Time-Manipulated Cricket Song

Without a doubt this is the eeriest, and even most frightening piece of music I have ever heard. I am posting it here for others but I cannot listen to it any more.

Mosh Pits Described by Gas Equations

Story here. Back in the day I described mosh pits to the un-initiated in exactly this way. Note: a mosh pit is clearly not an ideal gas, because the particles interact with each other.

Proposal: One Way to Find von Neumann Probes

Find their relay stations. Still very much bound by our assumptions about how communications work (and that such probes would care to communicate with each other) but still translates to an actionable plan that can be approached reasonably with current technology.

Polar Lichens Survive Martian Conditions

Tested by the German Aerospace Center here. Also interesting: experimental worms from the Columbia (C. elegans of course) survived uncontrolled re-entry and were found alive weeks after the crash.

In related news, Robin Hanson weighs in with a statistical argument supporting the increasingly plausible idea that the origin of life (at least in its simplest form) was not on Earth.

The Improbable Convergent Evolution of Caucasians in Science Fiction

Yes Captain. I too am puzzled as to how white people evolved independently on every planet we go to; not only that, but how over time Khan appears to be a kind of deep space Michael Jackson. From startrek.com.
This is an expanded version of a comment at writer Marshall Maresca's blog. Maresca's original post is Perils of the Writer: Writing Race in SFF. In it he addresses that interesting convention, the occasional African-American alien in Star Trek:

My college roommate and I were watching Deep Space Nine, and in the episodes a small group of Bajorans were meeting with Cmdr. Sisko. One of the leaders of the Bajorans was played by a black actor.

"That's cool," my roommate said, "They have African-American Bajorans." Then after a moment he said, "Of course, that's inaccurate. He's Bajoran. Bajor is a different planet, there's no Africa, there's no America."

Over the course of the series, we saw that the Bajorans were as racially diverse as humans are*, but we never learn any real details of that diversity. And that's fine, because it didn't need to be directly addressed, it just was a part of their reality, easily achieved by color-blind casting.

Oddly, it was always the lack of racial diversity that stuck out to me in Star Trek. Does anyone seriously think there will be fewer multiracial people in the future? On one hand, Star Trek (and every other science fiction show and movie) is casting actors that their mostly-white audience will relate to; it's unfortunate, but I understand why. ST does have the occasional non-white regular cast member, and an occasional extra or non-recurring non-human played by not white actors, like the Bajoran Maresca mentions. But to the extent that we consider Star Trek to be in any way a plausible future as opposed to a Game of Thrones fantasy, then how amazing is it that not only are most of the aliens we meet humanoid, but they're Caucasian! Incredible! (Literally. Crabs I could believe, but extraterrestrial white people? Come on. I know that makeup and effects cost money so not everyone can be a Tholian, but there are plenty of non-white actors.)

In truth, I kind of view black Bajorans/Vulcans/etc. the same way that I view non-European actors in Shakespeare - in and of itself, you don't really take these casting decisions as making any point inside or outside the story, that's just who the actors are, and you forget about it. Did it really affect Voyager's storyline after the debut that Tuvok was a black Vulcan? Was there some interesting or painful chapter of history on Vulcan that this built into his character? And come to think of it, have there been Asian aliens with speaking roles in ST? I can't think of any examples. (If you tell me the Vulcans and Romulans count as Asians because they correspond to China and Japan in the original Gene Roddenberry one-alien-race equals one-nationality scheme, I'll punch you. I really will.)

The problem is that token aliens only make the lack of diversity and specifically, multi-racial characters in science fiction film and TV more obvious. Wait, it's the year 2330 (or whatever) and you're telling me not only is Starfleet still mostly white, but there aren't many multiracial humans? The modern U.S. Navy is more diverse than this! And why did they jump straight to multi-species characters? That is obviously intentionally making a point, which is useful and interesting, both inside and outside the story. Great, a half-Klingon faces discrimination and questioning looks, and some viewers will identify with that. What about a half-black half-Filipino actor that Paramount and the writers somehow couldn't fit into the twenty-fourth century? Those actors are absolutely out there.* Again, I imagine Paramount would make no bones about saying, "We cast people the audience will identify with." It's the audience's accepting this as being remotely representative of the future that's mystifying. "Not every science fiction show and movie has to be Fifth Element," people might say, and that's certainly true, but then you can't complain if you see people using 8-track tape players in the future either.

To the question of race in writing more broadly - it certainly can give a feeling of verisimilitude, but if someone has the chance to write race (in a supposed future world) and doesn't touch on the actual real-world hair triggers, I think they're wasting an opportunity unique to speculative fiction. Most alien races are just science fiction demi-humans; for all many writers do with them, just go ahead and put elves on Alpha Centauri and be more honest about it! But if you actually want to use your aliens for something, you can be District Nine. Even if you insist on Caucasian aliens, you can still be Alien Nation. If you don't have aliens, you can be subtle like Asimov in The Currents of Space, where he wrote something that was clearly about mid-century segregation in the U.S. even if the color scheme was reversed. Case in point, in Elysium, people speaking Spanglish down on grimy Earth, security forces speaking German up on the space station. (Ouch! This German-American saw that and said "Oh no you didn't!") But it gets people thinking who might not have thought before. My own "debut" novel (that is, the one I'm furthest along on) takes place far enough in the future that any descendants of ethnic groups we might recognize are distant myths, although the characters are definitely not Caucasian-looking. The protagonist is a member of an occasionally-persecuted sometimes-tolerated minority religion; he's a powerful man but still sighs at the bizarre, annoying, sometimes dangerous blood libels that persist against them. Any takers on who this is about?


*Of course you can name lots of multiracial entertainers who have been successful - Keanu Reeves, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Moon Bloodgood, Vanessa Williams and Dean Cain for starters - and many more are certainly coming. The interesting thing is that there is no narrative and therefore easily-understood character for "multiracial" to fit into, so these people are still either white or black. (Fine, Moon Bloodgood was Native American in Terminator Salvation. But still not hapa.) I would argue that the believability of multiracial actors in other roles by people who know their background is a positive but, but these actors are mostly thought of in the same terms that all American race issues are still mostly framed: white or black, no option for other.

A Way Around the Fermi Paradox: Just Look for Life, Not Intelligence

There must be more life than intelligence (assuming that all intelligent things are alive). Even if you think that the solution to the Fermi paradox is that intelligence is an evolutionary dead end, using our own planet as an example, you would have had 3.5 billion years to observe life prior to the emergence of intelligence.

That's why work by MIT's Sara Seager is so exciting (and brilliant). Instead of looking for signals (that we might not notice as signals) or even for artifacts, Seager is looking for chemical signatures of life, period. These techniques will limit us to a smaller set of closer stars, but a) again, life must be more common than intelligence and b) we actually know what we're looking for. In this case, biosignature gases - gases that cannot be in the atmosphere unless there's some non-geologic process actively replacing them. On Earth, that's oxygen. On terrestrial planets, another one is ammonia. That "smaller set" of stars that she's looking at - all M-class, in line with Seager's technique - is still 30,000 systems.

And most excitingly, she kind of puts odds on it: she plugged values into the Drake equation and, based on the actual data that her project will be generating, she thinks there will be two detections of alien life in the next decade. Not everyone gets to build a spreadsheet that translates budget numbers and processor speed into number of projected alien ecosystems discovered.

Abrupt Rise of New Machine Ecology Beyond Human Response Time

That's a new paper about ultra-high frequency trading in Nature Scientific Reports by Johnson et al. Link here.

List of Organic Compounds Found in Sutter's Mill Meteorite

A paper by Pizzarello et al using NMR and mass spec of material extracted from the meteorites has shown many new compounds. I'm always frustrated when papers look at chemistry of extraterrestrial samples and doesn't use basic organic techniques (like NMR) so I was very happy to read this one. Of note, the extraction method used by this team is a new one and more closely resembles conditions on early Earth. The excitement about this paper is that it brings us closer to supporting a panspermia model for the origin of life on Earth. It also supports the idea that meteors (and comets) might actually be harboring some kind of active chemistry - and if we're going to look for von Neumann probes or indeed any replicator chemistry, we should start with the low gravity bodies right here in our solar system. Some of the compounds they found are below:

Pizzarello S, Daviodski S, Hollanda G, Williams L. Processing of meteoritic organic materials as a possible analog of early molecular evolution in planetary environments. Published online before print September 9, 2013, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1309113110.

Morality Machines in the Distant Future Universe

Far Futures is a collection of stories put together by Gregory Benford, with contributiosn from Greg Bear, Poul Anderson, Haldeman, Kingsbury, and Sheffield.


Not going to happen. But great story. If you don't like it, then re-write it with a Maxwell's demon catching particles as the universe continues to accelerate outward, trying to predict which ones it should grab based on current projected but not-quite-there solutions. Now would that really make the story better?
They're all excellent as you might expect from a Benford-edited collection, but the one story in particular that stood out to me was Bear's Judgement Engine. The story is a collision of thermodynamics, morality, and metaphysics. At the Big Crunch there remains a single library where the far future's remaining minds remain, crunching through possible solutions to suffering and the nature of existence.

Essentially, consciousness requires life, which requires energy, which requires things to prey on other things, and in all the aeons of existence, no one has found a way around this brute fact of reality. There is either non-existence, or there is suffering - which includes things making each other suffer. As the edge of the universe and the end of all things draws quickly and inexorably closer, this Problem is the last unsolved conjecture at the end of time. Why do they care? Because (in an homage to Buddhist ideas about death and reincarnation) their thoughts at the moment of the Big Crunch will determine the nature of the entire universe that will appear at the next Big Bang. A story like this can only end in tragedy.

Modern Architecture and Bad Bathrooms: Wright's Beth Shalom Synagogue, Philadelphia

That the bathroom is the most important room in any building is self-evident. Consequently, for modern architects to so studiously ignore it is a crime. Here in California the Salk Institute is a perfect example; I haven't been in enough of the prolific William Pereira's buildings to pass judgment (but here's more on them.)

In 1997 when I still lived in Philadelphia I was on a Frank Lloyd Wright kick and the Philadelphia synagogue Beth Shalom is a Wright building. In fact it was one of his last; it was started while he was alive but he died during the construction, in 1959. It's actually a bit garish and uber-Mayan; I wonder if the guys who wrote the script for Ghostbusters got the idea for the Gozer-building from this thing. That said, the worship space is pretty nice (third picture is looking up).

Of course I wouldn't be posting this if I weren't going to complain about the bathrooms, tiny, consistent with another famous Wright, Falling Water. Look at this! For that gigantic facility, there are 2 (two) stalls in the single men's room! I guess no one ever has to defecate in the presence of Yahweh?

Full New Carcass Album Surgical Steel, on Youtube (for now)

Several reviews have stated the album improves with repeated listening but that's B.S., I loved it the first time out. I think the two released tracks were the two weakest of the work!

Solitude Aeturnus, Into the Depths of Sorrow (1991)

This is the full album. The chant is "Dawn of Antiquity" then it goes into "Opaque Divinity".

More New Carcass

Submit to the new track Unfit for Human Consumption. All paths lead to annihilation but only with Carcass is there meaning.

Also, buy this.

Old Transformers Music and Sound Effects

I guess there's a video too but that's secondary.

Bruce Dickinson Supposedly Building Drones

Story here.

An XKCD Reader Asks About the C-Index

The C-Index is a way to think about the difficulty and likelihood of detecting other civilizations. It's a distance, in light years. The question is "What's the farthest away a twin Earth with the same technology could be so that we would hear each other, given how 'loud' we are and our detection technology?" Interestingly, we couldn't hear our own radio waves more than about a half light year away, and we're actually getting quieter, not louder.

A reader of XKCD's What-Ifs asks Randall Munro pretty much this exact question: "Let's assume there's life on the the nearest habitable exoplanet and that they have technology comparable to ours. If they looked at our star right now, what would they see?"

Asimov's Foundation: The Meta-Cult?

Above: apparently, the idol of Paul Krugman, Newt Gingrich, and Osama bin Laden. Asimov Aqbar!

Peter Turchin is a historian who has written a book claiming to scientifically predict future history based on past patterns (War and Peace and War); it's no surprise that he is an Asimov fan, and to his credit he gets the reference out of the way quickly. But it's not just psychohistorians who Asimov's work influenced. Newt Gingrich and Paul Krugman are unabashed fans of the Foundation series, crediting it with their inspiration in politics and economics. And it turns out, so was Shoko Asahara, the Tokyo subway nerve gas guy who founded Aum Shinri Kyo, and who wanted to start the real Foundation. There's even speculation that Bin Laden was a fan and that Al Qaeda is his Foundation.

Consequently, when I was reading about Keith Raniere and his cult-like NXIVM in a Forbes article, I almost fell out of my chair when I read: " As a boy he read an Isaac Asimov sci-fi novel about a brilliant scientist who knew his galaxy was in irremediable decline and had reduced all human behavior to elegant mathematical equations. It inspired Raniere later to try to do the same."

What, did old Isaac accidentally write a cult handbook? Maybe L. Ron Hubbard made the mistake of being too overt and should have buried his ideas in fiction! Granted, the idea of an algorithm for building a strong civilization - sort of like the Ten Commandments written in Python - is certainly seductive, but there are lots of seductive ideas in sf that haven't had this degree of influence. (I was reminded of Heinlein when non-naturalized U.S. residents who fought in Iraq were given citizenship immediately upon returning in 2003, but that's the strongest I can think of.) Maybe all these people think they're going to be the Mule, only smarter.

By now I imagine the NSA must have a list of people who check this out of libraries.

Without Constraints, How Do Humans Behave?

Cross-posted to my politics and economics blog as well as Cognition and Evolution.

Life on Earth evolved in an environment of constraints: resource limitations, disease and predation all put lids on behavior and reproduction. Consequently, the mechanisms to deal with those constraints have no "brakes", because nature provided them. There's no reason to have tight control on over-eating, because such a situation rarely arose. There was no reason to protect reward circuitry in general from overstimulation. But now we're starting to remove those constraints. Solve food scarcity, and we get obesity. Go straight to the reward center (without a real external reward), and we get heroin and video game addiction.

This is the biggest problem we face in any post-scarcity world, or (more broadly) in any world where our behavioral regulation is freed from the constraints that sculpted it for billions of years, whether in reality (because there really is more than enough food) or virtually (because you can just shoot up and feel good). This problem has even been advanced to explain the Fermi paradox, since whatever behavior regulation intelligent aliens evolve, presumably when they solve their own constraints, they will run into the same problems - perhaps with species-destroying consequences. The more complete and effective a representational system is*, the faster and greater the instability it creates in the system.

You might think of a science fiction story where curious and powerful aliens have put humans in a kind of terrarium where the weather is always fair, there's always enough to eat, there's no physical danger, and where there is always another territory to move into, with no loss of security, if you burn too many bridges with the ones in this one. That is to say, someone looks at you the wrong way, or your significant other mildly irritates you - why stick around? The aliens have guaranteed there will be another handsome gentleman/pretty lady waiting for you when you get to the new territory. And when you get there you wonder idly if these are real humans also in the experiment, or were whipped up and memory-programmed by the tissue replicator twenty minutes before you got there; or maybe you were, before your new mate got here. But you're taken care of; does it matter? (California sometimes feels like it's almost there.) In a world of limitless security and resources and even others' company, why ever tolerate the least inconvenience?

A scenario similar to this that happens in the real world is the strange discomfort of working alongside someone who is wealthy independent of their jobs. Why are they even here, people might ask resentfully - and indeed, from anecdotal experience, when these people get annoyed, they quickly leave, because why not? They have security and more territory.

So what happens to people when all the constraints are removed, when they're both wealthy and not subject to censure by broader political forces? That is to say, how do humans behave when all the brakes are off?Predictably. From "The Prince Who Blew Through Billions" by Mark Seal, from Vanity Fair in July 2011:

On the brother of the Sultan of Brunei, Prince Jefri Bolkiah, who has "probably gone through more cash than any other human being on earth.": "The sultan's biggest extravagance turned out to be his love for his youngest brother, Jefri, his constant companion in hedonism. They raced their Ferraris through the streets of Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital, at midnight, sailed the oceans on their fleet of yachts (Jefri named one of his Tits, its tenders Nipple 1 and Nipple 2), and imported planeloads of polo ponies and Argentinean players to indulge their love for that game, which they sometimes played with Prince Charles. They snapped up real estate like Monopoly pieces—hundreds of far-flung properties, a collection of five-star hotels (the Dorchester, in London, the Hôtel Plaza Athénée, in Paris, the New York Palace, and Hotel Bel-Air and the Beverly Hills Hotel, in Los Angeles), and an array of international companies (including Asprey, the London jeweler to the Queen, for which Jefri paid about $385 million in 1995, despite the fact that that was twice Asprey's estimated market value or that Brunei's royal family constituted a healthy portion of its business).

"Back home, the sultan erected a 1,788-room palace on 49 acres, 'which is without equal in the world for offensive and ugly display,' in the words of one British magnate, and celebrated his 50th birthday with a blowout featuring a concert by Michael Jackson, who was reportedly paid $17 million, in a stadium built for the occasion. (When the sultan flew in Whitney Houston for a performance, he is rumored to have given her a blank check and instructed her to fill it in for what she thought she was worth: more than $7 million, it turned out.) The brothers routinely traveled with 100-member entourages and emptied entire inventories of stores such as Armani and Versace, buying 100 suits of the same color at a time. When they partied, they indulged in just about everything forbidden in a Muslim country. Afforded four wives by Islamic law, they left their multiple spouses and scores of children in their palaces while they allegedly sent emissaries to comb the globe for the sexiest women they could find in order to create a harem the likes of which the world had never known."

This reads like an account of what each of us would do if we found out tomorrow we were in a simulation, with power over said simulation. This is what happens when the brakes are off. If you object that this is an exception or an extreme example - I guarantee that this behavior happens more among the fabulously wealthy and powerful. Well of course, you again object, other people can't behave that way! But then if the tendency wasn't there, why should it happen at all? And (more to the point) do you seriously think you would be any better-behaved? Of course you would; you're biologically and/or morally superior to these folks and would never let that kind of thing happen. (Also note that lottery winners, with a sudden random infusion of karma or whatever you call the points in our game - that's right, "money" - are known for going off the rails, and being more miserable and more likely to go bankrupt than the general population. Also, see "athletes from poor backgrounds suddenly signed up to multi-million dollar contracts in pro sports".)

An astute observer will say, "So what if people descend into depravity? If you're in a simulation or the aliens' zoo or you're royalty and don't hurt anyone, if you're happy with harems and Ferraris, fine!" That would be fine. But the problem is these people often seem not to be happy. Here it's hard to get data, but they are not invariably happier than other humans and in fact often have considerably troubled emotional lives. Again, they're using nervous systems built for an environment of resource and social constraints. It should not be surprising that they experience boredom, restlessness, and emptiness. In fact in the developed world it's not just the ultra-wealthy that experience these things. That said, it's sure better than starving or being eaten by tigers, but it seems those are our two alternatives: obese or at best bored, versus running from predators, starvation, and stronger neighbors. Yes, I fully recognize the pessimism of this position.

So, there's an addition to Malthus here. Malthus merely pointed out that when all constraints are relaxed but one, that constraint will limit (and his rule concerned, specifically, energy input as the unrelaxed constraint, but you can imagine for example a dense population of well-fed non-preyed-upon humans being periodically cut down by plagues). The addition is that when all constraints are relaxed, the system becomes unstable, whether that system is a cell (cancer) or an individual. The more powerful the system - which can be approximated by how fast it can change - the faster it will become unstable.

*The first representational system to evolve on Earth was the gene: the proteins it codes for are indirect mirrors of a DNA strand's environment - and as the environment changes, the genes change. As life became more complex, systems appeared that became able to more and more rapidly and/or accurately reflect parts of the environment beyond the replicator: the cytochrome P450 system which is a remarkably non-specific but effective metabolism system (which is how most drugs are broken down even though life on Earth has never seen these molecules before) and the immune system, which produces high-affinity molecules with a process of directed by limited somatic mutation. The ultimate such system however is the development of large numbers of cells signalling with ion channels, which can represent much more information much faster, and in humans has expanded to allow the assignment of arbitrary symbols to novel relationships (language). While we still can't assume that our language-enhanced nervous systems can represent every possible state external to themselves (any more than the immune system can do so), it's still by far the fastest-acting system and the one most likely to spell its own demise. As an aside, it's probably no surprise that plants that have begun to evolve "behavior" of a sort - the carnivorous plants - also use ion channels. Assuming causality is unidirectional, what happens first matters, and therefore so does speed.

New Mammals Being Discovered, Aliens Obviously Not In Solar System

The discovery of a new mammal had been announced by the Smithsonian - not a new insect or worm, a new mammal, in 2013 - and meanwhile, we can confidently say we have enough information to rule out alien artifacts in the solar system.

De Niro As Hilarious Patronizing Satan

The movie Angel Heart with Mickey Rourke and De Niro is undeservedly forgotten (how could it be bad with those two in the same movie?) And, spoiler alert, De Niro plays the devil (but you don't know that until the end). Easily my favorite De Niro role. How can you not just roll on the floor at his mockery of concern for others and decency in general in these scenes: