While traveling late last night, from MIT to Cornell for entrepreneurship events, the radio station in the car seemed to get caught between two different FM transmissions from two neighboring cities. With a crackling of static, the song I had been listening to was being slowly replaced by a different new song. I liked the new song better, but it faded in and out. So I tuned it in—by stepping on the gas, accelerating towards a conjured image of a bleeping radio tower shooting out lightning bolt waves—just like those old black and white ads just before they say “we interrupt this broadcast…”
 
My point is this: new and persuasive ideas can take hold of you just as that song did. They draw you in and make you accelerate towards the people originating the signal—and away from some old idea you held. For some short period of time, the two ideas might intersect, amplify or cancel each other, leaving you confused, despite F. Scott Fitzgerald’s claim that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. Eventually old ideas like old songs get replaced by new ones.
 
And remember all new ideas are just combinations (usually with mutations) of old ideas, just as all new molecules are different combinations of atoms pulled from the periodic table of elements.
 
Here’s something interesting to consider on the complex interaction of old things. As you increase the number of components you have in a system, the possible ways those components can interact grows even more quickly. Imagine you have two subsystems, let’s call them X and Y. Let’s also say each is made up of 5 parts. If you only consider two-way interaction between the parts, there are 55 determinants. (Here’s the math; 5 X-parts, 5 Y-parts, 10 interactions between the X-parts, 10 interactions between the Y-parts and 25 interactions between X-parts and Y-parts).
 
Now consider this: Only 18% (10 out of 55) of the determinants of the system come from the individual effects of parts in X and Y while 82% (45 out of 55) come from their interactions. Remember: this is a system with only two subsystems each with 5 parts. Now imagine having a system where two subsystems X and Y are each made up of 100 parts. Now 99% of what happens occurs because of the interactions between the parts. Here’s the math: (100 X-parts, 100 y-parts, 4,950 interactions of X-parts, 4,950 interactions of Y-parts and 10,000 interactions between X-parts and Y-parts)–and the credulity of those who flock. Remember, eventually flocks get fleeced.
 
Think about this: this is a mildly complex system with only 100 variables and already the individual inputs are less relevant than the output of their interactions! Now remember this when you scratch your head at even far more complex systems that test the credibility—(of weather forecasters, stocks market pundits and anyone else who lays claim to predict the future of complex systems like weather or markets).

{ Josh Wolfe, Nanotech Weekly Insider Newsletter | Apr. 10, 2008 }

A scientific technique that could allow same-sex couples to create their own biological child in a laboratory should be allowed under law, a group of influential scientists said on Monday.

The experts, all international leaders in embryology research, called on ministers not to restrict such “important” research.

The laboratory creation of eggs and sperm from other cells could offer hope to thousands of people unable to have children of their own.

Although the creation of both sperm and eggs in a laboratory is still at an early stage, the Hinxton group, made up of 40 world-renowned experts, estimates that the procedure could be used to create human foetuses within 15 years.

Creating sperm from female instead of male cells could take longer but was still “possible”, they said.

{ Telegraph | Continue reading }

For the next dozen years or so the US broad stock markets will be a wild roller-coaster ride. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 index will go up and down (and in the process will set all-time highs and multiyear lows), stagnate, and trade in a tight range. At some point during the ride, index investors and buy and hold stock collectors will realize that their portfolios aren’t showing much of a return.

I know this prediction has a mild sci-fi feel to it. After all, how could I possibly know what the market will do, especially that far into the future? Though I’ll explain in more detail in just a second why I have the audacity to make this prediction, let me offer you a little factoid: over the last 200 years, every full-blown, long-lasting (secular) bull market (and we just had a supersized one from 1982 to 2000) was followed by a range-bound market that lasted about 15 years. Yes, this happened every time, with the exception of the Great Depression, over the last two centuries.

Though we tend to think about market cycles in binary terms - bull (rising) or bear (declining) - in the long run markets spend a lot more time in bull or range-bound (sideways) states, roughly half in each, and visit a bear cage a lot less often then we think.

{ Vitaliy Katsenelson | PDF }

Did you know?

Sometimes size does matter.

If you’re one in a million in China, there are 1,300 people just like you.

In India, there are 1,100 people just like you.

The 25% of the population in China with the highest IQs is greater than the total population of North America.

In India, it’s the top 28%.

Translation for teachers: they have more honors kids than we have kids.

China will soon become the number one English-speaking country in the world.

If you took every single job in the U.S. today and shipped it to China, it still would have a labor surplus.

[In the next five minutes]

~ 60 babies will be born in the U.S.

~ 244 babies will be born in China.

~ 351 babies will be born in India.

The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that today’s learner will have 10 to 14 jobs by age 38.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 1 out of 4 workers today works for a company for whom they have been employed less than 1 year.

More than 1 out of 2 are working for a company for whom they have worked less than 5 years.

According to former Secretary of Education Richard Riley, the top 10 jobs that will be in demand in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004.

We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist,

using technologies that haven’t yet been invented,

in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.

Name this country:

~ Richest in the world

~ Largest military

~ Center of world business and finance

~ Strongest education system

~ World center of innovation and invention

~ Currency the world standard of value

~ Highest standard of living

England, in 1900.

Did you know?

The U.S. is 20th in the world in broadband Internet penetration (Luxembourg just passed us).

Nintendo invested more than $140 million in research and development in 2002 alone.

The U.S. federal government spent less than half as much on research and innovation in education.

1 of every 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met online.

There are over 106 million registered users of MySpace (as of September 2006).

If MySpace were a country, it would be the 11th largest in the world (between Japan and Mexico).

The average MySpace page is visited 30 times a day.

Did you know?

We are living in exponential times.

There are over 2.7 billion searches performed on Google each month.

To whom were these questions addressed B.G. (before Google)?

The number of text messages sent and received every day exceeds the population of the planet.

There are about 540,000 words in the English language, about 5 times as many as during Shakespeare’s time.

More than 3,000 new books are published–daily.

It is estimated that a week’s worth of New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.

It is estimated that 1.5 exabytes (1.5 x 10^18) of unique new information will be generated worldwide this year. That’s estimated to be more than in the previous 5,000 years.

The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years.

For students starting a four-year technical or college degree, this means that half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study.

It is predicted to double every 72 hours by 2010.

Third-generation fiber optics has recently been tested by both NEC and Alcatel that pushes 10 trillion bits per second down one strand of fiber.

That’s 1,900 CDs, or 150 million simultaneous phone calls, every second.

It’s currently tripling every 6 months and is expected to do so for at least the next 20 years.

The fiber is already there. They’re just improving the switches on the ends, which means the marginal cost of these improvements is effectively $0.

Predictions are that e-paper will be cheaper than real paper.

47 million laptops were shipped worldwide last year.

The $100 laptop project is expecting to ship between 50 and 100 million laptops a year to children in underdeveloped countries.

Predictions are that by 2013 a supercomputer will be built that exceeds the computation capability of the human brain.

By 2023, when 1st-graders will be just 23 years old and beginning their (first) careers, it only will take a $1,000 computer to exceed the capabilities of the human brain.

And while technical predictions farther out than 15 years are hard to make, predictions are that by 2049, a $1,000 computer will exceed the computational capabilities of the human race.”

{ Glimpse of the Future by Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod }

photo { Mark Heithoff }

How do you fancy tucking into a bowl of ice cream that has no more fat than a carrot? Or eating a burger that will lower your cholesterol? If you are allergic to peanuts, perhaps you’d like to fix your food so that any nut traces pass harmlessly through your body.

Welcome to the world of nanofoods, where almost anything is possible: where food can be manipulated at an atomic or molecular level to taste as delicious as you want, do you as much good as you want, and stay fresh for … well, who knows? A world where smart pesticides are harmless until they reach the stomachs of destructive insects; where food manufacturers promise an end to starvation; where smart packaging sniffs out and destroys the micro-organisms that make good food go bad.

In short, a food heaven to those who see it spelling the end of obesity and poor diet. Food hell to those who believe the case for nanofood safety is still far from proven. One thing is certain: after the controversy that surrounded genetically modified foods, nano is set to become the next kitchen battleground.

Nanotechnology has its roots in a talk delivered in 1959 by physicist Richard Feynman to the American Physical Society. He predicted a time when individual atoms and molecules might be used as the building blocks for a set of tools that could then make a smaller set, and so on. The scale he was talking about strains the imagination. A nanometer - nm - (from the Greek word nanos, dwarf) is one-billionth of a metre. To help you visualise how small that is, a red blood cell is about 7,000nm across, a human hair 80,000nm wide and a water molecule slightly less than 0.3nm in diameter. The science of nanotechnology generally inhabits the region of 0.1nm to 100nm.

The science behind the theory became a reality in the 1980s with the invention of specialist microscopes which allowed scientists to see how atoms and molecules behaved in different conditions. By manipulating those conditions - say, with other chemicals, heat, moisture, electromagnetism and so on - they could encourage atoms and molecules to form useful shapes.

This resulted in the creation of new nanomaterials built at the atomic level that promise to revolutionise everything from chemistry to aeronautics. Some nanotechnology products are already on the market - sunscreens, for example, make use of titanium oxide, TiO2. (…)

Nano-futurists don’t dispute that, one day, nanofoods will be everywhere. They envisage a day when tiny sensors called motes or smart dust will radio information to the farmer detailing what is going on in his field, inside his crops and in the bodies of his animals so that he can optimise his yields. While such “precision farming” is some way off, nanotechnology is already here in the form of smart pesticides, or nanocides.

{ The Guardian | Continue reading }

photo { Kathleen Dustin’s purse }

Contrary to fevered popular speculation in the 1990s, the yen and the mark never had the potential to challenge the dollar as premier international currency: their home economies were smaller than the US and their financial markets less well developed and liquid than New York. The euro, however, is a credible challenger: Euroland is roughly as big as the United States, and the euro has shown itself a better store of value than the dollar.  

To be sure, rankings of international currencies change only very slowly.

Although the US surpassed the UK in economic size in 1872, in exports in 1915, and as a net creditor in 1917, the dollar did not surpass the pound as number one international currency until 1945. In 2005, when Menzie Chinn and I used historical data on central bank holdings of foreign exchange reserves to estimate the determinants, even our pessimistic scenarios did not have the euro overtaking the dollar until 2022. Thus we could not have asserted that the dollar would be dethroned “ten years from now.” But the dollar has continued to lose ground. We have now updated our calculations, particularly to recognize that London is usurping Frankfurt’s role as the financial capital of the euro, notwithstanding that the UK remains outside of EMU. Now we find that the tipping point could come within the ten-year horizon: the euro could overtake the dollar even as early as 2015.

{ Jeff Frankels }

One might ask why this would matter. Some of the reasons it matters are economic: we would lose the “exorbitant privilege” of being able to finance our international deficits easily.

{ Jeff Frankels }

illustration { Interactive Data Visualization }

Embryo space colonization is a proposal for colonizing space using embryos raised by robots.

It involves sending a robotic mission to a habitable terrestrial planet transporting frozen early-stage human embryos or the technological or biological means to create human embryos.

In contrast to both a sleeper ship (in which the crew spends the journey in some form of hibernation) and a generation ship (in which the occupants might either grow old or die during the journey and leave their descendants to continue traveling) the resources needed to build a spacecraft for an embryonic space colonization effort are considerably lower in terms of pure mass and complexity of the spacecraft.

Embryo space colonization concepts involve various concepts of delivering the embryos from Earth to another extrasolar planet around another star system.

• The most straightforward concept is to make use of frozen embryos. Modern medicine has made it possible to store frozen embryos in various low-development stages (up to several weeks in the development of the embryo).

• The technologically more challenging but more flexible scenario calls for just carrying the biological means to create embryos, that is various samples of donated sperm and egg cells.

• Going a step further, the spacecraft “cargo” could be limited just to the genetic information of humans stored in digital form. In this case, sperm and egg cells would need to be recreated by a biosequencer at the target planet (this proposal is currently not technologically feasible).

Regardless of the “cargo” used in any embryo space colonization scenario, the basic concept is that upon arrival of the embryo-carrying spacecraft (EIS) at the target planet, fully autonomous robots would build the first settlement on the planet and start growing crops. More ambitiously, the planet may be terraformed first. Thereafter the first embryos could be unfrozen (or created using biosequenced or natural sperm and egg cells).

In any event, one of the technologies needed for the proposal are artificial uteri. The embryos would need to develop in such artificial uteri until a large enough population existed to procreate by natural biological means.

Proposals of sleeper ships and generation ships require very large spacecrafts to transport humans, life support systems and other equipment or food as well as an even larger propulsion system for a long period in time. In contrast an EIS would have feasible small dimensions in the range of today’s spacecraft, as the most important “cargo” would not need much space or would not weigh very much.

While sleeper ships and generation ships would deliver to a prospective colony world a population that has undergone some degree of education, training, and socialization in areas reconcilable with those of the sponsor culture (e.g. historical, scientific, and technical education, language acquisition, an understanding of the original mission and broader cultural norms), individuals who are born into colony worlds through embryo space colonization would lack this education.

Major difficulties with the idea being implemented include needed advances in various technological areas:

• Artificial Uterus: Artificial wombs are not available today. However, scientists are working on this technology.

• Robotics: Whether it will be possible to develop fully autonomous robots that can build the first settlement on the target planet and raise the first humans, is unclear.

• Long-duration computers: Computer hardware would need to function reliably over long periods of time, in the range of several thousand of years.

• Power: Small and more efficient power systems have to be developed. Spacecraft traveling past the orbit of Mars (like Voyager and Pioneer) derive their electrical power from onboard nuclear batteries (solar panel systems sometimes double the weight of the spacecraft). With nuclear power (radioisotope thermoelectric generators/RTG), weight and volume are far less of a concern. Pioneer 11 was launched in 1973 to investigate Jupiter and the outer solar system. The spacecraft contained two (RTGs), which generated 144 W at Jupiter, but decreased to 100 W by the time it reached Saturn. Pioneer 11’s RTG power supply is now dead. Its last communication with Earth was in November 1995.

• A propulsion system would be required that could accelerate the EIS to a high speed and slow it down again upon nearing the destination. Even assuming a speed one hundred times faster than any of today’s spaceprobes and a target planet within a couple of hundred light years would lead to a journey lasting several thousand years.

• Exoplanet: Spotting an exoplanet qualifying for colonization within a reachable distance, preferably unoccupied (intelligent life could already occupy the planet, and might not allow us to settle it).

• Ultimate Meaning: Some would argue that there is no point to such a mission, as the humans eventually born from such a mission would have no idea of their significance, and even if educated about it somehow by the robots, would have no way to return information to earth’s inhabitants. Some would accuse it of being an empty, purely symbolic gesture at best.

{ Wikipedia/nswd }

Astronomers have discovered more than 150 planets outside our solar system, ranging from 100 to 1,000 times Earth’s mass. In 2005, they announced the 155th exoplanet discovery, much hotter than Earth (400º to 750º Fahrenheit (244º to 398º Celsius)). Astronomers believe these conditions could not support life, but have not ruled out the existence of water — the hot conditions also make it likely that the planet has not retained much gas, making the planet solid.

In 2007, they discovered Gliese 581 c, the most earthlike planet outside our solar system to date, with a radius only 50% larger than the Earth and possibly having liquid water on its surface. Liquid water is a key ingredient for life as we know it. The newfound planet is located at the “Goldilocks” distance-not too close and not too far from its star to keep water on its surface from freezing or vaporizing away.

{ Space.com | Astronomy.com }

It’s not so obvious how old a 60-year-old is. Ask most 60-year-olds these days and they’ll say they still feel pretty young, since they’re healthy and expect many active years to come. In 1900, though, a 60-year-old was, well, old.

This simple fact has big ramifications for demographers. Demographers have long known that on average people are getting older all around the world, and they have worked to assess the likely social impacts of that aging. For example, relatively few young people are around to support old people’s pensions. But increased longevity counteracts those impacts by making people of any age in effect younger than they used to be, for example increasing the number of years they are capable of working. So it has been hard to assess how big the impact of an aging population is likely to be. (…)

“If the younger generation is smaller, but they are better educated and can be more productive, that might be a good thing,” Lutz says, since the young people, though fewer, would still be able to produce enough to support those too old to work. “Certainly the decline of population is desirable from an environmental perspective,” he says. The team next plans to try to quantify these effects.

World population is likely to stop growing within the century. The researchers made this prediction two years ago, and they have now incorporated newer data that has corroborated it. Their model shows an 88 percent probability that world population growth will end within the century.

{ MathTrek/Science News | Continue reading }

related { What exactly does a demographer do? }

{ panther house | AA statue: Marc Quinn | Penthouse girl: Playboy/Stephen Wayda }

MORE »

Let’s do a test: How do you think you’ll feel at the end of this interview?
Approximately the way I feel now. That’s almost always a good guess about how you’re going to feel in the future. Most events have a small impact that doesn’t last very long. More than one person who’s gotten married or moved to California to change their happiness has found that it stays about where it is. (…)

Do negative events affect us as much as we think they do?
Human resilience is really quite astonishing. People are not the fragile flowers that a century of psychologists have made us out to be. People who suffer real tragedy and trauma typically recover more quickly than they expect to and often return to their original level of happiness, or something close to it. That’s the good news—we are a hardy species, even though we don’t know this about ourselves. The bad news is that the good things that happen to us don’t feel as good or last as long as we think they will. So all that wonderful stuff we’re aiming for—winning the lottery, getting promoted, whatever we think will change our lives—probably won’t do it after all. We’re resilient in both directions. We rebound from distress but we also rebound from joy.

But people do know what will make them happy, don’t they?
If you ask people whether they would rather have gallbladder surgery or a weekend in Paris, they get the answer right. What they’re wrong about is knowing just how bad or how good these events will be, and how long those feelings will last. (…) Affective forecasting errors are very hard to avoid, and nobody has come up with a magic pill or a special mantra that can turn you from a bad to a good forecaster. But there’s another way to get a sense of how you would feel in some future circumstance: other people’s experience. For example, lots of people have won the lottery and put their happiness, or lack thereof, on public display. Rather than closing your eyes and imagining how wonderful it would be to win the lotto, you could find out how past winners actually feel. But we tend not to do that. Why? Because we all believe that we’re unique and that other people’s experiences are a poor guide to our own. But it turns out we’re not nearly as unique as we think.

Why does it seem we’re hard-wired to want to feel happy, over all the other emotions?
That’s a $64 million question. But I think the answer is something like: Happiness is the gauge the mind uses to know if it’s doing what’s right. When I say what’s right, I mean in the evolutionary sense, not in the moral sense. Nature could have wired you up with knowing 10,000 rules about how to mate, when to eat, where to seek shelter and safety. Or it could simply have wired you with one prime directive: Be happy. You’ve got a needle that can go from happy to unhappy, and your job in life is to get it as close to H as possible. As you’re walking through woods, when that needle starts going towards U, for unhappy, turn around, do something else, see if you can get it to go toward H. As it turns out, all the things that push the needle toward H—salt, fat, sugar, sex, warmth, security—are just the things you need to survive. I think of happiness as a kind of fitness-o-meter. It’s the way the organism is constantly updated about whether its behavior is in support of, or opposition to, its own evolutionary fitness.

{ Smithsonian magazine | Continue reading }

photo { Square America }

Back to the Future II | plot summary

The story continues with Marty McFly and Doc (Emmett Brown) as they now leave 1985 and time travel to the year 2015 to stop Marty’s kids from destroying their lives.

While Marty is in 2015, he finds an antique store selling all sorts of memorabilia from the 20th Century, among which is “Gray’s Sports Almanac 1950s-2000,” containing all sport scores for that time span. Seeing it as a money-making scheme when he returns to 1985, Marty buys the almanac, but Doc catches him and puts it in the trash, berating Marty that he did not build a time machine for such trivialities as making money. The Biff of 2015 overhears the conversation and takes the almanac.

Later, the Biff of 2015 steals the DeLorean and travels to some point in time (1955). He comes back before Marty and Doc return.

Returning to 1985, Marty and Doc quickly realize that their time has been mysteriously altered. Hill Valley is now dilapidated, crime-infested and corrupt. Biff has become a rich and powerful man.

Doc discovers the bag the Gray’s Sports Almanac came in and old Biff’s fist-shaped cane handle, in the DeLorean, revealing Biff had given the book to himself sometime in the past, thus changing his future. Marty confronts Biff to find out when and where he got the almanac, which turns out to be on November 12, 1955.

Marty and Doc go to 1955. Marty, operating incognito, witnesses the scene where the Biff of 2015 gives the teenage Biff the sports almanac.

Hanging onto the side of Biff’s car with the aid of the hoverboard, Marty grabs the almanac. Marty burns the almanac to cinders, thus repairing the future.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | original theatrical trailer }

{ 1885-2015 diagram }

Hello? Hello? Anybody home? | plot confusion

Daedeveriu writes:
The Doc clearly explains after they return to Alternate-1985 that if a person travels back in time, changes something, and returns to the period they left, they will have altered the world as they knew it.

This is quite evident in that when they return, Alternate-Biff is the corrupt ruler of their town–a major change.

However, there’s a slight problem with the events that lead up to this situation.

Old Biff steals the Time Machine (DeLorean), travels back to 1955, and gives his past-self the Sports Almanac. After, he takes the Time Machine and returns to his own time, so that he can replace the car before it’s missed.

The problem with this is that it’s not plausible. If Old-Biff gave Past-Biff the Almanac, that would have instantly begun the series of events that created Alternate-1985. So, when Biff returns to the Future, it would’ve been Alternate-2015… Not the one he left.

xoandre writes:
There are two possibilities that could explain this problem:

1. The time-ripple/delay effect did not happen for BIFF or anyone else until well AFTER Marty and Doc had jumped to Alternate 1985. Think about the time-ripple/delay in Back to the Future 1 with Marty changing his parent’s fate and how slowly time caught up with him there, thus allowing for the possibility of repairing the timeline.

2. Some time between 1985 and 2015, either time repaired itself OR Biff lost it all…

3. IF you watch the DELETED SCENES, you will find one where OLD BIFF actually VANISHES after he returns to 2015 and goes into that fit of pain… As if he had been ERASED from existence in that timeline!

{ Slip-Up Archive }

What happened to old Biff when he staggered out of the DeLorean in 2015?

Our intention regarding old Biff was that upon his return to 2015, he would be erased from existence because he had changed his entire destiny by giving his younger self the Sports Almanac. After old Biff clutches his chest and staggers (the same symptoms that Marty exhibited in Back to the Future when he was beginning to be “erased”), we actually filmed him falling onto the street and vanishing, and we previewed the movie this way. However, the vast majority of the audience did not understand it, so we decided to cut it out, leaving the answer ambiguous, and subject to various interpretations — besides the above explanation, you can believe that Old Biff had a heart attack from the shock of time travel or from flying the car, or from something that happened to him in 1955.

When Doc and Marty are in 1955-Alternate, Doc says they can’t return to the future to stop Biff from stealing the DeLorean, because it would be the wrong future. But if that’s true, how did Old Biff manage to get back to the same future that he left? Shouldn’t he have come back to a different future?

As should be clear from the answer to the previous question, we believe Old Biff DID indeed return to a different future — a “2015-A.”. This would happen AFTER Old Biff returned with the DeLorean. For this reason, we made sure that Doc had caught Jennifer and exited the McFly Townhouse before Old Biff returned. Thus, by the time Marty and Doc are carrying Jennifer back to the DeLorean, there COULD be other residents in that townhouse — or perhaps the McFlys still live there. It is just as believable that the physicality of the neighborhood did NOT change as it is to believe that it did — so we didn’t change it. We decided not to make anything of this idea because this is one of those difficult time travel concepts that general audiences have a real hard time understanding. (Try explaining this stuff to your mother and you’ll see what we mean.) A detailed explanation of it would have slowed down the story, and most of the audience doesn’t ever think about it.

That’s why we made certain things ambiguous and left various things open for interpretation in hopes that the possibility of at least one or two explanations would be better than a “definitive” explanation that you could find holes in.

{ FAQ | Writer/Producer Bob Gale and Writer/Director Robert Zemeckis }

related { Time may not exist. Not to mention the question of which way it goes. }