Prolific Weird Things scribe Matt just posted his criticism of Avatar’s bioelectric network premise. Basically he feels that director James Cameron is trying to make it a parable of earth and our resource use – and that it’s an unfair comparison because Pandora has all sorts of nifty features like consciousness uploading that we don’t. I disagree.

The bioelectric network Matt takes exception to was just one example that Cameron was using to make a much more important point.

While on the surface Avatar seems to be have a hippy “save the rain forest” tone, it’s a lot deeper than that and has a scientific and ecological world view even a libertarian could agree with.

Resource use is a complicated issue. Cameron was trying to point out that we often don’t see the real value of the things in front of us. And he wasn’t suggesting the value of Pandora was the Na’vi’s religious beliefs – they didn’t seem to have any. A point the movie touched on a little and the accompanying Avatar field guide went into in great detail was all of the scientific knowledge of Pandora. Disease and starvation were problems facing Earth of 2154 and Pandora had solutions for that, but the government enforced monopoly of RDA (the company that runs things on Pandora) had no interest in shaking up the status quo. When the government won’t allow any competition, why change things? They had no interest in curing the problems of Earth using newly discovered Pandora science because as long as Earth was in a crisis the government backed their monopoly.

On present day Earth the difference between poor countries and rich countries has very little to do with natural resources. The countries with the highest GDPs are the ones that export information technologies and have a scientifically literate population. If your wealth comes from just pulling things out of the ground, you’ll eventually run into trouble when you don’t have anything more to pull out of the ground. Making matters worse, because your entire industry is tied up in what’s basically unskilled labor, you never develop schools and training that put you on a forward path.

Pandora, like Earth, is filled with incredible scientific knowledge with practical applications on Earth. The message of the movie was that the RDA was ignoring that because the could only see the value of one resource. Like an American car company or 90’s OS maker, they had no vision of the future other than their own.

The greatest wealth of the 21st century is probably going to come from biotech. Fuel, food, medicine and materials are going to come from us exploiting genes of various life forms on our planet. Scientist-entrepreneurs like Craig Venter are collecting vast databases of all the genetic information on our planet so they can engineer microbes that can turn CO2 into fuel or create new medicines. This is made possible by studying how life on Earth functions and then using what we’ve learned to create new technologies.

The moral of Avatar is that the greatest resource is knowledge – scientific knowledge. If the RDA saw the wealth that was around them besides the mineral they were after they would be even richer and life on Earth would be much better. The best capitalists are the ones that look to the future. Cameron, a physics major, explorer and multi-millionaire knows this and his movie reflects this value.

Immortality, plentiful resources and endless energy could happen in the 21st century – as long as we see the world around us and learn how to use its resources wisely.

According to some scientists at the Daily Mail, the answer is yes. A long term global warming trend due to CO2 emissions doesn’t preclude the possibility of nature deciding to flip the bit at least for a few decades and make things cooler.

Even though United States and other parts of the world are experiencing record cold temperatures, climate scientists are quick to point out (and rightly so), that doesn’t change the fact that CO2 absorbs infrared energy that would normally bounce back into space and that we’re producing a lot more CO2 than ever. The big question is how much does this CO2 contribute to global temperatures and how much warming is due to other natural factors?

The debate gets sticky when people claim it’s either one or the other. Professor Mojib Latif, a UN scientists and leading member of the IPCC is a global warming scientist who fully accepts that CO2 is a contributing factor to climate change – but questions how much. Global warming proponents are critical of him for suggesting that not all temperature increase is due to man made CO2. Global warming deniers (not the same as skeptics) are upset that he still believes CO2 is a contributing factor.

His data is based upon the role the oceans play in contributing to global temperatures. He attributes the latest cooling trend to ‘multi-decadal oscillations’ (MDOs). He called the current cooling temps back in 2008. His research goes on to indicate that we could be in for a several decade long mini ice age before things get warmer again thanks to nature and man-made CO2.

If this is the case, then there’s an argument to be made that we should be thankful of all the CO2 we put in the atmosphere, because the winters are going to be milder than they would have had we miraculously stopped producing CO2 in the 1990’s.

The more we study climate, the weirder it gets. A recent study mentioned here at Weird Things a few weeks ago pointed out that core sample data indicates that historical temperature changes can come a lot faster than previously thought. Frequent mini ice ages may be the norm. You can read the Live Science article here: Big Freeze: Earth Could Plunge into Sudden Ice Age

The Daily Mail: The Mini Ice Age Starts Here

Sphere.com reports that the Pentagon has launched a program called Transformer X with the intent of developing flying cars for the battlefield. Awesome.

The objective of the Transformer (TX) program is to demonstrate a one- to four-person transportation vehicle that can drive and fly, thus enabling the warfighter to avoid water, difficult terrain, and road obstructions as well as IED and ambush threats

Everyone is well aware of the promise of flying cars and the fact that they still aren’t here. While investment schemes like the Moller Flying Car seemed only able to produce tantalizing proof of concept videos, there’s reason to hope that we may actually see real honest to goodness flying cars after all. Carbon composites have made it possible to make extremely lightweight airframes. New engine technologies have made engines far more powerful and lightweight. And computing has advanced far enough to solve the balance problem faced by very early designs.

So lets hope that billions of our tax dollars get this one right and maybe Elon Musk can bring it to market for the rest of us.

link: Pentagon’s Transformer Programs Aims to Build Flying Car – Sphere News

A tangent becomes a tangent when the hosts try to stretch their feeble minds around the global warming, the energy crisis and the singularity (again) after discussing clone sex.

Link: Craig Venter at TED on creating synthetic life
Link: Venter and Exxon enter partnership for biofuels
Link: Synthetic Genomics web site

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Natalie Angier at the New York Times has an interesting article that suggest if your goal in life is to avoid eating other sensitive, feeling communal creatures, going vegan isn’t enough. According to plant biologists, our leafy friends experience a world of sensation and try to avoid pain – a hallmark for many of what you should and shouldn’t eat:

Just because we humans can’t hear them doesn’t mean plants don’t howl. Some of the compounds that plants generate in response to insect mastication — their feedback, you might say — are volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help.

This is why we should eat as many cows as possible. A cow eats millions of blades of grass, each one a soulful howling poet, and this genocide must be stopped, one juicy delicious steak at a time…

link: Basics – Another Challenge for Ethical Eating – Plants Want to Live, Too – NYTimes.com

In the latest Scientific American theoretical physicists Alejandro Jenkins and Gilad Perez speculate that there might be a greater chance of life developing in other universes with different physical laws and that our own may not be as finely tuned as once thought.

Our recent studies, however, suggest that some of these other universes—assuming they exist—may not be so inhospitable after all. Remarkably, we have found examples of alternative values of the fundamental constants, and thus of alternative sets of physical laws, that might still lead to very interesting worlds and perhaps to life. The basic idea is to change one aspect of the laws of nature and then make compensatory changes to other aspects.

For example, if life really is possible in a weakless universe, then why does our own universe have a weak force at all? In fact, particle physicists consider the weak force in our universe to be, in a sense, not weak enough. Its observed value seems unnaturally strong within the Standard Model. (The leading explanation for this mystery requires the existence of new particles and forces that physicists hope to discover at the newly opened Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva.)

This week, Weird Thing Culture Reporter Matt Finley takes a look at the Homunculus, a strange idea that survived against reason and logic. Monday we looked at how long the idea has been around. Wednesday we found out how science got past the idea of little naked men ruling our lives.

The homunculi set a daring course – out of the genitals and into the brain. But before turning things over to all the scholarly yak yak of those incorrigible philosophers, I want to make a brief pit stop over in science. Remember that awesome part in “Blade Runner,” when Roy Batty is shaking down the replicant eye maker and says, “If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes.”? Well, before humans had any real understanding of how vision functioned, some people believed that there was a little brain-dwelling homunculus whose job it was to see what we see through our eyes, and then relate the information to our brains, so that the images weren’t lost, like, in the words of Batty, “tears in the rain.” (Seriously, though, how awesome is “Blade Runner”?)

The flaw in this notion is that if a person requires an internal homunculus proxy to perceive the world, it follows that said homunculus must rely on its own even tinier, more disgusting homunculus proxy. And so on. This conceptual roadblock is known as infinite regression, and it represents, among other things, the intersection between homunculi in science and homunculi in philosophy.

Divorced from unsettling, naked men, infinite regress is still a popular philosophical rejoinder, especially during disputes about consciousness.

(Brief history lesson: It was 20th century philosopher Gilbert Ryle who initially spelled out these types of arguments in depth, initially using the example of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s assertion that “The ancestor of every action is a thought.” Ryle essentially argued that if, in fact, every intelligent action is preceded by a conscious thought, and a conscious thought is, in itself, an intelligent action, then, etc.)

One classic (though woefully out-dated) philosophical argument about the nature of human consciousness is Descartes notion of dualism (AKA the mind-body problem) – that the mind is non-physical entity separate from the material brain. Descartes even identified the pineal gland as the area of the brain where this immaterial vapor soul thing resided. Cognitive science has since discredited this notion, leaving philosophers to reconstruct an entirely new model of human consciousness.

Lo, gaze yonder! The homunculi are returning! And contemporary American philosopher Daniel Dennett is carrying them in an adorable papoose. Dennett is extremely concerned that, even as philosophers attempt to divorce themselves from the long-standing notions of Cartesian dualism, its ghost haunts even the most logical materialist argument. He calls this effect Cartesian materialism, and basically argues that if you take Descartes’ intangible mind and regard it as physical, but still approach the mind and brain as separate material entities, the newly tangible mind entity becomes, in essence, a homunculus, perched back up inside the human head for the first time since that whole vision debacle, absorbing stimuli and whispering analyses into the cortex. And if that little guy’s up there functioning as our consciousness, then he himself is conscious and must have… well, you know the drill.

Gizmodo reports that the brains at MIT have decided to take a new direction for creating Artificial Intelligence. They’ve thrown out some age old assumptions and are considering new alternatives to concepts line the Turing Test.

We’re glad somebody decided it was time to bring Skynet online sooner than later. We don’t want to be in the geriatric ward when it’s time to fight the machines.

Gizmodo

LiveScience is reporting that the latest core sample data gives more credibility to the scientifically challenged sci-fi movie The Day After Tomorrow‘s rapid freezing scenario. Except we suspect they didn’t actually see the movie because the rapid freezing scenario there was literally a wall of freeze that hits you like a beam from Mr. Freeze’s freeze gun.

Anyhow, the latest data supports the idea that rapid melting could lead to rapid cooling in the Northern Hemisphere.

Starting roughly 12,800 years ago, the Northern Hemisphere was gripped by a chill that lasted some 1,300 years. Known by scientists as the Younger Dryas and nicknamed the “Big Freeze,” geological evidence suggests it was brought on when a vast pulse of fresh water – a greater volume than all of North America’s Great Lakes combined – poured into the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.

For a different reference to what a rapidly frozen world could be like we suggest the Paul Newman film Quintet.

link: Big Freeze: Earth Could Plunge into Sudden Ice Age – Yahoo! News

So what is the Singularity? Check out Ray Kurzweil’s TED talks to get a jump start.

Ray Kurzweil on how technology will transform us

Inventor, entrepreneur and visionary Ray Kurzweil explains in abundant, grounded detail why, by the 2020s, we will have reverse-engineered the human brain and nanobots will be operating your consciousness.

A university for the coming singularity

Ray Kurzweil’s latest graphs show that technology’s breakneck advances will only accelerate — recession or not. He unveils his new project, Singularity University, to study oncoming tech and guide it to benefit humanity.

According to ScienceNews, lightning isn’t just for powering your time traveling Delorean. Using the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, scientists were able to detect the signature of the production of anti-matter particles in gamma ray emissions from lightning flashes.

During its first 14 months of operation, the flying observatory has detected 17 gamma-ray flashes associated with terrestrial storms — and some of those flashes have contained a surprising signature of antimatter.

This of course lends even more credibility to the hypothesis that lightning can be as useful of a way to obtain super powers as cosmic rays. The presence of gamma rays and antimatter particles makes them both good options. We hope Marvel Comics can take some time off from overdoing their zombie premise to write a Fantastic Four series with Ben Franklin as Reed Richards.

link: Signature Of Antimatter Detected In Lightning / Science News

According to an article from the October 1936 issue of Modern Mechanix, invisibility wasn’t just a possibility, it was a reality. The author credulously reports a description of an invisibility ray, but states emphatically that, “This is no illusion done by some magician, no trick of mirrors, it is asserted, but an actual performance of a new device which produces and projects what, for lack of a better name, may be called an ‘invisible ray.'”

Read the description of the potential applications and decide for yourself…

SUPPOSE that out onto a stage come eight chorus girls performing an intricate dance. Gradually something seems to happen, the heads, faces, and upper parts of the bodies of the girls seem to be disappearing. In fact, little by little they do become invisible to the audience until at last only eight pairs of legs are seen gracefully skipping about on the stage in perfect rhythm. You rub your eyes and begin to think you’d better see an oculist right away, but while you are worrying about it, back into your vision come the eight girls, wholly there and dancing gaily as though they had not just given you the shock of a lifetime. Or suppose again that a girl is sitting atop a piano, singing. The piano begins to fade from sight; finally the girl is left sitting in midair, nonchalantly swinging her feet and blithely singing, as though her perch was perfectly substantial.

If you did not think that you were just “seeing things,” right off you’d say, “Some invisible wires, or anyway, a cleverly arranged set of mirrors.” But you would be wrong in your guess. At least so says Mr. Adam Gosztonyi, the inventor of a machine which he claims can accomplish just such disappearing acts as have been described.

For something that’s not a magician’s trick, it’s kind of odd that all of the theoretical applications are theatrical in nature.

At that same time an illusion known as Pepper’s Ghost and the Blue Room was well known to magicians. It did *exactly* the same thing as described in the demonstration and under the same conditions. Check out a YouTube video here of a historic recreation of the effect (two facts: 1. It uses a mirror. 2. I’ve touched it).

In defense of the Modern Mechanix reporter, it’s a really awesome effect.

link: Modern Mechanix Invisibility At Last Within Grasp of Man

Does this sound kind of familiar? From the Detroit Tribune in 1858:

We have learned the full particulars of the balloon ascension…on Thursday, its subsequent descent, and its second ascension and runaway with the aeronaut while beyond his control…

While internally at Weird Things we were calling the balloon boy story a likely hoax given our own personal experiences in building such crafts (and the credulous nature of the father), it should serve as a cautionary tale.

The long history of being an aeronaut (what they used to call people who flew before airplanes) is a dangerous one. In the Google news archives you can find stories of missing and killed in action aeronauts going back almost 200 years. Here are a few of the more interesting ones:

Journals: Fate Of The First Aeronaut

Terrible Adventure of an Aeronaut

BALLOONIST FALLS TO DEATH.; Aeronaut Drops 700 Feet

SEEK FOR AERONAUTS IN SIERRA MADRES

Here’s one of the earliest aeronaut adventures we could find: From a London Paper

Listen up Philip K. Dick fans, Total Recall (We Can Remember it For You Wholesale) is now a reality – at least for flies. According to ScienceDaily:

By directly manipulating the activity of individual neurons, scientists have given flies memories of a bad experience they never really had, according to a report in the October 16th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication.

One wonders if the bad experience starts with some grad student plugging wires into your brain…

So far this has only been tested on flies. There’s no word yet when we can implant memories of our trip to Mars or learn Kung-Fu in seconds, but we’re sure it’s a top priority for these researchers. At least it should be.

link: Scientists Give Flies False Memories

A staple of science fiction is the suspended animation chamber. It’s how we send astronauts to faraway places, punish criminals (we’re not quite clear on how sending bad guys into the future where they can expect longer, healthier lives and really cool technology is punishment) and sending our heroes forward in time.

The development of this technology has taken researchers down different paths from just plain freezing people to drug cocktails.

One of the more promising innovations in the search for suspended animation is the discovery that certain poisonous gases at low levels can actually slow down the metabolism without killing the organism. CNN.com has an interesting report from the lab of biologist Mark Roth at the Fred Hutchinson Research Center:

She turns a dial, and the sealed enclosure starts to fill with poison gas — hydrogen sulfide. An ounce could kill dozens of people.

The rat sniffs the air a few times, and within a minute, his naturally twitchy movements are almost still. On a monitor that shows his rate of breathing, the lines look like a steep mountain slope, going down.

At first glance, that looks bad. We need oxygen to live. If you don’t get it for several minutes — for example, if you suffer cardiac arrest or a bad gunshot wound — you die. But something else is going on inside this rat. He isn’t dead, isn’t dying. The reason why, some people think, is the future of emergency medicine.

We won’t ruin it for you, but the rat turns out okay.

His pioneering research got him a MacArthur prize which then lead to 600 million in venture capital funding. The military is looking into his technology as a way to save lives on the battlefield.

Right now the biggest hurdle is dealing with larger mammals. The process works on rats allowing them to slow their respiration to 10% of normal with no apparent cell damage. Scaling up to humans is a challenge.

This is fascinating research but the article fails to give due credit to the pioneer of this kind of suspended animation, Buck Rogers. It was while exploring an abandoned mine that he came in contact with a poisonous gas that put him in suspended animation for 500 years.

link: Scientists hope work with poison gas can be a lifesaver – CNN.com

link: Metabolic Flexibility and Suspended Animation

link: Suspended animation – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

With the current debate over nationalized health care a lot of facts and figures are flying fast and loose. It seems like for every point of view there’s a data set to support it. In the discussion of what the ideal system should be two facts are often overlooked. The vast differences in life expectancy from state to state (Washington DC = 72 and Hawaii = 80) and the country with the most old folks in the top ten oldest people list: The United States with 6. All are women.

Of course the United States is the 3rd most populous country (300 million), but with a global population of well over 6 billion people, all things being equal, we should only account for 1 out 20 (or just half an old person in the top 10).

So what gives?

It could be that our geriatric care is actually pretty good. But perhaps there’s something else at work. In the Robert Heinlein novel Methuselah’s Children, he described a very clever low-tech longevity project: Pay people with really old grandparents to have children. In the novel, over time this lead to a race of people that lived hundreds of years.

Has the land of opportunity created a natural program for breeding some of the oldest people? We don’t know. But asking why Americans tend to cluster at the far end of the bell curve is probably a worthwhile question.

Oldest people – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia