Politics of science… of hypocrisy… and transparency

 Several off-angle political threads, this time. Simultaneously partisan yet contrary, ornery and proudly free of the stupid “left-right axis.” Stay tuned next time, though, for an important one — the Wager Challenge.

== Start with science ==

Now is the time to begin a hard push for the 2012 candidates to participate in a debate on science and technology matters, during the coming electoral season.  Make this an issue!  Shoe that you (you-personally) consider this to be a vital matter, and not just for the presidential candidates!

The one thing that will correlate with future U.S. success, more than any other, will be whether we become – once again – a scientifically-oriented, ambitiously pragmatic, problem solving nation.

Seriously, can you picture America being led by a science ignoramus? (Please, no obvious comments about recent history!)

If we get enough ground swell for this science debate to happen, we might see it every election, and scare the ignorami off entirely.  Please do check out the Science Debate site and actually sign-on. Press the issue.

== Shake that Etch-a-Sketch! ==  

Sure enough, as expected, the day after poll figures showed him gaining in Pennsylvania -  his last big primary to clinch the GOP nomination – Mitt Romney began his much-expected scurry-to-the-center. “We’re Republicans and Democrats in this campaign, but we’re all connected with one destiny for America…” and “We have a president who I think is a nice guy, but he spent too much time at Harvard, perhaps, or maybe just not enough time working in the real world.”

Not exactly the red meat he was tossing to the party’s hard core, till very recently.  (Also, as the LA Times pondered: It is a potentially self-defeating line of attack: Romney spent four years at Harvard, receiving a law degree and an MBA; Obama spent three years there, graduating from the law school. Also, three of Romney’s five sons attended Harvard Business School.)

Heck, while we’re at it… will the real Mitt Romney please stand up?  A funky funny video mash.  More intellectually diverting… see the “Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney,” a very clever political spoof by a writer who has clearly consumed WAY too many pop-sci articles about quantum mechanics!  I especially liked the “principle uncertainty principle.”  Just when you think he must run out of QM parallels, he tunnels thru to more.

== If only we were still like this ==

“Born often under another sky, placed in the middle of an always moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible torrent which draws all about him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural state of man. He feels the need of it, more he loves it; for the instability; instead of meaning disaster to him, seems to give birth only to miracles all about him.”

– Alexis de Tocqueville, writing about the national character he observed in Democracy in America   

In truth… millions of us still are like this!  It is the mentality of folks who like good science fiction.

== Ah Transparency ==

Robert Wright‘s column in The Atlantic ponders how the Zimmerman-Martin tragedy might have gone very differently, if both men wore Google Glasses, video recording their encounter to the Cloud.  Awareness that there are witnesses affects human behavior, and even if it didn’t, we’d know exactly what happened.  Wright ponders this cogently – citing my nonfiction book The Transparent Society – and goes on to ponder the downsides.  The potential that such records might be misused either by a Big Brother state or by hundreds of millions of nosy-oppressive “little brothers.”

He is correct to worry we are returning to the classic human condition that reigned in villages of old, wherein everybody knew everything about everybody else.  You might be safer from some kinds of random violence by strangers.  But those villages were also oppressed by the feudal lord and local harpy-gossips, who knew everything about you – and how to use it against you.

Our modern notions of anonymity and privacy stem in part from knowing how easily that cozy old village can turn sour.

Is this the kind of Global Village we’ll see, when everyone on Earth wears Augmented Reality Spectacles, or “specs”?  (As portrayed in my new novel Existence.)  Are we doomed by unstoppable omniscience technology to see ourselves trapped in spirals of ever-steepening, conformity-enforcing judgmentalism?

Not necessarily. in The Transparent Society I refer folks to the popular 1960s song Harper Valley PTA, which illustrates the inherent power of sousveillance, or looking back at the mighty.  There is already very strong evidence that it can let us have the good aspects of the village, and eliminate the bad in a true Positive Sum Game.  But only if the power of reciprocal accountability is true, and no mirage.

That is the critical matter before us.  The omni-vision provided by “specs” is coming, like it or not.  But we still have time to make this universal light truly empowering to average folk to protect their personal space and eccentricity, granting them one special capability, above all other godlike traits. The ability to be left alone.

== More on this. Reciprocality can be a bitch ==

What goes around comes around.  See how the landlord of an abortion clinic politely, but effectively, turned the tables on protesters who started targeting his 11 year old daughter.

A good example of reciprocality at work. Alas though, things keep getting worrisome.  I began writing The Transparent Society back in 1987, when I lived in Britain and witnessed the bare beginnings of the U.K.’s love affair with massive police surveillance.  Now that country is exporting the technologies to oppressive regimes around the world. Privacy International, which monitors the use of surveillance technology, claims equipment being exported includes devices known as “IMSI catchers” that masquerade as normal mobile phone masts and identify phone users and malware – software that can allow its operator to control a target’s computer, while allowing the interception to remain undetected.

Want to see the latest salvo, fired by those who want society to go back to feudalism?  Conservatives are arming up for their war on public universities, trying to de-fund them, destroy them, and replace them with for-profit colleges. Seriously, it is even a slogan.  “Defund public universities.” If this is what conservatism has become, then we know what that whirring sound is: the spinning in Barry Goldwater’s grave.

== The Good News on U.S. Energy Independence ==

Not only has the United States reduced oil imports from members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries by more than 20 percent in the last three years, it has become a net exporter of refined petroleum products like gasoline for the first time since the Truman presidency. The natural gas industry, which less than a decade ago feared running out of domestic gas, is suddenly dealing with a glut so vast that import facilities are applying for licenses to export gas to Europe and Asia. …  This surge is hardly without consequences!  But the turnaround may buy time to move to more sustainable energy sources.  And it may prove a factor in this year’s U.S. elections.

== Next time… the Wager Challenge! ==

I plan to offer a silver bullet for Culture War.  Oh, it won’t solve our current political insanity, but it should offer sensible, fact-oriented folks like you and me a way to corner those loonies of the far-left and the entire-right who have transformed political discourse in the United States from a matter of pragmatic negotiation into outright Civil War.  Maybe even a way to get some of them to shut the &$!# up.

Come back next time for the Wager Challenge!

From The Brick Moon to Telstar

It’s well known that in 1865, Jules Verne published his novel, De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon), which includes the concept of human spaceflight. And yet, Verne never discussed the far more practical notion of of an artificial satellite orbiting Earth.

For that it took an American, Edward Everett Hale (author of The Man Without a Country).  The Brick Moon was published serially in Atlantic Monthly starting in 1869.  And it is absolutely amazing.  Almost every other paragraph you are either chortling over some bit of what we’d now call scientific naiveté… or else staring at the page in disbelief that some folks back then had such clear notions as geo-stationary navigation satellites.  The entire book is available on Project Gutenberg — where you can download for free much of our literary heritage.

The Brick Moon, 200 feet in diameter, was a polar-orbiting satellite (built from 12 million bricks) intended to establish a space meridian to assist with navigation—to help ships determine longitude. Hale called it “the blessing of all seamen.” And how was it launched? With two massive flywheels:

“Then, before we began even to build the moon, before we even began to make the brick, we would build two gigantic fly-wheels, the diameter of each should be ever so great, the circumference heavy beyond all precedent, and thundering strong, so that no temptation might burst it. They should revolve, their edges nearly touching, in opposite directions, for years, if it were necessary, to accumulate power, driven by some waterfall now wasted to the world. One should be a little heavier than the other. When the Brick Moon was finished, and all was ready, IT should be gently rolled down a gigantic groove provided for it, till it lighted on the edge of both wheels at the same instant. Of course it would not rest there, not the ten-thousandth part of a second. It would be snapped upward, as a drop of water from a grindstone. Upward and upward; but the heavier wheel would have deflected it a little from the vertical. Upward and northward it would rise, therefore, till it had passed the axis of the world. It would, of course, feel the world’s attraction all the time, which would bend its flight gently, but still it would leave the world more and more behind. Upward still, but now southward, till it had traversed more than one hundred and eighty degrees of a circle. Little resistance, indeed, after it had cleared the forty or fifty miles of visible atmosphere. “Now let it fall,” said Q., inspired with the vision. “Let it fall, and the sooner the better! The curve it is now on will forever clear the world; and over the meridian of that lonely waterfall,—if only we have rightly adjusted the gigantic flies,—will forever revolve, in its obedient orbit, the—BRICK MOON, the blessing of all seamen,—as constant in all change as its older sister has been fickle.”

One complication ensues:  the satellite is accidentally launched, with people aboard… and yet more mixtures of hilarity and awed respect proceed to unfold.

In 1945, Arthur C. Clarke published an article, Extra-Terrestrial Relays, in Wireless World magazine envisioning a global communications network, using satellites in geosynchronous orbit. This was twelve years before the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, setting off the Space Race to the moon. A time of enthusiasm and innovation that is sorely lacking today. Twenty years later, Intelsat I Early Bird, the first commercial geostationary communication satellite was launched. Since then, satellites have become essential to our daily life, as we rely upon them for telecommunications, weather prediction, geolocation and defense imaging. See this interactive History of Satellites Timeline, ranging from Jules Verne to Telstar to DIRECTV and beyond.

==Miscellaneous Items==

A collection of resources for using science fiction in the classroom to teach and illustrate science.

Humans have created a vast population of robotic workers to take on the tasks that they no longer want to carry out themselves, resulting in a disenchanted robot underclass that that takes over the Brixton area of South London. This is the premise of an incredible short film called ‘Robots of Brixton’ by Factory Fifteen, a collective of six animators based in London.

A cool, quasi-classical piece inspired by my characters and stories is available on iTunes.  “Tytlal Wave” has both beauty and whimsey – by Maestro Siderious.

 == Fund science & explore the world with renowned researchers ==

So far, science has been funded by gracious-rich patrons, or by governments or universities… so how about crowd sourcing to help fund science research: Choose your own projects through Petridish: a crowdfunding site, where scientists  can showcase their research to the public. In exchange, you will receive updates, acknowledgement and/or various rewards (photographs, DVD, field samples, journal acknowledgment, or invitations to talks/dinner), plus the satisfaction of assisting scientists trying to understand our world. (Donations are not currently tax deductible.)  Way cool.

A cute and zealously enthusiastic (and much too blithe) essay on the coming singularity.

And a brief – but more broad and cautious – essay of mine (tangentially related to Existence) appeared on the site of the TechCast virtual think tank, tracking the techn revolution. “Is there such a thing as human destiny?”

There is Madness on the Other Side Too: The Left’s War on Optimism

Is the bold future of our youth being killed by gloomy science fiction?  Or has Sci Fi grown more dour as a reflection of our mood?  Glenn Reynolds interviews authors Neal Stephenson and Vernor Vinge in a thought-provoking inquiry: Why We Need Big, Bold Science Fiction: “While books about space exploration and robots once inspired young people to become scientists and engineers—and inspired grownup engineers and scientists to do big things—in recent decades the field has become dominated by escapist fantasies and depressing dystopias.”

(Hey… I’m TRYING, dammit!)

Almost as if deliberately proving the point, TED speaker Paul Gilster rails against techno-optimism in a desperately wrongheaded essay that really should be read in order to understand the problem with today’s well-meaning left.  Paul does us all a disservice by conflating a multidimensional landscape with a digital, either-or choice – confusing”optimism” with “complacency.”

Yes, we all know the types he refers to as techno-optimists – fools who shrug off looming water shortages, energy deficits and climate degradation, blithely assuring us that “humanity and/or science and/or markets will find a way.”  Such people are dolts, often driven by a political wing that has done horrific damage both to the U.S. and the world.

Nevertheless, in taking the reflexive opposite point of view, many folks on the left wind up being very little better.  Their sense of urgency to save the world is much appreciated.  But it gets wrongheaded when the message becomes “Let’s do something!  And by the way, nothing ever works!”  

That was the calamitously awful, guilt-tripping meme conveyed in James Cameron’s film – Avatar.  The notion that our society is not only dismally greedy and stupid, but the very worst culture ever.  The worst civilization conceivable.

This despite being the very same civilization that paid James Cameron billions to help enthusiastic audiences want to be better. Ah well. Ironies are lost on those steeped in finger-wagging lecture mode.  We have experienced waves of such finger-wagging since the sixties, all of it lusciously indignant and satisfying to the finger waggers.  But helpful?

Sure, in the beginning, films like Soylent Green used the raw-guilt-trip approach effectively to shake people into awareness.  I call such tales – along with Silent Running and Silent Spring – “self-preventing prophecies” in that they roused millions not only to look up (and ahead) but to become actively involved in working against disaster.

Which is, in fact, the point! Doomy-gloomy guilt trips have served their purpose!  Everyone who can be recruited into environmentalism (for example) by guilt-tripping already has been!  Everybody else is simply repelled by the message.  Forced – by either-or logic – into the other camp.

 Today, we need more sophisticated legends, that show us not only possible failure modes, but humanity buckling down to get things right.  Overcoming errors and dastardly-plots, sure! But balanced by other trends, like a civilization filled with citizens eager to do better.

Solutions are possible.  They will require investment, thought, negotiation and endless hard work, just to squeak by.  But that we can do.  Can-do.  A can-do spirit that (alas!) dismal reflexes on the left associate only with complacency.

Take Jared Diamond’s fascinating and important book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succed. By all means get and read it.  Diamond overstates (by far) the case that all past civilizations declined for reasons of environmental neglect. But his examples edify and warn, about where we’ll wind up, if we don’t pay heed!

On the other hand, his prescription – renunciatory ecological fascism – is yet another example of the primly dour puritanism of Paul Ehrlich and many others – the truest heirs of Cotton Mather – who finger-wag dire proclamations that salvation can only come from retreating to “ancient wisdom” and shivering in the dark.

Never, ever, is it avowed that we might get past this dangerous era (as I suggest in Earth and Existence) by moving forward.

== Anyone for Plan C? ==

Are these our only choices?  Between chiding, prune-faced, lefty-puritans and giddy rightists who proclaim that either God or some vague corporatist market-innovators will save us out of the blue?  Will anybody note that both groups are vociferously, fanatically anti-future?

Is it any wonder that can-do science fiction – suggesting that hard work and goodwill and ingenuity and negotiation might achieve wonders – has fallen on hard times?

Our root problem today is not obdurate denialism coming from the right.  That insanity is part of Culture War and can only be treated as a mental illness. Blue America must do what it did in every previous phase of the U.S. Civil War.  Simply win. We will stop resurgent feudalism and know-nothingism. Tell the troglodytes and oligarchs they cannot have our renaissance.  Our enlightenment.  Our proudly scientific civilization.

No. What I find far more worrisome is the left’s mania to confuse ALL optimism with complacency, proclaiming any zealous, can-do enthusiasm to be part and parcel of the right’s madness.

It is a baseless and dismal reflex, inherently illogical, anti-technological, demoralizing, and – above all – truly destructive of hope, undermining our ability to actively and vigorously save ourselves and the world.

Celebrating Space! Solar Tornadoes, Exoplanets ‘n Micro Black Holes

12-4-12 Thursday is Yuri’s Night, an international celebration of human achievement and ingenuity, in recognition of mankind’s achievements in space exploration—with hopes of inspiring a new generation to continue looking upward and reaching outward. Fifty-one years ago, Yuri Gagarin was the first human to launch into space: “Circling the Earth in my orbital spaceship I marveled at the beauty of our planet. People of the world, let us safeguard and enhance this beauty – not destroy it!”

Do something on Yuri’s night.  Look up some local or online event. Or just step outside with someone impressionable, and infect them with a sense of wonder.  And determination.

How do we recapture our enthusiasm for space? Neil deGrasse Tyson examines America’s ailing aerospace industry and NASA’s shrinking vision — and asks what it would take for America to remain the leading power in space: “In fact we may be entering a new age of geopolitics, in which economic strength wields greater power than military strength. If that’s the case, we shouldn’t need reminders that innovations in science and technology drive tomorrow’s economies. That’s been true since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. And so healthy investment in space exploration—something we saw 50 years ago, and something many other countries have just figured out—is like a new force of nature operating on a nation’s economic prosperity. As nothing else does, the frontier of space exploration, which draws upon a dozen fields of science and engineering, attracts the ambitions of those who are still in the educational pipeline. It is they who become the scientists and technologists. It is they who invent tomorrow.”

Hear hear. Every decade since the forties, some scientific breakthrough (or several) enabled the U.S. to stay rich and vibrant enough to then spend it all in the Great Buying Spree that propelled world prosperity and created a world-majority Middle Class. That is, every decade except the first decade of the 21st Century, amid the calamitous War on Science.

The possibilities are there!  See my video: Grand Scale Reasons to Explore Space. I am on the board of advisers for the NASA Innovative and Advanced Concepts program. Last week in Pasadena we saw some outtasight and amazing proposals, some of them both groundbreaking and apparently eminently practical. All we have to do is rediscover within ourselves the kind of people who step outside and look up, now and then.

== Great Sci-Television ==

Is There an Edge to the Universe? This episode of Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole will blow your mind!

Our family liked the whole series.  Well. Except the episode about “The Sixth Sense.”  And the fact that they could have used a physicist sci fi- author pundit, now and then.

==Exoplanets and Runaway Planets==

Turns out there could be billions of habitable planets around faint red dwarf stars in our galaxy. Well… maybe.

An international team, including astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), has applied the technique of gravitational microlensing to measure how common planets are in the Milky Way, surveying millions of stars over six years. The team concludes that planets around stars are the rule rather than the exception.  How was it done? Beyond gravitational wobble and Kepler’s occultation method, there’s an added method by which exoplanets are detected – via the way that the gravitational field of their host stars acts like a lens, magnifying the light of a background star. If the star that acts as a lens has a planet in orbit around it, the planet can make a detectable contribution, warping the brightening effect on the background star.

Microlensing is a very powerful tool, with the potential to detect exoplanets that could never be found any other way. But a very rare chance alignment of a background and foreground star is required for a microlensing event to be seen at all. And, to spot a planet during the rare event, an additional chance alignment of the planet’s orbit is also needed.  Significantly, any one episode is likely never to be repeated, so you can’t learn much about the planet.  This mostly helps by offering statistics.  In  six year’s worth of microlensing data used in the analysis, three exoplanets were firmly detected… enough to suggest that planets are very abundant. (In fact, we astonomers always expected it to be so, because of angular momentum considerations; but it is good to see proof.)

In other news: Astronomers believe that runaway planets may zoom at a fraction of speed of light. When a solar system passed close to a black hole, all sorts of wild stuff can happen, including planets being expelled from the galaxy at relativistic speeds!

==Solar Tornadoes, Micro Black Holes & Civilization’s End==

Astronomers present images of a solar tornado as much as five times the width of Earth, an event they believe triggers solar storms.  Cool images!  Reminding me of the days when I was a solar observer at the Big Bear Observatory and caught on film the Great Flare of ‘72.  Yep!  By crickey!

Should we fear collisions with micro-black holes? Scientists seem convinced that such a tiny singularity (black hole) would pass right through our planet without gobbling enough mass to slow down.  Fair enough.  But what if the singularity were local?  So in much lower-velocity orbit in the Solar system?  Or even (as I portrayed in EARTH) man-made?  One of ten thousand possible explanations for why we seem to be alone in the universe?

Noted author and futurist Vernor Vinge is surprisingly optimistic when it comes to the prospect of civilization collapsing. “I think that [civilization] coming back would actually be a very big surprise,” he says in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

And see a  fairly wise article on SETI by my esteemed colleague Nick Sagan.

==Fusion Finally?==

Computer simulations of magnetically-confined inertial fusion, suggest we may be a lot closer to workable fusion reactors than previously thought. Sandia Labs will test the simulation experimentally in 2013.  To which frequent blog commentor Sociotard cogently replied: “A scientist performing a detailed simulation of fusion is as close to making a meatspace model as a middleschooler making out with her pillow is to actually reaching second base.”

==Tech Updates==

Boston Dynamics does it again!  See the “sand flea rover“  prototype of a wheeled robot that can also (sproing!) leap actual tall buildings in a single bound.  Amazing… and highly relevant to our mission at the NASA Innovative and Advanced Concepts group. Watch the video.

Patent Bolt has discovered that Microsoft has been secretly working on a video headset since September 2010. A New Microsoft patent reveals that they’ve been working two styles of headset: an aviation styled helmet aimed at Xbox gamers, and one that resembles a pair of sunglasses for use with smartphones, MP3 players and other future devices.

MIT Media Lab researchers have developed a camera that peers around corners. It can “see” objects hidden behind walls… via a non-imaging method akin to radar, bouncing off other walls. that are in-view. The system can produced recognizable 3-D images of a wooden figurine and of foam cutouts outside their camera’s line of sight.

Printing three dimensional objects with incredibly fine details is now possible using “two-photon lithography“. With this technology, tiny structures on a nanometer scale can be fabricated. (I was involved in the earliest version of this technique, back in the 1980s!)

Visualizing light in motion at a trillion frames per second..

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Final note… I have written my novels on Apple computers since 1982 – around the time that I (Brin brags) bought some stock.  But I am disturbed by rumors that Apple is setting up the iPad as an eReader with some unpleasant aspects.  Drop by the comments section below this blog and offer up their views.

From Brain Imaging to Parasite Infestations

==April Fools’ Day Technology==

Google’s April Fools’ Day “product releases” are infamous, but this is one I sure hope they actually implement as an app. (Anyone care to try it?)  “Tap” is an implementation of two-thumb texting that would let you exchange messages truly eyes-free… via Morse Code!  (Hey, I even portrayed this in my new novel Existence (June) without knowing of Tap in advance!) Check out the advance features they “promise”–  which I hope they will implement. Not mentioned?  Using a phone’s vibrate mode to *receive* Morse  incoming messages.  Wouldn’t it be a hoot if this restored Morse usage and took off?

Meanwhile, Google promised a self-driving car for NASCAR, Richard Branson “announced” his plan to take passengers to the center of the earth, and Sony lives up to its slogan — “Make. Believe.” — with its April Fools’ Day introduction of quarter-sized laptop  “with a gorgeous .75-inch by 1.25-inch high-definition display.”

==Brain Science: Fiction, Memories and Parasites==

The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.  “Reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Read the article in The New York Times:

“Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica… The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters. … Reading great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges and improves us as human beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined.“

In a new MIT study, researchers used optogenetics to show that memories reside in very specific brain cells, and that simply activating a tiny fraction of brain cells can recall an entire memory.  If you read the article – the generality of the result may be overstated.  On the other hand, this suggests intracellular computation really does take place.  And if so, the Singularity may require a LOT more computing power than today’s transhumanists expect.

High-resolution brain imaging from the NIH indicates an elegant simplicity in the brain’s wiring. “Far from being just a tangle of wires, the brain’s connections turn out to be more like ribbon cables — folding 2D sheets of parallel neuronal fibers that cross paths at right angles, like the warp and weft of a fabric,” explained Dr. Van Wedeen of Massachusetts General Hospital — a pervasive 3D grid structure with no diagonals.

I have written before about the Toxoplasma gondii parasite that millions of humans get from close affiliation with cats. (It also features in my next novel, Existence.)  Rats who are infected with T-g develop unique neural and behavioral traits that make them easier for cats to catch.  Cats are the natural T-g hosts (where the protozoans breed). So what happens when humans are infected? (55% of French people and about 15% of Americans, for example.) T-g appears to cause many sex specific changes in personality. Compared with uninfected men, males who had the parasite were more introverted, suspicious, oblivious to other people’s opinions of them, and inclined to disregard rules. Infected women, on the other hand, presented in exactly the opposite way: they were more outgoing, trusting, image-conscious, and rule-abiding than uninfected women. Infected men tended to have fewer friends, while infected women tended to have more. Those who tested positive for the parasite were about two and a half times as likely to be in a traffic accident as their uninfected peers. Now, more findings associate infection with schizophrenia.

Read this fascinating article in The Atlantic: How Your Cat is Making You Crazy. T-g is just one of many parasites that are being discovered to alter their victims’ behavior and even neurology, in ways that Greg Bear seems to have foreseen in his deeply disturbing novel Vitals.  It is a new frontier that makes us wonder, might some of the calamities of human behavior not always be our fault?  Might our civilization benefit simply from the right antibiotics?

==Shifting Online Empires==

Visual displays of the rise and fall of internet empires. If you track the histories of MySpace, AOL, Yahoo, and several others… Facebook may be riding for a fall.  Indeed, the interface is so bad, so cumbersome and lobotomizing, that some group with wonderfully new approaches to social media ought to eat FB’s lunch.

On Star’s Family Link now offers real-time tracking of your family’s automobiles, enabling you to follow cars driven by teens and/or spouses, with updates sent to your PC or smartphone. On Star is advertising “peace of mind”…  Yipe.  Both creepy and inevitable.  We are SO going to have to be agile in this coming age.

Creepy… and shades of the movie Gattaca! Employers are now asking for Facebook log in information.  So they can prowl through your past postings for pecadillos, and evaluate the kinds of people you hang with?  Mind you this is inevitable, at some level. (As they portray in Gattaca.)  But where is the effective ability to look back?  The human resources folk who do this judging should somehow have to answer to the people they are nosing into. Facebook responds that users should not have to share their passwords “or do anything that might jeopardize the security of your account or violate the privacy of your friends.”

Hackers are winning: The FBI’s top cyber cop offered a grim appraisal of the nation’s efforts to keep computer hackers from plundering corporate data networks: “We’re not winning,” and the current public and private approach to fending off hackers is “unsustainable. Senior officials say there is not a single, secure unclassified computer network in the United States.

==Depressing==

If you haven’t reached your full quota of depression and outrage yet, have a look at accumulating evidence that pesticides and plastics have saturated us with artificial hormones that are affecting the next generation in countless ways. e.g. the age of puberty in girls has been plummeting to around ten years old.  I do not know enough to be certain that the alarmists on this issue are right in the intensity of their warnings.  (In fact, I would bet good money they exaggerate by a lurid degree!) But suppose they exaggerate by even a factor of ten.  Even then, isn’t it time to boost and unleash science, and not squelch it?

==Miscellaneous==

Take a gorgeous “street-view” voyage down the Amazon…

Three new studies of using aspirin to prevent cancer, led by researchers at Oxford University, raise the possibility that a daily low dose of the drug could be effective, not just as a preventative measure, but as an additional treatment for those with cancer. This follows the finding that aspirin can reduce the chances of tumors spreading.

You will find this entrancing & captivating.  500 years of female portraits.

SWIPE — a new method to sift Wikipedia for more complex answers than a simple keyword search.

The Navy, Russians, Shipping & Insurance companies… and Climate Change

I regularly consult with various branches of our “protector caste”… from the military services and homeland security to several unnamed “agencies.” Naturally, I am encouraged by the fact that some of the most serious-minded men and women on the planet are very interested in well-grounded projections of diverse possible futures – not only mine, but those of several other “science & sci-fi guys.”

I can’t tell you about some of these “future studies.”  But I am free to share this one observation:

Absolutely all of the top-elite officers of these services appear to be convinced, without a shadow of a doubt, about Human Generated Climate Change (HGCC). All of those I have met consider it to be both real and one of the greatest challenges of our time.

Ponder this: the US Navy is striving with great intensity to prepare for an Arctic Ocean that is nearly ice-free for large parts of the year. Canada is shifting most of its military budget northward.  The Russians have moved an entire division to the Siberian northern coast.  And dig this.  The Russian Navy’s top priority? Their pride-and-joy?  SIX brand new, double-hulled, nuclear powered icebreakers they recently put in service. (The U.S. has one single-hulled, obsolete oil-powered breaker, soon to be retired)

A year or so ago, the Northwest passage opened so wide that a flood of cargo vessels raced through it from China to Europe. And prospectors are sifting for treasures on the sea floor, where Peary once spent a summer dragging sledges over ice-continents in search of the Pole.

What do all of these groups share in common? They cannot afford to let their view of reality be warped by willful delusion, just-so stories, Beckian rants and dogma, They don’t have the time for denialism. Want another example?

==  Insurers Confirm Growing Risks, Costs ==

Stakeholders from the insurance industry met with members of the U.S. Senate to acknowledge the role global warming plays in extreme weather-related losses, and to issue a call for action.  “At a Capital Hill a press conference on the cost of climate change, debate was not on the agenda. Pointing to a year of history-making, $1 billion-plus natural disasters, representatives of Tier 1 insurance companies took a definitive stance with members of the U.S. Senate to confirm that costs to taxpayers and businesses from extreme weather will continue to soar because of climate change.

“From our industry’s perspective, the footprints of climate change are around us and the trend of increasing damage to property and threat to lives is clear,” said Franklin Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America. “We need a national policy related to climate and weather.” Perhaps no industry better understands the impact of global warming than the insurance industry whose job it is to analyze risk. See the video of the March 1st press conference. Marsh & McLennan, one of the world’s largest insurance brokers, called climate change “one of the most significant emerging risks facing the world today.” As Jules Boykoff put it in The Guardian, “Let’s be clear: insurance firms aren’t altruists; they’re capitalists. A rise in extreme weather means a fall in their profits. This is hardball economics based on risk analysis, not save-the-polar-bears stuff.”

Read more in: What Insurance Companies already know about Climate Change.

So, if all the men and women who must combine brains, education and professionalism with harsh practicality can see the desperate need to prepare, how do 40% of the citizens of a great nation enter denial so severe they’ll demean and ignore not only scientists and the insurance industry… but even the U.S. Navy?

Are all of these groups (and a myriad more) absolutely convinced that absolutely every single aspect of current climate theory is absolutely proved in all levels, in all ways?  Of course not. There is always room for sincere skepticism that aims at finding flaws and improving our models of the world.

What they can’t afford is prim dogmatism. They have to pragmatically prepare for the world that appears 95% likely (by preponderance of evidence and expert calculations) to be coming.

On the other hand, there is a word for people who refuse to take reasonable precautions, or even negotiate in good faith the cheapest and most efficient just-in-case precautions, demanding instead (at the behest of a couple of coal-billionaire brothers)  that climate theory be absolutely proved in all levels, in all ways, before we take prudent, moderate measures to protect ourselves.

That word is imbeciles.

== Consistency: A Litmus of Madness ==

Here is a distilled essence showing just how bad it’s gotten.  How thoroughly Murdoch-Limbaugh-Norquist-Waleed, the four horsemen of America’s collapse, control the Republican Party. Two years ago, 100% of the GOP Senators voted the party line 100% of the time, all votes, for every issue, all year long.

Hell, a single dumb light switch could have done that job. What’s the point in being a “statesman” or delegate of the people to the world’s greatest deliberative body? As Mark Anderson put it: “This is the opposite of informed, rational decision-making. If that’s all they are going to do, why not save a few billion dollars and just put hats in their empty seats, and let them stay home? In other words, Newt’s party discipline has poisoned American politics.

 == Moral Decline? ==

All right, I am almost done with this political blog-trilogy. So let me just add a couple more thoughts.

Many – even most – “red” voters proclaim they are motivated in large part by anger over America’s “moral decline.” Rick Santorum says it is Satan’s work, undermining the moral foundations of the nation that is his biggest obstacle on Earth.  But is this assertion subject to any kind of test or comparison with facts?

In a fascinating article, The Economist explores measurable things like divorce rates, abortion, violent crime, high school dropout rates and teen pregnancy… all of which have declined… most of them steeply… in the last couple of decades. (Unmentioned by the article: rates for these things, as well as domestic violence, STDs and teen sex, have all declined much less in purportedly “more moral” Red America than they have in Blue states and cities.)

Teen pregnancy is at its lowest level in 40 years.  Shouldn’t that indicate something?

There is one contrary statistic, so read the original article. But this would seem to be yet another case of looking for a mythical reason to rationalize a fuming, volcanic anger that has other, much more psychological causes.  The truth is often bitterly inconvenient to dogmatists

(And you lefties… you have some of your own!)

== Political Miscellany ==

Here is a quickie interview on my local NPR station in which I did some rapid blather about taxes and pyramids and diamonds and oligarchy and historical perspective.  Stuff you’ve all heard from me before, but redolent and relevant this year.

An interesting piece of film-polemic. Biased but very telling. Asking anti-abortion demonstrators if making it illegal should then send women to jail.

A fascinating story about re-shoring or in-sourcing of manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.  – claimed to be a growing and significant trend.

Courts ruled that GPS trackers on cars require a warrant. FBI turned off 3000 GPS trackers currently in use, and now has to apply for permission to turn them back on, in order to find them, in order to remove them.

AND FINALLY: More on high frequency trading (HFT). In recent postings I gave five different reasons why they infernal mutation of capitalism threatens to destroy the very same capital markets that brought it into being. Now here’s another: “Sometimes high-frequency traders don’t even profit from the trade itself. They buy and sell shares at the same price and make money by sending large orders through the exchanges. NYSE, Nasdaq and others want to attract the most traders. So they offer rebates of 20 to 32 cents per 100 shares to traders who send in large orders. On the electronic exchange NYSE Arca, traders who can move 35 million shares pocket a quick $112,000“.

Yeesh. If there were one tax we desperately need, it is this one.

Who Is Insulting the Middle Class?

A deep irony, underlying our political season, is that the U.S. middle class…the biggest victims of the first decade of this century, are also being slandered relentlessly. The ongoing campaign of propaganda that democracy can’t work and we should turn to oligarchy has many threads. May I take you on a tour of some of the nastiest and most repulsive component memes?

One of the oldest is a nostrum that under a democracy the people will inevitably drain the public treasury by demanding more spending than taxes. The theory is that citizens who get more than they pay for will vote for politicians who promise to increase spending.

This is often called the “Largesse Canard” — an outright fantasy that was first fabricated by Plato, in order to demean the Athenian democracy, and that more recently was expressed in an oft-quoted aphorism, supposedly by Alexander Tytler: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

“Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.”

Among those who have carelessly bandied this smugly cynical assertion has been sci fi author Jerry Pournelle, along with many of his more right wing colleagues. It circulates widely among the dour Rothbardians and Randites who dominate today’s warped version of the libertarian movement….

…and it is a damned lie.

Remember the 1990s?  When Bill Clinton ran budget surpluses and wanted to spend the black ink buying down  public debt, instead of frittering it on short term “largesse”?  Nearly all of his support came from the middle class. By huge majorities, those working Americans polled their preference for debt buy-down. So why did it instead get flushed down the toilet of Supply-Side (voodoo) tax gifts for the rich?

Because (duh) the aristocracy – supposedly wise and far-seeing – rationalized a demand for instant gratification, instead of reduced debt which (ironically) would have lowered commercial borrowing costs overall and led to the very scenario that they were supposed to be after in the first place! In other words, U.S. federal debt pay-down would have engendered far more new business activity than opening our veins for the wide-open maws of plutocrat vampires.

History shows that it is always the aristocracy that behaves in spendthrift ways, not the middle class.  (Oh but they do like to invest lavishly in “think tanks” and media empires, ordering them to spread calumnies against citizenship. Propaganda like the Largesse Canard.)

Now a new twist. Dean P. Lacy, a professor of political science at Dartmouth College, has identified a theme in American politics over the last generation. Support for Republican candidates, who generally promise to cut government spending, has increased since 1980 in states where the federal government spends more than it collects. The greater the dependence, the greater the support for Republican candidates.

Conversely, states that pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits tend to support Democratic candidates. And Professor Lacy found that the pattern could not be explained by demographics or social issues.” See a map showing the geography of government benefits.

The full article is six pages, a typical New York Times in-depth Sunday magazine drill-down.

Seriously, read up on this.  You need to be armed against these insults to the people who actually create the wealth in our civilization.

Save Cato from the Kochs? Should we care?

Much in the news is an effort by the Koch brothers – coal barons David and Charles – to seize complete control over the Cato Institute, which has long touted itself as the leading libertarian think tank in the United States.  Staffers and fellows at Cato have been beating the drums of insurrection, calling for support and funds to stave off this blatant takeover by extreme-right oligarchs.  And many – even liberal intellectuals – have come flocking to the cause, offering support.

Is this just a case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend?”  Or are there layers beneath layers?  Does it even matter?

First: fair warning.  Though I oft call myself “a type of libertarian,” I’m not today’s typical variety.  Yes, I tout Adam Smith widely and feel we’d all benefit – especially liberals – from re-immersion in the profound common sense of “the First Liberal.”  Moreover, I am the only sci fi author who ever keynoted part of a political party’s convention – the Libertarian Party – at which half the audience gave me a standing ovation, defending me from being lynched by the other half! (The latter, Rand-Rothbard half has – alas – taken over the movement, with calamitous consequences.)  Have a look at how libertarians might save their cause… plus some fresh ways that they – and liberals and conservatives – might view the political landscape.

But back to this attempted putsch to take over the Cato Institute, and the “brave resistance of its scholars.”

== Who are the villains? ==

We start with the most blatant fact – that the Koch brothers, together with Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, Grover Norquist and Prince Waleed, have been core promulgators of America’s current, lobotomizing Civil War, which has demolished the nation’s traditional notions of negotiated pragmatism.  A big part of this has been the anti-future, relentless War on Science.

As their frenzy to degrade science metastacized, it turned into a campaign against every “smartypants caste” or knowledge profession in American life. Their other goal – destruction of the U.S. Civil Service – would then leave just one elite standing. The same elite that crushed liberty and markets in every other culture for 6000 years.  The same oligarchic elite that Adam Smith publicly despised in Wealth of Nations, calling it the  basic enemy of true capitalism and the age-old oppressor of mankind.

The damage that these half dozen men – plus a few dozen more – have done both to the people of the United States and to Pax Americana is too spectacularly consistent to have been anything but deliberate.

Ah, but having said that, is the Cato Institute really worth getting in a froth over?  I consulted and wrote for them a few times, back in the last century, before I came to see how shallow was their commitment to Smithian libertarianism or the fundamental goal of encouraging creative competition in society. In fact, parsing down their messages, we find that encouraging creative-competition is the very last thing on their minds.

Ignoring those 6000 years, during which markets were always destroyed by oligarchic cliques, Cato helped to spread the modern mythology that freedom is all-and-entirely about idolatry of unlimited private property.  Government and only government is inherently evil, anti-market or anti-liberty.  If you point to history… any history at all… or to the actual words of Adam Smith, they change the subject with stunning alacrity and truly awesome verbal agility.

In other words, the oligarchic right never had better whores than the intellectual courtesans at Cato.  Polysyllabic prostitutes eager to twist their tongues around fresh rationalizations for a new feudalism.

Read the article. Scan what percentage of Cato’s donors and board members ever gave to genuinely libertarian causes, as opposed to a Republican Party fast spiraling into aristocratism and know-nothing, anti-intellectual populism.

== Example: The “case” for privatizing Social Security ==

Take Cato’s relentless campaign to privatize Social Security. Funny thing about that. Both times that it came near passage… in the late nineties and 2005… it would have dumped 100 million naive sheep into the stock market just in time to re-inflate a failing valuation bubble, letting oligarchs dump half a trillion dollars in unwanted shares onto “greater fools.”

On both occasions, within a few years, most Americans’ portfolio values would have been slashed in half.  (And maybe it should have happened!  The Democrats should not have prevented it.  The ensuing turmoil and anger – perhaps reaching French Revolution levels – might have “solved the oligarchy problem” for a generation. A bit (a lot) more severely than I’d prefer.  But at least there’d be no debilitating, lobotomizing, murdochian “culture war” by now.)

Let’s be plain.  The role model for this “privatization” (of social security) was the selling off of Russian state assets after the fall of communism, in which the shares distributed to each Russian citizen soon were snapped up by a few dozen savvy insiders who became today’s famous Moscow Oligarchs. Some of the richest plutocrats in the world arose from insider manipulation of the unwisely executed privatization of state assets… and NOT the creative-competitive delivery of innovative goods and services.  If you call such monopolist-moguls “capitalists” who deserve their vast lucre, then you add to the spinning in Adam Smith’s grave.

And make no mistake, this timing was no coincidence.  The “let’s privatize social security!” movement only gained its full head of steam… propelled by the Kochs and other eager-funders… after they witnessed how well things went over in Russia.  It was their role model. And Cato led the charge.

Okay, so now we should weep and gnash our teeth, because these guys now face final takeover by the Kochs, who effectively owned their brothel already and are now simply ending the pretense of independence? The hypocrisy? Because the dukes’ court apologists might now have to drop the play-act… and admit – like Blanche Dubois – that their gentlemen callers actually owned them, all along?

Don’t bother, fellows.  Try this instead. Go out into the market you claim to love, and get actual jobs, delivering goods and services.

Weep for Cato. Crocodile tears.

Space-Launch Mass Drivers and von Neumann machines: Science meets Science Fiction

The notion of gun-propelled launch goes back to Jules Verne. Such Mass Drivers have been envisioned in numerous Sci Fi tales, including Earthlight, by Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Heart of the Comet by Benford & Brin. We’ve also seen them portrayed in Buck Rogers, Babylon 5 and Halo. Now, two researchers propose that a space-capable mass driver may be feasible. Startram would act as an electromagnetic catapult, using maglev technology, to accelerate and launch spacecraft into orbit, without using rockets or propellant. James Powell and George Maise take a highly optimistic view, claiming that a system capable of launching payload into orbit for less than $40/kg could be built using existing technology—if we were to gather substantial international support.

Sloping a launcher along the western face of Mt. Chimborazo in Ecuador or Mt. Kenya would allow a very profitable/cheap launch system for cargo. But see the concept for a 1200 km long version (to spread out the g-load) for passengers! And yes, we studied stuff like this long ago, back when I worked at CalSpace.

A slanted mass drive along Chimborazo (and yes it needs to be near the equator) would need “super-capacitor” surge capability, far exceeding the ability of nuclear plants to deliver in real time. But here’s how you do it:

You have several nuclear power plants–but their main job is to raise/pump water to several big/high artificial lakes. When you fire, you DRAIN those lakes through many-many-many rapid tubes to standard hydro-power turbines. The nukes are just for steady replenishment of the lakes.

This is highly do-able with existing tech. Especially if you have whirling tether grabbers awaiting in low earth orbit. These could snag the cargoes and give them circularization momentum… or else act as electrodynamic tugs from there.  (To learn the principles involved, see my short story Tank Farm Dynamo.)

Hence, the cargoes might not even have to take along the fuel to circularize and the tethers themselves use solar power to replenish the donated momentum. Again, there’s nothing to research… just develop. We could be doing it within 5-10 years.

==Autofacs and von Neumann Machines==

Philip K. Dick’s 1955 post-apocalyptic story, Autofac, short for Automatic Factories, was one of the earliest fictional portrayals of nanotechnology and self-replicating machines – an example of von Neumann probes, which he called “Universal Assemblers.” Carl Sagan and Freeman Dyson both argued that the reason we have observed no self-reproducing probes in the universe is because the probes would spread like a cancer; building such probes would be suicidal to their creators and destructive to any species they encounter.

Indeed, Dick’s Autofac is set after war has devastated much of Earth; robotic autofacs scavenge and monopolize the planet’s remaining resources (“We mere people come second.”), to build devices that humans no longer need. Humans have lost the ability to communicate with or control the autofacs, as they continue their relentless autonomous activity: “Maybe some of them are geared to escape velocity. That would be neat – autofac networks throughout the universe.” Would it really? My next novel, Existence, will offer a new take on some of these probes…

==Terminator Goggles==

Augmented Reality is soon to arrive: Google Goggles are smart glasses with heads-up display that will stream in real time to a screen in your field of view, providing GPS, facial recognition, web info, entertainment (and ads)—operated by voice control and/or head motions. Image recognition tech will overlay names of colleagues or buildings, background on historic landmarks or artwork, restaurant or movie reviews. Will all this expand soon (as I portray in a coming novel) to plaster everyone on the street with nametags? Perhaps credibility ratings … or the opinions and “reviews” of past dates or spouses?

==And more Science Fiction==

An article about our ongoing efforts to use science fiction as a tool for teaching and stimulating bright minds — Reading for the Future — has been published in the December 2011 issue of VOYA (the magazine for young adult librarians).  It’s a worthy effort that will continue at this year’s World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago, next August. Read about how Sci Fi can help save the next generation and civilization! Tell teachers and librarians. And consider helping. Also see a collection of resources for using Science Fiction in the classroom.

Isaac Asimov identified three basic types of science fiction scenarios: What if, If only and If this goes on…. Paul Di Filippo has written – in a cover piece for Salon – a fascinating review of two recent sci fi novels exploring Big Ideas of the ‘What if’ category. In Arctic Rising, Tobias Buckell spins a massive geoengineering project to counter climate change. Meanwhile Matt Ruff’s The Mirage is an alternate history in which America is a backward, fundamentalist nation, breeding terrorists responsible for destroying the World Trade Towers of Baghdad…Well worth a look.

And now Elon Musk, of SpaceX, claims that within ten years, he will be able to send passengers to Mars (and back!) for $500,000. Science or science fiction?  Only a fool would bet against Elon.  So I might as well sign on!

Total Information Awareness and Crime-Reporting Apps

== From the Transparency Front ==

Total Information Awareness?   NSA (the National Security Agency) is building a mammoth electronic spy center in Utah. The $2 billion Utah Data Center, to be completed by Sept. 2013, will be five times the size of the US Capitol. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher and analyze torrents of information flowing through the world’s communications databases— with an ability to handle yottabytes of data. Much of it international but a fair amount obtained by sifting intra-U.S. phone and email traffic.

What does this have to do with transparency and freedom and all that?

Only this.

Our protectors of online liberty, ranging from the ACLU and EFF and Privacy NGOs all the way to European Privacy Bureaucrats, are all very well-meaning – but clueless if they think laws, regulations and procedures will prevent elites (over the long run) from seeing anything that they want to see, or knowing whatever is within reach to know. Why? It’s simple and basic. We’re monkeys!  And a powerful monkey will not let you prevent him from seeing. Name one nation in all of human history where the elites allowed this to happen.  One.

On the other hand, we can prevent the mighty from becoming tyrants by looking back!  If we master the arts of sousveillance or watching the watchers, then no matter what they know about us, there will be limits to what they can do to us.

The chilling thing about the new NSA facility is not how much better it will let government “protectors” see, in order to better protect us.  The scary thing is that there won’t be officers of a uniformed and independent Inspectorate, roaming the halls on our behalf, making sure that protection is the only thing going on.  Or better yet, dozens of randomly chosen citizens (with security clearance) whose universal-access badges give them the right to poke their heads in any door and ask any question.

Inconvenient?  Irksome?  Will the protectors complain?  Tough. We need to demand that price! In exchange for their omniscience, they must surrender any chance of omnipotence, by letting us wrap them in chains of accountability. A chain we can yank, to remind our watchdog THAT he is a dog… lest he start thinking like a wolf.

==An App for Reporting Crime==

Want to report a crime, terrorist alert…or just snitch on your neighbors? The new Suspicious Activity Reporting Application, a crime-reporting app for your Smartphone, lets you snap a pic, and anonymously voice your suspicions to authorities. Developed by the West Virginia Division of Homeland Security, the free app is available through Itunes. “The longer you wait the less accurate eyewitness information becomes and evidence fades,” said Thom Kirk, Director of the West Virginia Intelligence Fusion Center. “Enabling the information to be sent at the time the activity is taking place will not only improve the accuracy of the report, but also improve the ability of the authorities to respond quickly.”

Is this an aid to community policing or a way to harass your neighbors; a powerful tool against terrorism or the next step toward Big Brother?

Or rather… clearly if we all have this, then Big Brother becomes impossible!  But (as I explore in The Transparent Society) might this lead to a nation and world filled with oppressive little brothers?  With nosy neighbors bullying each other, or tyranny by a perfectly democratic 51%?  I show good reasons to believe we may evade this pitfall too!  But not if we remain mired in civil war.

== Sci-Tech Miscellany ==

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding Boston Dynamics’ development of a prototype robot called the Cheetah. (Recall Boston’s incredible robot donkey… and the satires it inspired?) The cat-like bot managed to gallop 18 mph on a treadmill, setting a new land speed record for legged robots. (The previous record: 13.1 mph, set at MIT in 1989.) The company has a prototype human-like robot in the works called the Atlas that can walk upright and use its hands for balance while squeezing through narrow passages on surveillance or emergency rescue missions.

Smart lighting: Philips has a system being widely used all over the world now with some statistics to back it up.  They have just one camera in each light, facing straight down, with the light around the camera (concentric). The result is a computer vision system with mesh-based computing that estimates the number of pedestrians, cyclists, etc., and their speed and direction of movement, and predictively adjusts the light outputs on all the lights, to optimize for the activity detected by the vision system. One result is a 75% reduction in energy usage with no noticeable reduction in light output.

Ah, but will all lamps on public streets and areas then come equipped with cameras?  (As I already portrayed in EXISTENCE.) Oh, what they’ll see… and report.

Meanwhile…. some sci-tech miscellany!

A radical Japanese biplane design flies supersonic airspeeds without the sonic boom. Misoru (sky in Japanese) uses two wings to reflect shock waves back at each other, zeroing out the pressure shockwaves.

NASA has released a mosaic of images covering the entire sky as observed by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).

A gorgeous visualization of the Universe – dark matter and all.