisticated terms to describe sophisticated events. "Knock-down" is one, a physically impossible concept that is never the less widely used. The same strained, tortured approach is used to define "kinetic energy" and "energy transfer." Autopsies are not fun reads; nor are obituaries. We will search long and hard to find a medical report that lists "kinetic energy" as the cause of death.

Surely, after all these years, there must be one recorded instance where a human being lost his life to a sudden gust of kinetic energy? Yet, medical journals are generally void of energy and velocity as causes of death. Perhaps it is because neither ever is. Those waiting for the Surgeon General to alert us to avoid kinetic energy exposure are in for a very long wait, indeed.

The Gut-Wrenching Nightmare of Caliber Worship
by Randy Wakeman

This quarter's physics lab is my favorite, covering topics in classical electrodynamics. Here's a characteristic curve for the charge/discharge of a capacitor:

Taken a few minutes ago, on Castro Street in downtown Mountain View, California:

Two nights ago, in physics lab, we replicated a version of the famous "e over m" experiment of J.J. Thompson, to experimentally determine the ratio of the charge of an electron to its mass, using a Helmholtz coil apparatus:

I took this grainy shot in relative dark with my Treo 650 cellphone, since the flash on my Sony would have been disruptive. This is a transfixing sight: a beam of electrons fluorescing in a rarified Helium tube, produced by a thermionic emission apparatus, made circular by a nearly uniform B-field.

I am fortunate to have a lab partner - an earnest young Japanese guy - who doesn't mind that we deliberately stick around to the bitter end doing these experiments, while many of our classmates try to finish early and leave. These experiments are things of grace and beauty, and should be savored and appreciated. Oh, and it helps that we generally get very good agreement with theory in our experiments by doing so: we were within 3.12% of the theoretical electron charge to mass ratio. On nights like this, I walk home from lab feeling more content than I can describe.

K. Eric Drexler informs me that his book "Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology" has a new home on his website (migrated from its previous hosting at the Foresight Institute).

Check out the attribution on the entry page... I did the work 10 years ago, but I deeply appreciate the continuing credit.

There is no such thing as a nature/nurture debate. It’s something that caught on in the media because it rhymes. You can’t have one without the other. A gene can only work in an environment that triggers it to turn on. An environment can only express its influence through an animal by turning genes on and off. You can’t impose a culture on a rock. You can only impose culture on an animal designed by genes to learn from culture.

Joe Quirk

William Faulkner, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, called upon writers of the future to not write merely "for the glands." Of course, at that moment, Faulkner was being rewarded for being the best writer for the glands this country has ever known. Incest, serial killing, insanity, race war, castration, burial of the dead, biblical flood, hunting bear, rape with a corn cob - Faulkner did it all. The guy played our genome like a xylophone. Faulkner, in a suddenly noble moment, called upon writers... to transcend the endocrinological. He didn't set the best example.

Joe Quirk
Sperm Are from Men, Eggs Are from Women, p118

All of the liability problems of general aviation manufacturers were brought on by their own lawyers. They maintained that they couldn't afford to fight these cases, when in truth they couldn't afford not to. Ford fought their Pinto case to the Supreme Court and had a $125 million judgment against them thrown out of court. Nobody sues Ford capriciously anymore.

Scott Crossfield, aviation legend, who died yesterday at the age of 84 while piloting his Cessna 210
Courtesy of AVweb

Now that I've wrapped up what turned out to be a surprisingly subtle and difficult volunteer Japanese translation job (which I'm very happy to have done, I should note), I'm going to blog a bit more for fun. Combing my bookshelves, I pulled another several titles with interesting cover copy and art. Here's one: "Strike From Space: A Megadeath Mystery" by Phyllis Schlafly and Chester Ward, 1965, Pere Marquette Press:

In preparing yesterday's "Little Red Book" post, I discovered that my US $99 Canon all-in-one scanner/printer/copier is an excellent proxy for a macro lens on an expensive camera (I have an Olympus E-1 but don't yet have that lens.) Here's another old school example from the many I have in my personal book collection, this one from 1956, "New Worlds of Modern Science":

Frank Bieser writes:
> Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>> Without enough people working on the problem, we won't finish in
>> time. Right now, I'd say smart people are the biggest missing resource.
>
> And why might that be? Where did all the smart people go?

They didn't "go" anywhere. They've never been in the field.

How many smart people were working on orbital rocketry in 1920? A half
dozen, perhaps. Lots of people claimed the whole idea was bunk, too,
including the New York Times. Later on, lots of people joined up.

Today, not many people are working on Drexler's vision. That doesn't
mean it isn't worthwhile -- it just means that the field is young and
lots of people are still skeptical about it. I suspect that the number
of people actively working on it numbers less than 20, and possibly
less than 10.

There is enough work for thousands of people to push on this for many
years to come. At some point, we'll get IA or AI and the pace will be
able to pick up, but that point still seems pretty distant. Meanwhile,
direct molecular manipulation and molecular manufacturing pose a very
hard set of problems -- possibly the hardest engineering problem yet
faced by mankind -- and we need more minds to make progress. On the
flip side, MNT will also bring the biggest revolution in civilization
yet experienced, dwarfing everything that came before, so I see it as
a worthwhile problem to attack.

Still, we lack enough smart people working on it. As any good VC can
tell you, money is something of a commodity, but smart people are
rare. More smart people are needed.

Perry

I'm going through a year's worth of iPhoto archives and found this, taken in organic chemistry lab by my friend Jenny... me in Maximum Nerd mode:

I had an offer to get some free stick time in a friend's friend's luxury (pressurized cabin, an aisle between the seats, etc.) airplane for a trip he and the other guy were making to CES in Las Vegas, but I'm getting ready for school on Monday, so I declined. I'm taking in some of the show's highlights by way of reportage, and just saw this on one of the gadget/gimmick blogs:

"Radar Scope sees through walls"

Fascinating, and a bit terrifying at the same time. It's a handheld device for detecting people on the other side of a (presumably radiolucent) wall. The display device looks milspec/ruggedized, and the printed matter pitches to military application, but I'm quite sure they're being pitched to police departments too. I wonder, what are the relevant U.S. laws with respect to using this device in warrantless searches? I believe SCOTUS has already ruled that "standoff" search techniques are not covered under the 4th Amendment.

Four weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending a Halloween party in Manhattan. I wasn't prepared with a costume, unless you count my normal get-up below as, um, "Visiting Silicon Valley Guy." On the left is Perry Metzger who is, ahem, a eusocialist insect:

Two days ago, I bought a copy of "Mathematica 5.2 For Students" from the campus bookstore for $150 after tax. This is the same software that sells for around $2000 after tax to non-students. It's a fantastic package, and I'm happy I bought it. However, yesterday, after having already installed a copy on my home's dual G5, I tried to install a copy on my PowerBook. Wolfram's licencing scheme doesn't allow that: I could either buy their $100/year "Premium Support" contract, which would allow me to run other copies on other nodes, or buy another copy. If I'd paid full boat for the original copy, that might have made sense, but at the student discount, it made more sense to actually buy another package entirely. FYI for science and engineering students.

A week ago, I caught a short segment of Fox News' business anchor Neil Cavuto interviewing Eric Anderson, president and CEO of Space Adventures, who was promoting his company's Deep Space DSE-Alpha program, a privately-funded Soyuz-based circumlunar expedition. I noticed, not for the first time, a surprising skepticism about private space travel from the normally highly pro-free enterprise Cavuto, who seems to be nurturing a serious blind spot on the matter, a dangerous case of NASA-romanticization.

Me, I'm sanguine about the DSE-Alpha, and hope to see Anderson's enterprise succeed. In the meantime, someone needs to buy Neil Cavuto a copy of Victor Koman's "Kings of the High Frontier." Abolish NASA, get the government out of the space business, and let people like Anderson do their thing without subsidy or interference.

An interesting blog article about the use of dendrimers in targetted drug delivery systems, sent me by Tom Burroughes in London.

University of Michigan scientists have created the nanotechnology equivalent of a Trojan horse to smuggle a powerful chemotherapeutic drug inside tumor cells – increasing the drug's cancer-killing activity and reducing its toxic side effects.

Previous studies in cell cultures have suggested that attaching anticancer drugs to nanoparticles for targeted delivery to tumor cells could increase the therapeutic response. Now, U-M scientists have shown that this nanotechnology-based treatment is effective in living animals.

...the digital (PDF) version I'm reading now, but Charlie Stross tells his readers not to do so. I will, however, be buying several copies from Amazon as gifts to friends. Damn it's good!

I needed to my online investment bank's customer service center, which was given on its website in the form of "800-555-CALL", one of those supposedly helpful mnemonic phone numbers with letters corresponding to digits. Well, my Treo 650 smartphone has a QWERTY keyboard with a digit keypad superimposed on the left side of the board, no 3-letter-to-single-digit DTMF tonepad overlay. I had to dig an old phone out of my "sell on eBay" box to puzzle out my bank's phone number, since they didn't provide a digits-only version of that number.

Year by year, a third of the [American] labor pool emerges with a college degree. Most of these degrees are in the humanities and social sciences.

Meanwhile, China produces over 450,000 college graduates a year in science and engineering – as many scientists and engineers as the United States has, total. Then, next year, China will do it again.

Gary North

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of his work were. "Well", I said, "there aren't any". He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind". I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing -- and if they don't support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.

One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish BOTH kinds of results.

Richard Feynman
"Cargo Cult Science"

Thanks to Perry for bringing this to my attention: "Rapid Gene Synthesizer Will Enable Custom Microbe Construction."

I am really, really enjoying my biology class, a concentrated term of cell & molecular biology. Students in this program spend about four times as much time in lab, learning industrially useful techniques, as do students in comparable programs in the University of California system. In the last three weeks, I've had hands-on time doing protein electrophoresis, conjugation (bacterial DNA transfer), and DNA electrophoresis. Here's an image of our team's first DNA gel:

The DNA is from purified coliphage Lambda virus, 48,502 Kb (kilobases) in length. Lane 1 is pure, uncut DNA. Lane 2 is DNA restricted (cut) by Eco RI enzyme, Lane 3 restricted by Hind III, and Lane 4 by both (the restriction sites are different, resulting in more, smaller DNA fragments.)

Lanes 5 through 7 are subsamples taken from 2 through 4, subjected slowly and thoroughly to the action of the enzyme DNA ligase, resulting in outrageously long, randomly recombinant strands.

The gel is purified agarose treated with ethidium bromide. The image above is a high-contrast Polaroid of the gel UV-transilluminated to fluoresce in the visible spectrum (reddish orange, here shown in black and white).

This stuff is outrageously fun.

Monica, you can take my blog off the "Missing in Action" list on your blogroll: I'm out of school for three weeks, concentrating on work but taking a few minutes a day to blog.

Speaking of school, the last few weeks of organic chemistry were split between the standard track material (in this case reactions of alkynes) and a series of lectures on NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) in depth. When I return to school, our department's new NMR machines will be in place, so this preparation is essential to actually using these machines productively. I'm really looking forward to adding NMR to my toolkit.

This just in from my distant friend James Bennett: his announcement today of the website supporting his new book "The Anglosphere Challenge." This seems like a very enticing book, and I plan to read it during winter school break.

A college student challenged a senior citizen, saying it was impossible for their generation to understand his. "You grew up in a different world," the student said. "Today we have television, jet planes, space travel, nuclear energy, computers..." Taking advantage of a pause in the student's litany, the geezer said, "You're right. We didn't have those things when we were young. So we invented them."

Unattributed, sent to me by email from Terry Egan

Most of us are familiar with the events marking the Ansari X Prize winning flights of SpaceDev's SpaceShip One recently. Far fewer, however, know of the story of the American Rocket Company (AMROC), the pioneering company whose intellectual property lives on in that prize-winning ship: the revolutionary hybrid rocket engine that sent it to the edge of space, twice. Read on...

In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Stephen Jay Gould

Here's a term I'd not expected to hear: "cosmetic neurology" (via John Venlet).

Computer, compute to the last digit the value of pi.

Spock
TOS, Wolf in the Fold

We finally started into dissections in biology lab tonight. My own specimen was this rather stout, well-endowed female Ascaris lumbricoides, an intestinal parasite of humans:

I'd suspected that although our college's brand-new science center was state of the art in facilities, our gear would be knackered, so I brought my own gear (probes, pins, scalpels, various forceps, etc.) just in case. I was correct in my assessment: all the school-supplied gear was thrashed. One other guy in the lab, an Air Force PJ (USAF Pararescue) who's med-school bound, brought his own gear too; it was interesting to compare kits.

Since this specimen was pseudocoelomate in its body plan, there was no mesentary tissue to complicate the incision process. I was able to do really well with a #15T surgical blade: small enough, with a fine tip for starting an incision, but a sufficiently curved blade belly to continue incisions without nicking the viscera.

One gets the impression after laying this open and spreading its innards with a blunt probe that it is all uterus, wrapped in oviduct... two strands of Top Ramen cloaked in angel hair pasta. This thing is even more dedicated to reproduction than it is to feeding. Brrrrrr.

I seemed to have been the only person this morning other than my instructor to have paid attention to the warning on the bottle of crotyl chloride, "Danger: lacrymating agent!"

It was also amazing to see the number of people dispensing silver nitrate without gloves... low toxicity risk, but high chance of Rorschach tattoos on one's hands (hint: silver nitrate is photosensitive.)

A scientist can discover a new star, but he cannot make one. He would have to ask an engineer to do that.

Gordon L. Glegg
American Engineer, 1969.

A discovery is like falling in love and reaching the top of a mountain after a hard climb all in one, an ecstasy induced not by drugs but by the revelation of a face of nature that no one has seen before.

Max F. Perutz

The other way makers learn is from examples. For a painter, a museum is a reference library of techniques. For hundreds of years it has been part of the traditional education of painters to copy the works of the great masters, because copying forces you to look closely at the way a painting is made.

Writers do this too. Benjamin Franklin learned to write by summarizing the points in the essays of Addison and Steele and then trying to reproduce them. Raymond Chandler did the same thing with detective stories.

Hackers, likewise, can learn to program by looking at good programs-- not just at what they do, but the source code too. One of the less publicized benefits of the open-source movement is that it has made it easier to learn to program. When I learned to program, we had to rely mostly on examples in books. The one big chunk of code available then was Unix, but even this was not open source. Most of the people who read the source read it in illicit photocopies of John Lions' book, which though written in 1977 was not allowed to be published until 1996.

Paul Graham, in "Hackers and Painters"

A few days ago, I finished reading Henry Petroski's "The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are," a breezy exposition on the origins of things most people take for granted, usually considered not worth wondering about. In a similar vein, and coincidentally well-timed, Curt Howland forwarded me yesterday a pointer to an essay lauding one artifact in particular, "In Praise of the Oh-So-Dependable Cardboard Box," by Russell Roberts.

I'm reminded of an essay I read in the summer of 1990, a copy of which was given me by its author, Phil Salin, at a house party in Palo Alto, before leaving for my 1st work assignment in Europe. The essay, "The Ecology of Decisions, or 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Kitchens,'" opened my eyes to what Petroski often refers to as the "artifactual intelligence" encoded in the seemingly mundane, the things we don't consider.

Phil's work, by the way, is maintained on the web by friends who deeply care about him: he succumbed to stomach cancer sometime around 1993, and is presently in cryostasis at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. I didn't have the chance to personally thank Phil for his strong influence on my thinking, but I hope to have that chance someday.

Perry Metzger reports a fantastic bit of news about the reconstruction of a man's jaw using a fusion of prosthesis and a novel bone re-growth technique.

God isn't interested in technology. He knows nothing of the potential of the microchip or the silicon revolution. Look how he spends his time! Forty three species of parrot! Nipples for men! Slugs! He created slugs! They can't hear! They can't speak! They can't operate machinery! I mean, are we not in the hands of a lunatic? If I were creating a world, I wouldn't mess about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o'clock, Day One!

from Time Bandits, via Samizdata

These giant microbe stuffed toys are pretty cool.

The same piece of software can be both an application and infrastructure. Apache is an excellent example of this. Apache is really Linux’s “killer app.” It runs on Windows and BSD, but the main point is that it doesn’t require Windows, and many machines are built for the sole purpose of running Apache. Apache is an application when I am setting up a web server, but it’s infrastructure for you when you’re looking at my blog.

Sean Lynch

Thanks to Chris Tame for passing along this article: "Scientists Identify Compounds That Mimic Calorie Restriction."

I really enjoy this woman's writing: "Science Friction," by Monica White.

Relatedly, Monica has informed me that she's working on an extended, adapted version of her Firefly review (of course she loves it too) for The Atlasphere, which I'll pass along when she tells me it's been published.

Anton Sherwood informs me of this funny little cartoon rant against "smart guns"; the lead character reminds me very vaguely of Cerebus the Aardvark.

I have to admit that I don't understand luddites well. Human welfare has been radically improved by technology. The progress we've made towards reducing poverty and human misery has been nothing short of breathtaking. Even Marx seemed to understand this pretty well. I get the feeling that the people who used to embrace communism now have switched to technophobia.

As a postscript, let me note that even the most radical anti-technology activists out there like the Unibomber, Ted Kaczynski, seem to make use of at least some technology in their lives. I doubt Kaczynski could have survived through the winter in his cabin without steel implements and an iron stove for heat. No one would know of Kaczynski's ideas but for his willingness to use of technology to write them down (even paper and pencils require pretty significant ingenuity and effort to produce). Even written down, high technology, including computers, has been the primary means by which his ideas have been disseminated. Some such people argue that they are merely using technology temporarily to try to fight technology, or that they do not oppose "appropriate" technologies like wood stoves. (Kaczynski doesn't seem to make any such arguments, though, or at least, none that I can see.) Even so, there is tremendous irony in anti-technologists making use of even primitive technologies, and further irony in their communicating by any method other than speech. I suspect, however, that the irony is lost on them.

Perry Metzger

Perry Metzger reports in "Immunotherapy Halts Alzheimer's in Mice" that:

...the injection of antibodies targeting the beta amyloid plaques into the brains of mice with a close analog of Alzheimer's disease managed to trigger a response in which the immune system cleared the plaques. Neurofibrillary tangles associated with the disease cleared spontaneously shortly after the amyloid plaques vanished.

This is not to say that I believe all religious people are readily capable of murder. Rather, I claim that once you structure your life around ideas that you are not permitted to test, but which you accept as beyond testing (that is, on "faith"), you've abandoned your most important survival tool, namely reason.

Introduce a bad axiom into a mathematical formal system, you can prove anything. Similarly, if you abandon reason for "faith", you lose your only tool with which to distinguish the truth. This could leave you helpless to escape the idea that "God" demands that you kill, and from there it is a short step to shooting abortion doctors or flying planes into skyscrapers.

Perry Metzger

I've noticed an interesting phenomenon in my math classes over the last couple of years, which has become more pronounced as the subject matter becomes (to some people) more difficult: the Desperate Calculator Jockey. This is the guy who never studies, is too lazy to do his homework, but somehow manages to struggle his way from one class to the next. He can usually be seen furiously punching formulae into a top-of-the-line TI-89 or its near-equivalent, expecting some magical insight into the problem from the resulting graph. While this approach may actually work in some instances, such as with a simple "differentiate this function" problem, the approach is an utter - and deserved - failure when the student is confronted with the dreaded applications problem (the so-called "word problem.")

Oh, my... this is where thinking skills are really tested, and where numerical prosthesis is nearly worthless. I love these problems: exercises in aircraft fuel vs range optimization, predictions of least-time photon transit through a non-vacuum medium (Snell's Law, an application of the Brachistochrone curve), calculations of marginal cost & maximization of profit, how to make the largest rectangular horse corral with a fixed length of expensive fencing... the good stuff. The Calculator Jockeys rarely know where to start decomposing a problem to its tractable constituents, instead, as usual, attempting to invoke an answer from the aether by keypunch.

I can pretty much tell from looking around a room who's faking it and who's getting it: those who are actually learning the calculus are learning with their pencils, which are constantly moving on paper. The fakers, on the other hand, are constantly pushing buttons. The joke's on the latter group: with the exception of actual symbolic manipulation packages such as Wolfram's Mathematica, hand calculators - to date - depend entirely on methods such as linear approximation. This means that the calculator jockey can actually get the wrong answer for a derivative of a function at a point on a curve, since the curve may not actually be differentiable at that point, but the linear approximation around that point of a secant line connecting points on either side of the original point may exist. Suckers.

Brian Smith passes on this fantastic link to a placed call eMachineShop. Their blurb:

eMachineShop is the remarkable new way to get the custom parts you need. Download our free software, draw your part, and click to order - it's that easy! Your part will be machined and delivered. Even better, your cost is low due to the Internet, software, and automated machines.

Why waste time traveling, calling, faxing or emailing to conventional machine shops? Reduce your total time up to 90% and open doors to new products and projects. Intelligent design software gives instant exact pricing, expert feedback, and unrivaled convenience.

Perry Metzger recommends the open source encyclopedia Wikipedia, and I concur. I've found myself referring here to entries there on occasion the last couple of years, and have been impressed at the tendancy to improvement of the content over time. You see, at one time I hadn't been sure that allowing (pretty much) anyone to edit entries would result in better content, but it has.

I only very recently actually registered as an editorial user with the service, after having been a consumer of it. Registration gives you a number of benefits, such as the privilege of watchlists, where if interesting entries are modified by others, you're notified of those changes. Also, since the history of all entries is maintained in CVS-like changelogs (preserving history) and is recorded against some evidence of identity (discouraging vandalism), registration means that your chosen name is made public rather than your IP address. This is a good thing, if you don't already know. Check it out.

Perry Metzger reports that Francis Crick has died. He will be missed.

Mr. O'Dowd also misses one of the most important aspects of security -- he fails to discuss the economic tradeoffs (if any) being made in a given security decision. He mentions only the possible problems of using an open source operating system, but he ignores the price associated with not using one. Against the weak claim of decreased security, we have to balance the loss of functionality and increased cost that using a proprietary operating system might cause. Developers do not select open source software at random. They adopt it because it gives them better functionality and has a lower cost.

Indeed, the cost savings and productivity benefits of open source systems might easily make it possible to devote more effort to security in a design, and the improved tools available can make security far easier to implement. Open source operating system users take features like packet filters, MMU based memory protection for multiple processes, logging facilities, etc., for granted, but these features not available in many conventional embedded operating systems. Even the ones that do have any particular feature rarely provide the breadth of functionality of the open source systems.

Perry Metzger

Chris Goodwin passes on this fascinating account of the Oklo natural nuclear reactors in Gabon, equatorial Africa:

In 1972 the very well preserved remains of several ancient natural nuclear reactors were discovered in the middle of the Oklo Uranium ore deposit.

As I mentioned earlier, I saw "I, Robot" last night. Right before the movie began, I saw a spectacular trailer for an alternate universe fantasy, "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Angelina Jolie. It looks like a great deal of fun, and I'm looking forward to its September release.

I mentioned this on a mailing list last night, adding that Zeppelins were featured prominently in the trailer, to which listmember Chris Claypoole offered this observation:

...[this phenomenon falls] under the purview of Hite's Law: "All change points, from Xerxes to the last presidential election, create worlds with clean, efficient Zeppelin traffic."

Every alternate history can be differentiated from our own by the presence of airships. *Every* one. So, if you're ever not sure whether you're in an alternate universe, look up.

I'd mentioned yesterday I'd be seeing this film, and I did. I also mentioned in a short comment followup that I'd seen a few old friends leaving the cinema, who confirmed my suspicions that the film was very loosely based on Asimov's work of the same name, so I went into the cinema not expecting a film realization of the original story.

There were tips of the hat all over the film to Asimov's original work, mostly in the naming of characters (Sonny, Dr. Susan Calvin) and in partial buzzword compliance (e.g. "positronic"), but as the credits honestly acknowledged, it's "based on a work of" Isaac Asimov. With that in mind, I determined to enjoy the film on its own merits, and was not disappointed. I was particularly impressed with Alan Tudyk's portrayal of Sonny (as an aside, I hope whatever name recognition this earns him - as a greenscreen actor - helps in the success of the forthcoming Firefly movie "Serenity".)

It's interesting to see that the movie treated Asimov's 3 Laws as sacrosanct, considering that Asimov himself later saw flaws in that approach to robot safety, working in a hack he called the "Zeroth Law." See this interesting commentary for a summary of the Laws... which might have prevented the disaster dramatized in the movie (that's the closest I'll come to a spoiler), or might not, given the rationalizations employed by the villain, which were the same as almost every tinpot dictator of the 20th century or before.

Here's a related amusement: the Singularity Institute apparently saw fit to ride the wave of the movie's popularity by launching a website called "3 Laws Unsafe".

My old friend Perry Metzger gave in today and finally started a blog. Now to convince him to add a comment mechanism...

Just a few short days after the 35th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's historic moonwalk, we learn the unalloyed truth about what he really said on that occasion:

In 1969, Neil Armstrong made history by becoming the first man to walk on the moon, uttering the immortal phrase, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Or did he? Previously suppressed footage discovered by blogjam shows that Armstrong's reaction was a great deal more uninhibited than history suggests, and that a hasty editing job was needed to prepare the astronaut's moment of glory for broadcast.

Personally, while I like [L.] Neil [Smith]'s idea in Hope of a "Bill of Rights Party", I think a better idea would be a "Mind your own damned business party":

Don't like guns? Don't own one, and mind your own damned business!
Don't like homosexuals? Don't associate with them, and mind your own damned business!
Don't like pagans? Don't associate with them, and mind your own damned business!
Don't like nuclear power? Don't use it, and mind your own damned business!
Don't like hunting? Don't hunt, and mind your own damned business!

See how easy it is? All the individual has to do is live and let live, follow the basic precepts of ALL major religions, as far as love, tolerance and respect, and mind their own damned business!

Ron Beatty

One of the then new private co-location facilities I had in mind when I mentioned them yesterday was PAIX in Palo Alto, California. This was one of the .com boom beautiful creations. By Cromm, what a facility! I've never seen expensive track lighting in a raised-floor facility before, or since. The Cisco campus in San Jose, or @Home in Redwood City, those were beautiful and fun because people worked there. Beauty in a co-location facility is a pointless expense better spent on infrastructure, in my not so humble opinion, but I may be the only person who cares. Isn't beauty for its own sake, even if no one sees it, important too?

A well designed network isn't fancy, it doesn't embody the latest and greatest. That's for marketing droids. A beautiful network is embodied in its simplicity of design, in as minimal a number of different protocols as possible, in its invisibility. Much like traditional Japanese architecture, I think. Like air, it should just be there as needed. If the users know it's there, it's because it has affected them in some way they didn't expect, and that is bad.

Curt Howland

Duncan Frissell just today posted a jaw-dropping bit of what he claims is history, the 1953 testing of an atomic cannon, "Shot Grable 10" at Frenchman's Flat, Nevada:

When I was looking for a nuclear weapons photo for a previous post, I immediately thought of the only live firing of an atomic cannon (in the US, that is). So I hunted up the famous photo of Shot Grable 10 (isn't the Net convenient?) and found that most of the images were poor scans. Finally I "borrowed" a good one and thought I'd actually post so you don't have to follow a link to see it. This is an actual photo of an actual atomic cannon firing an actual atomic shell. No editing or fakery involved.

Whoa. There's more here and also here.

Courtesy of Perry Metzger today: "New Technique for Imaging May Improve Study of Proteins" and its related story direct from IBM, "IBM Scientists Make Breakthrough in Nanoscale Imaging."

IBM scientists have achieved a breakthrough in nanoscale magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) by directly detecting the faint magnetic signal from a single electron buried inside a solid sample.

I was told of this by a poster to the smith2004-discuss list, an incredibly meticulous comparison of the performances of a number of common ammunition types: "Terminal Ballistics Comparison in Water Media", a compilation of many years of data generated by 84 year old Carmon Crapson (published by Stephen Ricciardelli.)

A biophysicist talks physics to the biologists and biology to the physicists, but when he meets another biophysicist, they just discuss women.

Unknown

I just found a cool and useful site for software testers (which I include to mean all developers, who should write their own test cases): Opensourcetesting.org, "Open source tools for software testing professionals".

A big thanks to James and Steph for their gift of the Springer title Name Reactions by Jie Jack Li, a compact atlas of 331 reactions in organic chemistry, from "Abnormal Claisen rearrangement" to "Zenin benzine rearrangement." This should be truly useful from the fall term onwards; thanks guys!

This is very much like the arguments I've been having with those who believe only government is capable of "real" science, of "pure" research. Yes, indeed it did take 43 years for private efforts to repeat the sub-orbital flight of [Alan] Shepherd.

But Rutan['s ship] returned to earth with everything he left with except his fuel, a feat that Government has never achieved.

Curt Howland

Recommended by Monica White: the blog "Bizarre Science."

Now, I am no climate scientist, but I harbor a suspicion that maybe, just maybe, one factor impacting on the Earth's climate just might be - now, I'm just throwing this out - the sun. I find discussion of the sun's impact on global weather to be oddly absent from the reams of paper speculating on how minute variations in various gases here on earth may affect climate, rather like speculating on how adjusting the air pressure in your tires a few ounces might affect fuel efficiency without ever considering the, well, fuel you are putting in the tank.

Robert Clayton Dean

Brian Micklethwait does a little cat-blogging.

This is nasty and upsetting news from Steve Pegram: "Rocket Hobbyists Dropping Hobby" due to hamfisted, jackbooted regulation by the goons of the BATF. Just when we're seeing the spirit of innovation in rocketry and space travel rekindled, the government is working to snuff that spirit. This crap needs to be fought... which seems to be happening by default, since many rocket hobbyists have chosen to ignore F-Troop anyway.

Bear in mind this was written in the 1930's, a time when the role of medicine was far more profoundly focussed on service to the individual, rather than as a tool of social engineering (a path we've been headed down for a few decades):

Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. The whole hygienic art, indeed, resolves itself into an ethical exhortation. This brings it, in the end, into diametrical conflict with medicine proper. The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous, it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance; he offers absolution.

H. L. Mencken

The famous Koko the lowland gorilla lives a few miles north of where I'm sitting. Apparently her keepers are looking for an excuse to move from Woodside, California to Maui.

Helen Pearson has written an interesting little piece in Nature summarizing recent changes in thinking about what many of us were indoctinated to believe were 'junk' DNA (non-structural and non-regulatory) sequences.

This is getting even more interesting: Eric Pavao sends along yet another piece (Popular Science) on the SpaceShipOne flight, this one intimating that Burt Rutan has a lot more up his sleeve:

After winning the X-Prize, Rutan will quickly move on to other challenges. During press conferences leading up to Monday's flights, he dropped hints about "going to orbit sooner than you think," an apparent allusion to the Tier 3 orbital space-vehicle program that he is reportedly involved in. The SpaceShipOne program is known as Tier 1, and Tier 2 would probably be a tour-bus-like version of the same concept, a vehicle capable of carrying up to 10 passengers on suborbital space flights. Under his contract with Allen, Rutan is required to deliver data on how much such a vehicle would cost to build and fly. Mojave Aerospace--a new company jointly owned by Allen and Rutan and disclosed this week--will own the rights to SpaceShipOne technology and would oversee future franchising and commercialization efforts for the system. Details will remain secret, said the cagey Rutan, "until we're ready to push something out of the door."

I'm sure this is old news now, but I just found out that the ultralightweight carbon-fiber Carbon 15 rifle is now a Bushmaster offering. I've had the opportunity to handle one of these 4-pound carbines in training, and found it rather pleasant. I'd be interested in knowing how rugged they actually are.

Bill St. Clair passes along this SpaceShipOne flight coverage with video (you'll need to enable pop-ups in your browser).

The success of SpaceShipOne feels like a reward for my faith. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised – relief is more the word. If I were anywhere near the Mojave desert instead of freezing through a London summer, I would have travelled myself to witness it.

It’s a shining example of what like-minded people would say is the ultimate freedom – the freedom to create, to produce, to take risk, to try and also to fail. The freedom that can only fully be realized where our money (our very lives) isn’t taxed away for a variety of hare-brained political schemes and our lives aren’t regulated to the point of absurdity.

Most Americans reading this would have paid for NASA through their taxes – where’s your return on investment? I’m willing to bet that the VCs who stumped up for SpaceShipOne are looking forward to some long term return on their money.

I hope that those who advocate the big-government nanny state for various reasons sit up and take notice this week. This is what we humans are capable of – without the interference, guidance or regulation of beaurocracy.

Monica White

The world's first privately funded manned spaceflight will occur in less than 7 hours from now, with the takeoff of the carrier ship and spaceship from Mojave Airport at 0630 California time.

Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.

Mike Adams

When the war finally came to an end, I was at a loss as to what to do... I took stock of my qualifications. A not-very-good degree, redeemed somewhat by my achievements at the Admiralty. A knowledge of certain restricted parts of magnetism and hydrodynamics, neither of them subjects for which I felt the least bit of enthusiasm. No published papers at all... Only gradually did I realize that this lack of qualification could be an advantage. By the time most scientists have reached age thirty they are trapped by their own expertise. They have invested so much effort in one particular field that it is often extremely difficult, at that time in their careers, to make a radical change. I, on the other hand, knew nothing, except for a basic training in somewhat old-fashioned physics and mathematics and an ability to turn my hand to new things... Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice...

Francis Crick
What Mad Pursuit, Basic Books, New York, 1988, pp 15-16.

In chemistry lecture, and studying outside class, I often use a molecular modelling kit made by Darling Models to help me visualize the stereochemistry of various molecules. I like my kit, but it's rather bulky, so I don't always have it immediately at hand. A few days ago, one of my classmates showed me the kit she carried, which is very much more compact and does most of what we need to know (in respect of linear and branched hydrocarbons and some of their halogenated derivatives): a Student Organic Chemistry C-set from Hinomoto Plastics. The Hinomoto kit fits in a small pocket pouch, and is very solidly constructed. Some of the components look amusingly like dice from the game Dungeons & Dragons, by the way.

Via Eric Pavao: Japanese company takes delivery of first new Zeppelin airship, a 247-foot updated helium version of the original ships.

Eric Pavao passes on this fantastic news: SpaceShipOne will be making its first historic flight from Mojave in less than 3 weeks:

Mojave, CA: A privately-developed rocket plane will launch into history on June 21 on a mission to become the world's first commercial manned space vehicle. Investor and philanthropist Paul G. Allen and aviation legend Burt Rutan have teamed to create the program, which will attempt the first non-governmental flight to leave the earth's atmosphere.

Paul G. Allen and aviation legend Burt Rutan have teamed to create a manned space program, which will attempt the first non-governmental flight to leave the earth's atmosphere. SpaceShipOne will rocket to 100 kilometers (62 miles) into sub-orbital space above the Mojave Civilian Aerospace Test Center, a commercial airport in the California desert. If successful, it will demonstrate that the space frontier is finally open to private enterprise. This event could be the breakthrough that will enable space access for future generations.

L. Neil Smith passes on this amusing bit of reportage about a possible consequence of the American habit of wearing the silk snot rag with the white coat.

Here's an interesting short article by Ralph Merkle written when he was working for Zyvex (before he moved on to Georgia Tech): "Nanotechnology and Medicine".

[A bit of context: this quote refers to an amusing incident where a religious cultist in a forum I frequent blew up when he was called out on an issue of "quantum mysticism" he couldn't support. - Russell]

I think [a particular theist twit] actually did good job of defining by example an important concept in quantum mechanics: the uncertainty principle.

He obviously has some beliefs, and we could either know the position or the energy of his beliefs, but not both.

He chose to show us the energy.

Dan McCoy

I just saw the word "creationist" alternately spelled "cretinist", on a list I frequent. I find, upon Googling, that it's a widespread meme.

Kevin Cole on Orkut passes along this bit of only-in-the-new-world news: "Devils Hit Cyber Church".

I found a pretty cool resource on iron, one of my favorite funky transition metals.

Another source of concise information on the respirocyte concept.

My thanks to my longtime friend (I avoid the term "old friend" for such a young woman) Kennita Watson for alerting me to this lecture at Stanford on 23 June 2004: "The Artificial Synapse Chip: Towards an Electronic Prosthetic Retina" by Harvey A. Fishman, M.D., Ph.D, Stanford University School of Medicine, the Director of Ophthalmic Tissue Engineering and Chief Ophthalmology Resident in the department of Ophthalmology.

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the most common form of severe and irreversible blindness in the U.S. Our research program consists of a highly interdisciplinary effort between physicians, engineers, and scientists to develop a neural interface that will connect the output from a digital camera to individual retinal cells in patients with AMD, thus bypassing injured cells.

By the way, this sounds like a skillset for the type of research physician I find really interesting:

Dr. Fishman's area of expertise is translational research that uses a multidisciplinary approach to develop novel therapies for blinding diseases in the eye – in particular, Age-Related Macular Degeneration. His research bridges the gaps between tissue engineering, surface science, nanofabrication, chemistry, neuroscience and retinal transplantation biology in Ophthalmology. His background in new technologies and medical science is diverse including bioMEMS, chip-based microfluidics and confocal and time-lapse microscopy, neuroscience/nerve cell regeneration and macular diseases in Ophthalmology. He has made contributions in the fields of microfluidics, laser-induced fluorescence detection, separation science, and biosensors.

I imagine respirocytes as minuscule objects consisting of roughly 18 billion atoms arranged in small balls about a thousandth of a millimeter in diameter. Each respirocyte is a tiny pressurized gas tank equipped with small pumps. Respirocytes are nanobots that move with the blood. In the body's periphery, they release oxygen and absorb carbon dioxide. In the lungs, they do the opposite, recharging themselves with oxygen. The exchange of gases is regulated by minute sensors. Though the respirocytes are modeled on red blood corpuscles, they transport oxygen two hundred times more efficiently than the natural item. A small syringe-full of respirocytes could carry as much oxygen as your entire bloodstream.

Robert A. Freitas Jr
28 July 2000

I crashed late last night, and woke early this morning, and am ready to do it all again today: the Foresight SAG continues.

Michael Reed strongly recommends to me in email Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan as "an absolutely knock-out sci-fi novel", so I've put it in my queue. I've not read it yet, so I'd welcome opinions.

I don't generally read science fiction nowadays, having gotten increasingly picky as time goes by (and science fact often holds more fascination for me the better educated I become). I did however take a weekend recently to relax with Ken Macleod's Dark Light and Engine City, which were a mixture of disappointment and amusement for me. I've read all his work so far, and will continue to do so, but the man seems to be afflicted recently with the problem Heinlein had during the late period of his life when he was stricken with a cerebral arterial blockage: at some point near the end of each story, he seems to simply get tired, and tries to wrap up the story abruptly.

My bedside reading the last couple of days: Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics: A Citizens Guide to the Economy, Revised and Expanded, a fantastic book I very highly recommend.

This is pretty cool: scans of Linus Pauling's Research Notebooks taken from 1922 to 1994 (he lived 1901-1994).

As with many scientists, Linus Pauling utilized bound notebooks to keep track of the details of his research as it unfolded. A testament to the remarkable length and diversity of Dr. Pauling's career, the Pauling Papers holdings include forty-six research notebooks spanning the years of 1922 to 1994 and covering any number of the scientific fields in which Dr. Pauling involved himself. In this regard, the notebooks contain many of Pauling's laboratory calculations and experimental data, as well as scientific conclusions, ideas for further research and numerous autobiographical musings.

On Friday during his office hours, my chem prof was deeply surprised to find that I didn't yet own a copy of Zumdahl's "Chemistry", which is not our school's official text... so he gave me one of his, a new copy, the Instructor's Annotated Edition (5th)! He had an extra, so it became mine... a good, good man, and deeply flattering.

A couple of people in a chemistry forum I frequent had recommended Linus Pauling's "General Chemistry". I saw a copy in my local Border's - the 1989 Dover reprint of the 3rd edition (the last, 1971) - and flipped through it. I was impressed, so I took note of its ISBN. The shelf price was $20, but I found a pristine copy on Amazon Marketplace for half that price and ordered it. Can't wait to get it.

A caveat, by the way - and this is no hit on the book, given its age - if you're going to study coordination compounds of metals, you'll need to supplement your reading with Zumdahl, or another modern source. Although Pauling mentions the work of Alfred Werner in a sidebar of a couple of pages on the matter, he (quite understandably) doesn't mention crystal field theory & d-shell splitting (of course he wouldn't). Very highly recommended.

...especially when it involves bad things happening perilously close to me.

There's a phenomenon well known in its universality among martial artists, pilots, and laboratory investigators (and many others, though these are categories to which I can personally claim memberhip): beginners can be dangerous!

For fledgling pilots, safety comes first in collision avoidance and minimal aptitude in takeoff and landing (especially landing). Student pilots at this point truly have to be watched carefully.

For martial artists, dealing with beginners means being aware that the beginner is often not aware of how easy it is to hurt your training partner, and hence how important it is to learn how to train properly so that you don't get hurt "when it's your turn to lose" in practice. Genuinely dangerous!

Today, I had a reminder of how easily late-first-year chemistry students can be genuinely dangerous too. I'm a stickler for thorough preparation for lab investigation, which includes adequately understanding any reaction schema involved in the labwork. Today's labwork involved the generation of noticable volumes of chlorine and nitrogen dioxide gasses, the latter of which was to be generated by heating of reagents including concentrated nitric acid under a fume hood.

Well, today a couple of giggly Chinese girls (otherwise sharp but who are treating chemistry as a checklist item, a waypoint on the way to medical school) who didn't fully understand the reaction schema, were heating the nitric acid solutions at their bench! Before any of us had time to react, they'd already generated a visible cloud of white, toxic smoke. The hell of it was, they simply stood rooted where they were standing, looking embarassed. They were not embarassed that they stood a risk of death or injury, but that they'd been caught not having prepped their lab notebooks with the proper procedure! A couple of other students managed to shake them from their (not yet literal) mortification and pull them away from the danger, while my instructor and I started hitting the buttons on the emergency fume hood evacuation systems, hoping we could clear the cloud quickly and safely by drawing it across the room into the hood system (and upwards from there into the Great Dilution of the atmosphere... note that our lab building is gratifyingly free of pigeon poop for a very good reason.)

Later, I did what the instructor later noted was probably more effective and shocking coming from a fellow student rather than from him: I dressed down the girls in front of everyone else, telling them they must come into the lab prepared next time, rather than faking their way through an experiment. Funny thing was, just a few minutes before the incident I'd commented to my instructor that many of my classmates didn't seem to have any grasp of the difference between real laboratory science and ritual magic.

Oh, and several minutes later I witnessed another girl come up to the instructor asking if the open centrifuge tubes she was holding - which were continuously generating chlorine gas as a side reaction - were hazardous! Argh!

At least our labwork on Thursday of last week went without incident. You see, there was a reaction on that day which required careful control of pH in one of the test solutions containing thiocyanate ions (SCN-). We needed to maintain a particular weakly acidic environment in order to favor a certain desired product. You see, a more acidic pH would have tilted the reaction strongly to the production of HCN, hydrogen cyanide gas...

Do you really think that innovation will come to a grinding halt without the FBI confiscating computers and spying on P2P networks? Please.

This whole DMCA bs isn't about protecting intellectual property. It's about the recording, movie, and software industries believing that for the time being it's more cost effective to manipulate legislation than to cut prices enough that consumers will opt for paid distribution channels.

Here's a hint-- how many people do you know who pirate books via photocopy? That's right, not many. Why? Because most books (certain textbooks and tech manuals being the exception) are priced such that it is simply not worth the effort to stand there and photocopy them. Technologies change. Media corporations that can't/won't keep up will go out of business and good riddance.

Alex Bokov

It's 4 weeks into my fourth quarter of general chemistry, and I'm deep into a weeks-long laboratory assignment involving identification of unknown cations in mystery solutions... a forensics exercise involving minute amounts of reagent, fiddly and frustrating, but necessary. It'a also a transition to the full-blown organic chemistry sequence, which I'm eagerly anticipating.

In the midst of my frustration, my chemistry professor, whose labtime desk sits next to my workbench, handed me my previous quarter's graded final exam, the taking of which marked the completion of the most difficult course in the general chemistry sequence.

I made a perfect score on that exam.

I feel really, really good right now. Really good. I've been given permission to copy that exam before I return it to my professor... and it's going right into the folder of recommendations and other papers I can show to schools and employers in the near future. Woohoo!

I'll be attending all 3 days of the 14-16 May 2004 Foresight Senior Associates Gathering in Palo Alto, California. I very highly recommend this event to anyone interested in molecular nanotechnology. If you're not intimately familiar with nanotechnology, but want to learn, I enthusiastically recommend the 8-hour "Fundamentals of Nanotechnology" tutorial session on Friday: I'll be attending myself to dust off and deepen my own understanding.

Mark Miller informs me via Orkut that K. Eric Drexler now has a personal nanotechnology website, e-drexler.com.

There is a central myth about British science and economic growth, and it goes like this: science breeds wealth, Britain is in economic decline, therefore Britain has not done enough science. Actually, it is easy to show that a key cause of Britain's economic decline has been that the government has funded too much science...

Post-war British science policy illustrates the folly of wasting money on research. The government decided, as it surveyed the ruins of war-torn Europe in 1945, that the future lay in computers, nuclear power and jet aircraft, so successive administrations poured money into these projects--to vast technical success. The world's first commercial mainframe computer was British, sold by Ferrranti in 1951; the world's first commercial jet aircraft was British, the Comet, in service in 1952; the first nuclear power station was British, Calder Hall, commissioned in 1956; and the world's first and only supersonic commercial jet aircraft was Anglo-French, Concorde, in service in 1976.

Yet these technical advances crippled us economically, because they were so uncommercial. The nuclear generation of electricity, for example, had lost 2.1 billion pounds by 1975 (2.1 billion pounds was a lot then); Concord had lost us, alone, 2.3 billion pounds by 1976; the Comet crashed and America now dominates computers. Had these vast sums of money not been wasted on research, we would now be a significantly richer country.

Terence Kealey
Wasting Billions, the Scientific Way
The Sunday Times, October 13, 1996

Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big enough majority in any town?

Mark Twain (1835-1910) in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

A few days ago, in my physical anthropology class, our instructor told us that Carolus Linnaeus' original taxa included Primates (us and our proximate cousins), Secundates (other mammals), and Tertiates (all other animals)! I can't find independent verification of this (I Googled hard for it)... anyone heard of this and can supply references?

I was helping one of my chemistry classmates study after class this morning. Our topic of conversation was electrochemistry. My classmate's confusion was over the terminology used in voltaic cells, e.g. oxidation, reduction, cathode, anode, cation, anion, etc. It occurred to me in the course of discussion that her confusion was due to the use of the term "reduction", which simply means "a reduction in oxidation state by electron donation"; it's a useful numerical indication of that state, not of the physical configuration of the element being "reduced". I'd long ago internalized the actual meaning, so it had slipped me that to a very bright but non-native speaker of English, "reduction" would seem to indicate a physical reduction of some dimension of the affected chemical species!

I had one of those "aha" moments and drew her a diagram of what actually happens with an example species being reduced, in this case a bare proton (a hydrogen ion, H+): H+ has an oxidation state of +1, which can be reduced by an electron donor to 0. The atomic diameter of the ion is as small as a species can get, effectively equal to the proton's diameter; the addition of an electron ("reduction") drastically increases, in a relative sense, the effective atomic diameter of the neutral hydrogen (disregarding the issue of likelihood of a monatomic non-ionic hydrogen), which is "a bigger dimension", not "a reduced dimension".

Chemistry - and most of science - is full of such interesting and sometimes annoying little ambiguities which are the legacy of discovery and provisional definition. Don't even get me started on all the different symbols used to denote "energy"...

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

Hippocrates, in "Law"

This is 4 years old, and I'm not even ten percent the way through, but it would be interesting to have more eyeballs on this idea: "The Wall Street Performer Protocol: Using Software Completion Bonds To Fund Open Source Software Development" by Chris Rasch.

The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated.

Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter, English surgeon (1872-1939)

To illustrate the vain conceit that the universe must be somehow pre-ordained for us, because we are so well-suited to live in it, he [Douglas Adams] mimed a wonderfully funny imitation of a puddle of water, fitting itself snugly into a depression in the ground, the depression uncannily being exactly the same shape as the puddle.

Richard Dawkins, in "Lament for Douglas" (17 September 2001)

I'm a software developer by trade, and one of my pet peeves is clients who expect me to be on-call in case they have a bug, or (more likely) forget how to use their software. I stand by the rule taught to me by a long-time developer: "There are NO software emergencies." His point being, trying to slap a bug fix onto an application under pressure is almost certainly going to cause more problems than the bug you originally introduced when you were developing at a measured pace. The cure for this type of issue is testing and training, not 24/7 availability.

Bob Tipton

The thinking physician identifies AOIs [areas of ignorance] daily.

Professor Elliot Wolfe, MD
Stanford University Medical Center, 5 April 2004

Just found out today that CBS has cancelled their law drama "Century City" after only 3 weeks' run of 4 episodes. That's too bad. The show, employing a mix of inspired and insipid storyline, dealt with issues extropians have been mooting for over 15 years. The show had promise, if the two episodes I saw were any indication of promise. I do share Virginia Postrel's opinion of the series:

Real lawyers in the future would take for granted legal, cultural, and technological developments that strike us as strange. It's the background, not the cutting-edge issues, that makes the present feel different from the past. A 1978 show about 2004 might have featured a plotline on cloning. It wouldn't have routinely shown 40-year-old new parents of twins or business people walking down the street talking to no one, with wires hanging out of their ears. It wouldn't have Starbucks, or Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, or rock-and-roll megachurches.

It was an interesting try.

One down, two to go: just finished my chemistry final exam half an hour ago, now time to relax and prepare myself with rest and food before my discrete mathematics exam tonight. I don't believe in cramming: I prefer to clear my mind before an exam, using the store of knowledge I've built up over the school term... that way, I know what I know when I take the test. Cramming doesn't really work, neurologically, though some people never seem to understand that observation.

It was almost funny the number of classmates who nearly physically jumped me on campus during the last half-hour before the exam, asking me questions they should have been asking the teacher weeks ago, e.g. "What does entropy have to do with Gibbs free energy?" or "What is a 'colligative property'?" or "What's the 'steric factor' in the rate constant?"

The best I could do is assure the questioners that they'd do fine, and to stop worrying: they'd be better prepared by meditating to clear their heads than to try to understand material they should have already mastered. I didn't have the heart to say, "Dude, you're so screwed!"

The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain any more so it eats it. It's rather like getting tenure.

Daniel Dennett
Consciousness Explained

Here's an update from Alcor re: yesterday's legislative alert:

MARCH 11, 11:40 AM MST UPDATE

Alcor sincerely thanks its members for doing a great job contacting the Representatives of Arizona in opposition to HB2637. Apparently, as a result of our collective deluge, we have overwhelmed the system. Our numbers maybe small, but we have clearly made a statement to the Representatives of Arizona. At this point, we ask you to discontinue making phone calls or sending email and faxes, unless you hear otherwise from Alcor.

Thank you for your support,

Alcor Foundation

Can't wait to see the outcome of the vote...

I got voicemail from Alcor alerting me to this a few minutes ago:

In spite of our conciliatory actions and assumption of good intentions on the part of Representative Stump, he has decided to move forward with a House vote on his bill TOMORROW (Thursday) without allowing the affected parties to complete negotiations. Apparently, it doesn’t matter to him that the primary parties impacted by this legislation agree that passing new law is unnecessary when an administrative solution can easily be achieved. Nor does it seem to matter to him that his bill is also strongly opposed by other organ donation groups, including the local Science Care, the Organ Donation Network, Life Legacy, and others. Furthermore, the University of Arizona, Midwestern University, and other academic organizations will be negatively impacted by this hasty legislation.

I first got wind of this about 3 weeks ago. I'll be writing a protest letter tonight, ASAP. I urge you to do the same.

I took this shot two hours ago. These are the digital and tape audio recorders of a number of students in our chemistry lecture section:

Look familiar? Anyone else remember that running sight gag from the 1985 Val Kilmer flick "Real Genius"? As one writer describes the scene (yay Google, saved a bit of typing on my part):

Do you remember the scene in the movie "Real Genius" that showed students at the beginning of a university semester sitting in a large lecture room listening to the professor? As the semester wore on, one-by-one each student left a tape recorder on their seat. The scene ended with the professor's recorder pontificating to a room full of other recorders.

I found a screenshot of that scene, which looks amazingly like our chem lecture hall, down to the same phenolic resin desktop:

Whoa. Life converges on art. Fortunately, ours is a very dynamic professor... most of the students are simply trying to capture his superb lectures for replay later. As a matter of fact, on most days the professor records his own lectures with studio-quality equipment for posting on his personal website. If only more of the good ones did that, we'd have more "Feynman Lectures on Physics" preserved for posterity.

Today in lab, a couple of people broke the "no food or drinks in lab" rule. My prof - whose lab desk is next to my lab bench - and I reacted not by stating the obvious, but by saying, "Hey! Let's measure the pH of those drinks!" Why not? We all had $600 Accumet pH meters in front of us. So, we measured the pH of the following solutions:

• Gatorade X-Factor: pH 3.089
• Arizona Iced Tea brand Green Tea w/ Ginseng & Honey: pH 3.424

That's pretty interesting, since at first approximation, I'd expected any Gatorade solution to be isotonic, at a physiologic pH of ~7.42 or so. Not so, but given that the ingredients label lists citric acid and its conjugate base sodium citrate (a buffer solution), no big surprise: it's almost exactly the pH of a 0.100 M solution of acetic acid (a weak acid, with a Ka of 1.737 x 10^-5). The Arizona Iced Tea also has citric acid in its ingredient list, but no conjugate base listed (though it undoubtedly exists in solution).

Jim Lesczynski mentions this unbelievable little bit of dreck from the New York State Assembly, A03054:

This bill requires the installation of ignition interlock devices, similar to breathalyzers, in all cars sold or registered in New York State.

One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.

Sir William Osler

Strange as it may sound, the power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.

Ernst Mach

My good, longtime friend Romana Machado Reynolds has aroused my envy by taking a long trip to the Galapagos Islands:

The guy on the ground is Raj Apte, brother of Arun Apte (whom I've met). According to Romana: "[The] only way you can get close to the big turtles is by creeping toward them at their level, or from behind."

That's so cool. I had my childhood fascination with the Galapagos re-kindled last year when I read a couple of Darwin biographies, and really stoked a couple of months ago when Hollywood made history by filming the fantastic and epic Master and Commander in the Islands. I'll be hitting up Romana for many more vacation photos in the near future.

Whilst on board the Beagle (October 1836-January 1839) I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality. I suppose it was the novelty of the argument that amused them. But I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament; from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.

Charles Darwin
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin with original omissions restored. New York, Norton, 1969, p85

Where, then, are the dissatisfied consumers? Where are the unhappy Alcor members? Where are the family members that wanted cryonics for a loved one, but were let down by it? There appear to be none. There are only people who don't understand cryonics, people who don't want cryonics, and people who don't like what they read in newspapers about cryonics. That is not sufficient justification for a majority to use government force to assume control of a technology desired by a minority with beliefs different from theirs.

Brian Wowk

It looks like the lawgivers in Arizona are trying to shut down something they fear:

As you may have heard, Alcor is currently engaged in a serious legislative matter. Representative Bob Stump has introduced a bill to the Arizona House of Representatives that proposes to regulate cryonics. HB 2637 (embalmers; funeral establishments; storing remains) proposes cryonics be regulated under the Funeral and Embalmer's Board and that Alcor's use of the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act (UAGA) be stripped.

A couple of days ago I was working in the chem lab under time pressure, preparing a number of buffer solutions for a kinetics exercise prior to a tedious and time-consuming spectroscopy run. I'd very carefully delivered fixed amounts of various reagents when, at the last phase of preparation, I added minute amounts (0.3 mL each) of bromocresol green indicator (AKA 3,3',5,5'-Tetrabromo-m-cresolsulfonphthalein), this happened:

I had to stop at this moment and pull out that little digital camera I keep in my cargo pockets when I'm clothed. These little moments of unexpected beauty (to my eyes, at least) should be appreciated, and sometimes shared with friends. Here's what they looked like after mixing but before analysis:

This reminds me a bit of before and after shots of a line of carefully prepared cocktails in a Vegas casino bar.

This is one of those "don't get me started" moments, but I'm compelled to comment with fascinated horror at the number of fellow students who will follow the letter of a laboratory procedure but not understand in the least what is happening on the bench in front of them. I can't believe the number of students who don't understand that if they're assaying for a peak absorbance, and you don't find it in the range suggested by the lab manual, you keep measuring until and after peak until you find that crucial number. I think the term "laboratory investigation" should be stressed over "laboratory procedure." The former is science; the latter is sleepwalking.

Recent days have seen another widespread exploit of a Microsoft operating system vulnerability... yet another reason to start paying attention to those people advocating capabilities-based operating systems.

I've discovered that a standard metal Slinky is not only a great tutoring tool for explaining concepts of physics such as both transverse and longitudinal wave motion, harmonics, and spring constants, but also for concepts of chemistry, namely chemical equilibrium. For those of you familiar with LeChatelier's Principle and reaction coordinate diagrams, do this: hold the ends of a metal Slinky in your hands at the same level. The activation energy for some fundamental step is represented by the high PE peak of the curve at the top. Reactants are in your left hand, products in your right. With you hands even, the enthalpy of reaction (delta H) is 0, and the Slinky oscillates around top dead center, representing an equally product-or-reactant favored reaction step. Drop your right hand, increasing negative enthalpy of reaction, and the Slinky drops quickly into the product side. Drop the left hand instead, increasing positive enthalpy of reaction, and the reaction moves toward reactants. Very cool: it's fun to watch the light of understanding in the eyes of your audience.

...I have to tell you that there is no oil shortage and there never will be. It's one of the commonest substances in the Solar System.

If asteroids have oil -- and they do, in tremendous, astonishing amounts -- then that means that Fred Hoyle was right, and there are vast pools (he said ten miles wide) of non-biological petroleum deeper under the ground than we've been drilling, but not beyond reach.

We will run out of a desire or need to use oil long before we run out of oil.

Even if we did run out of oil, however, it would change very little. Our civilization made the transition from whale oil, when that resource became impractical, with relatively little friction. There are several resources that can replace petroleum if need be, and simple economics lets us predict how it will happen.

There's enough in the world already to be worried about. This one, running out of gas, is about as serious a threat to us as Y2K was -- a panic over nothing.

L. Neil Smith

Christopher Pellerito has written an excellent piece on the phenomenon of "financial pornography", a term coined by mathematician John Allen Paulos to describe "under-researched puff pieces on personal finance (e.g. Five Hot Stocks to Pump Up your 401k NOW!)"

It is no paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications.

Alfred North Whitehead

I admit I still find it a little amazing people fall for this crap. Magicians have been doing it for well over 100 years. Just off the top of my head there was Munito the dog, Toby "The Sapient Pig," and the "Two Curious Birds" -- one of which was a parrot as I recall. All could perform amazing tricks incuding "mind reading." It is no big secret how it is done: Cold reading (sometime called "Barnum effect") mixed with clever training or exceptionally perceptive animals.

What used to be sideshow entertainment has become a near-as-dammit religion. Perhaps it is just another side effect of how the publik skoolz fragment and compartmentalize knowledge and prevent critical thinking.

e0ts

Proof serves many purposes simultaneously. In being exposed to the scrutiny and judgment of a new audience, [a] proof is subject to a constant process of criticism and revalidation. Errors, ambiguities, and misunderstandings are cleared up by constant exposure. Proof is respectability. Proof is the seal of authority.

Proof, in its best instances, increases understanding by revealing the heart of the matter. Proof suggests new mathematics. The novice who studies proofs gets closer to the creation of new mathematics. Proof is mathematical power, the electric voltage of the subject which vitalizes the static assertions of the theorems.

Finally, proof is ritual, and a celebration of the power of pure reason.

Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh
The Mathematical Experience

It is a sign of intelligence to make generalizations. Frequently, after observing a property to hold in a large number of cases, you may guess that it holds in all cases. You may, however, run into difficulty when you try to prove your guess. Perhaps you just have not figured out the key to the proof. But perhaps your guess is false. Consequently, when you are having serious difficulty proving a general statement, you should interrupt your efforts to look for a counterexample. Analyzing the kinds of problems you are encountering in your proof efforts may help the search. It may even happen that if you find a counterexample and therefore prove the statement false, your understanding may be sufficiently clarified that you can formulate a more limited but true version of the statement.

Susanna S. Epp
Discrete Mathematics with Applications, 2nd edition, p123

Just saw this on the smith2004-discuss list: Kirsten C. Tynan's "Space Entrepreneurship Network" website, which has a useful set of pointers to relevant "Treaties, Laws, and Regulation."

I have a bit of the matchmaker in my blood. Some months ago I mentioned FuturePundit; recently I mentioned SciScoop. Those blogs really should get together for drinks and dinner sometime soon, maybe catch a movie afterwards.

I mentioned a few days ago that Sciscoop's Ricky Roberson had written on interesting piece reflecting on my earlier report of a day at the range with an Armalite AR-50. He asked some very general, open-ended questions about the motivational psychology of shooters. I just now noticed that a couple of days ago, someone named Dirk Koenig posted a long and spot-on followup comment, "An interest in Long-Range Shooting", with which I completely agree. An excerpt:

Ultimately, you're attempting to apply scientific repeatability to an endeavor which relies on human sensory input (or a small weather station) to determine nearly all of the factors, none of which are necessarily constant from shot to shot. (or from muzzle to target, for that matter) This is to say nothing of the skill of the shooter, which has to improve alongside the equipment which can get the bullet to a target farther and farther away and where being half a millimeter off in aim will cause a miss at 400 meters, provided all your estimates about wind direction and speed were right in the first place.

In reviewing all this, it doesn't sound like a lot of fun. But, like the sound of a golf ball draining into the hole after travelling 20 feet on the green, there are few sounds that warm a long-range shooters heart more than the muted CLANK of a round hitting a steel target that's a long way off...

Sometimes people lump together the ideas of validity and truth. If an argument seems valid, they accept the conclusion as true. And if an argument seems fishy (really a slang expression for invalid), they think the conclusion must be false.

This is not correct. Validity is a property of argument forms: If an argument is valid, then so is every other argument that has the same form. Similarly, if an argument is invalid, then so is every other argument that has the same form. What characterizes a valid argument is that no argument whose form is valid can have all true premises and a false conclusion. For each valid argument, there are arguments of that form with all true premises and a true conclusion, at least one false premise and a true conclusion, and at least one false premise and a false conclusion. On the other hand, for each invalid argument, there are arguments of that form with every combination of truth values for the premises and conclusion, including all true premises and a false conclusion.

Susanna S. Epp
Discrete Mathematics with Applications, 2nd edition, p37

About a year ago, I recommended Victor Koman's "Kings of the High Frontier" to my readership. I just re-read this by Ricky Roberson in his memorium of Kerry Pearson:

I learned about a few other things besides Firefly from him on his [Kerry's] website, such as some insights into political anarchy as a philosophy that I don't personally agree with but still have to acknowledge more than a few grains of truth in...

Another interesting little piece arrived a couple of days ago from Netflix, a documentary produced a couple of years ago in Silicon Valley, "Revolution OS". It's worth the watch, especially if you're one of the many like me Who Were There When It Happened (in my case, I was working at Netscape when the big Mozilla code release happened... even attended the big bash in the City). I was delighted to see my friend Christine Peterson given the credit she deserved for having invented the term "open source", and was also delighted to see a short bit with another old friend, Terry Egan, at a documented SVLUG Installfest.

Remember "H.E.A.P." ("Holocaust Education and Prevention") from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon? Well, Ken Holder maintains an excellent H.E.A.P. site.

Michael Reed pestered me for a couple of days to read Michael Crichton's Caltech Michelin Lecture "Aliens Cause Global Warming", and I'm very glad I did. Crichton's polemic is an uncommonly clear warning against the phenomenon of "consensus science" in America. Lysenkoism is still alive and well... and in America now.

A little over a week ago I was sitting in a hotel room in Portland, Oregon, checking my email, when I discovered that Ricky Roberson (whom I'd misattributed earlier as "Ricky James") of SciScoop had written a rather lengthy post on his site entitled "The Toy That's Not For Christmas" expressing his fascination with my ownership of an Armalite AR-50 single-shot .50BMG. I'd mentioned my discovery of his blog a few days before, and he was apparently returning the favor, in spades.

Ricky expresses his apparently sincere and heartfelt belief that if guns are going to exist, then he'd rather be in the group who has access to guns:

...I do unfortunately see the need to kill humans upon occasion - preferably a selected few key enemies instead of massive indiscriminate "shock and awe." An Armalite AR-50 is the best tool out there as far as I'm concerned for accomplishing this grisly task, and if this fearsome rifle is going to exist, I want to be in the group of people who have access to this technology instead of belonging to the group that doesn't.

While I essentially agree with this sentiment, I should point out a few things. First, I don't think the AR-50 is the best tool for that "grisly task". There are better tools for sniper and countersniper work nowadays, e.g. the 300 Winchester Magnum, or the 300 Lapua. Both these and related types are in increasingly common use nowadays by people whose paid jobs require their use as tools. A 700 grain .50 caliber bullet, for long range antipersonnel work, is fast becoming an outmoded approach. The guns are heavy, the ammo bulky, and the ballistics, while impressive, aren't nearly as optimal as the new breed of .30 caliber wonderguns (two of which I just mentioned).

If any student comes to me and says he wants to be useful to mankind and go into research to alleviate human suffering, I advise him to go into charity instead. Research wants real egotists who seek their own pleasure and satisfaction, but find it in solving the puzzles of nature.

Albert Szent-Györgi
(1893-1986)

It's great to get feedback on one's blog postings, especially when it results in the personal discovery of a great resource. Blog commenter Ricky James runs the compendious and incredibly interesting SciScoop: Exploring Tomorrow, which I strongly recommend telling all your friends about. So much to explore!

Now if you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason-responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I'm eager to play. I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenon of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith seriously as a way of getting to the truth, and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other (a worthy function that I do take seriously). But you must not expect me to go along with your defense of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify. Before you appeal to faith when reason has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side. You are sightseeing with a loved one in a foreign land, and your loved one is brutally murdered in front of your eyes. At the trial it turns out that in this land friends of the accused may be called as witnesses for the defense, testifying about their faith in his innocence. You watch the parade of his moist-eyed friends, obviously sincere, proudly proclaiming their undying faith in the innocence of the man you saw commit the terrible deed. The judge listens intently and respectfully, obviously more moved by this outpouring than by all the evidence presented by the prosecution. Is this not a nightmare? Would you be willing to live in such a land? Or would you be willing to be operated on by a surgeon who tells you that whenever a little voice in him tells him to disregard his medical training, he listens to the little voice? I know it passes in polite company to let people have it both ways, and under most circumstances I wholeheartedly cooperate with this benign arrangement. But we're seriously trying to get at the truth here, and if you think that this common but unspoken understanding about faith is anything better than socially useful obfuscation to avoid mutual embarrassment and loss of face, you have either seen much more deeply into this issue than any philosopher ever has (for none has ever come up with a good defense of this) or you are kidding yourself.

Daniel C. Dennett
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
pp154-155

A member of one of my mailing lists de-lurked today to introduce himself. He runs an incredibly cool and useful website, "Technical Video Rental", which advertises a carefully selected library of tapes, DVDs, and books for the independent-operator machinist. This should be of particular interest to those in the Free Arms Project.

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' pioneering flight. On the same day that a hobbiest at Kill Devil Hills was trying unsuccessfully to replicate that flight, the real news of the day went mostly unnoticed:

Today, a significant milestone was achieved by Scaled Composites: The first manned supersonic flight by an aircraft developed by a small company's private, non-government effort.

Rutan finally did it! This is fantastic news; congratulations to the Scaled Composites team. Images and a related story are available on Space.com.

The Free Arms Project just opened today for business, spun off the smith2004-discuss Yahoo Groups mailing list:

"The Free Arms Project is committed to the development of a patentless, Open Source, Open Engineering personal defense weapon."

It'll be interesting to see where we take this. The Weapon Shops of Isher?

The partially learned conceive of biological evolution as a teleological process producing what we consider "progress". In fact, natural selection is concerned only with what succeeds, not with what human beings find aesthetically pleasing. If there is some statistically significant survival value in being ugly enough to scare maggots off a shitpile, then biological evolution will happily beat all creatures with the ugly stick.

Dave Krieger

Almost 10 months ago to the day, I wrote a short blurb on this blog about Shenzhou V, which was supposed to have carried 2 taikonauts. That launch happened today, in the same type of communist secrecy which surrounded Yuri Gagarin's launch so long ago, and featured only one taikonaut, Yang Liwei. CNN reports:

Quoted by Chinese media just before he blasted off into space, Yang said he would "gain honor for the People's Liberation Army and for the Chinese nation."

All hail the "motherland": another ersatz superpower dedicated to making space its military summit. Yet another incident which compels me to recommend Victor Koman's Kings of the High Frontier.

I couldn't resist this: phenol.

G'nite.

I'm playing with RasMol, a molecular visualization tool. I'm starting with small inorganic molecules right now; since I was talking sulfites today, here's sulfur dioxide (SO₂) for you, in the standard space-filling model:

I'll be playing with RalMol some more. Visualization of macromolecules should be interesting in this tool...

Yesterday, I published an article by John Sebastian on the amusing topic of homemade wines done on the cheap. John made some assertions about "sulfates" (actually "sulfites") which generated some informative response from James Rogers in refutation. As a chemistry student with a burgeoning personal library on the science and some of its applications, I happened to have a copy of the proceedings of the 12-13 April 1973 "symposium sponsored by the Division of Agricultural and Food Chemistry at the 165th Meeting of the American Chemical Society" held in Dallas, Texas: "Chemistry of Winemaking", A. Dinsmoor Webb, editor (published 1974 by the ACS, Advances in Chemistry Series #137).

I've scanned in several pages of this out-of-print book, pp280-285, from the Webb article "Home Winemaking", which mention sulfite production and supplementation. I've included the section entitled "The Course of Fermentation" below simply because my OCR program flawlessly reproduced it... why waste the material by not including it? I have reproduced "Table I" manually with the published values, and placed it inline, after the first reference to it in the original text.

Those with a chemistry background will also note that this was written 30 years ago, before IUPAC nomenclature standarization.

- Russell

Excerpt follows:

Addition of Sulfur Dioxide

Certain fruits and some of the white varieties of vinifera have a tendency to brown during crushing and other early processing operations because of oxidation. This oxidation may be promoted by enzymes in the fruit, or it may be a direct reaction between phenolic material of the fruit and oxygen from air. Sulfur dioxide (SO₂) is a strong enough reducing agent that it is oxidized in preference to the phenolics of the fruit juice. Sulfur dioxide may also function by denaturing the oxidizing enzymes. Therefore, to prevent browning, add 25-200 ppm SO₂ to the fruit immediately after crushing. The quantity of SO₂ is governed by the ease of browning of the particular Juice being vinified. SO₂ in addition to preventing oxidative browning in juices, inhibits growth of bacteria and wild yeasts. Thus it provides a more nearly sterile field for the action of the desirable yeast starter added by the enologist. The quantity of SO₂ to be added to the juice is varied according to the condition of the fruit-clear, cool, sound fruit fresh from the vineyard requires very little while fruit that is in poor condition and warm needs more. The amounts of SO₂ to be added to a juice can be estimated from Table I.

SO₂ is a pungent and unpleasant smelling, dense gas at normal temperature and pressure. Under moderate pressure it condenses to a liquid which can be stored in steel cylinders. The large winery usually adds SO₂ to the crushed grapes by carefully metering a small stream of the liquid from a cylinder to the inlet line of the pump that transfers the must from the crusher to the fermenting tanks; this ensures that SO₂ is uniformly mixed into the mass of crushed fruit. For the small winery and the home winegrower, however, the relatively small amounts of SO₂ required are difficult to measure and transfer as liquid, so either water saturated with SO₂ or a SO₂-liberating salt is used.

Someone on the smith2004-discuss list said he'd like me to post a picture I had taken last year of an MBA Gyrojet 13mm rocket carbine. Here it is. The owner had it on display at a gun show in San Jose, and was kind enough to allow me to have a couple of photos taken.

"warren_et" on the same list calls the projectile a - get ready for this - "Single-Stage-To-Obit rocket".

I just saw some astounding demos of this wheel replacement system on the History Channel's "Tactical to Practical": MATTRACKS Rubber Track Conversion Systems. Great gear!

Just heard about this: "The Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize for Accomplishments in Commercial Space Activities":

The Heinlein Prize is a cash award of $500,000 to an individual or individuals for practical accomplishments in the field of commercial space activities.

I'm not sure if this is newsworthy or not. I can't find on their site what they mean by "practical accomplishments," and after a bit of searching in the obvious places, I still can't find out where they get their funding. But it's interesting, nonetheless.

I suggest the Heinlein Prize people be as specific in their mission as the people at the X Prize Foundation.

I thought I was being clever over the last half year by avoiding buying the "cheap" laboratory safety visors from the campus bookstore. Today I gave in and bought a pair of "visorgogs" made by "Jones and Company" in East Providence, Rhode Island. $7. You see, until now, if I wanted to avoid completely fogging my goggles within minutes in the lab, I'd have to switch to a pair of expensive shooting glasses for relief. Yesterday was the last straw for me. Sitting at a bench in front of an analytical balance, I simply couldn't see anything. I asked around among the other students for a pair I could borrow, and was handed one of the "cheap" school pair... and wore it for 10 minutes with no fogging whatsoever. Yeah, my other goggles were actual goggles (the big problem, it turns out), supposedly vented, but the vents on these visorgogs actually worked for me.

I recommended them. By the way, I really did consider doing with my problem goggles what I usually do with a scuba mask - spread saliva in them as antifog - but there's no way I could have done that in the non-aquatic environment of the lab and gotten away with it. If I'd tried, there's no way the girls in my class would ever ask me for help ever again...

By the way, it seems that visorgogs are very popular amongst "ice bikers." Why am I surprised that such a hobby exists?

We live in an age of fabulous technology - and crappy politics. Just like the Italian Renaissance, only with color TV.

L. Neil Smith
27 September 2003

Here's a term I would never, ever have thought up on my own: "fecal plume."

This is something I'd never expected to hear, as much of a MacOS X fan as I am:

The Virginia Tech Mac supercomputer should be fully functional and in use by January 2004. It will be used for research into nanoscale electronics, quantum chemistry, computational chemistry, aerodynamics, molecular statics, computational acoustics and the molecular modeling of proteins.

I attended a small party (about 20 people) of mostly extropians up in Santa Cruz last weekend. It was interesting to hear several large scale systems administrators discuss their newly found preference for MacOS in the data center. These were former NetBSD/OpenBSD/FreeBSD diehards, and some Linuxheads.

We admit, in geometry, not only infinite magnitudes, that is to say magnitudes greater than any assignable magnitude, but infinite magnitudes infinitely greater, the one than the other. This astonishes our dimension of brains, which is only about six inches long, five broad, and six in depth, in the largest of heads.

Voltaire

Just one other note: it took years from the time AIDS was identified until there was a sequenced HIV genome. It took days from the time SARS was identified until there was a sequenced genome for the coronavirus at fault. Many people have become jaded by this sort of shift -- but I haven't. I have friends who grasped the implications of the curves years ago but have become jaded waiting for the future, without realizing "hey, wait a minute, it has all been happening!"

Perry Metzger
21 September 2003

Yesterday I attended a barbeque party of extropian friends up at a buddy's dome house in the Santa Cruz mountains. Well after midnight, those of us still hanging around took our binoculars and did some stargazing, successfully finding M-31 (the Andromeda Galaxy) from memory, and Uranus using a copy of the software ephemeris XEphem from Clear Sky Institute, which I very highly recommend.

The case against agriculture's being a natural cultural advance began to gather momentum with the surprising discovery that hunting and gathering isn't such a bad way to make a living. The !Kung San, Richard Lee found in the 196os, work just a few hours a day - hunting, digging roots, harvesting mongongo trees - and then it's Miller time. In 1972, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (a former cultural evolutionist turned skeptic of cultural evolutionism) dubbed hunter-gatherers "the original affluent society" on grounds that "all the people's material wants are easily satisfied."

And the problem isn't just that primitive agriculture may have been a regression in terms of sheer efficiency. The more populous villages that farming ushered in would presumably foment disease; and the low-protein, high-starch content of some staple crops might be unhealthy. Studying the bones of early farmers, some archaeologists have concluded that they had shorter lives, and more rotten teeth, than hunter-gatherers.

Robert Wright
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
pp66-67

The goal of research in evolutionary psychology is to discover and understand the design of the human mind. Evolutionary psychology is an approach to psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in research on the structure of the human mind... In this view, the mind is a set of information-processing machines that were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

Leda Cosmides & John Tooby
Evolutionary Psychology Primer

Thanks to L. Neil Smith for pointing out this article today on a possible life extending chemical found in northern red wines: resveratrol.

The proposition here is that the human brain is, in large part, a machine for winning arguments, a machine for convincing others that its owner is in the right—and thus a machine for convincing its owner of the same thing. The brain is like a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world of their moral and logical worth, regardless of whether they in fact have any of either. Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than for virtue.

Robert Wright
The Moral Animal, p280

I was going through some of my personal papers. I found an original copy of my buddy Dr. Ralph Merkle's seminal 1989 Xerox PARC paper "Large Scale Analysis of Neural Structures". I'm not surprised to find that Ralph has put it online. Check it out.

"...only at Katsura [Detached Palace] does there exist that overwhelming freedom of intellect which does not subordinate any element of the structure or the garden to some rigid system. At Nikko, as in many architectural attractions of the world, the effect is gained by quantity - about in the same way that an army of two hundred thousand is larger than one of twenty thousand. At Katsura, on the contrary, each element remains a free individual, much like a member of a good society in which harmony arises from the absence of coercion so that everyone may express himself according to his individual nature. Thus the Katsura Palace is a completely isolated miracle in the civilized world."

Bruno Taut, in a speech given 1936 to the Society for International Cultural Relations (Kokusai Bunka Shinkoukai) in Tokyo
as quoted in Japanese Culture by Paul Varley, 4th edition, 2000, pp325-326

Assemblers will take years to emerge, but their emergence seems almost inevitable: Though the path to assemblers has many steps, each step will bring the next in reach, and each will bring immediate rewards. The first steps have already been taken, under the names of "genetic engineering" and "biotechnology." Other paths to assemblers seem possible. Barring worldwide destruction or worldwide controls, the technology race will continue whether we wish it or not. And as advances in computer-aided design speed the development of molecular tools, the advance toward assemblers will quicken.

To have any hope of understanding our future, we must understand the consequences of assemblers, disassemblers, and nanocomputers. They promise to bring changes as profound as the industrial revolution, antibiotics, and nuclear weapons all rolled up in one massive breakthrough.

K. Eric Drexler
Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology

We're told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years. We're told cars should be replaced with mass transportation. But it's hard to reach the drive through window at McDonald's from a speeding train. And we're told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?

P.J. O'Rourke

One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. ...[This] convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency. that they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest.

H. L. Mencken

The earth is the cradle of humankind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, 1896

The world needs uninhibited thinkers, not afraid of far out speculations; it also needs conservative hard-headed engineers who can make their dreams come true.

Arthur C. Clarke

In real life, however, even in our worst circumstances we have always been a relatively minor interest of the vast microbial world. Pathogenicity is not the rule. Indeed, it occurs so infrequently and involves such a relatively small number of species, considering the huge population of bacteria on the earth, that it has a freakish aspect. Disease usually results from inconclusive negotiations for symbiosys, an overstepping of the line by one side or the other, a biologic misinterpretation of borders.

Lewis Thomas
The Lives of a Cell, Germs, p76

50 years ago today, Watson and Crick discovered the codebook of all life on Earth.

David C. Harris passes this along: DNA Day at the Stanford Human Genome Center tomorrow, Friday 25 April 2003, "to honor the 50th anniversary of Watson-Crick's article with the structure (and hinted function) of DNA."

The uniformity of earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled.

Lewis Thomas
The Lives of a Cell