Wired: How did understanding the carbon molecule lead to connecting organic materials and electronics?
Inokuchi: Sixty years ago when I started studying carbon, there was very little data and few applications. What was known at the time was the structure of the molecule. You can get all the way down to just a few molecules of carbon and you find electrons that move freely.
The range for the carbon molecule is from graphite to benzene. These materials have several shared properties, and my belief that they must share more properties and with other materials made me look at properties of materials within the family of this material. This is a chemist’s thinking.
I did not start studying for electrical materials. I started out thinking about the properties of a material and knowing that it conducted heat and began looking for materials in the family that also conducted heat and electricity.
MonthMarch 2008
From Anglican Virginia, Puritan New England, Quaker Pennsylvania and everywhere in between, Waldman makes it clear that America, both as a set of colonies and as a young republic, was no hotbed of religious freedom. Boston-based Puritans routinely beat and tortured Quakers in their midst, for instance, and though Maryland was founded explicitly as a refuge for Catholics in 1632, less than a century later they were barred from owning property or voting; priests could be imprisoned for life. After independence, most states barred non-Christians (a group that sometimes included Catholics) from holding office.
Though he spends a lot of time on Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson (and convincingly dispels the idea that they were deists or non-believers), the real hero of Waldman’s account is James Madison, the fourth president and the father of the Constitution. As a young man in 18th century Virginia, Madison witnessed the systematic and at times brutal repression of dozens of “unlicensed” Baptist preachers by the Anglican-dominated government. Madison’s “transformational ideas about religious freedom grew in part from disturbing incidents in his backyard,” says Waldman. Madison concluded that separating church and state not only secured the most basic human right of conscience, it created the precondition for religion to thrive.
The Celestopia Project is a broad-scoped attempt at colonizing the Earth’s oceans one settlement at a time. According to one source, Celestopean Elemental Separators will (apparently) allow them to mine the ocean’s waters for not only ‘hydrogen and oxygen’ but also for ‘platinum and gold.’ Their more moderate homepage suggests they will use Thermal Energy Converters (OTECs) to harvest power from temperature differentials in the ocean. Life on these oceanic colonies will involve age-extending health practices and domed residences that will be resistant to the forces of nature. Each such floating city will be designed to house 5,000 to 10,000 people and these will slowly cover the surfaces of all of the Earth’s oceans.
Four other Big Brothers:
(I started this back when Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo!, but I’ve only just not gotten a chance to finish up).
We all know about the potential “Big Brother”hood of Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!. Here are four other organizations with massive databases or the potential to collect extensive personal data.
Amazon, the other data hoarders – Amazon has perhaps the most complete database of the web outside of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. They own Alexa, which keeps detailed statistics on web traffic of the entire web. Alexa helps maintain archive.org, which includes an extensive backup of as much of the web as possible. They also have their own Google-based search engine a9 and host database apps. And all of this is just gravy for their extensive consumer data from amazon.com.
eBay, merchant monopoly – So far the government has resisted Internet sales tax. But eBay’s cut of their auctions and Paypal transactions almost constitutes a sales tax in and of itself considering the number of transactions that use these services. Also, they own what amounts to the biggest Internet telco, Skype. They have (or have the potential to collect) data on who buys what, who pays who what, and who calls who. To top it all off, they own an approximate 25% share in Craig’s List (and they own a Craig’s List competitor, Kijiji).
Wikipedia Foundation, truth and authority incorporated – Wikipedia is on its way to “owning” truth. We all probably know better, but we’ll all still trust Wikipedia entries without checking references more often than we should. In many cases, I search Wikipedia on a subject before I search Google – and more often than not, a Wikipedia entry is the top listing for a topic on Google. Often I’ll never even end up looking at a Google search for a subject because I’ll just look at the references and external links from a Wikipedia article. I believe Wales’s side of this story, but the potential for conflict of interest at Wikipedia is huge. The transparency and “crowd sourced” accountability temper this, but to what extent? It’s worth noting they now have a private wing – Wikia, which has started a search engine service.
IAC/Interactive Corp , or: who? – This huge company owns dozens of recognizable Internet brands, but hardly anyone has heard of them. If they started pooling all their data and mining it, what could they do? They’ve got one of the “other” big search engines, ask.com. They’ve got huge reserves of data for potential mining of social information from sites like match.com and evites, which could give them data on par with Myspace or Facebook. They’ve got a popular web based RSS reader, Bloglines. They could mine all sorts of consumer preference data from sites like Citysearch, Lending Tree, and the home shopping network. One of their businesses already attracted criticism years ago and remains a juggernaut in its niche: Ticketmaster.
Cobalt connects Lost to, well, pretty much everything.
GSPOT: Wes Unruh interviews Taylor Ellwood.
GSPOT: Joseph Matheny and Chandra Shukla Interview Andrew Liles.
Viking Youth: Erik Davis on Scientology.
Viking Youth: The Knee Deep Slumber of the American Buffet.
Point of Inquiry: Norm Allen – African American Religiosity, Humanism, and Politics.
Point of Inquiry: Robert M. Price – The Paperback Apocalypse.
Adam Gorightly: Dr. Edgar Mitchell.
Adam Gorightly: Kentroversy Returns.
Occult of Personality: Bishop T Allen Greenfield on gnosticism.
“Everywhere I see them there, I stop and stare at patterns… ”
A big part of what makes Lost so successful (and at the same time so hit-and-miss) is the way it doles out mysteries and secrets. Hidden clues and cryptic statements are the bread and butter of the show, leading some to frustration at never getting answers, while others dig deeper and deeper into the material to find the truth. The writers and producers of the show have gone out of their way to encourage theorizing, pattern recognition, clue-spotting, and solving the puzzles constantly thrown to the audience. Why does this show fire people up so much; capable of turning the most mundane conversation into wide-eyed frantic speculation on who Jacob is, or what the deal is with that Black Smoke Monster? It’s because Lost is one gigantic apophenia machine.
Apophenia is a fancy psychological term that refers to finding patterns in seemingly meaningless or unrelated data. There is a great deal of this going on in Lost, the Numbers being only one of the most obvious examples. Deliberate connections were made between the different castaways in flashbacks, such as Locke and Sawyer’s shared history with the same man. The production team intentionally adding in patterns leads to the hunt for more and more patterns, going deeper and deeper into minutia. Therein lies the danger of finding too much order: connecting things that are completely unconnected, or only incidentally related.
There seems to be a fine spectrum of pattern-recognition, where apophenia is classed as a disorder (or a Type I Error) and can lead to psychosis, and the other side of the spectrum leading to invention, creativity, and discovery. On the one hand, the Skeptic’s Dictionary goes so far as to define all paranormal and supernatural events as apophenia. Another skeptic’s analysis presents many examples of apophenia sliding into madness. Familiar stories can be found among many conspiracy theorists, especially when the one proposing the theory happens to be at the center of it as well. The visual subset of apophenia, called pareidolia, is often the true cause of religious visions, Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches, and other equally bizarre sightings. In Lost, the producers seem to encourage this, putting clues in quick flashes that can’t quite be seen but for the pause button on a TiVo (Christian Shepard’s eye in the cabin window, for example), but it has led to fans finding meaningful connections and images even in accidental prop goofs, cloud patterns, even letters in the waves on the ocean. This is sometimes known as the Confirmation Bias, or as Robert Anton Wilson put it in Prometheus Rising, “What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.” In other words, whatever you believe, or whatever pattern it is you are searching for, you’ll find it.
The possibility of discovering patterns that don’t exist should not, however, dissuade anyone from looking for the patterns to begin with. It can be useful to see how history connects to itself, despite being a collection of unrelated people and events, as in James Burke’s television series called Connections. In the search for connections, the universe starts to take on a certain kind of structure of its own. The notion that the world is a
complex and deeply interconnected mind is found behind nearly all
mystical practices. In Hermeticism, it is called The All; in Hinduism the piece of god within everyone is the atman; in Buddhism the doctrine is of Interpenetration. One of the more useful metaphorical illustrations of interpenetration in particular is Indra’s Net, which then bleeds over into physics in the holographic universe theory. In such a reality, everything actually is connected to everything else, something also hinted at in Bell’s Theorem of non-locality. This makes finding patterns in random noise much easier, which is what divination is for. The methods of divination are nearly endless, all of them taking input from random phenomena of the world and interpreting meaningful results. One of the better-known ancient divinatory practices is the I-Ching, which decorates the outer edge of the DHARMA logo. Of course, there’s an extreme to this end of the spectrum as well, where one falls into the belief that imposing a pattern on the universe is just as easy as finding one; or even that one creates one’s own universe.
In another view entirely, both sides are equally illusory. Finding order where there’s only chaos, or finding chaos where there’s only order; neither one is the full truth. “Reality is the original Rorschach.” Profound stuff? Actually it’s Discordianism. Really, I agree with this comment that what really counts is the meaning you assign to any given perceived structure. There’s room for both sides of the coin, both on the psychological level and the practical magic level.
As a mystery show that seems to include references to practically everything everywhere, Lost is highly susceptible to false-pattern recognition. This is, however, part of the narrative structure, to give hints and red herrings at every turn. So many narrative themes, leading to so many theories. What to do, but connect everything to everything! We’ll know the truth by the end of Season Six–or at least, we can hope.
Ask most decently informed Westerners the following questions: What country has for most of the past two plus decades been racked with ethnic and religious violence supported enthusiastically by fanatical clerics, has a constitution that states the duty of the state is to foster a religion, been manipulated by a large regional power, and was the true incubator for horrifyingly calculated suicide bombers? It’s a solid bet that the typical response would be a country in the Middle East or at least one with a Muslim majority (one shutters when contemplating how many responders would answer ‘Palestine’); however the correct answer is the South Asian country Sri Lanka, the combatants ethnic Tamil separatists against a majority Sinhalese government, and the fanatical clerics in this case, Buddhist monks.
If the reality of war-crazed Buddhist monks shatters the conceptions of good hearted liberals, the largely overlooked Sri Lankan conflict features many other of the worst hallmarks of modern warfare including the use of morally destroyed child soldiers, a terrorized urban population, death squads, and a large internal refugee crisis. Like most of Africa’s post-colonial civil wars, the civil war in Sri Lanka takes place within an ecologically brilliant ecosystem and an otherwise beautiful cultural environment.
See also: Buddhism in Burma.
When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the preferred pictures were shown to generate much more brain activity than the unpreferred shots. While researchers don’t yet know what exactly these brain scans signify, a likely possibility involves increased production of the brain’s pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids.
In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.
It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’ “
Full Story: Wall Street Journal.
(Thanks Danny!)
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