whatissingularity

Buzz Aldrin's freaky space travel story

2009-03-29T16:44:00.000-04:00

Aldrin_buzz Apropos of nothing, but worth a read, is Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin's tale of one of the most unusual things he saw during his 1969 mission to the moon. Aldrin was on a TCA panel for National Geographic Channel’s Expedition Week.

Here’s a lightly edited version of Aldrin’s story:

I guess the discovery that really baffled me started the first night en route to the moon beyond the Van Allen Belts. We closed the windows and turned out the lights and Mike Collins had the headset on to listen to Houston and Neil [Armstrong] and I were under the couch.

All of a sudden I saw a flash, and then another flash. And before I could move my eye to see what it was, it was gone. And then maybe a streak. And I kept seeing these, until I decided I wanted to go to sleep.

So when we had one day left coming back and I said to the other two guys, “You guys see anything funny last night, like some flashes of light, or something? Mike, did you see anything?”

“No, I didn’t see anything.”

“Neil?”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, I saw about a hundred of them.”

Well, it was obviously inside the spacecraft [because the windows were closed]. So we came back and reported that afterward. And to get to the bottom of if, the next flight was briefed. And they went up there. And they could see the flashes with their eyes shut.

Which meant that high Z particles were penetrating the spacecraft, your helmet, everything else -- and impacting the retina of your eye. And it’s an example of the kind of particles that are out there en route to human travel to Mars and so forth that we need to keep track of. And when they hit your brain, you just lost a cell of two of memory. So I guess that was one of the most unusual things we saw.

http://www.thrfeed.com/2008/07/buzz-aldrins-fr.html

What Your Cell Phone Is Teaching Companies

2009-03-13T21:23:00.000-04:00

Next time you glance at your BlackBerry, it may be useful to know you're not only checking e-mail, you're making a contribution to the central nervous system of the world.

A mobile phone is, after all, a kind of sensor: every time you send a text message, make a phone call, or download an e-mail, cellular towers pinpoint your position. With 4 billion handsets in use worldwide, that makes for trillions of data points flowing through the network every month and creating digital graphs of our paths through time and space. When aggregated, those individual paths convey a picture of a block, a community, a city even a whole society.

As Sandy Pentland, a professor at MIT's Media Lab, puts it, our cell phones have become the neurons in "an emerging and truly global nervous system."

Until recently, the information cascading out of our mobiles has been more or less ignored. In the past two years, however, there's been a paradigm shift as mobile companies seek new sources of revenue and smarter, more powerful phones embolden a new generation of software designers.

Taken together, these pressures have cracked the data vault. Established companies such as Nokia, Microsoft Relevant Products/Services and Google, as well as ambitious startups and academic researchers, are beginning to interpret the data sloughing off our digital selves. They're doing for real-world sites what the first Internet search companies did for Web sites in the late 1990s: index them, chart their relationships, and in the process learn about the people who move between them.

"Mobile is really the next frontier" for technology-oriented businesses," says Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research. "If you look at the next 1 to 3 billion online users, these people are going to be online on phones," making location an essential new data point for aspiring Googles to consider.

Search is only the beginning.

Location data will give marketers and advertisers new insight into consumers. Financiers are using it to predict retail trends and inform their stock trades. And researchers say that understanding the movements of people within a city block or neighborhood will enable policymakers to craft more effective government programs, and provide early indicators of a disease outbreak or other public hazard.

Too abstract? Heres a real-world example: Say a jazz group plays a 10 p.m. set at a downtown bar.

Using the location data they've collected, researchers can see where all the jazz aficionados ate dinner before the show, and what kind of late-night clubs they visit after the trumpets hit the final high C. They're putting the jazz club and, by extension, its patrons in the context of the rest of the city. That capability is on display in the company's first application for consumers, CitySense, which shows where everyone is in real time. Cell-phone users who download it can see which blocks are busier than usual, and even learn the most popular destinations people go to from their current location.

That might not sound like much, but if you're a business owner, its sweet music. Businesses spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to understand their customers. Surveys and focus groups, though, are blunt instruments. Sense Networks can craft customer profiles based on where people actually go and what they actually do not where they say they go and what they say they do.

© 2009 Daily Herald; Arlington Heights, Ill. under contract with YellowBrix. All rights reserved.

http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=023002T7E3V2

http://singularityu.org/

2009-02-09T23:38:00.000-05:00

Check it.

“Singularity University”

2009-02-03T15:32:00.002-05:00

Google and Nasa back new school for futurists

By David Gelles in San Francisco

Published: February 3 2009 05:02 | Last updated: February 3 2009 05:02

Google and Nasa are throwing their weight behind a new school for futurists in Silicon Valley to prepare scientists for an era when machines become cleverer than people.

The new institution, known as “Singularity University”, is to be headed by Ray Kurzweil, whose predictions about the exponential pace of technological change have made him a controversial figure in technology circles.

Google and Nasa’s backing demonstrates the growing mainstream acceptance of Mr Kurzweil’s views, which include a claim that before the middle of this century artificial intelligence will outstrip human beings, ushering in a new era of civilisation.

To be housed at Nasa’s Ames Research Center, a stone’s-throw from the Googleplex, the Singularity University will offer courses on biotechnology, nano-technology and artificial intelligence.

The so-called “singularity” is a theorised period of rapid technological progress in the near future. Mr Kurzweil, an American inventor, popularised the term in his 2005 book “The Singularity is Near”.

Proponents say that during the singularity, machines will be able to improve themselves using artificial intelligence and that smarter-than-human computers will solve problems including energy scarcity, climate change and hunger.

Yet many critics call the singularity dangerous. Some worry that a malicious artificial intelligence might annihilate the human race.

Mr Kurzweil said the university was launching now because many technologies were approaching a moment of radical advancement. “We’re getting to the steep part of the curve,” said Mr Kurzweil. “It’s not just electronics and computers. It’s any technology where we can measure the information content, like genetics.”

The school is backed by Larry Page, Google co-founder, and Peter Diamandis, chief executive of X-Prize, an organisation which provides grants to support technological change.

“We are anchoring the university in what is in the lab today, with an understanding of what’s in the realm of possibility in the future,” said Mr Diamandis, who will be vice-chancellor. “The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.”

Despite its title, the school will not be an accredited university. Instead, it will be modelled on the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, the interdisciplinary, multi-cultural school that Mr Diamandis helped establish in 1987.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8b162dfc-f168-11dd-8790-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

Internet users worldwide surpass 1 billion

2009-01-30T21:00:00.001-05:00

January 23, 2009 4:35 PM PST

Posted by Dawn Kawamoto

McDonald's restaurants and global Internet usage share something in common: more than 1 billion served within a month.

Global Internet usage reached more than 1 billion unique visitors in December, with 41.3 percent in the Asia-Pacific region, according to a report released Friday by ComScore.

The study looked at Internet users over the age of 15 who accessed the Net from their home or work computers. Europe grabbed the next largest slice of the global Internet audience, with 28 percent, followed by the United States, with an 18.4 percent slice.

But Latin America, while comprising just 7.4 percent of the global Internet audience, is the region to watch, noted Jamie Gavin, a ComScore senior analyst.

"The U.S. is slowing down in its growth and momentum, but Latin America, with social networking and the mobile Internet, is expected to gain momentum over the next few years," Gavin said.

He noted that while population plays a role in aiding certain regions to lay claim to a larger Internet audience, another equally important factor is the ability of the Internet to easily cross borders and take root.

A closer look at countries within the regions reveals that China accounted for the most Internet users worldwide, with a 17.8 share of unique visitors. The United States ranked second, with 16.2 percent, and Japan ranked a distant third, at 6 percent.

Across specific Internet properties, Google carried a sizable share of the global Internet market, visited by 77 percent of the worldwide audience, or nearly 776 million users.

Microsoft Web sites were used by 64.2 percent of users worldwide, and Yahoo sites 55.8 percent, according to ComScore. Sites run by Time Warner's AOL, meanwhile, were used by 27.1 percent of the worldwide Internet audience.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10149534-93.html

Check out the audio interview on the link

2009-01-12T19:51:00.001-05:00

Daniel Tammet on the Mind

Daniel Tammet’s mind does not work like most. He’s an autistic savant. One of just fifty or a hundred of his rare kind in the world.

He can recite pi out to 22,000 digits, from memory. And, maybe most unusually, he can talk about how he does it. About the lightning-fast associations and textures of reality that leap out at him.

Daniel Tammet is a savant and a great communicator. And his message is this: As strange and marvelous as his mind may seem, it is not that different from yours. You can learn from the autistic savant.

This hour, On Point: A tour of the wide horizon of the human mind.

-Tom Ashbrook

http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2009/01/daniel-tammet-on-the-mind/

What Comes After Minds?

2008-12-22T22:59:00.001-05:00

The human mind is the most complex thing we know. We feel this intuitively. But complexity is hard to measure. The total number of cells in a human brain may be no more than those in a watermelon, yet the diversity and functions of those cells in the brain exceed those in a fruit.

Brainspot

We can count up the number of parts, links, subparts, logical depth, and degrees of freedom of various complicated entities (a jumbo jet, rainforest, a star fish) and the final tally of components may near the total for a brain. Yet the function and results of those parts are way more complicated than the sum of the parts. When we begin to consider the multiple processes each part participates in, the complexity of the mind becomes more evident. Considered in the light of their behavior, living things outrank the inert in complexity, and smart things outrank dumb ones. We also have evidence for this claim in our efforts to manufacture complexity. Making a stone hammer is pretty easy. Making a horseless carriage more difficult. Making a synthetic organism more so. A human mind is yet more difficult to synthesize or recreate. We have not come close to achieving an artificial mind and some believe the complexity of the mind is so great that we will forever fail in that quest. Because of this difficulty and uncertainty, the mind is currently the paragon of complexity in creation.

If anything might rival the mind’s ultimate complexity, it would be the planetary biosphere. In its sheer mass and scale, the tangle of zillions of organisms and vast ecosystems in the biosphere trumps the 5 kilos of neurons and synapses in the brain – by miles. Yet we tend to assign greater complexity to the mind for two reasons. One, we think we understand how ecosystems work, although we can’t yet predict how they all work together. We have not conquered its planetary scale. On the other hand, we are baffled how the human mind works even in small regions. Scale is just one problem. Our mind parts are much more deeply entangled, reflective, recursive, and woven together into a unified whole than the biosphere. As a whole, the mind is a mystery still.

Two, the output of the biosphere is primarily more of itself. It will self-regulate and slowly evolve new species, but it has not produced new types of creation – except of course it produced human minds. But human minds have created all these other things, including miniature ecosystems and tiny biospheres, so we assign greater complexity to it.

This point was better said, more succinctly, by Emily Dickinson in her grenade of a poem.

The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will contain,
With ease, and you, beside.

The asymmetry of compression is an important metric. The fact that the brain can contain an abstract of the biosphere, but the biosphere not contain an abstract of a human mind, suggests one is larger, or more complex, than the other.

While we have not yet made anything as complex as a human mind, we are trying to. The question is, what would be more complex than a human mind? What would we make if we could? What would such a thing do? In the story of technological evolution – or even biological evolution – what comes after minds?

The usual response to “what comes after a human mind” is better, faster, bigger minds. The same thing only more. That is probably true – we might be able to make or evolve bigger faster minds -- but as pictured they are still minds.

A more recent response, one that I have been championing, is that what comes after minds may be a biosphere of minds, an ecological network of many minds and many types of minds – sort of like rainforest of minds – that would have its own meta-level behavior and consequences. Just as a biological rainforest processes nutrients, energy, and diversity, this system of intelligences would process problems, memories, anticipations, data and knowledge. This rainforest of minds would contain all the human minds connected to it, as well as various artificial intelligences, as well as billions of semi-smart things linked up into a sprawling ecosystem of intelligences. Vegetable intelligences, insect intelligences, primate intelligences and human intelligences and maybe superhuman intelligences, all interacting in one seething network. As in any ecosystem, different agents have different capabilities and different roles. Some would cooperate, some would compete. The whole complex would be a dynamic beast, constantly in flux.

Franklin Trees 02

We could imagine the makeup of a rainforest of minds, but what would it do? Having thoughts, solving problems is what minds do. What does an ecosystem of minds do that an individual mind does not?

And what comes after it, if a biome of intelligences is next? If we let our imaginations construct the most complex entity possible, what does it do? I have found we either imagine it as a omniscient mind, or as a lesser god (almost the same thing). In a certain sense we can’t get beyond the paragon of a mind.

Cultures run on metaphors. The human mind is the current benchmark metaphor for our scientific society. Once upon a time we saw nature as an animal, then it was a clock, now we see it as a kind of mind. A mind is the metaphor for ultimate mystery, ultimate awe. It represents the standard for our attempts at creation. It is the metric for complexity. It is also our prison because we can’t see beyond it. This is the message of the Singularitans: we are incapable of imagining what comes after a human mind.

I don’t believe that, but I don’t know what the answer is either. I think it is too early in our technological development to have reached a limit of complexity. Surely in the next 100 or 500 years we’ll construct entities many thousands of times more complex than a human mind. As these ascend in prominence they will become the new metaphor.

Often the metaphor precedes the reality. We build what we can imagine. Can we imagine – now – what comes after minds?

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/12/what_comes_afte.php

Portable devices give "cloud" new clout (Reuters)

2008-12-22T22:57:00.000-05:00

* Posted on Wed Dec 17, 2008 5:31PM EST
BOSTON (Reuters) - Chances are the mobile phone tucked in your pocket, the lightweight laptop in your backpack, or the navigation system in your car are under a cloud.

That means much of your vital data is not just at your home, at the office or in your wallet, but can easily be accessed by hooking up to the huge memory of the Internet "cloud" with portable devices.

"There's a lot of buzz about this. Everybody wants to be connected to everything everywhere," said Laura DiDio, an analyst with Information Technology Intelligence Corp.

Cloud computing for mobile devices is taking off with the expansion of high-speed wireless networks around the world.

"You're in a car driving someplace. Not only do you want directions, you want weather reports. You want know what are the best hotels around, where are the restaurants," DiDio said.

That kind of information is available in cars -- and most other places -- via mobile phones, "netbook" laptops hooked up to wireless air cards and even high-end navigation systems.

The cloud has been around since the mid-1990s when Web pioneers such as Hotmail, Yahoo Inc and Amazon.com Inc started letting consumers manage communications, appointments and shopping via the Internet.

Expansion came after companies such as Google Inc offered free programs similar to Microsoft's Word and PowerPoint, using an ordinary PC hooked up to the Internet, or a wireless handheld computer, or phone such as Apple Inc's iPhone. Nowadays you can shoot a photo with your mobile phone and email it to a free photo-editing site such as Picnik.com. Rearden Commerce offers a "personal assistant" that manages airline bookings and restaurant reservations via Research in Motion Ltd's BlackBerry device.

NETBOOKS

The Internet cloud, which also stores photos, music and documents that could be lost if a mobile device or PC were damaged, also supports huge social networks such as Facebook and News Corp's MySpace.

"Cloud computing is going to accelerate. It's a no brainer," said Roger Entner, an analyst with Nielsen IAG. "The stronger the wireless networks become and the more ubiquitous they become, the easier it is to put things on the cloud."

PC makers including Dell Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and Asustek Computer Inc have been successful in promoting "netbooks" -- a class of PCs introduced over the past two years that are essentially stripped down laptops, but smaller and less expensive. They are designed primarily to access the Web.

Nine of Amazon's 10 top-selling laptops are netbooks, which have little storage capacity and generally do not come with DVD drives. In the past, consumers paid a premium for smaller laptops, which often were high-end models.

"Netbooks hit an immediate sweet spot because of the price point," said Enderle Group analyst Rob Enderle.

A NEW TWIST

Back in the mid-1990s, Hotmail, now owned by Microsoft Corp, pioneered the use of a Web-based service.

Today Web-based email is one of the most widely used and easily accessible cloud services.

It works on ordinary laptops and netbooks. But it is rapidly gaining traction on "smart" mobile phones that share many functions with PCs. They include sophisticated devices such as the Blackberry and iPhone, as well as a new generation of handhelds from companies that include HTC Corp, Nokia and Palm Inc.

Analysts expect Internet companies to focus more attention on cloud-based applications for consumers in 2009.

"There's no way to stop it," said Enderle of the Enderle Group. "It's just a case of getting more and more consumer offerings based in the cloud."

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20081217/wr_nm/us_column_pluggedin_1

The internet in 2020: Mobile, ubiquitous and full of free movies

2008-12-22T19:41:00.001-05:00

San Francisco - A survey of internet leaders and analysts has predicted that most people will use mobile devices such as smartphones to access the internet in 2020, but cautioned that the spread of communications networks would not necessarily make the world a better place. "A strong undercurrent of anxiety runs through these experts' answers," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project that polled almost 1,200 experts. "They are quite sure the internet and cell phones will continue to advance at an amazing clip, but they are not at all sure people will make the same kind of progress as they embrace better, faster, cheaper gadgets," he said Wednesday. "The picture they paint of the future is that technology will give people the power to be stronger actors in the political and economic world, but that won't necessarily make it a kinder, gentler world."The survey forecast that for the majority of people getting online around the world in 2020 the mobile phone will be their only path to the web. Internet devices would feature a far greater level of touch and voice recognition technologies. But the always-on availability of internet users would increase the blurring of divisions between personal and work time. Most experts also agreed that despite the best efforts of those trying to enforce copyright protections the internet will still be a great place to find copied content available without payment, from music and movies to TV shows and books. The survey also predicted that artificial and virtual reality will become more embedded in everyday life, and that the transparency of organizations would increase - though this would not necessarily guarantee greater standards of integrity or economic and political justice. Social tolerance will not necessarily be improved by the growth of the internet, the experts agreed, since the same technology that spreads a diversity of viewpoints also spreads the potential for hate, bigotry and terrorism.

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/246802,the-internet-in-2020-mobile-ubiquitous-and-full-of-free-movies.html

Musicians protest use of songs by US jailers

2008-12-13T01:08:00.002-05:00

By ANDREW O. SELSKY, Associated Press Writer Andrew O. Selsky, Associated Press Writer – Tue Dec 9, 3:41 pm ET

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba – Blaring from a speaker behind a metal grate in his tiny cell in Iraq, the blistering rock from Nine Inch Nails hit Prisoner No. 200343 like a sonic bludgeon.

"Stains like the blood on your teeth," Trent Reznor snarled over distorted guitars. "Bite. Chew."

The auditory assault went on for days, then weeks, then months at the U.S. military detention center in Iraq. Twenty hours a day. AC/DC. Queen. Pantera. The prisoner, military contractor Donald Vance of Chicago, told The Associated Press he was soon suicidal.

The tactic has been common in the U.S. war on terror, with forces systematically using loud music on hundreds of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the U.S. military commander in Iraq, authorized it on Sept. 14, 2003, "to create fear, disorient ... and prolong capture shock."

Now the detainees aren't the only ones complaining. Musicians are banding together to demand the U.S. military stop using their songs as weapons.

A campaign being launched Wednesday has brought together groups including Massive Attack and musicians such as Tom Morello, who played with Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave and is now on a solo tour. It will feature minutes of silence during concerts and festivals, said Chloe Davies of the British law group Reprieve, which represents dozens of Guantanamo Bay detainees and is organizing the campaign.

At least Vance, who says he was jailed for reporting illegal arms sales, was used to rock music. For many detainees who grew up in Afghanistan — where music was prohibited under Taliban rule — interrogations by U.S. forces marked their first exposure to the pounding rhythms, played at top volume.

The experience was overwhelming for many. Binyam Mohammed, now a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, said men held with him at the CIA's "Dark Prison" in Afghanistan wound up screaming and smashing their heads against walls, unable to endure more.

"There was loud music, (Eminem's) 'Slim Shady' and Dr. Dre for 20 days. I heard this nonstop over and over," he told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith. "The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night for the months before I left. Plenty lost their minds."

The spokeswoman for Guantanamo's detention center, Navy Cmdr. Pauline Storum, wouldn't give details of when and how music has been used at the prison, but said it isn't used today. She didn't respond when asked whether music might be used in the future.

FBI agents stationed at Guantanamo Bay reported numerous instances in which music was blasted at detainees, saying they were "told such tactics were common there."

According to an FBI memo, one interrogator at Guantanamo Bay bragged he needed only four days to "break" someone by alternating 16 hours of music and lights with four hours of silence and darkness.

Ruhal Ahmed, a Briton who was captured in Afghanistan, describes excruciating sessions at Guantanamo Bay. He said his hands were shackled to his feet, which were shackled to the floor, forcing him into a painful squat for periods of up to two days.

"You're in agony," Ahmed, who was released without charge in 2004, told Reprieve. He said the agony was compounded when music was introduced, because "before you could actually concentrate on something else, try to make yourself focus on some other things in your life that you did before and take that pain away.

"It makes you feel like you are going mad," he said.

Not all of the music is hard rock. Christopher Cerf, who wrote music for "Sesame Street," said he was horrified to learn songs from the children's TV show were used in interrogations.

"I wouldn't want my music to be a party to that," he told AP.

Bob Singleton, whose song "I Love You" is beloved by legions of preschool Barney fans, wrote in a newspaper opinion column that any music can become unbearable if played loudly for long stretches.

"It's absolutely ludicrous," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times. "A song that was designed to make little children feel safe and loved was somehow going to threaten the mental state of adults and drive them to the emotional breaking point?"

Morello, of Rage Against the Machine, has been especially forceful in denouncing the practice. During a recent concert in San Francisco, he proposed taking revenge on President George W. Bush.

"I suggest that they level Guantanamo Bay, but they keep one small cell and they put Bush in there ... and they blast some Rage Against the Machine," he said to whoops and cheers.

Some musicians, however, say they're proud that their music is used in interrogations. Those include bassist Stevie Benton, whose group Drowning Pool has performed in Iraq and recorded one of the interrogators' favorites, "Bodies."

"People assume we should be offended that somebody in the military thinks our song is annoying enough that played over and over it can psychologically break someone down," he told Spin magazine. "I take it as an honor to think that perhaps our song could be used to quell another 9/11 attack or something like that."

The band's record label told AP that Benton did not want to comment further. Instead, the band issued a statement reading: "Drowning Pool is committed to supporting the lives and rights of our troops stationed around the world."

Vance, in a telephone interview from Chicago, said the tactic can make innocent men go mad. According to a lawsuit he has filed, his jailers said he was being held because his employer was suspected of selling weapons to terrorists and insurgents. The U.S. military confirms Vance was jailed but won't elaborate because of the lawsuit.

He said he was locked in an overcooled 9-foot-by-9-foot cell that had a speaker with a metal grate over it. Two large speakers stood in the hallway outside. The music was almost constant, mostly hard rock, he said.

"There was a lot of Nine Inch Nails, including 'March of the Pigs,'" he said. "I couldn't tell you how many times I heard Queen's 'We Will Rock You.'"

He wore only a jumpsuit and flip-flops and had no protection from the cold.

"I had no blanket or sheet. If I had, I would probably have tried suicide," he said. "I got to a few points toward the end where I thought, `How can I do this?' Actively plotting, `How can I get away with it so they don't stop it?'"

Asked to describe the experience, Vance said: "It sort of removes you from you. You can no longer formulate your own thoughts when you're in an environment like that."

He was released after 97 days. Two years later, he says, "I keep my home very quie

Kevin Kelly's Latest

2008-11-06T21:02:00.001-05:00

The Ninth Transition of Evolution

Many folks responded to my inquiry about evidence of a global super-organism. Among the most detailed and well-considered was Nova Spivack's long essay posted on Twine. Twine is a crowd-sourced aggregator of knowledge, superficially like the shared bookmarks of Delicious, or Stumbleupon, but with more room for comments and potentially more connections between posts. Nova founded Twine. I've been trying it out. One idea Nova mentioned in his essay I think is worth developing. He suggest three stages of development for collective action.

1. Crowds. Crowds are collectives in which the individuals are not aware of the whole and in which there is no unified sense of identity or purpose. Nevertheless crowds do intelligent things. Consider for example, schools of fish, or flocks of birds. There is no single leader, yet the individuals, by adapting to what their nearby neighbors are doing, behave collectively as a single entity of sorts.

2. Groups. Groups are the next step up from crowds. Groups have some form of structure, which usually includes a system for command and control. They are more organized. Groups are capable of much more directed and intelligent behaviors. Families, cities, workgroups, sports teams, armies, universities, corporations, and nations are examples of groups. They may have a primitive sense of identity and self, and on the basis of that, they are capable of planning and acting in a more coordinated fashion.

3. Meta-Individuals. The highest level of collective intelligence is the meta-individual. This emerges when what was once a crowd of separate individuals, evolves to become a new individual in its own right, and is facilitated by the formation of a sophisticated meta-level self-construct for the collective. This new whole resembles the parts, but transcends their abilities. High level collective consciousness requires a sophisticated collective self construct to serve as a catalyst.

What Nova Spivack suggests here is that the path from random population to meta-individual is a path of increasing structure. The parts are more tightly bound in relationships, and as they gain in interdependence, the whole advances to the next phase. I think a close study of how meta-individuals, or super-organisms (which I think are the same thing), form would reveal that there they be more than 3 stages, or perhaps more than one pathway. I think the main research hurdle in describing this development is to specify what exactly is being structured. My guess is that it is the informational nature of the organism.

In the landmark book "The Major Transitions in Evolution" the authors Smith and Szathmary lay out the eight major phases of development in biological evolution so far, and perhaps not remarkably, these eight stages resemble the path from random population to meta-individuals at each level. In other words, Smith and Szathmary say that evolution is the continued, graduated progression in which smaller units form larger, higher level units, and then those new meta-individuals start to form a new group, where each meta-individual is a mere individual. Thus life has formed a super-organism structure eight times so far. These eight levels or stages of super-organization are:

From replicating molecules to bounded population of molecules
From populations of replicators to chromosomes
From RNA chromosomes to DNA genes and proteins
From Prokaryotes to Eukaryotes
From Asexual clones to sexual populations
From single cell protists to multicelluar organisms
From solitary individuals to colonies
From animal societies to language-based human societies

As the Wikipedia entry on the theory states, Smith and Szathmary extract out several principles they find common to these eight transitions.

1. Smaller entities have often come about together to form larger entities. e.g. Chromosomes, eukaryotes, sex multicellular colonies.
2. Smaller entities often become differentiated as part of a larger entity. e.g. DNA & protein, organelles, anisogamy, tissues, castes
3. The smaller entities are often unable to replicate in the absence of the larger entity. e.g. Organelles, tissues, castes
4. The smaller entities can sometimes disrupt the development of the larger entity e.g. Meiotic drive (selfish non-Mendelian genes), parthenogenesis, cancers, coup d’état
5. New ways of transmitting information have arisen.e.g. DNA-protein, cell heredity, epigenesis, universal grammar.

I believe the last point is the cause and not a symptom of the transition.

Another way to view these transitions is as increased levels or varieties of cooperation. At each stage there is a tension between the selfish needs of the individual and the needs of the collective. Robert Wright, writing in "Nonzero" argues that the evolution of humanity is one long progression of increasing cooperation, starting from the first cell of life, where both "sides" win. Rather than having to choose the interests of the individual or the meta-individual collective in a zero-sum game, evolution innovates ways to structure cooperation so that both the individual and the group benefit in a non-zero-sum win/win. John Stewart, author of "Evolution's Arrow", argues that the direction of evolution is to extend cooperation over large spans of time and space. In the beginning atoms "cooperated" to form molecules, than replicators, then DNA, and so on, where greater amounts of material are interdependent for greater lengths of time. He suggests we can see where evolution is going by imagining a next phase which will increases the span of cooperation further.

That of course, would be the ninth transition,

From human society to a global super-organism containing both humans and their machines.

For this to happen, humans would have to benefit directly as well as the One Machine. (Nova suggests we abbreviate the One Machines as OM, pronounced Om, as in the mantra. That works for me.) There has to be a non-zero sum benefit for individual humans and for the larger collective of the OM. We see such benefits in the use of the web. In fact the web is ruled by network effects, which is another way of stating the increase benefits accrue to a collective (network) with the participation of additional individuals, who join because they also get direct benefit. Humans use Google because they benefit greatly, and their use makes Google better.

At every stage of evolutionary development we see

1. Increased cooperation among parts, benefiting both parts and the whole.
2. Increased span of interdependence in space and time.
3. Increase complexity of informational flow.
4. Emergence of a new level of control.

For the ninth transition in life's evolution -- the transition to a planetary level organization of humans and machines -- we should expect to see:

1. Increased cooperation among humans, benefiting both humans and the OM.
2. Increased span of interdependence. Planetary scale, things happening and enduring longer or quicker than before.
3. Increase complexity of informational flow. New ways of connecting, organizing, relating not possible before.
4. Emergence of a new level of control. An innovation (like DNA, or spinal cord, government) that takes control of functions in order to benefit constituents non-zero-ly.

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/11/the_ninth_trans.php

Wired.com Photo Contest: Music

2008-11-05T01:52:00.001-05:00

Your assignment for this photo contest is both simple and difficult: music. Move beyond the band and concert cliches and show us what music means to you.

Use the Reddit widget below to submit your best music photo and vote for your favorite among the other submissions. The 10 highest-ranked photos will appear in a gallery on the Wired.com homepage. Show us your grandpa's old dusty stacks of shellac, the piano in the backyard overgrown with moss and ivy, an exotic minstrel in the heart of a Mediterranean bazaar. Deliver us to psychedelic synesthesia by making us hear your vivid photos with our eyes.

The photo must be your own, and by submitting it you are giving us permission to use it on Wired.com and in Wired magazine. Please submit images that are relatively large, the ideal size being 800 to 1200 pixels or larger on the longest side. Please include a description of your photo, which may include exposure information, equipment used, etc.

We don't host the photos, so you'll have to upload it somewhere else and submit a link to it. If you're using Flickr, Picasa or another photo-sharing site to host your image, please provide a link to the image directly and not just to the photo page where it's displayed. Using an online photo service that requires that you log in will not work. If your photo doesn't show up, it's because the URL you have entered is incorrect. Check it and make sure it ends with the image file name (XXXXXX.jpg).

Please bookmark this page and check back periodically over the next two weeks to vote on new submissions!

Follow the link to see the photos:

http://www.wired.com/culture/art/news/2008/11/submissions_music

Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism

2008-11-01T01:13:00.000-04:00

By Kevin Kelly

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/

I am not the first, nor the only one, to believe a superorganism is emerging from the cloak of wires, radio waves, and electronic nodes wrapping the surface of our planet. No one can dispute the scale or reality of this vast connectivity. What's uncertain is, what is it? Is this global web of computers, servers and trunk lines a mere mechanical circuit, a very large tool, or does it reach a threshold where something, well, different happens?

So far the proposition that a global superorganism is forming along the internet power lines has been treated as a lyrical metaphor at best, and as a mystical illusion at worst. I've decided to treat the idea of a global superorganism seriously, and to see if I could muster a falsifiable claim and evidence for its emergence.

My hypothesis is this: The rapidly increasing sum of all computational devices in the world connected online, including wirelessly, forms a superorganism of computationÂ with its own emergent behaviors.

Superorganisms are a different type of organism. Large things are made from smaller things. Big machines are made from small parts, and visible living organisms from invisible cells. But these parts don't usually stand on their own. In a slightly fractal recursion, the parts of a superorganism lead fairly autonomous existences on their own. A superorganism such as an insect or mole rat colony contains many sub-individuals. These individual organisms eat, move about, get things done on their own. From most perspectives they appear complete. But in the case of the social insects and the naked mole rat these autonomous sub individuals need the super colony to reproduce themselves. In this way reproduction is a phenomenon that occurs at the level of the superorganism.

I define the One Machine as the emerging superorganism of computers. It is a megasupercomputer composed of billions of sub computers. The sub computers can compute individually on their own, and from most perspectives these units are distinct complete pieces of gear. But there is an emerging smartness in their collective that is smarter than any individual computer. We could say learning (or smartness) occurs at the level of the superorganism.

Supercomputers built from subcomputers were invented 50 years ago. Back then clusters of tightly integrated specialized computer chips in close proximity were designed to work on one kind of task, such as simulations. This was known as cluster computing. In recent years, we've created supercomputers composed of loosely integrated individual computers not centralized in one building, but geographically distributed over continents and designed to be versatile and general purpose. This later supercomputer is called grid computing because the computation is served up as a utility to be delivered anywhere on the grid, like electricity. It is also called cloud computing because the tally of the exact component machines is dynamic and amorphous - like a cloud. The actual contours of the grid or cloud can change by the minute as machines come on or off line.

There are many cloud computers at this time. Amazon is credited with building one of the first commercial cloud computers. Google probably has the largest cloud computer in operation. According to Jeff Dean one of their infrastructure engineers, Google is hoping to scale up their cloud computer to encompass 10 million processors in 1,000 locations.

Each of these processors is an off-the-shelf PC chip that is nearly identical to the ones that power your laptop. A few years ago computer scientists realized that it did not pay to make specialized chips for a supercomputer. It was far more cost effective to just gang up rows and rows of cheap generic personal computer chips, and route around them when they fail. The data centers for cloud computers are now filled with racks and racks of the most mass-produced chips on the planet. An unexpected bonus of this strategy is that their high production volume means bugs are minimized and so the generic chips are more reliable than any custom chip they could have designed.

If the cloud is a vast array of personal computer processors, then why not add your own laptop or desktop computer to it?Â It in a certain way it already is. Whenever you are online, whenever you click on a link, or create a link, your processor is participating in the yet larger cloud, the cloud of all computer chips online. I call this cloud the One Machine because in many ways it acts as one supermegacomputer.

The majority of the content of the web is created within this one virtual computer. Links are programmed, clicks are chosen, files are moved and code is installed from the dispersed, extended cloud created by consumers and enterprise - the tons of smart phones, Macbooks, Blackberries, and workstations we work in front of. While the business of moving bits and storing their history all happens deep in the tombs of server farms, the cloud's interaction with the real world takes place in the extremely distributed field of laptop, hand-held and desktop devices. Unlike servers these outer devices have output screens, and eyes, skin, ears in the form of cameras, touch pads, and microphones. We might say the cloud is embodied primarily by these computer chips in parts only loosely joined to grid.

This megasupercomputer is the Cloud of all clouds, the largest possible inclusion of communicating chips. It is a vast machine of extraordinary dimensions. It is comprised of quadrillion chips, and consumes 5% of the planet's electricity. It is not owned by any one corporation or nation (yet), nor is it really governed by humans at all. Several corporations run the larger sub clouds, and one of them, Google, dominates the user interface to the One Machine at the moment.

None of this is controversial. Seen from an abstract level there surely must be a very large collective virtual machine. But that is not what most people think of when they hear the term a "global superorganism." That phrase suggests the sustained integrity of a living organism, or a defensible and defended boundary, or maybe a sense of self, or even conscious intelligence.

Sadly, there is no ironclad definition for some of the terms we most care about, such as life, mind, intelligence and consciousness. Each of these terms has a long list of traits often but not always associated with them.Â Whenever these traits are cast into a qualifying definition, we can easily find troublesome exceptions. For instance, if reproduction is needed for the definition of life, what about mules, which are sterile?Â Mules are obviously alive. Intelligence is a notoriously slippery threshold, and consciousness more so. The logical answer is that all these phenomenon are continuums. Some things are smarter, more alive, or less conscious than others. The thresholds for life, intelligence, and consciousness are gradients, rather than off-on binary.

With that perspective a useful way to tackle the question of whether a planetary superorganism is emerging is to offer a gradient of four assertions.

There exists on this planet:

IÂ Â A manufactured superorganism

IIÂ Â An autonomous superorganism
IIIÂ An autonomous smart superorganism
IVÂ An autonomous conscious superorganism

These four could be thought of as an escalating set of definitions. At the bottom we start with the almost trivial observation that we have constructed a globally distributed cluster of machines that can exhibit large-scale behavior. Call this the weak form of the claim. Next come the two intermediate levels, which are uncertain and vexing (and therefore probably the most productive to explore). Then we end up at the top with the extreme assertion of "Oh my God, it's thinking!"Â That's the strong form of the superorganism. Very few people would deny the weak claim and very few affirm the strong.

My claim is that in addition to these four strengths of definitions, the four levels are developmental stages through which the One Machine progresses. It starts out forming a plain superorganism, than becomes autonomous, then smart, then conscious. The phases are soft, feathered, and blurred. My hunch is that the One Machine has advanced through levels I and II in the past decades and is presently entering level III. If that is true we should find initial evidence of an autonomous smart (but not conscious) computational superorganism operating today.

But let's start at the beginning.

LEVEL I
A manufactured superorganism

By definition, organisms and superorganisms have boundaries. An outside and inside. The boundary of the One Machine is clear: if a device is on the internet, it is inside. "On" means it is communicating with the other inside parts. Even though some components are "on" in terms of consuming power, they may be on (communicating) for only brief periods. Your laptop may be useful to you on a 5-hour plane ride, but it may be technically "on" the One Machine only when you land and it finds a wifi connection. An unconnected TV is not part of the superorganism; a connected TV is.Â Most of the time the embedded chip in your car is off the grid, but on the few occasions when its contents are downloaded for diagnostic purposes, it becomes part of the greater cloud. The dimensions of this network are measurable and finite, although variable.

The One Machine consumes electricity to produce structured information. Like other organisms, it is growing. Its size is increasing rapidly, close to 66% per year, which is basically the rate of Moore's Law. Every year it consumes more power, more material, more money, more information, and more of our attention. And each year it produces more structured information, more wealth, and more interest.

On average the cells of biological organisms have a resting metabolism rate of between 1- 10 watts per kilogram. Based on research by Jonathan Koomey a UC Berkeley, the most efficient common data servers in 2005 (by IBM and Sun) have a metabolism rate of 11 watts per kilogram. Currently the other parts of the Machine (the electric grid itself, the telephone system) may not be as efficient, but I haven't found any data on it yet. Energy efficiency is a huge issue for engineers. As the size of the One Machine scales up the metabolism rate for the whole will probably drop (although the total amount of energy consumed rises).

The span of the Machine is roughly the size of the surface of the earth. Some portion of it floats a few hundred miles above in orbit, but at the scale of the planet, satellites, cell towers and servers farms form the same thin layer.Â Activity in one part can be sensed across the entire organism; it forms a unified whole.

Within a hive honeybees are incapable of thermoregulation. The hive superorganism must regulate the bee's working temperature. It does this by collectively fanning thousands of tiny bee wings, which moves hot air out of the colony. Individual computers are incapable of governing the flow of bits between themselves in the One Machine.

Prediction: the One Machine will continue to grow. We should see how data flows around this whole machine in response to daily usage patterns (see Follow the Moon). The metabolism rate of the whole should approach that of a living organism.

LEVEL II
An autonomous superorganism

Autonomy is a problematic concept. There are many who believe that no non-living entity can truly be said to be autonomous. We have plenty of examples of partial autonomy in created things. Autonomous airplane drones: they steer themselves, but they don't repair themselves. We have self-repairing networks that don't reproduce themselves. We have self-reproducing computer viruses, but they don't have a metabolism. All these inventions require human help for at least aspect of their survival. To date we have not conjured up a fully human-free sustainable synthetic artifact of any type.

But autonomy too is a continuum. Partial autonomy is often all we need - or want. We'll be happy with miniature autonomous cleaning bots that requires our help, and approval, to reproduce. A global superorganism doesn't need to be fully human-free for us to sense its autonomy. We would acknowledge a degree of autonomy if an entity displayed any of these traits: self-repair, self-defense, self-maintenance (securing energy, disposing waste), self-control of goals, self-improvement. The common element in all these characteristics is of course the emergence of a self at the level of the superorganism.

In the case of the One Machine we should look for evidence of self-governance at the level of the greater cloud rather than at the component chip level. A very common cloud-level phenomenon is a DDoS attack. In a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack a vast hidden network of computers under the control of a master computer are awakened from their ordinary tasks and secretly assigned to "ping" (call) a particular target computer in mass in order to overwhelm it and take it offline. Some of these networks (called bot nets) may reach a million unsuspecting computers, so the effect of this distributed attack is quite substantial. From the individual level it is hard to detect the net, to pin down its command, and to stop it. DDoS attacks are so massive that they can disrupt traffic flows outside of the targeted routers - a consequence we might expect from an superorganism level event.

I don't think we can make too much of it yet, but researchers such as Reginald Smith have noticed there was a profound change in the nature of traffic on the communications network in the last few decades as it shifted from chiefly voice to a mixture of data, voice, and everything else. Voice traffic during the Bell/AT&T era obeyed a pattern known as Poisson distribution, sort of like a Gaussian bell curve. But ever since data from diverse components and web pages became the majority of bits on the lines, the traffic on the internet has been following a scale-invariant, or fractal, or power-law pattern. Here the distribution of very large and very small packets fall out onto a curve familiarly recognized as the long-tail curve. The scale-invariant, or long tail traffic patterns of the recent internet has meant engineers needed to devise a whole set of new algorithms for shaping the teletraffic. This phase change toward scale-invariant traffic patterns may be evidence for an elevated degree of autonomy. Other researchers have detected sensitivity to initial conditions, "strange attractor" patterns and stable periodic orbits in the self-similar nature of traffic - all indications of self-governing systems. Scale-free distributions can be understood as a result of internal feedback, usually brought about by loose interdependence between the units. Feedback loops constrain the actions of the bits by other bits.Â For instance the Ethernet collision detection management algorithm (CSMA/CD) employs feedback loops to manage congestion by backing off collisions in response to other traffic.Â The foundational TCP/IP system underpinning internet traffic therefore "behaves in part as a massive closed loop feedback system." While the scale free pattern of internet traffic is indisputable and verified by many studies, there is dispute whether it means the system itself is tending to optimize traffic efficiency - but some believe it is.

Unsurprisingly the vast flows of bits in the global internet exhibit periodic rhythms. Most of these are diurnal, and resemble a heartbeat. But perturbations of internet bit flows caused by massive traffic congestion can also be seen. Analysis of these "abnormal" events show great similarity to abnormal heart beats. They deviate from an "at rest" rhythms the same way that fluctuations of a diseased heart deviated from a healthy heart beat.

Prediction: The One Machine has a low order of autonomy at present. If the superorganism hypothesis is correct in the next decade we should detect increased scale-invariant phenomenon, more cases of stabilizing feedback loops, and a more autonomous traffic management system.

LEVEL III
An autonomous smart superorganism

Organisms can be smart without being conscious. A rat is smart, but we presume, without much self-awareness. If the One Machine was as unconsciously smart as a rat, we would expect it to follow the strategies a clever animal would pursue. It would seek sources of energy, it would gather as many other resources it could find, maybe even hoard them. It would look for safe, secure shelter. It would steal anything it needed to grow. It would fend off attempts to kill it. It would resist parasites, but not bother to eliminate them if they caused no mortal harm. It would learn and get smarter over time.

Google and Amazon, two clouds of distributed computers, are getting smarter. Google has learned to spell. By watching the patterns of correct-spelling humans online it has become a good enough speller that it now corrects bad-spelling humans. Google is learning dozens of languages, and is constantly getting better at translating from one language to another. It is learning how to perceive the objects in a photo. And of course it is constantly getting better at answering everyday questions. In much the same manner Amazon has learned to use the collective behavior of humans to anticipate their reading and buying habits. It is far smarter than a rat in this department.

Cloud computers such as Google and Amazon form the learning center for the smart superorganism. Let's call this organ el Googazon, or el Goog for short. El Goog encompasses more than the functions the company Google and includes all the functions provided by Yahoo, Amazon, Microsoft online and other cloud-based services. This loosely defined cloud behaves like an animal.

El Goog seeks sources of energy. It is building power plants around the world at strategic points of cheap energy. It is using its own smart web to find yet cheaper energy places and to plan future power plants. El Goog is sucking in the smartest humans on earth to work for it, to help make it smarter. The smarter it gets, the more smart people, and smarter people, want to work for it. El Goog ropes in money. Money is its higher metabolism. It takes the money of investors to create technology which attracts human attention (ads), which in turns creates more money (profits), which attracts more investments.Â The smarter it makes itself, the more attention and money will flow to it.

Manufactured intelligence is a new commodity in the world. Until now all useable intelligence came in the package of humans - and all their troubles.Â El Goog and the One Machine offer intelligence without human troubles. In the beginning this intelligence is transhuman rather than non-human intelligence. It is the smartness derived from the wisdom of human crowds, but as it continues to develop this smartness transcends a human type of thinking. Humans will eagerly pay for El Goog intelligence. It is a different kind of intelligence. It is not artificial - i.e. a mechanicalÂ -- because it is extracted from billions of humans working within the One Machine. It is a hybrid intelligence, half humanity, half computer chip.Â Therefore it is probably more useful to us. We don't know what the limits are to its value. How much would you pay for a portable genius who knew all there was known?

With the snowballing wealth from this fiercely desirable intelligence, el Goog builds a robust network that cannot be unplugged. It uses its distributed intelligence to devise more efficient energy technologies, more wealth producing inventions, and more favorable human laws for its continued prosperity. El Goog is developing an immune system to restrict the damage from viruses, worms and bot storms to the edges of its perimeter. These parasites plague humans but they won't affect el Goog's core functions. While El Goog is constantly seeking chips to occupy, energy to burn, wires to fill, radio waves to ride, what it wants and needs most is money. So one test of its success is when El Goog becomes our bank. Not only will all data flow through it, but all money as well.

This New York Times chart of the October 2008 financial market crash shows how global markets were synchronized, as if they were one organism responding to a signal.

How far away is this? "Closer than you think" say the actual CEOs of Google, the company. I like the way George Dyson puts it:

If you build a machine that makes connections between everything, accumulates all the data in the world, and you then harness all available minds to collectively teach it where the meaningful connections and meaningful data are (Who is searching Whom?) while implementing deceptively simple algorithms that reinforce meaningful connections while physically moving, optimizing and replicating the data structures accordingly - if you do all this you will, from highly economical (yes, profitable) position arrive at a result - an intelligence -- that is "not as far off as people think."

To accomplish all this el Goog need not be conscious, just smart.

Prediction: The mega-cloud will learn more languages, answer more of our questions, anticipate more of our actions, process more of our money, create more wealth, and become harder to turn off.

LEVEL IV
An autonomous conscious superorganism

How would we know if there was an autonomous conscious superorganism? We would need a Turing Test for a global AI. But the Turing Test is flawed for this search because it is meant to detect human-like intelligence, and if a consciousness emerged at the scale of a global megacomputer, its intelligence would unlikely to be anything human-like.Â We might need to turn to SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), for guidance. By definition, it is a test for non-human intelligence. We would have to turn the search from the stars to our own planet, from an ETI, to an ii - an internet intelligence. I call this proposed systematic program Sii, the Search for Internet Intelligence.

This search assumes the intelligence we are looking for is not human-like. It may operate at frequencies alien to our minds. Remember the tree-ish Ents in Lord of the Rings? It took them hours just to say hello. Or the gas cloud intelligence in Fred Hoyle's "The Black Cloud". A global conscious superorganism might have "thoughts" at such a high level, or low frequency, that we might be unable to detect it. Sii would require a very broad sensitivity to intelligence.

But as Allen Tough, an ETI theorist told me, "Unfortunately, radio and optical SETI astronomers pay remarkably little attention to intelligence.Â Their attention is focused on the search for anomalous radio waves and rapidly pulsed laser signals from outer space.Â They do not think much about the intelligence that would produce those signals." The cloud computer a global superorganism swims in is nothing but unnatural waves and non-random signals, so the current set of SETI tools and techniques won't help in a Sii.

For instance, in 2002 researchers analyzed some 300 million packets on the internet to classify their origins. They were particularly interested in the very small percentage of packets that passed through malformed. Packets (the message's envelope) are malformed by either malicious hackers to crash computers or by various bugs in the system. Turns out some 5% of all malformed packets examined by the study had unknown origins - neither malicious origins nor bugs. The researchers shrug these off. The unreadable packets are simply labeled "unknown." Maybe they were hatched by hackers with goals unknown to the researches, or by bugs not found. But a malformed packet could also be an emergent signal. A self-created packet. Almost by definition, these will not be tracked, or monitored, and when seen shrugged off as "unknown."

There are scads of science fiction scenarios for the first contact (awareness) of an emerging planetary AI. Allen Tough suggested two others:

One strategy is to assume that Internet Intelligence might have its own web page in which it explains how it came into being, what it is doing now, and its plans and hopes for the future. Another strategy is to post an invitation to ii (just as we have posted an invitation to ETI).Â Invite it to reveal itself, to dialogue, to join with us in mutually beneficial projects. It is possible, of course, that Internet Intelligence has made a firm decision not to reveal itself, but it is also possible that it is undecided and our invitation will tip the balance.

The main problem with these "tests" for a conscious ii superorganism is that they don't seem like the place to begin. I doubt the first debut act of consciousness is to post its biography, or to respond to an evite. The course of our own awakening consciousness when we were children is probably more fruitful. A standard test for self-awareness in a baby or adult primate is to reflect its image back in a mirror. When it can recognize its mirrored behavior as its own it has a developed sense of self. What would the equivalent mirror be for an ii?

But even before passing a mirror test, an intelligent consciousness would acquire a representation of itself, or more accurately a representation of a self. So one indication of a conscious ii would be the detection of a "map" of itself. Not a centrally located visible chart, but an articulation of its being. A "picture" of itself. What was inside and what was outside.Â It would have to be a real time atlas, probably distributed, of what it was. Part inventory, part operating manual, part self-portrait, it would act like an internal mirror. It would pay attention to this map. One test would be to disturb the internal self-portrait to see if the rest of the organism was disturbed. It is important to note that there need be no self-awareness of this self map. It would be like asking a baby to describe itself.

Long before a conscious global AI tries to hide itself, or take over the world, or begin to manipulate the stock market, or blackmail hackers to eliminate any competing ii's (see the science fiction novel "Daemon"), it will be a fragile baby of a superorganism. It's intelligence and consciousness will only be a glimmer, even if we know how to measure and detect it. Imagine if we were Martians and didn't know whether human babies were conscious or not. How old would they be before we were utterly convinced they were conscious beings? Probably long after they were.

Prediction: The cloud will develop an active and controlling map of itself (which includes a recursive map in the map), and a governing sense of "otherness."

What's so important about superorganism?

We don't have very scientific tests for general intelligence in animals or humans. We have some tests for a few very narrow tasks, but we have no reliable measurements for grades or varieties of intelligence beyond the range of normal IQ tests. What difference does it make whether we measure a global organism? Why bother?

Measuring the degree of self-organization of the One Machine is important for these reasons:

1) The more we are aware of how the big cloud of this Machine behaves, the more useful it will be to us. If it adapts like an organism, then it is essential to know this. If it can self-repair, that is vital knowledge. If it is smart, figuring the precise way it is smart will help us to be smarter.
2) In general, a more self-organized machine is more useful. We can engineer aspects of the machine to be more ready to self-organize. We can favor improvements that enable self-organization. We can assist its development by being aware of its growth and opening up possibilities in its development.
3) There are many ways to be smart and powerful. We have no clue to the range of possibilities a superorganism this big, made out of a billion small chips, might take, but we know the number of possible forms is more than one. By being aware early in the process we can shape the kind of self-organization and intelligence a global superorganism could have.

As I said, I am not the first nor only person to consider all this. In 2007 Philip Tetlow published an entire book,Â The Web's Awake,Â exploring this concept. He lays out many analogs between living systems and the web, but of course they are only parallels, not proof.

I welcome suggestions, additions, corrections, and constructive comments. And, of course, if el Goog has anything to say, just go ahead and send me an email.

What kind of evidence would you need to be persuaded we have Level I, II, III, or IV?

What does it all mean?

2008-10-27T20:06:00.002-04:00

http://release.theplatform.com/content.select?pid=x7aVOMrlfkkijQwcLllwk6WjB5JE0zrF

This video was produced by the Sony Corp. for its annual Executive meeting held in June, 2008.

2008-10-18T20:44:00.002-04:00

Melanie and I have been having good discussion over the issue of evolution after my last post regarding Emergence. I realize that this is a sensitive issue for a lot of people and I am excited to hear your thoughts on it! Check out our discussion below and lets continue the dialog in the replies.

Melanie said...

I thought a lot of the book made sense, and a lot of it didn't. It was quite obvious reading that he believed strongly in evolution. I will have to go through my notes (if I can find them these days) and discuss this with you sometime.

He brings up some interesting things as well. He seems to see his "emergence" theories as proof that there is not God or that God is not necessary.

It would be interesting to hear him speak, though.

October 12, 2008 7:40 PM

Jacob said...

Hi Melanie, I appreciate your posts :)

Some time ago I posted about a guy named Francis Collins and his book called "The Language of God."
He is the guy that headed up the Human Genome Project and the book discusses his transformation from an atheist to a person of faith in God. But he also has a lot of stuff to say about Christian's rejecting evolution and why that is both unnecessary and damaging to our cause.
I grew up in a home that still teaches against evolution. My mom and dad have raised me to appreciate science and love the mysteries that God has crafted into our beautiful universe. But they shut down every time scientific discussion speaks of "millions of years ago..."
I hit a wall during the making of Singularity where I was unable to deny it anymore. My perspective shifted and I actually began to see evolution as the creative process of God. Instead of trying to wrap the evidence around my beliefs I wanted to actually see what was really going on and what that could tell me about the God I love. When faced with issues and topics that challenge our faith we can either trust that God's plan is bigger than our understanding or we can retreat into our own understanding as a buffer from reality. I am afraid that is the place that many Christians have chosen to live. I would love to devote more time to this issue because I think it is important. I guess a good place to start is with a question. Is your faith is contingent on the existence of evolution. Why or why not?

October 13, 2008 11:16 AM

Melanie said...

Rats! I posted a response, and I have a feeling it didn't go through. My apologies if this duplicates anything.

Strangely enough, I recently pulled out Francis Collins' book to read soon. I found it a long while ago on clearance and picked it up.

It's funny to me that you have come to the conclusion, with study, that evolution is undeniable, while I went rather the opposite direction. My parents were a self-proclaimed athiest and agnostic. I do believe in micro evolution, but not macro evolution. As for the earth and things in it being millions of years old (which was what used to be said, now it's billions - who knew I was that old?) The truth is when it comes to the age of the universe, I don't think any time frame we have can account for it. I am curious now to see what Mr. Collins says.

I have to wonder why God would create taking millions/billions of years. Seven days, I can see a reason behind, as a pattern. But millions of years? Why?

You asked if my faith was contingent on the existence of evolution and the answer is quite obviously that it is not. God is God regardless of whatever creative process he uses or has used, however, and with or without evolution, my faith would not be swayed on that basis. Evolution from what I can see, just makes no real sense to me. I don't see one species evolving into another, among other things at least not without redefining species.

Anyway, I said this far better the first time around or at least I think I did. LOL

October 14, 2008 11:02 AM

Jacob said...

Thank you for that response Melanie, I know how frustrating it is to invest time into creating a good thought and having it disappear! My favorite part about this response is that your faith is not dependent on creation vs evolution. I have heard many people hinge their entire belief system on that issue and I am baffled by that.
It is also quite interesting to think about the way our paths have unfolded in relation to our parents. An initial reaction might be to think that we are both rebels but I believe there is more too it than that ;)
To me, the search for scientific truth represents a fundamentally different approach to understanding reality than does faith or philosophy or art. It encourages disproof. A good theory must stand the rigors of the entire community using the tools of elegant mathematical expression and experimental observation. If you are presenting a theory, you expect it to be ripped apart. It will be ripped apart many times throughout time as our understanding and our technology grows. This is the march of scientific progress. It leaves a wake of discarded older models behind it. Newton, Einstein, Bohr, all had ways of showing us the world and none of them were complete. They each gave us a stepping stone on the unending march of questions that we walk as a conscious species. Their answers enabled new thoughts but they weren't designed to be the END of thoughts.
Clearly there are answers that we are not yet aware of to questions that puzzle us about our universe. The realm of science is to assume nothing and proceed as if we can only trust that which we can prove. That is the only way it can work. This obviously presents a conflict of intention with those of us who believe in a creative and loving God.
Einstein said it best when he said, "The only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."

October 14, 2008 1:23 PM

Melanie said...

I think the great disadvantage of science is that it can only prove what is directly observed or can be duplicated. The origins of the universe will never fit into that category. One cannot disprove some things, nor can they be proven. Science nearly by necessity discounts God in the equation. The only problem is that if God was part of the equation, leaving him out would be akin to holding down the 7 on a calculator and still expecting for the answers to be correct.

"Einstein said it best when he said, 'The only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.'"

And sometimes one of the truths of God is that he is incomprehensible. How can the finite comprehend the infinite?
But to me, only God makes sense.

October 14, 2008 10:04 PM

Jacob said...

See, now I see that as its great advantage. There are limits to what it can speak to. But what it does speak to, it is careful to say the right thing. And when it is wrong, science is the first to admit it. When Einstein's theory of relativity overthrew the Newtonian worldview that all the world was so comfortable with, the world was told because it would result in a deeper understanding of the truth of our reality. Sadly, the history of the church is full of many missed opportunities to champion these truths until it is too late. Think about Galileo and story of heliocentrism. Only recently has the Catholic Church recanted its handling of such atrocities. The dangerous trend I see in the church as a whole is that we tend to lean too strongly on our own understanding. There are many amazing and confusing things about our universe and science should be viewed as ally in the search for Truth. Even when the results don't seem to connect with our understanding we can acknowledge that there is much to still be understood :)
You had mentioned earlier that evolution made no sense and that a 7 day pattern made sense but I would suggest that God is a God of process and that evolution is a perfect picture of that process.

October 15, 2008 8:55 AM

Melanie said...

Actually, I think both the church and science have been guilty of suppressing the truth. I will give this some thought. But science has been wrong plenty of times, and the church has been far from perfect - at least in this world.

Regardless, some things cannot be proven or disproven with science. A lot of times with science the data is unbiased, but the interpretation of data is not. At least that is my personal observation, especially when it comes to statistics.

"I would suggest that God is a God of process and that evolution is a perfect picture of that process."

I can see your point there to a point. LOL

"Even when the results don't seem to connect with our understanding we can acknowledge that there is much to still be understood :)"

I can definitely agree to this wholeheartedly. :)

The more information we have, sometimes the more evident it becomes how limited our knowledge truly is.

--Melanie

Steven Johnson

2008-10-12T17:16:00.002-04:00

I wanted to alert my friends at Drexel University and the surrounding Philadelphia area that one of my favorite writers/thinkers will be speaking at Bossone Auditorium on October 21.

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/599531/

Now the video above is obviously dated but it is a good introduction to Steven's kind of thinking. He is a champion of a science called Emergence. Basically Emergence deals with things like ant colonies, city development, the internet, and human consciousness. This may seem like a radically diverse array of topics (and it is) but they are connected by a common theme. Each of these cases use a bunch of little "stupid" things and connects them into a "smart" thing. It is nature's practical application of a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

What does this mean? Well, think for a second about an ant colony. It has huge numbers of individual ants. But none of those ants have the ability to govern the ant colony and lead complicated projects. Not even the ant queen. But somehow, in spite of this lack of leadership from the top, ant communities are able to accomplish amazing and unbelievable things by this kind of bottom up governance. But how?

Well, Steven wrote a really interesting book about this very thing. It is called "Emergence" and I would recommend it to anyone who takes an interest in how things work.

Also, there is an amazing podcast about this science of Emergence right here:
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2005/02/18

2008-09-25T01:31:00.003-04:00

What in the world is going on? I am blown away by the drastic nature of everything going on this week! Today was landmark in so many ways. The economy is obviously the star of the show. As we all try to wrap our minds around this massive bailout proposal, I am interested in hearing your thoughts. It seems like a radical shift is taking place and no one really understands the ramifications yet. Is this a good thing? Is this undermining the very principles of free market economies?
It will be awesome to see what the candidates have to say about all of this!
We are going to host a Debate viewing party at Bean There Cafe on Friday night. We will even play a few acoustic songs before the debates begin. Look out for an official announcement tomorrow.

2008-09-16T19:28:00.001-04:00

I am watching this right now... check it out!

2008-09-13T12:22:00.002-04:00

"Unchristian."

At the conference this past week, I had the opportunity to talk with author David Kinnaman about his book, "Unchristian." I had read this book earlier in the year after Isaac Slade had recommended it to me. When we were on tour with the Fray, Isaac and I had developed a really cool friendship and many great conversations. He was surprisingly candid about his faith and his passion for God. It was really refreshing to hear him speak with open conviction about his love for God and to see him live that out on a daily basis.
So, one day he was telling me about this book and why it was important. I finally got around to reading it and he was right. It is important. It is really important.

Here is a brief interview with David that describes what the book is about. Have any of you read it?

All eyes on collider as it comes to life (Boston Globe : 09-08-08)

2008-09-08T02:27:00.000-04:00

The world's biggest, most highly-anticipated physics experiment comes online this week, as the first beam of particles begins to circulate around a 17-mile underground racetrack that lies beneath France and Switzerland.

The $9 billion Large Hadron Collider, 20 years in the making, represents the work of at least 7,000 scientists from 60 countries, including a contingent from the Boston area that spent years, or entire careers, working on this project.

Their excitement is testimony to the importance of the mission: to recreate in an underground tunnel the conditions of the early universe, just a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. From that, they hope to fill in gaps in physics knowledge, search for hidden dimensions, and understand why particles have mass.

The collider soaks up superlatives like no other science project. But no whiz-bang insights are expected immediately, or even this year. The inaugural beam is just the critical first step in what will be years of research. So the revving up this week of the world's largest particle accelerator will be punctuated with emotion, not eureka. "It's the culmination of my career," said James Bensinger, 67, a physicist from Brandeis University who has been working on the project for 15 years. "It will certainly outlive my scientific life; it very well may outlive me, period. It's not that unusual in the human experience. The people who built cathedrals - often times their sons saw it completed. But still, they thought it was something much bigger than they were and kept it going."

The Large Hadron Collider is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known by its French acronym, CERN. The circular underground tunnel, in which the particle beams ramp up to 99.99 percent of the speed of the light, lies more than 300 feet below the earth, at the foot of the Jura Mountains. The accelerator dwarfs its closest cousin, the Tevatron at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., and because it can reach higher energies, it will be used to search for evidence of some of the most evanescent particles.

One of physicists' most vexing unanswered questions is: What are the origins of mass in the universe? The answer may lie in a theoretical particle called the Higgs boson first predicted in 1964, that has been bugging scientists for decades. The elusive particle, also called the "God particle," was inserted into scientific theory to make physicists' models work, but it has never been seen.

"For my entire career, since I got my PhD at Cornell in the early 70s, there's been something called the standard model that has explained all the phenomena that has been observed in high energy physics basically through my entire my career," said Frank Taylor, an MIT senior research scientist. "But there's one part that's missing, so in a sense the program would hopefully be the fulfillment of this one missing piece of the exploration."

Taylor, Bensinger, and other Boston-area scientists collaborated on building a detector that will be used within the collider to detect muons, particles that are signatures of the elusive particles expected to be created in the collisions. Scientists from Boston University, Brandeis University, Harvard University, MIT, Northeastern University, Tufts University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst worked on various research programs within the Large Hadron Collider.

Fifteen years seems like a long time to wait to build a single experiment, especially when scientists may have to wait additional months and years before the scientific breakthroughs start to percolate out. But many of the Boston-area physicists who worked on building a detector already had their patience tested before; they were alums from another major scientific experiment that was never built, called the Texas Superconducting Super Collider. Some had already devoted years to that project, estimated to cost $11 billion, when it was halted by Congress in 1993.

Back then, "There was a lot of soul searching, and a lot of saying, 'What do we do now?' " said George Brandenburg, a senior research fellow at Harvard University. But since then, Brandenburg and colleagues have been able to do in Europe the same work they once intended to do in Texas.

The United States is heavily involved in the Large Hadron Collider, paying $531 million to support it, but the new project does shift the center of such physics research to Europe. Still, "as a scientist, how can you be unhappy if the project is being done and you can be a part of it?" Brandenburg said.

Over the years, some physicists have shifted their research focus to different areas, yet they remain excited about the launch of the Large Hadron Collider.

"This could be an epic program, honestly," said Tony Mann, a physicist from Tufts University who worked on the detector, but has now resumed work on another area of particle physics. "This is potentially the most exciting experimental endeavor ever launched. There's a part of me that looks at that with curiosity, and a little bit of envy. I hate to miss a great party."

What scientists discover at the Large Hadron Collider will also help set the path for the next big experiment, the International Linear Collider, which will smash together another family of particles, called leptons.

But there's always the possibility that against all expectations, this massive game-changing experiment will come up empty-handed. It could take years to find out if it represents the dawn of a new era of physics - or not.

"This could be the last experiment ever done, or we could discover all kinds of extraordinary, exciting things," said Steve Ahlen, a BU physicist working on the collider. "I'm just ecstatic this thing got built."

Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.

http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2008/09/08/all_eyes_on_collider_as_it_comes_to_life/?page=2

2008-09-08T02:13:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow morning I will be flying out to Nashville for a couple of days to attend the Sapere Artist Retreat. This should be a pretty enjoyable few days and I will fill you in on all the stories as they happen. I have been told that the format will include panel discussion, Q&A, conversation about art and faith, and music. Here is an abbreviated list of speakers/panelists (and chef...sweet!)


Guest speakers include:

•  David Kinnaman, author of the best-selling book, unChristian: What
a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity
•  Anna Broadway, popular blogger and author of Sexless In The City:
A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity
•  David Dark, author of Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in
Radiohead, the Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons
•  Mark Scandrette, poet and author of Soul Graffiti: Making A Life
in the Way of Jesus
•  Charlie Peacock, author of New Way To Be Human

A Special Surprise Guest is scheduled for Tuesday afternoon!

Amazing food will be prepared by California guest chef Kathi Riley-
Smith, including a light breakfast at registration on Tuesday morning
at 9AM, so come hungry!  Kathi's food-cred is on stun (Chez Panisse,
Zuni Cafe).  She was nominated by “Food and Wine Magazine” as one of
the 25 Hot New American Chefs.

2008-09-04T20:56:00.000-04:00

So my sisters gave this book to me as a birthday gift and I have heard a lot about it from a lot of different people. Has anyone here read it yet? I just started and I must say that I am intrigued.

2008-08-30T20:08:00.000-04:00

I know I just threw a lot at you in a short amount of time. You may find yourself asking what all of this means and what any of it has to do with me or mae or singularity. Let me try to explain as briefly as possible because the most important part of this story is still to come.

I said at the beginning that this is a puzzle. I am not sure what the finished picture is supposed to look like yet. All I know is that these are the pieces that landed in my lap and let me know that I was part of something bigger than myself and my own little world. This is the mystery I have been given to solve. Would you please help me?

? -> .

2008-08-30T20:06:00.000-04:00

Questions must be asked before answers can be formulated.

truth comes from the sea

2008-08-30T20:02:00.000-04:00

2008-08-30T19:59:00.000-04:00

BEAR T.IA MART.
(a shift in perspective will illuminate the meaning)
BE ART. I AM ART.

Juan Maldacena

2008-08-30T17:24:00.000-04:00

The Big Bang Machine

A Long Island particle smasher re-creates the moment of creation.

by Tim Folger

published online February 27, 2007

"Here is where the action takes place. This is where we effectively try to turn the clock back 14 billion years. Right above your head, about 13½ feet in the air."

Looking up, I try to imagine the events Tim Hallman is describing—atoms of gold colliding at 99.99 percent the speed of light; temperatures instantly soaring to 1 trillion degrees, 150,000 times hotter than the core of the sun. Then I try to picture a minuscule five-dimensional black hole, which, depending on your point of view, may or may not have formed at that same spot over my head. It's all a little much for an imagination that sometimes struggles with the plot of Battlestar Galactica.

Particles unleashed by the high-energy
collisions at the RHIC collider offer a
peek at the freekish far end of physics.

I'm standing in a Battlestar-scale room at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, where Hallman and about 1,200 other physicists labor away as latter-day demiurges. Here in the middle of Long Island, they are re-creating the opening microseconds of the universe's existence, the time when the first particles of matter—of everything—appeared.

The building we're in straddles a small segment of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC (pronounced "Rick"), an ultrapowerful particle accelerator with a 2.4-mile circumference. For nine months of the year, a 1,200-ton detector as big as a house fills most of the room. But technicians have hauled the detector to an adjoining hangar-size area for maintenance, leaving me and Hallman free to amble just below the spot where a new form of matter exploded into being during the accelerator's recent runs. New, that is, in that it hasn't existed since the very beginning of time, or by the transcendently precise reckoning of physicists, since 10 millionths of a second after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

That was the last time particles called quarks and gluons—the most fundamental constituents of matter—roamed free in the cosmos, and it was a brief run. After just a hundred-millionth of a second, all the universe's quarks combined in triplets—held together by gluons—to form protons and neutrons. They have been locked inside the hearts of atoms ever since, until RHIC set them loose once again.

When the gold nuclei collide in the accelerator, they explode in a fireball just a trillionth of an inch wide. Inside that nanoscale fireball, temperatures exceed a trillion degrees, mimicking conditions in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang. The nuclei literally melt back into their constituent quarks and gluons. Then, 50 trillionths of a trillionth of a second later, the fireball cools, just as the infant universe did as it expanded, and the quarks and gluons merge once again to form protons and neutrons.

With these experiments, Hallman and his Brookhaven colleagues are discovering something extraordinary about the early universe. The quarks and gluons that coursed through the newborn cosmos—and considerably more recently, through RHIC—took the form not of a gas, as physicists expected, but of a liquid. For a few instants, a sloshing soup of quarks and gluons filled the universe.

"I like to say that our theory of the early universe is now all wet," says Bill Zajc, a physicist at Columbia University and the leader of one of the experimental teams at RHIC.

In the circular tunnel at RHIC (above),
two rings of superconducting magnets
accerlate heavy ions, like gold, to high
speeds in opposite directions. At six
points along the way, the rings cross,
causing collisions between the ions.
Gigantic detectors (below) track the
spray of particles released in the
smashups.

He might have added that the theory is full of holes, little black ones from the fifth dimension, because it turns out that in a strange mathematical sense, the quarks and gluons at RHIC are equivalent to microscopic black holes in a higher-
dimensional space. Understanding just why that is so involves navigating a labyrinth of strange, heady, and heretofore seemingly unrelated theories of physics. In addition to challenging the conventional model of how the universe behaved in its earliest instants, the RHIC data also provide the first empirical support for a theory so enthralling it once had physicists dancing at a major conference. Moreover, the accelerator's results hint that string theory—the much-
ballyhooed "theory of everything," which has lately come under attack as being little more than a fanciful, if elegant, set of equations—may have something to say about how the universe works after all.

Before the physicists at Brookhaven could begin their pursuit of quarks, gluons, and hyperdimensional holes in space-time, they first had to prove that they wouldn't destroy the planet in the process. The doomsday risk never really existed, but making that clear to a worried public occupied the time of some of the world's leading physicists (see "Could a Man-Made Black Hole Swallow Long Island?" opposite page).

Once the doubts about Earth's safety had been laid to rest, the physicists at Brookhaven fired up their $500 million accelerator for the first time, in the summer of 2000. For Nick Samios, it was the culmination of two decades of work. Samios, who is now director of the RIKEN-BNL Research Center, headed Brookhaven from 1982 until 1997 and was the driving force behind the effort to build RHIC. "I'll tell you a story," he says over lunch at Brookhaven's staff cafeteria, leaning forward. The story's principals are Stalin; his chief of secret police, Lavrenty Beria; and Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov, a leading Soviet nuclear physicist. "Stalin and Beria are discussing the Soviet Union's first atomic-bomb test. 'Who gets the award if the test is a success?' Beria asks Stalin. 'Kurchatov.' So then Beria asks, 'Who gets shot if it doesn't work?' 'Kurchatov.' I feel like Kurchatov. Anyone else could disassociate themselves from the project. I couldn't."

One gamble Samios and his colleagues made 20 years ago was to trust in Moore's law, first formulated in 1965 by one of Intel's founders, which holds that computing power doubles roughly every 18 months. The type of accelerator Samios wanted to design would generate a petabyte of data—a million gigabytes—during each run, a rate that would fill the hard drive of one of today's typical desktop PCs every few minutes. In 1985 there were no computers that could handle anything close to that. But the "if we build it, the computers will be there" strategy paid off, and Samios's dream of a Big Bang machine became a reality.

To re-create the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, RHIC reaches higher energies than any other collider in the world. Unlike most accelerators, which smash together simple particles like individual protons, RHIC accelerates clusters of hundreds of gold atoms—with 79 protons and neutrons in each gold nucleus—to 99.99 percent the speed of light. In the resulting multiatom collisions, a melee of tens of thousands of quarks and gluons is released. They in turn form thousands of ordinary particles that can be tracked and identified.

"The physics at RHIC is complicated," Samios says with a touch of understatement. "Two big nuclei are hitting each other. Physicists are used to calculating a proton hitting a proton. We're hitting 200 nucleons with 200 nucleons [a nucleon is a proton or neutron]. With each collision we get thousands of particle tracks coming out. We had to build detectors that could count all of them. People weren't used to that. They were used to counting 50 in a collision.

"We hoped that RHIC would make great discoveries. We hoped that we'd break nuclei into quarks—the early universe was quarks and gluons, and then it cooled off and you got protons and us. We've done that. The question is–Is there something new going on? And the answer is yes."

Until the first gold atoms started making their 13-microsecond laps around RHIC's 2.4-mile-long perimeter, physicists thought they had a pretty good idea of what to expect from the collisions. The gold nuclei were supposed to shatter and form a hot gas, or plasma, of quarks and gluons. For physicists, watching the collisions in RHIC would be like watching the Big Bang unfolding before their eyes, but running in reverse—instead of a seething cloud of gluons and quarks settling down to form protons and neutrons, they would see the protons and neutrons burst open in sprays of quarks and gluons.

The universe has been around now for about 400 quadrillion seconds, but for physicists like Tom Kirk, the former associate lab director for high-energy and nuclear physics at Brookhaven, the first millionth of a second was more intriguing than any that followed.

"You may remember Steven Weinberg's book The First Three Minutes," says Kirk, referring to a classic account of the physics of the early universe. "Steve said after those first three minutes, the rest of the story is boring. Well, we could say after that first microsecond, everything else was pretty boring."

Kirk smiles and raises his eyebrows slightly, gauging whether I'm sympathetic to his remark, made, perhaps, only half in jest. When that first microsecond of eternity ended, the remainder of cosmic history unfolded with stolid inevitability. Once quarks finished clumping together as protons and neutrons, it was only a matter of time—and gravity—before the first simple atoms gathered in vast clouds to form stars and galaxies, which eventually begot us. (For an elaboration of your personal relationship with quarks, see "The Big Bang Within You," below.)

RHIC was designed to observe directly, for the first time, how quarks behave when freed from their nuclear prisons. The initial results, announced in 2005, stunned physicists everywhere. The particles released by the high-speed smashups were not bounding around freely the way atoms in a gas do but moving smoothly and collectively like a liquid, responding as a connected whole to changes in pressure within the fireball. The RHIC physicists describe their creation as a near "perfect" fluid, one that has extremely low internal friction, or viscosity. By the standards physicists use, the quarks and gluons make a much better liquid than water.

Since the similarity of quarks and gluons to water is not readily apparent to me, I take the subway to Columbia University to meet Zajc, the leader of one of RHIC's main experimental groups, hoping he'll enlighten me. "So how does one calculate the viscosity of those quarks and gluons?" he asks rhetorically. I sit silently, clueless, hiding my befuddlement behind a vigorous show of note taking. "It turns out there's a connection here to black-hole physics." That connection could be the first, long-awaited sign that string theory—which is in desperate need of evidence, any evidence, to support its ambitious claims to truth—is on the right track. The implausible-sounding connection between droplets of quarks and black holes may also vindicate a theory that once had 200 of the world's leading theorists jubilantly dancing the macarena.

Ehhhh! Maldacena!

M-theory is finished,

Juan has great repute.

The black hole we have mastered,

QCD we can compute.

Too bad the glueball spectrum

Is still in some dispute.

Ehhhh! Maldacena!

So goes Jeffrey Harvey's über-geek version of the once-ubiquitous 1996 hit. Harvey, a theoretical physicist at the University of Chicago, wrote the lyrics to honor Juan Maldacena, a young Argentine string theorist now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

It was the summer of 1998, and Maldacena had just published a paper that to physicists bordered on the miraculous. He proposed an unexpected link between two ostensibly different theories of fundamental physics: string theory and quantum chromodynamics. String theory purports to describe all the elementary components of matter and energy not as particles but as vanishingly small vibrating strings. Photons, protons, and all the other particles are, according to this theory, just different "pitches" of vibration of these strings. If it is right, string theory would unify gravity and quantum mechanics in a single overarching framework—a goal that physicists have pursued for more than half a century. The problem is that there is no shred of experimental evidence that string theory is correct; all the arguments in its favor have been made entirely on the basis of its sophisticated mathematical structure. Direct experimental tests of string theory have thus far proved impossible, in part because strings are predicted to be so small that no conceivable particle accelerator could ever reach the energies needed to produce them.

Quantum chromodynamics, or QCD, on the other hand, is backed by decades of experiments. It describes the interactions of quarks and gluons. (Quarks come in three "colors," analogous to electric charge; hence the "chromo" in chromodynamics.) Unfortunately, unlike string theory, QCD says nothing about gravity, so physicists know they need a broader, more complete theory if they want to explain all of physics. Moreover, the equations of QCD are notoriously difficult to work with.

Enter Juan Maldacena. He developed a theory nearly identical to standard QCD, with the major difference being that in his version quarks come in many different colors rather than the usual three. Even though his theory does not fully apply to the universe we know—it doesn't correctly describe quarks—physicists frequently use such so-called toy models to get a handle on otherwise impossibly difficult problems. And Maldacena's theory had a remarkable feature, the one that inspired his colleagues to hit the dance floor. He proved that his pseudo-QCD and string theory are not in fact different theories at all; mathematically, they are entirely equivalent.

The site of the RHIC collider.

Maldacena's realization raised an enormous question: If string theory and his slightly altered take on QCD are essentially one and the same beast, does that mean there is a way to connect string theory to the physics of the real world? For the next few years, Maldacena's tour de force remained largely a plaything for theorists, who almost immediately found intriguing ways to use it. Most important, his theory simplified the grueling calculations of QCD by offering a way to translate certain QCD problems into the more tractable mathematics of string theory. "Things that are hard to calculate in QCD are easy in string theory, and vice versa," says Horatiu Nastase, a string theorist at Brown University.

It was this power to shift problems from the QCD perspective to a string theory view that first led some physicists to see a link between the quarks and gluons at RHIC and the equations describing a black hole. Dam Thanh Son, a physicist at the University of Washington in Seattle, was one of them. I called him to ask about what seems, on the face of it, an extraordinarily unlikely comparison. What could quarks and gluons possibly have in common with nature's ultimate trash compactors—ultradense concentrations of matter whose gravitational field is so powerful it curves space-time around itself, trapping anything that crosses its surface?

Son insists that black holes, quarks, and gluons really do have a big thing in common: They can be described by equations that govern the behavior of liquids. Then he explains that black holes—and quarks and gluons—are really no stranger than a cup of water.

"If you have a cup of water, and you disturb the water—say, you drop a pebble into it—the disturbance will not last forever. The water will come to rest. If you take a cup of honey, the motion ceases more quickly than in water; the more viscous the fluid, the quicker the perturbation of the system decays with time."

When something falls into a black hole, Son says, the surface of the black hole is disturbed, just like the water in a cup. "The black hole will wiggle for some time and come to rest. In these two processes"—disturbances in black holes and in water—"there is a connection at the mathematical level. The equation that describes the evolution of the stirring of water in a cup is similar in form to the equations that describe the evolution of the surface of a black hole. When I deform a black hole, it goes back and forth and then comes to rest. To describe that I use equations that are similar to equations used for any fluid."

As word spread that RHIC had created a quark-gluon fluid, Son and a number of other theorists began to wonder if they could use Maldacena's sleight of hand and substitute the equations of a black hole for the ones normally applied to quarks and gluons. The switch would make calculating the properties of the primordial particle soup much easier. Compared with a trillion-degree ruck of quarks and gluons, black holes are simple objects. (Which is why the lyrics to the Maldacena macarena go: "The black hole we have mastered, QCD we can compute.")

One property of the quarks and gluons that Son and his colleagues wanted to calculate was viscosity. Using a black-hole model, they predicted that quarks and gluons should have almost zero viscosity. When experimentalists at RHIC finally crunched through all their data, they confirmed that the quark-gluon fluid indeed had a low viscosity, at or near the theoretical minimum value predicted by the five-
dimensional black-hole model.

"Talk about a shot out of the blue," Zajc says. "Who would have thunk it? It is the most fascinating thing I've been involved with, to see this completely unexpected connection emerge and start having an impact on our field."

So does this success bolster the idea that string theory is the right way to unify all of physics?

"Absolutely," says Horatiu Nastase of Brown, who has also sought to understand RHIC's results in terms of a black hole. "At least that's my interpretation and the interpretation of other people. My understanding is that one is experimentally testing, in this indirect way, string theory."

Zajc and many other physicists aren't so sure. "I've thought an awful lot about this," he says. "But I'm not ready yet to claim that this validates string theory. Even the string theorists will tell you the viscosity result depends only on ordinary quantum mechanics—it's just that string theory gives you a snazzy way to calculate it."

In any event, the black hole under consideration is not the sort that could swallow Long Island. It's an entirely different animal. According to string theory, the universe may contain as many as 10 dimensions. Most of them are hidden, curled up on scales so small that we cannot sense or even detect them. The black hole in Son's calculation dwells in a theoretical world of five dimensions, where the effects of gravity drop so precipitously with increasing distance that a five-dimensional black hole poses no threat—if it even exists at all. Some physicists consider the five-dimensional black hole to be a mathematical convenience, a way to tackle a complex physical system. Others are open to a far more radical interpretation, however.

"What we think of as atomic nuclei, quarks, and gluons may really be objects that are projections, in a sense, on a screen," says Miklos Gyulassy of Columbia, sounding more like Plato philosophizing than like the theoretical physicist that he is. "We are on the screen. It looks to us like there are photons and these other particles, but they might really be manifestations, projections, from a higher-dimensional space, of objects that are more conveniently described in our world by saying, 'There is a photon,' or 'There is a gluon.' So the very hot quarks and gluons at RHIC may really be a hologram of some nasty black hole somewhere."

All of these issues and more will continue to be studied at RHIC and at an even more powerful accelerator nearing completion in Switzerland. The Large Hadron Collider, as the new accelerator is called, will be almost 17 miles in circumference and will reach energies 27 times higher than RHIC's.

"One question that screams out to be answered is whether we'll see the same sort of perfect fluid that we see at RHIC," Zajc says, "or whether we'll see something like an ideal gas where the quarks and gluons are essentially free. I think it will continue to be a perfect fluid, or very nearly so. But we've been surprised before in this field."

As to whether Maldacena's ideas will further strengthen string theory or prove a theoretical dead end is anyone's guess. The data, says Zajc, are simply too raw.

"This is what new discoveries look like from the inside," he says. "If you'll allow me to mix metaphors, it's sort of a Mixmaster of swirling ideas that may gradually be distilled into something elegant and nice. But at the moment we're watching the sausage-making process."

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/feb/cover/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C=

2008-08-29T12:55:00.000-04:00

The Mind of God is a 1992 non-fiction book by Paul Davies. Subtitled The Scientific Basis for a Rational World, it is a whirlwind tour and explanation of theories, both physical and metaphysical, regarding ultimate causes. Its title comes from a quotation from Stephen Hawking: "If we do discover a theory of everything...it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would truly know the mind of God."

In the preface, Davies explains that he has been interested in ultimate causes since childhood, having annoyed his parents with unending "why's" about everything, with each answer demanding another "why," and usually ending with the reply, "Because God made it that way, and that's that!" In the book proper, Davies briefly explores: the nature of reason, belief, and metaphysics; theories of the origin of the universe; the laws of nature; the relationship of mathematics to physics; a few arguments for the existence of God; the possibility that the universe shows evidence of intelligent design; and his opinion of the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, that "the search for a closed logical scheme that provides a complete and self-consistent explanation is doomed to failure."

He concludes with a statement of his belief that, even though we may never attain a theory of everything, "the existence of mind in some organism on some planet in the universe is surely a fact of fundamental significance. Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness. This can be no trivial detail, no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here."

Gödel Escher and Bach

2008-08-29T12:50:00.000-04:00

http://books.google.com/books?id=aFcsnUEewLkC&dq=G%C3%B6del+Escher+and+Bach&pg=PP1&ots=FLOTcgkysZ&sig=lpN8hh4A4sI5qjtJwwz-0gAZZrk&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA792,M1

Einstein and Gödel

2008-08-29T12:37:00.000-04:00

Friendship between Equals
By: David Berlinski
DISCOVER
March 1, 2002

A picture taken in Princeton, New Jersey in August of 1950 shows Albert Einstein standing next to the Austrian logician, Kurt Gödel. Einstein is wearing baggy slacks and a rumpled shirt. His body sags. Dressed in a white linen suit, and wearing owlish spectacles, Gödel looks lean and almost elegant in comparison, the austerity of his expression softened by a certain odd sensuality that plays over the lower half of his face. Plainly at ease, the men are indulging the photographer.

When their friendship began in 1941, Kurt Gödel was thirty-five. Ten years earlier, in a relatively short but symphonic paper of some thirty-five pages, he had created one of the monuments of modern thought. Elementary arithmetic, he had demonstrated, is incomplete and incompleteable. Whatever the axiomatic system by which arithmetic is expressed, there are true statements that lie beyond the system’s reach. They cannot be demonstrated. Adding such statements to the system as further axioms does no good. The enriched system is also incomplete, the infection moving upward by degrees.

A number of mathematicians knew of Gödel’s achievement in 1941, but word of his genius had not left the cloister, where it was still conveyed in whispers. Einstein, on the other hand, was sixty-two, and one of the century’s mythic figures, his plump sad face known throughout the world.

The difference in their public stature were reflected in the nature of their friendship. In letters to his mother, Gödel took pleasure in affirming that through his friendship with Einstein, he was basking in reflected light. “I have so far been to his house two or three times,” he wrote (in 1946), “all for scientific discussions. I believe it rarely happens that he invites anybody to his house.”

Yet in the grandeur of their achievements, Einstein and Gödel stood alone, and so must have turned to one another at least in part because they could turn to no one else.

They were in their personalities quite different. Einstein was a man of unshakeable self-confidence, intellectually massive, unafraid. Gödel was, by way of contrast, both delicate and diffident. He loathed criticism and shrank from controversy. His life was hardly an exercise in vigour. He was under the best of circumstances a valetudinarian, and under the worst, a hypochondriac. Often both.

And yet his philosophy reveals currents that move against the grain of what seemed to be his personality. His experiences in Europe notwithstanding, he was an optimist by conviction and a theist by inclination; he took seriously speculations about the after-life; he was sceptical about the Darwinian theory of evolution. And he was a voluptuous Platonist, arguing with great boldness and ingenuity that the human intellect is capable of directly grasping pure mathematical abstractions. If during his life he chose to keep his philosophical views largely to himself, perhaps this is because he was persuaded that criticism would serve only to impede his tranquillity while doing nothing to advance his intellectual agenda.

The general theory of relativity is Einstein’s supreme creation, and it is to general relativity that Gödel made an unexpected contribution in 1948. The idea governing general relativity is not difficult to grasp. Space and time are fused within the theory, but, in truth, space and time are fused in ordinary life as well. We locate an event — the assassination of JFK, for example — both in terms of where it took place — Dallas, Texas — and when it took place — at roughly 1.30 EST on the afternoon of November 22nd, 1963. Three numbers suffice to mark Dallas, Texas on any map that indicates height as well as longitude and latitude; one number is need to mark the time. Four numbers identify the event precisely.

If events are brief bursting episodes, processes in the most ordinary sense are sequences of such events, the events trailing one another like elephants marching trunk to tail. It is processes that comprise the fundamental objects treated in general relativity, where they are called world-lines, and the theory’s considerable mathematical apparatus is put in place to shed an analytic light on their behaviour.

We may leave the mathematical details to the mathematicians who cherish them. For all its complexity, the theory subordinates itself nicely to a number of homely metaphors. Imagine a marble placed on a mattress. Given a tap, the marble will move in a straight line. The mattress is, after all, flat. A heavy bowling ball is now placed on the mattress, its weight deforming the mattress by means of an obvious dimple. Given precisely the same tap, that marble flows downward toward the dimple, its path changing from a straight to a curved line. The weight of the bowling ball, the shape of the mattress and the path of the marble are obviously co-ordinated. The bowling ball deforms the medium of the mattress, and the deformed medium in turn controls the way in which the marble moves.

Those metaphoric crutches may now be withdrawn, marbles and mattresses replaced by the universe itself, with its stars, planets, wheeling galaxies and clouds of cosmic dust. The happy co-ordination just scouted reappears in this more general setting, no worse for wear. Massive objects deform the medium of space and time; and the deformed medium in turn influences the processes that take place within it, the field equation of general relativity co-ordinating that deformation with those processes.

Co-ordinate? Not quite. In its control over the cosmos, the field equation of general relativity sets the stage, but it does not determine the drama. The Russian mathematician Alexandr Friedmann provided the first realistic solution of Einstein’s field equation in 1922; and by the 1930s, his work had been assimilated into a general analytic structure — Friedmann-LeMaitre cosmology. It is this work that suggested the now familiar picture of an expanding universe, one moving explosively outward from a dense initial singularity.
But a universe proceeding from nothing to nowhere by means of an enthusiastic expansion — our universe, apparently — is but one possibility; and there are others. Some interpretations of the field equation are realised in a static but unstable universe, one that simply hangs around for all eternity if it manages to hang around at all. Early on, Einstein had committed his allegiance to a universe of this sort; he came to regard the universe of contemporary cosmology as inevitable, given the facts, but somewhat vulgar.

Until Gödel’s work, the universes available to cosmologists, although different in some respects, were all of them well-behaved and roly-poly, with the great imponderables of time, space and cause arranged with consideration for the common intellectual decencies.

Gödel succeeded in coaxing a new and certainly a flamboyant universe from the alembic of Einstein’s symbols. His analysis reflects the distinctive characteristic of all his work. It is highly original and logically coherent, the argument set out simply but with complete and convincing authority. A sense of superb taste prevails throughout. There is no show.

And it is odd. It is very and distinctly odd.

The concept of time now occupies centre stage. A number of philosophers are standing by. And what they are saying, those philosophers, is that change is an illusion. Things do not become, they have not been, and they will not be: they simply are. Human beings reach events in the future by displacing themselves in time just as they reach places on the earth by displacing themselves in space. They do not bring those places into being, nor those events. It is thus that time dwindles, and thus that time disappears, replaced by an entirely more arid notion, that of position along a temporal stream.

Einstein’s special theory of relativity, Gödel observed, was widely thought to support this view. Imagine a group of observers scattered carelessly throughout the cosmos. Each is able to organise the events of his life into a linear order; and as a result each is persuaded that his life consists of a series of nows, moving moments passing from the past to the present to the future. I might as well dismiss those observers before they do any real harm. This is how we see things. Now is after all now, it is not? Right now.

Apparently not. Simultaneity, special relativity revealed, depends on the speed at which we are moving with respect to one another. Moving at different speeds, the two of us, it is entirely possible that my now might be your past or your future.

It follows that what is becoming for me may have become or may become for you. But then Gödel asks, very reasonably, how something can become for me when it has already been for you? The idea is if not absurd then deeply unattractive. What is left when becoming is subtracted from the cosmic account is time — that remains. But change has disappeared. A philosophical conjecture has been ratified by a great physical theory.

This is a view that Gödel found congenial; in fact, it is view that Einstein also embraced, writing to the widow of his old friend Michael Besso, and writing with great poignancy, that “for us believing physicists, the distinction between the past, the present and the future is only an illusion ….”
And now the odd point. However much the illusory nature of time is suggested by special relativity, it is, in fact, slyly contravened by the dominant interpretation of general relativity. There is at least one universal system of time that provides a compelling standard of simultaneity throughout the cosmos, and that is the system provided by cosmology itself. The expansion of the universe is universal, space and time stretching the very fabric of creation. This means that there is a universal reference frame as well — it is the frame provided by the behaviour of matter. Physicists talk, after all, about the first three minutes. If this makes sense, it makes sense as well to talk of times after the first three minutes. It makes sense to talk of the time after the first three minutes everywhere in the universe, and if time has an origin, and a uniform measure, then we are again within the sounds of Newton’s universal clock. It is everywhere approximately fifteen billion years after the Big Bang, and it is that time now.

It is against this interpretation that Gödel turned his face, his work arising from his desire to reaffirm the very deepest insights of Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

In an expanding universe, space and time rush outward in a hot gush from a primordial explosion. So, too, world-lines. They have no choice. There is a profound connection between the structure of an expanding universe and the nature of those processes taking place within it. Processes are, of course, nothing more than events following one another in a series, but it is useful to give them a visual incarnation, if only for purposes of illustration. Imagine those processes as strands in a great rope, a cosmic hawser. In a simply expanding universe, such as our own, the cosmic hawser is twist-free. The strands do not snake around one another, as they do in an ordinary rope. To say that they are twist-free is just to say that a cosmic knife could slice through them all at a right angle. It is this that makes for a global sense of simultaneity. It is now throughout the universe wherever the cosmic knife cuts the cosmic hawser, and it is now throughout the universe just because a twist-free cosmic hawser can be cut and cut completely by a cosmic knife.

The assumption of a simply expanding universe is now allowed to lapse. If not expanding, just what is the universe doing otherwise? It might, of course, be doing nothing whatsoever, as Einstein had originally expected; but then again it might be rotating in the void, turning serenely like a gigantic pinwheel, and it this idea that Gödel found compelling. In a universe of this sort, each observer sees things as if the whole universe were rotating about him. This strange assumption, Gödel demonstrated, satisfies the field equation of general relativity exactly.

Rotating universes may now be added to the catalogue of possible things.

A pause to collect ourselves. A rotating universe might suggest, at first glimpse, nothing more than the universe scouted by ancient astrologers, with observers clustered on the earth, and the celestial sphere turning around them. There is surely something to this analogy, a kind of historical wormhole snaking from one speculative enterprise to another; but the analogy is flawed inasmuch as it suggests that it is the galaxies alone that are rotating. Not so. Everything else goes along for the ride. If space and time can expand, as they do in Big Bang cosmology, they can also assume other geometrical properties. Which properties they assume depends on the behaviour of material objects, and if those objects are turning in circles, space and time must follow. This is precisely what happens in Gödel’s universe. As the galaxies rotate, they drag space and time with them, the medium in which all processes take place crumpling before and after those fugitive galaxies. An expanding universe blows up space and time; a rotating universe turns space and time around in spirals. The same idea is at work, but it works to profoundly different effect.

Rotating universes, most notably, permit travel in time. By moving in a large enough circle around an axis of rotation, an observer might in fact catch his own temporal tail, returning to his starting point some time earlier than his departure. Force is required, but not speeds in excess of the speed of light. The requisite paths are known as closed time-like curves. Their existence is guaranteed in Gödel’s rotating universe.

Needless to say, neither Gödel nor anyone else succeeded in making sense of the idea of time travel, whatever the unexpected possibilities his solutions suggest. The most obvious problem is well known. Were time travel possible, it would also be possible mischievously to influence the causal stream, say by assassinating one’s own grandfather or by otherwise causing upheavals in the flux and fleen of things. Star Trek notwithstanding, these practical problems are both bizarre and uninteresting. Gödel’s crucial point lies elsewhere.

In a universe containing closed time-like curves — Gödel’s universe -- the cosmic hawser is twisted, the strands looping over one another like snakes, and no cosmic cut of any cosmic knife could possibly cut them all. With the cosmic hawser irreparably twisted, time completely loses its significance as a form of change.

Inferences and assumptions now arrange themselves in a delicate array. Imagine a grand cosmological division, with rotating universe on the right, and non-rotating universes on the left. Gödel was able to demonstrate that on the left, where the non-rotating universes are collected, and the cosmic hawser is twist free, it is always possible to define an ever moving now and so a natural temporal order. On the right, where there are rotating universes, time undergoes its fateful dissolution and change disappears.

So much the worse, one might think, for rotating universes. Our universe is blessedly twist free, time a vehicle for change as it has always been.

But this, Gödel observed, is an accident of creation. The equations of general relativity are compatible with other possibilities. If in other possible universes no cosmic or global time is accessible, this might suggest that on the very deepest level, the features of time that we take for granted are also accidents of creation. It is this idea that Gödel found objectionable. If time exists, wherever it does exist, it must exist simply in virtue of “the particular way in which matter and its motions are arranged in the world.” A philosophical view leading to this conclusion, he added dryly, “can hardly be considered satisfactory.” Time and change demand a deeper explanation. And this physical theory does not provide.

They were close. This much we know, Gödel regarding the avuncular Einstein with appreciation, a sense of indebtedness for his robust psychological health.
And both men admired one another. This we know, too.

And yet curiously enough, the circumstances of their lives revealed countervailing currents. Einstein struggled to purge himself of the ties of family and friends, seeking solace not only in solitude but in a deliberate, carefully contrived release from the ordinary human bonds of family and affection. He had married as a young man, and divorced his first wife; he was hardly an inspired father. He lived within himself.

Like Einstein, Gödel found ordinary social intercourse an immense chore. He was notoriously reclusive, working at the Institute for Advanced Study in a darkened room, never attending other men’s lectures, solitary, obsessed, half-mad, consumed from within by the fires of an intellectual passion so powerful that by the end of his life they seemed quite literally to have consumed his frail flesh entirely. He died of ‘inanition,’ in the lapidary words of the Princeton health examiner: he had refused to eat.

And yet Gödel spent much of his adult life in state of matrimonial contentment. He had chosen his wife, Adele Porkert, by dropping from his own social class, scandalising his parents and his brother. She had been a dancer in a Viennese cabaret; and if she gave any thought to incompleteness, it must have been expressed by a typical Viennese expression of amused indulgence. But she was obviously a woman with a powerful will and great self-possession, and she made Gödel’s life possible by making it bearable.

Gödel spent the second half of his life absorbed by philosophy. In the end, he concluded that his efforts had been unavailing. “I did not,” he remarked to Hao Wang, “find in philosophy what I was looking for.” Much the same is true for Einstein. The great unified theory for which he had searched for more than thirty years eluded him.

Did Einstein and Gödel discuss issues such as this? I do not know. I suspect that the depth of their friendship made what diplomats often call frank discussions unnecessary. Gödel was skeptical of Einstein’s quest for a unified theory; and Einstein, we may be sure, must have regarded Gödel’s philosophical investigations with detachment, the deep and ineradicable melancholy in his personality making it impossible for him to regard optimism or theism with anything more than a sense of tolerant skepticism.

The issues between the men remain unsettled. But however they may be settled, neither Einstein nor Gödel found the arch that would have completed their lives.

But then again, none of us do.

For further reading please check out the following : http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=cTVs5e97DE4C&dq=einstein+and+G%C3%B6del+a+world+without+time&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=IUk9aVElEr&sig=UQ1fIr6qYwAws4AgMGHvemGpfJA&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=2&ct=result#PPP1,M1

Every Child Grows Up

2008-08-29T01:39:00.001-04:00

Story is a Vessel of Truth

2008-08-29T01:27:00.001-04:00

Willing Suspension of Disbelief

2008-08-29T01:23:00.000-04:00

Suspension of disbelief or "Willing Suspension of Disbelief" is an aesthetic theory intended to characterize people's relationships to art. It was coined by the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817. It refers to the willingness of a person to accept as true the premises of a work of fiction, even if they are fantastic or impossible. It also refers to the willingness of the audience to overlook the limitations of a medium, so that these do not interfere with the acceptance of those premises. According to the theory, suspension of disbelief is a quid pro quo: the audience tacitly agrees to provisionally suspend their judgment in exchange for the promise of entertainment.

The Seagull

2008-08-29T01:20:00.000-04:00

(Russian: "Чайка" ("Chayka")), written in 1895, is the first of what are generally considered to be Anton Chekhov's four major plays. It centres on the romantic and artistic conflicts between four theatrical characters: the ingenue Nina, the fading leading lady Irina Arkadina, her son the experimental playwright Konstantin Treplyov, and the famous middlebrow story writer Trigorin.

Like the rest of Chekhov's full-length plays, The Seagull relies upon an ensemble cast of diverse, fully developed characters. In opposition to much of the melodramatic theatre of the 19th century, lurid actions (such as Treplyov's suicide attempts) are kept offstage. Characters tend to speak in ways that skirt around issues rather than addressing them directly, a concept known as subtext.

The play has a strong intertextual relationship with Shakespeare's Hamlet. Arkadina and Treplyov quote lines from it before the play-within-a-play in the first act (and the play-within-a-play device is itself used in Hamlet). There are many allusions to Shakespearean plot details as well. For instance, Treplyov seeks to win his mother back from the usurping older man Trigorin much as Hamlet tries to win Queen Gertrude back from his uncle Claudius.

The opening night of the first production was a famous failure. Vera Komissarzhevskaya, playing Nina, was so intimidated by the hostility of the audience that she lost her voice.^[1] Chekhov left the audience and spent the last two acts behind the scenes. When supporters wrote to him that the production later became a success, he assumed they were just trying to be kind.^[1] When Constantin Stanislavski directed it in a later production for the Moscow Art Theatre, the play was a triumph.

Constantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski

2008-08-29T01:17:00.001-04:00

(Russian: Константин Сергеевич Станиславский) (January 17 [O.S. 5 January] 1863 – August 7, 1938), was a Russian actor and theatre director.

Stanislavski's innovative contribution to modern European and American naturalistic acting has remained at the heart of mainstream western performance training for much of the last century. Building on the directorially-unified aesthetic and ensemble playing of the Meiningen company and the naturalistic staging of Antoine and the independent theatre movement, Stanislavski organized his realistic techniques into a coherent and usable system.^[1] Thanks to its promotion and development by acting teachers who were former students and the many translations of his theoretical writings, Stanislavski's system acquired an unprecedented ability to cross cultural boundaries and developed an international reach, dominating debates about acting in the West.

Stanislavski treated theatre-making as a serious endeavour, requiring dedication, discipline and integrity, and the work of the actor as an artistic undertaking. His 'Method' resulted from a persistent struggle to remove the blocks he encountered. He developed a theorized praxis in which practice is used as a mode of inquiry and theory as a catalyst for creative development. Stanislavski believed that after seeing young actors at Aquinas College in Moscow he could see why theatre needed to change to a more disciplined endeavour.

Stanislavski's work was as important to the development of socialist realism in the USSR as it was to that of psychological realism in the United States.^[2] Many actors routinely identify his 'system' with the American Method, although the latter's exclusively psychological techniques contrast sharply with Stanislavski's multivariant, holistic and psychophysical approach, which explores character and action both from the 'inside out' and the 'outside in'.^[3] Stanislavski's work draws on a wide range of influences and ideas, including his study of the modernist and avant-garde developments of his time (naturalism, symbolism and Meyerhold's constructivism), Russian formalism, Yoga, Pavlovian behaviourist psychology, James-Lange (via Ribot) psychophysiology and the aesthetics of Pushkin, Gogol, and Tolstoy. He described his approach as 'spiritual Realism'.

In 1897 he co-founded the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, but the theatre started operating in 1898. The first production MAT produced was the critically acclaimed and previously censored Czar Fyodor by Alexei Tolstoy. Anton Chekhov's The Seagull was performed. Initially Chekhov did not grant Danchenko's request to perform the play because he wanted a more experienced troupe to perform it. Stanislavski beautified and innovated Chekov's script, and it created shock in the audiences. According to The Stanislavski Technique: Russia, by Mel Gordon, "his detailed realism transformed the most commonplace scene into an orchestrated display of minute effects... something modern had been born." The MAT had created what became known as psychological realism. Psychological realism embodied hidden conflicts within relationships, which exposed that which is so embedded in everyday life. Chekhov never liked the rendition of his play, but the rest of the audience, and the rest of the world, started to like the work of the MAT. It was then that the MAT became known as the House of Chekhov as they produced Chekhov's melancholic plays (though the playwright himself always insisted they were comedies) like Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. The Moscow Art Theatre became a venerable institution and opened up classes in dance, voice and fencing. During the Russo-Japanese War, the group traveled to Germany and Eastern Europe, where they were so admired that one German playwright called them "artistic divinities." Parades were made in their honor, as the Europeans never saw such brilliant theatre. Upon returning to Russia, Stanislavski fell into an artistic crisis, where his acting and directing became erratic, as he professed his lack of fulfillment and inspiration. He went to Finland with his wife to vacation, and came back to give birth to his acting system that would change what it means to be an actor.The company under the direction of Stanislavski only toured the United States once in 1922-1923. Although they performed in Russian, the verisimilitude of the acting and the ensemble work impressed all who saw them, particularly a number of young actors starting their careers in the commercial theater in New York, among them Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg. When two former members of the company, Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya, began teaching the System at the American Laboratory Theater these performers jumped at the chance to study.

Stanislavski's 'system' focused on the development of artistic truth onstage by teaching actors to "live the part" during performance. Despite being primarily known in The United States for Realism, Stanislavski developed the system to be applied to all forms of theater, directing and producing melodrama, vaudeville, opera, etc. In order to create an ensemble of actors all working together as an artistic unit, he began organizing a series of studios in which young actors were trained in his system. At the First Studio of MAT, actors were instructed to use their own memories in order to naturally express emotions. Stanislavski soon observed that some of the actors using or abusing Emotional Memory were given to hysteria. Although he never disavowed Emotional Memory as an essential tool in the actor's kit, he began searching for less draining ways of accessing emotion, eventually emphasizing the actor's use of imagination and belief in the given circumstances of the text rather than her/his private and often painful memories.

Stanislavski's 'system' is a systematic approach to training actors. This system is at some point different from but not a rejection of what he states earlier in affective memory. At the beginning, Stanislavski proposed that actors study and experience subjective emotions and feelings and manifest them to audiences by physical and vocal means - Theatre language. While his System focused on creating truthful emotions and then embodying these, he later worked on The Method of Physical Actions. This was developed at the Opera Dramatic Studio from the early 30s, and worked like Emotion Memory in reverse. The focus was on the physical actions inspiring truthful emotion, and involved improvisation and discussion. The focus remained on reaching the subconscious through the conscious.

Stanislavski survived the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, with Lenin apparently intervening to protect him. In 1918, Stanislavski established the First Studio as a school for young actors and wrote several works: those available in English translation include: An Actor Prepares, Building a Character, Creating a Role, and the autobiography My Life in Art.

Stanislavski always thought of his system as if it were a table of contents for a large book which dealt with all aspects of acting. His final work, now known as The Method of Physical Actions (see Stanislavski's 'system'), is in no way a rejection of his early interest in sense and affective memory. At no time did he ever reject the notion of emotion memory; he simply found other means of accessing emotion, among them the absolute belief in given circumstances; the exercise of the imagination; and the use of physical action.

2008-08-29T01:08:00.000-04:00

Wassily Kandinsky (Russian: Василий Кандинский, first name pronounced as [vassi:li]) (December 16 [O.S. December 4] 1866 – December 13, 1944) was a Russian painter, printmaker and art theorist. One of the most famous 20th-century artists, he is credited with painting the first modern abstract works.

Kandinsky's conception of art

The artist as prophet

Writing that "music is the ultimate teacher," Kandinsky embarked upon the first seven of his ten Compositions. The first three survive only in black-and-white photographs taken by fellow artist and friend, Gabriele Münter. While studies, sketches, and improvisations exist (particularly of Composition II), a Nazi raid on the Bauhaus in the 1930s resulted in the confiscation of Kandinsky's first three Compositions. They were displayed in the State-sponsored exhibit "Degenerate Art" then destroyed along with works by Paul Klee, Franz Marc and other modern artists.

Influenced by Theosophy and the perception of a coming New Age, a common theme among Kandinsky's first seven Compositions is the Apocalypse, or the end of the world as we know it. Writing of the "artist as prophet" in his book, Concerning the Spiritual In Art, Kandinsky created paintings in the years immediately preceding World War I showing a coming cataclysm which would alter individual and social reality. Raised an Orthodox Christian, Kandinsky drew upon the Jewish and Christian stories of Noah's Ark, Jonah and the whale, Christ's Anastasis and Resurrection, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Revelation, various Russian folk tales, and the common mythological experiences of death and rebirth. Never attempting to picture any one of these stories as a narrative, he used their veiled imagery as symbols of the archetypes of death / rebirth and destruction / creation he felt were imminent to the pre-World War I world.

As he stated in Concerning the Spiritual In Art (see below), Kandinsky felt that an authentic artist creating art from "an internal necessity" inhabits the tip of an upward moving triangle. This progressing triangle is penetrating and proceeding into tomorrow. Accordingly, what was odd or inconceivable yesterday is commonplace today; what is avant garde (and only understood by the few) today is standard tomorrow. The modern artist/prophet stands lonely at the tip of this triangle making new discoveries and ushering in tomorrow's reality. Kandinsky had become aware of recent developments in sciences, as well as the advances of modern artists who had contributed to radically new ways of seeing and experiencing the world.

Composition IV and subsequent paintings are primarily concerned with evoking a spiritual resonance in viewer and artist. As in his painting of the apocalypse by water (Composition VI), Kandinsky puts the viewer in the situation of experiencing these epic myths by translating them into contemporary terms along with requisite senses of desperation, flurry, urgency, and confusion. This spiritual communion of viewer-painting-artist/prophet is ineffable but may be described to the limits of words and images.

Artistic and spiritual theoretician

As the Der Blaue Reiter Almanac essays and theorizing with composer Arnold Schoenberg indicate, Kandinsky also expressed this communion between artist and viewer as being simultaneously available to the various sense faculties as well as to the intellect (synesthesia). Hearing tones and chords as he painted, Kandinsky theorized that, for examples, yellow is the color of middle-C on a piano, a brassy trumpet blast; black is the color of closure and the ends of things; and that combinations and associations of colors produce vibrational frequencies akin to chords played on a piano. Kandinsky also developed an intricate theory of geometric figures and their relationships, claiming, for example, that the circle is the most peaceful shape and represents the human soul. These theories are set forth in Point and Line to Plane (see below).

During the months of studies Kandinsky made in preparation for Composition IV he became exhausted while working on a painting and went for a walk. In the meantime, Gabriele Münter tidied his studio and inadvertently turned his canvas on its side. Upon returning and seeing the canvas—yet not identifying it—Kandinsky fell to his knees and wept, saying it was the most beautiful painting he had seen. He had been liberated from attachment to the object. As when he first viewed Monet's Haystacks, the experience would change his life and the history of Western art.

In another event with Münter during the Bavarian Abstract Expressionist years, Kandinsky was working on his Composition VI. From nearly six months of study and preparation, he had intended the work to evoke a flood, baptism, destruction, and rebirth simultaneously. After outlining the work on a mural-sized wood panel, he became blocked and could not go on. Münter told him that he was trapped in his intellect and not reaching the true subject of the picture. She suggested he simply repeat the word "uberflut" ("deluge" or "flood") and focus on its sound rather than its meaning. Repeating this word like a mantra, Kandinsky painted and completed the monumental work in only a three-day span.

Theoretical writings on art

The analysis made by Kandinsky on forms and on colours doesn't result from simple arbitrary ideas associations, but from the inner experience of the painter who has passed years creating abstract paintings of an incredible sensorial richness, working on forms and with colors, observing for a long time and tirelessly his own paintings and those of other artists, noting simply their subjective effect on the very high sensibility to colors of his artist and poet soul.

So it is a purely subjective form of experience that everyone can do and repeat taking the time to look at his paintings and letting acting the forms and the colors on his own living sensibility. These are not scientific and objective observations, but inner observations radically subjective and purely phenomenological which is a matter of what the French philosopher Michel Henry calls the absolute subjectivity or the absolute phenomenological life.

Concerning the Spiritual in Art

Originally published in 1911, Kandinsky compares the spiritual life of humanity to a large triangle similar to a pyramid; the artist has the task and the mission of leading others to the top by the exercise of his talent. The point of the Triangle is constituted only by some individuals who bring the sublime bread to men. It is a spiritual triangle which moves forward and rises slowly, even if it sometimes remains immobile. During decadent periods, souls fall to the bottom of the Triangle and men only search for the external success and ignore purely spiritual forces.

When we look at colors on the painter's palette, a double effect happens: a purely physical effect on the eye, charmed by the beauty of colors firstly, which provokes a joyful impression as when we eat a delicacy. But this effect can be much deeper and cause an emotion and a vibration of the soul, or an inner resonance which is a purely spiritual effect, by which the color touches the soul.

The inner necessity is for Kandinsky the principle of the art and the foundation of forms and colors' harmony. He defines it as the principle of the efficient contact of the form with the human soul. Every form is the delimitation of a surface by another one; it possesses an inner content which is the effect it produces on the one who looks at it attentively. This inner necessity is the right of the artist to an unlimited freedom, but this freedom becomes a crime if it is not founded on such a necessity. The art work is born from the inner necessity of the artist in a mysterious, enigmatic and mystic way, and then it acquires an autonomous life; it becomes an independent subject animated by a spiritual breath.

The first obvious properties we can see when we look at isolated color and let it act alone; it is on one side the warmth or the coldness of the colored tone, and on the other side the clarity or the obscurity of the tone.

The warmth is a tendency to yellow, the coldness a tendency to blue. The yellow and the blue form the first big contrast, which is dynamic. The yellow possesses an eccentric movement and the blue a concentric movement, a yellow surface seems to get closer to us, while a blue surface seems to move away. The yellow is the typically terrestrial color whose violence can be painful and aggressive. The blue is the typically celestial color which evokes a deep calm. The mixing of blue with yellow gives the total immobility and the calm, the green.

Clarity is a tendency to the white and obscurity a tendency to the black. The white and the black form the second big contrast, which is static. The white acts like a deep and absolute silence full of possibilities. The black is a nothingness without possibility, it is an eternal silence without hope, it corresponds to death. That’s why any other color resonates so strongly on its neighbors. The mixing of white with black leads to gray, which possesses no active force and whose affective tonality is near that of green. The gray corresponds to immobility without hope; it tends to despair when it becomes dark and regains little hope when it lightens.

The red is a warmth color, very living, lively and agitated, it possesses an immense force, it is a movement in oneself. Mixed with black, it leads to brown which is a hard color. Mixed with yellow, it gains in warmth and gives the orange which possesses an irradiating movement on the surroundings. Mixed with blue, it moves away from man to give the purple, which is cooled red. The red and the green form the third big contrast, the orange and the purple the fourth one.

Point and line to plane

Kandinsky analyses in his writings the geometrical elements which compose every painting, namely the point and the line, as well as the physical support and the material surface on which the artist draws or paints and which he calls the basic plane or BP. He doesn’t analyze them on an objective and exterior point of view, but on the point of view of their inner effect on the living subjectivity of the observer who looks at them and lets them act on his sensibility.

The point is in practice a small stain of color put by the artist on the canvas. So the point used by the painter is not a geometric point, it is not a mathematical abstraction, it possesses a certain extension, a form and a color. This form can be a square, a triangle, a circle, like a star or even more complex. The point is the most concise form, but according to its placement on the basic plane it will take a different tonality. It can be alone and isolated or put in resonance with other points or lines.

The line is the product of a force, it is a point on which a living force has been applied in a given direction, the force applied on the pencil or on the paint brush by the hand of the artist. The produced linear forms can be of several types: a straight line which results from a unique force applied in a single direction, an angular line which results from the alternation of two forces with different directions, or a curved or wave-like line produced by the effect of two forces acting simultaneously. A plane can be obtained by condensation, from a line rotated around one of its ends.

The subjective effect produced by a line depends on its orientation: the horizontal line corresponds to the ground on which man rests and moves, to flatness, it possesses a dark and cold affective tonality similar with black or blue, while the vertical line corresponds to height which offers no support, it possesses a luminous and warm tonality close from white and yellow. A diagonal possesses by consequence a more or less warm or cold tonality according to its inclination according to the horizontal and to the vertical.

A force which deploys itself without obstacle as the one which produces a straight line corresponds to lyricism, while several forces which confront or annoy each other form a drama. The angle formed by the angular line possesses as well an inner sonority which is warm and close to yellow for an acute angle (triangle), cold and similar to blue for an obtuse angle (circle) and similar to red for a right angle (square).

The basic plane is in general rectangular or square, thus it is composed of horizontals and verticals lines which delimit it and define it as an autonomous being which will serve as support to the painting, communicating its affective tonality. This tonality is determined by the relative importance of horizontal and vertical lines, the horizontals giving a calm and cold tonality to the basic plane, while the verticals give it a calm and warm tonality. The artist possesses the intuition of this inner effect of the canvas format and dimensions, which he chooses according to the tonality he wants to give to his work. Kandinsky even considers the basic plane as a living being that the artist "fertilizes" and of which he feels the "breathing".

Every part of the basic plane possesses a proper affective coloration which influences the tonality of the pictorial elements that will be drawn on it, and which contributes to the richness of the composition which results from their juxtaposition on the canvas. The above of the basic plane corresponds to the looseness and to lightness, while the below evokes the condensation and heaviness. The work of the painter is to listen and to know these effects in order to produce paintings which are not just the effect of a random process, but the fruit of an authentic work and the result of an effort toward the inner beauty.

Music + Color = multisensory aesthetic experience

2008-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00

Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (Russian: Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Скря́бин, Aleksandr Nikolaevič Skrjabin; sometimes transliterated as Skriabin, Skryabin, or Scriabine) (6 January 1872 [O.S. 25 December 1871]–27 April 1915) was a Russian composer and pianist who developed a highly lyrical and idiosyncratic tonal language. Driven by a poetic, philosophical and aesthetic vision that bordered on the mystical, he can be considered the primary figure of Russian Symbolism in music.

Influence of color

Keys arranged in a circle of fifths in order to show the spectral relationship.

The synthetic colours described by Scriabin.

Scriabin's keyboard (Ivan's version 1).

Though these works are often considered to be influenced by Scriabin's synesthesia, a condition wherein one experiences sensation in one sense in response to stimulus in another, it is doubted that Alexander Scriabin actually experienced this.^[10]^[11] His colour system, unlike most synesthetic experience, lines up with the circle of fifths: it was a thought-out system based on Sir Isaac Newton's Opticks. Note that Scriabin did not, as far as his theory is concerned, recognize a difference between a major and a minor tonality of the same name (for example: c-minor and C-Major). Indeed, influenced also by the doctrines of Theosophy, he developed his system of Synesthesia toward what would have been a pioneering multimedia performance: his unrealized magnum opus Mysterium was to have been a grand week-long performance including music, scent, dance, and light in the foothills of the Himalayas that was to bring about the dissolution of the world in bliss.

In his autobiographical Recollections, Sergei Rachmaninoff recorded a conversation he had had with Scriabin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov about Scriabin's association of colour and music. Rachmaninoff was surprised to find that Rimsky-Korsakov agreed with Scriabin on associations of musical keys with colors; himself skeptical, Rachmaninoff made the obvious objection that the two composers did not always agree on the colours involved. Both maintained that the key of D major was golden-brown; but Scriabin linked E-flat major with red-purple, while Rimsky-Korsakov favored blue. However, Rimsky-Korsakov protested that a passage in Rachmaninoff's opera The Miserly Knight supported their view: the scene in which the Old Baron opens treasure chests to reveal gold and jewels glittering in torchlight is written in D major. Scriabin told Rachmaninoff that "your intuition has unconsciously followed the laws whose very existence you have tried to deny."

While Scriabin wrote only a small number of orchestral works, they are among his most famous, and some are frequently performed. They include three symphonies, a piano concerto (1896), The Poem of Ecstasy (1908) and Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1910), which includes a part for a "clavier à lumières", also known as the Luce (Italian for "Light"), which was a colour organ designed specifically for the performance of Scriabin's symphony. It was played like a piano, but projected coloured light on a screen in the concert hall rather than sound. Most performances of the piece (including the premiere) have not included this light element, although a performance in New York City in 1915 projected colours onto a screen. It has erroneously been claimed that this performance used the colour-organ invented by English painter A. Wallace Rimington when in fact it was a novel construction personally supervised and built in New York specifically for the performance by Preston S. Miller, the president of the Illuminating Engineering Society.

Scriabin's original colour keyboard, with its associated turntable of coloured lamps, is preserved in his apartment near the Arbat in Moscow, which is now a museum dedicated to his life and works.

Man Takes Time part 2 (Muybridge) (1877)

2008-08-29T00:52:00.000-04:00

Eadweard J. Muybridge (April 9, 1830 – May 8, 1904) was an English photographer, known primarily for his early use of multiple cameras to capture motion, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the celluloid film strip that is still used today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Muybridge_race_horse_animated.gif

Man Takes Time part 1 (Edison) (1877)

2008-08-29T00:41:00.000-04:00

First phonograph

Patent drawing for Edison's phonograph, May 18, 1880

Thomas Alva Edison conceived the principle of recording and reproducing sound between May and July 1877 as a byproduct of his efforts to "play back" recorded telegraph messages and to automate speech sounds for transmission by telephone.^[4] He announced his invention of the first phonograph, a device for recording and replaying sound, on November 21, 1877, and he demonstrated the device for the first time on November 29 (it was patented on February 19, 1878 as US Patent 200,521). Edison's early phonographs recorded onto a tinfoil sheet phonograph cylinder using an up-down ("hill-and-dale") motion of the stylus.^[5] The tinfoil sheet was wrapped around a grooved cylinder, and the sound was recorded as indentations into the foil. Edison's early patents show that he also considered the idea that sound could be recorded as a spiral onto a disc, but Edison concentrated his efforts on cylinders, since the groove on the outside of a rotating cylinder provides a constant velocity to the stylus in the groove, which Edison considered more "scientifically correct". Edison's patent specified that the audio recording was embossed, and it was not until 1886 that vertically modulated engraved recordings using wax coated cylinders were patented by Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter. They named their version the Graphophone. Emile Berliner patented his Gramophone in 1887. The Gramophone involved a system of recording using a lateral (back and forth) movement of the stylus as it traced a spiral onto a zinc disc coated with a compound of beeswax in a solution of benzine. The zinc disc was immersed in a bath of chromic acid; this etched the groove into the disc where the stylus had removed the coating, after which the recording could be played.

Genesis 32:24-32

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²⁴And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a Man with him until the breaking of the day.

²⁵And when He saw that He prevailed not against him, He touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with Him.

²⁶And He said, Let Me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let Thee go, except Thou bless me.

²⁷And He said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob.

²⁸And He said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.

²⁹And Jacob asked Him, and said, Tell me, I pray Thee, Thy name. And He said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after My name? And He blessed him there.

³⁰And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.

³¹And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh.

³²Therefore the children of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank, which is upon the hollow of the thigh, unto this day: because he touched the hollow of Jacob's thigh in the sinew that shrank.

Pay Attention to the Capitals.
What is going on here?
Think about it.

Numbers 23:23

2008-08-29T00:31:00.000-04:00

Passage Numbers 23:23:
²³Surely there is no enchantment against Jacob, neither is there any divination against Israel: according to this time it shall be said of Jacob and of Israel, What hath God wrought!

Man Takes Space

2008-08-29T00:29:00.000-04:00

WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?

When Samuel Morse unveiled his telegraph in 1844, very little about it was new. His genius lay in artfully combining elements that had been anticipated by others.

by Maury Klein

If there’s a cliché that hounds our lives unmercifully, it is that we live in the Information Age, a time when ever more information, wanted and unwanted, pours in on us from every side. So relentless and insistent has this flood become that it often seems impossible to escape. Marshall McLuhan’s once fanciful “global village” has emerged with astonishing swiftness in the form of a planet interconnected by elaborate media networks that transfer data and images almost instantly. One way industrial societies measure progress is by the speed with which their technologies develop and mutate. For decades the transportation and industrial sectors dominated this type of thinking. After all, what symbols better reflect the rise of American material civilization than the locomotive and the factory? The first bound a sprawling continent together and spurred the settlement of remote regions; the second revolutionized the production of goods and led to a dramatic rise in the standard of living. In 150 years transportation leaped from the fledgling railroad to the jet plane, while the factory progressed from crude, waterpowered machines to automated assembly lines.

Impressive as this record is, the third component of this transformation, the communications revolution, has in that same century and a half come even farther, racing since its birth all the way to the modern maze of telephones, radio, television, computers, fax machines, and satellites. So furious has the pace of change in communications been that we sometimes forget the machine that started it all.

In its day the telegraph was no less a miracle than any of its modern offspring. It dazzled and bewildered people the same way computers can today, with feats that seemed magical if not unnatural. Today we live in an age that routinely expects new technological wonders even as we marvel at them. The telegraph was an innovation without precedent, born at a time when few grasped even remotely what electric current was, let alone what it might do. As the first form of modern communication, it burst upon the sensibilities of a people proud of progress but still new to technical leaps of such magnitude.

The telegraph was a landmark in human development from which there could be no retreat. For the first time messages could routinely travel great distances faster than man or beast could carry them. Later inventions would send much more information farther and faster through the “ether,” rather than over a wire, but they would always be progeny of the first devices created by the pioneers of modern communications.

Foremost among these pioneers was Samuel Finley Breese Morse, surely the most improbable engineering hero in American history. The man who ushered in an era of accelerating technological breakthroughs was neither a scientist nor an inventor; he was, rather, one of the foremost artists of his day who shocked and disappointed his admirers by abandoning his career as a painter to perfect the strange new device that had captured his imagination. Nor was this all. On the side Morse also pioneered in another form of technology that rose to dominance over the following century: photography.

MORSE KNEW TOO LITTLE TO REALIZE THE OBSTACLES THAT LAY AHEAD.

Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1791, a year after the death of Benjamin Franklin and a short distance from the birthplace of that celebrated genius. He loafed and partied his way through Yale, like most students of the day, pausing to absorb something of electricity and other scientific topics from Professor Jeremiah Day and Professor Benjamin Silliman, for whom Morse took apart the still novel batteries of Volta and Cruickshanks. Upon his graduation in 1810 he spent a year working as a bookstore clerk and assisting his father, a noted clergyman and geographer. Then he went to London for four years to refine the artistic talent he had shown in college. After completing his training, he traveled through the United States and Europe, pursuing a career as a painter that brought him more plaudits than money.

In 1823 he moved permanently to New York City, where he was popular socially but made only a precarious living. During his artistic career he produced many outstanding works and helped found what eventually became the National Academy of Design, serving as its president for twenty years.

The turning point in Morse’s life came in October 1832 on a voyage home from Europe, where he had spent three years painting, traveling, and studying. He was at lunch one day with Dr. Charles Thomas Jackson, a Boston chemist who later claimed to have discovered anesthesia, when the talk turned to André Ampere’s recent experiments with electromagnetism. Someone asked whether electricity took much time to travel over a long wire. No, replied Jackson; Franklin had passed current over several miles with no perceptible delay. It is not clear whether Franklin ever actually performed such an experiment; still, Jackson’s remark inspired Morse.

“If this be so,” he said abruptly, “and the presence of electricity can be made visible in any desired part of the circuit, I see no reason why intelligence might not be instantaneously transmitted by electricity to any distance.” The idea began to obsess him. Before reaching shore, Morse had sketched in his notebook the basic elements of a telegraph instrument and a crude version of a code based on dots and dashes. Excited by his epiphany, he knew too little about electricity to realize the obstacles that lay before him.

Upon his return Morse accepted a position as professor of painting and sculpture at the just-opened University of the City of New York (now New York University). The post was unsalaried; Morse made his income by collecting fees directly from his students. As the first professor of art in the United States, he used the facilities provided him at Washington Square to perfect the telegraph. (The telegraph was not Morse’s first foray into inventing; with his brother Sidney he had patented a water pump for fire engines in 1817, and several years later he had invented a marble-carving machine. Neither device made any money.)

At first Morse kept up his painting while dabbling in the telegraph, but as the years passed, his interests began to shift. Several events that took place in 1836 and 1837 concentrated his mind even more. News from Europe in early 1837 told of the great strides that were being made in telegraphy there; Morse realized that if he did not finish the invention soon, his efforts might be wasted. More important, that same winter Congress declined to hire Morse to provide a painting for the Capitol rotunda, a commission he had had high hopes for. The rejection crystallized his increasing disillusionment with the world of art and seems to have inspired him to redouble his inventive efforts.

Besides all this, for several years after his return from Europe, Morse, a minister’s son and a sixth-generation Puritan descendant, had been deeply involved in anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant politics. These activities were climaxed by Morse’s run for mayor of New York on the Native American ticket in the spring of 1836. The campaign was a miserable failure; he received only 1,496 votes and finished last in a field of four. After this humiliation Morse turned away from politics for the most part, though he did mount another campaign for mayor in 1841, with even less success.

Finally, in February 1837 Congress directed the Secretary of the Treasury, Levi Woodbury, to solicit proposals for a telegraph. The sponsors of this measure had in mind a semaphore system of the type that had been around since the 1790s, with messages transmitted by visual signals along a chain of stations. Morse thought that if he could perfect the electromagnetic telegraph that he had designed on the ship back from Europe and brought to crude operation late in 1836, it would answer the government’s needs even better.

He was far from original in trying to develop an electrical telegraph; dogged efforts had been going on for half a century. The idea of using electricity to transmit information goes back at least as far as 1753, when a letter in a Scottish magazine suggested a system of insulated wires, one for each letter of the alphabet, that could be charged in sequence to spell out a message. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw many attempts to put this idea, or some variation of it, into practice, using sparks, pith balls, and various electrochemical effects. Each method had its problems, and all were generally regarded as “philosophical toys” rather than serious methods of communication.

The breakthrough that would eventually make modern telegraphy possible came in 1820, when the Danish physicist Hans Ørested startled the scientific world by demonstrating that a magnetic needle was deflected by an electric current at right angles to it. This discovery revealed a connection between magnetism and electricity and launched the study of electromagnetism. A week after hearing about Ørested’s discovery, Ampère showed how current flowed through a wire and thereby could serve as the basis for a magnetic-needle telegraph, but he didn’t pursue the idea.

Meanwhile, other scientists seized on Ørested’s discovery and experimented with it in areas besides communication. In 1823 William Sturgeon of England wrapped some wire around a horseshoe-shaped iron bar coated with varnish, sent current flowing through it, and astonished colleagues by lifting nine pounds—twenty times the weight of his apparatus. Sturgeon used bare wire, so to avoid a short circuit he couldn’t let the turns of his coil touch each other. That limited the strength of his electromagnet. Despite this limitation the new device set the stage for Joseph Henry.

The modest Henry was the opposite of Morse—a dedicated scientist who cared little about money, public acclaim, or the practical application of his findings. Fascinated by Ørested’s discovery and Sturgeon’s experiment, Henry became the first American since Franklin to study electricity in detail. By ripping up one of his wife’s silk petticoats and laboriously wrapping the strands around wire as insulation, Henry was able to create a much tighter coil around an iron bar than Sturgeon had done. In 1831 Henry built an electromagnet capable of lifting an astounding 750 pounds of iron with current from a simple battery. Later that year a revised model lifted more than a ton.

That same year Henry strung a mile of copper wire around a classroom in Albany, New York, then used the flow of current from a battery to send a signal by magnetically striking a bell. At the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), where he accepted a post the next year, he repeated the experiment by stringing wire between two buildings. In 1835 he solved the problem of transmitting over long distances by inventing the electrical relay, in which a large circuit is broken down into a series of smaller ones with their own power supplies, each triggered in sequence by the completion of the previous one.

Henry had created all the elements of a telegraph except for a code (he still used bell taps as signals), but he made no attempt to put them together and rejected friends’ pleas that he patent his devices. “I did not then consider it compatible with the dignity of science to confine benefits which might be derived from it to the exclusive use of any individual,” he said later, then added wistfully, “In this I was perhaps too fastidious.” But others were not so reticent. In fact, a scramble to perfect the electrical telegraph had been taking place on two continents for more than a decade.

EFFORTS TO DEVELOP A TELEGRAPH HAD BEEN GOING ON FOR HALF A CENTURY.

Around 1825 a Russian nobleman, Baron Pavel Ludovich Schilling, transformed Ampere’s 1821 suggestion of the possibility of a telegraph into a practical device. With backing from the czar, Schilling improved his telegraph, and he exhibited it in 1835 to a congress of German scientists in Bonn. Schilling’s system included an alphabetic code that operated by turning needles right or left. But he died in 1837, just as he seemed on the verge of creating the first operating electromagnetic telegraph, and the Russian government did not pursue research on his system.

Around 1828 an American named Harrison Gray Dyar invented a chemical telegraph that operated by producing discolorations on specially treated paper. He strung wire with glass insulators on trees and poles around a Long Island racetrack to demonstrate it. Although it was quite slow, the method showed some promise. Dyar found a financial backer only to have him scuttle the project with a long and bitter lawsuit over dividing the proceeds.

In 1833 two German scientists, Carl Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Eduard Weber, devised a galvanometer telegraph. In 1835 they turned it over to a colleague, Karl A. Steinheil, to develop. Steinheil added enough improvements, including fountain pens that moved by clockwork on a roll of paper to form dots capable of delineating an alphabet, to produce the first automatic recording electromagnetic telegraph that actually functioned. The Bavarian government installed this telegraph for signaling purposes on a couple of railroads, but it proved to be too expensive. Steinheil eventually recognized that other versions of the technology were better and cheaper than his own and urged the government to adopt them instead.

In England young Charles Wheatstone, a physicist who had made important discoveries in acoustics and optics and had invented the stereoscope (a favorite amusement in Victorian parlors), developed his own telegraph instrument. He got help from none other than Joseph Henry, who visited London in April 1837. Two months later Wheatstone and his partner, William Fothergill Cooke, obtained patents on what they called a Chronometric telegraph. It spelled out words with a system of five needles, which combined to indicate letters on a grid. The next year they reduced the number of needles to two. In 1839 Cooke and Wheatstone completed a different type of telegraph, which worked by pointing to letters on a dial. It was far superior to their earlier model and saw extensive use on British railways. By 1852 four thousand miles of wire using this system had been installed. For this and other work Wheatstone was knighted and hailed by his countrymen as the inventor of the telegraph. Some of his later models were used in the United States, but they fell short of with improved American instruments.

Despite the impressive work done by all these men, Morse brought to the task a quality none of them had. He lacked the knowledge and training of a scientist, but his strength as an artist was, in the historian Brooke Hindle’s words, “an excellent design capability based upon a mind practiced in forming and re-forming multiple elements into varying complexes. This sort of synthetic-spatial thinking … is, of course, involved in most intellectual activity including science, but in technology it has to be central.”

This ability enabled Morse to refine and adapt elements created by others into a marvelously simple and rugged system. His transmitter was a portrule —a long, horizontal rod with a deep lengthwise slot in its upper side. Morse made a set of metal blocks to be held inside the portrule. They were like printer’s type except that instead of being cast in the form of the letter itself, each block had a distinctive pattern of pointed and flat-bottomed indentations. As the block was drawn across a lever arm, it completed an electric circuit in short and long bursts, corresponding to the pointed and flat indentations respectively. In later versions of the telegraph, beginning in 1839, the type-and-portrule system would be replaced by the now-familiar finger key.

For his receiver Morse nailed one of his old canvas stretchers against the side of a table and attached an electromagnet to a bar hung across it. A lever was suspended from the top of the frame with its center near the electromagnet, and a pencil was attached to the tip of the lever, its point resting on a paper-covered roller. When the magnet was electrified, it pulled the lever toward it, moving the pencil. As clockworks drew the paper slowly along, the pencil marked on it a series of V-shaped lines with wide and narrow bases as the circuit was completed and broken. The lines formed a distinct pattern for each letter, which could be read easily. After the finger key replaced the portrule, the paper recorder would eventually be found unnecessary, since a trained operator could decipher a message just from hearing the clicks as the circuit was made and broken.

The key to Morse’s system was his ability to solve a problem that had stumped other inventors: a form of encoding messages suited to the limitations of the telegraph. Two-element codes in themselves were hardly new; the ancient Greeks had invented one using torches covered and then unmasked, and Francis Bacon had created one to represent the alphabet as early as 1605. Schilling devised an alphabet code in 1832, and Steinheil used one based on dots and dashes in 1836.

Morse’s first impulse had been to transpose a code devised in 1793 by three French brothers named Chappe for semaphore signaling. He envisioned transmitting short and long bursts, which he called dots and lines, of electricity separated by intervals, and coding each letter in a combination of them. Morse had started in 1832 with a code in which common words were assigned numbers. In early 1838 he switched to the dot-dash system, the final version of which did not emerge until 1844. In this version the most frequently used letters were assigned the shortest codes.

The instrument Morse exhibited to friends in September 1837 contained the basic elements of what later became the standard telegraph. Morse had come to it less by the usual route of chasing ideas down dead ends than by his ability to visualize all the components needed and then design whatever alternative elements proved necessary. Of his contribution, Joseph Henry had this to say in an 1849 patent suit: “I am not aware that Mr. Morse made a single original discovery, in electricity, magnetism, or electromagnetism, applicable to the invention of the telegraph. I have always considered his merit to consist in combining and applying the discoveries of others in the invention of a particular instrument and process for telegraphic purposes.”

This was a fair assessment. Morse’s original contribution consisted of his code, which made it possible to transmit messages with just a single circuit connecting the endpoints. Most earlier attempts at a telegraph had required multiple circuits interacting in complicated ways.

Once Morse had an instrument to test, he ran into further obstacles. The power problem—how to transmit over long distances without a crippling loss of current—had been the downfall of all earlier telegraph inventors. It stumped Morse as well, until Leonard D. Gale came along. Gale, a geology professor at the university, improved Morse’s design in the spring of 1837 by using superior batteries and electromagnets that had been suggested by Joseph Henry six years earlier.

Gale realized that Morse’s battery of one large cell generated ample electric current but not nearly enough intensity (voltage). Since the latter was what the telegraph needed to send current over long distances, Gale helped Morse construct a battery of twenty cells connected in series. He also improved the electromagnet by increasing the loops of wire around it from tens to hundreds. Henry had suggested both these things in a seminal 1831 article in Benjamin Silliman’s journal. Gale was familiar with Henry’s work on electromagnetism, but Morse was not. The inventor’s formal training in the subject was limited to a series of lectures by James Freeman Dana that he had attended in 1827.

Once Morse had adopted Gale’s modifications, the results were astonishing. In November 1837 his improved device sent a signal over ten miles of wire set on reels in Gale’s lecture room. This test made clear that by combining the new apparatus with the relay principle, which Morse seems to have thought of independent of Henry, it would be possible to send messages over any distance.

THE KEY TO MORSE’S SYSTEM WAS A CODE SUITED TO THE LIMITATIONS OF THE TELEGRAPH.

Two months before the November test, Morse had made Gale his partner in the venture along with Alfred Vail, a recent graduate of the university who had taken a deep interest in Morse’s work. Vail brought to the partnership the resources of his father, who owned the Speedwell Iron Works in Morristown, New Jersey. The young enthusiast agreed to build a model of the telegraph at his own expense, to let Morse demonstrate it in Washington, and to underwrite other models for obtaining patents abroad. With this backing Morse filed preliminary requests for patents (the first was awarded in 1840), and after demonstrations in Morristown, Newark, New York, and Philadelphia, he took his apparatus to Washington in February 1838.

Treasury Secretary Woodbury’s circular of the previous year soliciting ideas for telegraph systems had brought five replies. Four described semaphoric systems; the fifth came from Morse. His presentation so impressed the House Commerce Committee that it recommended appropriating $30,000 to construct an experimental fifty-mile line. Although the bill died without coming to a vote, the test resulted in the recruitment of another partner for Morse: Francis Ormand Jonathan (“Fog”) Smith of Maine, chairman of the Commerce Committee.

The shrewd, venal Smith grasped the potential of the telegraph at once and induced the guileless Morse to let him serve as counsel and promoter for the invention in return for a share of its profits. After quietly teaming up with Morse, Smith enthusiastically supported the appropriation; then he took leave from the House for several months to promote the invention in Europe with Morse. He returned to Congress late in 1838 and continued to seek government help for the partnership. Recognizing that his dual public-private role might cause concern even by the lax standards of the day, Smith left the House when his term expired in 1839.

Morse hoped that Smith would provide the business sense and Washington connections that the other partners lacked, and in the short term he was indeed quite helpful. In the end, however, Morse would get far more of Smith’s cunning than he wanted. The new partnership concealed a hopeless clash of interests. Smith cared only for the money that could be made out of the private development and exploitation of telegraph companies. Morse cherished a far different vision: He hoped the government would buy his invention and use it as an improved mail service. The partners would be suitably rewarded, the public would benefit, and Morse would achieve the recognition he had always sought.

While Congress dawdled over the appropriation, Smith made his first financial contribution. In the spring of 1838 he underwrote his and Morse’s trip to Europe, where they would seek patents for the telegraph. England, where the Cooke-Wheatstone system was becoming established, received him coolly. France applauded him and granted patents but no government funding. Russia ignored a feeler sent in its direction from Paris. A discouraged Morse came home in April 1839 with but a single bonus from the trip, a working knowledge of the new technique for making images developed by Louis Daguerre. Excited by the chiaroscuro images he described as “Rembrandt perfected,” Morse introduced Americans to the daguerreotype in a letter that was printed in his brother’s New York Observer on April 20, 1839, and reprinted in newspapers throughout the nation.

Discouraged by Congress’s continued inaction and his lack of success abroad, Morse retreated to his studio. Over the next several years, as the interest and support of his friends and partners dwindled, Morse led a hand-to-mouth existence. He gave painting lessons, worked on improving his telegraph, and mounted his second unsuccessful campaign for mayor. He also began experimenting with the new photographic technology.

Morse did not produce the first American daguerreotype; that honor went to an Englishman named D. W. Seager. Within days after details of the process arrived in New York in September 1839, Seager produced a view of lower Broadway, beating Morse’s image of the new Unitarian Church by about a week. Morse soon moved on from buildings to tackle in photography his old specialty as a painter: portraits. Daguerre had told Morse that portraits were impossible because subjects could not remain still for the five to ten minutes (at least) required to make a good image, but Morse persisted in collaboration with Professor John W. Draper. Eventually they got decent results by reducing the size of the plate and using faster chemicals and better lenses. Morse’s studio, which had become a jumble of batteries, cameras, instruments, and coils of wire, attracted a flock of students eager to learn the new art. These included T. W. Gridland, who became the first professional photographer west of the Alleghenies; Edward Anthony, who later founded a major photographic supply house; and a young man named Mathew Brady.

With his improved telegraph in hand, Morse journeyed to Washington and repeated his demonstration in December 1842. He appealed to Smith for help with lobbying, but the ex-congressman could not be bothered to leave his business interests in Maine. Morse spent several anxious months attending congressional debates and waiting. Then in early March, in the waning hours of the session, Congress narrowly approved a $30,000 appropriation for a trial line over the forty miles between Washington and Baltimore. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad agreed to allow the line along its right-of-way if it could be done “without injury to the road and without embarrassment to the operations of the company.” This stern proviso betrays an utter lack of anticipation of the symbiotic relationship that would soon develop between those two prime movers of the nineteenth century, the railroad and the telegraph.

None of the work Morse had done so far had given him any inkling of the most efficient way to construct the line itself. He decided that the wire had to be carefully insulated with cotton twine and then buried in half-inch lead pipe to protect it from the elements. A bright young man named Ezra Cornell, an itinerant plow promoter who had met Fog Smith while extolling his wares in Maine, devised an ingenious plow that would open a trench, lay the pipe, and close the trench in one operation. (Cornell would go on in the telegraph business to make a fortune, with which he endowed the university that bears his name.) The process was expensive, however, and disaster loomed when the pipe proved to be defective and, despite the insulation, shorted out the wire it contained. Having spent $23,000 of his $30,000 and laid only nine miles of wire, and with his assistants resigning and Smith bad-mouthing him in an attempt to collect graft on the pipelaying contract, Morse cast about desperately for an alternative. Apparently it was Charles Grafton Page of the Patent Office who suggested that Morse string a single wire on glass insulators on poles and use the earth as a ground.

The Germans and English used this method, and so had Dyar back in the 1820s. Morse knew nothing of this, but he pounced gratefully on the idea. Cornell managed to complete the line within the appropriation to a point fifteen miles from Baltimore by May 1, 1844. The Whig party’s presidential convention happened to open that day in Baltimore, and Morse used the occasion for an impromptu demonstration. When the Whigs named their ticket, the news was rushed via train to the end of the telegraph line and then transmitted to Washington. Morse received the message in Washington and announced that the Whigs had nominated Henry Clay and Theodore Frelinghuysen.

Ninety minutes later word from an arriving train confirmed the news. Even skeptics were impressed; anyone could have guessed that Clay would be nominated, but who could have predicted Frelinghuysen, an obscure lawyer? Basking in this success, Morse watched with satisfaction as the line was strung the final few miles. By May 24 it connected the railroad depot on Pratt Street in Baltimore with the Supreme Court chamber in Washington, where the telegraph had been set up for its official demonstration.

MORSE HOPED THE TELEGRAPH WOULD PASS INTO GOVERNMENT HANDS.

What should the first message ever sent over an American intercity telegraph line be? Morse gave the question some thought, then let his friend Annie Ellsworth (daughter of Henry Ellsworth, the commissioner of patents and a Yale classmate of Morse) make the choice. Annie sounded out her mother on the subject and decided on part of a prophecy handed down by an ancient soothsayer named Balaam in Numbers 23:23. Morse liked the selection. On Friday, May 24, 1844, he sat down at his instrument and began tapping out letters. It took him one minute to complete the message: WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?

The message could not have been more appropriate. Morse went on to gather the fame and fortune he had so ardently sought, but the telegraph never passed into government hands, as he had hoped. (The partners offered to sell their rights to the government in 1844 but were turned down.) Instead it became a football among several competing private groups that struggled to build lines and improve technology enough to provide reliable service over long distances. In the byzantine machinations among these rivals, the talented but erratic Smith, ostensibly Morse’s ally, proved more of an ordeal to him than his business enemies. Not until 1866 were the clashing firms absorbed into the first giant monopoly in American business, Western Union. Order finally came to the telegraph, and in doing so it set a precedent: The first American telecommunications medium belonged to the private rather than the public sector.

By the eve of the Civil War the telegraph had become a staple of American life, used extensively by railroads, businessmen, speculators, and the press. Bankers, brokers, and shippers quickly grasped the advantage of instant communication, as did wholesale and retail merchants. Fast access to information from across the nation led to the rise of Wall Street as the center of financial markets and the centralizing of other markets, such as the commodities exchanges in Chicago. Merchants using the device developed a whole new style of doing business. “Operations are made in one day with its aid, by repeated communications,” marveled one observer in 1847, “which could not be done in from two to four weeks by mail.”

A vast, sprawling nation that had been tied together by a network of local newspapers came quickly to rely on the telegraph for information that would otherwise have taken days or weeks to arrive. The medium influenced the message in ways that showed most strikingly in politics. During the secession crisis of 1860, President James Buchanan complained that “the public mind throughout the interior is kept in a constant state of excitement by what are called ‘telegrams.’ They are short and spicy, and can easily be inserted in the country newspapers.”

The elderly Buchanan, whose roots lay in a world that knew nothing of what telecommunications was or would bring, barely scratched the surface in his lament. A hundred and fifty years after Morse sent his first message, our information-soaked world still gropes for an answer to the query it contained.

2008-08-29T00:27:00.000-04:00

SOS is the commonly used description for the International Morse code distress signal (· · · — — — · · ·). This distress signal was first adopted by the German government in radio regulations effective April 1, 1905, and became the worldwide standard when it was included in the second International Radiotelegraphic Convention, which was signed on November 3, 1906, becoming effective on July 1, 1908. SOS remained the maritime distress signal until 1999, when it was replaced by the Global Maritime Distress Safety System^[1].

From the beginning, the SOS distress signal has actually consisted of a continuous sequence of three-dits/three-dahs/three-dits, all run together without letter spacing. In International Morse Code, three dits form the letter S, and three dahs make the letter O, so "SOS" became an easy way to remember the correct order of the dits and dashes. In modern terminology, SOS is a Morse "procedural signal" or "prosign", and the formal way to write it is with a bar above the letters, i.e. SOS.

In popular usage, SOS became associated with phrases such as "Save Our Ship" and "Save Our Souls". These were a later development, most likely used to help remember the correct letters (something known as a backronym).

I AM

2008-08-29T00:23:00.000-04:00

Exodus 3

The Burning Bush

¹Now Moses was pasturing the flock of ^(A)Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian; and he led the flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to ^(B)Horeb, the ^(C)mountain of God.

²^(D)The angel of the LORD appeared to him in a blazing fire from the midst of a ^(E)bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed.

³So Moses said, "^(F)I must turn aside now and see this marvelous sight, why the bush is not burned up."

⁴When the LORD saw that he turned aside to look, ^(G)God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, "Moses, Moses!" And he said, "Here I am."

⁵Then He said, "Do not come near here; ^(H)remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground."

⁶He said also, "^(I)I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob " ^(J)Then Moses hid his face, for he was ^(K)afraid to look at God.

⁷The LORD said, "I have surely ^(L)seen the affliction of My people who are in Egypt, and have given heed to their cry because of their taskmasters, for I am aware of their sufferings.

⁸"So I have come down ^(M)to deliver them from the power of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from that land to a ^(N)good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of ^(O)the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Amorite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite.

⁹"Now, behold, ^(P)the cry of the sons of Israel has come to Me; furthermore, I have seen the oppression with which the Egyptians are oppressing them.

The Mission of Moses

¹⁰"Therefore, come now, and I will send you to Pharaoh, ^(Q)so that you may bring My people, the sons of Israel, out of Egypt."

¹¹But Moses said to God, "^(R)Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh, and that I should bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt?"

¹²And He said, "Certainly ^(S)I will be with you, and this shall be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: ^(T)when you have brought the people out of Egypt, ^(U)you shall worship God at this mountain."

¹³Then Moses said to God, "Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I will say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you.' Now they may say to me, 'What is His name?' What shall I say to them?"

¹⁴God said to Moses, "^[a]^(V)I AM WHO I AM"; and He said, "Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you.'"

¹⁵God, furthermore, said to Moses, "Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, '^(W)The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you ' This is My name forever, and this is My ^(X)memorial-name to all generations.

I just turned 29

2008-08-29T00:20:00.000-04:00

Yikes :)

What is Jacob

2008-08-28T23:18:00.000-04:00

JACOB graciously acknowledges the following:
(IAM)._ _ .... ._ _ .... ._ _ .... _ _. _ _ _ _.. ._ _ ._. _ _ _ .._ _ _. .... _ (man takes space)
Numbers 23:23 -> Gen 32:22-32, (man takes time) Muybridge and Edison for 1877, Scriabin for Prometheus: The Poem of Fire and clavier à lumières, Kandinsky for the pyramid,
Stanislavsky and Chekhov for the Seagull, realism, willing suspension of disbelief, story is a vessel of truth, every child grows up, Einstein and Gödel for a world without time, Gödel,
Escher, Bach and Hofstadter for 1979, Paul Davies for the Mind of God, Juan Maldacena for the "real" color of music (Quantum chromodynamics + string theory = ?) (a shift in
perspective will unlock the meaning) BEAR T.IA MART. truth comes from the sea?->.

How to build a worldview...

2008-08-28T18:20:00.000-04:00

Lets think of this as a puzzle. For me it has been exactly that. I see patterns that I can't quite understand but I can not deny. I know what I have been raised to believe. I know aspects of that world view ring incredibly true and other aspects seem incredibly hollow. How do I know what is real and what is an illusion? How do I know what is Truth and what is a current understanding of the universe that will fade with the discoveries of a future generation?
Do you believe in God?
If so, what is God like?
If not, how do you explain the order in our universe that we merely uncover with our "discoveries"?
If so, how do you explain the chaos in our universe?
If not, then are we alone? And what is life and why does it exist? Why are we even capable of asking the question "why?"
If so, why would God make us? What purpose do we serve?

Einstein had a quote that I think is a pretty great jumping off point for this discussion. He said, "The only thing incomprehensible about our universe is that it is comprehensible."

Mission control can you read me? Am I loud and clear?
There is a cloud between the two of us.
A static fear.

Where am I going?
Where have I been?
Do You have my position?
You got to tell me this is how it ends -
With a break in transmission?

Mission Control can You read me?

These are the questions of the conscious and self aware mind. Only those beings who are aware of themselves are capable of asking a question at all. Was consciousness born when the first question was asked?
? -> .

2008-08-28T01:41:00.000-04:00

singularity |ˌsi ng gyəˈlaritē|
noun ( pl. -ties)
1 the state, fact, quality, or condition of being singular : he believed in the singularity of all cultures.
• a peculiarity or odd trait.
2 Physics & Mathematics a point at which a function takes an infinite value, esp. in space-time when matter is infinitely dense, as at the center of a black hole.
3 ( the Singularity) a point in the future (often set at or around 2030 A.D.) beyond which overwhelming technical changes (especially the development of superhuman artificial intelligence) make reliable predictions impossible.

?->.

2008-08-28T01:16:00.000-04:00

Welcome! This will be a blog for thoughts, articles, questions, answers, and discussions concerning Singularity. I feel that there is a tremendous amount of unaddressed content that could be fun to dig into here. I have enjoyed amazing conversations with many of you about my own thoughts as this record was being created and the many questions we in Mae were wrestling with at the time and continue to wrestle with today. We all have different perspectives on the meaning of this record and that is important for me to express outright at the beginning. This will be a "Jacob" blog not necessarily a "Mae" blog although as a part of Mae I can not help but include the influence of Mae upon myself. I hope this will evolve into a forum for furthering that discussion.

I would like to start with a question. What did this record mean to you?