Filed under: Comics, General Musings, movies, NYT, Paleo-Future, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, tech, Travel
. . . but the announcement that there is a functional personal flying device to be revealed today is still pretty cool.
Why do I call it a ‘personal flying device’? Because it isn’t really a classic ‘jetpack‘ as we’ve seen in plenty of cartoons and movies. It is a large beast, weighing about 250 pounds, with twin fans each the size of a garbage can cut about in half. And for safety purposes, there is a support frame which allows the pilot to climb under the thing and strap himself to it. Hardly the ‘engine’ of The Rocketeer. But all in all, not a bad start – this is functional, will fly for about 30 minutes (the longest classic jetpack such as James Bond flew could go for about 30 seconds), and is fairly stable. From here significant improvements will be made. And Glenn Martin, the inventor of the device, understands this:
Only 12 people have flown the jetpack, and no one has gained more than three hours of experience in the air. Mr. Martin plans to take it up to 500 feet within six months. This time, he said with a smile, he will be the first.
Mr. Martin said he had no idea how his invention might ultimately be used, but he is not a man of small hopes. He repeated the story of Benjamin Franklin, on first seeing a hot-air balloon, being asked, “What good is it?” He answered, “What good is a newborn baby?”
Exactly.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Genetic Testing, Health, io9, NPR, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Sleep, Writing stuff
Some years back a good friend sent me a postcard from Florida with the image of a tri-colored heron’s head (you can see the image from which the card came here). On the card, the heron is looking straight at you, top feathers standing straight up, and above it in bright blue ‘electric’ lettering are the words “Stress? What Stress?”
It’s been tacked to the wall next to my desk here since. And it has been something of a standing joke between my wife and I. When things have gotten bad from time to time, one of us will turn to the other and simply say in a squeaky, high pitched voice “Stress? What Stress?”
* * * * * * *
A month ago I wrote about slowly coming down from the prolonged adrenalin high which was being a full time care provider. Doctors have known for a while that such long term stress was hard on care providers. It’ll drive up blood pressure, screw with your sleep habits, and even compromise your immune system. Now they have started to figure out how that immune system mechanism works. Last night I caught a piece on NPR’s All Things Considered with UCLA professor Rita Effros about her research on this mechanism. What professor Effros said (no transcript yet, so this excerpt is my transcription):
So, in the short term cortisol does a lot of really good things. The problem is, if cortisol stays high in your bloodstream for long periods of time, all those things that got shut down short term stay shut down. For example, your immune system.
…
But let’s say you were taking care of an Alzheimer’s spouse, or a chronically ill child – those kinds of situations are known now to cause chronic, really long-term stress – let’s say years of stress.
…
(These care providers) were found to have a funny thing happening in their white blood cells. A certain part of the cell is called the telomere, which is a kind of a clock which keeps track of how hard the cell has been working. Their telomeres got shorter and shorter, and it has been known for many years that when cells have very short telomeres they don’t function the way they’re supposed to function.
What happens is this: cortisol inhibits the production of telomerase – a protein which helps to lengthen and buffer aging effects. Abstract on the mechanism is here, and it says it succinctly:
BACKGROUND:
Every cell contains a tiny clock called a telomere, which shortens each time the cell divides. Short telomeres are linked to a range of human diseases, including HIV, osteoporosis, heart disease and aging. Previous studies show that an enzyme within the cell, called telomerase, keeps immune cells young by preserving their telomere length and ability to continue dividing.FINDINGS:
UCLA scientists found that the stress hormone cortisol suppresses immune cells’ ability to activate their telomerase. This may explain why the cells of persons under chronic stress have shorter telomeres.IMPACT:
The study reveals how stress makes people more susceptible to illness. The findings also suggest a potential drug target for preventing damage to the immune systems of persons who are under long-term stress, such as caregivers to chronically ill family members, as well as astronauts, soldiers, air traffic controllers and people who drive long daily commutes.
* * * * * * *
io9 picked up on this story, and gave it a nice Science Fiction spin:
Stress runs down the body’s immune system, which is why people with high-stress jobs or events in their lives are vulnerable to illness. Now a researcher at UCLA has discovered the link between emotional stress and physical damage — and she’s going to develop a pill that will allow you to endure stress without the nasty side-effects. And there may also be one good side-effect: Extreme longevity.
It turns out that when you’re under stress, your body releases more of the hormone cortisol, which stimulates that hyper-alert “fight or flight” reflex. While cortisol is good in small doses, over time it erodes the small caps at the end of your chromosomes known as telomeres (the little yellow dots at the end of those blue chromosomes in the picture). Many researchers have long suspected that telomeres would provide a key to longevity because they are quite large in young people and gradually shrink over time as cells divide.
Rita Effros, the researcher who led the UCLA study, believes that she can synthesize a pill that combats stress by putting more telomerase — the substance that builds telomeres — into the body. This would keep those telomeres large, even in the face of large amounts of cortisol. It might also make your body live a lot longer too.
[Spoiler alert!]
Curiously, this clue about telomere length and aging is exactly the mechanism I use in Communion of Dreams to reveal that the character Chu Ling is a clone. Genetic testing reveals that the telomeres in her cells are much shorter than would be expected from a child her age, leading to the understanding that this is due to the fact that she has been cloned.
Ironic, eh? No, no one is going to think that I’m a clone. But I find it curious that the same mechanism which I chose for a major plot point pertaining to the health of the human race in my book is one which has been clearly operating on my own health.
Fascinating.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Arthur C. Clarke, Artificial Intelligence, Expert systems, Google, movies, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, tech
A good friend sent me a link to a longish piece in the latest edition of The Atlantic titled Is Google Making Us Stupid? by author Nicholas Carr. It’s interesting, and touches on several of the things I explore as future technologies in Communion of Dreams, and I would urge you to go read the whole thing.
Read it, but don’t believe it for a moment.
OK, Carr starts out with the basic premise that the human mind is a remarkably plastic organ, and is capable of reordering itself to a large degree even well into adulthood. Fine. Obvious. Anyone who has learned a new language, or mastered a new computer game, or acquired any other skill as an adult knows this, and knows how it expands one’s awareness of different and previously unperceived aspects of reality. That, actually, is one of the basic premises behind what I do with Communion, in opening up the human understanding of what the reality of the universe actually is (and how that is in contrast with our prejudices of what it is).
From this premise, Carr speculates that the increasing penetration of the internet into our intellectual lives is changing how we think. I cannot disagree, and have said as much in several of my posts here. For about 2/3 of the article he is discussing how the hyperlinked reality of the web tends to scatter our attention, making it more difficult for us to concentrate and think (or read) ‘deeply’. Anyone who has spent a lot of time reading online knows this phenomenon – pick up an old-fashioned paper book, and you’ll likely find yourself now and again wanting explanatory hyperlinks on this point or that for further clarification. This, admittedly, makes it more difficult to concentrate and immerse yourself into the text at hand, to lose yourself in either the author’s argument or the world they are creating.
But then Carr hits his main point, having established his premises. And it is this: that somehow this scattered attention turns us into information zombies, spoon-fed by the incipient AI of the Google search engine.
Huh?
No, seriously, that’s what he says. Going back to the time-motion efficiency studies pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor at the turn of the last century, which turned factory workers into ideal components for working with machines, he makes this argument:
Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.
The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?
Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
Do you see the pivot there? He’s just spent over a score of paragraphs explaining how the internet has degraded our ability to concentrate because of hyperlinked distractions, but then he turns around and says that Google’s increasing sophistication at seeking out information will limit our curiosity about that information.
No. If anything, the ability to access a broader selection of possible references quickly, the ability to see a wider scope of data, will allow us to better use our human ability to understand patterns intuitively, and to delve down into the data pile to extract supporting or contradicting information. This will *feed* our curiosity, not limit it. More information will be hyperlinked – more jumps hither and yon for our minds to explore.
The mistake Carr has made is to use the wrong model for his analogy. He has tried to equate the knowledge economy with the industrial economy. Sure, there are forces at play which push us in the direction he sees – any business is going to want its workers to concentrate on the task at hand, and be efficient about it. That’s what the industrial revolution was all about, from a sociological point of view. This is why some employers will limit ‘surfing’ time, and push their workers to focus on managing a database, keeping accounts balanced, and monitoring production quality. While they are at work. But that has little or nothing to do with what people do on their own time, and how the use the tools created by information technology which allow for much greater exploration and curiosity. And for those employees who are not just an extension of some automated process, those who write, or teach, or research – these tools are a godsend.
In fairness, Carr recognizes the weakness in his argument. He acknowledges that previous technological innovations on a par with the internet (first writing itself, then the development of the printing press) were initially met with gloom on the part of those who thought that it would allow for the human mind to become lazy by not needing to hold all the information needed within the brain itself. These predictions of doom proved wrong, of course, because while some discipline in holding facts in the brain was lost, increasing freedom with accessing information needed only fleetingly was a great boon, allowing people to turn their intellectual abilities to using those facts rather than just remembering them.
Carr ends his essay with this:
I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. This is a complete misreading of what happens in the movie. Kubrick’s vision was exactly the opposite – HAL was quite literally just following orders. Those orders were to preserve the secret nature of the mission, at the expense of the lives of the crew whom he murders or attempts to murder. That is the danger in allowing machinelike behaviour to be determinant. Kubrick (and Arthur C. Clarke) were, rather, showing that it is the human ability to assess unforeseen situations and synthesize information to draw a new conclusion (and act on it) which is our real strength.
*Sigh*
Jim Downey
(Hat tip to Wendy for the link to the Carr essay!)
Filed under: Arthur C. Clarke, ISS, Jupiter, movies, NASA, Paleo-Future, Science, Science Fiction, Space
I just came across an interesting idea from Michael Benson in the Washington Post last weekend:
Consider the International Space Station, that marvel of incremental engineering. It has close to 15,000 cubic feet of livable space; 10 modules, or living and working areas; a Canadian robot arm that can repair the station from outside; and the capacity to keep five astronauts (including the occasional wealthy rubbernecking space tourist) in good health for long periods. It has gleaming, underused laboratories; its bathroom is fully repaired; and its exercycle is ready for vigorous mandatory workouts.
The only problem with this $156 billion manifestation of human genius — a project as large as a football field that has been called the single most expensive thing ever built — is that it’s still going nowhere at a very high rate of speed. And as a scientific research platform, it still has virtually no purpose and is accomplishing nothing.
* * *
Send the ISS somewhere.
The ISS, you see, is already an interplanetary spacecraft — at least potentially. It’s missing a drive system and a steerage module, but those are technicalities. Although it’s ungainly in appearance, it’s designed to be boosted periodically to a higher altitude by a shuttle, a Russian Soyuz or one of the upcoming new Constellation program Orion spacecraft. It could fairly easily be retrofitted for operations beyond low-Earth orbit. In principle, we could fly it almost anywhere within the inner solar system — to any place where it could still receive enough solar power to keep all its systems running.
Like I said, interesting. But problematic – the ISS wasn’t constructed to provide adequate protection from radiation (the orbit it occupies is within the Earth’s protective magnetosphere), and therefore would need to be retrofitted extensively to protect inhabitants on a long-distance voyage. It would likely also need retrofitting to reinforce the many joints where components have been mounted together, since these were not designed to withstand significant stress from propulsion. I think Mr. Benson may have underestimated these problems and costs.
But it is still an interesting idea. Unfortunately, it’s not original. Well, not exactly. Like so many things related to our early exploration in space, something similar was proposed by Arthur C. Clarke over 25 years ago. Yes, about 15 before construction began on the ISS. It is a plot point in his novel 2010: Odyssey Two (the book differs significantly from the movie 2010, so you may not have come across it). In the book, a Chinese space station under construction in LEO surprisingly reveals itself to be an interplanetary craft, and takes off for Jupiter, getting the jump on both the American and Soviet missions planned to investigate the monolith in orbit there.
Just a little factoid for a Sunday morning.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Humor, Marketing, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction
Last Friday we crossed 10,000 downloads of Communion of Dreams. By Monday we had another 500 downloads. By this morning it was another 435. That’s 935 downloads in a week. Or, put it another way, that’s a 9.35% increase. Sorta like a return on investment. Let’s see . . . a simple interest calculation . . . 10,000 (base) x 0.0935 (% increase) x 52 (weeks per year) . . . in one year, another 48,620 people will have downloaded Communion at this rate. Of course, if we *compound* the increase (saying that we’ll not have 935 downloads each week, but rather a 9.35% increase each week) then that results in over a million downloads (check it yourself).
Woo-hoo! Time to get a publisher – who wouldn’t want a million-seller book?
Big-time, here I come!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Google, Government, movies, Nuclear weapons, Predictions, Preparedness, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, tech, Terrorism, Violence, Wired
Yesterday was an anniversary. Here are some stunning pictures related to it. There have been movies made about it. And movies about what it meant. Or what it could lead to. And, of course, there are a whole bunch of books on related subjects. I’ve talked about the threat it presents. Lore about it has widely influenced popular culture. And it is still topical.
Did you mix a drink to celebrate?
Jim Downey
Filed under: Feedback, Marketing, Music, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Society
Well, as I noted the other day, we crossed the threshold of 10,000 downloads of Communion of Dreams sometime last Friday. This after a bit of a slow crawl the last couple of months to reach that number.
Of course, what happens this weekend? Another 500 downloads.
Because, clearly, 9,775 downloads doesn’t indicate that something is popular. But 10,000 does, and so other people want to check it out.
Man, I love marketing. We hairless apes sure have some funny quirks.
But thanks to all those who decided to check out the book this weekend. And, again, thanks to all who downloaded it previously and helped to spread the word about it.
Jim Downey
*with apologies.
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Daily Kos, Feedback, Marketing, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
Huh. It finally happened, a week after I turned 50. Over 10,000 downloads of Communion of Dreams.
I’ve posted a ‘thank you’ to both UTI and dKos, but I want to extend a personal thanks to all who follow the blog and have helped to spread the word of the novel. As I noted on dKos:
When I set up a website to allow people to download the novel early last year, I thought that I would just make it available until I got around to finding a publisher for the book. But then my life became completely preoccupied with the deteriorating condition of my mother-in-law (see my diaries here tagged “Alzheimer’s”, or go to my blog), and just didn’t have the time/energy for doing the legwork of finding an agent or publisher.
So the book remained available for download. And surprise, surprise, word of it spread. The most I ever did to promote it was to put a link in my .sig file here and a couple of other places where I post. The whole thing took on a bit of a life of its own, to be honest, and watching the numbers of downloads slowly climb helped to bolster my spirits during some very dark and depressing times.
OK, that’s not entirely true – I did start this blog with the goal of promoting the book and documenting the process of finding an agent and then landing a publishing deal. But the part about watching the numbers climb helping me through those difficult times of caring for Martha Sr are certainly true. The same for the feedback I have gotten through this blog. Thanks to one and all for your support, criticism, and friendship.
Huh. 10,000. That’s kinda cool.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 