Magnetic Power Revealed in Gamma-Ray Burst Jet

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A specialized camera on a telescope operated by U.K. astronomers from Liverpool has made the first measurement of magnetic fields in the afterglow of a gamma-ray burst (GRB). The result is reported in the Dec.10 issue of Nature magazine by the team of Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) astronomers who built and operate the telescope and its unique scientific camera, named RINGO.

The burst occurred January 2, 2009. NASA’s Swift satellite observed its position and immediately notified telescopes all over the world via the Internet. When it received the trigger from Swift, the robotic Liverpool Telescope on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands automatically swung to observe the burst. Its special camera employs a spinning disk of Polaroid -- similar to the material used in sunglasses.

"By observing how the brightness of the GRB varied as we spun the Polaroid, we could measure the magnetic field in the burst," explained Iain Steele, Director of the Liverpool Telescope.

"This important result gives us new insight into the physics of these remarkable objects and is a testament to the close collaboration between observers, theoreticians and technologists in the Liverpool and NASA Swift teams," added LMJU team leader Carole Mundell. "It's incredible to think that the GRB discovery and our measurement process – from first detection and notification by NASA's Swift satellite to the polarization measurement using RINGO on the Liverpool Telescope – took place completely automatically within less than three minutes and with no human intervention!"

"This breakthrough observation gives us the first measurement of magnetic fields in the afterglow of a GRB," said Swift lead scientist Neil Gehrels, Swift lead scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Gamma Ray Bursts form when the core of a massive star collapses or when two neutron stars merge together. The resulting explosions are the brightest events in the universe and vastly outshine entire galaxies containing hundreds of billions of stars. NASA’s Swift satellite sees about 100 of these events each year, triggering ground-based follow-up by observations across the globe.

Polarization is one of the least-observed properties in astronomy. This finding opens the door to understanding the role of magnetic fields in some of the most powerful events in the universe.

"These very interesting observations raise the possibility that gamma-ray bursts are not fireballs as usually presumed but are powered and collimated by an organized electromagnetic field," said Roger Blandford, Director of the Kavli Institute of Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University, California, commenting on the result's importance. "It will be very interesting to see if there are similarities in observations of other kinds of cosmic jets."

Funding for the operation of the Liverpool Telescope and GRB research at Liverpool JMU is provided by the U.K. Science and Technology Facilities Council. Swift is managed by NASA Goddard. It was built and is being operated in collaboration with Pennsylvania State University, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and General Dynamics of Gilbert, Ariz., in the United States. International collaborators include the University of Leicester and Mullard Space Sciences Laboratory in the United Kingdom, Brera Observatory and the Italian Space Agency in Italy, and additional partners in Germany and Japan.

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Just 5 Questions: Aerosols

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Nadine UngerWhile the word "aerosol" may conjure up thoughts of things that come in spray cans, it means something quite different to scientists. And it turns out that aerosols have a far bigger role to play in climate change and global warming than originally thought. JPL's Amber Jenkins spoke to Nadine Unger, a researcher at Columbia University’s Center for Climate Systems Research and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, to find out more.

Unger studies air pollution, the impact of climate change on air quality, and the effects of ozone and aerosol pollution on Earth's climate. She holds degrees in chemistry and atmospheric chemistry from the University of Leeds in the U.K.

What are aerosols? Aren't they the things that come in spray cans?

Aerosols are tiny particles in the air that can be produced when we burn different types of fossil fuels -- coal, petroleum, wood and biofuels -- in different ways. A significant man-made source of aerosols is pollution from cars and factories. If you live in a big city you're probably pretty familiar with soot, an aerosol that forms black layers on your windowsill. But aerosols can also be produced naturally, for example, through being given off from trees or burning vegetation.

The word "aerosol" is used by scientists to mean "atmospheric particulate". But it was used a lot by the media during the 1980s and 1990s to refer to the spray cans that released chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) into the air, which damage the ozone layer and created the ozone hole. So it's no surprise that there is some confusion over the word!

Is there a link between aerosols and climate change?

Yes. Aerosols have a profound impact on the climate because, just like greenhouse gases, they are able to change the Earth's "radiative", or energy, balance. Aerosols can control how much energy from the sun reaches the planet’s surface by changing the amount that is absorbed in the atmosphere and the amount that is scattered back out to space. It turns out that most aerosols are cooling -- that is to say, they reflect the sun’s energy back out into space. There is only one aerosol -- soot, also known as black carbon -- that actually helps contribute to global warming by boosting the warming effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have pumped more and more aerosols into the air, and this in turn has actually counteracted global warming to a significant degree. Using climate models, we estimate that aerosols have masked about 50 percent of the warming that would otherwise have been caused by greenhouse gases trapping heat near the surface of the Earth. Without the presence of these aerosols in the air, the planet would be about 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F) hotter.

So aerosols are a good thing then?

No. It's true that aerosols have limited the warming that we've experienced on Earth since the Industrial Revolution. But they also have very big, detrimental impacts on human health, and have been implicated in health problems such as lung damage. Aerosols also affect other parts of the climate system like rainfall -- reducing rain in areas like India and China where it is desperately needed for food production -- and they alter patterns of wind and atmospheric circulation.

How can we reduce aerosol levels?

In the US, diesel vehicles are the major source of soot, and filters on exhaust pipes can help reduce the amount that they pump into the air. In terms of sulfate aerosols, which are created by sulfur dioxide given off by power plants, the US and Europe have very successfully used sulfur dioxide scrubbers in power plants to reduce these emissions over the past 20 years or so. But we can definitely do more.

By reducing aerosol (soot) emissions, we can buy ourselves some climate time -- about 5 to 10 years -- while we work on reducing emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) in parallel. CO2 you see, hangs around in the atmosphere for an extremely long time, from decades to centuries, so even if we implement cuts today, it will take years for them to take effect. Aerosols, on the other hand, have much shorter lifetimes. If we work to reduce soot emissions now, which can enhance the global warming effect of CO2 by 20-50 percent, the climate impacts will be felt more rapidly.

What are you working on right now?

I have a paper in review at the moment that is quite exciting; we're looking at the future total climate impacts of current emissions from different industries, taking into account the effects of both greenhouse gases such as CO2, ozone and methane, and the impacts of aerosols. What we've found is that for the next 40 years, emissions from road vehicles will have the largest global warming impacts of all human activities -- because of the air pollutant effects that enhance greenhouse gas warming. After 2050, however, power sector emissions are by far the largest global warmer because of the build up of CO2 in the atmosphere from that activity.

There are a few other relevant questions coming out of this. In particular, should we be including the effects of aerosols (also known as "non-CO2 effects") in emissions trading schemes? The aviation industry is starting to consider this, but shouldn't we be doing it for all the other industries and sectors as well?
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Saturn’s Mysterious Hexagon Emerges from Winter Darkness

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After waiting years for the sun to illuminate Saturn's north pole again, cameras aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft have captured the most detailed images yet of the intriguing hexagon shape crowning the planet.

The new images of the hexagon, whose shape is the path of a jet stream flowing around the north pole, reveal concentric circles, curlicues, walls and streamers not seen in previous images. Images and the three-frame animation are available at http://www.nasa.gov/cassini , http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://ciclops.org.

The last visible-light images of the entire hexagon were captured by NASA's Voyager spacecraft nearly 30 years ago, the last time spring began on Saturn. After the sunlight faded, darkness shrouded the north pole for 15 years. Much to the delight and bafflement of Cassini scientists, the location and shape of the hexagon in the latest images match up with what they saw in the Voyager pictures.

"The longevity of the hexagon makes this something special, given that weather on Earth lasts on the order of weeks," said Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at the California Institute of Technology. "It's a mystery on par with the strange weather conditions that give rise to the long-lived Great Red Spot of Jupiter."

The hexagon was originally discovered in images taken by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s. It encircles Saturn at about 77 degrees north latitude and has been estimated to have a diameter wider than two Earths. The jet stream is believed to whip along the hexagon at around 100 meters per second (220 miles per hour).

Early hexagon images from Voyager and ground-based telescopes suffered from poor viewing perspectives. Cassini, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004, has a better angle for viewing the north pole. But the long darkness of Saturnian winter hid the hexagon from Cassini's visible-light cameras for years. Infrared instruments, however, were able to obtain images by using heat patterns. Those images showed the hexagon is nearly stationary and extends deep into the atmosphere. They also discovered a hotspot and cyclone in the same region.

The visible-light cameras of Cassini's imaging science subsystem, which have higher resolution than the infrared instruments and the Voyager cameras, got their long-awaited glimpse of the hexagon in January, as the planet approached equinox. Imaging team scientists calibrated and stitched together 55 images to create a mosaic and three-frame movie. The mosaics do not show the region directly around the north pole because it had not yet fully emerged from winter night at that time.

Scientists are still trying to figure out what causes the hexagon, where it gets and expels its energy and how it has stayed so organized for so long. They plan to search the new images for clues, taking an especially close look at the newly identified waves that radiate from the corners of the hexagon -- where the jet takes its hardest turns -- and the multi-walled structure that extends to the top of Saturn's cloud layer in each of the hexagon's six sides. Scientists are also particularly intrigued by a large dark spot that appeared in a different position in a previous infrared image from Cassini. In the latest images, the spot appears in the 2 o'clock position.

Because Saturn does not have land masses or oceans on its surface to complicate weather the way Earth does, its conditions should give scientists a more elementary model to study the physics of circulation patterns and atmosphere, said Kevin Baines, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., who has studied the hexagon with Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer.

"Now that we can see undulations and circular features instead of blobs in the hexagon, we can start trying to solve some of the unanswered questions about one of the most bizarre things we've ever seen in the solar system," Baines said. "Solving these unanswered questions about the hexagon will help us answer basic questions about weather that we're still asking about our own planet."

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of Caltech, manages the Cassini mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

Related Links:

› Giant Cyclones at Saturn's Poles Create a Swirl of Mystery
› Hot Cyclones Churn at Both Ends of Saturn
› Cassini Images Bizarre Hexagon on Saturn

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Fermi Sees Brightest-Ever Blazar Flare

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Unprecedented flares from the blazar 3C 454.3 in the constellation Pegasus now make it the brightest persistent gamma-ray source in the skyA galaxy located billions of light-years away is commanding the attention of NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and astronomers around the globe. Thanks to a series of flares that began September 15, the galaxy is now the brightest source in the gamma-ray sky -- more than ten times brighter than it was in the summer.
Astronomers identify the object as 3C 454.3, an active galaxy located 7.2 billion light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. But even among active galaxies, it's exceptional.

"We're looking right down the barrel of a particle jet powered by the galaxy's supermassive black hole," said Gino Tosti at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Perugia, Italy. "Some change within that jet -- we don't know what -- is likely responsible for these flares."

Blazars, like many active galaxies, emit oppositely directed jets of particles traveling near the speed of light when matter falls toward their central supermassive black holes. What makes a blazar so bright in gamma rays is its orientation: One of the jets happens to be aimed straight at us.

Most of the time, the brightest persistent source in the gamma-ray sky is the Vela pulsar, which at a distance of about 1,000 light-years lies practically next door.

"3C 454.3 is millions of times farther away, yet the current flare makes it twice as bright as Vela," said Lise Escande at the Center for Nuclear Studies in Gradignan, near Bordeaux, France. "That represents an incredible energy release, and one the source can't sustain for very long."

According to Massimo Villata at Italy's Torino Observatory, 3C 454.3 also is flaring at radio and visible wavelengths, if less dramatically. "In red light, the blazar brightened by more than two and a half times to magnitude 13.7, and it is also very bright at high radio frequencies."

The Fermi team is alerting astronomers to monitor the event over as broad a range of wavelengths as possible. "That's our best bet for understanding what's going on inside that jet," Tosti said.

Related Link:

› NASA's Fermi Mission, Namibia's HESS Telescopes Explore a Blazar

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Physicist Earns Title as Kennedy’s Best

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Bob Youngquist is the lead of Kennedy Space Center's Applied Physics Laboratory. He has worked at the center for more than 20 yearsBob Youngquist rarely is happier than when he’s solving problems for the space program.

As someone might expect, the launch business offers plenty of unusual opportunities for Youngquist and NASA Kennedy Space Center's Applied Physics Laboratory, which he leads.

A day can bring in a request to find a better way to dry a shuttle's heat shield tile, a need to improve an existing hydrogen fire detector or a chance to predict the outcome if a solid rocket booster accidentally ignited inside the Vehicle Assembly Building.

"I come into work every day expecting to think and hoping to solve something," Youngquist said. "Anytime where you can come to work and it's a different duty. I don't see how you could have a better job than that."

His enthusiasm and the solutions developed by him and the lab earned the 20-year Kennedy veteran the center's first Engineer/Scientist of the Year award.

It's a far different career outcome than Youngquist expected.

Youngquist earned two bachelor's degrees in math and physics and then turned to applied physics for his master's degree. He followed that with a doctorate in applied physics from Stanford University in California.

"I was planning on being a professor," the physicist said. "I had never considered aerospace."

Working at University College London in England was wearing Youngquist out, though, and he came back to the United States.

Youngquist had lived in Florida since he was seven, having moved down from New York, so the Space Coast was a natural home base for him. He took a post with a contractor in 1988, then moved to a NASA position in 1999.

With a specialty in fiber optics just as the field was burgeoning, Youngquist earned nine patents. His work at Kennedy would earn nine more.

Throughout the 1990s, almost all the work the lab did was focused on the Space Shuttle Program. It often dealt with ground support equipment, launch needs and inventions to help analyze shuttle components after a mission.

The current decade has seen a shift as the engineers turn their attention to the needs of the Constellation Program. They also work with the Launch Services Program on the expendable rockets that loft scientific and observation spacecraft for the agency. These days, shuttle program work accounts for 40 percent of the lab's manifest.

Still, Youngquist said he doesn't know what to expect. Depending on the problem, a solution can be as simple as suggesting a new way to do something, or it might require an invention.

"There have been so many unique days out here," he said. "I spent a Sunday afternoon at the top of the fixed service structure with acoustic equipment measuring the pressure waves as they set cannons off to scare away birds."

With seven other NASA engineers in the lab, Youngquist doesn't have to research and solve each problem himself.

"It's a very diverse lab and we get involved with a large number of activities," he said.

The award also is a recognition of Youngquist's work with students and engineers working toward higher degrees.

When engineering and math students visit the lab, Youngquist said that "in almost every case these students unanimously agree that this is where they would like to work."

How do you Make a Helicopter Safer to Fly? You Crash One.

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How do you make a helicopter safer to fly? You crash one.

NASA aeronautics researchers recently dropped a small helicopter from a height of 35 feet (10.7 m) to see whether an expandable honeycomb cushion called a deployable energy absorber could lessen the destructive force of a crash.

NASA helicopter drop test.

On impact, the helicopter's skid landing gear bent outward, but the cushion attached to its belly kept the rotorcraft's bottom from touching the ground. Four crash test dummies along for the ride appeared only a little worse for the wear.

Researchers must analyze the test results before they can say for sure whether the deployable energy absorber worked as designed.

"I'd like to think the research we're doing is going to end up in airframes and will potentially save lives," said Karen Jackson, an aerospace engineer who oversaw the test at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

According to the National Transportation Safety Board, more than 200 people are injured in helicopter accidents in the United States each year, in part because helicopters fly in riskier conditions than most other aircraft. They fly close to the ground, not far from power lines and other obstacles, and often are used for emergencies, including search and rescue and medical evacuations.

For the test at Langley, researchers used an MD-500 helicopter donated by the U.S. Army. The rotorcraft was equipped with instruments that collected 160 channels of data. One of the four crash test dummies was a special torso model equipped with simulated internal organs. It came from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.

A sort of honeycomb airbag created to cushion future astronauts may end up in helicopters to help prevent injuries insteadTechnicians outfitted the underside of the helicopter's crew and passenger compartment with the deployable energy absorber. Created by engineer Sotiris Kellas at Langley, the device is made of Kevlar and has a unique flexible hinge design that allows the honeycomb to be packaged and remain flat until needed.

Kellas initially came up with the idea as a way to cushion the next generation of astronaut-carrying space capsules, but soon realized it had many other possible applications. So the concept became part of a helicopter drop test for the Subsonic Rotary Wing Project of NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate in Washington.

Jackson said researchers tested the deployable energy absorber under realistic conditions. "We crash-tested the helicopter by suspending it about 35 feet (10.7 m) into the air using cables. Then, as it swung to the ground, we used pyrotechnics to remove the cables just before the helicopter hit so that it reacted like it would in a real accident," she explained.

nasa helicopter drop testThe test conditions imitated what would be a relatively severe helicopter crash. The flight path angle was about 33 degrees and the combined forward and vertical speeds were about 48 feet per second or 33 miles per hour (14.6 meters per second, 53.1 kph).

"We got data to validate our integrated computer models that predict how all parts of the helicopter and the occupants react in a crash. Plus the torso model test dummy will help us assess internal injuries to occupants during a helicopter crash."

Engineers say the MD-500 survived relatively intact as a result of the honeycomb cushion. They plan to recycle the helicopter and drop it again next year, but without the deployable energy absorber attached, in order to compare the results.

Hubble’s Deepest View of Universe Unveils Never-Before-Seen Galaxies

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near-infrared image of Hubble Ultra Deep Field region
Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory and the University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (UCO/Lick Observatory and Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team.
› Larger image

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made the deepest image of the universe ever taken in near-infrared light. The faintest and reddest objects in the image are galaxies that formed 600 million years after the Big Bang. No galaxies have been seen before at such early times. The new deep view also provides insights into how galaxies grew in their formative years early in the universe's history.

The image was taken in the same region as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), which was taken in 2004 and is the deepest visible-light image of the universe. Hubble's newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) collects light from near-infrared wavelengths and therefore looks even deeper into the universe, because the light from very distant galaxies is stretched out of the ultraviolet and visible regions of the spectrum into near-infrared wavelengths by the expansion of the universe.

This image was taken by the HUDF09 team, that was awarded the time for the observation and made it available for research by astronomers worldwide. In just three months, 12 scientific papers have already been submitted on these new data.

The photo was taken with the new WFC3/IR camera on Hubble in late August 2009 during a total of four days of pointing for 173,000 seconds of total exposure time. Infrared light is invisible and therefore does not have colors that can be perceived by the human eye. The colors in the image are assigned comparatively short, medium, and long, near-IR wavelengths (blue, 1.05 microns; green, 1.25 microns; red, 1.6 microns). The representation is "natural" in that blue objects look blue and red objects look red. The faintest objects are about one billionth as bright as can be seen with the naked eye.

These Hubble observations are trailblazing a path for Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which will look even farther into the universe than Hubble, at infrared wavelengths. The JWST is planned to be launched in 2014.

The HUDF09 team members are Garth Illingworth (University of California Observatories/Lick Observatory and the University of California, Santa Cruz), Rychard Bouwens (University of California Observatories/Lick Observatory and Leiden University), Pascal Oesch and Marcella Carollo (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH)), Marijn Franx (Leiden University), Ivo Labbe (Carnegie Institute of Washington), Daniel Magee (University of California, Santa Cruz), Massimo Stiavelli (Space Telescope Science Institute), Michele Trenti (University of Colorado, Boulder), and Pieter van Dokkum (Yale University).

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute conducts Hubble science operations. The institute is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington, and is an International Year of Astronomy 2009 program partner.

Images and more information are available at:

› HubbleSite
› Space Telescope Science Institute
› NASA Hubble page
› Series of STSI images

Earth’s Moon

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Earth's Moon
During its mission, the Galileo spacecraft returned a number of images of Earth's only natural satellite. Galileo surveyed the moon on Dec. 7, 1992, on its way to explore the Jupiter system in 1995-1997.

This color mosaic was assembled from 18 images taken by Galileo's imaging system through a green filter. On the upperleft is the dark, lava-filled Mare Imbrium, Mare Serenitatis (middle left), Mare Tranquillitatis (lower left), and Mare Crisium, the dark circular feature toward the bottom of the mosaic. Also visible in this view are the dark lava plains of the Marginis and Smythii Basins at the lower right. The Humboldtianum Basin, a 400-mile impact structure partly filled with dark volcanic deposits, is seen at the center of the image.

Initiation ceremony

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Initiation Ceremony

"Yes, I want to know," said Brennan.
"Know what, exactly?" whispered the figure.
Brennan's face scrunched up in concentration, trying to visualize the game to its end, and hoping he hadn't blown it already; until finally he fell back on the first and last resort, which is the truth:
"It doesn't matter," said Brennan, "the answer is still yes."

A little meditation on intellectual honesty: whatever is true is true, and I want to know the truth no matter how unpleasant it seems to my primate brain.

11 core rationalist skills – from LessWrong

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An excellent way to improve one's skill as a rationalist is to identify one's strengths and weaknesses, and then expend effort on the things that one can most effectively improve (which are often the areas where one is weakest). This seems especially useful if one is very specific about the parts of rationality, if one describes them in detail.

In order to facilitate improving my own and others' rationality, I am posting this list of 11 core rationalist skills, thanks almost entirely to Anna Salamon.

  • Keep your eyes on the prize. Focus your modeling efforts on the issues most relevant to your goals. Be able to quickly refocus a train of thought or discussion on the most important issues, and be able and willing to quickly kill tempting tangents. Periodically stop and ask yourself "Is what I am thinking about at the moment really an effective way to achieve my stated goals?".
  • Entangle yourself with the evidence. Realize that true opinions don't come from nowhere and can't just be painted in by choice or intuition or consensus. Realize that it is information-theoretically impossible to reliably get true beliefs unless you actually get reliably pushed around by the evidence. Distinguish between knowledge and feelings.
  • Be Curious: Look for interesting details; resist cached thoughts; respond to unexpected observations and thoughts. Learn to acquire interesting angles, and to make connections to the task at hand.
  • Aumann-update: Update to the right extent from others' opinions. Borrow reasonable practices for grocery shopping, social interaction, etc from those who have already worked out what the best way to do these things is. Take relevant experts seriously. Use outside views to estimate the outcome of one's own projects and the merit of one's own clever ideas. Be willing to depart from consensus in cases where there is sufficient evidence that the consensus is mistaken or that the common practice doesn't serve its ostensible purposes. Have correct models of the causes of others’ beliefs and psychological states, so that you can tell the difference between cases where the vast majority of people believe falsehoods for some specific reason, and cases where the vast majority actually knows best.
  • Know standard Biases: Have conscious knowledge of common human error patterns, including theheuristics and biases literature; practice using this knowledge in real-world situations to identify probable errors; practice making predictions and update from the track record of your own accurate and inaccurate judgments.
  • Know Probability theory: Have conscious knowledge of probability theory; practice applying probability theory in real-world instances and seeing e.g. how much to penalize conjunctions, how to regress to the mean, etc.
  • Know your own mind: Have a moment-to-moment awareness of your own emotions and of the motivations guiding your thoughts. (Are you searching for justifications? Shying away from certain considerations out of fear?) Be willing to acknowledge all of yourself, including the petty and unsavory parts. Knowledge of your own track record of accurate and inaccurate predictions, including in cases where fear, pride, etc. were strong.
  • Be well calibrated: Avoid over- and under-confidence. Know how much to trust your judgments in different circumstances. Keep track of many levels of confidence, precision, and surprisingness; dare to predict as much as you can, and update as you test the limits of your knowledge. Develop as precise a world-model as you can manage. (Tom McCabe wrote a quiz to test some simple aspects of your calibration.)
  • Use analytic philosophy: understand the habits of thought taught in analytic philosophy; the habit of following out lines of thought, of taking on one issue at a time, of searching for counter-examples, and of carefully keeping distinct concepts distinct (e.g. not confusing heat and temperature; free will and lack of determinism; systems for talking about Peano arithmetic and systems for talking about systems for talking about Peano arithmetic).
  • Resist Thoughtcrime. Keep truth and virtue utterly distinct in your mind. Give no quarter to claims of the sort "I must believe X, because otherwise I will be {racist / without morality / at risk of coming late to work/ kicked out of the group / similar to stupid people}". Decide that it is better to merely lie to others than to lie to others and to yourself. Realize that goals and world maps can be separated; one can pursue the goal of fighting against climate change without deliberately fooling oneself into having too high an estimate (given the evidence) of the probability that the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis is correct.

Transhumanism, personal immortality and the prospect of technologically enabled utopia

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We live in a universe that works on physical laws - simple rules that determine how quantum mechanical amplitude evolves over time. The universe is, at its lowest level, rather like a lego kit with a comparatively small number of bricks, or to put it another way, the universe is a lot like Conway's Game of Life. This surprising (and highly counterintuitive) fact has an even more surprising implication: there is no fundamental law that prevents us from improving our lives to arbitrarily high levels of personal well-being. There is no fundamental reason why we cannot create a utopia - to shape the little blocks that the universe is made out of into an arrangement that satisfies our true desires to the maximal extent possible.

Death is not a fundamental fact of existence, it is not a deliberate plan hatched by a careful creator who works in mysterious ways, it is not a punishment or a way to teach us a lesson. It is simply an accident of evolution, and it is perfectly possible (in principle!) to get rid of that particular accident. Likewise human suffering: from the minor annoyances to the agony of losing a loved-one or being betrayed by a friend or partner. Likewise the problems that we humans probably don't even realize that we have, because they are as ubiquitous and invisible to us as water is to a fish. Likewise the extreme suffering of the poorest 1 billion humans.

Transhumanism is simply the idea that we can and should use technology to enable human beings to live the lives that they would, upon reflection, choose. Nick Bostrom put this set of ideas particularly eloquently in his Letter from Utopia:

How can I tell you about Utopia and not leave you nonplussed? What words could convey the wonder? What inflections express our happiness? What points overcome your skepticism? My pen, I fear, is as unequal to the task as if I had tried to use it against a charging elephant.

Have you ever known a moment of bliss? On the rapids of inspiration, maybe, where your hands were guided by a greater force to trace the shapes of truth and beauty? Or perhaps you found such a moment in the ecstasy of love? Or in a glorious success achieved with good friends? Or in splendid conversation on a vine-overhung terrace one star-appointed night? Or perhaps there was a song or a melody that smuggled itself into your heart, setting it alight with kaleidoscopic emotion? Or during worship?

If you have experienced such a moment, experienced the best type of such a moment, then a certain idle but sincere thought may have presented itself to you: “Oh Heaven! I didn’t realize it could feel like this. This is on a different level, so very much more real and worthwhile. Why can’t it be like this always? Why must good times end? I was sleeping; now I am awake.”

RokoMijic.com is up

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My personal website is now up at:

My website covers similar topics to this blog, but hopefully in a more "official" style. It currently hosts my report on AI and the Semantic Web that I spent the academic year 2008-2009 writing, and my essay on operads and the opetopes that I wrote for my final mathematics examination at Cambridge.

I'm hoping to add more essays and preprints to the website as I complete them, including a preprint of a paper on evolutionary pressures on uploaded humans that I am currently writing.

Why the Fuss About Intelligence?

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Part two in a GOOD miniseries on the singularity by Michael Anissimov and Roko Mijic. New posts every Monday from November 16 to January 23.

Last time, we took our first look at the concept of the technological singularity—a point in time when a genuinely smarter-than-human intelligence is developed—and saw that it is an old idea which has gained momentum and is more relevant today than ever before. Now we’ll look at why smarter than human intelligence is worthy of more attention than other futuristic technologies such as spaceflight or cleaner energy technology which, on the surface, seem just as exciting.

Why are singularity researchers so concerned about the prospect of smarter-than-human intelligence? To answer this question, we must first unlearn something we all instinctively know: We must unlearn the idea that human intelligence is nothing special. In everyday life, our human intelligence—including our language ability, social intelligence, strategic thinking, planning ability, rationality, and scientific skill—is ubiquitous, so we take it for granted. But it is amazingly powerful compared to the level of intelligence that other higher animals have. There are no chimps that win Nobel Prizes in physics, no dogs that are CEOs of major corporations.

Once one realizes that the notion of human intelligence encompasses every useful skill that we perform with our brains, one begins to see that intelligence is the reason that human beings have taken control of much of the planet’s land mass, constructed skyscrapers, developed economies, and invented nuclear weapons. The speed of the human takeover of earth was startling relative to the slow changes that came before it. In just a few tens of thousands of years, humans took control of a 4-billion-year-old biosphere. The effect of human intelligence on many other species living on this planet has been fatal: Human beings have caused the extinction of millions of other species, primarily because of the power that our intelligence brings. This historical perspective is key to understanding what the technological singularity is about. It isn’t about shiny new gadgets or mundane, Jetsons-style futurism where humans live the same lifestyle as today but against a flashier background. It is about the next iteration of the most powerful force in the universe: intelligence. The correct metaphor for the singularity is not the image of a shiny, chrome-plated robot, it is the leap from wild animals to human societies, but this time with humans as the starting point.

In the 21st century, cognitive science or artificial intelligence researchers may find out how to construct an intelligence that surpasses ours in the same way human intelligence surpasses that of chimps. Given what happened the last time a new level of intelligence emerged (the rapid rise of humans 12,000 years ago), this is likely to be the most important event in the history of the human race. We should expect smarter-than-human intelligence to wield immense power—to be able to think through complex problems in a fraction of a second, to uniformly outclass humans in mathematics, physics, and computer science, and to build technological artifacts with superlative properties. Smarter-than-human intelligences will stand a good chance of solving the problem of how to make themselves even smarter, spiraling into ever greater heights of intelligence.

Genuinely smarter beings could solve many of the problems that humans currently find hard to deal with, such as involuntary death, disease and aging, global inequality and poverty, war and environmental degradation. If a smarter-than-human intelligence were put to the task of solving these human problems, it might not be able to solve all of them, but I bet that it could do a much better job than we are. We should expect that the result of a sequence of self-improving intelligences could probably cure all human diseases, harvest the entire energy output of the sun, and colonize the galaxy at a speed approaching the speed of light. If this kind of power seems unreasonable to you, then I agree—but reality is not limited by our very human sense of reasonableness.

Read the original article at GOOD Magazine.

The Harmonic Convergence of Science, Sight, & Sound

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Linda MacDonald Glenn is guest blogging this month.

I had the pleasure of listening to Joann Kuchera-Morin from Allosphere at the BioPolitics/H+ conference this weekend and just had to share it -- it elevates the art and science of communication to a new dimension (including the six dimensions now recognized in quantum physics):

You can check out Linda's original blog at the Women's Bioethics Blogspot.

Link dump: 2009.12.05

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From the four corners of the web:

Link dump for 2009.11.29

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From the four corners of the web:

  • 25 Everyday Technologies That Came from NASA
    Though associated mainly with aerospace innovations, NASA holds a significant influence over daily life as well. Many people do not realize that everything from toys to sunglasses and even horseshoes have benefitted from technologies originally intended for astronauts, shuttle flights, and other elements of space exploration. While some inventions stem directly from NASA and its collaborations, others simply involve vast improvements to existing designs. The following list contains a combination of technologies that went straight from NASA to consumers as well as ones that went on to streamline articles that were already available.
  • Bionic supermen of sport | CTV Olympics
    Athletes with disabilities can now be transformed with the addition of high-tech prostheses which can actually outdo the human equivalents
  • Man trapped in a 23-year 'coma' was conscious entire time
    Doctors in Belgium have freed a hospital patient from a 23-year nightmare after discovering the man had been misdiagnosed with a coma.
  • Meat without animals? Science says yes! | Current
    Winston Churchill once predicted that it would be possible to grow chicken breasts and wings more efficiently without having to keep an actual chicken. And in fact scientists have since figured out how to grow tiny nuggets of lab meat and say it will one day be possible to produce steaks in vats, sans any livestock.