Oddly_Even

Got A Wound? Science Says Rub Some Dirt In It_

oddly — Wed, 22 May 2013 21:56:56 +0000

Antibacterial clays can kill antibiotic-resistant E. coli and MRSA, researchers found.

The colloquial medical advice “rub some dirt in it” appears to have some merit. Researchers at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute have been experimenting with different clays, and it appears in research presented in the journal PLoS ONE that they’ve come across a family of antibacterial clays capable of killing pathogens ranging from E. coli to methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, otherwise known as hard-to-kill MRSA.

Clays have been used as medical tools for ages, appearing in ancient medical texts going back as far as 3,000 B.C. Topically, they were used to treat wounds, a practice that became common in the 19th century. Early practitioners of clay therapy noted that clays tended to aid in healing, in reducing inflammation of wounds, and in pain management–though they couldn’t have known why exactly.

It turns out that’s probably because some clays–particularly clays rich in a certain group of metallic ions–work as antibacterial agents. In their study, the ASU researchers tested a variety of different clays with similar mineral composition but ranging compositions of metallic ions against E. coli and MRSA. They found that five metal ions–iron, copper, cobalt, nickel, and zinc–could fight the two bacterial strains, both of which are increasingly difficult to kill using standard antibiotics and antibacterials.

That doesn’t mean these clays are silver bullet or any kind of antibacterial panacea. Not all clays are created equal and some lack the necessary concentrations of the necessary metal ions. Moreover, clays can contain other metals as well, like cadmium, lead, mercury, and arsenic (if you weren’t paying attention in chem class, these are not metals you particularly want to introduce to your bloodstream).

But the researchers are optimistic that medicinal clays could find widespread use in certain therapeutic roles, particularly as bandaging agents as their absorptive and adhering characteristics make them somewhat ideal for sealing out external pathogens as well as absorbing and removing unwanted particulates or devitalized tissues from wounds–all while delivering a dose of antibacterial ions to the affected area.

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These Self-Assembling Nanoflowers Are As Beautiful As They Are Tiny_

oddly — Wed, 22 May 2013 21:42:51 +0000

Harvard researchers grew these lovely microscopic gardens using delicate chemical reactions.

A nanorose may not smell as sweet as an organic one, but the red petals on this micron-scale flower are unquestionably just as beautiful. At Harvard University, materials scientists have perfected an underwater chemical reaction that results in these gorgeous, self-assembling nanoflowers.

The microscopic structures are crystals that build themselves, one molecule at a time, on a glass surface submerged in a beaker of water, barium chloride, and sodium silicate. When carbon dioxide from the air naturally dissolves in the water, it sets off the chemical reaction that causes the crystals to form.

Though the colors in these images are artificial, the intricate shapes of the nanoflowers are very real. The twists, curves, and ruffles are created when the scientists shift the components of the chemical reaction; the crystals naturally “grow” toward or away from various chemical gradients. For example, the broad-leaf shapes you’ll see in the gallery formed in solutions with extra carbon dioxide.

“When you look through the electron microscope, it really feels a bit like you’re diving in the ocean, seeing huge fields of coral and sponges,” says Wim L. Noorduin, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and lead author of the paper in Science. “Sometimes I forget to take images because it’s so nice to explore.”

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Inverted Landscape_

oddly — Wed, 22 May 2013 21:33:26 +0000

Downside Up_

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Woman accused of using Bible as a weapon_

oddly — Wed, 22 May 2013 21:04:32 +0000

Police in North Carolina said they arrested a woman whose alleged Bible-thumping left a woman with bruises and abrasions.

The arrest report said Evelyn Mills Moore, 57, of Kings Mountain struck the other woman “numerous times about her body with a closed fist and striking her with a Bible about her left arm,” the Gaston Gazette reported Tuesday.

The alleged victim was left with bruises and abrasions to her head, face and arms after the Saturday incident, police said.

Moore was charged with assault inflicting serious injury.

She was also charged with a second assault charge inflicting serious injury for allegedly attacking a man and causing abrasions on his head, face and arms.

Police did not reveal the reasons behind the alleged attacks.

Moore was jailed in lieu of $105,000 bond.

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Rear Window_

oddly — Wed, 22 May 2013 20:28:38 +0000

Simon Prades is a freelancing Illustrator living and working in Saarbrücken, Germany and teaching Illustration at the university of applied sciences in Trier. His works show his diverse interests in movies, books and travelling and we especially enjoy the small hidden details in his illustrations. He mainly works in analog mediums, such as ink, pencil and aquarell without ignoring the computer as a tool to finish his work.

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Humans With Amplified Intelligence Could Be More Powerful Than AI_

oddly — Wed, 22 May 2013 20:18:48 +0000

With much of our attention focused the rise of advanced artificial intelligence, few consider the potential for radically amplified human intelligence (IA). It’s an open question as to which will come first, but a technologically boosted brain could be just as powerful — and just as dangerous – as AI.

As a species, we’ve been amplifying our brains for millennia. Or at least we’ve tried to. Looking to overcome our cognitive limitations, humans have employed everything from writing, language, and meditative techniques straight through to today’s nootropics. But none of these compare to what’s in store.

Unlike efforts to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), or even an artificial superintelligence (SAI), the human brain already presents us with a pre-existing intelligence to work with. Radically extending the abilities of a pre-existing human mind — whether it be through genetics, cybernetics or the integration of external devices — could result in something quite similar to how we envision advanced AI.
Looking to learn more about this, I contacted futurist Michael Anissimov, a blogger at Accelerating Future and a co-organizer of the Singularity Summit. He’s given this subject considerable thought — and warns that we need to be just as wary of IA as we are AI.

Michael, when we speak of Intelligence Amplification, what are we really talking about? Are we looking to create Einsteins? Or is it something significantly more profound?

The real objective of IA is to create super-Einsteins, persons qualitatively smarter than any human being that has ever lived. There will be a number of steps on the way there.
The first step will be to create a direct neural link to information. Think of it as a “telepathic Google.”

The next step will be to develop brain-computer interfaces that augment the visual cortex, the best-understood part of the brain. This would boost our spatial visualization and manipulation capabilities. Imagine being able to imagine a complex blueprint with high reliability and detail, or to learn new blueprints quickly. There will also be augmentations that focus on other portions of sensory cortex, like tactile cortex and auditory cortex.

The third step involves the genuine augmentation of pre-frontal cortex. This is the Holy Grail of IA research — enhancing the way we combine perceptual data to form concepts. The end result would be cognitive super-McGyvers, people who perform apparently impossible intellectual feats. For instance, mind controlling other people, beating the stock market, or designing inventions that change the world almost overnight. This seems impossible to us now in the same way that all our modern scientific achievements would have seemed impossible to a stone age human — but the possibility is real.

For it to be otherwise would require that there is some mysterious metaphysical ceiling on qualitative intelligence that miraculously exists at just above the human level. Given that mankind was the first generally intelligent organism to evolve on this planet, that seems highly implausible. We shouldn’t expect version one to be the final version, any more than we should have expected the Model T to be the fastest car ever built.

Looking ahead to the next few decades, how could AI come about? Is the human brain really that fungible?
The human brain is not really that fungible. It is the product of more than seven million years of evolutionary optimization and fine-tuning, which is to say that it’s already highly optimized given its inherent constraints. Attempts to overclock it usually cause it to break, as demonstrated by the horrific effects of amphetamine addiction.

Chemicals are not targeted enough to produce big gains in human cognitive performance. The evidence for the effectiveness of current “brain-enhancing drugs” is extremely sketchy. To achieve real strides will require brain implants with connections to millions of neurons. This will require millions of tiny electrodes, and a control system to synchronize them all. The current state of the art brain-computer interfaces have around 1,000 connections. So, current devices need to be scaled up by more than 1,000 times to get anywhere interesting. Even if you assume exponential improvement, it will be awhile before this is possible — at least 15 to 20 years.
Improvement in IA rests upon progress in nano-manufacturing. Brain-computer interface engineers, like Ed Boyden at MIT, depend upon improvements in manufacturing to build these devices. Manufacturing is the linchpin on which everything else depends. Given that there is very little development of atomically-precise manufacturing technologies, nanoscale self-assembly seems like the most likely route to million-electrode brain-computer interfaces. Nanoscale self-assembly is not atomically precise, but it’s precise by the standards of bulk manufacturing and photolithography.

What potential psychological side-effects may emerge from a radically enhanced human? Would they even be considered a human at this point?

One of the most salient side effects would be insanity. The human brain is an extremely fine-tuned and calibrated machine. Most perturbations to this tuning qualify as what we would consider “crazy.” There are many different types of insanity, far more than there are types of sanity. From the inside, insanity seems perfectly sane, so we’d probably have a lot of trouble convincing these people they are insane.
Even in the case of perfect sanity, side effects might include seizures, information overload, and possibly feelings of egomania or extreme alienation. Smart people tend to feel comparatively more alienated in the world, and for a being smarter than everyone, the effect would be greatly amplified.
Most very smart people are not jovial and sociable like Richard Feynman. Hemingway said, “An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.” What if drunkenness were not enough to instill camaraderie and mutual affection? There could be a clean “empathy break” that leads to psychopathy.

So which will come first? AI or IA?
It’s very difficult to predict either. There is a tremendous bias for wanting IA to come first, because of all the fun movies and video games with intelligence-enhanced protagonists. It’s important to recognize that this bias in favor of IA does not in fact influence the actual technological difficulty of the approach. My guess is that AI will come first because development is so much cheaper and cleaner.
Both endeavours are extremely difficult. They may not come to pass until the 2060s, 2070s, or later. Eventually, however, they must both come to pass — there’s nothing magical about intelligence, and the demand for its enhancement is enormous. It would require nothing less than a global totalitarian Luddite dictatorship to hold either back for the long term.

What are the advantages and disadvantages to the two different developmental approaches?
The primary advantage of the AI route is that it is immeasurably cheaper and easier to do research. AI is developed on paper and in code. Most useful IA research, on the other hand, is illegal. Serious IA would require deep neurosurgery and experimental brain implants. These brain implants may malfunction, causing seizures, insanity, or death. Enhancing human intelligence in a qualitative way is not a matter of popping a few pills — you really need to develop brain implants to get any significant returns.
Most research in that area is heavily regulated and expensive. All animal testing is expensive. Theodore Berger has been working on a hippocampal implant for a number of years — and in 2004 it passed a live tissue test, but there has been very little news since then. Every few years he pops up in the media and says it’s just around the corner, but I’m skeptical. Meanwhile, there is a lot of intriguing progress in Artificial Intelligence.

Does IA have the potential to be safer than AI as far as predictability and controllability is concerned? Is it important that we develop IA before super-powerful AGI?

Intelligence Augmentation is much more unpredictable and uncontrollable than AGI has the potential to be. It’s actually quite dangerous, in the long term. I recently wrote an article that speculates on global political transformation caused by a large amount of power concentrated in the hands of a small group due to “miracle technologies” like IA or molecular manufacturing. I also coined the term “Maximillian,” meaning “the best,” to refer to a powerful leader making use of intelligence enhancement technology to put himself in an unassailable position.

The problem with IA is that you are dealing with human beings, and human beings are flawed. People with enhanced intelligence could still have a merely human-level morality, leveraging their vast intellects for hedonistic or even genocidal purposes.
AGI, on the other hand, can be built from the ground up to simply follow a set of intrinsic motivations that are benevolent, stable, and self-reinforcing.
People say, “won’t it reject those motivations?” It won’t, because those motivations will make up its entire core of values — if it’s programmed properly. There will be no “ghost in the machine” to emerge and overthrow its programmed motives. Philosopher Nick Bostrom does an excellent analysis of this in his paper “The Superintelligent Will”. The key point is that selfish motivations will not magically emerge if an AI has a goal system that is fundamentally selfless, if the very essence of its being is devoted to preserving that selflessness. Evolution produced self-interested organisms because of evolutionary design constraints, but that doesn’t mean we can’t code selfless agents de novo.

What roadblocks, be they technological, medical, or ethical, do you see hindering development?
The biggest roadblock is developing the appropriate manufacturing technology. Right now, we aren’t even close.
Another roadblock is figuring out what exactly each neuron does, and identifying the exact positions of these neurons in individual people. Again, we’re not even close.
Thirdly, we need some way to quickly test extremely fine-grained theories of brain function — what Ed Boyden calls “high throughput circuit screening” of neural circuits. The best way to do this would be to somehow create a human being without consciousness and experiment on them to our heart’s content, but I have a feeling that idea might not go over so well with ethics committees.
Absent that, we’d need an extremely high-resolution simulation of the human brain. Contrary to hype surrounding “brain simulation” projects today, such a high-resolution simulation is not likely to be developed until the 2050-2080 timeframe. An Oxford analysis picks a median date of around 2080. That sounds a bit conservative to me, but in the right ballpark.

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Why do people hallucinate geometric tunnels?

oddly — Wed, 22 May 2013 20:06:35 +0000

Whenever you imagine any kind of altered reality — from dreams, to drug trips, to warp speed — the main image is always a tunnel, ringed by regular geometric patterns. And most of us see those odd, tunneling patterns at some point in our lives. What exactly is it about our brains that creates them?
There’s a certain area in the brain that is the first stop for visual information. This visual cortex, called V1, is awash with nerves that interact with each other near-instantaneously. There are neurons that encourage activity among others, and neurons that inhibit activity among others. The combination of the both of them firing – say, during a drug trip – creates some interesting, and regular, patterns.

These patterns, though, don’t create the tunnel effect. The tunnel springs from the fact that the visual system needs to perceive more than just a picture of contrasting values of light and dark. It also needs to perceive contour. The neurons in V1 are linked up in structures called hypercolumns. Each neuron in a hypercolumn perceives a different edge value. One neuron in a hypercolumn would perceive the vertical edge that two walls make when they come together. Another would detect the horizontal edge that a wall makes when it meets the floor. Although the neurons in each hypercolumn can interact with each other, they can’t interact with all the neurons in the next hypercolumn. They can only interact with some, and the selective links between the columns are what scientists believe gives us the ability to perceive smooth, continuous curves.
It also means that, when we are hallucinating a pattern, we don’t see the just the pattern. We create a symmetric pattern that comes together at certain angles. The interaction of the nerves in each hypercolumn causes an otherwise flat honeycomb or grid to curve around a central point in our vision. We see a tunnel, because our brain connects up that way.

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Watch: Boards of Canada Debut Video on Screen in Tokyo_

oddly — Wed, 22 May 2013 18:10:37 +0000

At midnight Tokyo time today, Boards of Canada projected a video onto a big screen in Shibuya, as anticipated. No word yet on what, exactly the video was, though it seems to have contained new music. A fan broadcast the screening live on Ustream (see below). Update: Watch a fan-shot video of the screening below, via FACT.
Tomorrow’s Harvest is out June 10 in the UK and June 11 in the U.S. via Warp.

Video streaming by Ustream

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Giant Carnivorous Plant Found In Silicon Valley_

oddly — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:34:09 +0000

Yahoo! is a carnivorous plant whose prey-trapping mechanism features a deep cavity filled with liquid, known as a pitfall trap.

Startups, such as Flickr, Tumblr, and Del.icio.us, are attracted to the cavity formed by the cupped leaf, often by visual lures such as anthocyanin pigments and nectar bribes. Yahoo!’s rim (peristome) is slippery, when moistened by condensation or nectar, causing startups to fall into the trap. Yahoo! may also contain waxy scales, protruding aldehyde crystals, cuticular folds, downward pointing hairs, or guard-cell-originating lunate cells on the inside of the pitcher to ensure that startups cannot climb out.

The small bodies of liquid contained within the pitcher traps are called phytotelmata. They drown the startup, and it is gradually dissolved. This may occur by bacterial action (the bacteria being washed into the pitcher by rainfall) or by enzymes secreted by Yahoo! itself. Yahoo! may also contain mutualistic insect larvae, which feed on trapped startups, and whose excreta Yahoo! then absorbs.

Whatever the mechanism of digestion, startups are converted into a solution of amino acids, peptides, phosphates, ammonium and urea, from which Yahoo! obtains its mineral nutrition (particularly nitrogen and phosphorus). Like all carnivorous plants, Yahoo! exists in locations where the soil is too poor in minerals and/or too acidic for most companies to survive.

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The Creator of the GIF Says It’s Pronounced JIF. He Is Wrong_

oddly — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:01:48 +0000

Along with whether or not Al Gore invented the Internet, figuring out the correct pronunciation of GIF is one of the earliest questions of the Internet. I grew up believing it was hard-G GIF. Most people I know pronounce it like that too. Even the White House agreed on pronouncing GIF like ‘gift’. But we have to re-evaluate the whole argument again because the inventor of GIF—PAPA GIF Steve Wilhite—says its pronounced JIF. What. The. Hell.
Steve Wilhite, who is accepting a lifetime achievement award at The Webby Awards, told the NY Times how annoyed he was at the debate over the pronunciation of GIF:

“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”

You hear that? They are wrong. He’s saying we, the people of America, are wrong. It is a soft ‘G’, pronounced ‘jif’. Sir, why did you not name it JIF like the peanut butter then! End of story. I have long thought the story was over too, but I’m guessing we’re reading different books.
But he is Papa Gif, and parents have a certain amount of right over the things they bring into this world. If you want to name your kid Dwyane instead of Dwayne like Dwyane Wade, go ahead (but it’s still pronounced duh-wayne). And also, Wilhite isn’t exactly wrong in his thinking. The hard-G pronunciation of the letter G usually comes when a, o, or u follows it (think gas, good, or guy). We pronounce G’s as the soft-G when i, e, or y follow it (think giraffe, German, or analogy). There are exceptions of course, but in general practice, Wilhite has his point. GIF is followed by an I.
The problem with Wilhite’s thinking is how we see acronyms. Are they their own words or do they stand for something? Is BBC a word? Buhbuhck? Or is it B-B-C. If you combine the letters into a word, how does jay-peg for JPEG make sense as opposed to juh-peg? If GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format, does the ‘Graphics’ portion of the phrase point toward a hard-G in the acronym? It gets confusing, I know.
But the clearest difference for me is that there are things pronounced JIF and not spelled GIF already. The peanut butter comes to mind. Jiffy Lube. Back in a jiffy. If you want to pronounce GIF like JIF, spell it JIF (that’s also the JPEG Interchange Format, so I can see why maybe not). If you spell it with a G and use it as an acronym for the word Graphics, if there are words like gift, girl, give, Gizmodo and many more gi- words being pronounced with a hard-G and if the President of the United States of America decrees that GIF is GIF and not JIF, well then, you are wrong. Even if you are the father.

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