Hey there hi there ho there, Arduinos! Here we are on yet another beautiful summer day in August, with the breeze teasing the leaves where the birdies whistle in the trees and gorgeous sunshine everywhere.

I am telling you, the place is downright soggy with the stuff.

Sadly, the construction next door also continues apace, bringing all kinds of power tool noises, along with the occasional loud conversation in, I am guessing… Arabic? I really wish that real life construction jobs had progress bars, so I would have some idea of how close to being done they are.

And that would totally be the case if the houses were being printed instead of built!

Ctrl-P To Print House

Another player had entered the “some day you will print your house” game. Before, we have heard about Enrico Dini’s desire to print moon building out of lunar soil.

Well now Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis wants to print your entire house here on Earth, using a giant 3D printer taller than the final house that would print your house layer by layer, using various materials to add the plumbing and wiring as it went.

It is quite the heady concept, and the most amazing thing is that the whole thing would only take 20 hours. Imagine that, a whole house fabricated from scratch in less than a day.

To me, massive gizmo appeal aside, the most exciting thing about such a technology is that it could make houses much, much cheaper. There is not much you can do about the cost of the land, but that is only a small fraction of the cost of home ownership.

The real money comes from the cost of constructing the darn thing, and that cost in turn is mostly labour. Eliminate most of the labour costs, and we could create a future where the loan on your house is smaller than the one on your car.

And it could be a custom house, with everything exactly where and how you want it, all at no extra cost. They would just sit you down with a house building app with the limits of the printer built into it, and let you put together the house of your dreams.

Radically cheaper houses could have a massive ripple effect on the whole economy. Sure, construction workers would be out of a job… but whatever job they move to next, they will be able to afford a house. And imagine what the middle class would do without the yoke of a mortgage around their necks!

It could be a real game-changer.

Attack of the Drones

Drones, otherwise known as semi-autonomous aerial recon vehicles, otherwise known as the coolest RC plans ever with guns that really shoot and cameras that work and everything, have been making the news ever since drone strikes have started being very, very effective ways to kill people we don’t like.

But that is this morning’s news. The news of now is all about how the defense contractors at a recent drone convention are all talking about expanding these military drone technologies into civilian applications, like law enforcement and environmental monitoring.

Now obviously, this is getting a little creepy. First we start being able to kill someone in Afghanistan from the safety and comfort of some military base in the USA, then we have hordes of drones flying around at home waiting to catch us in a crime? Spooky!

The Panopticon lives!

But remember that the same technology could be used to catch corporations in the act of polluting, shredding documents, or whatever else those scumbags are getting away with right now.

Also, first responders like EMTs and firefighters could send in the drones first to see what they are up against before they even get to the scene, and have all the right materials and tools ready to go when they arrive and seconds could mean lives.

So, creepy or no, there could be a lot of benefits from a drone filled future.

Their Own Little World

And as usual, our last slot is reserved for whatever story has me the most excited right now, and in this case, it is a rather sad one.

Recently, in Kazan, a city in Russia, a tiny Islamist cult was discovered in an underground bunker where the group had been living for nearly a decade.

Around 70 people had been living in this bunker without running water or central heat, 20 of whom were children, some of whom had never seen sunlight or the outside world until the authorities discovered them and removed them for health checks on August 1 of this year.

One seventeen year old girl was found to be pregnant.

Now this is clearly a tragedy. I want to acknowledge that before I go off the deep end about the science and end up sounding like a psycho.

But I am dying to know more about these kids and this microcosm in which they have grown up.

I should point out, this is no spider hole. The bunker might have lacked modern amenities, but it was eight stories underground. Imagine an eight story apartment or office building, and you can see that their world was not as small as you might think.

Still, I really want to know about these kids. Has the lack of sunlight damaged them physically? Has growing up in a relative small environment caused parts of their brain to atrophy? What exactly did they know about the outside world before the authorities came for them?

The patriarchal leader(s) of this sect would have total information control within the bunker, so they could have told the people inside who were kept inside all the time anything they wanted about the horrible, evil, sinful outside world.

And they would have a very strong incentive to feed them a narrative that supports their isolation. So who knows? Maybe they told everybody that the infidels had destroyed the world, and if they left the bunker, the radiation would kill them.

So many questions! The scientist in me is dying to know.

The humanitarian in me is just glad those kids will get a chance at a normal life now.

I have a browser stuffed with stuff to share, and I do not really feel like squeezing more blood from my heart onto the page tonight, so let’s just get right down to it.

Here is a bit of modern comedy about the joys of text(ing).

Love the style on this piece. Sure, the art is beyond primitive, but it gets the job done, and the animation keeps up with the monologue perfectly, and I love that. I love things where the content is happening on more than one sensory level at a time. Like music videos which are about the song being sung, or animations based on speech like this one.

I love that kind of thing!

As for the text talk, while I have no cell phone myself, I talk via text online all the freaking time, and so his points more or less apply to me too. I have had all those things happen to me, and they piss me off solid. DO NOT IGNORE ME!

Next up, you have heard it before. You have seen it before. You may even have typed it before, especially if you are old enough to have needed to test a typewriter.

But odds are, you never knew it had actually happened… until now.

And here is the video proof!

Yes, the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Well, technically, he jumped onto the lazy dog then kind of fell off of him on the other side. But let’s not pick nits.

I wonder how long it took to get the obviously tame fox to do it. He obviously did not quite have the thrust, and it looks to be a youngish fox (though it is hard to tell with foxes) but I can easily imagine the person thinking “Wait… I have a brown fox who is very excitable and bouncy… and a dog who, if not exactly lazy, has a calm and placid temperament… quick, get the camera!”

And then it was just a matter of running the little foxy around to get him all excited and revved up, then getting him jumping over things and rewarding him, then getting him to try to jump the big dog.

Probably took a whole afternoon, but it was worth it, don’t you think? An idiomatic phrase, a sentence really, captured in real life, on film.

Now that we are warmed up with comedy, time to inject a little sadness, I am afraid. The following is a real letter an actual father gave to his son after his son came out of the closet.

This is what hate sounds like.

Click to enlarge to a more readable size.

I have heard of this sort of thing happening, as incomprehensible as it is. People disowning their children after learning their children were LGBT. As if it was a choice. As if their children were doing this just to hurt them. As if…

As if having an LGBT child was worse than having no child at all.

But it is quite another thing to actually read it, right there in the parent’s own handwriting, in their own words. I cannot imagine being so cold as to write something like that. When I read it, I get this profound sense of dead dread coldness from it. It is all so cruel and detached.

Not so long ago, it would have been dating outside one’s race that provoked such cold hate.

Hopefully, this hate too shall pass.

In fact, maybe it already has. Check out this heartwarming article, in which a father writes a letter to the future gay son he may one day have.

My favorite part :

I am still, as always, your biggest defender. Just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you’re any less capable of taking care of/defending yourself. That said, if you need me to stand next to you, in front of you, write letters, sign petitions, advocate, or anything else, I am here. I will go to war for you.

Emphasis from original article, but wholeheartedly endorsed by yours truly. I can really identify with that kind of strong protective urge. I am a mellow person on the surface, but if you threaten me and mine, I will fucking end you. Period.

I strongly suggest you read both letters. The second is the antidote to the first.

On to more fun stuff, as in, this truly epic tale of criminal stupidity from Charlottetown, my old stomping grounds, where I went to University.

I will attempt to summarize. Schmuck is picked up for being drunk in public after dancing down the middle of University Avenue (super busy) with a beer in one hand and a cheeseburger in the other.

Already hilarious. But it gets better.

They go to stick schmuck in a cell, but while changing from his street clothes to prison togs, a presumably naked schmuck says “Hey, you guys ever see Cyril Sneer“, then tucks his penis between his legs, bends over, and hops around.

I swear to God, I am not making that up. This story includes an incredibly obscene impression of the villain from The Raccoons.

I could not make that up. Even my perverted imagination has limits.

So during his no doubt hilarious impression (seriously, how does one acquire that skill), the police notice the edge of a plastic bag sticking out of of schmuck’s rectum.

Yup. Schmuck is packing drugs in his rear compartment. So what might have just been a night in the drunk tank turns into a drug possession charge (4 hits of Hydromorphone for schmuck, and all because of his Cyril Sneer Naked Dance.

And all in little old Charlottetown, back home on Prince Edward Island.

The story could not be more perfectly Canadian.

And speaking of perfect Canadian stories, this one is going around the Internet.

And in this one, we get to make fun of Americans! Joy.

Seems an off-duty cop from Kalamazoo was in Calgary and some people who were giving away free tickets to the Stampede approached him to ask if he had been to the Stampede yet.

Clearly, this was an argument that said off-duty cop should have been able to carry a concealed gun!

At least, that is what said cop argued in a letter to the editor of the Calgary Herald.

Here is his version of the encounter :

Recently, while out for a walk in Nose Hill Park, in broad daylight on a paved trail, two young men approached my wife and me. The men stepped in front of us, then said in a very aggressive tone: “Been to the Stampede yet?”

We ignored them. The two moved closer, repeating: “Hey, you been to the Stampede yet?”

I quickly moved between these two and my wife, replying, “Gentle-men, I have no need to talk with you, goodbye.” They looked bewildered, and we then walked past them.

I speculate they did not have good intentions when they approached in such an aggressive, disrespectful and menacing manner. I thank the Lord Jesus Christ they did not pull a weapon of some sort, but rather concluded it was in their best interest to leave us alone.

Would we not expect a uniformed officer to pull his or her weapon to intercede in a life-or-death encounter to protect self, or another? Why then should the expectation be lower for a citizen of Canada or a visitor? Wait, I know – it’s because in Canada, only the criminals and the police carry handguns.

Some people think this is an expert level troll pulling our chains, but the Herald insists that it is the text of a real letter they received.

I know which I prefer was true. I want it to be a real letter so I can laugh at it. What kind of a pussy gets that threatened by two guys trying to give them free tickets then feels all macho when they go away, but still wishes he had been packing heat?

I picture this guy as a shrimpy little guy already a little freaked out by the simply enormous culture shock between the US and here (these clean streets can only be the product of COMMUNISM) who then gets approached by a few big Alberta rednecks and covers his own cowering fear by pretending like they were some big deal threat. Fools the wife, or so he thinks.

Pathetic, really. Yes, you are right, in Canada only the cops and the crooks have handguns. And that is exactly how we like it, because it means that Canada is so safe that nobody else even feels the desire to have one.

Maybe that is because we are not surrounded by cowardly paranoid Americans with gun fetishes, just itching for an opportunity to commit legal murder with their oversized phallic symbol.

Just a thought.

That is it for this week, folks! Tomorrow, we tackle some way cool Science stories!

See you then!

I will not talk about how subjectively recent the last entry seems.

Instead, let’s talk science! Been a pretty good week for cool science stuff and I am happy to my writing all about it on this lovely August evening.

I will also not talk about how rapidly this summer seems to be passing me by.

Tonight, we have gamer science, scary cool space science, scary bad hacker science, and autonomous car related science. Four fun stories, and what the hell, let’s get right down to it.

First, we have gamer science.

Gaming Of The Future

We will start off with the Kickstarter page of a way cool technology with a ridiculously pretentious and overblown name, Oculus Rift.

Believe it or not, that is not the name of an obscure cult game from the DOS era or a Star Trek destination that seems far too good to be true… and is. It is a VR helmet that promises to deliver that fully immersive video game experience that we all thought we would have by now, back in the 90’s when the whole “virtual reality” buzz was going around.

Here is their spiel :

With an incredibly wide field of view, high resolution display, and ultra-low latency head tracking, the Rift provides a truly immersive experience that allows you to step inside your favorite game and explore new worlds like never before.

Sounds good to me. I have only been waiting for something like that for like, my entire life. And those are the three things that nobody that I know of has gotten all working at the same time before. You were always sacrificing at least one of them to get the other two to work.

The low latency is especially important, because VR systems which did not update the screen fast enough when people turn their heads before (in other words, high latency) actually made people acutely motion sick because what their eyes were telling them and what their inner ear was telling them was badly out of sync. Makes me feel ill just thinking about it.

And it makes sense that this is the time for the VR revolution to finally happen, in this era of dirt cheap accelerometers and motion tracking software.

I hope these guys make it. I only wish I could donate.

Devourer of Worlds

A warning for Felicity : the following story is scary and about a massive black hole. You might want to skip this one and pop down to the one about black hat hackers.

Here is the scary space story : In a distant galaxy, far far away from our own little cosmic back yard, a super massive black hole is devouring a star, and we get to watch.

Heck, we even get to listen. Well, “listen”. It turns out the ripples in space caused by this massive calamity are so regular, they can be likened to sound^[1], and if they were a sound, they would be rockin’ the celestial spheres at a completely inaudible 4.8 milliHertz.

So, not exactly the next “sound” to rock the charts, but still, pretty damn cool.

Now of course, as a science fiction thinker, I immediately imagine that the star involved has a wise and ancient civilization on one of its planets that will be tragically destroyed by the incessant munching of this very real version of Galactus or Unicron.

Of course, it is equally likely that one of the planets is host to a race of complete and utter bastards for whom all the good and decent species of the Universe will shed not a single tear.

It’s just fun to speculate.

Four Million Places To Stay

On to some bad news for the hotel industry : a Black Hat type hacker has figured out a way to seamlessly hack into about four million hotel room doors that use those swipe cards as keys.

Turns out, all you need is an Arduino microcontroller and the right software, and you can essentially read the code for the door right off the lock, and then just feed it back in, and presto, the door opens. It is exactly the sort of technology that heroes and villains have in action movies, only presumably without the huge LED that displays each number of the code as it is cracked.

I have wondered whether such a hack was possible ever since my first science fiction convention, when I first encountered the keycard locking system. I reasoned that it was highly unlikely (at the time, before the wireless revolution) that all these locks were connected to a central computer, and therefore their locking code had to be stored in the lock itself.

So I can only assume that these four million locks are pretty old by today’s standard. And they will all have to be changed. This is not a software problem. If the “key” to unlocking the lock is stored inside the lock, you have to change the whole lock.

Gonna cost some chains a lot of change.

Stop In The Name Of The Law

Finally, touching on one of my favorite subjects, autonomous driving, the EU will soon require all new cars to have autonomous self-braking systems in order to prevent crashes.

Makes sense to me. The technology has proved itself fully on the roads of the world. It clearly prevents a wide spectrum of crashes and makes those that do occur a lot milder. I see this as no different than requiring seat belts or airbags. Anything to make the road safer, and it is hard to make an argument that it violates your rights to crash if you feel like it.

What really intrigues me is the view down the road about ten years, when most cars on the road in Europe have one of these systems installed. Will we find that road casualties have taken a drastic drop?

I sure hope so. We all know that driving is one of the leading causes of death in society, but we don’t pay attention to it because it’s “normal”.

It is good to know that people are still working hard to make driving safer.

And a computer’s reflexes are a million times faster than yours.

I know I am beginning to sound like a broken record^[1], but wow that week went fast. Hell, the whole month feels like it has galloped past at breakneck speed, and boy does that make a fella feel old.

Now I won’t lie to you. It has been a pretty thin week for science. Nothing really spectacular has come down the line, and to be perfectly honest, I was almost tempted to skip this week entirely and give you something other than the Friday Science Whatever instead.

But no, I will not deny you your science injection this week.

In fact, let us warm up our science receptors with this marvelous video of what the brave men and women working in the International Space Station get to see every day.

A Room With A View

View from the ISS at Night from Knate Myers on Vimeo.

Now that, my friends….. is a view.

In fact, arguably, it is the best view available to live human beings in this entire Universe. It is the sort of view that I hope will fuel space tourism in the future.

You do not need to build a luxury hotel in space. All you need is the minimal creature comforts… and that amazing, incredible, indescribable view. Everyone who has seen that view, in person, has said it changed them profoundly, like a religious experience.

And not to be crass, but that kind of unique experience is something you can sell.

Imagine the social advantage you would have over other rich people if you had been to space when they had not. Imagine being able to hold forth endlessly on how it changed you, how it really gave you a fresh perspective on things, and how (this is the really juicy bit) you really cannot understand it until you have been there yourself.

That would get the rest of the private jet set salivating to go as well, and space motel rooms should then be sold to the rich like everything should be sold to the rich :

With an auction! Get them crawling all over each other to fund space exploration with their own personal fortunes when they will not pay for it with their taxes.

And of course, with enough capital, the industry expands, the number of space motels explodes, and the price goes down, till it becomes no more expensive than a mid-range expensive vacation.

Of course, by then simply everybody will have been to orbit, so what is a bored billionaire to do to get the upper hand at the country club to do?

Go to the Moon, of course.

The Fourth Bond^[2]

In other space related news, did you know that there was a third kind of chemical bond?

Not covalent, not ionic, not metallic, but a weird fourth type that can only form in the incredibly intense magnetic fields inside white dwarf and neutron stars. These fields are ten thousand times stronger than anything we could hope to create on Earth, because even if we could get the energy and the technology together somehow, the very intensity of the magnetic field would start warping the apparatus itself.

That is the freaky world of mega high magnetic field intensities. So to say that this discovery has no immediate real world application is a bit of an understatement.

But scientists are wondering whether the principles involved could be applied to the “barely past the stage of being science fiction” field of quantum computing.

Whether it can or not, attaching your fascinating but fairly obscure discovery to one of the hot science buzzwords of the day is always a good idea when it comes time for funding.

Certainly, we need all the help we can get as we come up against the limits of silicon computing and perhaps, even, the limits of binary computer and the semiconductor model entirely.

Up against such a challenge, all angles must be explored. Electricity was once just a scientific curiosity, after all, and people thought Maxwell’s equations were useless.

That is why we must fund basic science. You never know from what tiny and obscure seeds the next technological revolution will spring.

You Can Hear Me Now

Finally, an interesting development in the marvelously massive and fertile innovation space that is the world of cell phone technology : a phone that you can hear no matter how noisy your environment is.

And what intrigued me is that this is not accomplished via bone conduction, which is a technology that has been on the verge of becoming practical for at least a decade^[3], but something they are calling “tissue conduction”.

Instead of trying to get the vibrations that make up sound through our thick skulls, which tends to muffle things up a bit, tissue conduction transmits sound through the soft tissues of our heads.

This makes a certain amount of sense to me. After all, our ears, noses, and throat are all connected via sinus tissues and the Eustachian tubes. Using those soft tissues to get sound directly to the eardrum and to bypass the skull entirely seems at least plausible.

And the results of the research are apparently so good, they are rushing right into production :

The Urbano Progresso, currently available in Japan, is the first phone to use tissue conduction; the feature will debut in the U.S. within a year.

OK, first off… Urbano Progresso? that’s not a phone, that’s a Starbucks order.

Japan is so silly!

But back on topic, I am surprised they were able to go from concept to research to reality so quickly. But that is the light speed world of cellular technology for you.

I’m as big a fan as someone who does not even own a cellphone can be!

Seeya next week folks!

Whaddaya know, it’s TED Talk talk time again. Saw this one just a few minutes ago and loved it so much that I just had to share it will you nice people, and share what I thought about it, and see what you think about it once you have seen it.

So wrap your brains around this hot truth enema, chillun. This is the truth about what is really going on in the world and how bad things really have gotten. This is the truth without all the media bias and preconceived notions making it fit in our tiny little brains.

So like, dig it!

See? Things are not nearly as bad as we have been led to believe, and in fact we are living in the most peaceful, nonviolent, and civilized era ever known to the species Homo sapiens.

And I would add that it only looks to get better and better in the future.

Or did I just blow your mind?

Now our lecturer Stephen Pinker (pinker than what?) does an admirable job of covering all the major points as to why this decline in violence has happened and why we seems to have no clue that it happened and often, in fact, seem to believe exactly the opposite of what is known to be true.

He did such a good job of covering all the bases, in fact, that at first I had no idea where to begin to comment upon it. All the things that I thought of to say in my commentary while watching the talk, he eventually covered in the talk.

That is a rare feat indeed, and Mister Pinker should consider himself a potent theorist and communicator indeed if he can cover such a large subject so thoroughly that my ever questioning and nitpicking brain is not left with any unanswered questions.

But there are a few areas that overlap with my own theories on the matter and that I therefore would like to go over in more detail.

For instance, the cognitive bias created by the media feeding us a diet of crime, brutality, and violence, both real and fictional, all the time.

Pinker (what does he pink?) mentions the prime cognitive bias involved here : that we tend to think that things we can remember more easily are more probable than things that do not come to mind easily.

In others words, the easier it is to remember it, the more likely we think it is. This makes sense if we think of it in a pre-media world, where if you saw something happening, it was happening either to you or right in front of you.

In that sense, it makes sense to judge something as more likely if you have experienced it more often.

But since Gutenberg, we have been increasing the number and complexity of routes for having experiences that have nothing to do with what is actually happening to us.

And even though we know that what we are reading, watching, or hearing via media is not literally happening to us, our brains are not quite sophisticated enough to entirely dismiss these vivid fictional experiences, and still counts them on some level as if they had really happened.

And because a lot of these experiences revolve around violence in one way or another, and especially crime, they make us feel like the world is a dangerous, crime filled, violent place, when in truth, the world has never been safer.

And we, the media consumers, are not the passive victims of some malign media conspiracy in this process. Violence, even if it is just the emotional violence of interpersonal conflict, is what intrigues us. The essence of fiction is conflict, after all, and that is also what we seek in our media. As much as we might decry the news media’s thirst for blood and appetite for sensationalism, they would not do it if it did not work, and because we treat all media as entertainment, it is going to stay that way for a long time.

So it is actually a sick codependent relationship. And I am not sure how I would solve it. A “realistic” crime show would be very boring most of the time. A properly proportional news show would likely get zero ratings because it is, honestly, no fun. And so on.

The other thing I wanted to talk about from the talk was the idea that our moral expectations evolve far more rapidly than the moral reality. Our moral standards of what is acceptable have radically changed by many orders of magnitude since the sixteenth century. From the time when women (and men) of Dickensian London looked at the normal conditions of their world and cried out “This is not acceptable!”, there has been a strong pressure towards higher standards of what is acceptable for any human being to endure.

And this is a good thing, for the most part. It does cause the rather laughable phenomenon of generation after generation of passionate young progressives looking at the world and declaring that it is a horrible place, surely the worst place that has ever been!

But even this largely leads to them being motivated to go and fix things, so all is good.

In fact, it is this very renewal of outrage that moves society forward. It is, in fact, exactly how we got to such a good state of the world in the first place, and future social progress demands it.

In order to stride into an ever saner, more peaceful, more livable, more civilized future, we need people to continue to look at the world around them and say “This is not acceptable!”.

So what if the price we pay is a bit of a deficit in the historical perspective department. That seems a small price to pay for the kind of progress of which Pinker(no more jokes) speaks.

Perhaps we should just save this sort of perspective for when the people fighting the good fight begin to tire out, and wonder if they can ever win.

Then we can show them that people like them have been winning for five centuries at least, and that it shows no sign of stopping.

The tide is on our side!

Time for another TED Talk talk! This time it is about one of my all time favorite subjects amongst all my eclectic grab bag of interests, brain science. Neurology. The science of the MIND!

Hey, when you live between your ears like I do, you begin to wonder about the neighborhood!

And this talk is gripping on a few levels, because it consists of not only science fact, but one person, one scientist’s harrowing, terrifying, yet highly illuminating personal tragedy that gave her a great deal of insight into more than just science.

She got a glimpse into a very different mode of being.

Now before we start on her amazing personal story, I just want to say that I had no idea, before now, that the right half of the brain is parallel and the left half is serial. It makes sense, and actually makes for a very powerful combination. The parallel right brain gathers an enormous breadth of information from the world, filled with subtlety and rich with information. The left brain then sorts through this sensory feast and turns it into sequential consciousness. And all this happens so seamlessly that our frontal lobe can add its pattern seeking predictive powers, the amygdala can give it all emotional context, and the whole thing can be sythesized into one single big process that we are happy to call our “everyday consciousness”.

Just think, even as you read my words, this whole complicated orchestra is coordinating and combining in your head and you do not feel a thing. It is so good at its job that even knowing all this crazy stuff is going on means nothing. Just seems like another day at the office to you.

It is like a very well run stage production, where in the background there is what looks like madness and chaos but is actually highly complex levels of coordination and order.

But all the audience sees is a play, and because it is so well produced, the audience can forget all the details and just enjoy the story.

Now on to Jill Bolte Taylor’s personal story. I was completely unprepared for it. This was, after all, a TED Talk, and she began her talk in quite acceptable academic yet accessible TED mode, and then wham, a bombshell, the fact that she had a massive stroke in her sleep and woke up in a very terrible state, medically and scientifically speaking.

This immediately freaked me out a fair bit, and I am feeling a little freaked right now just writing about it, because this is exactly the sort of nightmare scenario that I worry about. I have a lot of weird mental moments, where my consciousness is not at all normal, and it is only through a concentrated effort for a long period of time that I learned not to panic myself over these moments by imagining they all mean that I am having a stroke or that I am finally going crazy.

So hearing her tell the story of waking up in a highly disordered mental state and that actually literally meaning she was having a stroke and in great danger and yet being unable to get it together enough to get melt at first… well, let’s just say it stirred the embers of a long suppressed fear and made me wonder about the amount of mental noise I suppress just to get through the day in my sad little life, and makes me wonder how much of that might actually be signal.

It helps that she tells her story with such charming casualness and wit, and that we can see that clearly, she is fine now, so we do not have to worry about how it all turns out.

And I was quite pleased when she talked about thinking something like “Wow, what a great opportunity for a brain scientist, to be able to observe her own brain while it breaks down!”, because I had been thinking more or less the same thing and feeling sort of guilty about it.

So when she said that, I laughed out of both humour and relief.

But what really impressed me about the whole thing is how she had basically had a transcendental experience of the exact same kind that others achieve through prayer, meditation, drugs, fasting, and so forth and so on.

The feeling of oneness with the universe, the perception of the universe as being entirely made of energy, the discovery of the infinite eternal now… these things all map precisely to the spiritual revelations of mystics, prophets, gurus, and other transcendental experience seekers all over the world and throughout history.

But this time, it was happening to a scientist who was in the unique position of being able to understand some of what was actually happening in her brain, and so she could interpret the experience without being entirely overwhelmed by it and leaving her grasping at straws to find a way to express it.

The idea that this transcendental experience has something to do with shutting off the left hand side of of the brain fascinates me. One might be tempted, after hearing about he transcendent euphoria, to say “To hell with the left brain, it sucks! I want what she had!”

But remember, it was her left brain that saved her life, and the lack of it that made saving herself so difficult. Spending time in the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind might well do all of us a lot of good, but it is no place to raise your kids. Like she said, she was basically an infant.

And I think it is a tribute to her very strong mind that she was able to keep it together enough to eventually get some help and save her own life, instead of just dissolving into La La Land and never coming out because she died there.

Still turned her into somewhat of a mystic, but then again, after what she has been through, who can blame her for being kind of a hippie?

I would honestly like to have the same experience myself.

Um, without the massive brain trauma, obviously.

Another seven days has passed in this hot and steamy summer season, and it is finally time to open up yet another can of whoop-ass knowledge on your collective buttocks…. of science!

Luckily, the summer heat has not quite parboiled all of my forebrain yet, so I as yet remain sufficiently compis mentis to act in loco cognis for you and bring you the most au courant and de rigeur science stories of this week.

But enough of those languages. For one thing, my spell checker is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

“None of these are WORDS! Why aren’t you DOING anything?”

Our first story is usually the light and breezy, optimistic story, so let’s talk about AIDS.

Big News On AIDS

Wait, come back! I meant… let’s talk about a possible proof that AIDS can be cured!

That’s right, cured. Not just handled, or treated, or controlled. Cured, as in gone, as in you go back to you life as if it had never happened.

Now the proof is slim, so to speak. It is largely in the form of this guy.

Timothy Brown, shown here with his pet human being dog.

Short version : he had AIDS, he got a bone marrow transplant to deal with a type of blood cancer, nobody expected that to cure his AIDS, but now he is five years AIDS free despite not taking his antivirals any more. Ta da!

So after almost thirty years of the word “cure” being quite firmly taboo in AIDS medicine due to the disease’s ability to hide in one’s DNA forever, now it just might be OK to talk cure again.

What’s the cure? Well, in one percent of the population, that HIV never leads to AIDS because their white blood cells have a slight mutation that HIV can’t handle.

These people are called elite controllers ^[1], and it was from an elite controller that Timothy Brown got his bone marrow transplant.

Now bone marrow transplants are not child’s play for either donor or recipient, so this is not exactly going to become the standard procedure. But it points the way towards a possible cure.

And if we take down AIDS, things are going to get freakay.

Never Forget A Password Again

Because basically, you will never actually remember it in the first place.

Not consciously, anyhow. Bear with me because this is a little complicated.

But basically, it relies on what is known as implicit learning, that is, learning things without knowing you are learning them. The volunteers played a video game in which they had to intercept falling blocks. There were six places the blocks could fall, each corresponding to a different key on their keyboards.

The trick is that the placement of the blocks was not always random. In fact, the same series of thirty blocks was repeated around 100 times while the people played the game for like 45 minutes. ^[2]

Each time that sequence was repeated, the volunteers would react a little faster, and hence were “memorizing” the sequence without even having a vocabulary to describe it.

This could lead to a system where you establish your password by playing the game with a random set pattern embedded in it, and then you are the only person in the world who would be able to consistently get that exact pattern right faster than you would just random blocks.

Even if someone played the game morning noon and night to get good at it, they would simply be faster at the game as a whole. They would still not be faster at only the right sequence of blocks.

And the bonus would be that nobody could force you to reveal your password, because you do not even know it to start with. Only your reflexes know it.

More trouble than it is worth for the average consumer, but I can see it having applications in very high security situations.

Science Wants To Be Free

Finally, a very interesting and stimulating story from the UK, where the government has ordered that all government funded research must be made freely available to the public by 2014.

This opens up a huge can of worms about how science works as an industry and as a phenomenon, as well as poking at the very substrata of scientific academia.

From the point of view of pure science and the advancement of human knowledge, it is a fantastic development. Nothing accelerates the cause of human knowledge and progress faster that the free and unfettered exchange of information, and having all public science be publicly available would mean that there would be no need for scientists to duplicate one another’s research all over the world because they are all hoarding knowledge in order to get funding.

Instead, everyone could have all the up to date data and results all the time, and hence, the state of the art (or in this case, science) would progress at a far faster rate.

And for a science loving, progress loving, big time intellectual nerd like me, that could not be more awesome if it tried.

But there are practical concerns. For one thing, there still has to be the regulatory effect of the scientific journals. They serve to evaluate various experiments and studies and weed out the junk science, the weak science, the incomplete science, and so forth.

That is why you cannot have, as some suggest, science published directly to the people. That would lead to far too much mass confusion about what was real science and what was not.

Still, I look forward to more nations taking this approach, and via the Internet, giving science the kind of supercharge it needs to face the problems of the future.

Which it sort of created.

Here are some videos I have come across recently. Surprise : only ONE is a TED talk!

First off, we have this charming clip of an adorable nerd girl and her amazing journey to complete a pretty daunting and impressive task.

Yes, she does impressions of all one hundred and fifty one of the original set of Pokemon. Now, I am only a little Pokemon literate. I have played the video games a fair bit (especially the Gameboy version of the Pokemon Collectable Card Game) and watched a bunch of the series, but it has never been more than a slight interest of mine and so I have no idea just how well she does her impressions.

I mean, they all seem pretty good to me, but what do I know? I never even learned the Poke-rap.

What I do know is that she is darned adorable doing them. I had a lot of fun watching this video. Not only is it just fun watching her make silly faces as she makes silly noises, but it was just cool to hear all of the Pokemon’s signature “the only thing I can say is my name if you are lucky” noises in a row. A lot of them I had never heard before.

Plus, of course, I adore people who puts a lot of time and effort and love into things that other people might think of as silly, pointless, childish, or inane.

In other words…. nerds. Know what I am saying?

Next up, a magnificent sign of the progress of gay rights : a very pro-gay anti-homophobia rap song.

But um, spoiler alert : bummer ending warning.

I sort of knew it would not end well when I watched it the first time. I just had a deep intuition that this would be a cautionary tale of just exactly how homophobia kills every single day.

I am really impressed with the level of social progress that a video like this represents. We are a long way from all that gangsta bullshit about hating faggots and beating up faggots and so on. Hip hop has had a seriously homophobic culture for twenty years or more, and it is good to see someone have the balls to confront that and tell a different side of the story.

Plus, I think the young actors do a very good job. I felt the love between our two principals. I felt Roderick’s deep, crazy pain. I understood how someone in that kind of profound conflict might do someone completely insane and wrong in order to resolve it.

I felt maybe the transition between what seems like it will be a happy ending, and when Roderick pulls out the gun, was a little too sharp. It did not totally feel real to me. Then again, the plot of the video has to follow the lyrics of the song. Not a lot of time to develop really solid, naturally flowing characterization in a five minute music video,.

Still, that shit was solid. Word.

Next up, we have a ten minute movie that is way better than 99 percent of the rehashed crap that Hollywood shits onto the screen in ninety minute grunts these days.

And it has a special treat at the end that if you are like me will absolutely blow your mind.

Now that is how you make a fan movie. I already loved the movie before that absolutely kick ass action scene at the end. The mood and the atmosphere had me mesmerized. Everything had that perfect clarity and texture of a really vivid dream. Realer than reality, in a way. Stylized only in ways that made it more awesome. That is serious craft.

And obviously, the action sequence did not come as a surprise. You just knew those evil motherfuckers were going down. And damn, did they go down good. I love how they handled the blood. Probably not very realistic, but it made it all the more satisfying.

(SPOILER ALERT) No, what blew my mind was the Punisher symbol on the shirt he gives the kid at the end. I saw that and my brain was frozen for just a heartbeat, like it could not contain my surprise and delight, and then I am all ‘HOLY SHIT! THAT WAS FRANK CASTLE! THAT WAS THE PUNISHER! HOOOOOLY SHIIIIT!”

And there was much rejoicing. I was pretty much incapacitated with nerd glee for like five minutes.

And that was something I just had to share with you, my beloved readers!

Finally, that TED Talk I mentioned earlier.

The guy speaks in a rumbling, rambling monotone, but stick with him, because he is quite hilarious and incredibly brilliant to boot.

This is the latest TED Talk I watched, and it just became more delightful as he went along. He has a marvelous dry sense of humour, with quite a wicked snap to it, and that would be enough to make his talk quite a lot of fun.,

But when he started talking about some of his group’s designs, I began to really take notice, and by the time he was talking about those cities he is designing in China, I was feeling someone like religious awe for this man who talked so much sense.

His cities sound absolutely brilliant, and for someone like me who hold efficiency as a primary virtue, the ability to create such a marvelously efficient system that optimizes all the important variables of human life, even to the point of making sure every street gets a fresh breeze and the town’s human waste creates natural gas for cooking!

I cannot sufficiently articulate how excited I am by such things. The cities of the future will be designed with the full human equation in mind. It will be designed to make us all as happy as we can be, and that includes keeping us cool with the environment.

And I love how he talked about not being anti-growth. Growth with happen no matter what.

The question is, what do we want to grow?

It’s a very spooky Friday the 13th!

Actually, it is not even vaguely spooky. It has been a lovely summer day except for a few moody gray moments to keep us on our toes, not a single particularly unlucky thing has happened to me (at least, nothing outside regular probability), I had a pretty good therapy session, and all in all, it has been a lovely day. Take that, triskaidecaphobia!

Besides, everyone knows it’s unlucky to be superstitious! Thank goodness I have never been superstitious, knock on wood.

And we are certainly lucky in that I have a full, metric bevy of science stories to share.

So let’s get down to it, boppers!

Let’s start off in the world of music, with a development that is sure to piss off a lot of people with painted vans and feathered hair : a stringless guitar simulator that anyone can play.

A Montreal tinkerer named Miroslaw Sowa teamed up with a Toronto software engineer named Vsevolod Zagainov to take over the world via chess create the Tabstrummer, an all-electronic guitar simulator where the musician (?) just touches both sides of the neck of the guitar to indicate where they would put their fingers on the frets of a guitar, and strums across a circuit that represents the strings.

All this sounds faboo to me. I come from a long line of guitar players, and I would love to learn to play, but I am simply too much of a wimp to shred up my fingers in order to build callouses, like I have seen my relations do. If someone can take the knifelike metal strings out of the equation, I would be more than delighted.

Of course, if it sounds like crap, it will not matter how easy it is to play. The kazoo is easy to play too, and a lot cheaper.

Next up, we have a fascinating story from the world of anthroplogy, once I have been sitting on for a while but which I just have to share with you now.

Warning, this does come from the Daily Mail, but still, give it a go.

It is the story of what might be called Britain’s Atlantis, an enormous ancient settlement in what the scientists call Doggerland, a vast area that was highly populated circa 20,000 BC, but which slowly sank under the waters of the North Sea as sea levels rose.

So that which was once verdant plains and valleys is now under hundreds of feet of icy cold water, which makes the settlement find even more exciting because the cold waters should preserve much of what these ancient people made.

So it truly is like a time capsule from our ancient past. The as yet unnamed settlement had tens of thousands of residents, and the amount we can learn from such a staggering find is incalculable.

Personally, I am very interested in their diet. What was their agriculture versus wildcrafting mix? Obviously, with so many people living close together, urbanization and specialization had been achieved. Did they have commerce?

Next up, we have one of my favorite things in science, a genuine mystery! And not just any kind of mystery… a SPACE MYSTERY of TITANIC PROPORTIONS!

See, something is up on Titan, the moon of Saturn. An enormous vortex 3,200 miles across has formed in the atmosphere around Titan’s south pole, and nobody knows why.

The problem is that we do not know a lot about Titan’s seasons. A Titanic year is roughly thirty Earth years, and so we do not have a lot of years of climate data to analyze. For all we know, this happens every other year on Titan, and we just have not watched it long enough to know.

Throw in the effects of Saturn on its satellites, and the satellites on each other, and we really have no clue what is up on Titan.

This could be perfectly normal Titanic weather patterns and if we are around and watching one hundred years from now, we will see it again.

Or it could mean that aliens are sucking up Titan’s atmosphere in order to recharge their mega death blasters before attacking the sweet, succulent jewel that is… The Earth!

We just do not know.

And finally, what is cooler than a SPACE MYSTERY? Why, lasers of course!

And what is the coolest, most awesome laser in the world? Why, the most high energy one, of course.

Well how does 500 trillion watts of laser power strike you?

That is the latest benchmark for the extremely amazing laser at the National Ignition Facility in California, U S of A. A thousand lasers fired simultaneously at a target only 2 mm in diameter, using a mind melting (literally, if you got in the way) 300 terawatts of power.

Now, just what is it the National Ignition Facility is hoping to ignite? Glad you asked, John. What the National Ignition Facility is hoping to ignite is nuclear fusion, the same process which keeps our beloved Sol pumping out the energy that all life on Earth needs to survive.

So if we could successfully spark up nuclear fusion by zapping a highly compressed pellet with enough energy to get things rolling, we could manufacture, on demand, miniature stars which would provide enormous amounts of energy for thousands of years with no additional input.

Fusion is just that efficient. And if you can make one, you can make as many as you like. Imagine a future where every city has its own captive star giving it clean, limitless energy. Energy so cheap they do not even bother to meter it any more. Power so cheap that fossil fuels cannot even begin to compete on price, and so their use just fades away, and the idea of powering your vehicle with gasoline will seem as bizarre, esoteric, and needlessly expensive as powering it with whale oil.

That is the dream of fusion, and it is one I share.

Plus, you get to build huge frickin’ lasers in the process!

How cool is that?

Hey there science fans! It is the July, and that means it is Summer, which means I get to see nice sunny days out the window of my lonesome garret, which is always nice. I love sunshine, despite the fact that it inevitably comes with heat, which makes me ill and in pain.

But still, like a lot of people, sunshine and blue skies just seem to perk me up a little. So as long as I stay well hydrated, I am going to enjoy the summer views.

It is a big big week in science, what with the Higgs Boson spotted at last, which means the Standard Model survives, and a lot of news types have to do their best to look like they understand what the hell the whole thing is all about.

I don’t claimed to really get it. Theoretical physics left me behind a long time ago. But what the hell, we will talk about it anyhow.

But first, a fun little scientific curiosity courtesy YouTube.

Pretty weird huh? The big egg is the size of a medium potato, and has a normal sized egg inside! I love the kids going “weeeeeeeird!”. And I am with the mother. That poor bird. Passing that thing must have been an all day cluck.

I figure an egg got stuck inside, and the only thing Miss Hen’s body could do to get rid of it was form another egg around it.

And just think, in more ignorant times, people would have been freaking out about this monster egg and possibly burning people at the stake over it.

Now, we just put it up on YouTube and go “Wow. Weird. ”

Next comes a story that I knew I had to share simply from the idea alone : a dark matter detector made of DNA.

I mean, how marvelously Lovecraftian is that? Dark matter! Living matter! The two shall combine and bring about the End of Days! And lots of goopy tentacle stuff will squish about! Mua ha ha!

The actual science is a tad beyond me, but the idea is that if this dark energy/matter stuff is all around us, then the Earth moving through it must push it forward like a ship creating a bow wave in front of it, and if they hang growing strands of DNA from nice dense gold atoms, when the dark matter hits the gold atom, the DNA will fall off, and they will be able to then sequence the DNA and figure out when it got knocked off.

All very clever, if you ask me. I love the fact that we have come to the point when we realize that we know, definitively, mathematically, that we have no idea whatsoever what the majority of the universe is made out of, or even what it is.

That sort of thing just makes me giddy with joy. Such a marvelous mystery! And what a marvelous humbling of our scientific hubris.

And speaking of scientific humility, a rather humbling and embarrassing story has emerged from Japan, where it has been revealed that a Japanese anesthesiologist completely faked 172 papers.

And not just for fun, either. On the strength of these completely bogus papers, he got a professorship, public funds, speaking engagements, and even had the gall to apply for a Japan Science Prize based on his entirely fictional work.

He made up patients. He forged the signatures of other scientists. He created entire case histories out of thin air. And he got away with it one hundred and seventy two times.

That is the real scandal. It is not as bad as it sounds, because he was smart enough to fake really boring, marginal research that has no real impact on the field, which is how he got away with it for so long. The world of scientific academia works on the “publish or perish” rule, and so every professor is trying to get their studies published, but there are only so many journals (and judges) to go around, so only the really important seeming research gets the thorough scrutiny that, in theory, all of it should.

This creates the inefficiency that someone like the person in question, Yoshitaka Fujii, can exploit in order to build a fairly mediocre academic career based on bogus science.

It is more embarrassing than damaging, and I have to admit that, while the scientist in me wants to box Yoshitaka Fujii’s ears soundly for muddying the waters with his garbage, the humorist in me finds the whole thing pretty funny.

Sad, but funny.

Well, I have put it off for long enough. Let’s talk Higgs Boson, shall we?

The news story is that they have found it, or at least, what is probably it, or something like it.

See, it is already a hard story to tell.

Anyhow, the idea is that the Higgs Boson would be the elementary particle of mass. Without it, nothing would have mass, everything would be moving at the speed of light all the time, there would be no matter, and basically the Big Bang would have changed nothing.

So far so good. And the reason finding the good old HB is such a big deal is that it was the last elementary particle which had been predicted by what is known as the Standard Model of physics but not actually observed.

The tricky bit was that it took building the Large Hadron Collider (which took fifteen years and billions of dollars) and doing millions of collisions a second for months and months just to get enough data to draw some kind of conclusion.

So, now we have it. The Higg Boson, found. The Standard Model works, and a lot of fanciful and attractive (but silly) alternate theories bite the dust.

What does this mean for the future? heck if I know. But if we know what gives things mass now, who knows. Maybe we could block it, create a massless space ship, and be able to travel at light speed without acquiring infinite mass?

Or maybe it will just lead to a better dishwasher soap. Who knows?

And that is the news this week, folks.