Tag Archives: science fiction

November 2015 in Review

What did I learn in November? Let’s start with the bad and then go to the good.

Negative stories (-10):

  • The World Economic Forum’s 2015 Global Risks Report came out. Some of the top risks are interstate conflict, water crisis, failure of climate change adaptation, unemployment and underemployment. Hmm, that “interstate conflict” items might be what we used to call “war”. And I think there might be one underway right now in the Middle East, which Jimmy Carter says we are getting all wrong. And it just might be caused by the other items on the list. And speaking of war, there is a new book on the Vietnam War aimed at the middle grades, but it seems pretty harsh for that age to me. (-2)
  • I noticed that Robert Costanza in 2014 issued an update to his seminal 1997 paper on ecosystem services. He now estimates their value at $125 trillion per year, compared to a world economy of $77 trillion per year. Each year we are using up about $4-20 trillion in value more than the Earth is able to replenish. The correct conclusion here is that we can’t live without ecosystem services any time soon with our current level of knowledge and wealth, and yet we are depleting the natural capital that produces them. We were all lucky enough to inherit an enormous trust fund of natural capital at birth, and we are spending it down like the spoiled trust fund babies we are. We are living it up, and we measure our wealth based on that lifestyle, but we don’t have a bank statement so we don’t actually know when that nest egg is going to run out. (-3)
  • This crop of presidential candidates is easy for comedians to make fun of. I enjoy it but think it may be a contrary indicator for the health of the country. (-1)
  • Bicycle helmets are not making U.S. bicycle riders any safer. This is why we need streets designed on the European model to be safe for driving, bicycling, and walking. It’s 100% known technology and there can be no excuses! (-2)
  • In current events, we had the awful, shocking terrorist attacks in Paris. I suggested that the long-term answer to violence caused by angry young men anywhere is to understand why they are angry, address their legitimate grievances, and give them productive work to do. Short term, we also have to detect and disrupt any plots involving nuclear or biological weapons, of course, because we can’t afford even one. (-2)

Positive stories (+9):

Watson vs. Shalmaneser

A class at Georgia Tech did an experiment where artificial intelligence (“Watson”) was used to “enhance human creativity”. It sounds like a cool class:

Following research on computational creativity in our Design & Intelligence Laboratory (http://dilab.gatech.edu), most readings and discussions in the class focused on six themes: (1) Design Thinking is thinking about illstructured, open-ended problems with ill-defined goals and evaluation criteria; (2) Analogical Thinking is thinking about novel situations in terms of similar, familiar situations; (3) Meta-Thinking is thinking about one’s own knowledge and thinking; (4) Abductive Thinking is thinking about potential explanations for a set of data; (5) Visual Thinking is thinking about images and in images; and (6) Systems Thinking is thinking about complex phenomena consisting of multiple interacting components and causal processes. Further, following the research in the Design & Intelligence Laboratory, the two major creative domains of discussion in the class were (i) Engineering design and invention, and (ii) Scientific modeling and discovery. The class website provides details about the course (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2015/cs8803_spring)

Here’s how they actually went about using the computer:

The general design process followed by the 6 design teams for using Watson to support biologically inspired design may be decomposed into two phases: an initial learning phase and a latter open-ended research phase. The initial learning phase proceeded roughly as follows. (1) The 6 teams selected a case study of biologically inspired design of their choice from a digital library called DSL (Goel et al. 2015). For each team, the selected case study became the use case. (2) The teams started seeding Watson with articles selected from a collection of around 200 biology articles derived from Biologue. Biologue is an interactive system for retrieving biology articles relevant to a design query (Vattam & Goel 2013). (3) The teams generated about 600 questions relevant to their use cases. (4) The teams identified the best answers in their 200 biology articles for the 600 questions. (5) The teams trained Watson on the 600 question-answer pairs. (6) The 6 teams evaluated Watson for answering design questions related to their respective use cases.

The value of the computer seems to be in helping the humans sort through and screen and enormous amount of literature in a short time that otherwise could take years to go through. This theoretically could accelerate progress by allowing us to make connections that otherwise could not be made. There are going to be some brilliant ideas out there that are stuck in a dead end where they never got to the people who can use them. And there are going to be many more brilliant ideas that emerge only when older ideas are connected.

These students seem to have restricted themselves to a research database in one field (biology). But I think it could be very valuable to cross disciplinary boundaries and look for analogous ideas – let’s say, in thermodynamics, ecology, and economics. Or sociology and animal behavior. These are boundaries that have been crossed by just a few visionary people, but are often ignored by everyone else. If making connections was more of a standard practice, many more brilliant ideas would escape the information cul-de-sacs.

This reminded me of the novel Stand on Zanzibar, where “synthesist” is a job. The world is not doing so well, and governments are seeking out unconventional thinkers to try to synthesize knowledge across multiple fields and try to come up with new problems. There is also an artificial intelligence in the book as I recall, but I don’t remember it being involved in the synthesis. I don’t have a copy of the book, and this particular piece of human knowledge and creativity is walled off from me by “intellectual property” law, so I can’t benefit from it or connect it to anything else right now.

the yeast vats are here

Asimov’s 1953 novel Caves of Steel featured food grown in vats by genetically modified yeast. It took awhile, but that’s here.

Cargill’s new product is an example of synthetic biology, a form of genetic engineering that uses modified organisms to manufacture compounds that would never be produced naturally. What makes EverSweet taste sweet is not stevia; it is a compound produced by a bioengineered yeast…

Ingredients that are being replaced or are likely to be exchanged for products made through synthetic biology include vanilla, saffron, coconut oil, patchouli, olive squalene, and rose oil. Indeed, the world’s largest cosmetics, flavor, and fragrance companies are hoping that synthetic biology will help them replace more than 200 natural botanical extracts.

This particular article is most worried about large food and chemical corporations replacing products formerly produced by small farmers. That’s a shame. It also talks about the growing backlash from the anti-GMO crowd. But the fact is, the backlash is probably growing because the technology has reached commercial viability. There may be a silver lining – if we are worried about ultimately hitting photosynthetic limits on food production, this may be a way around it. I think yeast will eat pretty much anything organic – mine like barley and honey, but I suspect you could feed them garbage, sewage, etc. in a severely resource constrained world. The dark cloud to the silver lining is always that if you remove one constraint, your ecological footprint will tend to keep growing until you encounter another one. The people in the caves of steel weren’t doing all that well as I recall.

September 2015 in Review

What did I learn in September? Let’s start with the bad and then go to the good.

Negative stories (-11):

  • The Environmental Kuznets Curve is the idea that a developing country will go through a period of environmental degradation caused by economic growth, but then the environment will improve in the long run. Sounds okay but the evidence for it is weak. (-1)
  • The Inca are an example of a very advanced civilization that was wiped out. (-1)
  • Consumerism and the pursuit of wealth are not sufficient cultural glue to hold a nation together. (-1)
  • Climate may be playing a role in the current refugee crisis, and the future may hold much more of this. (-1)
  • North and South America would have enormous herds of large mammals if humans had never come along.  (-1)
  • The U.S. clearly has lower average life expectancy than other advanced countries. Developing countries in Asia and Latin America are catching up, but life expectancy in Africa is still tragically low. (-1)
  • People get away with criminally violent behavior behind the wheel because police do not see it as on par with other types of crime. (-2)
  • People are still suggesting a false choice between critical and creative thinking. This is not how the problems are tomorrow will be solved. (-2)
  • This just in – an extreme form of central planning does not work. (-1)

Positive stories (+9):

    • Pneumatic chutes for garbage collection have been used successfully on an island in New York City for decades. This technology has some potential to move us closer to a closed loop world where resources are recovered rather than wasted. (+1)
    • Scientists and engineers could learn some lessons from marketing on how to communicate better with the rest of humanity. (+1)
    • There is new evidence from New Zealand on economic benefits of cycling and cycling infrastructure. (+1)
    • There has been some progress on New York City’s “lowline“, which is what a park in space might look like. The only problem is, it looks to me like a mall. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the exciting science fiction future may look a lot like malls in space. (+0)
    • The U.S. Surgeon General thinks walkable communities may be a good idea. The End of Traffic may actually be a possibility. (+3)
    • Peter Singer advocates “effective altruism”. A version of his Princeton ethics course is available for free online. (+1)
    • Edward Tufte does not like Infographics. (+0)
    • The unpronounceable Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi believes he has found the key to happiness. (+1)
    • The right mix of variety and repetition might be the key to learning. (+1)

Hugo Awards

The Hugo Award winner for best novel is:

From Amazon:

The Three-Body Problem is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience this multiple award winning phenomenon from China’s most beloved science fiction author, Liu Cixin.
Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.

fear the walking dead

AMC is producing a (predictably pro-weapon) prequel show called Fear the Walking Dead. An excerpt is provided by Fresh Air:

KIM DICKENS: (As Madison) So why the knife? Hey – I could expel you just for crossing the threshold with that thing.

LINCOLN A. CASTELLANOS: (As Tobias) No. Please. We’re safer in numbers.

DICKENS: (As Madison) Safer from what? Tobias, please, don’t screw yourself like this. You’ve been working your ass off. You’re on track to go to college.

CASTELLANOS: (As Tobias) Yeah. No one’s going to college. No one’s doing anything they think they are.

DICKENS: (As Madison) What? What are you talking about?

CASTELLANOS: (As Tobias) Can I get my knife back, please?

DICKENS: (As Madison) No, you can’t get your knife back.

CASTELLANOS: (As Tobias) They say it’s not connected. They say that, but I don’t believe them. It is – from reports in five states. They don’t know if it’s a virus or a microbe. They don’t know, but it’s spreading.

Ah, fun stuff.

 

The Secret of N.I.M.H.

I remember going to see the rats of N.I.M.H. way too young and being terrified (perhaps second only to my fear of the Wicked Witch of the West). Anyway, the secret is out…

Wong FK, Fei J-F, Mora-Bermúdez F, Taverna E, Haffner C, Fu J, et al. (2015) Sustained Pax6 Expression Generates Primate-like Basal Radial Glia in Developing Mouse Neocortex. PLoS Biol 13(8): e1002217. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002217

The evolutionary expansion of the neocortex in mammals has been linked to enlargement of the subventricular zone (SVZ) and increased proliferative capacity of basal progenitors (BPs), notably basal radial glia (bRG). The transcription factor Pax6 is known to be highly expressed in primate, but not mouse, BPs. Here, we demonstrate that sustaining Pax6 expression selectively in BP-genic apical radial glia (aRG) and their BP progeny of embryonic mouse neocortex suffices to induce primate-like progenitor behaviour.

NIMH stood for “National Institute of Mental Health”. Which was, of course, secretly creating super-intelligent rats.

Elon Musk vs. The Terminator

The Terminator is baaaaaack.

In related news, Elon Musk is worried about this actually happening:

The Boston-based Future of Life Institute (FLI) today announced the selection of 37 research teams around the world to which it plans to award about $7 million from Elon Musk and the Open Philanthropy Project as part of a first-of-its-kind grant program dedicated to “keeping AI robust and beneficial”. The program launches as an increasing number of high-profile figures including Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking voice concerns about the possibility of powerful AI systems having unintended, or even potentially disastrous, consequences. The winning teams, chosen from nearly 300 applicants worldwide, will research a host of questions in computer science, law, policy, economics, and other fields relevant to coming advances in AI.

air pollution and diabetes

Here is a long article citing evidence that air pollution is at least correlated, and quite possibly a contributing factor, to diabetes. The website is called diabetesandenvironment.org, so I don’t know if it is an unbiased source of scientific information. The scientific studies it cites are certainly real.

These authors suggest that oxidative stress, which involves an excess of free radicals, might be one mechanism whereby air pollutants could influence the development of type 1 diabetes. Ozone and sulfate can have oxidative effects. Particulate matter carries contaminants that can trigger the production of free radicals as well as immune system cells called cytokines (involved in inflammation), and may affect organs that are sensitive to oxidative stress (MohanKumar et al. 2008). Beta cells are highly sensitive to oxidative stress, and free radicals are likely to be involved in beta cell destruction in type 1 diabetes (Lenzen 2008)…

The children of mothers exposed to higher levels of air pollution while pregnant have a higher risk of later developing type 1 diabetes. This finding comes from the relatively unpolluted area of southern Sweden, and was found for both ozone and nitrogen oxides (NOx) (Malmqvist et al. 2015)…

A number of long-term studies have found that exposure to traffic-related air pollution is associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes in adults. For example, a study of African-American women from Los Angeles found that those who had higher exposure to traffic-related air pollutants (PM2.5 and nitrogen oxides) were more likely to develop diabetes (as well as high blood pressure) (Coogan et al. 2012). Adults in Denmark had an increased risk of diabetes when exposed to higher levels of the traffic-related air pollutant nitrogen dioxide (NO2)– especially those who had a healthy lifestyle, were physically active, and did not smoke– factors that should be protective against type 2 diabetes (Andersen et al. 2012). A study of adult women in West Germany found that women exposed to higher levels of traffic-related air pollution (NO2 and PM) developed type 2 diabetes at a higher rate. This study followed the participants over a 16 year period (at the beginning, none had diabetes) (Krämer et al. 2010). A long-term study from Ontario, Canada, found that exposure to PM2.5 was associated with the development of diabetes in adults (Chen et al. 2013). From Switzerland, a 10 year long study found that levels of PM10 and NO 2were associated with diabetes development in adults, at levels of pollution below air quality standards (Eze et al. 2014).

So does it make sense that we are obsessing over chemicals like trace agricultural pesticide residues in food and “microconstituents” in drinking water, rather than air pollution, which is 100% proven to be extremely harmful? I am not suggesting that we shouldn’t be concerned about all of the above, but in a world of finite resources and time we should calibrate our amount of concern and action to the biggest, most proven risks, while continuing to learn more about the others. The internal combustion engine is killing us and our children, slowly through the air not to mention through sudden, violent death on the ground.

A few more interesting air pollution notes:

  • China may have reached peak coal, with its consumption actually falling last year. World energy consumption has been known to fall during recessions, but this is supposedly the first time it has fallen during an economic expansion. The economics of renewables seem to be playing a significant role.
  • Air pollution kills more people worldwide than tobacco.
  • A Chinese documentary about air pollution called “Under the Dome” was seen by 300 million people in less than a week before it was censored in China. The film maker was partly inspired by a rare tumor her daughter developed in the womb that she links back to air pollution.
  • Confusingly, Under the Dome was also the title of a recent Stephen King novel and TV series. In Stephen King’s 1982 novel The Running Man, which he wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, children are dying right and left of emphysema and cancer caused by air pollution. The government is covering it up and keeping people distracted and entertained with reality TV shows.

what’s going on with Star Wars

Were you wondering what was going on with Star Wars? It’s owned by Disney now, which is concerning, but Episode VII: The Force Awakens is supposed to come out on December 18, 2015. There are also some spinoff movies coming out in the next couple years that take place “in the Star Wars universe” but don’t involve the main characters.