Category Archives: Science

A new pet word

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Seasoned readers know that mariner has a world class linguist as a friend. One of our pastimes is collecting words that catch our fancy. Most of them are American slurs like ‘jeetjet?’, or the word may be a ridiculously long and convoluted word like ‘hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia which happens to mean fear of long words. Mariner has a new one: peer. As an adverb, it is someone going to the bathroom; as a verb, it is someone looking with timidity; as a noun, it is someone who is equal to others; as a proper noun, it is the name of Gynt’s fancy hotel room. In British usage, being a peer suggests one belongs to an upper class rank like Duke or Lord; in the United States, it means that a person is accepted and equal in a group of others with similar circumstances – as in the democratic phrase ‘All men are created equal’ which, of course, has never been true.

Mariner came upon ‘peer’ nestled in psychological essays. The essays suggested that the desire to be a peer is a strong need to sustain the ego and is a core survival skill. One quickly can identify with this urge especially in school rooms; if classmates are not openly friendly, an individual may have doubts about their own worth in this peer group. A nuanced suggestion is that ‘peer pressure’ is at the foundation of human behavior in that it is a desire to have others accept the individual as a social member and to be part of the tribe’s protection against harm. So while the ego is sensitive to group acceptance, it also is the motivation for achievement AKA defender of the tribe.

Throw the word ‘peer’ into the political mixing bowl and one can see what drives social conflict. It has become common knowledge that MAGA emerged from a labor class that for half a century has been underpaid, lost guaranteed benefits and ultimately was not considered as successful as college graduates. Talk about peer pressure – from the white collar world!

To survive, the ego must be satisfied. it finds others who share the person’s disgruntlement and together launch counter attacks against those who deny their equality.

It turns out not all humans are peers and, will a computer ever be a peer to a human?

Armageddon proceeds.

Ancient Mariner

God bless us, everyone

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With political fireworks everywhere and wars in every direction, mariner thought he may need an update from his alter egos. He searched for Nosey Mole but he was nowhere to be found. Mariner hadn’t heard from Amos in quite a while so he called him.

“My readers have missed your skepticism, Amos. What’s happening?” Amos replied quietly that these are not times to agitate. “These are times to hold tight to what is dear, to what comforts, to what gives hope for the future.” Amos didn’t have much else to say. Clearly he was frightened by the American collapse of democracy, by the disappearing biosphere and the potential for a global war. He felt that resolution in the tiniest sense was nowhere to be found.

Mariner went to see Guru. “What’s your image, Guru? Where will this all end?”

“The end is far away.” Guru replied. He explained that the planet is rolling into a global warming that not only will have physical ramifications on economic stability but will promote global war – likely between US allies and the rest of the world. The underlying causes will be food shortage for an over populated planet – a profound shortage that challenges equality as a political virtue.

He mentioned that many countries, especially more liberal countries, will be hard pressed not to succumb to authoritative governments constrained by a strong plutocracy governed by giant corporations.

Mariner suggested that this may be a continuous process; how long will it take? Guru suggested that global warming will cause significant destruction by 2050 and that further, will put pressure on a capitalistic world – if survival is an objective.

The fact remains that this election, and its reconciliation, will determine how humans move forward in an unbalanced world.

As a famous fictional character once said: “God bless us, everyone.”

Ancient Mariner

 

Marvelous magic of evolution

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Mariner reads several magazines and journals just for entertainment. For example, here’s an article everyone will want to read:

To achieve remarkable performances, quantum computing systems based on multiple qubits must attain high-fidelity entanglement between their underlying qubits.

( https://phys.org/news/2024-10-subtle-current-phase-potential-stable.html )

Recently mariner came upon an article about a fish named Sea Robin. It inherited the ‘robin’ word because it flies underwater with wings just like a bird. Sea Robin’s wings don’t look like fancy paddles or oars like other fish have, they look and behave just like robin wings. Isn’t it intriguing that somewhere along the long, long trail of evolution, Nature’s office of genetic distribution delivered wings to a fish!

Even more odd is that Sea Robin walks on the bottom of the ocean in a fashion similar to four legged animals on land. Even more intriguing, it hunts for and smells food with its feet. Mariner’s feet smell too, but he wouldn’t want to eat what they picked for supper. Even Sea Robin’s color scheme looks more like a bird than a fish.

Sea Robin is such an intriguing aberration in Nature’s normal but slow cell-by-cell inheritance. It isn’t that Sea Robin came along at the same time as other sea creatures who were evolving in a way that would lead them to walking on land or flying like a bird. Sea Robin has been around for 18 million years!

The Sea Robin catches one’s interest and opens the door to thinking about the larger systems of Nature – not just evolution but all the systems that are in play in all the sciences from astrophysics to the chemistry of fungi.  Sea Robin demonstrates, however, that sometimes an aberration takes evolution in a different direction.

For example, Homo sappians has been around only 300,000 years and they are wreaking havoc among all of Nature’s sciences. One can perceive that Nature is dealing with the same type of confrontation as the one that happened at the US Capitol on January 6. The sappians aren’t improving anything – they have launched Armageddon against Nature’s planet Earth.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Transition

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There are a few things about which to take note.

֎ First, read the following quote from Scientific American:

” Now researchers led by Daniela Angulo of the University of Toronto have revealed another oddball quantum outcome: photons, wave-particles of light, can spend a negative amount of time zipping through a cloud of chilled atoms. In other words, photons can seem to exit a material before entering it.”

Briefly, it’s about light energy entering a transparent thing like glass but seems to take longer to pass through except the light energy already has exited.

Back in the old days Albert Einstein said unequivocally that it may be possible to travel into the future but it is not possible to go back in time. Is time a situational fantasy? Mariner always has thought that we live in multiple dimensions. For example, mariner fills his prescription box every week but it takes just a few days before it is empty again – or so it seems. Is AI being honest with our scientists?

֎ A new alter ego metaphor has been chosen to replace Chicken Little: Nosey Mole.

Nosey Mole lives in a large maze of tunnels. The food is good and there is little concern for catastrophe. Still, being nosy, he pops to the surface periodically to see what’s happenin’. Every time he pops up to look around, he gets whacked by the swirl of reality and returns to his tunnels. There is no great historical theme in Nosey’s life that must be feared or hoped. Life is pleasant in the tunnels.

֎ This topic is too broad to address in essay form. Mariner strongly recommends his readers make the subject of public education something of a conscious interest that induces them to learn more and do more about the state of education. There are several large issues: Public schools no longer mandate that children learn how their society works – whether its government or group behavior or issues of physiological morality.

The field of education has been set adrift for half a century. It has gone the way of unions, free speech and equal rights. In today’s world, education is confronted by extremism, technology and shifting family economics. Education is infected with obsolete teaching techniques, life threatening lack of funding and a loss of raison d’etre.

The loss of a reason to be has allowed other disciplines to invade education. Public issues like health, sexuality, classism, public funding of private schools and replacing expansive learning with extreme restrictionist objectives.

Be kind to Nosey Mole as he adapts to a role in mariner’s life.  If a reader can explain negative time, let mariner know. Do become focused on education; if our children don’t have the intellectual tools to survive during Armageddon, things will get worse than we can imagine. Think ‘Israeli-Hamas war’ in the United States. . .

Ancient Mariner

Chicken Little moved to hospice

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Afraid so. It is true that evolution is the dynamic element in all the universe – including galaxies, solar systems, life of every kind and certainly every conceivable element of existence – including the planet Earth itself – is subject to change over time. So, too, fantasy and whimsy move on as reality paves a new future.

What was important about Chicken Little’s presence was his belief that it was possible for things to behave as expected – it was just a matter of adjusting a bit to keep reality chugging along. Like the Chicken Little of children’s storybook fame, he often overreacted to what others felt was not so important as to warrant hysterical behavior.

The belief in adjusting has faded as all the world’s activity is in disarray. Human history has become a demolition derby where every conceivable idea is an effort to dismantle rational, logical behavior. Mariner, like Chicken Little, is acutely aware of the abrasion of industrial development against the evolutionary limitations not only of Homo sapiens but all of the planet’s life forms. Homo’s dangerous ability to imagine things that do not exist has been the fire that has set off an Armageddon. For casual readers who may not be familiar, mariner’s examples are any industrial development requiring chemical, environmental or any other destruction of the biosphere. For example, internal combustion engines, killing millions of species for greedy reasons, leveling quantum amounts of forest for commercial purposes, forcing every biological behavior of every species to compensate or die, etc. The result today is, of course, a destabilized, biospheric condition humans call ‘global warming’ which is most commonly observed as changes in the climate.

So mariner is interviewing several applicants to replace Chicken Little. An applicant that has caught mariner’s eye is the squirrel – especially urban squirrels. Squirrels already know that Homo sappians is a destructive creature, said and done. What concerns mariner is that the squirrel already has a bit of skepticism about it’s obsessive neighbors; Amos, another alter ego, already has more than enough skepticism.

Perhaps this is all a sign that mariner is growing old. He’s old enough to be receiving social security but young enough to see it disappear. His brain has been throwing out to trash memories that aren’t relevant anymore. Sadly, he cannot forget Lawrence Welk or Hyacinth Bucket on the British series, Keeping Up Appearances.

Suggestions for a new icon to replace Chicken Little are welcome – an icon that has come to accept Homo sappians as the failure it is but with an innocence that there is a looming Armageddon.

Ancient Mariner

November 5 2024

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That is the date of the upcoming election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Trump has made it crystal clear that there will be an honest election only if he wins.  He promises chaos if he doesn’t win. Citizens of the US must take note – this isn’t just inflammatory banter. Citizen groups already are developing plans for combat if Trump loses.

Nevertheless, every citizen must exercise their right to vote.

* * * * *

Mariner has written 1,835 posts. Many topics were covered in every field of interest from nonsense to serious essays. With certainty he knows often he has been redundant, skeptical and overly critical on many political and societal occasions.

In recent posts he has expressed a fatalistic prognosis for the future of Homo sapiens and many fellow creatures. Even these comments have become redundant. He sat down with Guru to have a last effort at defining order in the humanly perceived universe and the cacophony of noise that clouds that order.

Guru made it clear that mariner must describe the structure of authority as it relates to the Homo universe:

Planet Earth is 4.5 Billion years old. It abides by the rules imposed upon it as a member of a vast, disciplined Universe. Accordingly, Earth has seasons, is accountable to the influence of a moon, and must accommodate the behavior of a close star, the Sun. Given these influences, the Earth is in charge of all that occurs on, in, and above its sphere. This includes non-living material and all, all living creatures.

Egocentric Homo thinks it has the ability to ignore Earth’s management of the planet’s existence. This is the largest source of cacophony since Hominidae Ardipithecus came on the scene 5.3 million years ago. A large amount of today’s noise would not have occurred if Homo had acknowledged Earth’s authority. Consequently, Homo finds itself in the following circumstances:

Stealing oil, forests, several chemicals and gases and a disregard for social disciplines required by evolution, Earth has been thrown off balance and has no choice but to adjust. The planet’s adjustment has paid for the thievery of Homo by sending tens of thousands of species to extinction and re-balancing the global ecosystem, AKA climate change.

Using various methods of chemistry and artificial environment, Homo has doubled the lifespan of a largely unchanged genome. The result is a much larger population of Homo than Earth had planned for. As the twenty-first century begins, natural resources are short which leads to an unsettled fear for the future which leads to stress in Homo economic practices.

Finally, Homo has discovered an artificial way to create life forms. Recently, computer applications have become capable of reproducing chromosomes, AKA remaking electrically controlled genomes. It is too early to predict the ramifications but the movie “Matrix” can’t be too far off.

What lies beneath the cacophony and conflict? The original Homo. For the time being (perhaps another 100+ years), the only safe ground is to behave like a normal Homo sapiens. Individuals must place social interaction and tribal sympathy foremost in their daily lives. Although it may be too late, Homo should pay retribution to Earth’s ways by showing respect and following nature’s rules.

Ancient Mariner

Beware the Eye of Sauron

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An icon from J.R. R. Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’, The Eye is constantly watching for an opportunity to strike evil in the world. Tolkien references Sauron as the most complete evil. Throughout many of Tolkien’s stories, Sauron, by many names, is the evil power that wishes to control all of Middle Earth.

The manner by which Sauron attempts to intercede in Middle Earth society is surreptitious. Sauron seeks to undermine truth with malicious myths; he seeks to disrupt achievement with abusive intent; he provokes war and conflict by any means. Eventually, if his tactics prevail, he will reign as the evil dictator of all Middle Earth.

Who has the power to make today’s reality exist according to the plot of The Lord of the Rings? Is it Sauron himself? Is he, in fact, real? There are surreptitious examples:

AI displacing human behavior.

MAGA, a movement driven by myth.

Plutocracy, an economic ploy to suck the life out of human equality.

Twenty active wars around the globe with some very large wars waiting in the wings.

A myriad of destructive prejudices preventing humanity from a smooth, collaborative world.

COVID

Unsustainable relationship between humans and sufficient food in the biosphere.

Increasingly rapid extinction of tens of thousands of creatures in the environment.

Sauron is good at what he does. Mariner is thinking about moving back to Chicken Little’s henhouse.

Ancient Mariner

 

Homo sapiens is a lot like crabgrass

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Instead of writing about these things, mariner will drop the lead-ins and sources so the reader can check out the ones of interest.

֎ Scientists Make ‘Cyborg Worms’ with a Brain Guided by AI — AI and tiny worms team up to get to treats. In the study, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, researchers trained an AI agent to direct one-millimeter-long Caenorhabditis elegans worms toward tasty patches of Escherichia coli in a four-centimeter dish.

Want to know where the best place to buy a house is? Just ask AI, they’ll make you go there. BTW, got lots of money?

֎  https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily:  California lawmakers sent a nationally consequential AI bill to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk last week — America’s most high-profile effort to date to put fresh legal guardrails around AI safety.

State Bill 1047 would hold companies liable for harms caused by their software, establish protection for AI whistleblowers, and put safety restrictions and requirements on AI models that reach a certain level of computational power, the closest any new American law has come to the European Union’s sweeping AI Act.

All we need now is a functioning Federal Government.

֎ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-surveillance-pricing-practices-under-federal-probe/   AI ‘Surveillance Pricing’ Could Use Personal Data to Make People Pay More. The agency’s ongoing investigation was sparked by a growing awareness that companies are using AI and machine learning to track certain categories of user data—such as age, location, credit score or browsing history—which many people probably wouldn’t deliberately share.

Consumer surveillance extends beyond online shopping. “Companies are investing in infrastructure to monitor customers in real time in brick-and-mortar stores,” she says. Some price tags, for example, have become digitized, designed to be updated automatically in response to factors such as expiration dates and customer demand. Retail giant Walmart—which is not being probed by the FTC—says its new digital price tags can be remotely updated within minutes.

Use storefronts and pay cash as much as you can! Google won’t know you were there (if you leave your phone in the car).

֎ There are several stories in online news about the useless effort to make the oil industry take responsibility to reduce global warming.

Goodbye, Florida and New York City.

Ancient Mariner

 

The education experience

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In the last post, mariner wrote about habits stored in the brain which were hard to dislodge. It occurred to him that the manner in which education is applied to students also is suffering from old habits that are hard to dislodge.

It is true that the scope of intended subjects has changed over the centuries. It is ‘how’ a student is instructed that is under the microscope today. We can assume the early Homo folks simply did a show-and-tell, demonstrating the actual procedures to be learned. As conceptualization crept into the culture, it had to be captured in documents and eventually into special books called textbooks. Even with books, an instructor was required to translate information and give the information a human perspective. And so it has been for eons.

Today, it has suddenly occurred, “why keep human instructors in the classroom if a computer can provide a simulated teacher any time day or night?” Mariner admits that he often takes advantage of the wide, free-roaming learning opportunities available on the Internet; he has a master’s degree in gardening from Junk University (YouTube). The mistake in the question above is that for all its intelligence, computer tablets don’t have physiological souls, that is, computers don’t have to change behavioral habits hidden in their subconscious. A human instructor still is needed; it’s the instructor’s focus in the classroom that needs an upgrade.

Sadly, the idea of displacing employees as a beneficial act affects other professions as well from truck drivers to office workers to nurses. Even delivery workers may be displaced by little automated delivery boxes and drones – it occurs to mariner these boxes offer a good opportunity to practice hunting; will geese and deer be irritated if they are replaced by automated drones and robots?

Back to education.

Education, as everyone has learned during the Covid pandemic, is not just about books and visual presentations. He has heard from friends who are teachers that students, especially the younger ones, are unruly, unmannerly and disrespectful of the teacher’s role in the classroom. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that 32% of K-12 students are behind grade level. Why are schools still dealing with the long-term effects of remote schooling and other pandemic-era learning disruptions?  Something other than book learning and concepts disappeared during the pandemic.

Given a moment, one realizes that a great deal of socialization occurs in the classroom from pre-school to college. The most important learning may be tuning the student’s subconscious to be a collaborator with society. AI is trying hard to emulate this interactive experience as well but despite the canned responses of social robots, children need children – and someone who can adjust response and guidance to fit many subconscious minds in an integrated fashion. That takes another subconscious mind – a human instructor.

Along this line of thought, mariner has written posts that question the use of individual grading. He suggests that society today, with all its automated advantages, is more interested in individuals who can fit in and be fellow collaborators. To that end, grading should be applied to small teams in the classroom rather than to individuals since the Internet is so handy with factual information. What becomes important is human behavior in a learning atmosphere, not what a student knows about page 130 in a textbook. Having teams of students compete with other teams forces collaborative behavior. The computer tablet is the new textbook.

All these conditions affect the standard approach of instruction and require adjustment to long ingrained teaching habits. The growth of community colleges and new student demands that colleges guarantee employment at graduation are two of many indicators which suggest revamping the grading, textbook and syllabus methodology that has been around long before the United States existed.

An afterthought, smartphones are the new version of talking in class. Any psychologist or therapist or teacher would want to control thought processes. Think how successful a hypnotist would be if the person being hypnotized was busy using a smartphone.

Ancient Mariner

The Neanderthal

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If one looks hard enough on television one can find excellent documentaries. Mariner recommends a documentary on Netflix about the Neanderthal. It was engrossing enough to provoke him into visiting several books and URLs about the topic of Homo history.

These five skulls, which range from an approximately 2.5-million-year-old Australopithecus africanus on the left to an approximately 4,800-year-old Homo sapiens on the right, show changes in the size of the braincase, slope of the face and shape of the brow ridges over just less than half of human evolutionary history. {Human Origins Program, NMNH,}

The future Homo in an artificial intelligence age: Homo electrus

Seriously, the documentary about Neanderthal was excellent and he recommends the reader check it out. One of the commentators suggested, in mariner’s words, It ain’t over til its over. How many more evolutionary eons in the future are there for Homo sapiens?

The Neanderthal existed for 400,000 years, disappearing 40,000 years ago because of the aftermath of the Great Ice Age that occurred in the Pleistocene Period. Neanderthal disappeared simultaneously with the migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa. There was enough hanky-panky that all humans today have some Neanderthal DNA in them.

Several sources cite the beginning of ‘modern man’ to be around 6,000 years ago – less than a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. ‘Modern’ implies an interest in economy, invention and the manipulation of the biosphere AKA the beginning of industrialism.

What was pleasantly insightful in the documentary was the insights of the archeologists  who, interpreting the bones and surmised behavior, showed that even Neanderthal had an awareness of spirituality and compassion. These primitive sensitivities were exercised without any need for a defined religion or imposed cultural obligation. Would they be able to understand today’s anti-religious Protestant Evangelicals? How can Homo saps exist for the next 400,000 years, they wonder.

Making some comparisons between the fate of Neanderthal and ourselves today, there is one commonality: the environment. Neanderthal had no choice because the ice age totally wiped out a forested biosphere. Perhaps we have no choice, either . . . .

Ancient Mariner