CUANAS

2011-09-25T19:33:00.000-07:00

Wealth of Papers from Recent Artificial General Intelligence Conference Held on Google Mountain View Campus

From Al Fin:

Brian Wang presents a nice overview of the recent 4th Conference on AGI, held in the heart of Silicon Valley. This year's AGI conference seems to represent an important evolution in much of the thinking in the AGI field, with a growing depth and sophistication of approach to the problems involved.

To get a better idea of what I am talking about, here are links to most of the papers presented at the conference.

And here are papers from a special workshop on "Self Programming in AGI Systems"

Videos from 3rd Conference on AGI

Artificial general intelligence of human level or higher, would be a radically disruptive technology to modern societies. Along with breakthroughs in scalable robotics, universal nano-assemblers, and a mastery of biological gene expression, a breakthrough in AGI would quickly overhaul most of the bases of modern economics and most other important foundations of everyday life in high tech societies.

Al Fin cognitive scientists have presented many criticisms to mainstream AI approaches -- particularly to the idea that human intelligence can be represented algorithmically. One of the papers presented at this year's AGI conference elaborates on this idea: "Real World Limits to Algorithmic Intelligence"

The biological basis of mathematical competencies is an interesting look by Aaron Sloman at the development of spatial and mathematical concepts in humans. (via Brian Wang) Sloman touches on the idea of the non-verbal or pre-verbal metaphor, an important key to understanding human learning and thought.

Overall, Al Fin cognitive scientists are pleased at the direction the AGI movement is taking, on the basis of the AGI-4 papers they have read, and on the topics covered generally.

There is no doubt a great deal of hidden treasure in the many papers provided at the conference links above. For those who find this sort of thing interesting, enjoy.

2011-06-21T14:44:00.001-07:00

All Artists Are Liars

From More Intelligent Life:

Shortly before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of instructional videos about acting, to be called “Lying for a Living”. On the surviving footage, Brando can be seen dispensing gnomic advice on his craft to a group of enthusiastic, if somewhat bemused, Hollywood stars, including Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn. Brando also recruited random people from the Los Angeles street and persuaded them to improvise (the footage is said to include a memorable scene featuring two dwarves and a giant Samoan). “If you can lie, you can act,” Brando told Jod Kaftan, a writer for Rolling Stone and one of the few people to have viewed the footage. “Are you good at lying?” asked Kaftan. “Jesus,” said Brando, “I’m fabulous at it.”
Brando was not the first person to note that the line between an artist and a liar is a fine one. If art is a kind of lying, then lying is a form of art, albeit of a lower order—as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain have observed. Both liars and artists refuse to accept the tyranny of reality. Both carefully craft stories that are worthy of belief—a skill requiring intellectual sophistication, emotional sensitivity and physical self-control (liars are writers and performers of their own work). Such parallels are hardly coincidental, as I discovered while researching my book on lying. Indeed, lying and artistic storytelling spring from a common neurological root—one that is exposed in the cases of psychiatric patients who suffer from a particular kind of impairment.
A case study published in 1985 by Antonio Damasio, a neurologist, tells the story of a middle-aged woman with brain damage caused by a series of strokes. She retained cognitive abilities, including coherent speech, but what she actually said was rather unpredictable. Checking her knowledge of contemporary events, Damasio asked her about the Falklands War. This patient spontaneously described a blissful holiday she had taken in the islands, involving long strolls with her husband and the purchase of local trinkets from a shop. Asked what language was spoken there, she replied, “Falklandese. What else?”
In the language of psychiatry, this woman was ‘confabulating’. Chronic confabulation is a rare type of memory problem that affects a small proportion of brain-damaged people. In the literature it is defined as “the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive”. Whereas amnesiacs make errors of omission—there are gaps in their recollections they find impossible to fill—confabulators make errors of commission: they make things up. Rather than forgetting, they are inventing.
Confabulating patients are nearly always oblivious to their own condition, and will earnestly give absurdly implausible explanations of why they’re in hospital, or talking to a doctor. One patient, asked about his surgical scar, explained that during the second world war he surprised a teenage girl who shot him three times in the head, killing him, only for surgery to bring him back to life. The same patient, when asked about his family, described how at various times they had died in his arms, or had been killed before his eyes. Others tell yet more fantastical tales, about trips to the moon, fighting alongside Alexander in India or seeing Jesus on the Cross. Confabulators aren’t out to deceive. They engage in what Morris Moscovitch, a neuropsychologist, calls “honest lying”. Uncertain, and obscurely distressed by their uncertainty, they are seized by a “compulsion to narrate”: a deep-seated need to shape, order and explain what they do not understand.
As with the woman who told of her holiday in the Falklands, the stories spun by chronic confabulators are conjured up instantaneously—an interlocutor only has to ask a question, or say a particular word, and they’re off, like a jazz saxophonist using a phrase thrown out by his pianist as the start of his solo. A patient might explain to her visiting friend that she’s in hospital because she now works as a psychiatrist, that the man standing next to her (the real doctor) is her assistant, and they are about to visit a patient. Chronic confabulators are often highly inventive at the verbal level, jamming together words in nonsensical but suggestive ways: one patient, when asked what happened to Queen Marie Antoinette of France, answered that she had been “suicided” by her family. In a sense, these patients are like novelists, as described by Henry James: people on whom “nothing is wasted”. Unlike writers, however, they have little or no control over their own material.
Chronic confabulation is usually associated with damage to the brain’s frontal lobes, particularly the region responsible for self-regulation and self-censoring. Of course we all are sensitive to associations—hear the word “scar” and you too might think about war wounds, old movies or tales of near-death experiences. But rarely do we let these random thoughts reach consciousness, and fewer still would ever articulate them. We self-censor for the sake of truth, sense and social appropriateness. Chronic confabulators can’t do this. They randomly combine real memories with stray thoughts, wishes and hopes, and summon up a story from the confusion.
The wider significance of this condition is what it tells us about ourselves. Evidently there is a gushing river of verbal creativity in the normal human mind, from which both artistic invention and lying are drawn. We are born storytellers, spinning narrative out of our experience and imagination, straining against the leash that keeps us tethered to reality. This is a wonderful thing; it is what gives us our ability to conceive of alternative futures and different worlds. And it helps us to understand our own lives through the entertaining stories of others. But it can lead us into trouble, particularly when we try to persuade others that our inventions are real. Most of the time, as our stories bubble up to consciousness, we exercise our cerebral censors, controlling which stories we tell, and to whom. Yet people lie for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that confabulating can be dangerously fun.

During a now-famous libel case in 1996, Jonathan Aitken, a former cabinet minister, recounted a tale to illustrate the horrors he endured after a national newspaper tainted his name. He told of how, on leaving his home in Westminster one morning with his teenage daughter, he found himself ‘stampeded’ by a documentary crew. Upset and scared by the crew’s aggressive behaviour, his daughter burst into tears, he said, and Aitken bundled her into his ministerial car. But as they drove away he realised that they were being followed by the journalists in their van. A hair-raising chase across central London ensued. The journalists were only shaken off when Aitken executed a cunning deception: he stopped at the Spanish embassy and swapped vehicles.
The case, which stretched on for more than two years, involved a series of claims made by the Guardian about Aitken’s relationships with Saudi arms dealers, including meetings he allegedly held with them on a trip to Paris while he was a government minister. What amazed many in hindsight was the sheer superfluity of the lies Aitken told during his testimony. Some were necessary to maintain his original lie, but others were told, it appeared, for the sheer thrill of invention. As Aitken stood at the witness stand and piled lie upon lie—apparently carried away by the improvisatory act of creativity—it’s possible that he felt similar to Brando during one of his performances. Aitken’s case collapsed in June 1997, when the defence finally found indisputable evidence about his Paris trip. Until then, Aitken’s charm, fluency and flair for theatrical displays of sincerity looked as if they might bring him victory. The first big dent in his façade came just days before, when a documentary crew submitted the unedited rushes of their “stampede” encounter with Aitken outside his home. They revealed that not only was Aitken’s daughter not with him that day (when he was indeed doorstepped), but also that the minister had simply got into his car and drove off, with no vehicle in pursuit.
Of course, unlike Aitken, actors, playwrights and novelists are not literally attempting to deceive us, because the rules are laid out in advance: come to the theatre, or open this book, and we’ll lie to you. Perhaps this is why we felt it necessary to invent art in the first place: as a safe space into which our lies can be corralled, and channelled into something socially useful. Given the universal compulsion to tell stories, art is the best way to refine and enjoy the particularly outlandish or insightful ones. But that is not the whole story. The key way in which artistic “lies” differ from normal lies, and from the “honest lying” of chronic confabulators, is that they have a meaning and resonance beyond their creator. The liar lies on behalf of himself; the artist tell lies on behalf of everyone. If writers have a compulsion to narrate, they compel themselves to find insights about the human condition. Mario Vargas Llosa has written that novels “express a curious truth that can only be expressed in a furtive and veiled fashion, masquerading as what it is not”. Art is a lie whose secret ingredient is truth.

Ian Leslie is the author of "Born Liars: Why We Can’t Live Without Deceit", published by Quercus and out now in Britain. He can be followed on Twitter at @mrianleslie. Picture credit: procsilas and jesus_leon (both via Flickr)

2011-05-06T13:39:00.000-07:00

Scientists afflict computers with schizophrenia to better understand the human brain

From Good Shit:

Computer networks that can’t forget fast enough can show symptoms of a kind of virtual schizophrenia, giving researchers further clues to the inner workings of schizophrenic brains, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Yale University have found.
The researchers used a virtual computer model, or “neural network,” to simulate the excessive release of dopamine in the brain. They found that the network recalled memories in a distinctly schizophrenic-like fashion.
Their results were published in April in Biological Psychiatry.
MORE

2011-02-18T10:56:00.000-08:00

World Wide Mind:

Imagining a World of Total Connectedness, and Its Consequences

From the New York Times:

Imagine, Michael Chorost proposes, that four police officers on a drug raid are connected mentally in a way that allows them to sense what their colleagues are seeing and feeling. Tony Vittorio, the captain, is in the center room of the three-room drug den.

He can sense that his partner Wilson, in the room on his left, is not feeling danger or arousal and thus has encountered no one. But suddenly Vittorio feels a distant thump on his chest. Sarsen, in the room on the right, has been hit with something, possibly a bullet fired from a gun with a silencer.

Vittorio glimpses a flickering image of a metallic barrel pointed at Sarsen, who is projecting overwhelming shock and alarm. By deducing how far Sarsen might have gone into the room and where the gunman is likely to be standing, Vittorio fires shots into the wall that will, at the very least, distract the gunman and allow Sarsen to shoot back. Sarsen is saved; the gunman is dead.

That scene, from his new book, “World Wide Mind,” is an example of what Mr. Chorost sees as “the coming integration of humanity, machines, and the Internet.” The prediction is conceptually feasible, he tells us, something that technology does not yet permit but that breaks no known physical laws.

Mr. Chorost also wrote “Rebuilt,” about his experience with deafness and his decision to get a cochlear implant in 2001. In that eloquent and thoughtful book, he refers to himself as a cyborg: He has a computer in his skull, which, along with a second implant three years ago, artificially restores his hearing. In “World Wide Mind,” he writes, “My two implants make me irreversibly computational, a living example of the integration of humans and computers.”

He takes off from his own implanted computer to imagine a world where people are connected by them. The implanted computer would work something like his BlackBerry, he explains, in that it would let people “be effortlessly aware of what their friends and colleagues are doing.” It would let each person know what the others “are seeing and feeling, thus enabling much richer forms of communication.”

Cool. Maybe. But beginning with privacy issues, the hazards are almost countless.

In discussing one of them, he cites the work of Dr. John Ratey, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard who believes people can be physically addicted to e-mail. “Each e-mail you open gives you a little hit of dopamine,” Mr. Chorost writes, “which you associate with satiety. But it’s just a little hit. The effect wears off quickly, leaving you wanting another hit.”

Dr. Ratey, he says, calls this “acquired attention deficit disorder.” Think about how this addiction to the quick informational hit would be compounded many times over by those implanted BlackBerrys shooting off constant information. “The effort would be so low, the rewards so intermittent, and the payoff so good, that a savage compulsion would result.”

Recognizing these dangers, and his own isolation, Mr. Chorost set out to make human contact. About to turn 40, in 2005, he had never been in love. Obsessed with the fact that he is short and deaf, by his own description, he undermined relationships. He enrolled in a workshop that a friend told him was about “love, sexuality and intimacy.”

The workshop was such a success that he attended six more and then became an assistant. Passages describing workshop experiences alternate with erudite passages about technology. Sometimes it’s hard to see the connection. Often it’s cringe-inducing.

Halfway into the weekend, clothes come off and participants are urged to hug someone: “I peered around, looking for likely candidates. I met the eyes of a chubby woman about my height, clothed only from the waist down. She smiled warmly and held out her arms.”

A fascinating discussion of optogenetics research is followed by the story of how Mr. Chorost met the woman who is now his wife, Victoria, on a dating Web site. I’m happy for him — Victoria sounds like a wonderful person. But as in “Rebuilt,” he’s shared too much intimacy, too many confessions.

Avert your eyes and get back to technology. Mr. Chorost’s curiosity is contagious. Even if you don’t quite follow the explanation and graphics about how the brain generates speech (discussing the work of computational neuroscientists at Harvard), you may be glad you tried. Edited out of the final book (I read an early galley proof) is the author’s assurance that if you just get through a few technical paragraphs, you’ll understand “how specific memories and perception can be manipulated.”

I didn’t. But I enjoyed the effort. And I liked the author’s belief in my ability to follow what he was saying.
Michael Chorost is not only a clear and concise science writer, but also a visionary. The coming integration of humans and machines may be a bit further off than he thinks, but he convinced me that we will get there someday.

Excerpt:

In Ramez Naam’s book More Than Human I learned of an idea that had been proposed by Rodolfo Llinás, a New York University neuroscientist. It was hair-raising. He suggested that engineers could bundle thousands of slender wires into a cable and insert it into the femoral artery in the groin. They would snake the cable through the bloodstream to the brain, as if doing an angiogram. As the cable entered the brain, the wires would spread out so that each one ended up in a capillary. Once put in place, each wire could detect a single neuron’s firing, and change its firing by pulsing a jolt of electricity to it.

Imagine it: a flower blossoming inside the brain, nanometer stalks splitting away from a micrometer stem. Expanding into every available capillary, touching every cubic millimeter of the brain, collecting terabytes of data in every second. By the same token, it could send in terabytes of data every second. It would be the most intimate interface ever invented. If you connected one person’s wired brain to another person’s, you could literally connect them together; they would have a real corpus callosum joining them (albeit with links of radio waves rather than wires.) And if you connected a number of people to each other via the Internet, then you would have a network in which each node was a human brain. The World Wide Web would become the World Wide Mind.

You wouldn’t think there’s room inside your capillaries to insert any kind of wire, but there is. As the image above shows, each nanowire is less than a micron (a millionth of a meter) across—substantially narrower than a capillary. Llinás’s lab has shown that it can be done in principle. They inserted platinum nanowires into the capillaries of tissue samples and detected the activity of neurons lying next to them. Power tends to dissipate rapidly from extremely thin wires, but researchers are trying, with some success, to create wires that can carry the necessary levels of current.[1]

Larger-scale technologies already exist. Doctors can now thread a tube from the groin into the brain to inject anticancer drugs into tumors. These devices, called microcatheters, are thousands of times wider than nanowires, at half a millimeter to a millimeter in diameter. Nonetheless, they show that it’s possible to go deeply into the brain by threading a wire through the bloodstream. In an article on microcatheters the New York Times quoted a doctor as saying, “Technically, I can go anywhere in your brain.”

Of course, anyone can see problems with using large numbers of nanowires in a living brain. How does one guide thousands of wires through tangled kinks of capillaries? (Brain capillaries are as gnarled and twisted as baobab tree branches.) How does one get each one of them to a specific location? What if the wires get tangled? How do you keep them from shorting each other out? What about blood clotting? What if a wire goes through a capillary wall?
But virtually all of these objections were raised against cochlear implants in the 1970s.

2011-02-08T15:54:00.000-08:00

Intelligent Design?

If this guy's theory were true, it would be an example of "Intelligent Design." Here, we find "The Cornell University Library" has published an article on the idea that the Physical Universve may simply be a 3-D Virtual Reality simulation, or in other words, an Intelligently Designed Universe.

LOL

From New Scientist:

The VR hypothesis

The idea that the universe is a giant virtual reality simulation is a well explored theme in science fiction. Films such as The Matrix have used this premise to great effect.

Now a New Zealand scientist is saying that physicists should seriously explore the idea. Brian Whitworth at Massey University says that it is perfectly reasonable to conjecture that "the world is an information simulation running on a three-dimensional space-time screen". Deciding whether or not this is true is a matter for science to resolve.

Assuming Whitworth is serious, what should we make of this idea? He readily admits that this is a weird idea but points out that it is no more strange than many widely held views in physics such as the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the big bang and Boltzmann brains.

So how would we be able to tell if our universe was a simulation? Whitworth says that if reality was to do something that information processing cannot, then it cannot be virtual. But he falls short of suggesting what this might be.

(As an aside, there are plenty of mathematical algorithms that are incomputable. They are the products of a physical human mind, so if they count as something that information processing could not come up with, Whitworth's idea is already dead in the water.)

Whitworth goes on to suggest various ways in which phenomenon associated with quantum mechanics and relativity can be explained in terms of VR.

He also claims that VR can resolve many of the philosophical questions associated with the Big Bang, such as what caused it and how could it arise when there was no space and time. His answer is that the universe simply booted up although he conveniently ignores all the questions that such a "Big Boot" would raise.

Whether the VR hypothesis is actually testable is a question Whitworth avoids. But without testable predictions about the universe that would distinguish this idea from other theories, the VR hypothesis is pure philosophy.

That's why it is almost certain to be ignored by mainstream physicists. It's not the first idea to suffer this fate - the physicist David Bohm proposed a small modification to quantum mechanics that made no difference to its predictions but ensured that the theory was deterministic.

Most physicists rejected it on the basis of Occam's Razor: that science should strive for the simplest theory that fits all the facts.

My guess is that Whitworth's work will go the same way.

2011-01-19T15:05:00.000-08:00

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2011-01-09T15:50:00.000-08:00

The Improvisational Brain

Feature by Amanda Rose Martinez / December 14, 2010

Watching a musician in the throes of an improvisational solo can be like witnessing an act of divine intervention. But embedded memories and conspiring brain regions, scientists now believe, are the true source of ad-hoc creativity

Credit: Flickr user maistora

One summer at the annual Bremen Music Festival in Germany, Robert Levin, a classical pianist, was in the midst of improvising a passionate and wild cadenza during Beethoven’s “C Major Piano Concerto.” A cadenza is a passage in a concerto during which the orchestra ceases and a soloist strikes out on his own, improvising within the style of the piece. Up until the early nineteenth century, many classical composers wrote space for these cadenzas within their works. Levin is one of a handful of musicians who has taken it upon himself to revive the practice of classical improvisation. He is world renowned for his ability to effortlessly extemporize in the styles of several composers, including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn. In this particular concert, however, Levin had gotten himself into a bit of a pickle.
“I was going whole hog,” Levin said, thanks to the permission Beethoven gave his renderers to modulate or change keys during his cadenzas. “I had gone really far afield and was in F sharp major. That’s as far away from C major as you can possibly get because if you keep going, you start to get closer to the other side.”
“It’s like the world,” Levin said, drawing a parallel to the structure of musical scales. “You go more than 12,500 miles around the equator and you might as well keep going.”
At this point, Levin pounded some F sharp major chords, and for a split second, he paused. “I was shocked at how far off I was and how crazy this all was,” Levin said. “I thought to myself: ‘Oh my god! How am I going to get home?’ ”
Imagine the pressure: Levin is sitting at the piano. A full orchestra of musicians, with instruments poised at the ready, not to mention the conductor, Sir John Eliot Gardner, are waiting for Levin to finish out the cadenza, so that they can resume the piece. And then there is the festival audience of thousands, some of whom, according to Levin, had sensed his predicament and audibly gasped.
“I looked down at the keyboard and imagined myself saying: ‘Save me! Help me!’ ” said Levin. “And literally—I felt this—I thought the keys looked up at me and said: ‘You got yourself here. You get yourself out.’ ”
What happened next, Levin said, was truly miraculous. “I started to play again. And so to speak, I slid on the banana peel of a diminished seventh chord and through some enharmonic sleight of hand—it was not planned—I suddenly found myself within sight of my front door, and I got home.”
There is something fascinating about the act of musical improvisation—that moment when a musician departs from the score, embarking on a thematically relevant, yet wholly spontaneous composition. We normally think of it as the province of jazz musicians, conjuring the iconic image of a sax player wailing through riffs in a smoky, dim-lit club. John Coltrane and Bill Evans were masters. Miles Davis was never much for rehearsal. He used to gather his band in the studio, rattle off a few suggestions for the broad shape each track should take, and hit record.
But many of the early classical composers—Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Liszt—were also known for improvising entire portions of their concerts. Liszt had a penchant for soliciting musical themes from his audience. Before a show, anyone could jot down a few bars of melody on a piece of paper. Some were original. Others were bits of recognizable tunes from the time, a popular symphony or aria. Liszt would then pull one of these melodies out of a hat and use it as a launching point. He’d reharmonize it or play it backwards, always wresting from it a spirited improvisation that could last for several minutes.
Regardless of genre, the appeal of improvisation is its danger. It’s an act of audacity, says Levin, but ultimately an act of profound humanity, given that it’s a communication between the performer and the audience. The musician takes a huge risk, trusting, hoping that his brain and fingers will successfully allow him to “walk the tight rope over the precipice and arrive at the other side,” Levin says. “Or you might crash and burn. You never know.” But the spectators, as they live vicariously through the musician’s adventure, love him for it.
How do musicians do this? When he’s ready to begin a cadenza, Levin says, he doesn’t have a plan. As many other seasoned improvisers claim, he just starts playing. It’s intuitive. But, Levin admits, he didn’t always know how to improvise. He had to learn. So the question remains: how can a skill that in its truest form is innate be learned?
Aaron Berkowitz, a cognitive ethnomusicologist, who took on the task of demystifying improvisation as the focus of his dissertation work at Harvard, has a theory. He likens the process of learning to improvise to that of learning a second language. Initially, he says, it’s all about memorizing vocabulary words, useful phrases and verb conjugation tables. Your first day, you might learn to say: How are you? I’m fine. “These are like the baby steps beginning improvisers take. They learn the structure of the blues. They learn basic chords and get the form down,” said Berkowitz. But they’re still very limited in what they can do.
A dedicated musician will immerse himself in the recordings of his chosen genre or composer, just as a language student might absorb foreign films or tapes of people speaking. Over time, both musician and student accumulate more phrases and ways to combine them. “But you still can’t really invent anything. [The language learner] can’t talk about politics or the environment,” Berkowitz said. “You’re still thinking: ‘Uh oh, here’s comes a verb. I have to put it in the past tense. I have to put it at the end of the sentence before I can say this whole phrase.”
But eventually, through constant practice, you get to the point where, scientists believe, these processes get pushed down into the subconscious. They don’t need to be consciously worked out anymore. They become a subroutine. Suddenly you realize you’re saying things you haven’t heard or memorized. You’re able to free-associate. Your brain begins exerting control at a higher level, directing bigger chunks of information that can be expressed as whole ideas.

The trajectory of acquiring a language, according to Berkowitz, where you begin with learned phrases, achieve fluency, and are eventually able to create poetry mirrors perfectly the process of learning to improvise. In the same way a language student learns words, phrases and grammatical structure so that later he can recombine them to best communicate his thoughts, a musician collects and commits to memory patterns of notes, chords and progressions, which he can later draw from to express his musical ideas.
Berkowitz was halfway through medical school at Johns Hopkins when he decided that his long-evolving interest in the intersection of music, music cognition and cognitive neuroscience could no longer be ignored. He decided to focus on improvisation mainly as a result of seeing Levin, a professor in Harvard’s music department, perform. “I was pretty blown away,” said Berkowitz. “If you want to talk about improvisation, he’s one of the grand masters.”
As it turns out, Berkowitz’s theory seems to explain Levin’s road to improvisational mastery almost exactly. For his early and intense exposure to Mozart, whose style was the first in which he learned to improvise, Levin credits his father, a dental ceramist. “He was absolutely taken with him,” Levin said. “He would smuggle 78s of Mozart into the house when we needed food more than we needed shellac records.”
When Levin was 12, he began a rigorous course of study with the legendary music teacher, Nadia Boulanger, in France. Levin credits Boulanger for giving him “a toolbox that contained everything that I needed for the rest of my life as a musician.” Later, when Levin began to improvise in Mozart’s style, he discovered he had in place the requisite musical vocabulary and grammar thanks to Boulanger’s keyboard harmony, sight-reading and transposition exercises.
Fluency arrived for Levin during thousands upon thousands of hours of practice. At a certain point, he acquired a Mozart mindset, which consists, says Levin, of a collection of idiosyncratic musical details—rhythms, chords, turns of phrase—that recall the distinct language of the composer.
What came next, however, was the somewhat unsettling period when he began improvising in concert, which, with all its risk, was a completely different beast. “At first I thought, I’d better have a safety net,” Levin said. Three hours before a performance, Levin would be lying there in his hotel room bed, trying to work out a mental roadmap for his impending cadenza. He’d get it all planned out and think “fine, I don’t have to worry about it.”
But inevitably, during performance, Levin would stray from his roadmap, forcing a choice. “You can think about what you should be doing instead of what you are doing and screw up completely or you can ditch everything you were going to do because you aren’t there, you’re somewhere else.”
Eventually, Levin just let go, and in doing so, made the crucial transition from fluency to poetry. “Now I prepare absolutely nothing,” he said. “The orchestra is playing and I know I’ve got twelve seconds, I’ve got eight, I’ve got six, I’ve got four, and if nothing comes into my head, I just start playing. I start to play a scale. I start to play something. And as I play, I know something is going to come to me.”
At this level of musical cognition, the improviser often achieves a seamless trade-off between his conscious and subconscious knowledge. He knows he’s creating the music and feels very much in control, yet he also feels as if he’s watching himself play, a paradox that Berkowitz calls the creator/witness phenomenon. “They’ll be playing and something happens that they didn’t quite expect,” Berkowitz said. “Then they react to that and it kind of starts this dialogue where the improviser is steering the ship, but is also being steered by the ship.”
Levin confirms this phenomenon, recalling his miraculous recovery at Bremen. “I was certainly the protagonist. Nobody else was calling the shots,” Levin said. “But, at the same time, I was watching myself do this and said: ‘Whew! Lucked out.’ ”
With a rough idea of how musicians learned to improvise, Berkowitz decided to go a step further. He wanted to know specifically how the musician’s brain acted differently when it was improvising as opposed to when it was just playing a scripted melody. Berkowitz teamed up with Daniel Ansari, a neuroscientist at the University of Western Ontario, and together they designed an experiment that would attempt to isolate the brain regions responsible for the aspect of improvisation that requires creativity.
Berkowitz had his test subjects, all classically trained pianists with an average of 13 years piano experience, perform a series of four musical tasks while inside an fMRI machine. A noninvasive brain imaging technique, fMRI uses powerful magnets to measure blood flow to brain regions that are being activated and deactivated during neural activity. As each subject lay recumbent in the machine, he or she would play a small, plastic piano-like keyboard, which had five keys. The first task constrained both melody and rhythm, and required subjects to play pre-memorized, five-note-long melodies while maintaining a fixed rhythm with the aid of a metronome. The other three tasks included improvisation in some form: one allowed the subject to create rhythms, while playing the memorized melodies; another had the subject create melodies in time to the metronome; and the third permitted freestyle generation of both melody and rhythm.
When Berkowitz and Ansari looked at the subjects’ brain maps, they found three regions that were activated during all tasks that involved improvisation, whether it was rhythmic or melodic. When it comes to determining the roles these regions might play in improvisation, Berkowitz is cautious, emphasizing that fMRI is just a tool—an inference tool—that allows assumptions to be made based on what is known about the region’s general function, but offers no definitive answers. Still, the implications are provocative.

One of the regions, the anterior cingulate, is enlisted for most cognitive tasks, especially when the brain needs to decide between a surfeit of potentially conflicting responses. A neuroscience test called the Stroop task has become famous for riling up this region. Researchers show subjects the word “red,” but it’s written in the color blue. They’re then asked to either read the word aloud or say what color it is. “You feel your brain sort of freeze for a second,” said Berkowitz, an indication that the anterior cingulate is working hard. During improvisation, the musician has myriad, varied choices for what to play at any given moment, so it makes sense that this region would be fired up.
Another activated region, the dorsal premotor cortex, acts as a type of command center for crucial sensory input about where the body is and how it negotiates space. If the body has to move, what will be its goal and how fast should it go? Analyzing this input, the region issues a plan of action. When the musicians started to improvise, this region, already active during the playing of memorized melodies, ramped up significantly, possibly due to the musicians’ need to execute anything they could conceive of playing.
The third region Berkowitz identified—the inferior frontal gyrus/ventral premotor cortex—has long been known as an area key to our ability to understand and produce language. While more recent studies have linked it to music processing, Berkowitz and Ansari are the first to show that it plays a role in generating music as well. This would seem to strengthen the theory that music functions similar to language in the brain.
These results were published in 2008, but Berkowitz and Ansari released another study in early 2010 that took their investigation of improvisation one step further, pitting musicians against non-musicians. Keeping the setup and tasks the same, the scientists isolated an additional brain region that appears to be involved in improvisation. Called the right temporo-parietal junction, this region powers up when a new stimulus occurs in our environment, stealing our attention.
“For example, if you’re walking through the forest, it’s all trees, brown and green, and then suddenly something red pops out,” Berkowitz said. “This is the area that might say ‘Oh, something in my field of vision has changed and I need to draw attention to it.’ ” When the musicians were playing memorized melodies, this region was active, but as they began to improvise, the region shut down. The non-musicians showed no change in the region regardless of their task. Turning off this region, Berkowitz said, likely allows musicians to apply a steely focus to their improvisation—a feat, which according to Levin is critical. “If the brain gets distracted because the rhinestones on the pendant of the woman in the third row suddenly catch the light and for even a fraction of a second you lose focus, the music can lose its sense.”
Within weeks of Berkowitz’s first study coming out, a separate fMRI study on improvisation was published by Allen Braun, head of the Language Branch at the National Institutes of Health and Charles Limb, an otolaryngologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Where the Berkowitz/Ansari study tried to zero in on only those brain regions responsible for creativity during improvisation, the Limb/Braun study took a more holistic approach. Its goal was to glimpse every brain region enlisted in any aspect of improvisation.
Designing musical freedom into the study, which focused specifically on jazz, was challenging. Limb casts jazz and science, respectively, as the ultimate free spirit and control freak. “They’re just not really natural bedfellows,” he says.
Limb, a jazz saxophonist and self-described music addict whose lab resembles a recording studio due to its full-size piano keyboard and profusion of speakers, worked for two years with a California engineer to design a realistic, 35-key, plastic keyboard. He asked his subjects, all consummate jazz pianists, to perform two sets of musical tasks, while lying recumbent in the fMRI machine with the keyboard resting on their laps. The first set, intended to be simple, either had the pianists play a C major scale in sequence or allowed them to improvise, one note at a time within that scale. The second set was more complex. The subjects either played a short, pre-learned jazz tune composed by Limb or they improvised over a prerecorded four-piece band.
Results showed a veritable symphony of activated and deactivated brain regions during improvisation, which included the regions noted by Berkowitz and Ansari. The strangest activity, Limb said, occurred in the prefrontal cortex, where the scientists observed a surge in medial prefrontal activity, the “self-expressive, autobiographical brain region,” and, simultaneously, a broad deactivation in the lateral prefrontal regions, the area that governs self-consciousness and inhibition. In other words, in the improviser’s brain, the area that imposes self-restraint powers down, allowing the region that drives self-expression, which ramps up, to proceed virtually unchecked. “This notion of trying to tell your own musical story, without the constraints of caring how well it’s going as you’re saying it, was really pretty intriguing,” Limb said.
And so it happened for Robert Levin, seated at the piano, seized with panic, at the concert hall in Bremen. Memories of note patterns and chords embedded by thousands of practice hours, we may be certain, arose from his subconscious, flooding his brain. His lateral prefrontal regions said “This is it—time to tell your musical narrative,” while his medial prefrontal region reassured him, saying “Don’t worry about how it comes out.” His right temporo-parietal junction turned down the dial on any audience gasps, his anterior cingulate made a series of snap decisions, and his dorsal premotor cortex organized them into a motor missive, which it then sent out to his fingers. A split second later, Levin started to play, and before he knew it, he was home.

2010-12-17T11:39:00.001-08:00

The most intelligent man in the world

The works of William Sidis (1898 – 1944 )
William James Sidis, born in Boston in 1898 to Russian émigré Boris, a psychologist and his wife Sarah, a physician, showed astonishing intellectual qualities from an exceptionally early age. By the age of one he had learned to spell in English. He taught himself to type in French and German at four and by the age of six had added Russian, Hebrew Turkish and Armenian to his repertoire. At five he devised a system which could enable him to name the day of the week on which any date in history fell. Hot-housed by his pushy father, Sidis entered Harvard at eleven, and was soon lecturing on 4 dimensional bodies to the University’s Maths Society. At twelve he suffered his first nervous breakdown, but recovered at his father’s sanatorium, and after returning to Harvard, graduated with first class honours in 1914, aged just sixteen. Law School followed and by the age of twenty Sidis had become a professor of maths at Texas Rice Institute.
It was then that his troubles began . Looking back at his social gaucheness, hatred of crowds, physical awkwardness and obsessions, it seems very probable that Sidis suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome. But decades before the condition was recognised his eccentricities and aloofness were put down to arrogance. His good looks didn’t help him and he was teased by his female students, especially when he pronounced publicly that he would never marry and intended to live the rest of his life in seclusion.
With Sidis, as with most freaks of nature, it is sometimes hard to separate fact from fiction. Take his IQ. It has been assessed at above 250 ( Einstein’s is reckoned at around 168), whereas modern psychologists insist that IQs over 170 cannot be measured. I read somewhere that he could learn a new language in a day and it has been reported that he was familiar with 200 languages. This seems unlikely. The popular image of him as reclusive comptometer operator whose main hobby was collecting tram transfers—is a travesty of the truth. Only in recent years has the true extent of Sidis’s genius emerged. Far from wasting his life in menial jobs, nerdy hobbies, and idle speculation, Sidis was a prolific writer, who at his death aged just 46 of a cranial haemorrhage, left behind a catalogue of significant contributions to cosmology , applied maths, transport system theory, anthropology and linguistics—all of which suggest that he had a wider intellectual range than did Leonardo.
CONTINUED

2010-12-12T08:32:00.001-08:00

Let's Be Reasonable About This

2010-12-12T08:16:00.001-08:00

I Wish I Could Describe Him To You

2010-11-05T16:46:00.001-07:00

Mick responds to Keith Life” by Keith Richards.Editor’s note: On a recent morning, the journalist Bill Wyman received a UPS package containing a typed manuscript. On reading it, he saw that it seemed to be the thoughts, at some length, of singer Mick Jagger on the recently published autobiography[1] of his longtime songwriting partner in the Rolling Stones, Keith Richards. A handwritten note on an old piece of Munro Sounds stationery read: “Bill: For the vault. M.”
From this, Wyman surmised that the package was intended for Jagger and Richards’ former bandmate, the bassist Bill Wyman, who has assiduously overseen the band’s archives over the past five decades and with whom Wyman the journalist coincidentally shares the same name. Wyman the journalist, a longtime rock critic, was once threatened with a cease-and-desist letter[2] from Wyman the bassist’s Park Avenue attorneys and felt no compunction about perusing the contents of the package. The manuscript he received is reprinted below.
I am, I see here, marginally endowed, if I read Keith’s sniggering aright. I do not sing well, either. I am not polite to employees; indeed, I have even been known to say, “Oh, shut up, Keith,” in band meetings. I do not appreciate the authenticity of the music or the importance of what we do. I want to “lord it over” the band, like James Brown. I am “insufferable.” I slept with Anita.
Most of that is in just the first quarter of this overlong book, but a tattoo of my failings sounds all through it and culminates in almost 20 full pages of rambling invective near the end.

I don’t mind this, really, for reasons I hope are understandable and will get into later. This is all from a guy pushing 70 for whom gays are still “poofters” and women “bitches.” I think so many things about Keith. We were close, the two of us, for many years. We had known each other in grade school, if you can believe it, in the same undistinguished eastern suburb. Then we bumped into each other in a train station at 18 or so and started talking about the blues. We were different; I’d already been on TV with my father, who was a fairly notable expert on physical education at the time. Keith was … rougher, let’s say. For the next nearly 10 years, we were rarely apart. Even after we were famous, we lived at each others’ flats or houses. We were still very young, and, like puppies, we’d cluster together.
We were barely a band before our lives changed, but I think still of the time we spent, squalidly, before we were a group, in a very cold and small flat, more filthy than you can imagine. Our flatmate Jimmy Phelge was a veritable comic virtuoso with a pair of soiled underwear. Certainly we—I—wanted to be famous, but can I point out our road to it was not absurd, exactly, but unthinkable, in the sense that we couldn’t even imagine a way to do it? The London music scene was entirely insignificant, and we didn’t even play the trad jazz (Charlie’s métier), which dominated.
Still, we practiced day and night out of some unspoken impetus, innocent suburban boys abruptly living quite near the edge of a dark milieu. This brings me to Brian, who played guitar very well and was a brittle devil. We knew that because of many things, not least that he spent an inappropriate amount of time beating up his girls in the next room. I’m not proud of that. Keith gives himself (too much, I think) credit for rescuing Anita, eventually, from Brian; but that of course was years later. Earlier, we both listened to or watched his cruelty, in the bedroom and elsewhere; we paid no attention to the half-dozen kids he’d fathered and ignored the savagery he accomplished on tour. We didn’t know better; we were priapic jackals ourselves, fucking even one another’s girlfriends if they got left, as it were, unattended. But it was wrong to have let Brian do that, and Keith should have owned up to this in the book.
I supposed it is a karmic justice for Brian that we continued to watch as he descended from there to hell, harried by the police and increasingly incapacitated artistically, which further estranged him from us. Oh, that’s not true; we didn’t just watch. We ushered him along, ridiculing him, you might say, to death as he began to lose his ability to contribute. Again, we were young. What were you doing at 25? We didn’t know about depression, insanity, addiction, or what acid might have done to him. It’s unclear to me whether the drugs diminished his ability to contribute or whether the drugs were in effect a way to cover up something that wasn’t there. The first song Keith and I wrote was a hit single; Brian couldn’t write a song to save his life, literally. And let’s remember that he was a total asshole.
I’m digressing but I’m trying to explain where we came from. We didn’t have a template. Nothing against Steven Tyler, but there’s a difference. We felt around in the dark; we were famous within weeks; and, in the end, we left a body or two behind us. We did these things, good and bad, together; we were friends.
The second important thing is Keith’s talent. We took it for granted, in a way, as he says. We felt it was our duty to get together and write a song, one good song each day we worked. He is kind to say I could take what he gave me and run with it. But he is the one who gave me the actual song to write the lyrics to. He wrote a dozen Top 10 hits in five years, and, after the band added Mick Taylor and essentially grew up, he wrote most of Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed. Again: What were you doing at 25? It’s interesting to me how no previous song we’d recorded would have a respectable place on those albums; and any song on them would have seem out of place even on Aftermath or Between the Buttons. Keith’s lurch forward was amazing. As a pure rock (not folk or pop) songwriter, I think he is not just without peer. I think he is unrivaled in depth and growth, from “As Tears Go By” to “Satisfaction” to “Jumping Jack Flash” to, I don’t know, “Gimme Shelter. ” “Monkey Man.” “Street Fighting Man.” The primal feel of the chording. The musicality of the intros and breaks. The innovation of the recording—cruder, no doubt, but I will argue far more emotionally powerful than the Beatles’. The winding, intermixed guitars he almost desperately loved. Without him, what would I have been? Peter Noone? It is hard to use a word like integrity about a band as compromised, as self-bloodied, as we were. But for some years, unlike any other group, the Beatles included, we declared war on that silly, hypocritical, repressive, and arbitrary society in which we lived. The only ammunition we had were Keith’s songs. The lyrics, I confess now, may have been in their defiance just épater la bourgeoisie and in their poesy derivatively Zimmerman-esque. Even when they weren’t, no one would have paid attention if the chords weren’t arresting, irrefutable. The songs spoke primarily through their music, not their words. Keith’s doting fans nattering on about the ultimate avatar of rock ‘n’ roll authenticity irritate me, it’s true; but he may to this day be underappreciated.
So those two things I think, are important. Our bond; his talent. We blink at that point, and go 40 years forward, and he has written a book that says, essentially, that I have a small dick. That I am a bad friend. That I am unknowable.
The reviewers, who idolize Keith, don’t ask why this is all in here. We have rarely spoken of such things publicly, and tangentially even then. We don’t talk about it in private, either, and, no, he hasn’t been in my dressing room in 20 years. I thought we both learned that there is no point in sharing anything at all with the press, save a few tidbits for the upbeat The Stones are back in top working form! article that accompanies each of our tours. I think Keith never appreciated the tedious hours I had to spend with Jann Wenner to accomplish that.
But I know why it is all here.
In the book we get the stories.
Oh, the stories. The rock, the girls. The car wrecks, the arrests. You read them on the printed page, delivered in what, I must admit, is a pretty fair written representation of Keith’s slightly tangential, drawling, effeminate delivery, resting charmingly just this side of the incomprehensible.
I was generally made familiar with the stories in a different context. They were generally related by an assistant or a lawyer, tour manager or a publicist, poking their head into a room. Keith’s disappeared. Keith’s asleep backstage and can’t be roused for the show. No one will wake him because he keeps a loaded gun under his pillow and grabs it and points when riled. Keith fell asleep in the studio again. No, Keith isn’t mixing the album. He flew off to Jamaica, and, no, we don’t know when he will be back. Keith’s asleep. Keith’s asleep. Keith’s asleep.
The scamp. Those are but one tier, and a fairly innocuous one, of the many times I was vouchsafed news of my partner. The next tier is more colorful. Keith (or his favorite sax player/drug runner/drug buddy/hanger-on) has slugged a photographer/destroyed a hotel room/gotten into a fistfight with the locals/fallen into a coma. Oh, yes, and the police are here. (Because police are whom you want backstage at a rock concert or at a recording studio.)
Or: The bandmate Keith personally vouched for is freebasing again. This last was of some interest to me, because it meant that I got to sing at a stadium backed by not one but two guitarists falling over onstage. Keith likes to talk a lot about his getting clean from heroin. It is not correspondingly apprehended that he replaced the heroin comprehensively with liquor. Given a choice I select the slurring alcoholic over the comatose junkie as a lifelong professional partner, and I say this with some knowledge of the two alternatives. But neither is strictly desirable.
And, yes, they do fall over onstage. (Or asleep on a chair in the studio.) I laugh at it now and blame no one but myself. Why, Keith gave me his “personal guarantee” Woody would not be freebasing on tour.
And yet I was surprised when it happened. I take the point that professionalism, one’s word, rock ‘n’ roll merriment … these are fungible things in our world. It is a fair charge that I have become less tolerant in these matters over the decades. In our organization, inside this rather unusual floating circus we call home, I am forced into the role of martinet, the one who gets blamed for silly arbitrary rules. (Like, for a show in front of 60,000 people for which we are being paid some $6 or $7 million for a few hours’ work, I like to suggest to everyone that we start on time, and that we each have in place a personal plan, in whatever way suits us best, to stay conscious for the duration of the show.)
So I will take that point. All of the forgoing was just … a little outré behavior on tour. Let’s go to the next tier—again, of matters one is informed of with some regularity, this not over months, not years, but entire decades. Keith’s been arrested with a mason jar full of heroin and a shopping bag full of other drugs and drug paraphernalia and is charged with drug trafficking. That was his baggage for a weekend in Toronto. It is hard to play a show with a catatonic guitarist, harder still when he is in jail for 10 years. I won’t even get into the fact that this came right when I had every record label in the world fighting to sign us, and in an instant my negotiating power was vaporized. Here’s a baroque bulletin from the archives: Anita’s 17-year-old boyfriend has accidentally shot himself, in Keith’s house—Keith’s bedroom—with a gun Keith left lying around. Young Marlon, then perhaps 10, saw Anita, covered in blood, coming down the stairs distraught, and God knows it could have been Marlon playing with the gun. Or: Keith’s driven his car off the road (again) with Marlon inside (again). In his book Keith stands back, amazed at the things that just … happen to him. He is frequently the victim of faulty wiring in the hotels in which we bivouac; a surprising number of times this phenomenon has caused fires. Ritz-Carltons are not built the way they use to be, I guess. Redlands burned down a couple of times as well, as did a house he was renting in Laurel Canyon. It’s a wonder Marlon survived his childhood. A third child Keith disposed of by sending her off to his mum back in Dartford I to raise. The second? That was another son, who was left with his paranoid, unstable, heroin-addict mother and didn’t make it past infancy. Keith says he blames himself, and on that at least I think we can agree.
It is said of me that I act above the rest of the band and prefer the company of society swells. Would you rather have had a conversation with Warren Beatty, Andy Warhol, and Ahmet Ertegun … or Keith, his drug mule Tony, and the other surly nonverbal members of his merry junkie entourage? Keith actually seems not to understand why I would want my dressing room as far away as possible from that of someone who travels with a loaded gun. And for heaven’s sake. No sooner did Keith kick heroin than Charlie took it up. In the book Keith blames me for not touring during the 1980s. I was quoted, unfortunately, saying words to the effect of “the Rolling Stones are a millstone around my neck.” This hurt Keith’s feelings. He thinks it was a canard flung from a fleeting position of advantage in my solo career, the failing of which he delights in. He’s not appreciating the cause and effect. Can you imagine going on tour with an alcoholic, a junkie, and a crackhead? Millstone wasn’t even the word. I spent much of the 1980s looking for a new career, and it didn’t work. If I had it to do over again I would only try harder.
When I came back I resolved to do at least something well. Which brings us to money. We did not entirely mismanage our career in the 1960s, save for the calamity of signing with Allen Klein, who, with fatal strokes of our pens, obtained the rights and total control of our work throughout the 1960s. It was my responsibility. Keith downplays this, but the fact is we signed the thief’s papers. It was all done legally. Klein was a Moriarity, truly; he didn’t wait to sign us to steal. The signing was the theft, a product of a scheme so encompassing that in the end, he paid us a pittance and walked off with our songs. This is by far the single most important nonmusical event in our history, and yet it is rarely remarked on. I was not 30 and had lost us a historic treasure.
In the 1970s, we worked very hard, and with Some Girls we eventually sold a lot of records, but in reality you couldn’t make much money back then, even touring. In the early 1970s we might play for a period of, say, two months, 10,000- and 20,000-seat halls at $6 or $10 a ticket. Back then, we were lucky to take half the gross home. You do the math. Then take out expenses and manager and lawyer fees … and split the remainder five ways. Nor did we live frugally. It got better over the decade, and Keith and I had the songwriting, of course, but compare us with Paul or Elton during the 1970s (who outsold us by many times, for starters, and among other things did not split their income with anyone) and our fame was entirely inconsistent with our back accounts.
In 1981, I put us in stadiums and charged a more reasonable tariff and might have made us more money that summer than we’d earned in our entire career up to that point. And I’ve done it several times since—each time, I mean, to be precise, literally earning close to as much as we had the previous 30 or 40 years in total, including those previous tours. The Bigger Bang outing grossed more than $588 million—more than a million dollars a day for 18 months—and we pocketed the lion’s share of it. If the promoters didn’t like it they could raise price of the nachos, or the parking. And I’m not even mentioning the sponsorships, the ticket fees, the merchandise …
I sound, now, like the accountant who earns my bandmates’ jeers. But I don’t remember Keith complaining about these sums, or, incidentally, that it took me 20 years to remember to give Ronnie a full share, just as we both pretended not to hear when Mick Taylor, or Ronnie, asked for credit for songs they’d written.
Does Keith really sigh for the good old days on tour? Shabby theaters, shitty sound? Wound-up kids standing for hours in the hot summer sun in dreadful mid-American cities waiting for a chance to race recklessly for general-admission seats? Us enduring a day of hassle and travel to take home perhaps $3,500 each? I remember Keith asleep or not showing up until hours after the scheduled start time. Our feral fans running, fighting, throwing rocks at police. Today, the shows start promptly, there are video screens for the folks in the back, and we offer $1,000-a-seat ducats for the fat cats.
Here’s the thing: I’m a rock star. What is the measure of my success if not the biggest rock and roll tour of all time?
I know what you’re thinking. It’s what Keith thinks, too.
What about the music. Isn’t it all, in the end, about the music?
I must note that the Stones rarely get a bad review, no matter how poor our albums. (Jann again, and so many wannabe Janns; how is it that we somehow manage, again and again, to record our “best album since Some Girls”?)
But let me ask you to imagine yourself, as I was, unimaginably, partnered with the writer of “Satisfaction,” “Paint It Black,” “19th Nervous Breakdown,” “Honky Tonk Woman,” etc. And then imagine that your partner, seemingly overnight, lost some essential part of his talents.
Not, as is commonly supposed, sometime perhaps in the 1980s, when the Rolling Stones’ decline in creativity was on obvious display, but earlier. A lot earlier. Like, say, 1972 at the latest.
Those who like Exile on Main St. like its denseness, its mystery, its swampy commitment. Accidentally and amid no little chaos, we conjured up something dirty, impenetrable, and, in parts, compelling. But I think its murk promises depths that aren’t there. There are decent but no major songs on Exile. Let’s go back an album, to Sticky Fingers. I wrote “Brown Sugar.” Mick Taylor wrote “Sway” and most of “Moonlight Mile,” and made “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” his own. Keith and I together did most of the rest, like “Wild Horses,” but, in the end, he didn’t write most of the thing’s best songs.
From there, there’s Exile. Some nice tracks— “Rocks Off,” “Happy”—but there is no “Gimme Shelter” or “Let It Bleed.” Chords that once threatened society in some significant now way rarely radiated outward.
The next few years were difficult. I don’t want to say Keith wrote no songs. He did. But successively, in each album, the process became more difficult, as both his capacity for the job declined along with the quality of what he did write. He mocks the disco songs—”Hot Stuff,” “Miss You,” “Emotional Rescue.” But what would the commercial impact of those albums have been without those immediate hits? We were being outsold by everyone from Supertramp to the Doobie Brothers as it was. At the same time I had to come up with tracks and weasel promising material out of our cohort and not give up songwriting credit, which I accomplished in all but one or two cases.
The resulting albums are, with perhaps the exception of Some Girls, flaccid and unconvincing. The aforementioned disco hits. A little lyrical naughtiness (“Starfucker,” “Some Girls”). The earnest ballad in which the incorrigible Stones display some unexpected touches of maturity (“Memory Motel,” “Waiting on a Friend”). Lots and lots of undistinguished filler, clavinet playing by Billy Preston, Motown covers … And for some of the good stuff Keith wasn’t even there. For It’s Only Rock and Roll I did the title single with Woody and Bowie. Taylor and I constructed the splendid “Time Waits for No One,” a fantasia, alluring to this day, for percussion, piano, and guitar. (I don’t think Keith has ever let us play it live.) (“Sway,” either.)
I will testify that Keith was intermittently sentient during some part of the recording of Some Girls. Yes we were fully Manhattanized at this point, because I live here and that’s what I found interesting. The geographic location of Keith’s talent, being nowhere, wasn’t available for evocation.
By the time of Tattoo You I was exhausted. Entirely drained of ideas. I told Chris Kimsey to ransack the archives. “Start Me Up” was a very old song, with some 20, 30, 40 takes as a reggae … and one with a real rock guitar. It turned out to be our last real hit, and the arc of our career would look a lot different if we hadn’t found it. With it, we could plausibly least claim to be hitmakers in the 1980s. “Waiting on a Friend,” that symbol of our new-found maturity, was, if memory serves, from a centuries-old session with me and Mick Taylor. About our work from the rest of the 1980s and 1990s, the less said the better. Can you sing a single chorus from Dirty Work? Name a single track? We certainly don’t play songs from those records in concert if we can help it.
I go into such detail to describe the arc of our decline accurately but also note this sad corollary: Keith brought something out of me, way back when. Through Exile, I felt I had to rise to his songs. When he checked out creatively, I lost something important. While there is some spark, I guess, in “Some Girls” or “Shattered” or whatever, however contrived, I know most of the other songs sucked. In the 1980s and ’90s it got worse. I could conjure up only the most banal cliché or the most pretentious polysyllabic nonsense. Compare “Sympathy for the Devil” with “Heartbreaker.” One Godard made a film about. The other is a TV movie. I literally wrote a song called “She’s So Cold” and then, a few years later, one called “She Was Hot.”
Now, Keith went through the same thing. I think this is why Keith lost himself with heroin and now drinks: to stave off the pressure to match himself and dull the knowledge that he can’t any more (and, back then, couldn’t). It’s trite, maybe, but there’s a reason a guy spends a decade in a haze, and the three decades since in a stupor. Keith’s rancor is almost entirely based on the fact that it was not, in the end, easy to keep the appearances of what in the public mind is the Rolling Stones, and the process wasn’t always pretty. But I did it, and, among other things, to this day it is hardly in the public mind that Keith Richards hasn’t written a significant rock ‘n’ roll song in nearly 35 years.
For that I get Keith’s book.
Why did he write it? Or, rather, having decided to write it all down, why did he devote so much of it to carping about me?
Well, he’s not talking about me, really. He’s just trying to get my attention, I think, in the end. The remaining part of the rancor comes from the fact that he knows he lost me, many years ago. It’s funny—Keith doesn’t write good rock songs much any more, but what he does do, every four or five years, is craft a beautiful little ballad. Since Tattoo You Keith’s written and sung a couple of tracks per album. (We had a huge fight about his putting three on Bridges to Babylon; I didn’t like it, but didn’t have anything else to offer, even with three years since the previous album. Why one of the songs I did write is now co-credited to k.d. lang is a matter to be discussed on some other day. ) Generally, one of these is a throwaway, and the other … is something gorgeous. Put them all together along with songs he wrote solo and sang from the early years—”You Got the Silver,” “Happy,” and so forth, all the way up to “Thru & Thru” and “All About You”—and you have a CD of no little power and emotion. (I’ve done it.)
These songs are more honest than his book. In “The Worst,” he says something about “I’m the worst kind of guy/ For you to be around.” That’s a song that might ring true for many people. It makes me think about how Keith lost me only after I lost him. In an older song, he explains a worldview I find a bit disturbing, and I would like to point out that since from most peoples’ perspective I have flirted the edge of total decadence my entire life I can make that observation with some authority:
Slipped my tongue in someone else’s pie
Tasted better every time
She turned green and tried to make me cry
Being hungry
Ain’t no crime
Again, the honesty is bracing. I think Keith puts just about any of his manifold urges on a par with hunger, and I think we can agree the world would be a dangerous place if that was the norm. It explains many, many of his actions over the years. In the book he tells the story of going to meet Patti Hansen’s parents for the first time—drunk, holding an open bottle of Jack, and with one of his fucktard friends in tow. You can imagine how the evening ended. I’m sure Keith thinks it’s OK. (“Being nervous ain’t no crime.”) (“Oh, shut up, Keith,” I think.) With that perspective—and the added benefit of being rich and famous and having most of his deplorable actions do nothing but burnish his image—Keith’s way in the world has been, in a certain way and ignoring, for the moment, the people who died, a blessed one.
I certainly bless it. I stood by him and propped him up and didn’t fire his ass for many, many years. It would have ended the Stones, of course, so maybe I was being selfish. In a way, even comatose he had a marquee name; as my meal ticket, you might say, it suited me to let him doze. I took the reins until, when he finally woke up, he found that he had no place in the management. He’s angry about that, too. Yes, let’s let Keith Richards have a hand in overseeing an operation that generates $1 million a day in revenue. I don’t know what else I could have done. Later, one grows older and becomes more informed about such things, and I saw I was supposed to have held an elaborate ceremony called an “intervention.” Society could have effectively halted the upheavals of the 1960s simply by requiring all of us to “intervene” with one another. In any event, considering half our circle was on heroin and the rest were coke fiends, I think it wouldn’t have efficacious in our circumstances.
He talks about me, too, in his solo songs, less subtly: “I’m so sick and tired/ Of hanging around/ Jerks like you.” People ask me why I let him put these on the album. I think: Oh, why not? It’s a great song, and he can sing it, and he can write the book, too. He’s trying to get my attention. To connect. To have it be how it once was. At our age, I think there’s no basis for it. Keith celebrates his own unchanging character, and I have had quite enough of that.
But, still, when I think of Keith, I think sometimes of how someone different from the book comes out through these songs. Once in a great while he detaches and looks down at his corporeal self. “I think I lost my touch,” he sings on one of them; “It’s just another song and it’s slippin’ away.” Rock and roll is strange. When a song is beautiful—those spare guitars rumbling and chiming, by turns—the words mean so much more, and there, for a moment, I believe him, and feel for him.
Or I think about “How Can I Stop” which may end up being Keith’s last great song.
“How can I stop … once I start?” he murmurs, over and over again. “How can I stop once I start?”
It’s about rock ‘n’ roll, of course, and playing guitar, and his tenure, and mine, in our unusual coalition. It’s also about heroin and everything else he can’t stop ingesting. But again it’s about Keith himself, who once started never did stop—through the fame, the songs, the concerts and the women and the drugs; and the violence and senselessness, the addictions and the deaths, the ruined lives, the petty and large-scale cruelties. At the end Keith got Wayne Shorter to do a sax solo that is itself almost an out-of-body experience, perhaps the loveliest moment on one of our records. It goes on and on over the last two minutes of a very long track, and the end is almost a … an exaltation, perhaps? I am lost there. It’s something I’m not sure I ever saw evidenced in real life, and something that isn’t in his book. It’s the sound—or at least the closest thing Keith Richards will ever admit to it—of a conscience.

2010-06-26T13:28:00.000-07:00

Creative minds 'mimic schizophrenia'

Given the mind that I live with, I have long suspected this to be true.

From BBC News:

Artist Salvador Dali is known for his surreal paintings and eccentric personality

Creativity is akin to insanity, say scientists who have been studying how the mind works.
Brain scans reveal striking similarities in the thought pathways of highly creative people and those with schizophrenia.
Both groups lack important receptors used to filter and direct thought.
It could be this uninhibited processing that allows creative people to "think outside the box", say experts from Sweden's Karolinska Institute.
In some people, it leads to mental illness.
But rather than a clear division, experts suspect a continuum, with some people having psychotic traits but few negative symptoms.
Art and sufferingSome of the world's leading artists, writers and theorists have also had mental illnesses - the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and American mathematician John Nash (portrayed by Russell Crowe in the film A Beautiful Mind) to name just two.
Creativity is known to be associated with an increased risk of depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
The thalamus channels thoughts Similarly, people who have mental illness in their family have a higher chance of being creative.
Associate Professor Fredrik Ullen believes his findings could help explain why.
He looked at the brain's dopamine (D2) receptor genes which experts believe govern divergent thought.
He found highly creative people who did well on tests of divergent thought had a lower than expected density of D2 receptors in the thalamus - as do people with schizophrenia.
The thalamus serves as a relay centre, filtering information before it reaches areas of the cortex, which is responsible, amongst other things, for cognition and reasoning.
"Fewer D2 receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower degree of signal filtering, and thus a higher flow of information from the thalamus," said Professor Ullen.
He believes it is this barrage of uncensored information that ignites the creative spark.
This would explain how highly creative people manage to see unusual connections in problem-solving situations that other people miss.
Schizophrenics share this same ability to make novel associations. But in schizophrenia, it results in bizarre and disturbing thoughts.
UK psychologist and member of the British Psychological Society Mark Millard said the overlap with mental illness might explain the motivation and determination creative people share.
"Creativity is uncomfortable. It is their dissatisfaction with the present that drives them on to make changes.
"Creative people, like those with psychotic illnesses, tend to see the world differently to most. It's like looking at a shattered mirror. They see the world in a fractured way.
"There is no sense of conventional limitations and you can see this in their work. Take Salvador Dali, for example. He certainly saw the world differently and behaved in a way that some people perceived as very odd."
He said businesses have already recognised and capitalised on this knowledge.
Some companies have "skunk works" - secure, secret laboratories for their highly creative staff where they can freely experiment without disrupting the daily business.
Chartered psychologist Gary Fitzgibbon says an ability to "suspend disbelief" is one way of looking at creativity.
"When you suspend disbelief you are prepared to believe anything and this opens up the scope for seeing more possibilities.
"Creativity is certainly about not being constrained by rules or accepting the restrictions that society places on us. Of course the more people break the rules, the more likely they are to be perceived as 'mentally ill'."
He works as an executive coach helping people to be more creative in their problem solving behaviour and thinking styles.
"The result is typically a significant rise in their well being, so as opposed to creativity being associated with mental illness it becomes associated with good mental health."

2010-06-12T15:58:00.001-07:00

6 lotto winners who lost it all

Please do not tell me about your dreams of free money. I don't want to hear it.

Michael Carroll won $15 million – and proceeded to lose it all.
Want to know how to fritter away a multi-million lottery fortune? Ask Michael Carroll[1]: The unemployed 26-year-old Brit has blown a £9.7 million jackpot he won in 2002 (approximately $15 million at the time) and is currently hoping to get his old job back as a garbageman. At first, Carroll lavished gifts on friends and family, but soon started spending on less admirable causes: Cocaine, parties, cars, and, at one point, up to four prostitutes a day. “The party has ended,” he recently told the UK Daily Mail, “and it’s back to reality. That’s the way I like it. I find it easier to live off £42 dole than a million.” Though Carroll’s laid-back attitude might be unusual, it’s not that rare for lotto winners to lose their cash. Here, five more average Joes who won it big, for a while:

(Continued)

2010-06-03T04:18:00.000-07:00

The Future of Energy Production

An interview with Craig Venter

2010-05-23T17:22:00.000-07:00

The Origin of Humanness
Part One
Adamic Development
By John Gavazzoni

From Greater Emanuel:

In this study of the origin of our humanness, I'm choosing to start at the point of mankind's formation from the dust of the ground, instead of expounding on the truth that in the eternal Being of God, we have our being. I'm beginning with our formation, rather than our kin-of-God generation, because of the very precise wording of the Genesis record of man's emergence within the ages, and then proceed to the scripturally valid inferences to be drawn re: our eternal origin, and re: the expectation we ought to have based upon such a "sure foundation."

As I take, as my starting point, a verse of very precise wording, I will admit up front that I have been slow in learning to take great care in the study of the message of the Bible, often reading a passage as if it said one thing, when it, in fact, conveyed something quite different.

So it's been, for me, with that part of the Genesis record informing us of our eonian origin as those who, as Paul put it, are "of the earth, earthy." With each of us, there is a certain uniqueness in how the Spirit of Truth leads us into all truth. The operation of God's grace in this vessel, as pertaining to "rightly cutting the Word of truth," has often included being instructed to notice what a passage does NOT say, so as to cleanse the mind to receive what it DOES say.

We are all prone, with minds, at any given point yet unassisted by the Author of scripture, to approach its pages with certain assumptions that are so egregiously clumsy, that we tend to read into passages exactly what the passage does not convey, and our headlong rush into confusion is helped along often by a matching clumsiness of translation.

One day, the Spirit insisted that I rehearse again in my thinking, what was really said of man's formed-dust, eonian stage of existence. He, the Spirit, whispered,"Notice, the verse does not say, 'And the Lord God formed a human BODY for man out of the dust of the ground....,' or similarly, 'And the Lord God formed an empty body into which He planned to put a man,'" what it does say is, 'And the Lord God formed MAN of the dust of the ground....'" I think most students of the Bible think along the lines that God created a body FOR a soon-to-be man, rather than the man, himself, at least at that stage of manhood, being the result of God's craftsmanship.

But the passage, if read with the degree of prayerful consideration it, as indeed all scripture deserves, reveals God forming MAN, not just a BODY FOR the man. By His crafting of the dust of the earth, God formed man. Did you get that? He formed MAN, not just a body FOR man. Man, at the point of his eonian origin of existence IS formed dust. Reflect on that for a bit. If man has been indeed created according to God's likeness, then it would follow that there is a developmental factor about his eonian existence, for the God, according to whose likeness we have been created, has a developmental factor in His nature.

Since, when we speak of the nature of God, we are handicapped by the linear mindedness native to our confining space-time existence, I will simply try to make it as simple as possible by drawing from the illustration of a circle as reflecting the nature of God, as opposed to a straight line, which would predispose us to think of the existence of God being linear going back infinitely into the past, and infinitely into the future. Rather, as close as we can come to understand God's essential eternality, is by picturing a circularity of communion within the Godhead that is developmental with a vast God-family in view.

Though in the whole, Darwinism's view of the nature of life, has not been provenly established by genuine science, that is, to repeat, in the whole, (it is systemically infused by a spirit of religiosity, and has been exposed as such, by its claim to possessing indisputable veracity), Darwin nevertheless did accurately observe a developmental factor within nature.

But Christians tend to lose their calm when faced with Darwin's Origin of the Species, with it's survival of the fittest element, etc., and they become reactionary, rather than calmly thoughtful in the face of the suggestion that the life of the universe is self-originating and self-determining, and that according to hideously violent, amoral forces.

But Darwin's insight into the developmental factor in all life, deserves serious consideration, while noting that he rushed with an intellectually adolescent imagination into the vacuum created by the institutional church's failure to infer from scripture, the full glory-content of all existence, and as nature abhors a vacuum, the vacuum attracted to itself a counterfeiting explanation of where life came from, and to where it is going. The true developmental factor within God's universe is particularly evident by the fact that the original man, formed of the dust of the ground, was not God's final human creation, but rather, the eonian BEGINNING of God's development of the full, true Humanness gathered together, and summed up in Jesus of Nazareth, our Lord.
We must not insist that both the formation of man, and God breathing into his nostrils the breath of life, all happened in a few moments of time. (please note before I go further, that God breathed into "his" nostrils." God did not breathe into a mere body with nostrils ----"His nostrils;" "HIS NOSTRILS." Got it?) It was a man into whose nostrils God breathed the breath of life, not just a body. The scripture-record does NOT say, "and breathed into the body's nostril's the breath of life."

We don't know how much time was involved between God's forming of the man, and the Divine-in breathing that caused him to become a living soul. Whatever may be your understanding of the dimension of soul in our humanity, I think the reader should consider just what might have been an overlooked, essential element of that which is soulical.

Before going any further, I want to pause and acknowledge a certain development-factor in the writing of this article, that arose from Jonathan Mitchell so helpfully pointing out, after reading my first draft, that in Genesis 1:20, and 24, in the original Hebrew of the text, the word commonly translated as "creatures (plural), is the same word (singular), commonly translated as "soul" in 2:7 in respect to forming man.

After much pondering, my attention became particularly focused upon the fact that the word is first used within the following contextual picture: "Let the waters teem with SWARMS of living creature" (emphasis, mine ["swarms" as per at least the NAS, and AMP] ) As mysterious as "soul" is to define, I see in this a communal quality that we ought to particularly associate with that which is soulical. This quality, granted, is seen more in some species than in others (for instance, lions are very communal, tigers are minimally so, at best).

It would seem that man's existence before God breathing into his nostrils the breath of life, and so making him to become a living soul, did not have that quality, though he existed certainly on a level above the plant kingdom, with unique intelligence and the potential for his existence to take on the communal quality of "living soul." He was very much "a loner" at that point. The way in which the biblical record shows him become a living soul, stands in stark contrast to how it describes the creation of the "souls" that teemed in the waters (1: 20) and those upon the earth (1:24). Only with the regard to the man, do we see that face-to-face, or mouth-to-nostrils way of life-giving that bespeaks a most special Divine elective attentiveness.

The infusion of the Divine Breath implies the bestowal of a crown of personhood upon his creaturehood, and so, caused the man to take on that likeness of God which is self-knowing, self-aware, in a way beyond the rest of the animal kingdom. God revealed Himself to Moses as I AM.

That's primal self-knowledge, the Source of all self-awareness that needs no instruction re: His identity. God IS, and He knows that He IS; knows what He is, and Who He is, and in sharing that by His breath, Adam became a living soul. The quite common description of the soul rather simplistically as mind, emotion and will leaves much to be desired. There is, to me, more of a suggestion of ontological connection of self-aware, self-distinguished personhood with that of God Himself.

It now seems to me, that there was a pre-existent man, relative to the one who became a living soul, that God started with in His creation of the full humanness of His design and purpose. Please understand, to repeat, that I'm speaking of our sharing of creaturehood with all creation, our eonian existence, not the eternal being we have in the Being of God. Some of us are just too spiritual, so to speak. We want to only glorify man too simplistically as being purely, distinctively spirit, without studying the development of spirit into full, embodied humanness, and of that humanness' bodily return to the glory from which it has proceeded.

There may have been long ages between man's original formation from the dust of the ground, and that moment when God breathed into that man's nostrils His Divine Life. He may have been given his start as a humanoid species of God's creation possessed of such a degree of natural intelligence, grace and beauty, as to stand out from, and attract the admiration of all creation, having about his existence, an undeniable prediction of that which all creation longed for, especially indicated by way the text describes the very personally attentive way God formed him, in contrast to all other living creatures. (Pardon me belaboring that point so.) Out from that species, God ELECTED one to become His especially beloved Adam. It would do us well to consider that nature of Divine election which delights in starting with very common material.

2010-04-16T08:18:00.001-07:00

More Thoughts on The Future of the Patent System

This article, on the question of whether the patent system is out-of-date, made me think.

Here are some of my thoughts:

I know open source collaboration is spurning great innovation, and yet I had never considered the idea that the whole patent process is too slow and hierarchical to allow for the fast-paced open source-type innovations that we see today. I think what is going to have to happen is open source work will have to be done on the internet, in chat room-type situations which can be archived chronologically. Perhaps, patents will have to handed out based upon the relative value of the various contributions, as seen by some sort of Patent court. In my opinion, you can not do away with patenting. People need the profit motive of owning what they invent. I know that in songwriting there is a formula for how wrtiing credits are handed out. When a band writes a song, the guy who comes up with the melody and the lyrics gets 50% of the songwriting credit, when he is working in a band situation. The band gets the other 50% divided between however many band members were present. These credits are divided up on the honor system. For instance, my band wrote songs as a band and then years later applied for songwriiting credit right before we recorded an album. We credited everyone who had been present when we wrote the songs, though we could have easily not credited the guys who were no longer in the band. That would be the advantage of working on the internet, in some sort of chat forum type situation. There would be a chronological record of all contributions. More thoughts to come.

2010-04-15T22:19:00.000-07:00

What If The Very Theory That Underlies Why We Need Patents Is Wrong?

Interesting. I'll really have to think about this. There are a lot of issues involved here.

From TechDirt:

Scott Walker points us to a fascinating paper by Carliss Y. Baldwin and Eric von Hippel, suggesting that some of the most basic theories on which the patent system is based are wrong, and because of that, the patent system might hinder innovation. Obviously, we've pointed to numerous other research papers and case studies that suggest that the patent system quite frequently hinders innovation, but this one approaches it from a different angle than ones we've seen before, and is actually quite convincing. It looks at the putative theory that innovation comes from a direct profit motive of a single corporation looking to sell the good in market, and for that to work, the company needs to take the initial invention and get temporary monopoly protection to keep out competitors in order to recoup the cost of research and development.

The problem is that while this is certainly true sometimes, in many, many, many other cases -- it's not the way it works at all. Instead, the paper goes through a whole bunch of studies suggesting that quite frequently innovation happens through a very different process: either individuals or companies directly trying to solve a problem they themselves have (i.e., the initial motive is not to profit directly from sales, but to help them in something they were doing) or through a much more collaborative process, whereby multiple parties all contribute to the process of innovation, somewhat openly, recognizing that as each contributes some, everyone benefits. As the report notes:
This result hinges on the fact that the innovative design itself is a non-rival good: each participant in a collaborative effort gets the value of the whole design, but incurs only a fraction of the design cost.
But, of course, patents are designed to make that sort of thing more difficult, because it assumes that the initial act of invention is the key point, rather than all the incremental innovations built on top of it that all parties can benefit from. In fact, the report points to numerous studies that show, when given the chance, many companies freely share their ideas with others, recognizing the direct benefit they get. This flies in the face of (unsubstantiated) claims by patent system supporters that the patent system is needed to disclose and share inventions. In fact, the evidence suggests that in many cases, firms will willingly share that information anyway (for a variety of reasons detailed in the report) without requiring the "prize" of a monopoly right to do so.

Even more importantly, the paper finds that due to technological advances and the ability to more rapidly and easily communicate and collaborate widely, these forms of innovation (innovation for direct use as well as collaborative innovation) are becoming more and more viable across a variety of industries, which in the past may have relied more on the old way of innovating (single company innovative for the profit of selling that product). And, in fact, because of the ease of communication and collaboration these days, there's tremendous incentive for those companies that innovate for their own use to collaborate with others, since the benefit from others improving as well help improve their own uses. Thus, the overall incentives are to move much more to a collaborative form of innovation in the market. That has huge implications for a patent system designed to help the "old model" of innovation (producer inventing for the market) and not the increasingly regular one (collaborative innovation for usage).

Of course, no one is saying that producer-based innovation (company inventing to sell on the market) doesn't occur or won't continue to occur. But it is an open policy question as to whether or not our innovation policies should favor that model over other models -- when evidence suggests that a significant amount of innovation occurs in these other ways -- and that amount is growing rapidly.

The paper points out that the "devil's bargain" of granting monopoly rights in order to create incentives for producer-driven innovation makes less and less sense:
The work in this paper and that of many others, suggests that this traditionally-struck 'devil's bargain' may not be beneficial. First, there is increasing evidence that intellectual property protection does not increase innovation. As we saw in section 2.2, studies carried out over 40 years do not find that firm managers are inclined to increase their innovation investments due to the availability of patent grant protections. There are also many examples in which strong intellectual property rights may have impeded subsequent progress (Dosi, Marengo and Pasquali, 2006; Merges and Nelson, 1994). Indeed, recent empirical work has actually shown a negative relationship between patenting and subsequent progress in both biotechnology (Murray and Stern 2007) and software (Bessen and Meurer 2008). Second, the ascendent user and open collaborative innovation models that we have discussed in this paper mean that alternatives that are open by participants' free choice -- and to the economic benefit of those participants -- are now ascendent alternatives to the traditional, closed producer innovation model. And openness, as we noted above, increases social welfare, other things equal.
The paper concludes with some policy recommendations, seeking to have the government look for ways to encourage more collaborative and open innovation, such as by supporting more open licensing programs directly (such as open source licenses), though I'm not sure what specific support the government really needs to do there. It also suggests that net neutrality actually plays into this as well -- as one of the reasons why there is greater collaboration is that a neutral network infrastructure made that possible. Removing network neutrality could limit the ability to collaborate, and because of that, the social benefit found from such collaborative projects. Again, I'm not convinced that any ISP would go so far as to restrict communication to that level, but it is an interesting note.

Either way, it's yet another study that suggests our patent system is tremendously obsolete in terms of actually promoting the progress, and is set up in a way that favors a concept of innovation and invention that may not be how the world actually works.

Just to start with, it seems to me that corporations, and individuals, ought to be allowed to apply for patents which allow them to pick who they will collaborate with. Perhaps, also, the length of monopolistic patents ought to be shortened.

But these are just my initial thoughts.

2010-04-12T16:46:00.001-07:00

17 Year Old Musical Prodigy, Alex Prior

2010-04-08T09:39:00.001-07:00

When you sign up to be with people for the long-haul, you know at the outset you are going to see some die. Your sorrow is not a loss. It is a badge of victory. You have loved. Continue to love. That is an even greater glory.

2010-04-07T14:31:00.000-07:00

Dust in the Wind and the Summer of 77

I lost one of my best lifelong friends yesterday. He had been about 45. He and I were about 13-14 in 1977.

He died of heart failure. But, of course, I, and his family, and friends are the ones living on with what feels like heart failure.

Because this is where I am at today, the meditations below seem appropriate.

From American Digest:

We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness.
-- Eliot, The Dry Salvages

Following a memory of my own, I "found" this video shortly after it was posted to YouTube around three years ago. It struck me then as enormously powerful in that offhand, out-of-left-field way that found objects can be. The power of this short window into 1977 is that it captures, without intent, the elements of memory. It melds the plaintive almost psalmic acoustic hit by Kansas with an imagery whose sheer faded quality adds to an overall impression of other times once lived and now gone beyond recall. It is the essence of "time in a bottle."

Ordinary when made the film aged into something beyond itself. The better memories do that. They seem, if we think of them at all at the time we have the experience we will later remember, to be just barely beyond the cusp of ordinary. Often we don't even discover them as memories until years later when they emerge, not as they were, but as they have become as our souls expand enough to value what we thought at the time was dross as the real gold of our lives.

The fact that it was viewable by me at all was one of those strange conjunctions of love and fate that the Web has made possible. The video is under the YouTube account of "uselessdirector" who has in the years since he posted this posted only two other personal bits in his account. The response to those is what it should be. Negligible. But the response to this video is now above 3,640,000 views with fresh comments still coming in almost hourly.

What is the provenance of this video? Uselessdirector states only, "Filmed in 1977 by my dad, this music video nearly became "dust in the wind" until it was restored from its failing 8mm format." His role was to see the film as it was made, 8MM or 16MM, and to save it as a video before time faded the film to invisibility. He caught it just in time and in doing so caught time itself. Then because he knew it had a value beyond itself and because he could, he placed it on YouTube where, in time, it was discovered.

From the video itself, we learn the names of the "Cast" in the credits and also see a list of "The Tribe." Aside from that there are other hints to the spring or summer in which this was made. We discover it was made in Findley Lake, New York, a small rural community up near the shore of Lake Erie. Was "The Tribe" a group of friends or a small commune of the kind that were still common in those years? Did the young man and young woman paired as "Adam" and "Eve" have a relationship outside the film or was it only for the purposes of the film? Somehow I doubt it was the latter.

Looking a little deeper into the Net I found a few things worth noting. For one thing it is possible, through the odd but wonderful Google Street View to compare "Then" with "Now" and confirm, as if we did not know it with every cell of our being, that "Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky."

Then

Now

An interesting exercise in contrasting the present to a memory. But "interesting" is pretty much the finish of the exercise. In mere aesthetic terms it is obvious that the "Then" as evoked by the film image is far superior to the glimpse of "Now" gleaned by a Google Street View car sweeping by and capturing a slice of that particular road during the particular minute it passed that otherwise nondescript place on the edge of Findley Lake. The former is gold, the latter dross.

What was the memory I was following when I first found this film? It was the memory of that song heard first in the summer of 1977 somewhere in London, New York, or Burgundy. I loved the summer of 1977. It was one of my favorite years. It was one of those luminous years when everything seemed to fall right and come together into something you could assign to happiness.

I heard the song once again in memory. It was in a suburban mall parking lot in Connecticut on a chill winter evening during one of those years when it all went smash.

If I have to choose between memories I'll take the one contained in this ineffable bit of short film saved from the fade and the fog of time. It's one of those strange artifacts that evokes among those alive in the time it was made the cliched thought, "Dear God, were we ever that young?" Made on a whim during an afternoon, the film answers, "Yes, you were. Yes, we all were. And in time, with the grace of God, we will be again."

My friend would have hated that I remembered him with Dust In The Wind.

Here's the kind of music he and I favored.

2010-04-01T12:40:00.000-07:00

Administrative Note

Today, I noticed that there were over thirty comments left in the past few weeks, to which I have not responded.

Sorry about that.

I had enabled "Comments Moderation" because I'm getting an awful lot of Spam, and I was tired of it.

But, I had forgotten to deal with the Moderated Comments.

Hence, I have not been responding.

I'll start responding again.

Thanks.

2010-03-30T07:57:00.000-07:00

The Greatest Novel Ever Written

For me, the experience of life is like reading a great novel, filled with sadness, beauty, and humor. I'm very impressed by the guy who is writing the book.

2010-03-24T18:20:00.000-07:00

The Future of "Medicine"

Cancer genes switched off in humans

Cancer genes switched off in humans (Getty Images)
For the first time, researchers have used short sequences of RNA that can effectively treat skin cancer
in people by silencing specific genes behind tumour production.

Mark Davis from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and his colleagues have used the technique, called RNA interference (RNAi), to deliver particles containing such sequences to patients with the skin cancer melanoma.

When analysing biopsies of the tumours after treatment, they found that the particles had inhibited expression of a key gene, called RRM2, needed for the cancer cells to multiply.

The researchers created the particles from two polymers plus a protein that binds to receptors on the surface of cancer cells and pieces of RNA called small-interfering RNA, or siRNA, designed to stop the RRM2 gene from being translated into protein.

The siRNA works by sticking to the messenger RNA (mRNA) that carries the gene's code to the cell's protein-making machinery and ensuring that enzymes cut the mRNA at a specific spot.

When the components are mixed together in water, they assemble into particles about 70 nanometres in diameter. The researchers can then administer the nanoparticles into the bloodstream of patients, where the particles circulate until they encounter 'leaky' blood vessels that supply the tumours with blood.

The particles then pass through the vessels to the tumour, where they bind to the cell and are then absorbed. Once inside the cell, the nanoparticles fall apart, releasing the siRNA. The other parts of the nanoparticle are so small, they pass out of the body in urine.

"It sneaks in, evades the immune system, delivers the siRNA, and the disassembled components exit out," Nature quoted Davis as saying.

When researchers analysed tumour samples from three of the patients who volunteered samples, they found fragments of the mRNA in exactly the length and sequence they would expect from the design of their siRNA.

And in at least one patient, the levels of the protein were lower than they were in samples of the tumours taken before treatment.

They also found that patients who were given higher doses had higher levels of siRNA in their tumours. "The more we put in, the more ends up where they are supposed to be, in tumour cells," said Davis.

Davis says that by targeting specific genes he hopes these treatments will not have major side effects. "My hope is to make tumours melt away while maintaining a high quality of life for the patients. We're moving another step closer to being able to do that now," he said.

The study has been published in Nature.

2010-03-17T13:10:00.000-07:00

Nemesis - Does Our Solar System Have Another Star?

From Astrobiology Magazine:

Summary: Is our Sun part of a binary star system? An unseen companion star, nicknamed “Nemesis,” may be sending comets towards Earth. If Nemesis exists, NASA’s new WISE telescope should be able to spot it.

A dark object may be lurking near our solar system, occasionally kicking comets in our direction.

Nicknamed “Nemesis” or “The Death Star,” this undetected object could be a red or brown dwarf star, or an even darker presence several times the mass of Jupiter.

Why do scientists think something could be hidden beyond the edge of our solar system? Originally, Nemesis was suggested as a way to explain a cycle of mass extinctions on Earth.

The paleontologists David Raup and Jack Sepkoski claim that, over the last 250 million years, life on Earth has faced extinction in a 26-million-year cycle. Astronomers proposed comet impacts as a possible cause for these catastrophes.

Our solar system is surrounded by a vast collection of icy bodies called the Oort Cloud. If our Sun were part of a binary system in which two gravitationally-bound stars orbit a common center of mass, this interaction could disturb the Oort Cloud on a periodic basis, sending comets whizzing towards us.

An asteroid impact is famously responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, but large comet impacts may be equally deadly. A comet may have been the cause of the Tunguska event in Russia in 1908. That explosion had about a thousand times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and it flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an 830 square mile area.

While there’s little doubt about the destructive power of cosmic impacts, there is no evidence that comets have periodically caused mass extinctions on our planet. The theory of periodic extinctions itself is still debated, with many insisting that more proof is needed. Even if the scientific consensus is that extinction events don’t occur in a predictable cycle, there are now other reasons to suspect a dark companion to the Sun.

The Footprint of Nemesis

The smaller object in these two photos is a brown dwarf that orbits the star Gliese 229. Located in the constellation Lepus and about 19 light years from Earth, the brown dwarf Gliese 229B is about 20 to 50 times the mass of Jupiter. Image credit: NASA

A recently-discovered dwarf planet, named Sedna, has an extra-long and usual elliptical orbit around the Sun. Sedna is one of the most distant objects yet observed, with an orbit ranging between 76 and 975 AU (where 1 AU is the distance between the Earth and the Sun). Sedna’s orbit is estimated to last between 10.5 to 12 thousand years. Sedna’s discoverer, Mike Brown of Caltech, noted in a Discover magazine article that Sedna’s location doesn’t make sense.

"Sedna shouldn't be there,” said Brown. “There's no way to put Sedna where it is. It never comes close enough to be affected by the Sun, but it never goes far enough away from the Sun to be affected by other stars.”

Perhaps a massive unseen object is responsible for Sedna’s mystifying orbit, its gravitational influence keeping Sedna fixed in that far-distant portion of space.

“My surveys have always looked for objects closer and thus moving faster,” Brown told Astrobiology Magazine. “I would have easily overlooked something so distant and slow moving as Nemesis.”

John Matese, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, suspects Nemesis exists for another reason. The comets in the inner solar system seem to mostly come from the same region of the Oort Cloud, and Matese thinks the gravitational influence of a solar companion is disrupting that part of the cloud, scattering comets in its wake. His calculations suggest Nemesis is between 3 to 5 times the mass of Jupiter, rather than the 13 Jupiter masses or greater that some scientists think is a necessary quality of a brown dwarf. Even at this smaller mass, however, many astronomers would still classify it as a low mass star rather than a planet, since the circumstances of birth for stars and planets differ.

The “New Object” labeled in this image is Sedna, a dwarf planet with a 12,000-year orbit around the Sun. It’s a mystery why Sedna has such an elongated orbit.

The Oort Cloud is thought to extend about 1 light year from the Sun. Matese estimates Nemesis is 25,000 AU away (or about one-third of a light year). The next-closest known star to the Sun is Proxima Centauri, located 4.2 light years away.

Richard Muller of the University of California Berkeley first suggested the Nemesis theory, and even wrote a popular science book on the topic. He thinks Nemesis is a red dwarf star 1.5 light years away. Many scientists counter that such a wide orbit is inherently unstable and could not have lasted long – certainly not long enough to have caused the extinctions seen in Earth’s fossil record. But Muller says this instability has resulted in an orbit that has changed greatly over billions of years, and in the next billion years Nemesis will be thrown free of the solar system.

Binary star systems are common in the galaxy. It is estimated that one-third of the stars in the Milky Way are either binary or part of a multiple-star system.

Red dwarfs are also common – in fact, astronomers say they are the most common type of star in the galaxy. Brown dwarfs are also thought to be common, but there are only a few hundred known at this time because they are so difficult to see. Red and brown dwarfs are smaller and cooler than our Sun, and do not shine brightly. If red dwarfs can be compared to the red embers of a dying fire, then brown dwarfs would be the smoldering ash. Because they are so dim, it is plausible that the Sun could have a secret companion even though we’ve searched the sky for many years with a variety of instruments.

NASA’s newest telescope, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), may be able to answer the question about Nemesis once and for all.

Finding Dwarfs in the Dark

Illustration of the “Oort Cloud,” a vast region of comets thought to extend a light year beyond our Sun.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Donald K. Yeoman

WISE looks at our universe in the infrared part of the spectrum. Like the Spitzer space telescope, WISE is hunting for heat. The difference is that WISE has a much wider field of view, and so is able to scan a greater portion of the sky for distant objects.

WISE began scanning the sky on January 14, and NASA recently released the mission’s first images. The mission will map the entire sky until October, when the spacecraft’s coolant runs out.

Part of the WISE mission is to search for brown dwarfs, and NASA expects it could find one thousand of the dim stellar objects within 25 light years of our solar system.

Davy Kirkpatrick at NASA’s Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech found nothing when he searched for Nemesis using data from the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). Now Kirkpatrick is part of the WISE science team, ready to search again for any signs of a companion to our Sun.

Kirkpatrick doesn’t think Nemesis will be the red dwarf star with an enormous orbit described by Muller. In his view, Matese’s description of Nemesis as a low mass object closer to home is more plausible.

“I think the possibility that the Sun could harbor a companion of another sort is not a crazy idea,” said Kirkpatrick. “There might be a distant object in a more stable, more circular orbit that has gone unnoticed so far.”

Ned Wright, professor of astronomy and physics at UCLA and the principal investigator for the WISE mission, said that WISE will easily see an object with a mass a few times that of Jupiter and located 25,000 AU away, as suggested by Matese.

Astronomers think there could be as many brown dwarfs as stars like our Sun, but brown dwarfs are often too cool to find using visible light. Using infrared light, the WISE mission could find many brown dwarfs within 25 light years of the Sun. These two pictures show simulated data before and after the WISE mission (stars are not real). The simulated picture on the left shows known stars (white and yellow) and brown dwarfs (red) in our solar neighborhood. The picture on the right shows additional brown dwarfs WISE is expected to find.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

“This is because Jupiter is self-luminous like a brown dwarf,” said Wright. “But for planets less massive than Jupiter in the far outer solar system, WISE will be less sensitive.”

Comet “Siding Spring” appears to streak across the sky like a superhero in this new infrared image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. WISE will be looking for comets and asteroids that might pose a threat to Earth.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Neither Kirkpatrick nor Wright think Nemesis is disrupting the Oort cloud and sending comets towards Earth, however. Because they envision a more benign orbit, they prefer the name "Tyche" (the good sister).

Regardless of what they expect to find, the WISE search won’t focus on one particular region of the sky.

“The great thing about WISE, as was also true of 2MASS, is that it's an all-sky survey,” said Kirkpatrick. “There will be some regions such as the Galactic Plane where the observations are less sensitive or fields more crowded, but we'll search those areas too. So we're not preferentially targeting certain directions.”

We may not have an answer to the Nemesis question until mid-2013. WISE needs to scan the sky twice in order to generate the time-lapsed images astronomers use to detect objects in the outer solar system. The change in location of an object between the time of the first scan and the second tells astronomers about the object’s location and orbit. Then comes the long task of analyzing the data.

“I don't suspect we'll have completed the search for candidate objects until mid-2012, and then we may need up to a year of time to complete telescopic follow-up of those objects,” said Kirkpatrick.

Even if Nemesis is not found, the WISE telescope will help shed light on the darkest corners of the solar system. The telescope can be used to search for dwarf planets like Pluto that orbit the Sun off the solar system’s ecliptic plane. The objects that make up the Oort Cloud are too small and far away for WISE to see, but it will be able to track potentially dangerous comets and asteroids closer to home.

2010-03-16T13:38:00.000-07:00

"Spooky Action At A Distance"

From Belmont Club:

Suppose you could watch something — or someone — by observing its doppelganger. Not the thing in itself, but its shadow. Ridiculous? Maybe not. According to the Guardian Lockheed Martin filed a patent application for a quantum radar system which operates on precisely that principle. The Guardian writes:

In theory entangled particles could be used to reveal details of objects they have never interacted with. If one particle bumped into an aircraft its twin would react in the same way, even if it never left the laboratory. Work out a way to read that behaviour, and an image could be built up, even with no information being directly transmitted from the target.

The patent application itself suggests that by entangling waves of different characteristics the radar can decipher one by observing the other. In this way the frequency which cannot travel far can pass on the information to the frequency which can. It is a kind of information relay race in which the baton started by things which can look through walls, see IEDs emplaced underground and past stealthy coatings can be passed to something which can reach the radar receiver. The saying that you can run but can’t hide may be truer than ever.

The Lockheed Martin patent envisages a different use for entanglement. Current radar systems become less useful as range increases, because the frequencies needed to transmit over long distances are less sensitive. According to the patent this problem can be removed by entangling light at different frequencies and then sending them out together as a bundle.

It says: “Entangled radar waves can combine one or more particles with a relatively high frequency for resolution, with one or more particles at a lower frequency for more effective propagation.” The radar beam could then “propagate through different types of mediums and resolve different types of target”.

Research into quantum entanglement is at the heart of a revolution in understanding just how things happen and while knowledge of that process remains incomplete, developments this area are already changing cryptography, communication and computation. Recently DARPA has solicited research which can show “beyond any doubt that manifestly quantum effects occur in biology, and demonstrate through simulation proof-of concept experiments that devices that exploit these effects could be developed into biomimetic sensors.” Biomimetic sensors are “devices, or systems that imitate nature … of special interest to researchers in nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), the medical industry, and the military.” What Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” is rapidly becoming part of the technology because it seems to work though don’t quite understand it.

The impact of these new ideas will eventually spread past the hard sciences and technology into our zeitgeist. Popular culture is still largely based on 19th century physical concepts, on the ‘common sense’ of the 1920s. It is bound to be modified by our new knowledge. Sir Arthur Eddington once said that “not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine”. That is probably because we only see part of it and are perplexed and surprised when the balance comes into view. And now that 21st century science is bringing more of the strangeness to the surface I think we will find a remarkable willingness in the public to embrace it.

One of my favorite works of fantastic literature is an early 20th century story called The Charwoman’s Shadow, which is all about a young man’s attempts to restore an old woman’s shadow to herself because as it turns out, the least obviously valuable part of us is what is most important. The shadow was entangled with her; and a sorcerer by holding it in his keeping kept her in his thrall. You know, sort of like quantum radar. That today’s public might receive that comparison as more than poetic license stems from its exposure to the information revolution. This is the first generation that understands the value of the invisible, that knows the secret power pattern can impose on the inanimate; which grasps the relationship of software to hardware and who, perhaps for the first time since the electric light dispelled the shadows of night, can sense the ghost in the machine by the full light of day.

Arthur Clarke once wrote that “the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible,” and that moreover, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The magic is back. The hard part is being able to stay on our feet in its midst.

So the 21st century threatens to reverse the tremendous set piece on which the Charwoman’s Shadow ended, with the defeated sorcerer fleeing over the Pyrenees, summoning everything magical in the world after him to hide forever in the Land Beyond the Moon’s Rising. Perhaps for a while, but not for all time. A century which taught that the loss of magic was the price of enlightenment has given way to one in which marvels and perils we thought imaginary now rise before us into dark and wondrous heights and we must nerve ourselves to meet them.

2010-03-16T05:27:00.000-07:00

Psychopaths' brains wired to seek rewards, no matter the consequences

From Eurekalert:

The brains of psychopaths appear to be wired to keep seeking a reward at any cost, new research from Vanderbilt University finds. The research uncovers the role of the brain's reward system in psychopathy and opens a new area of study for understanding what drives these individuals.

The results were published March 14, 2010, in Nature Neuroscience.

"Psychopaths are often thought of as cold-blooded criminals who take what they want without thinking about consequences," Joshua Buckholtz, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology and lead author of the new study, said. "We found that a hyper-reactive dopamine reward system may be the foundation for some of the most problematic behaviors associated with psychopathy, such as violent crime, recidivism and substance abuse."

Previous research on psychopathy has focused on what these individuals lack—fear, empathy and interpersonal skills. The new research, however, examines what they have in abundance—impulsivity, heightened attraction to rewards and risk taking. Importantly, it is these latter traits that are most closely linked with the violent and criminal aspects of psychopathy.

"There has been a long tradition of research on psychopathy that has focused on the lack of sensitivity to punishment and a lack of fear, but those traits are not particularly good predictors of violence or criminal behavior," David Zald, associate professor of psychology and of psychiatry and co-author of the study, said. "Our data is suggesting that something might be happening on the other side of things. These individuals appear to have such a strong draw to reward—to the carrot—that it overwhelms the sense of risk or concern about the stick."

To examine the relationship between dopamine and psychopathy, the researchers used positron emission tomography, or PET, imaging of the brain to measure dopamine release, in concert with a functional magnetic imaging, or fMRI, probe of the brain's reward system.

"The really striking thing is with these two very different techniques we saw a very similar pattern—both were heightened in individuals with psychopathic traits," Zald said.

Study volunteers were given a personality test to determine their level of psychopathic traits. These traits exist on a spectrum, with violent criminals falling at the extreme end of the spectrum. However, a normally functioning person can also have the traits, which include manipulativeness, egocentricity, aggression and risk taking.

In the first portion of the experiment, the researchers gave the volunteers a dose of amphetamine, or speed, and then scanned their brains using PET to view dopamine release in response to the stimulant. Substance abuse has been shown in the past to be associated with alterations in dopamine responses. Psychopathy is strongly associated with substance abuse.

"Our hypothesis was that psychopathic traits are also linked to dysfunction in dopamine reward circuitry," Buckholtz said. "Consistent with what we thought, we found people with high levels of psychopathic traits had almost four times the amount of dopamine released in response to amphetamine."

In the second portion of the experiment, the research subjects were told they would receive a monetary reward for completing a simple task. Their brains were scanned with fMRI while they were performing the task. The researchers found in those individuals with elevated psychopathic traits the dopamine reward area of the brain, the nucleus accumbens, was much more active while they were anticipating the monetary reward than in the other volunteers.

"It may be that because of these exaggerated dopamine responses, once they focus on the chance to get a reward, psychopaths are unable to alter their attention until they get what they're after," Buckholtz said. Added Zald, "It's not just that they don't appreciate the potential threat, but that the anticipation or motivation for reward overwhelms those concerns."

2010-02-09T09:56:00.000-08:00

French "Thinker" Bernard-Henri Lévy a laughing stock for quoting fictional philosopher

As a guy who studied Philosophy extensively in college (I am just a few units short of my degree, cuz I switched majors), I find this extremely humorous.

From the Times Online:

When France’s most dashing philosopher took aim at Immanuel Kant in his latest book, calling him “raving mad” and a “fake”, his observations were greeted with the usual adulation. To support his attack, Bernard-Henri Lévy — a showman-penseur known simply by his initials, BHL — cited the little-known 20th-century thinker Jean-Baptiste Botul.

There was one problem: Botul was invented by a journalist in 1999 as an elaborate joke, and BHL has become the laughing stock of the Left Bank.

There were clues. One supposed work by Botul — from which BHL quoted — was entitled The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant. The philosopher’s school is known as Botulism and subscribes to his theory of “La Metaphysique du Mou” — the Metaphysics of the Flabby. Botul even has a Wikipedia entry that explains that he is a “fictional French philosopher”.

But Mr Lévy, a leader among the nouveaux philosophes school of the 1970s, was unaware. In On War in Philosophy, he writes that Botul had proved once and for all “just after the Second World War, in his series of lectures to the neo-Kantians of Paraguay, that their hero was an abstract fake, a pure spirit of pure appearance”.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen Philosophy professors go off the rails. I had one Professor whose garbled thinkin on Wittgenstein and Chomsy I could never understand. I was advised by the other Professors he was a "genius". During my tenure as a student, he helped his mistress kill her husband by wiring his car's ignition to a bomb.

The other Philosophy Professors at my college mortgaged their homes to pay his bail. During the trial it was revealed he believed the CIA was listening to his thoughts through the fillings in his teeth.

That is genius, isn't it?

I love Philosophy, but I have never met a stranger group of people than Philosophers.

2010-02-08T17:38:00.000-08:00

The Wandering Jew in 'An Education':

The Anatomy of an Anti-Semitic Film

From Fight Hated:

Nazi caricature of "The Wandering Jew"

Jenny: “Oh, and by the way ... David’s a Jew, a wandering Jew. So watch yourself.”

We were only 15 minutes into the film and this was the second reference to the “Wandering Jew,” an age-old, European anti-Semitic stereotype. The British coming-of-age film, “An Education,” had gotten rave reviews, yet the more I watched, the more the character of David Goldman resembled the parasitical Jew of “Der Ewige Juden” (“The Eternal Jew”) — one of the infamous 1930s Nazi propaganda films I had studied in Peter Loewenberg’s class at UCLA.

From the moment David starts following the teenage Jenny in his fancy car, the pudgy, effete David Goldman (played by Peter Sarsgaard) proclaims his ethnicity. (Jenny: “I’m not a Jew.” David: “No, I am. I wasn’t ... accusing you.”) Like the predatory creature characterized in “Der Ewige Juden,” Goldman pretends to adopt the values of his host culture in order to turn its treasures into his profit. He offers Jenny “three five-pound notes” to drive her cello home safely out of the rain; “I’m a music lover,” he tells her. Then he proceeds to corrupt the innocent gentile girl (played by Carey Mulligan) with expensive flowers, gifts, concerts, art auctions and trips to Oxford and Paris.

David enriches himself by ruining good English neighborhoods, deflating property values and looting cultural treasures from displaced widows. He moves blacks into white neighborhoods: “Shvartzes,” he tells Jenny, “have to live somewhere; it’s not as if they can rent from their own kind.” The only identifiable Jew in the film, he constantly uses the collective “we” to justify his wickedness: “This is how we are, Jenny,” Goldman editorializes. “We’re not clever like you, so we have to be clever in other ways, because if we weren’t, there would be no fun.” He uses the word “stats” for old ladies he victimizes. They “are scared of colored people; so we move the coloreds in and the old ladies out and I buy their flats cheap.” Along with his partner, Danny, David barges into a house, military style, and speeds away with precious relics. “We have to be clever with maps,” he tells Jenny. An ancient map, he rationalizes, “shouldn’t spend its life on a wall…. We know how to look after it…. We liberated it.”

Read the whole thing.

2010-02-04T07:53:00.000-08:00

NASA BAFFLED BY MYSTERIOUS CROSS-LIKE OBJECT

From the Astute Bloggers:

An X-shaped comet-like object which may have been created by a high speed "smash-up" in space has left astronomers baffled.

The object was spotted 90 million miles from Earth by the Hubble Telescope

Scientists say the object could be the result of a collision between two asteroids, possibly siblings of the rock blamed for wiping out the dinosaurs when it smashed into the Earth millions of years ago.

Nasa described the debris pattern and trailing streamers of dust as "mysterious" but said the images captured by the Hubble Telescope suggested a head-on collision.
HMMMMMMM: "X-XHAPED"!?!? SOME MIGHT SAY IT LOOKS LIKE A CROSS...

2010-02-03T18:31:00.000-08:00

Study: Vegetative brains show signs of awareness

From the Associated Press:

NEW YORK – Scientists have detected glimmers of awareness in some vegetative brain-injury patients and have even communicated with one of them — findings that push the boundaries of how to assess and care for such people.

The new research suggests that standard tests may overlook patients who have some consciousness, and that someday some kind of communication may be possible.

In the strongest example, a 29-year-old patient was able to answer yes-or-no questions by visualizing specific scenes the doctors asked him to imagine. The two visualizations sparked different brain activity viewed through a scanning machine.

"We were stunned when this happened," said one study author, Martin Monti of Medical Research Council Cognitive and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, England. "I find it literally amazing. This was a patient who was believed to be vegetative for five years."

Ever since a research paper four years ago showed apparent signs of awareness in a vegetative patient — one who was included in the new study — families of patients have been clamoring for brain scans, said Dr. James Bernat of Dartmouth Medical School, a spokesman for the American Academy of Neurology.

2010-01-30T08:34:00.000-08:00

'They Really Do Smell Like Blood'

Among Hitler's Executioners on the Eastern Front

From Spiegel:

Annette Schücking-Homeyer

As a young woman, Annette Schücking-Homeyer served as a Red Cross volunteer on the Eastern Front in Ukraine. In an interview with SPIEGEL, the retired judge discusses the horrors committed against the Jews there, how everyone knew about them and why, even after the war, most people just wanted to forget.

SPIEGEL: After World War II, most Germans denied having known about the Holocaust. From 1941 to 1943, you were a volunteer with the German Red Cross behind the lines on the Eastern Front. When did you discover that Jews were being murdered?

Annette Schücking-Homeyer: In the train on the way to the front. It was October 1941. I had been sent with another nurse to run a so-called soldiers' home in Zwiahel, a small city 200 kilometers (125 miles) west of Kiev. After Brest-Litovsk, two soldiers joined us in our compartment, but I don't remember whether they were with the SS or just regular soldiers. All of a sudden, one of them told us how he had been ordered to shoot a woman in Brest. He said the woman had begged for mercy, pleading that she had to take care of her handicapped sister. He had someone get the sister, and then he shot them both. We were horrified, but we didn't say anything.

SPIEGEL: Was the man trying to show off?

Schücking-Homeyer: I don't know.

SPIEGEL: Before you arrived in Zwiahel, the city's Jewish community -- which had numbered in the thousands -- was annihilated. When did you learn of this?

Schücking-Homeyer: On the day we got there, an older officer told us that there weren't any more Jews, that they were all dead and that their houses were empty.

SPIEGEL: Did the man tell you this in private?

Schücking-Homeyer: No, he told us at the dinner table. I described it in a letter I sent to my parents soon thereafter. I also wrote that other nurses had told me that I had shouted in my sleep: "But that's impossible, it's completely impossible, it's against all international laws."

SPIEGEL: What did the town look like?

Schücking-Homeyer: The houses that had belonged to the Jews were ransacked, and you could often find Hebrew texts lying in the dirt on the floors. We were told that we could find nice Jewish candlesticks there. One of the officers took one home with him.

SPIEGEL: Did you see any mass graves?

Schücking-Homeyer: One day, the director of the combat engineering staff offered to show us the historic fortifications of Zwiahel. He pointed to a spot on the bank of the Sluch River and said that 450 Jewish men, women and children were buried there. I didn't say anything in response.

SPIEGEL: Do you know how many people were killed in Zwiahel?

Schücking-Homeyer: A few local Ukrainian girls helped us out in the soldiers' home; they said 10,000 people had been murdered. In any case, it was a large number, as I realized a few weeks later when the National Socialist People's Welfare (NSV) opened a huge clothing warehouse in Zwiahel. Since our Ukrainian helpers always had so little to wear, one of the officers asked me if they wanted to have any of the clothes. So I went there with the girls. There was a lot of children's clothing. Some of our girls didn't want to take anything; others said "Heil Hitler" when thanking the soldiers. I wrote to my mother about it and immediately informed her nurses in Hamburg that under no circumstances should they take any clothing from the NSV -- because it was coming from murdered Jews.

SPIEGEL: Did you ever witness any of these crimes with your own eyes?

Schücking-Homeyer: No. But it almost happened once. Every week, I would travel to Rivne, about 100 kilometers away, to pick up food and beer for the soldiers' home. There was a large ghetto there. One day -- it was in July 1942 -- the brewery where many Jews had worked was closed for business. Then we drove through the ghetto, but it was deserted. It had apparently been cleared just a short time before. And then we saw Germans soldiers herding together women and children who had apparently been hiding. There was no doubt that they were about to be shot. When I got back to Zwiahel, I was still crying. All I wanted to do was go home.

SPIEGEL: Rivne saw several waves of murder, and thousands were killed. Do you know anything about the circumstances?

Schücking-Homeyer: I would often go to the office of the military administration in Rivne to pick up ration coupon books. The soldiers discussed the resettlements so nonchalantly that I had to ask. "What's this resettlement all about?" I would ask. "When do they find out about it…"

SPIEGEL: At that point, had you already figured out that "resettlement" was just a polite way of saying "murdering Jews"?

Schücking-Homeyer: Yes, but I don't remember exactly when and how I found out. At any rate, the people at the military administration in Rivne said: "We are notified on the evening before it happens that a resettlement is going to take place at a specific location, and that it could get violent. The locally stationed troops aren't supposed to worry about it or get involved." Today, we know that special task forces and police officers carried out the shootings.

SPIEGEL: Did you also talk to any of these men in the soldiers' home?

Schücking-Homeyer: I can't say. They were all wearing uniforms and did everything that normal soldiers do.

Go read the whole thing.

2010-01-25T15:45:00.000-08:00

Alice Herz-Sommer: 106 Years Young

From Haaretz:

LONDON - Nothing in her appearance, behavior or speech betrays the advanced age of Alice Herz-Sommer, who recently celebrated her 106th birthday. Sommer, who was born in Prague in 1903, still keeps to a regular and independent routine, decades after her peers have passed away. She is coherent, clear-eyed, witty, funny and opinionated, smiles often - and is very content with life.

The encounter with her, at the small apartment in which she lives by herself, is like traveling in a time machine that alternately moves forward and backward. One moment she excitedly recalls the happy hours she spent with her friend Franz Kafka; then she talks painfully about her mother and her husband, who were murdered in the Holocaust; speaks reverently of her love for the piano, which she says saved her life at Theresienstadt; grows sad once again over the death of her only son, eight years ago; and thereafter smiles at the sight of the flowers on her windowsill.

"Everyone wants to reach an advanced age, but to be elderly is actually to be sick all the time. The body can no longer resist disease," she says.

And yet Sommer is in fact quite healthy: She is able to stand up and walk on her own, answers the phone, reads books and enjoys music.

"I have trouble moving these two fingers," she says with an embarrassed smile, waving her hand and explaining why she plays the piano with just eight fingers. Other than that, knock wood, everything is in working order.

"Only when you get to be very old are you aware of life's beauty," she explains. "Young people take everything for granted, whereas we, the elderly, understand nature. What I have learned, at my advanced age, is to be grateful that we have a nice life. There is electricity, cars, telegraph, telephone, Internet. We also have hot water all day long. We live like kings. I even got used to the bad weather in London," she adds with a smile.

Sommer was born into a secular and educated Jewish family. Besides her twin sister, Mariana, she had another sister and two brothers. She discovered a love for music at the age of 3, and it has remained with her to this day. Her family home in Prague was also a cultural salon where writers, scientists, musicians and actors congregated. One of these, author Franz Kafka, she remembers well: He was the best friend of the journalist, author and philosopher Felix Weltsch, who married her sister Irma.

"Kafka was a slightly strange man," Sommer recalls. "He used to come to our house, sit and talk with my mother, mainly about his writing. He did not talk a lot, but rather loved quiet and nature. We frequently went on trips together. I remember that Kafka took us to a very nice place outside Prague. We sat on a bench and he told us stories. I remember the atmosphere and his unusual stories. He was an excellent writer, with a lovely style, the kind that you read effortlessly," she says, and then grows silent. "And now, hundreds of people all over the world research and write doctorates about him."

She says she knows about the ongoing trial in Israel, at the center of which is the question of who owns the rights to Kafka's estate.

"Kafka would have been against this. Don't forget that he asked his friend Max Brod not to publish his writings. That much I know," says Sommer - she is the last person alive who knew Kafka personally.

When World War I broke out, she was 11. Five years later she enrolled at the German music academy in Prague, where she was the youngest pupil. Within a short time she became one of the city's most famous pianists, and in the early 1930s was also known throughout Europe. Max Brod, the man who published Kafka's works, recognized Sommer's talent and reviewed several of her performances for a newspaper.

"Music is my world. I am wealthier than everyone, thanks to music," she declares.

In 1931 she married Leopold Sommer, also a musician. Six years later their only son, Rafael, was born. In 1939 the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. Several of Sommer's friends and relatives fled to Palestine, including her two sisters, Mariana and Irma, her brother-in-law Felix Weltsch and their close friend Max Brod. The group boarded the last train that left Prague on March 14, 1939, the day before the Germans entered the country, en route to Romania, from where they sailed for Palestine.

This was a very difficult time for Sommer, who had stayed behind. The Nazis forbade Jews to perform in public, and so she stopped holding concerts and participating in music competitions. At first she was still able to make a living by giving piano lessons, but when the Nazis forbade Jews to teach non-Jews, she lost most of her pupils.

"Everything was forbidden. We couldn't buy groceries, take the tram, or go to the park," she says.

But the hardest times of all still lay ahead. In 1942 the Germans arrested her sick mother, Sophie, who was 72 at the time, and subsequently murdered her.

"That was the lowest point in my life," Sommer says. "A catastrophe. The bond between a mother and her child is something special. I loved her so much. But an inner voice told me, 'From now on you alone can help yourself. Not your husband, not the doctor, not the child.' And at that moment I knew I had to play Frederic Chopin's 24 etudes, which are the greatest challenge for any pianist. Like Goethe's 'Faust' or Shakespeare's 'Hamlet.' I ran home and from that moment on I practiced for hours and hours. Until they forced us out."

'Who is Hitler?'

In 1943, Sommer was sent to the Terezin-Theresienstadt concentration camp, along with her husband and their son, who was then 6 years old. The Nazis allowed the Jews to maintain a cultural life there, in order to present the false impression to the world that the inmates were receiving proper treatment. Sommer thus performed there together with other musicians.

"We had to play because the Red Cross came three times a year," she recounts. "The Germans wanted to show its representatives that the situation of the Jews in Theresienstadt was good. Whenever I knew that I had a concert, I was happy. Music is magic. We performed in the council hall before an audience of 150 old, hopeless, sick and hungry people. They lived for the music. It was like food to them. If they hadn't come [to hear us], they would have died long before. As we would have."

Once, Sommer says, a Nazi officer came up to her in the camp and said: "Are you Frau Sommer? I can hear your concert from the window. I come from a musical family and understand music. I thank you from the bottom of my heart."

Her son Rafael also took part in the musical effort and appeared in the lead role in the Czech children's opera "Brundibar," with music by Hans Krasa and libretto by Adolf Hoffmeister, which was staged at the camp.

"He was happy," Sommer says, "but he asked questions like: Who is Hitler? What is war? Why is there nothing to eat? For two years we ate only black coffee and soup. It's not easy for a mother to see her child crying, and to know that she does not even have a little bread to give him."

In September 1944, her husband Leopold was sent to Auschwitz. He survived his imprisonment there, but died of illness at Dachau shortly before the war ended. His departing words to her at Theresienstadt saved her life, says Sommer: "One evening he came and told me that 1,000 men would be sent on a transport the following day - himself included. He made me swear not to volunteer to follow him afterward. And a day after his transport there was another one, which people were told was a transport of 'wives following in their husbands' footsteps.' Many wives volunteered to go, but they never met up with their husbands: They were murdered. If my husband hadn't warned me, I would have gone at once."

In May 1945, the Soviet army liberated Theresienstadt. Two years later Sommer and her son immigrated to Palestine, where they were reunited with her family: her twin Mariana, who had meanwhile married Prof. Emil Adler, one of the founders of Hadassah Medical Center (their son, Prof. Chaim Adler, is an Israel Prize laureate for education), and with Irma and her husband Felix (their grandson is actor Eli Gorenstein).

"I don't hate the Germans," Sommer declares. "[What they did] was a terrible thing, but was Alexander the Great any better? Evil has always existed and always will. It is part of our life."

In 1962, she adds, she attended the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem: "I have to say that I had pity for him. I have pity for the entire German people. They are wonderful people, no worse than others."

Despite everything she went through? "Yes," she answers. "I would not be alive without pity. That is the reason I am still alive: I think about the good. That takes a lot of practice."

For almost 40 years Sommer lived in Israel, making a living by teaching music at a conservatory in Jerusalem. "That was the best period in my life," she recalls. "I was happy."

Jewish humor

On the walls of her London apartment are pictures of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, among other things; alongside Kafka's works, her bookshelves hold several volumes by Amos Oz.

"Jews are an extraordinary and complicated people. They are helpful and generous, but not always easy to live with," she notes, with a laugh. "A sense of humor is what makes me particularly Jewish. Nobody has this kind of humor. And the same goes for a sense of family. We are far more family-oriented than others. Not like the English, who spend time with their dogs."

She emphasizes that for her, however, Judaism is not connected to religion per se: "I am Jewish without religion. The past - Einstein, Mendelssohn, Mahler, Spinoza - is what defines us as Jews. And the [emphasis on] education of our children: Everyone has to be a doctor. The best doctors, scientists and writers are Jews."

In 1986, Sommer followed her son, a cellist, and his family to London. She continued playing and teaching; to this day she devotes three hours a day to practicing. She speaks lovingly of her two grandchildren, whose father, Rafael, died of a heart attack in Israel in 2001, at the end of a concert tour. He was 64.

"His birth was the happiest day of my life, and his death was the worst thing that happened to me," she notes, but manages to find a bright spot even here. "I am grateful at least that he did not suffer when he died. And I still watch my son play, on television. He lives on. Sometimes I think it will be possible someday to postpone death through technology."

What is your secret to a long life?

Sommer: "In a word: optimism. I look at the good. When you are relaxed, your body is always relaxed. When you are pessimistic, your body behaves in an unnatural way. It is up to us whether we look at the good or the bad. When you are nice to others, they are nice to you. When you give, you receive."

And what about diet?

"My recommendation is not to eat a lot, but also not to go hungry. Fish or chicken and plenty of vegetables."

Aren't you afraid of death?

"Not at all. No. I was a good person, I helped people, I was loved, I have a good feeling."

2010-01-13T13:53:00.000-08:00

The Deadliest place on Earth? Surviving Cueva de los Cristales - The Giant Crystal Cave

Summary: Filming in the Giant Crystal Cave for 'How Earth Made Us'. One of the deadliest places on the planet. Watch a preview of the Crystal Cave sequence here.

It's 50oC and has a humidity of 100%, less than a hundred people have been inside and it's so deadly that even with respirators and suits of ice you can only survive for 20 minutes before your body starts to fail. It’s the nearest thing to visiting another planet – it’s going deep inside our own.

For 'How Earth made us' I have been lucky enough to film everywhere from tiny Pacific islands to the centre of the Sahara desert, yet nowhere could prepare me for filming in The Giant Crystal Cave - Cueva de los Cristales of Mexico.

Probably the most incredible photograph of the cave ever taken. Photograph by Carsten Peter/Speleoresearch & Films. Published in National Geographic.

Go read the whole thing.

2009-12-31T11:01:00.000-08:00

2009-12-07T19:39:00.001-08:00

Sailing Through The Storm Of Nihilist Obscurantism ... On A Rose

From Truth, Freedom, Tradition:

What are the contents of the education that we receive today in the West ?

A large dose of scientism and materialism, and a small dose of "religious" teachings that are always and without exception reduced to a "faith" that is interpreted, against all Tradition, as CREDENCE, that is to say, something subject to doubt, instead of being understood as the mature result of the Sacred Knowledge, the Faith that "moves the mountains" of Matthew 17:20 :

"For verily I say unto you If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed ye shall say unto this mountain Remove hence to yonder place and it shall remove and nothing shall be impossible unto you."
ἀμὴν γὰρ λέγω ὑμῖν, ἐὰν ἔχητε πίστιν ὡς κόκκον σινάπεως, ερεῖτε τῷ ὄρει τούτῳ• μετάβα ἔνθεν ἐκεῖ, καὶ μεταβήσεται• καὶ οὐδὲν ἀδυνατήσει ὑμῖν.

The true Faith of the Tradition is not a second class thought but is the pinnacle of Knowledge, it is the personal realization of the Truth, the personal realization that we find symbolized in both Eastern European Hasidism and in Chinese Ch'an (Zen) by the image of the Spiritual Master crossing the raging waters of a flood standing on the stem of a rose: supreme sailing in which the dark waves of finitude and becoming no longer hide, and instead reveal, the Radiant Presence of the Divine.

But against the Sacred Way have been raised the bastions of despair, founded on a pseudo-philosophy that has been imposed to the whole academic world and to all the society as an absolute dogma: this pseudo-philosophy blathers irrationally, it denies the Infinite Being and it spreads the blind credence in the absolute nothing. Whoever attempts to laugh at the ignorance and at the arrogance of the last two hundred years of pseudo-thinking is himself treated as a fool by the totalitarian machine of nihilism. Thousands and thousands of years of culture, reasoning, reflection that are the true roots of Western civilization and of Freedom are simply ignored by a (pseudo-)cultural machine designed to transform the People in a shapeless mass, obedient to the orders of the latest demon who has climbed the ladder of insanity and power until the top of delirium. Fascists, nazis, communists, socialists, subversives and revolutionaries of all kinds and shades, mock-initiatic societies and true cults of the sheer nothing, pseudo-religions that preach murder and conquest, all have in common one basic pseudo-philosophy that denies the Infinite Being Who Is Love, and all have in common a totalitarian idea of the society.

Only in the Traditional Philosophy the idea of Freedom is not reduced to an empty slogan, because Freedom is the Gift of God to the human beings AND Freedom is given to the human beings so that they can find the Way to the Supreme Knowledge.

With nihilism, this idea of Freedom can only die: the human being becomes a thing that can be managed like all the other things, AND the single individual is reduced to see himself/herself as a thing among all other things. All this is greatly encouraged - in the nihilist totalitarianism under whose rule we all live - by education and by the diffusion of a new (and subversive) common sense that describes reality in terms of materialism and describes the individual in terms of scientism (the ideology that transforms science from a tool into a "truth" that can be applied to the fundamental questions of life). This brainwashing creates strong interior chains that maim the existence of every individual and are actually maiming the same human culture: individuals fall into all forms of despair, the arts choke, the language itself is reduced to ugliness and oversimplification.

But the totalitarian regime of nihilism cannot make the Truth disappear: the Wonder is inside the individuals and survives and thrives in those who reject evil and keep themselves open to the Light: from every age and from the four corners of the world, the humans testify in infinite ways about visions and dreams that inspire them and reveal Truths that they couldn't possibly know...if the "reality" were what materialism and scientism say it is. Foreknowledge, visions, presentiments announce to the individuals a world free from the limits of space and time, foster them on the Way towards true Knowledge, kindle the original Freedom that every individual IS, as long as he/she rejects evil.

Even in the cave of the totalitarian regime of nihilism, the only Truth of the whole Creation is the Infinite Holy, the Infinite Love of God, the Infinite Life Eternal.

And that Truth can shine through any darkness.

And the Wonder of the Creation can ignite the Spirit of the individuals and make them discover again the depth of the Sacred Knowledge when the individual learns to think independently from the chains of nihilism: from birth to death the human beings voyage towards Light, Sun and Moon and Stars give guidance to their days and nights: Symbols literally surround us all the time and we can become sensitive to them, we can learn to see and listen again ("again", because we come from the Light of the Infinite Being, and again because as children we have all lived our life in the great Vision, before the "education" brainwashed us).

The Vision from inside us and the universe of Symbols from outside us are the guiding Lights that the nihilist regime cannot dim: the totalitarian regime of nihilism is certainly based on obscurantism, but all the violence that the regime uses - to make the humans forget their humanity and the Light of God Who Is Love - is powerless against the Truth.

John 8:32
καὶ γνώσεσθε τὴν ἀλήθειαν καὶ ἡ ἀλήθεια ἐλευθερώσει ὑμᾶς.
And ye shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free

2009-12-07T06:36:00.000-08:00

Mayo Clinic researchers show brain waves can 'write' on a computer in early tests

BOSTON, Mass. — Neuroscientists at the Mayo Clinic campus in Jacksonville, Fla., have demonstrated how brain waves can be used to type alphanumerical characters on a computer screen. By merely focusing on the "q" in a matrix of letters, for example, that "q" appears on the monitor.

Researchers say these findings, presented at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Epilepsy Society, represent concrete progress toward a mind-machine interface that may, one day, help people with a variety of disorders control devices, such as prosthetic arms and legs. These disorders include Lou Gehrig's disease and spinal cord injuries, among many others.

"Over 2 million people in the United States may benefit from assistive devices controlled by a brain-computer interface," says the study's lead investigator, neurologist Jerry Shih, M.D. "This study constitutes a baby step on the road toward that future, but it represents tangible progress in using brain waves to do certain tasks."

Dr. Shih and other Mayo Clinic researchers worked with Dean Krusienski, Ph.D., from the University of North Florida on this study, which was conducted in two patients with epilepsy. These patients were already being monitored for seizure activity using electrocorticography (ECoG), in which electrodes are placed directly on the surface of the brain to record electrical activity produced by the firing of nerve cells. This kind of procedure requires a craniotomy, a surgical incision into the skull.

Dr. Shih wanted to study a mind-machine interface in these patients because he hypothesized that feedback from electrodes placed directly on the brain would be much more specific than data collected from electroencephalography (EEG), in which electrodes are placed on the scalp. Most studies of mind-machine interaction have occurred with EEG, Dr. Shih says.

"There is a big difference in the quality of information you get from ECoG compared to EEG. The scalp and bony skull diffuses and distorts the signal, rather like how the Earth's atmosphere blurs the light from stars," he says. "That's why progress to date on developing these kind of mind interfaces has been slow."

Because these patients already had ECoG electrodes implanted in their brains to find the area where seizures originated, the researchers could test their fledgling brain-computer interface.
In the study, the two patients sat in front of a monitor that was hooked to a computer running the researchers' software, which was designed to interpret electrical signals coming from the electrodes.

The patients were asked to look at the screen, which contained a 6-by-6 matrix with a single alphanumeric character inside each square. Every time the square with a certain letter flashed, and the patient focused on it, the computer recorded the brain's response to the flashing letter. The patients were then asked to focus on specific letters, and the computer software recorded the information. The computer then calibrated the system with the individual patient's specific brain wave, and when the patient then focused on a letter, the letter appeared on the screen.

"We were able to consistently predict the desired letters for our patients at or near 100 percent accuracy," Dr. Shih says. "While this is comparable to other researchers' results with EEGs, this approach is more localized and can potentially provide a faster communication rate. Our goal is to find a way to effectively and consistently use a patient's brain waves to perform certain tasks."

Once the technique is perfected, its use will require patients to have a craniotomy, although it isn't yet known how many electrodes would have to be implanted. And software would have to calibrate each person's brain waves to the action that is desired, such as movement of a prosthetic arm, Dr. Shih says. "These patients would have to use a computer to interpret their brain waves, but these devices are getting so small, there is a possibility that they could be implanted at some point," he says.

"We find our progress so far to be very encouraging," he says.

Implant enables direct alphanumeric input from brain to computer

Using a technique known as electrocorticography (ECoG), neuroscientists at the Mayo Clinic have demonstrated how brain waves can be interpreted to directly enter alphanumerical characters into a computer. The team behind the findings, presented at the annual meeting of the American Epilepsy Society, say the results represent concrete progress toward a robust mind-machine interface.

"Over 2 million people in the United States may benefit from assistive devices controlled by a brain-computer interface," says the study's lead investigator, neurologist Jerry Shih. "This study constitutes a baby step on the road toward that future, but it represents tangible progress in using brain waves to do certain tasks."

The study was conducted with two epileptic patients who were already being monitored for epileptic seizures using ECoG, in which electrodes are placed directly on the surface of the brain to record electrical activity produced by the firing of nerve cells.

To date, most studies of mind-machine interfaces have used electroencephalography (EEG), in which electrodes are placed on the scalp. Dr. Shih hypothesized that feedback from electrodes placed directly on the brain would be much more specific than data collected from EEG.

"There is a big difference in the quality of information you get from ECoG compared to EEG. The scalp and bony skull diffuses and distorts the signal, rather like how the Earth's atmosphere blurs the light from stars," Shih explained. "That's why progress to date on developing these kind of mind interfaces has been slow."

In the study, the two patients sat in front of a monitor that was hooked to a computer running software which was designed to interpret electrical signals coming from the electrodes. The patients were asked to look at the screen, which contained a 6-by-6 matrix with a single alphanumeric character inside each square. Every time the square with a certain letter flashed, and the patient focused on it, the computer recorded the brain's response to the flashing letter. The patients were then asked to focus on specific letters, and the computer software recorded the information. The computer then calibrated the system with the individual patient's specific brain wave, and when the patient then focused on a letter, the letter appeared on the screen.

"We were able to consistently predict the desired letters for our patients at or near 100 percent accuracy," Dr. Shih boasted. "While this is comparable to other researchers' results with EEGs, this approach is more localized and can potentially provide a faster communication rate. Our goal is to find a way to effectively and consistently use a patient's brain waves to perform certain tasks."

Once the technique is perfected, its use will require patients to have a craniotomy (a surgical incision into the skull). The researchers say it isn't yet known how many electrodes would have to be implanted. "These patients would have to use a computer to interpret their brain waves, but these devices are getting so small, there is a possibility that they could be implanted at some point," Shih concluded.

2009-12-01T06:12:00.000-08:00

Five Levels of the Soul

From Inner:

In light of the above, an obvious question arises. What category corresponds to the yud of G-d's name, the world of Atzilut, and to the higher, kotso shel yud, the tip of the yud, which is the sefirah of keter? To understand this, we must return to the first model of the three categories. In the first model, the home corresponds to the highest level of the nefesh, the makeef harachok, called the yechida. The clothing, the makeef hakarov, corresponds to the chaya. In Kabbalah, the chaya is generally the yud of G-d's name, and the yechida is the "tip of the yud." Mazon corresponds to the first hei of G-d?s name. This is the phenomenon in Kabbalah called the Chotam Hamithapech, the "Inverted Seal." The very highest level of yechida becomes physically manifest at the level of malchut. The very highest descends to the very lowest. The chaya primarily manifests at the level of madim, clothing, which are the characteristics of the heart.

Mazon, the first hei of G-d's name,is the pivotal point. We have seen that food is the hinge on which the other two categories reflect themselves.

To Summarize:

Mazon

First hei

Imma

Neshamah

Levush

Vav

Midot

Chayah

Bayit

Final hei

Malchut

Yechidah

The five levels of the soul are called nefesh, ruach, neshama, chaya, yechida. The yechida reflects itself in the nefesh. This is revealed in the relation between Mashiach and King David. Each of the five levels of the soul correspond to a general soul root. The Arizal explains that the general soul root of the nefesh in all of Am Yisrael is King David. The ruach is the prophet, Elijah. The neshama, which is the mind, mochin d'Imma, is Moses, as stated in the Gemorah that Moses merited binah. The chaya corresponds to the ideal and primordial, blissful state of Adam and Eve before the sin. Had Adam stood that trial successfully, he would have risen to the level of yechida. Since he failed the trial he fell from all the levels of Olam ha'Atzilut. The highest level, yechida, is that of Mashiach, may he become revealed speedily in our days.

It is clear that of all the previous figures, Mashiach reflects himself in King David. That is why Mashiach is referred to as Mashiach ben David. The pivot point is Moses. The union of Mashiach and David depends on the power of Moses. In Kabbalah we are taught that the Mashiach possesses the soul of Moses within the body of David. Thus he is physically the son of David but it is the soul of Moses that is manifest in his inner state of consciousness.

Likewise, Moses reaches up and takes the spiritual level of Adam before the sin and manifests it as Elijah the Prophet. Had Adam not sinned, he would not have been punished with death. The soul that did not physically die is Elijah. In this respect, the rectification of Adam before the sin, or the return to the idyllic state of Adam prior to the sin, was achieved by Elijah. This was done with the power of Moses. This is Chotam Hamithapech.

To summarize:

Nefesh

King David

Ruach

Elijah

Neshama

Moses

Chaya

Adam and Eve

Yechida

Mashiach

2009-11-19T08:54:00.000-08:00

Meow: IBM takes a (feline) step toward thinking machines

From Yahoo News:

SAN FRANCISCO - Scientists say they've made a breakthrough in their pursuit of computers that "think" like a living thing's brain — an effort that tests the limits of technology.
Even the world's most powerful supercomputers can't replicate basic aspects of the human mind. The machines can't imagine a wall painted a different color, for instance, or picture a person's face and connect that to an emotion.

If researchers can make computers operate more like a brain thinks — by reasoning and dealing with abstractions, among other things — they could unleash tremendous insights in such diverse fields as medicine and economics.

A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near. But this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they've simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory — 100,000 times as much as your computer has.

The scientists had previously simulated 40 percent of a mouse's brain in 2006, a rat's full brain in 2007, and 1 percent of a human's cerebral cortex this year, using progressively bigger supercomputers.

The latest feat, being presented at a supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore., doesn't mean the computer thinks like a cat, or that it is the progenitor of a race of robo-cats.

The simulation, which runs 100 times slower than an actual cat's brain, is more about watching how thoughts are formed in the brain and how the roughly 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses in a cat's brain work together.

The researchers created a program that told the supercomputer, which is in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to behave how a brain is believed to behave. The computer was shown images of corporate logos, including IBM's, and scientists watched as different parts of the simulated brain worked together to figure out what the image was.
Dharmendra Modha, manager of cognitive computing for IBM Research and senior author of the paper, called it a "truly unprecedented scale of simulation."

2009-11-05T12:19:00.000-08:00

Outrage over wall blocking free U2 Berlin concert

From Yahoo Music News:

Fans hoping to glimpse U2's free concert celebrating 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell were outraged Thursday to find that a 12-foot (3.6-meter) metal barrier was installed to block the view for those without tickets.
Both Berliners and tourists alike saw the irony in building a wall around a concert dedicated to the wall that has already come down.
"It's completely ridiculous that they are blocking the view," said Louis-Pierre Boily, 23, who came to Berlin even though he failed to get U2 tickets. "I thought it's a free show, but MTV probably wants people to watch it on TV to get their ratings up."

2009-11-02T19:36:00.000-08:00

Monkeys in mourning

From the New York Post:

Farewell, old friend.
More than a dozen grief-stricken chimpanzees joined in an extraordinary expression of mourning as an elder in their family was laid to rest at a West African animal sanctuary.
Dorothy was in her late 40s, which is well into retirement age for a chimp, when she succumbed to heart failure.
As caregivers at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center bore her by wheelbarrow for burial, the typically boisterous apes rushed to the edge of their wired enclosure and fell silent.
They stood -- wrapping arms around one another, resting on each other's shoulder and not making a sound -- as Dorothy's female keeper adjusted her head in preparation for a final farewell.

Monica Szczupider

PAYING RESPECTS: Chimps watch in pained silence as Dorothy, who was in her 40s, is wheeled past them and prepared for burial at a sanctuary in Cameroon. The amazing story is featured in National Geographic.
The remarkable photo, which appears in the November issue of National Geographic magazine, was snapped by Monica Szczupider, who was working at the rescue center in eastern Cameroon.
She said Dorothy was a "prominent figure" among the extended family of about 25 chimps at Sanaga-Yong, and the sanctuary's caregivers made sure the other apes witnessed her last rites.
Get more on this story at NationalGeographic.com
"We brought her by wheelbarrow to let the others see," she told the British newspaper The Sun.
The chimps, united in mourning, remained there as they watched Dorothy's keeper give her a final, loving stroke on her forehead and then lowered her into the ground.
"It was unbelievably emotional. We were all struck," Szczupider, 30, said.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/international/monkeys_in_mourning_HZ86SGLBhngUmIUrAkzWWJ#ixzz0VlQrTjQ4

2009-10-28T19:55:00.000-07:00

The Great Debate - Is Yeshua Who He Said He Is?

Who is Jesus? Debate - Rabbi Blumofe & Dr Brown from RealMessiah.com on Vimeo.

2009-10-28T15:07:00.000-07:00

Girl's 'Notes Left Behind' Made Into Book

Elena Desserich Left Parents Notes Before She Died

From WLWT:

CINCINNATI -- Brooke and Keith Desserich say they never intended to write a book about their daughter.It started as a parent's personal journal to their younger daughter Gracie, so she would be able to remember her 6-year-old sister, Elena, who was diagnosed with pediatric brain cancer.
Elena Desserich

"They told us at the very beginning that she had 135 days to live," Keith Desserich said.

Though her parents didn't want her to know the severity of her cancer, they feel that she must have known what was happening.

The tumor slowly took away her ability to talk.

Images: Notes Left Behind

But Elena was still able to write.

"That was her way to letting us know everything would be OK," Brooke Desserich said.

After Elena passed away, her parents discovered that their daughter had left a message behind for them -- a lot of messages, actually.

"We started to pull out notes and they would be in between CDs or between books on our bookshelf," Keith Desserich said.Then the couple started finding them everywhere.

"We started to collect them and they would all say 'I love you Mom, Dad and Grace.' We kept finding them, and still to this day, we keep finding them," Keith Desserich said. "Literally, there are hundreds of notes that we found.

"Elena’s parents each hold onto a sealed note they've never opened.

"We always want to know that there’s one more note that we haven't read yet," Keith Desserich said.

The Desserich family initially didn’t want the story published, but in the end, they decided they would if all the money went to their cancer foundation, The Cure Starts Now, dedicated to finding "home run" cures for all cancers.

2009-09-25T17:01:00.000-07:00

Scientists See Numbers Inside Peoples Heads

From Yahoo News:

By carefully analyzing brain activity, scientists can tell what number a person has just seen, research now reveals.
They can similarly tell how many dots a person was presented with.
Past investigations had uncovered brain cells in monkeys that were linked with numbers. Although scientists had found brain regions linked with numerical tasks in humans - the frontal and parietal lobes, to be exact - until now patterns of brain activity linked with specific numbers had proven elusive.
Scientists had 10 volunteers watch either numerals or dots on a screen while a part of their brain known as the intraparietal cortex was scanned - it's a region of the parietal lobe especially linked with numbers. They next rigorously analyzed brain activity to decipher which patterns might be linked with the numbers the volunteers had observed.
When it came to small numbers of dots, the researchers found that brain activity patterns changed gradually in a way that reflected the ordered nature of the numbers. For example, one might be able to conclude that the pattern for six is between that for five and seven.
In the case of the numerals, the researchers could not detect this same gradual change. This suggests their methods simply might not be sensitive enough to detect this progression yet, or that these symbols are in fact coded as more precise, discrete entities in the brain.
"Activation patterns for numbers of dots seem to be stronger - are more easily discriminated - than those for digits, suggesting that maybe still more neurons encode specifically numbers of objects - the evolutionary older representation - than abstract symbolic numbers," said researcher Evelyn Eger at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay, France.
Given that numbers "are in principle infinite, it is very unlikely that the brain can have, or we can detect, a signature for each number," Eger noted. "There is some hint in our data that smaller numbers have a clearer signature, which may be related to their frequency of occurrence in daily life, but further work would be needed to say something more definite about this and about how the brain deals with larger numbers."
The methods employed in this research could ultimately help unlock how the brain makes sophisticated calculations and how the brain changes as people learn math, the researchers said.
"We are only beginning to access the most basic building blocks that symbolic math probably relies on," Eger said. "We still have no clear idea of how these number representations interact and are combined in mathematical operations, but the fact that we can resolve them in humans gives hope that at some point we can come up with paradigms that let us address this."
The scientists detailed their findings online September 24 in the journal Current Biology.

2009-09-24T12:51:00.000-07:00

Indian Lunar Mission Finds Water On The Moon

From the London Times:

Dreams of establishing a manned Moon base could become reality within two decades after India’s first lunar mission found evidence of large quantities of water on its surface.
Data from Chandrayaan-1 also suggests that water is still being formed on the Moon. Scientists said the breakthrough — to be announced by Nasa at a press conference today — would change the face of lunar exploration.
The discovery is a significant boost for India in its space race against China. Dr Mylswamy Annadurai, the mission’s project director at the Indian Space Research Organisation in Bangalore, said: “It’s very satisfying.”
The search for water was one of the mission’s main objectives, but it was a surprise nonetheless, scientists said.The unmanned craft was equipped with Nasa’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, designed specifically to search for water by picking up the electromagnetic radiation emitted by minerals. The M3 also made the unexpected discovery that water may still be forming on the surface of the Moon, according to scientists familiar with the mission.

There are two reasons I post this.

One, I think it's interesting, and two, I think it's a chance to promote the greatest unheralded Rock n' Roll band in history; the Bell Rays. After all, if there is water on the moon, there can also be Fire On The Moon:

More Bell Rays. Here they are on the Craig Ferguson Show.

2009-09-21T20:55:00.000-07:00

The Woman Who Could Not Forget

From Mental Floss:

4 People With Super Memory
by David K. Israel

What if you finished reading this article and remembered every detail of it for the rest of your life? That’s the problem people with super-autobiographical memory face—and yes, it’s often referred to as a problem, not a gift. Their minds are like a computer hard drive that retains everything: dates, middle names, license plate numbers, even what they eat for lunch on a daily basis There are only four confirmed super memory cases, a disorder experts say is somewhat related to OCD, though no doubt there are plenty others who haven’t been identified yet.

So who are the four individuals who’ve all recently been the subject of a study at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine.? Let’s meet them and find out…

1. Bob Petrella

A Los Angeles based producer for the Tennis Channel, Bob Petrella may remember every number in his cell phone, but it’s his ability to recall sporting events that’s most remarkable. Give him a date, like March 30, 1981, and he could tell you not only that it was the day Reagan was shot, but also that Indiana beat North Carolina for the NCAA championship that evening. Even more impressive: when it comes to the Pittsburgh Steelers, his favorite team, you can show him a single freeze frame from most any game that he’s seen, and he can tell you not only the date of the game, but the final score.

According to a piece on ABC news, Patrella “remembers all but two of his birthdays since he turned 5. He recalls where he was and what he did with high school buddies. Grainy images of the 1970s are vividpictures in his head. ‘I remember all my ATM codes,’ he said. ‘I remember people’s numbers. [I] lost my cell phone Sept. 24, 2006. A lot of people, if they lost their cell phone, they would panic because they have all these numbers. I didn’t have any numbers in my cell phone because I know everybody’s numbers up here [in my head].’

2. Jill Price

Probably the best known of the four, Jill Price has described her ‘gift’ as “nonstop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting.” She was the first to be diagnosed with the condition, and recently published a memoir, The Woman Who Can’t Forget. Price remembers most details of nearly every day she’s been alive since she was 14 and compares her super memory to walking around with a video camera on her shoulder. “If you throw a date out at me, it’s as if I pulled a videotape out, put in a VCR and just watched the day,” she has said.

Like Bob Petrella, Price calls California home, though working as an assistant at a Jewish religious day-school, she’s about as far from Hollywood as you can get. And although people she meets at parties are impressed with her ability to remember everything from the date of the Lockerbie plane crash (December 21, 1988) to the last episode of Dallas, (May 3, 1991), in her memoir, she describes super memory as a nuisance, partly because she can’t seem to forget painful events, like when someone she was crushing on rejected her.

3. Brad Williams

For every Jill Price, there’s a Brad Williams, a Wisconsin radio anchor who embraces his super memory and enjoys having it tested. Ask him what happened on November 7, 1991, and he’ll tell you that it was the day Magic Johnson announced he was HIV positive. But Williams does not stop there. “It was a Thursday,” he once said in an MSNBC piece. “There was a big snowstorm here the week before.”

Unlike Bob Petrella, Williams has a tough time with sports, but excels at pop-culture trivia. For instance, he could name you every Academy Award winner and even nailed all five questions in the category “1984 Movies” when he appeared on Jeopardy!in 1990.

Although the folk at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine don’t agree, Williams says he never saw his ability as anything out of the ordinary. “Growing up, I never really had reason to think I wasn’t like everyone else,” he has said. A feature-length doc on his life, titled Unforgettable, is presently in production.

If you’re interested in the subject, remember to check it out once it hits theaters.

4. Rick Baron

A Cleveland native, Rick Baron came out and announced his super ability directly to USA Today, after reading a piece the newspaper published on Jill Price. Unlike Price, Baron uses his super memory to win stuff. Although unemployed, he’s extremely resourceful and is constantly entering, and winning trivia contests. His list of rewards include restaurant gift cards, tickets to sporting events, even all expense paid vacations (Baron has won 14 of them). Baron claims to remember every detail of his life since the age of 11, and is usually pretty successful at remembering the day-to-day going all the way back to when he was seven.

According to the USA Today piece on Baron, his sister claims he shows signs of hardcore OCD. “He organizes and catalogs everything. He even keeps his bills in order of the city of the federal reserve bank where they were issued and also by how the sports teams in that city did.”

2009-08-05T20:13:00.000-07:00

Music, Love, and The Imaginative Dimension of Experience

This post is just a musing. I hope I find the time to go further with it, because it is an idea I think about quite a bit, but have never written about previously.

A friend of mine wrote to me, saying he hasn't gotten into iTunes, because,

I'm also still stuck on the "album", so the way of thinking about music in terms of buying individual songs is still pretty foreign to me. It did occur to me that i should, or at least could, do more of this for cool individual songs I happen to like. but I haven't really done it yet ...

I replied,

This brings up an interesting conversation that my friend Mark (Record Producer and Literary Agent) and I had. He and I both buy stuff on iTunes, and we've both noticed that the fact that we can get everything we want, whenever we want, has lessened our appreciation of music.

We've talked about how when we were younger, we'd have 10 bucks or whatever it was at the time, and we'd go and buy an album that we had been wanting to have for a long time. And, we'd listen to it the whole way through, sitting there with the record on the turntable, and reading the lyrics and checking out the cover graphics, and we'd fall in love with the whole package, including the feel of the cover (many had textures) and the smell of the printing ( I remember, in particular, Steely Dan used a extremely high-gloss method for the Aja album, which really smelled cool).

One of my beefs with albums for years was I'd buy an album, and then I'd find out I really only like two or three songs, and the rest were trash. So, I thought I'd love iTunes, and I do in a way, cuz I don't have to pay for all the trash.

BUT,

now I just don't have the same relationship with the music I like. I like it, instead of loving it.

Now, what I always think about when contemplating subjects like this, is how much IMAGINATION is involved in how we enjoy things. The albums I bought when I was a kid became personal, and I fell in love with them because of my imaginative experience as much as my "real" experience of the music.

So, I tend to think kids today probably have an imaginative experience of the music, but just within a different paradigm. We really won't know until they get older and start articulating it.

But, for us, the imaginative phase of the whole thing is gone. Now, it's just kind of the music and that's it. Once in awhile, I will be going through something (maybe the birth of one of my children, or some pain at work, or the death of my father) and I will once again fall in love with some piece of music because the imagination is connected to the experience of the music.

Sadly, that is a rarer and rarer experience.

Similarly, by the way, I believe that kids have an imaginative dimension to their video game playing. I don't believe the whole thing of them being zombies in front of the game console. I think there is a whole imaginative dimension going on there, but no one has come along to articulate that dimension.

I got a glimpse into it personally a few years ago when I fell in love with a video game called Twisted Metal Black. My nephew and I used to play that thing for hours. I had my PS2hooked up to my stereo system and we'd blast it (whenever my wife and daughter were gone) and we'd get totally wired into that bizarre and very dark world.

It was like a dream that you could sum up at will.

Just wait until this young generation coming up starts producing it's first writers and incorporating Pokemon and all the various characters into the imaginative dimension of their literature. I believe it will be amazing.

2009-08-01T20:13:00.000-07:00

The Rock Too Heavy For God To Lift

I have recently become all but convinced that there is one rock which God has created a rock which is too big for He, Himself to lift.

The Bible says he "delights" in us:

(Proverbs 11:20). “The prayer of the upright is his delight” (15:8). “My strong enemy [was]…too strong for me…but the Lord was my stay. He brought me forth into a large place; he delivered me, because he delighted in me” (Psalm 18:17-19)

I think the taking of great pleasure or joy (which is, of course, the definition of delight) is a component of the experience of surprise.

For instance, last week, my 6 year old daughter asked me to read her a book that she wrote. Well, actually, she wrote the first page. The rest of the book was written by the other kids in her class. The subject of the book was, "Why I love my Mommy ..."

Every kid in the whole class wrote things like, "I love my Mommy because she takes me for doughnuts every Saturday ... because she bakes me cookies ... because she is nice ..."

My daughter wrote, "I love my Mommy because I help her do the dishes."

I delighted in my daughter, because it took me aback, surprised me. I learned something new about my daughter.

Similarly, I think God is surprised by our Creativity. However, Creativity is a function of Limitlessness, or Infinity. Ronald Reagan believed the mind of man is infinite in it's capacity for creativity. I agree with him. The only limits on our abilities are those of time and space. It takes time to create things, and we must use matter (space) to do it. Other than that, everything conceived of by the mind of man eventually happens.

God delights in the things we learn through our Creativity. He is surprised by these things.

Evil is not a function of limitlessness, or of infinity. Evil is limited, petty, and self-serving/referential, and therefore, it is a tired circle, a downward spiral.

This, God is not surprised by. God is not surprised by evil. He is not surprised by our downward spirals. He knows everything evil will lead to. That is why he warns us, like a parent warns a child, not to do evil.

However, He does not know what our Creative Capacity will lead us to create. He is surprised by it, and therefore, He delights in it.

That is the rock God created which is too big for He, Himself, to lift.

However, ultimately, the Bible tells us there is one rock (the word used in most translations is "stone") too big for every men to lift. That is Israel.

The book of Zechariah tells us:

The burden of the word of the LORD concerning Israel. Thus declares the LORD who stretches out the heavens, lays the foundation of the earth, and forms the spirit of man within him,
²"Behold, I am going to make Jerusalem a cup that causes reeling to all the peoples around; and when the siege is against Jerusalem, it will also be against Judah.
"It will come about in that day that I will make Jerusalem a heavy stone for all the peoples; all who lift it will be severely injured And all the nations of the earth will be gathered against it.
"In that day," declares the LORD, "I will strike every horse with bewilderment and his rider with madness. But I will watch over the house of Judah, while I strike every horse of the peoples with blindness.
"Then the clans of Judah will say in their hearts, 'A strong support for us are the inhabitants of Jerusalem through the LORD of hosts, their God.'
"In that day I will make the clans of Judah like a firepot among pieces of wood and a flaming torch among sheaves, so they will consume on the right hand and on the left all the surrounding peoples, while the inhabitants of Jerusalem again dwell on their own sites in Jerusalem.
"The LORD also will save the tents of Judah first, so that the glory of the house of David and the glory of the inhabitants of Jerusalem will not be magnified above Judah.
"In that day the LORD will defend the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and the one who is feeble among them in that day will be like David, and the house of David will be like God, like the angel of the LORD before them.
"And in that day I will set about to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem.
...
"In that day a fountain will be opened for the house of David and for the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for sin and for impurity.
"It will come about in that day," declares the LORD of hosts, "that I will cut off the names of the idols from the land, and they will no longer be remembered; and I will also remove the prophets and the unclean spirit from the land.
...
For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle, and the city will be captured, the houses plundered, the women ravished and half of the city exiled, but the rest of the people will not be cut off from the city.
Then the LORD will go forth and fight against those nations, as when He fights on a day of battle.
In that day His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, which is in front of Jerusalem on the east; and the Mount of Olives will be split in its middle from east to west by a very large valley, so that half of the mountain will move toward the north and the other half toward the south.
...
And in that day living waters will flow out of Jerusalem, half of them toward the eastern sea and the other half toward the western sea; it will be in summer as well as in winter.
...
And the LORD will be king over all the earth; in that day the LORD will be the only one, and His name the only one.

In this way, the Lord God will manifest His Power and Majesty over all. And, from then on, we will be led by Him, as the King of the Earth, and all our Creativity will be a direct manifestation of our Oneness with God.

As the book of John says,

"I have given them Your word; and the world has hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.
"I do not ask You to take them out of the world, but to keep them from the evil one.
"They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.
"Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth.
"As You sent Me into the world, I also have sent them into the world.
"For their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth.
"I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their word;
that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me.
"The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one;
I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me.
"Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world.
"O righteous Father, although the world has not known You, yet I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me;
and I have made Your name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them."

2009-07-30T10:59:00.001-07:00

Catcerto

2009-07-29T22:54:00.000-07:00

New State of Invisible Matter Created

From Live Science:

Scientists claim to have created a form of aluminum that's nearly transparent to extreme ultraviolet radiation and which is a new state of matter.

It's an idea straight out of science fiction, featured in the movie "Star Trek IV."

The work is detailed in the journal Nature Physics.

The normal states of matter are solid, liquid and gas, and a fourth state, called plasma, is a superheated gas considered more exotic. Other experiments have created strange states of matter for brief periods. This one, too, existed only briefly.

To create the new, even more exotic stuff, a short pulse from a laser "knocked out" a core electron from every aluminum atom in a sample without disrupting the metal's crystalline structure, the researchers explain.

''What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before," said professor Justin Wark of Oxford University's Department of Physics.

"Transparent aluminum is just the start," Wark said. "The physical properties of the matter we are creating are relevant to the conditions inside large planets, and we also hope that by studying it we can gain a greater understanding of what is going on during the creation of 'miniature stars' created by high-power laser implosions, which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth."

Fusion is a dream of scientists who would create cheap and plentiful power by fusing atoms together, as opposed to nuclear fission that generates electricity today.

The discovery was made possible with a high-powered synchrotron radiation generator called the FLASH laser, based in Hamburg, Germany. It produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city.

The Oxford team, along with their international colleagues, focused all this power down into a spot with a diameter less than a twentieth of the width of a human hair. At such high intensities the aluminum turned transparent.

While the invisible effect lasted for only an extremely brief period - an estimated 40 femtoseconds - it demonstrates that such an exotic state of matter can be created using very high power X-ray sources.

"What is particularly remarkable about our experiment is that we have turned ordinary aluminum into this exotic new material in a single step by using this very powerful laser," Wark said. "For a brief period the sample looks and behaves in every way like a new form of matter. In certain respects, the way it reacts is as though we had changed every aluminum atom into silicon: it's almost as surprising as finding that you can turn lead into gold with light."

2009-07-12T22:11:00.000-07:00

When Rock Stars Fake It

An exceptionally intelligent article on the effect of Pre-Futurism on rock and pop music.

From the LA Times:

Lady Gaga wants you to know she is not a Method actor. The 23-year-old ingénue behind hits like "Poker Face" and "Paparazzi" does believe in cultivating what thespians call "theatrical truth." But while devotees use the exercises developed by the late Lee Strasberg and others to go deep into character and pull themselves out again, Gaga has made artifice her permanent home.

"Hated Lee Strasberg," Gaga says in a behind-the-scenes video on her website, reminiscing about her youthful studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. "You create sensory scenarios for yourself," she explains. "Like, I'm gonna feel a coffee cup right now, or feel the rain, and when I feel rain, I feel this way. Then you go into that state, and you stay there. And then you have to learn in the classes how to get out of that state."

"But that's what I don't do," she concludes. "I'm in a permanent state of Gaga."

The former Stefani Germanotta, who tells every journalist she encounters that Lady Gaga is "not a character" and who gets offended when someone calls her by her given name, is only the most insistent in a wave of pop artists actively questioning the value of an old and often-debated artistic standard: authenticity.

The balance between "real" and "fake" in pop has run in cycles. Rawness and spontaneity come into fashion, then formalism and glitz. In fact, both extremes are always present, with some artists aiming to express unfiltered emotions in unstudied ways, others adopting a deliberately mannered, costumed, referential style, and most combining elements of both approaches.

Since the dawn of the popular music age, the nature of authenticity has been debated by artists, who've battled in rhyme and punched each other backstage over the matter; fans, who tend to think whatever their community does is the most real; and critics and theorists, who've written enough on the topic to sag several bookshelves.

Lately, though, the split between "real" and "fake" seems to have closed. It sometimes seems that all of pop is in a permanent state of Gaga. This isn't because the quest for authenticity has been abandoned. It's because, for artists like Gaga, fake has become what feels most real.

Artificial conventions

Across nearly every genre in pop, artifice, theatricality and synthesized sound rule the day. The biggest group in the nation is the Black Eyed Peas, hip hop's answer to both the Monkees and Cirque du Soleil. Green Day, formerly your basic snotty punk band, has gained renewed respect and commercial success by writing rock operas; now the band's Billie Joe Armstrong and "Spring Awakening" director Michael Mayer are turning one into a musical. And Slipknot-style masks and pseudonyms have returned to the hard rock underground via the band Hollywood Undead.

Theater veteran Adam Lambert turned "American Idol" on its head by wearing glitter and metal wings and performing with KISS; he reportedly is working with Gaga's producer, Red One, on his upcoming album. Lambert's friend Katy Perry became the most talked-about female artist of last year by resurrecting classic styles of feminine masquerade, including burlesque and Lucille Ball-style screwball comedy, and releasing songs like "UR So Gay" and “I Kissed A Girl,” which make provocative hay from the hot topic of fluid sexual identity.

Even college rock, once a bastion of frumpy sincerity, has been taken over by the drama club kids -- from the kitchen-sink epics staged by bands like the Decemberists and Of Montreal to the fairy tales spun by alter-egoed fantasists Bat for Lashes and St. Vincent (real names are not cool these days, unless your mama called you Panda Bear).

Country music too has gained a synthetic sheen: The hot new single by crossover band Gloriana kicks off with what sounds suspiciously like a drum machine, while industry standard-bearer Brad Paisley celebrates video chatting and smart phone Super Pac-Man on "Welcome to the Future."

This giddy embrace of the world as a stage seems to go beyond where glam rock and disco took pop in the past, partly because it's assisted by more sophisticated technology. Auto-Tune, the software program that alters vocal pitch, has become ubiquitous both as a corrective and a kind of carnival mask, used by artists like T-Pain to upend listeners' expectations about what a love song -- or a party song -- should sound like.

Auto-Tune is so overused that it's engendered a backlash. The first single from Jay Z’s upcoming album, “The Blueprint 3,” is called "Death of Autotune," and similar polemics have been issued by his fellow hip-hop veterans Wyclef Jean and KRS-One. But these efforts are akin to the apocryphal story of Pete Seeger trying to cut the power lines with an ax when Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival.

The real story is the gradual emergence of the computer as pop's main musical instrument, not only in dance music and hip-hop -- forms based around synthesized sound -- but across the spectrum. Using Pro Tools or other digital audio workstations that provide huge libraries of sampled sounds, songwriters can create whole soundscapes without strumming a guitar or hitting a drum. Those who favor more "natural" methods of composition can tweak them in any way they want during the recording process, and they do. Even raggedy-looking neo-hippies like Bon Iver couldn't enact their "rustic" experiments without computers.

The new realities of musical composition mirror the ways we're all baring our carefully constructed souls using social media like Facebook or Twitter. No filtering device exists on the Web to separate a true confession from an artful lie, and virtual connections can feel very real. Reality television has blurred lines too: One of Lady Gaga's key concepts, that anyone can think themselves into the supremely self-confident state she calls "feeling the fame," make sense only in the context of a culture in which actual fame might strike any average Jenny lucky enough to have her closet raided by Quentin and Stacy or be challenged to a throwdown by chef Bobby Flay.

Beyond fake

In the permanent state of Gaga, old distinctions simply don't hold. This seems like a new moment in the ongoing relationship between pop music and the theater, one more seamlessly constructed than those to which it reaches back. Gaga and the many other dance-pop artists who cultivate a similar style (from Princess Superstar to the Scissor Sisters) constantly reference glam rock and disco, but in some ways, they take theatricality further than their beloved elders did.

In 1971, David Bowie, one of Gaga's idols, said, "I don't want to climb out of my fantasies in order to go up onstage -- I want to take them on stage with me." Bowie pioneered the idea of rock as theater, incorporating influences like mime and Kabuki into an act that stressed the dreamlike quality of his work. But he still made a distinction between that dream life and his real one.

A decade later, genre-crushing New Wave art star Grace Jones reiterated the split. With her signature Flat Top hairstyle and elaborate outfits designed by artists like Jean-Paul Goude and Keith Haring, the statuesque Jones was possibly the most high-concept pop diva ever. But she could step out of her role. "Listen, I'm two people," she told an interviewer in 1980. "Otherwise, I'd be insane!"

We've also come a long way since 1994, when Courtney Love and her band, Hole, released the single "Doll Parts" after the death of her husband, Kurt Cobain. "I fake it so real I am beyond fake," Love sang in what became one of the most quoted lyrics of the era. But Love, like most musicians of the time, wasn't that good at faking. In her torn ball gowns and smeared makeup, singing her bloody songs about failing to live up to feminine ideals, Love presented herself as exactly what a pop star was supposed to be in the 1990s: uncontainable, willing to be ugly, immediate.

Those qualities added up to "real," even when embodied by artists like Love, who'd read their feminist theory and believed that identity was, at least in part, a construct. Like Cobain, Love wrote songs that questioned social norms, especially when it came to gender roles, but behind her act (and his) was the assertion of a believable self.

Lady Gaga and her peers are the ones who've gone beyond fake. It's not that they no longer recognize the distinction between real life and performance; it's that they don't care about it. The pose initiates the self; what's behind it just can't be that interesting.

2009-06-11T15:01:00.000-07:00

Is Quantum Mechanics Controlling Your Thoughts?

From Discover:

Graham Fleming sits down at an L-shaped lab bench, occupying a footprint about the size of two parking spaces. Alongside him, a couple of off-the-shelf lasers spit out pulses of light just millionths of a billionth of a second long. After snaking through a jagged path of mirrors and lenses, these minus cule flashes disappear into a smoky black box containing proteins from green sulfur bacteria, which ordinarily obtain their energy and nourishment from the sun. Inside the black box, optics manufactured to billionths-of-a-meter precision detect something extraordinary: Within the bacterial proteins, dancing electrons make seemingly impossible leaps and appear to inhabit multiple places at once.

Peering deep into these proteins, Fleming and his colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley and at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered the driving engine of a key step in photosynthesis, the process by which plants and some microorganisms convert water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight into oxygen and carbohydrates. More efficient by far in its ability to convert energy than any operation devised by man, this cascade helps drive almost all life on earth. Remarkably, photosynthesis appears to derive its ferocious efficiency not from the familiar physical laws that govern the visible world but from the seemingly exotic rules of quantum mechanics, the physics of the subatomic world. Somehow, in every green plant or photosynthetic bacterium, the two disparate realms of physics not only meet but mesh harmoniously. Welcome to the strange new world of quantum biology.

On the face of things, quantum mechanics and the biological sciences do not mix. Biology focuses on larger-scale processes, from molecular interactions between proteins and DNA up to the behavior of organisms as a whole; quantum mechanics describes the often-strange nature of electrons, protons, muons, and quarks—the smallest of the small. Many events in biology are considered straightforward, with one reaction begetting another in a linear, predictable way. By contrast, quantum mechanics is fuzzy because when the world is observed at the subatomic scale, it is apparent that particles are also waves: A dancing electron is both a tangible nugget and an oscillation of energy. (Larger objects also exist in particle and wave form, but the effect is not noticeable in the macroscopic world.)

Quantum mechanics holds that any given particle has a chance of being in a whole range of locations and, in a sense, occupies all those places at once. Physicists describe quantum reality in an equation they call the wave function, which reflects all the potential ways a system can evolve. Until a scientist measures the system, a particle exists in its multitude of locations. But at the time of measurement, the particle has to “choose” just a single spot. At that point, quantum physicists say, probability narrows to a single outcome and the wave function “collapses,” sending ripples of certainty through space-time. Imposing certainty on one particle could alter the characteristics of any others it has been connected with, even if those particles are now light-years away. (This process of influence at a distance is what physicists call entanglement.) As in a game of dominoes, alteration of one particle affects the next one, and so on.

The implications of all this are mind-bending. In the macro world, a ball never spontaneously shoots itself over a wall. In the quantum world, though, an electron in one biomolecule might hop to a second biomolecule, even though classical laws of physics hold that the electrons are too tightly bound to leave. The phenomenon of hopping across seemingly forbidden gaps is called quantum tunneling.

From tunneling to entanglement, the special properties of the quantum realm allow events to unfold at speeds and efficiencies that would be unachievable with classical physics alone. Could quantum mechanisms be driving some of the most elegant and inexplicable processes of life? For years experts doubted it: Quantum phenomena typically reveal themselves only in lab settings, in vacuum chambers chilled to near absolute zero. Biological systems are warm and wet. Most researchers thought the thermal noise of life would drown out any quantum weirdness that might rear its head.

Yet new experiments keep finding quan tum processes at play in biological systems, says Christopher Altman, a researcher at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience in the Netherlands. With the advent of powerful new tools like femtosecond (10-15 second) lasers and nanoscale-precision positioning, life’s quantum dance is finally coming into view.

INTO THE LIGHT
One of the most significant quantum observations in the life sciences comes from Fleming and his collaborators. Their study of photosynthesis in green sulfur bacteria, published in 2007 in Nature [subscription required], tracked the detailed chemical steps that allow plants to harness sunlight and use it to convert simple raw materials into the oxygen we breathe and the carbohydrates we eat. Specifically, the team examined the protein scaffold connecting the bacteria’s external solar collectors, called the chlorosome, to reaction centers deep inside the cells. Unlike electric power lines, which lose as much as 20 percent of energy in transmission, these bacteria transmit energy at a staggering efficiency rate of 95 percent or better.

The secret, Fleming and his colleagues found, is quantum physics.

To unearth the bacteria’s inner workings, the researchers zapped the connective proteins with multiple ultrafast laser pulses. Over a span of femto seconds, they followed the light energy through the scaffolding to the cellular reaction centers where energy conversion takes place.

Then came the revelation: Instead of haphazardly moving from one connective channel to the next, as might be seen in classical physics, energy traveled in several directions at the same time. The researchers theorized that only when the energy had reached the end of the series of connections could an efficient pathway retroactively be found. At that point, the quantum process collapsed, and the electrons’ energy followed that single, most effective path.

Electrons moving through a leaf or a green sulfur bacterial bloom are effectively performing a quantum “random walk”—a sort of primitive quantum computation—to seek out the optimum transmission route for the solar energy they carry. “We have shown that this quantum random-walk stuff really exists,” Fleming says. “Have we absolutely demonstrated that it improves the efficiency? Not yet. But that’s our conjecture. And a lot of people agree with it.”

The olfactory bulb of an adult mouse (seen here at 800x magnification)
may provide its sense of smell via quantum vibrations.

Elated by the finding, researchers are looking to mimic nature’s quantum ability to build solar energy collectors that work with near-photosynthetic efficiency. Alán Aspuru-Guzik, an assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University, heads a team that is researching ways to incorporate the quantum lessons of photosynthesis into organic photovoltaic solar cells. This research is in only the earliest stages, but Aspuru-Guzik believes that Fleming’s work will be applicable in the race to manufacture cheap, efficient solar power cells out of organic molecules.

TUNNELING FOR SMELL Quantum physics may explain the mysterious biological process of smell, too, says biophysicist Luca Turin, who first published his controversial hypothesis in 1996 while teaching at University College London. Then, as now, the prevailing notion was that the sensation of different smells is triggered when molecules called odorants fit into receptors in our nostrils like three-dimensional puzzle pieces snapping into place. The glitch here, for Turin, was that molecules with similar shapes do not necessarily smell anything like one another. Pinanethiol [C10H18S] has a strong grapefruit odor, for instance, while its near-twin pinanol [C10H18O] smells of pine needles. Smell must be triggered, he concluded, by some criteria other than an odorant’s shape alone.

What is really happening, Turin posited, is that the approximately 350 types of human smell receptors perform an act of quantum tunneling when a new odorant enters the nostril and reaches the olfactory nerve. After the odorant attaches to one of the nerve’s receptors, electrons from that receptor tunnel through the odorant, jiggling it back and forth. In this view, the odorant’s unique pattern of vibration is what makes a rose smell rosy and a wet dog smell wet-doggy.

In the quantum world, an electron from one biomolecule might hop to another, though classical laws of physics forbid it.

In 2007 Turin (who is now chief technical officer of the odorant-designing company Flexitral in Chantilly, Virginia) and his hypothesis received support from a paper by four physicists at University College London. That work, published in the journalPhysical Review Letters [subscription required], showed how the smell-tunneling process may operate. As an odorant approaches, electrons released from one side of a receptor quantum-mechanically tunnel through the odorant to the opposite side of the receptor. Exposed to this electric current, the heavier pinanethiol would vibrate differently from the lighter but similarly shaped pinanol.

“I call it the ‘swipe-card model,’?” says coauthor A. Marshall Stoneham, an emeritus professor of physics. “The card’s got to be a good enough shape to swipe through one of the receptors.” But it is the frequency of vibration, not the shape, that determines the scent of a molecule.

THE GREEN TEA PARTY Even green tea may tie into subtle subatomic processes. In 2007 four biochemists from the Auton omous University of Barcelona announced that the secret to green tea’s effectiveness as an anti-oxidant—a substance that neutralizes the harmful free radicals that can damage cells—may also be quantum mechanical. Publishing their findings in the Journal of the American Chemical Society [subscription required], the group reported that antioxidants called catechins act like fishing trollers in the human body. (Catechins are among the chief organic compounds found in tea, wine, and some fruits and vegetables.)

Free radical molecules, by-products of the body’s breakdown of food or environmental toxins, have a spare electron. That extra electron makes free radicals reactive, and hence dangerous as they travel through the bloodstream. But an electron from the catechin can make use of quantum mechanics to tunnel across the gap to the free radical. Suddenly the catechin has chemically bound up the free radical, preventing it from interacting with and damaging cells in the body.

Quantum tunneling has also been observed in enzymes, the proteins that facilitate molecular reactions within cells. Two studies, one published in Science in 2006 and the other in Biophysical Journal in 2007, have found that some enzymes appear to lack the energy to complete the reactions they ultimately propel; the enzyme’s success, it now seems, could be explained only through quantum means.

QUANTUM TO THE CORE Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist and director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona, argues that the highest function of life—consciousness—is likely a quantum phenomenon too. This is illustrated, he says, through anesthetics. The brain of a patient under anesthesia continues to operate actively, but without a conscious mind at work. What enables anesthetics such as xenon or isoflurane gas to switch off the conscious mind?

Hameroff speculates that anesthetics “interrupt a delicate quantum process” within the neurons of the brain. Each neuron contains hundreds of long, cylindrical protein structures, called microtubules, that serve as scaffolding. Anesthetics, Hameroff says, dissolve inside tiny oily regions of the microtubules, affecting how some electrons inside these regions behave.

He speculates that the action unfolds like this: When certain key electrons are in one “place,” call it to the “left,” part of the microtubule is squashed; when the electrons fall to the “right,” the section is elongated. But the laws of quantum mechanics allow for electrons to be both “left” and “right” at the same time, and thus for the micro tubules to be both elongated and squashed at once. Each section of the constantly shifting system has an impact on other sections, potentially via quantum entanglement, leading to a dynamic quantum-mechanical dance.

It is in this faster-than-light subatomic communication, Hameroff says, that consciousness is born. Anesthetics get in the way of the dancing electrons and stop the gyration at its quantum-mechanical core; that is how they are able to switch consciousness off.

It is still a long way from Hameroff’s hypo thetical (and experimentally unproven) quantum neurons to a sentient, conscious human brain. But many human experiences, Hameroff says, from dreams to subconscious emotions to fuzzy memory, seem closer to the Alice in Wonderland rules governing the quantum world than to the cut-and-dried reality that classical physics suggests. Discovering a quantum portal within every neuron in your head might be the ultimate trip through the looking glass.

2009-05-29T17:57:00.000-07:00

The Secret Jews of the Southwest

From the Global News Service of the Jewish People:

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Sonya Loya is the director of Bat-Tzyion Hebrew Learning Center in Ruidoso, N.M. (Copyright Cary Herz / Courtesy University of New Mexico Press )

EL PASO, Texas (JTA) -- Three strange things happened to Rabbi Stephen Leon the first week he moved here in 1986 to lead Congregation B'nai Zion, the Conservative synagogue in this border city.

“Rabino,” said a Catholic man calling from Jaurez, Mexico, about 30 minutes away. “I need to talk to you.”

Every Friday night from the time he was little, the man's grandmother took him into a room, lit candles and said some prayers in a private language he didn't understand. His grandmother had just died, and he asked his mother if she would continue the tradition. She told him to go find a rabbi.

Three days later, a Catholic woman from El Paso came to the rabbi after visiting a relative in mourning, where she noticed that all the mirrors were covered.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked her relatives.

They said it was a Jewish custom.

Then the cable guy came, and the rabbi told him, “Shalom Y'all.” The man -- a Catholic Hispanic -- opened his shirt and showed his Jewish star necklace -- he had just found out about his Jewish roots.

“Three incidents in a week and a half?” Leon recalled. “There has to be something going on.”

Twenty-two years later that something is still going on: A steady trickle of Hispanics in the Southwest, from Juarez to Texas to New Mexico, are discovering Jewish roots.

Some are set on their search because of a mysterious tradition practiced by an older relative, such as not eating pork or working on Saturday. For others the clue is an artifact like a trompito spinning top that resembles a dreidel, or a set of tefillin that a Catholic grandmother on a road trip once insisted on depositing with the rabbi.

But for the majority of people it's something more tenuous: a word here (bubbe, tzedakah), a Jewish name there (Rael, from Israel). Very often it's just a feeling about Catholicism, Jesus, their past or what they say is their soul that leads people to wonder if their family was once Jewish.

Crypto-Jews. Marranos. Anusim. Judios. Conversos. They are all terms with different nuances referring to Jews and/or their descendants who were forced to convert after Spain and Portugal expelled all non-Catholics, but continued to practice Judaism or maintained some Jewish customs even as they and their children migrated to Latin America, Europe and finally the United States.

Some Crypto-Jews are interested in the genealogical knowledge but are not planning on leaving Catholicism; others practice a dual Messianic faith with both Judaism and Jesus. A very few give up their Catholic faith and convert -- they prefer the word “return” -- to Judaism.

“Who do you count?” asked Stanley Hordes, one of the foremost experts on the Crypto-Jews and author of “To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico” (Columbia University Press, 2008).

“Chances are really good that many people have Jewish ancestors going back 500 years,” he said, estimating that after half of Spain's several hundred thousand Jews left the country, half converted to Catholicism -- half of those Jews converted willingly, assimilating and eventually blending into Catholic society.

“There were certain families that held onto ancestral Jewish faith and continued to practice,” he said. “Today, the overwhelming majority are perfectly content in their Protestantism and Catholicism. Only a handful of cases people are exploring a relationship with mainstream Judaism.”

This Shavuot, as Jews around the world celebrate the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai and read the Book of Ruth -- the story of the world's most famous convert to Judaism -- some of these Crypto-Jewish returnees will celebrate their bar and bat mitzvah with Leon at Congregation B'nai Zion, a synagogue with 400 families.

Ten percent of the members are Crypto-Jews, yet “without my anusim I might not have a minyan,” Leon said.

He's not kidding. On a hot Saturday morning in May, in the imposing angular white B'nai Zion building set starkly against the mountain range dividing El Paso, about 30 of the 50 people sitting in the circular sanctuary topped by a Jewish star skylight are Crypto-Jews. (The larger sanctuary is used on the High Holidays to accommodate the 1,500 members.)

One is Blanca Carrasco, 43, who returned to Judaism last year and is about to celebrate her bat mitzvah on Shavuot, which this year begins on the evening of May 28.

As the rabbi takes the Torah around the sanctuary to be kissed, the congregation sings "Etz chayim chai, l'amachazikim bah" (“A tree of life to all those who hold fast to it ...”) and Carrasco tears up at the last verse: "Hashiveinu hashem elecha v'nashuva" -- “Return us to you, God, and we shall return.”

Carrasco's return to Judaism started as a curious Catholic child in Mexico, where she was infatuated with everything in the Bible. By the time she was 20 she converted to Evangelical Christianity, but the doctrine was still lacking for her and her husband, Cezar, who considered himself more of an atheist. Then, about 14 years ago, her mother invited her to a Passover seder at a Messianic congregation in El Paso.

“We felt it was familiar -- it felt like home,” Blanca Carrasco said.

“Right in that instance, our life changed,” she added. “I needed to know more.”

Like a number of Crypto-Jews who now attend B'nai Zion, the Carrascos began their religious transformation by praying at the Messianic Center in El Paso, where they learned about Judaism, important rabbis, the Jewish festivals and history, and Crypto-Jews. She found some family names -- Espinoza, Israel, Salinas -- and a great-aunt who said her grandmother spoke Ladino.

Eventually Carrasco began to believe only in the Jewish traditions, and three years ago she decided to leave the Messianic congregation after a decade there.

“How can I explain to what is in my heart?” she said. “People would tell us, 'You don't have to do it,' but we just love it and want to learn and want to do it.”

A year ago the couple underwent a “return ceremony,” which is technically a conversion, replete with a conversion certificate, since it requires at least a year of study, mikvah immersion and a declaration of faith.

For the Carrascos, their b'nai mitzvah ceremony on Shavuot is just another rite of passage on their journey to Judaism.

“Now we belong -- we are not longing anymore, we are here," Blanca Carrasco said. "We reached the place we were heading to.”

Talk to a number of the 50 anusim families that Leon has returned to Judaism -- some of whom will be b'nai mitzvah this week -- and you'll hear a similar story.

Margarita Luna remembered that her grandmother always lit candles on Friday night before saying the Rosary. But her mother didn't want to talk about it -- perhaps that was because during the Mexican wars in the 1920s they had to hide in a well for a few days. “Always in my heart I feel that I love the Jewish traditions,” she says, fingering her mezuzah necklace. “And always I say I am Jewish and I need to go back to my roots.”

She and her husband, Victor, converted five years ago, and after their b'nai mitzvah on Shavuot, they plan to have a Jewish wedding ceremony and, hopefully one day, move to Israel with their teenage daughter.

Is finding historical proof important to them?

“It's not a determinant for my actual connection with God,” Victor said. “I think my heart, my feelings, my soul is Jewish. That is most important thing.

For Leon, who led a New Jersey congregation for 22 years prior to coming to El Paso, this has become his mission.

“God said to me, 'I cannot bring back the 6 million who were killed in the Holocaust, but there was another group before who are alive in much larger numbers than Holocaust survivors because it's been 500 years, generation after generation of generation," he said. "Their souls are still alive. … You have to do something about it.’”

Not everyone agrees with this mission. Rabbi Yisrael Greenberg of Chabad of El Paso says he receives his share of phone calls from Mexicans who think they have Jewish roots but discourages conversion.

“I think the Crypto-Jew is a real thing -- 500 years ago in the Inquisition hundreds of thousands of Jewish boys and girls disappeared from the Jewish community … Jews always disappeared from the Jewish community -- most of it by force,” Greenberg said.

But, he added, referring to the strong religious ties of Mexican families and the community, “We have to be careful -- we break families.”

“We should put our energy into the Jewish people rather than to try and bring anusim back,” Greenberg said. “If the anusim have a desire to understand Judaism, then let's teach them about their ancestors and let them have an understanding,” he added, implying that the best thing to do would be to leave it at that.

Such an approach would be fine with Elay Romero, a retired pipe fitter, who has been retracing his family's lineage through state records and was considering some DNA testing. He discovered Hordes' book about Crypto-Jews and came to Taos, N.M., to hear the historian speak on the topic at the New Mexico Jewish Historical Society.

“I'm just curious," Romero said. "If I had Jewish blood, it's fine. But we've been practicing Catholics for generations, and I won't change my affiliation with the Church.”

The rabbi, meanwhile, has big plans. In addition to welcoming Crypto-Jews, he helped start an anusim/Sephardic learning center and yeshiva in El Paso with Juan Pable Mejia, a graduate of the rabbinical program at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and Sonya Loya, the director of Bat-Tzyion Hebrew Learning Center in Ruidoso, N.M. The goal would be to bring awareness to the Jewish and general public about the Inquisition and Crypto-Jews on par with Holocaust remembrance.

“The anusim will come back eventually; there is a yearning. There is a divine plan out there,” Leon said.

With Hispanics being the fastest-growing population and the Jews constantly concerned about their diminishing population, Leon says the Jewish community should welcome those Hispanics who want to explore their Jewish ancestry.

“I think the anusim are the only answer,” he said. “They are returning one way or another.”



Summary: Is our Sun part of a binary star system? An unseen companion star, nicknamed “Nemesis,” may be sending comets towards Earth. If Nemesis exists, NASA’s new WISE telescope should be able to spot it.

Mazon	First hei	Imma	Neshamah
Levush	Vav	Midot	Chayah
Bayit	Final hei	Malchut	Yechidah

Nefesh	King David
Ruach	Elijah
Neshama	Moses
Chaya	Adam and Eve
Yechida	Mashiach