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Surprisingly good solutions, falling in love and life in a materialistic universe

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

We live in a universe that conforms to what one might call reductionistic analysis: the behavior of the macroscale objects that we see around us (objects like people) can be explained by regarding those objects as conglomerates of simple building blocks called elementary particles which obey the same physical laws whether they are part of a machine gun or part of a dopamine receptor in your brain.

There are some highly counterintuitive predictions that this fact about our world makes: the physical laws that govern interactions between these elementary particles must give rise to parts of our lives that we don't usually associate with "physics" - such as feeling tired and defeated on a saturday morning, being in pain, or falling - and staying - in love. Furthermore, if those parts of our lives - parts that we care about deeply - are really just special cases of physics, then there is nothing stopping us from making them do more of what we want, and less of what we don't want. If our deepest feelings are ultiumately the result of the interactions of elementary particles, and we find that some other people around us sometimes seem to fare better in those most intimate aspects of life, then we have an opportunity: self-modification to make oneself more the person one wants to be.

The particular stimulus that jolted me into writing a blog post is this article (H/T David Pearce, Kaj Sotala) , which shows that there is a lot of natural variation in one of the most important aspects of our lives - being in love with our partner:

Suzanne Bernstein said she and her husband, Sidney, eat side-by-side when they go out, always walk hand-in-hand, and begin and end each day with "I love you." The couple from Weehawken, N.J., have been married 18 years and Suzanne said the relationship is as passionate as when they first met.

Now research exists to support her claim.
Stony Brook University researchers looked at the brains of Bernstein and 16 other people who had been married an average of 20 years and claimed to be still intensely in love. They found that their MRIs showed activity in the same regions of the brain as those who had just fallen in love. "It's always been assumed that passionate love inevitably declines over time," said Arthur Aron, a social psychologist at Stony Brook University and one of four authors of the study, presented in November at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
"But in survey after survey we always have these people who have been together a long time and say they are intensely in love. It was always chalked up to self-deception or trying to make a good impression," he said. In fact, she said, the study found an advantage to the longer-term relationships she studied: The brains of those people showed less anxiety and obsessiveness.
Aron had conducted an earlier MRI study published in 2005 among 17 people who had recently fallen in love. He found that regions of the brain associated generally with reward and motivation -- the same regions that light up when cocaine is taken -- activated when the subjects were shown pictures of their beloved. These regions, Aron said, are not the same as those associated with sexual arousal.

If there's that much natural variation, one wonders what could be done with deliberate interventions? This is the real allure of the humanity+ endeavour: forget space elevators and jupiter brains. Think about the fact that falling in love is a physical feat involving both you and your partner's ability to secrete certain hormones, and that neither of you are the best in the world at it, just as neither of you are the best in the world at other physical feats like running the 100m sprint in world-record breaking time.

In the limit of extremely high technology and extreme wisdom to steer that technology to good ends, we end up with the so-called surprisingly good solutions - states of existence that are so good that when we experience them, we will be shocked that it can get this good, and outraged that we didn't get there sooner.

For the moment, the article offers the following advice for people who are interested in improving the quality of their relationship with the best technology we have today - self-help:

Keeping the Fires Burning - research has found that passionate, long-lasting relationships generally have several things in common:
The couple is not facing terrible "external stressors," such as war or the loss of a child.
One partner is not highly depressed or anxious.
Both know how to communicate with each other.
The couple does new, challenging things together.
When one partner is successful, the other celebrates the success.

SENS4 top 10 photos

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

My AI research for this year

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

So, Transhuman Goodness is about to enter a peroid of technical posting to cover the content of my MSc thesis. I'll post a chapter per post, and I encourage readers to make constructive comments on the material.

To start us off, I will post an abridged version of my introduction chapter, as it currently stands.

My AI research: Formal Logic

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

My AI research: Category theory and institution theory

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

My AI research: The Semantic Web

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

Cure aging or give a small number of disabled people jobs as janitors – unary version.

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

Aubrey De Grey writes on Facebook:

Hi everyone,
After several days in the lead for the #sharetowin challenge, we've been overtaken by Los Angeles Habilitation House. They have a less radical agenda than ours, so it's no surprise that they're getting support, but I'd still prefer us to win $5000! Therefore, if you haven't yet commented, please do it now:
- go to http://bit.ly/sensf
- click the "comment" link
- comment!

The Share to Win competition describes itself as follows:

Share to Win is a fun contest we put together to help health, environment and education-related non-profit causes push the boundaries of the social internet to get people talking about them and to raise money for their mission.
We’re donating money to ||||| non-profits who can share a mission that resonates online. Just post information about a cause you care about as a note on |||banana, and then spread the word using email and social networks like Twitter or Facebook.
At the end of September, we will declare five winners: a $ ||||| k Grand Prize, a $2,000 Runner Up, and three Honorable Mentions of $ | k each. The Honorable Mentions will include one cause from each category: Health, Education, and Environment.
The causes that spread the most — as measured by online comments — can win donations from |||banana, while engaging supporters and recruiting new ones. It’s a win and a win. Simple as that.

And LA Habilitation House (LAHH) describes itself as follows:

Offering employment and career opportunities to persons with disabilities is our commitment at Los Angeles Habilitation House Inc. LAHH delivers contracted services in the janitorial and light duty industry.

A picture is appropriate at this stage:

Making ||||| disabled people's lives better today (LAHH claims to have successfully employed ||||| disabled people as of late last year) versus accelerating the cure of human aging - which causes
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deaths per day... from a utilitarian point of view, there is a clear winner here (as is hopefully obvious in this new unary system). But predictably, people vote based upon their emotional reactions, which are based upon tangible visual clues such as pictures of smiling disabled people proudly holding mops and buckets.

It is at times like this that I start to wonder whether the human race is worth saving at all. Then I remember that the human moral frame of reference is fundamental to every good thing that has ever happened to me, or will ever happen, and that even the concept of "being worth saving" is a human one.

At SENS4, Cambridge, UK

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

I just arrived at the SENS4 conference in Cambridge. More coverage to come later, but so far I have heard some great talks and met some interesting people.

SENS4 overview and review – how evolution complicates SENS, and why we must try harder

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

Will we live forever or have the dubious honour of being one of the last few mortal generations? That was the fundamental question that I came to the SENS4 conference in Cambridge, UK to answer.

The conference included around 90 talks, most of them by academic biomedical researchers, many of whom from "serious" universities such as UCL, Cambridge University, etc. A typical topic would be "we have this hypothesis about how this part of the ageing process works, and we tested it in this trial/we built this device". Some of the talks were a little flaky, but the majority that I saw were either good or excellent.

Now, as far as conquering death for those people who are currently within a few decades of dying goes, we are going to have to do an awful lot more, and pull out a lot more stops than I saw evidence of at SENS; if there's one overriding impression I really want to avoid, it is the impression that now that SENS exists, the ageing problem is handled, for that would be a fatal mistake to make. The problem of ageing is a very hard one, primarily because the human body is very, very complicated and very, very messy. The average biomedical talk given at SENS, which represented the work of a few researchers for a total time of perhaps a few months to a year, would typically make some small increment of progress on some small subsystem of the human body, and in some cases that progress was the refutation of some previous promising piece of work.

In discussing the problems and challenges that anti-ageing science faces, the following slide from James Larrick's talk comes to mind:

Evolution complicates SENS, James Larrick, SENS4 conference

The point at the bottom about ROS (Reactive Oxygen Species) relates to this recent study that showed that antioxidants negate the health-promoting effects of exercise; the theory being that ROS plays "both a creative (signalling) and a destructive (oxidative damage) role", so simply removing ROS does as much harm as good.

Larrick makes a point that I have long suspected: repairing the human body will be significantly harder than repairing a designed machine of similar total part-count, part-type count and complexity, because we are evolved machines.

Coming back to the subject of the conference itself, I was pleased overall: it was well-organized, professional and contained a lot of good science. I got to meet a lot of people, especially the people from the immortality institute and other familiar transhumanist faces.

And, by the way, the human body contains 10^14 cells, compared to a boeing 747 which has a mere 6*10^6 parts. Designing the boeing 747 cost $2 billion.

My thanks go out to Aubrey and all those who worked hard to make the conference a success; we should all be grateful to those who work towards the betterment of humankind by trying to defeat ageing, for they are the true heroes of our time.

Affective Death Spirals

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

I just met someone on facebook who convinced me to re-iterate the need for careful thought about human cognitive biases. A classic from the Yudkowsky school of thought - "Affective death spirals" that I probably linked to before:

Many, many, many are the flaws in human reasoning which lead us to overestimate how well our beloved theory explains the facts. The phlogiston theory of chemistry could explain just about anything, so long as it didn't have to predict it in advance. And the more phenomena you use your favored theory to explain, the truer your favored theory seems - has it not been confirmed by these many observations? As the theory seems truer, you will be more likely to question evidence that conflicts with it. As the favored theory seems more general, you will seek to use it in more explanations.
If you know anyone who believes that Belgium secretly controls the US banking system, or that they can use an invisible blue spirit force to detect available parking spaces, that's probably how they got started.
(Just keep an eye out, and you'll observe much that seems to confirm this theory...)
This positive feedback cycle of credulity and confirmation is indeed fearsome, and responsible for much error, both in science and in everyday life.
But it's nothing compared to the death spiral that begins with a charge of positive affect - a thought that feels really good.
A new political system that can save the world. A great leader, strong and noble and wise. An amazing tonic that can cure upset stomachs and cancer.
Heck, why not go for all three? A great cause needs a great leader. A great leader should be able to brew up a magical tonic or two.
The halo effect is that any perceived positive characteristic (such as attractiveness or strength) increases perception of any other positive characteristic (such as intelligence or courage). Even when it makes no sense, or less than no sense.
Positive characteristics enhance perception of every other positive characteristic? That sounds a lot like how a fissioning uranium atom sends out neutrons that fission other uranium atoms.
Weak positive affect is subcritical; it doesn't spiral out of control. An attractive person seems more honest, which, perhaps, makes them seem more attractive; but the effective neutron multiplication factor is less than 1. Metaphorically speaking. The resonance confuses things a little, but then dies out.
With intense positive affect attached to the Great Thingy, the resonance touches everywhere. A believing Communist sees the wisdom of Marx in every hamburger bought at McDonalds; in every promotion they're denied that would have gone to them in a true worker's paradise; in every election that doesn't go to their taste, in every newspaper article "slanted in the wrong direction". Every time they use the Great Idea to interpret another event, the Great Idea is confirmed all the more. It feels better - positive reinforcement - and of course, when something feels good, that, alas, makes us want to believe it all the more.

Read the rest at LessWrong

Cure aging or give a small number of disabled people jobs as janitors?

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

Aubrey De Grey writes on Facebook:

Hi everyone,
After several days in the lead for the #sharetowin challenge, we've been overtaken by Los Angeles Habilitation House. They have a less radical agenda than ours, so it's no surprise that they're getting support, but I'd still prefer us to win $5000! Therefore, if you haven't yet commented, please do it now:
- go to http://bit.ly/sensf
- click the "comment" link
- comment!

The Share to Win competition describes itself as follows:

Share to Win is a fun contest we put together to help health, environment and education-related non-profit causes push the boundaries of the social internet to get people talking about them and to raise money for their mission.
We’re donating money to five non-profits who can share a mission that resonates online. Just post information about a cause you care about as a note on 3banana, and then spread the word using email and social networks like Twitter or Facebook.
At the end of September, we will declare five winners: a $5,000 Grand Prize, a $2,000 Runner Up, and three Honorable Mentions of $1,000 each. The Honorable Mentions will include one cause from each category: Health, Education, and Environment.
The causes that spread the most — as measured by online comments — can win donations from 3banana, while engaging supporters and recruiting new ones. It’s a double win. Simple as that.

And LA Habilitation House (LAHH) describes itself as follows:

Offering employment and career opportunities to persons with disabilities is our commitment at Los Angeles Habilitation House Inc. LAHH delivers contracted services in the janitorial and light duty industry.

A picture says a thousand words:

Making a few disabled people's lives better today versus accelerating the cure of human aging - which causes 100,000 deaths per day... from a utilitarian point of view, there is a clear winner here. But predictably, people vote based upon their emotional reactions, which are based upon tangible visual clues such as pictures of smiling disabled people proudly holding mops and buckets.

Would unary notation prevent scope insensitivity?

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

In my last post, people complained about my stance that SENS was more deserving of money than the LA disabled charity LAHH. I have decided that the main reason for this could be scope insensitivity - the tendency to concentrate on the description of an effect, not the number attached to it:

Once upon a time, three groups of subjects were asked how much they would pay to save 2000 / 20000 / 200000 migrating birds from drowning in uncovered oil ponds. The groups respectively answered $80, $78, and $88 [1]. This is scope insensitivity or scope neglect: the number of birds saved - the scope of the altruistic action - had little effect on willingness to pay.
Similar experiments showed that Toronto residents would pay little more to clean up all polluted lakes in Ontario than polluted lakes in a particular region of Ontario [2], or that residents of four western US states would pay only 28% more to protect all 57 wilderness areas in those states than to protect a single area [3].
People visualize "a single exhausted bird, its feathers soaked in black oil, unable to escape" [4]. This image, or prototype, calls forth some level of emotional arousal that is primarily responsible for willingness-to-pay - and the image is the same in all cases. As for scope, it gets tossed out the window - no human can visualize 2000 birds at once, let alone 200000. The usual finding is that exponential increases in scope create linear increases in willingness-to-pay - perhaps corresponding to the linear time for our eyes to glaze over the zeroes; this small amount of affect is added, not multiplied, with the prototype affect.

So I have decided to re-write the post using unary notation for the numbers involved - a notation where the length number attached to the effect is in proportion to the size of the number, rather than to its logarithm.

IEET’s Biopolitics of Popular Culture Seminar

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies is holding a seminar on the Biopolitics of Popular Culture at Eon Reality in Irvine California on December 4, 2009. This seminar will precede the Humanity+ Summit, December 5-6 at the same venue.

The IEET has put together an impressive groups of speakers, a list that includes io9's Annalee Newitz, Jamais Cascio, film maker Matthew Patrick, Natasha Vita-More and science fiction writer Richard Kadrey.

From the IEET website:

Popular culture is full of tropes and cliches that shape our debates about emerging technologies. Our most transcendent expectations for technology come from pop culture, and the most common objections to emerging technologies come from science fiction and horror, from Frankenstein and Brave New World to Gattaca and the Terminator.
Why is it that almost every person in fiction who wants to live a longer than normal life is evil or pays some terrible price? What does it say about attitudes towards posthuman possibilities when mutants in Heroes or the X-Men, or cyborgs in Battlestar Galactica or Iron Man, or vampires in True Blood or Twilight are depicted as capable of responsible citizenship?
Is Hollywood reflecting a transhuman turn in popular culture, helping us imagine a day when magical and muggle can live together in a peaceful Star Trek federation? Will the merging of pop culture, social networking and virtual reality into a heightened augmented reality encourage us all to make our lives a form of participative fiction?
During this day long seminar we will engage with culture critics, artists, writers, and filmmakers to explore the biopolitics that are implicit in depictions of emerging technology in literature, film and television.

Other speakers include:

PJ Manney
Alex Lightman
Kristi Scott
J. Hughes
Mike Treder
Michael LaTorra
Jess Nevins
RJ Eskow
Brian Cross
Edward Miller
Michael Massuci
Jeannie Novak

Learn more and register today.

Einstein and Millikan should have done a Kurzweil

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

Over on facebook, Shane Legg writes, (regarding my previous post):

Some nice quotes I hadn't seen before. So what's best hypothesis we can draw from this? It seems like most people take the last few data points and then just extrapolate linearly to predict the future.

The key quotes here are:

There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom.

(Robert Millikan, American physicist and Nobel Prize winner, 1923.)

No “scientific bad boy” ever will be able to blow up the world by releasing atomic energy.

(Robert Millikan again)

There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.

(Albert Einstein, 1932.)

The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.

(Ernest Rutherford, 1917.)
Atomic energy might be as good as our present-day explosives, but it is unlikely to produce anything very much more dangerous.

(Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, then soon-to-be British Prime Minister, 1939.)
That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done [research on]... The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.

(Admiral William Leahy, U.S. Admiral working in the U.S. Atomic Bomb Project)

What made these smart people make false statments? (Einstein's statement is not technically false - but it certainly shows that one of the smartest minds ever to exist can make huge blunders. The tone of the quote - and the likely interpretation of it by lay people listening - is "this technology won't work, ever") Perhaps their mistakes are forgivable - there is a difference between being rational and being omniscient, after all.

But consider, for example, Einstein's quote from 1932. Rutherford had split the atom back in 1917, but it was done using a particle beam, and this method clearly didn't allow arbitrarily large numbers of atoms to be split. But does "The existing method doesn't scale" legitimize the jump to "There is not the slightest indication that it will ever be obtainable"?. Surely Einstein, if questioned, would have said something like:

"maybe there is some more efficient way of doing it that I haven't yet thought of, and the fact that it can be done at all does count as an indication that it might be possible to do it better, especially if we are in the business of making predictions about the entire technological future of mankind".

But he did not say this. One good explanation for why people like Einstein, Rutherford and Millikan wrote the bomb off for no good reason is that they were following what we might call the absurdity heuristic: if a hypothesis you come up with seems sufficiently absurd on a "gut instinct" level, reject it no matter what the evidence says.

But, if Einstein et al had considered the history of high-energy weapons up to the day they made those predictions (circa 1932), they would have seen something like this:

Weapon Energy (Joules) over time

Predicting that the energy of the most powerful kind of weapon in the world will not increase is a predictive strategy that would have made bad predictions again and again; there appear to have been 5 "paradigms" of weapon development: the ballista (not shown) around the time of the romans and greeks, the (re)invention of the trebuchet around 1200-1400, the invention of gunpowder based siege weapons circa 1600, the development of explosive shells in 1722 (culminating in the 70,000,000 Joule Paris Gun used by the germans to shell Paris in 1914-18), and finally the development of heavy bomber aircraft - which allowed the British Handley-Page bomber to drop a massive 1,650 pound (600kg) bomb on the Germans in 1918, which had an energy of roughly 3 billion Joules.

If Einstein, Millikan, etc had looked at the historical data in a Kurzweilian way, they might have thought to themselves:

"Weapon energy seems to increase in paradigms, with each paradigm shift increasing the energy by a greater multiple: 30,000, 130,000, 10,000,000, 30,000,000,000 . The next term in the sequence ought to be about 4 orders of magnitude larger than the heavy chemical bomb - or about 3*10^14 Joules per bomb. Nuclear bombs have roughly this energy - perhaps we shouldn't write them off as impossible just because our imagination is failing to see a way to make them work right now?"

Link dump for 2009.11.05

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

From the four corners of the web:

J.D. Trout - The Science of the Good Society | Point of Inquiry
J.D. Trout is a professor of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, and an adjunct professor at the Parmly Sensory Sciences Institute. He writes on the nature of scientific and intellectual progress, as well as on the contribution that social science can make to human well-being. He is the author of Measuring the Intentional World, and co-author of Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment. His most recent book is The Empathy Gap: Building Bridges to the Good Life and the Good Society.
Promises, Promises | The Scientist
Ill-judged predictions and projections can be embarrassing at best and, at worst, damaging to the authority of science and science policy.
Data Suggests Amputee Sprinters Not at a Biomechanical Advantage | MedGadget
Interest has risen significantly in studying the biomechanics of amputee athletes since Oscar Pistorius's historic bid to be a part of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. Oscar Pistorius is a double below the knee amputee who runs with the aid of Cheetah Flex-Foot prosthetic feet.

Link dump for 2009.11.04

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

From the four corners of the web:

Toward a meaningful definition of posthuman sentience | Machines Like Us
As we get closer and closer to developing artificial general intelligence, I feel it is necessary to highlight an important limitation of our anthropocentric perspective. While we sometimes have the capacity to treat other species of life in humane ways, we often stumble when it comes to categorizing non-human intelligence. We cannot help but ascribe anthropomorphic qualities to that which we view to be intelligent, and we are virtually unable to imagine intelligence that lacks such qualities. In the relatively near future, however, we're going to live in a world with intelligent robots, uploaded minds, and other transhumans; it will be necessary to alter our perceptions of what those entities represent.
Resilience Fail | Open the Future
The use of URL-shortening services is a classic example of short-term need trumping long-term resilience.
Singularity Summit 2009 Videos Now Available | Accelerating Future
The videos for Singularity Summit 2009 are now available at Vimeo. The few that are missing are either still awaiting confirmation of permission or the speaker asked for video not to be posted of their talk.
How to Stop Being a Workaholic | Zen Habits
Reader Carolyn recently asked, "How can an achievement-motivated workaholic learn to back off, relax, de-stress, and feel good about doing it? I am too driven!"
Keeping the Door interviews Greg Egan about his upcoming book, brain mapping and AI
Greg Egan is one of Australia's top science fiction authors, with seven novels under his belt and a slew of collections and short stories under his belt. His 1998 novella Oceanic won the 1999 Hugo Award for Best Novella.
AI Spacesuits Turn Astronauts Into Cyborg Biologists | Wired Science
Equipped with wearable AI systems and digital eyes that see what human eyes can't, space explorers of the future could be not just astronauts, but "cyborg astrobiologists."
Robot Armada Could Explore Alien Worlds | Astrobiology Magazine
Some scientists believe that we are on the brink of big changes in planetary exploration. Future robotic explorers might be nothing like what we see today, and the new technologies could have benefits for astrobiologists.
$39B needed to cut child pneumonia deaths: UN | CBC News
It would take $39 billion US to save the lives of 5.3 million children who will otherwise die of pneumonia by 2015, the United Nations said Monday.

Link dump for 2009.02.02

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

From the four corners of the web:

The Next Hacking Frontier: Your Brain? | Wired Science
Hackers who commandeer your computer are bad enough. Now scientists worry that someday, they'll try to take over your brain.
What's your place in the brave new future? - Times Online
Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, it was easy enough to track down Paul Saffo, Silicon Valley's favourite futurologist. He suggested a restaurant in leafy Burlingame, a plush little town south of San Francisco.
Coming up next: The super-rich cyborg overclass - Salon.com
Is the next stage in human evolution a great leap forward for the wealthy? Maybe so, if we don't fix healthcare
Possible Link Between Autism And Oxytocin Gene Via Non-DNA Sequence Mutation
Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have uncovered a new genetic signature that correlates strongly with autism and which doesn't involve changes to the DNA sequence itself. Rather, the changes are in the way the genes are turned on and off. The finding may suggest new approaches to diagnosis and treatment of autism.
A Catalogue of Extinct Experience: Renewing Our Disappearing Connections to Nature | Worldchanging
Our experiences shape our consciousness: who we are, who we become, the choices we make about how we spend our lives. But our range of experiences — from drinking from a clean, clear Sierra stream to beholding a star-filled night sky — is diminishing. With the disappearance of unmediated experiences in nature, the opportunity to know what it means to be human in the world is compromised and our awareness of the fundamental truth of the interdependent and interconnnected nature of our existence becomes more and more attenuated. This obscured perception has personal, social and global consequences.
Gwynne Dyer's Climate Wars: Now a Radio Series
The security dimensions of climate change provide the backdrop for Dyer's Climate Wars, an unflinching look at potential geopolitical consequences of rising seas and falling water and food supplies. The core text is interspersed with scenarios from the future about tensions evolving into conflicts. Reads near-apocalyptically in places, but gets realpolitik-oriented readers to take the climate issue seriously.
Do fish feel pain? | Slate Magazine
Here we go again. There is a new study out that contends fish feel pain.
7 Secrets to Raising a Happy Child | Zen Habits
Nature and nurture are in a never ending battle to claim the disposition of our children. While it's true that the apple rarely tumbles too far from the tree, it is also true that there are a multitude of things we as parents can do to safeguard the childhoods of our children, limit their exposure to the more damaging elements the world will see fit to introduce in time, and do our best to raise a healthy and happy child.
The search for ET just got easier
Astronomers using the Science and Technology Facilities Council's (STFC) William Herschel Telescope (WHT) on La Palma have confirmed an effective way to search the atmospheres of planets for signs of life, vastly improving our chances of finding alien life outside our solar system.
The Technium: Infinite In Some Directions
Where are we headed? Where does technology want to go? We frequently evaluate a questionable practice by extrapolating it into the future. If a phenomenon continues as it has been, then where does it lead? Where does the daily use of antibiotics on farms get you in 100 years? Where does hourly use of cell phones for everyone get a society in 500 years? If the technium continues another thousand years as is, is it a world we want or not? Indeed can it even continue another 1000 years as is?
Want to Avoid Traffic Jams? Study Ants.
Solving the nation's transportation woes will take some big ideas, but it doesn't hurt to think "small" in this case. GOOD magazine picked the brain of Audrey Dussutour, whose countless hours of ant-studying (and even sabotaging) taught her that the tiny travelers are über-skilled when it comes to avoiding traffic jams.
Andart: Is the biosphere unsustainable?
Peter Ward's The Medea Hypotehsis is interesting, disturbing and a bit annoying. Most of all, it is an antidote to naive Gaianism. Ward argues that the Earth's biosphere is not a self-regulating, self-improving or self-preserving Gaia but something more sinister: a system prone to crashes, declines and a lifespan shortened by its own activity.
The unromantic truth about why we kiss - to spread germs | Mail Online
It is an international symbol of love and romance. But the kiss may have evolved for reasons that are far more practical - and less alluring. British scientists believe it developed to spread germs. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1224249/The-unromantic-truth-kiss--spread-germs.
NASA to Start Irradiating Monkeys | Discovery News
NASA is stepping up its space radiation studies with a round of experiments that for the first time in decades will use monkeys as subjects.

NASA Shuttle-derived Sidemount Heavy Launch Vehicle Concept

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

This video depicting NASA's Shuttle-derived Sidemount Heavy Launch Vehicle concept was shown at the 17 June 2009 meeting of the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee in Washington DC by NASA Space Shuttle Program.

Dog gets osseointegrated prosthetic

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

Osseointegrated prosthetics, artificial limbs that fuse to the bone, have been touted as the future of prosthetics -- and rightly so. There are a number of possible benefits, both for humans and animals, including prosthetic limbs that attach without chafing or irritation and limbs with more natural ranges of motion.

Pictured is a male German Shepherd mix named Cassidy -- the first canine to receive the pioneering surgery. Cassidy was born with a defect in his left hind leg. Much of this work is being performed by the Carolina State University's School of Veterinary Medicine.

Mass produced artificial skin to replace animal testing

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Danzig

Doctors have been using synthetic skin for grafts and repairs for years now, but the process to create synthetic skin is expensive and time-consuming.

Now, a team from Germany's Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft science institute have created a way to mass-produce artificial skin (complete with blood vessels) that can be used for grafts, plastic surgery, or even cosmetics testing.

Indeed, in addition to providing new skin to burn victims, these swatches of artificial skin can take the place of animals in medical and cosmetic testing. And since the swatches can be made to contain blood vessels as well as skin cells, scientists can run circulatory as well as skin-related experiments on them.

The system is fully automated, with computers controlling the solution that the skin grows in, monitoring the vats for infection, guiding the blade that cuts the swatches, and even testing the quality of the final product.

The basic skin production system, which may be available as early as next year, can produce 5,000 swatches of human skin a month, for a total of over 600 square inches of mass-produced tissue. Each 0.12-square-inch section of skin would cost around US$49 to produce -- considerably less than the current cost.

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