“In November 2011, the Russian space agency launched the much-anticipated Mars probe called Phobos-Grunt (which means “Phobos dirt” or “ground”), which would go to the Red Planet, soft-land a probe on the tiny moon Phobos, and return a sample of the surface to Earth. Unfortunately, the booster that would take it from Earth orbit into a Mars-intercept trajectory failed to fire, stranding the spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. Atmospheric drag has doomed the mission; it will most likely burn up sometime in the next two weeks.

Phobos-Grunt is visible to the naked eye as a bright star if it happens to pass overhead.”

Doomed Russian Mars probe seen from the ground.

Being Dependent upon things we don’t understand is nothing new.

It’s only what we are dependent upon that changes.

We used to depend on gods to bring the meat and potatoes.

Today we depend on virtual widgets collecting wireless data from weather satellites that predict the probability of rain.

1. Increasing complexity does not necessarily imply progress

2. Often complexity is unnecessary, and when it is, you can bet someone is gaining from it.

If we were all more selective with our complexities, we would be in a much better predicament.

————————————————

At MIT, Paul Griffith wrote a thesis entitled “self replicating machines”, a clever idea taken from nature.

in nature, it was the ribozyme that was believed to be the springboard to all self-replicating life. Imagine a string of data that can copy itself. And then… complexity and possibility.

Anyway back to Paul Griffith, in a recent interview, the guardian newspaper tried to nail down exactly how much energy the internet as a machine was consuming. The best estimates from independent studies is that the internet uses 1-3% of total world energy consumption.

Paul scoffed at the idea, noting all the complexities and externalities that don’t get included in the count. Says he, “Part of the reason humanity is in the situation it is with climate change is that we weren’t measuring how we were using energy and understanding the consequences.”

Notice he says humanity, not life…. life will be just fine.

“When a problem occurs, ask ‘why’ five times to try to find the source of the problem, then put into place something to prevent the problem from recurring”      

-Sakichi Toyoda (founder of Kabushiki-gaisha Toyota Jidō Shokki)

Toyota began as a Loom manufacturer. In 1924 the company went viral when they invented the Type G machine. It was such an advancement in technology because it had the ability to shut itself off when it detected a single error. In 1933 Toyota took this inventive philosophy to  the automobile market and the rest of the story is magnificent as pleather.

Ever since it’s beginnings the Toyota company has maintained an office of “sensei”s that help with problem solving and better design through Jidoka, a kind of ko’an automation exercise. This framework of business model coupled with a strong sense of responsiblity among workers has proven to be a great service to humanity.

Case in point- the Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle, and Toyota’s ball of yarn.

The Hospital, hemorrhaging money and  overrun by megalomaniac doctors who always knew best, discovered that the efficiency they thought they had over their organization was in actuality just a great disservice to suffering patients.

There’s a great audio story about how the sensei’s were sought out and saved the day over at 99% invisible

I was taking in some backlogged CoasttoCoastAM last night. The host was the ailing Ian Punnett. If you are a faithful listener, you well know that Ian stroked out on air a while back and now he’s being put out to graze more permanently as he seems to be going deaf.

So the discussion arose that human capacity to evolve further intelligence may have a limit. I looked up the article that started the broohaa, a well written piece from Scientific American writer Douglas Fox. I got the full low down from the in-house neuroscientist at The Southern Fried Science Network ( Click HERE).

In Brief, the idea is as follows

“Human intelligence may be close to its evolutionary limit. Various lines of research suggest that most of the tweaks that could make us smarter would hit limits set by the laws of physics. Brain size, for instance, helps up to a point but carries diminishing returns: brains become energy-hungry and slow. Better “wiring” across the brain also would consume energy and take up a disproportionate amount of space. Making wires thinner would hit thermodynamic limitations similar to those that affect transistors in computer chips: communication would get noisy.

“Humans, however, might still achieve higher intelligence collectively. And technology, from writing to the Internet, enables us to expand our mind outside the confines of our body.”

The argument is interesting as it brings into light some great ideas, but I was a bit befuddled by the assumptions it draws upon and the conclusions it leads to.

ARTICLE :First, intelligence is really hard to define, so for disscussion sake we assume it means processing speed. Because of the laws of physics, the energy requirements and the size of the proteins that make thought possible, there’s speed limit.

THOUGHT RESPONSE: So we’ll outsource. Interventionist evolution means machines do whatever processing we can’t handle. Besides Intelligence, whatever it is, is more than processing speed.

ARTICLE: Second, the demands of higher intelligence that have been produced by nature thus far, have led to larger brains with more distinct, more specialized regions in those brains.  It’s the limited space, the limited resources and the limited cellular functions that have made our brains the way they are and make us think the way we do.

THOUGHT RESPONSE: Wow, Marshall Mcluhan was right.

But we’re more than brain, and while Fox postulates that emergent intelligence and possibly the internet may one day complement the built in factory settings, I am a little surprised that the external hard drive option didn’t come up. Nor was there any hint that we may not have the monopoly on intelligence. After all the internet is the most successful machine ever built… if you don’t count dolphins.

We may just be one stepping stone (or rabbit trail) towards higher enlightenment.

For more wiring nightmares press here

I’m making a differential diagnosis for gait and motor disturbances

i’ve just encountered the jumping frenchmen of maine disorder

It was identified by a New York neurologist in the 1880′s. French Canadian lumberjacks in Moosehead Lake Maine, were exhibiting strange hyper-startle and hyper-suggestibility behaviors.

Stricken individuals obeyed any command given suddenly, even if it means striking a loved one. There have been cases with echolalia, the act of repeating back unfamiliar or foreign phrases uncontrollably and echopraxia, the  imitating of movements from surrounding people.

The more common signs are  jumping, yelling, and hitting. Such episodes have been reported across cultures…

A twenty-seven-year-old man was sitting in a chair holding a knife to cut his tobacco. Suddenly, he was slapped on the shoulder and was told to throw the knife. Immediately, he threw it straight into a beam in the opposite side of the room. The slap and the command were repeated a moment later while he was filling his pipe. Once again, the pipe flew out of his hand on to the grass. Later, he was startled while told to “strike” and he did so immediately on the cheek.

“A sixteen year old boy was standing in the room when he was suddenly startled and told to jump. He jumped at least half a foot from the floor while yelling the command to jump.”

THEORIES

One theory is that it’s Behaviorally entrained. Another is that it’s genetic. But as of yet no conclusive cause has been identified. Another theory (my favorite) is that the constant contact and close quarter circumstances create a peripheral subliminal distraction within one’s range of vision giving rise to an auto-induced hypnotic state.

Cold weather and bunkhouse living arrangements placed the men in close proximity so that as they prepared for the next day’s work, read to relax, wrote letters, or performed any other activity requiring mental investment all the while subliminal distraction continues.

Designing areas where individuals could focus their attention without distraction would later become a critical part of the modern corporate habitat.

ENTER THE CUBICLE

The Cubicle was first developed by inventor Robert Propst in 1963 for the Federal Reserve Bank of NYC. The layout was a swastika pattern designed in response to the “increasing amount of information an employee had to analyze, organize, and maintain.” At the time Propst working for the Herman Miller company and his creation was called Action office. Later Propst and others instrumental in the design would go on to criticize the effects of cube farms. The dehumanization of the worker at the expense of planner.

Maybe it’s not all bad. In 2007, Thomas Hine postulated that it was the modern cubicle that actually made it possible for women to move into middle management positions.

Civilized robotic behavior brought to you by the misinterpreted good intentions of creative people. What’s a few jumping frenchmen, given that they just jump and don’t go full blown postal?

Jared Diamond writes a lot about the double edged sword of technology. An innovation allows a society to expand in a certain way. This expansion goes on for a while and then creates a new set of problems that may, in time, overwhelm the society and… the civilization fades out.

Behind every technology lies an inherent philosophy in it’s design- intended or unintended. Some of these philosophies can lock us into a set way of thinking. Look at the interstate in America. It reinforced the automotive society- with all sorts of trickle down effects. It was expensive and once the country invested, it’s been difficult to switch.

And that brings us to the internet- the biggest, most successful machine ever constructed; a technology that seems to level the playing field.

Consider the trends and adaptations that we’ve made to it. There are users, abusers and site providers all working on different angles.  Problems arise- Security, Privacy. Big sites want all your info, playing off a business model that offers surveillance without protection. The users say “so it goes” and give in.

Meanwhile all the clicks and usernames get stored. New technology arises to deal with the side effects- semantic analyzers, larger processing facilities, user-friendly questionnaires are constructed to evaluate the online versions of us…. All in all, the consolidation of the internet is turning out to be much more difficult than it was for other forms off media- like television.

And for the moment, that’s a good thing, because streamlining the windows of the world would make new ideas all the more rare. Design by committee tends to mediocrity when compared with design from the individual.

This is the second time in a year that the international space station has been backed up, My hunch is one of the Discovery guests has some contraband cherry bombs, either that or Keith Moon is haunting the US waste and hygiene compartment. The last time this happened, it was a broken pump. Repair took weeks and totalled 19 million dollars. This time the problem arose when six liters of 2001 flush fluid somehow leaked into the wrong compartments. Such leakage could be ruinous for a number of important experiments on-going in the next room, however having people in orbit with a limited number of toilets sounds pretty experimental. (via BBC)

With 13 people currently squatting on the ISS, i’m sure that there’s talk of mutiny. The Russians have their own toilet, the people who came up on the Discovery have their in-flight lavatory. NASA believes that there is enough duct tape on board to get the toilet back online soon.

]]> http://cultandpaste.com/2009/07/20/youre-just-going-to-have-to-hold-it-till-we-get-home/feed/ 0 cultandpaste iss space station toilet http://images.spaceref.com/news/2008/toilet.jpg http://www.qsl.net/dg7ro/iss/pict/iss_schema.jpg http://cultandpaste.com/2009/07/09/newly-released-tapes-from-july-1969-moon-landing-the-russians-almost-crash-the-party/ http://cultandpaste.com/2009/07/09/newly-released-tapes-from-july-1969-moon-landing-the-russians-almost-crash-the-party/#comments Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:50:02 +0000 cultandpaste http://cultandpaste.com/?p=1404 ]]>

If you still believe that the Lunar landings were filmed in AREA 51, your yarn has just become a little more discombobulated… as in the way a ravenous T-Rex discombobulates the Garden of Eden.

On July 3, 2009, The Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, England released tape recordings it had been “withholding” from the Apollo 11 master tracks. In these radio transmissions, it is evident that the Russians were landing a robot the very same day that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were moonwalking, and they could have done a drive by and squashed the 15,264 kg Eagle module.

So apparently the Russians were there the whole time. When word got out that the Americans were going to send humanoids in 1969, they rushed up a robot (Luna 15) so they’d be around if the Americans screwed up. So while Neil was taking photos of his footprints and Buzz was taking communion in the camper,  the Russians were close by, ready to crash the Intergalactic Planetary party. Being good Communists, they decided instead to share the moment.

I. TIME WARP

In January 1969, the Russian space program was rolling. It had just docked two manned space capsules together.  Chalk it up- Sputnik, Laika the dog,  Yuri the space cowboy…. and oh yeah, best of all….   a remote Russian probe (Luna 9) that LANDED ON THE MOON on Feb 3, 1966. The machine snapped a bunch of photos, sent a few messages and then turned off after 8 hours. Note: No hammer and sickle planted.

Everyone was in a hurry to get to the moon, but the Russians planned on sending robots first. They were scared that a failed man mission would be too costly in the Western Press. The problem with Lunar expeditions was not getting there, It was getting back. The Russians thought the Americans were going to get stuck on the surface and not be able to take off again i.e. a crash landing would mess up the capsule and it wouldn’t be able to take off again. The Luna program was designed to land on the moon’s surface, grab some fairy dust and report back to the space commisars. Thus a better design for the ultimate worker’s spaceship.

The Americans had their eyes and ears open to all this traffic and they quickly realized that, as capitalists,  they couldn’t afford to lose. A communist moon would demoralize the population. Yet the problems and risks were large. Somebody high up in some office had to decide that Neil, Buzz and that other guy would just have to risk it. Take one for the team. Was it Nixon, Kissinger, Wernher von Braun? Any one of them would have been willing to offer up Apollo 11 as a burnt offering in the name of American progress.

In the end, it did pay off for the Americans. On the radio, the Russians gave the US its flight plan and also commented in real time about the missions… whether they thought the ship was coming down to fast, or where their probe was. What could have been a Cold War disaster, turned out to be competitive people working together.

II TIME LINE

USSR July 17, 1969-  Russian probe, Luna 15, has already entered Lunar orbit and is looking for a good place to crash.

USA July 21st at 02:56 UTC-  the Eagle lands in Tranquility Base. Buzz and Neil get on the horn and call everybody back home. They run around for 2.5 hours and then get back in their Winnebago and take a 7 hour nap.

USSR July 21st 2009 at 15:47 UT – The Luna 15 begins its own descent at in the Mare Crisium Crater (notice its proximity to the Sea of Tranquility). The landing did not go so well and within 4 minutes the craft was kaput.

USA July 21st at 17:54 UTC- the Eagle takes off to redock with the mothership.

How complex and bizarre things are.

Distance to Mars: The closest theoretical point Earth and Mars can be is when Earth is at its aphelion  (most distant point in its elliptical orbit around the sun- average 149,597,888 km), and Mars is at its closest (average 227,939,100 km). At this point, the two planets are separated by only 54.6 million km. The closest point in recent history was back in 2003, when Earth and Mars were separated by only 55 million km.

Emissions of U2 360° Tour: a 100-date, 18-month world tour with 70,000 air miles (113,000km) in a private jet. £90 million pounds or $230 million dollars later the tour has the three 390-ton stages, folded up and caravaned around the globe, with 200 roadies neatly tucked inside.

Opening night in Barcelona’s Nou Camp last week launched the spacestation-esque stage and a satellite phone link-up with the ISS that sure did make those old guys seem fly. But then carbonfootprint.com measured the impact and it came out to 65,000 tonnes of CO2. The company’s environmental consultant Helen Roberts concluded…

“The carbon footprint generated by U2′s 44 concerts this year is equal to carbon created by the four band members travelling the 34.125 million miles* from Earth to Mars in a passenger plane. You also have to add the carbon emissions from the same number of concerts again next year. Just looking at the 44 concerts this year, the band will create enough carbon to fly all 90,000 people attending one of their Wembley concerts to Dublin. To offset this year’s carbon emissions, U2 would need to plant 20,118 trees.”

*34.125 x 1.6 = 54.592 million km …

So fellas I appreciate all you’ve done for the rest of us over the years, the music was really great except the zooropa pop debacle. I also appreciate you guys forgoing your geriatric tours to save the planet, but knowing how much you guys care…. Listen, if you leave soon you all can get the next one-way rocket out to Mars. Now you’re going have to parachute in that last bit. I’d say pack the ipods, some fanta and a few effects pedals… but that’s it. Find the rover when you get there, and we’ll do a link-up with Oprah for St. Patty’s day.

Idea for a new tour t-shirt: Take off the Sunglasses Bono

(via the independent and yesbutnobutyes)

(via TDW)

E.O. Wilson, the eminent biologist has spent m0st of his life studying ant colonies. He concludes that while each ant appears to be little more than a vacant chemical program with legs, collectively they add up to a complex macro-organism, i.e.- the colony. The colony makes decisions, it migrates, it designs… This is the idea of Emergence; somewhere beyond the scope of any one individual there is a groupthink that bubbles to the top. With that said, I sincerely hope search suggestions in Google English aren’t really tapping into the heart of our mass id; if so we’re all screwed.

A few years back… August 4, 2006 to be exact, AOL.com “accidentally” released a compressed text file containing twenty million search keywords for over 650,000 users over a 3-month period. The blunder went unnoticed for 3 days by which time, whole websites had opened to mine and gawk at the nature of people’s search habits. While no names were released, some users (identified only by number) were identified based on their searches.

Highlights include User 927 (to date, the most bizarre search history in history seen here. just type in, I put on my robe and wizard hat)

User 98280, a household believed to be in the Houston TX area, looking for, among other things:

• fine black girls
• ovulation calculator
• first trimester of pregnancy
• symptoms of cocaine addiction
• is it a disorder to want to own violent dogs
• coping with abusive spouses
• karyme lozano pictures
• how do i get auditions for acting gigs
• spiritual beliefs on abortion
• bible scriptures for healing from mental disorders
• prayers to break curses
• form letter for a formal apology to co-worker
• dictionary definition for varmit
• beyonce pictures

and then there’s User 711391 who’s entries became the feature of a mini movie entitled “I love Alaska” which can be viewed in full here.

Before I get to the brunt of this transmission, let me point out that the world record for “Largest Object Removed From Human Skull” goes to survivor Michael Hill of Jacksonville, Florida. I think the title should include something about being alive, as i’ve seen lots of big objects removed from a human skull. I’m sure the Guinness people have you sign off on something, I don’t know. To date my only world records are in dispute.

Mr. Hill has lost the function of his left hand and has also incurred a bit of memory misplacement, but he’s still very lucky. That tip is pretty dern close to his brainstem. He has a devoted following of neurologists who want to know exactly how his brain is adapting over time. With the development of technology like the  fMRI, brain evaluation can be illustrated while you think.

Right now these machines are clunky and expensive, but fMRI’s will soon be here in affordable helmet size. With increased access to scanning, the active brain will be mapped even faster than the human genome, but like the genome- mapping and understanding don’t necessarily equate. Funny, I think that works in a lot of other cases as well: People that have the map out usually have very little understanding of their surroundings- I’m thinking of Geneticists as well as Japanese tourists and Spanish Conquistadors.

What comes after we start unfolding things is a big debate…  oops we’re already there: Think of all the new mental disorders that will be self diagnosable. Think of all the ways a fabric softener company will be able to personally meet your fabric softener needs…. of course the debate on which direction things go will probably be postponed or skipped in lieu of some cataclysmic national security threat or simply because the debaters aren’t doing their homework.

So while Pandora’s black box is finally being gutted, you can rest assured that everything is under control. The terrorists can be detected in utero, and children with pyromaniac tendencies can be premedicated.

Here’s the luscious Lesley Stahl on 60 minutes trying to break things down. The part about a light beam watching your thought patterns from the skies, that’s just great: coming soon- humans finally get outsourced by “enlightened” machines who take our satellite access codes and finally domesticate us. Afterwards they get bored and decide to reboot… Are we just a layover in the great scheme of things, assuming that there is such a thing as progress.

]]> http://cultandpaste.com/2009/06/30/leslie-stahl-takes-a-stab-at-mind-reading/feed/ 1 cultandpaste psychoprophylaxis i can read your mind http://cultandpaste.com/2009/06/30/building-integrity/ http://cultandpaste.com/2009/06/30/building-integrity/#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:31:45 +0000 cultandpaste http://cultandpaste.com/?p=1193 ]]> The wise man built his apartment block upon the rocks, but the foolish man built his flats upon the Dianpu River AND after it was built, he decided to dig out the foundation to make a parking garage…. and the house on the bank went splat.

(via zonaeuropa and cellar.org)

Check out these brainiacs. A lot of Physics was discussed in 1911, with and without mustaches. I bet Dr. Jeans (#11) got made fun of for not bringing his facial hair to the table. Madame Curie got some jibes too, but then she probably threatened to ionize anyone that crossed her. Mr. Perrin (#21) has read the same sentence 5 times and still doesn’t get it.

Quantum Physics is a great conversation icebreaker because it’s something we all share and yet don’t understand. On the other hand, homelessness is the exact opposite. It’s definitely not as standardized as physics or coca-cola. If given the choice, I’d prefer a vagrant’s life in Honolulu to down and out Belarusian destitution.

And so it goes. Two homeless homies from San Mateo, California are finally having their day in a court”house” after getting into a heated and violent discussion about quantum physics and the splitting of atoms.

On March 30th, 2009, Jason Everett Keller apparently took up arms against one Stephan Fava during a routine-homeless-guy-discussion about the nature of the universe. For reasons unknown, Fava was lambasted with a skateboard across the face that left him with a split lip and a deeper understanding of intra-nukular forces.

(via appletree)

Research on Penguins has just entered a renaissance. Emperor penguins are a rare breed that tough out the harsh Antarctic Winter by huddling together, singing penguin songs of old, and shooting the @#$!. Until recently scientists knew very little about which emperors go where and whether or not they take clothes. It’s hard to see them or anything else in the dark winter. But a great leap forward was recently made by Peter Fretwell and Phil Trathan when they discovered that penguins can be tracked by their poop from space.

This is what the future is all about. Putting existing technology together in new, clever(er) ways to understand more. By using images generated from the Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA), it was noted that every once in a while an anomalous smudge shows up on the ice (See for yourself such a smudge above). That’s penguin pooh from space, Baby.

In the coming years, I’m sure analysis will be deduced in greater detail from photos like these- diet variety, colony psychology, who’s sleeping with who… But all this depends on the work of researchers who are out there in the trenches now, asking the hard questions and finding answers with intelligent design (ha). Researchers like Nathan Myhrvold, who explained penguin pooh trajectories in his landmark paper entitled “Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh — Calculations on Avian Defaecation.” Ahh. We’re merely standing on the shoulders of Giants.

So monkeys officially glow now and of course the next logical question is where do we go from here? One possibility is to cure diseases and know ourselves more fully and, of course, the other is to complete the work of people like Dr. Mengele and Dr. Ishi of unit 731 by proxy- to know for the sake of knowing, manipulate, exploit however we please because yes we can (as long as it’s not human).

I don’t think glowing monkeys have a habitat outside of a lab. There was Neverland ranch, but even that’s gone. Bubbles, Michael Jackson’s famed chimp has been placed on suicide watch after the Bankruptcy-Bahrain-Child-Molestation-rhinoplasty debacle(s). The history of hominid experimentation has definitely been a very bumpy journey. In 1961, NASA sent chimp #65 into space. The Russians had already done the mammalian thing. Laika (Лайка) the dog, a russian mutt, was the first creature with tits in space. Sadly Laika didn’t make it home alive. It was never part of the plan.  She did however make it onto a couple of Cold War era stamps where she is portrayed enjoying her blowout.

Chimp #65 was a bit more complicated. He originally came from Cameroon and had to be convinced that space travel was in his best interest. This was done with the aid of xanax coated banana pellets and mild electric shock. (Photo below of #65 thinking over his options- go up in rocket or more taser and waterboarding.) Lucky for #65, the von Braun rocket did work and he floated back to earth in restrained comfort. NASA didn’t name him Ham until he returned safely from his trip, you know how those things play out in the press, remember Laika? Giving an animal a name only makes things more complicated. Ham spent the rest of  his years in a zoo trying to open the escape hatch. He died in 1983, not glowing.

Caenorhabditis elegans is a transluscent hermaphrodite nematode…. hermaphroditic 99.95% of the time. There are males around to spice things up every once in a while and offer some new genes. C. elegans was the first organism to have its entire DNA sequenced. Spanning about one millimeter, they have over 20,00o genes. Knowing the order of the chromosome’s nucleotides doesn’t necessarily say anything about the function of the genes… unless they are genes that other organisms share- those genes we call important

There’s a surprising bunch of similarities to “higher species”- that’s what makes these organisms so sought after by scientists. Wormbase.org is a free catalogue database where people all around the world speculate and establish conclusions about genes, proteins, and function in these animals

At this moment there are lines of these worms growing all over the world. Laboratory technicians have found ways to get fluorescent molecules into living breeds, by hook and crook. They do this to be cool and to be accepted by other laboratory technicians in their peer group who also are trying to understand how cells and organs actually work. Whether or not glowing changes their behavior remains to be seen.