Category Archives: Science

Does anyone have a plot line?

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By Wiley:

Is it possible that our eager scientists are consumed by the phrase, “I do it because I can”? Is Homo sapiens ready for an automated lifestyle? Is the biosphere ready for Homo sapiens to have an automated lifestyle?

Scientists have created Xenobots, computer cells that can reproduce. Even Steven Hawking predicted this will be the demise of humanity.

Over the millennia, humans have learned to adapt to significant changes in the biosphere status quo; everything from ice ages to rocket ships and nuclear bombs. But each epoch was singular – just one at a time.

It isn’t the same today. There is AI, collapsing nationalism, global warming, social abuse, over-population and the waning of Adam Smith economics.

Can we Homos handle it?

Ancient Mariner

Phonemes

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For most readers, this is a new word. Roughly speaking, it means the set of sounds in a language. We are accustomed to using written letters to organize our language into words, grammar and the expression of meaning. But there are other ways of organizing a language: by its sounds, not its letters. For example, the ‘c’ in the word ‘cool’ is the same sound as the letter ‘k’ in ‘leek’. Though different letters, they are the same sound – just one sound in a phoneme ‘alphabet’.

Yes, this topic is extremely esoteric, Mariner is attracted to any topic that has to do with hearing and speaking. The marvel of science that could make a scientist the richest man in the world would be to emulate the mechanics of hearing.

His experience with hearing aids is subpar. It seems that trying to convert sound waves into human speech is flawed. Every human listening system is slightly different because brains are different, bone structure is different, language expectations are different (budder in the US is the same word as buTTa in England or ‘sar’ in Massachusetts versus ‘saw’ in the rest of the US. Mariner’s pleasing favorite is anything Fats Domino says; mariner’s favorites are ‘haut’ for ‘heart’ and the permanent replacement of a short ĭ with a long ē – My haut stood steel on Blueberry Heel).

He has noticed that in general practice, there is a human who translates sounds between two incommunicable groups – either a translator of language or a converter changing sounds to hand gestures. Hearing aids don’t have translators; they only hear sound waves without intelligent interpretation.

Perhaps hearing aids should have a phoneme lexicon built in. Computer storage can store a sound value on an atom these days. Why not build a phonemic dictionary into hearing aids; adaptability to parochial sounds could be as rapid as human listening.

Here is the difficulty: Phonemes are categories rather than actual sounds, they are not tangible things; instead, they are abstract, theoretical types or groups that are only psychologically real. (In other words, we cannot hear phonemes, but we assume they exist because of how the sounds in languages create a pattern.) For example, the word ‘kicked’ has two ‘k’ sounds but they are not identical. The first k is clearly thrust from the throat and the second k is a collaboration between the tongue and the roof of the mouth.

Nevertheless, mariner feels there must be some form of phonemic intelligence incorporated into hearing aids.

Ancient Mariner

You know what I mean

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Mariner is an old codger. The wiring between his brain and his mouth is damaged. Consequently, he cannot recall words, especially nouns and names of things if the mouth is asking for them – the brain knows but won’t tell until five minutes later when he doesn’t need the word anymore. On the other hand, when he is typing, he has almost his entire lexicon at hand; words fall in as needed and he can manipulate meanings with unending suffixes and metaphors.

It doesn’t help that mariner can’t hear other people’s words, either. He wears hearing aids.

Mariner was poking around on the Internet looking for information about his issue. He was familiar with the general explorations of language as a deep survival skill and as a social skill as well. Just as with whales and many birds, humans have a brain that, when as young toddlers, the brain is quite adept at associating meaning with a given sound.

The following two paragraphs are from science journals. The topic is about the anatomical science of hearing and its chemical processes.

The investigation of organometallic compounds containing unsupported homoatomic metal-metal (M-M) bonds has been an area of major interest for decades. These compounds feature distinct, otherwise inaccessible bonding, such as M-M quadruple and quintuple bonds, and fascinating reactivity, including mimicking the reactions of C-C multiple bonds. Ultimately, the main driver for research in this area is to push the boundaries of bonding for a given element and, in doing so, rewrite the textbooks. On page 1147 of this issue, Boronski et al. (1) report the isolation of diberyllocene as the latest entrant in the field. Diberyllocene is a stable Be-Be bonded compound and is a relatively accessible source of nucleophilic beryllium, which has the potential to unlock the reactivity of organoberyllium with a vast array of new substrates.

Astrocytes are intimately associated with neurons and participate in a host of essential roles that facilitate synaptic transmission and circuit function. In neurons, heightened activity induces the expression of “immediate early genes,” which are predominately transcription factors that modify gene expression programs and activity-dependent epigenomic states, ultimately regulating circuit activity, plasticity, and associated behavioral outputs. However, whether heightened neuronal activity induces an analogous immediate early gene–like response in mature astrocytes and how this sculpts astrocytic transcriptional and epigenomic responses to regulate circuit function remain unclear.

Isn’t knowledge wonderful?

Ancient Mariner

Amos and Worster

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Mariner was questioned “Who is Amos?” referring to the mention of that name in the last post. Mariner apologizes for having an empty page under the Heading ‘About the Author’ which has been blank for several months. Somehow, it was deleted.

Just a short precis of its contents: Mariner writes his post with the aid of three alter egos: Chicken Little, named for his namesake who thought the sky was falling and always assumed the worst in any situation; Amos, named for his namesake from the Book of Amos in the Old Testament who with earnestness chastised the religious authority of his time until he was assassinated; Guru, named for his namesake in the comic section of the newspapers who is preoccupied with esoteric, intensely intellectual theories of no relevance. Thus, mariner’s posts are assured of clarity, facts, and a comprehensive view of the world.

On to today’s post.

Having read Donald Worster’s book, The Wealth of Nature, mariner has given some thought to Worster’s hope that global society, perhaps through the absence of potable water, perhaps social conflict that collapses global economies, even perhaps the result of nuclear war, it may be that in order to survive, humans will have to return to a respectful relationship with a sparse environment.

Instead of sending humanity down the bottomless hole of AI, imagine that Mother Nature has an equal force on society. Season the next fifty years with the spice of the Maga movement and similar movements across Africa and the Middle East, the growing stress from free-ranging oligarchy, the demise of Ukraine, a collapse of world security by disrupting the Internet, then stir back in the destructive powers of an uncontrolled weather system, impending solar activity and little if any arable land.

Would this concoction be enough to create a throwback in human history? Could humanity be forced to become a member of the Earth’s ecosystem without fossil fuel? Such reversing phenomena have occurred many times as Planet Earth evolved. Consider the restart of the animal kingdom 65 million years ago (at the end of the Cretaceous Period).

By 2100 might it be important to protect arable land for individual survival? Will everyone have to own a couple of ponies?

Ancient Mariner

Pick your worries

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There must be dozens of worries from which to choose. Perhaps start with some of the big ones: A failing democracy, the collapse of religion, war with China, Trump becomes President, Social Security gets chopped, housing for normal Americans gets worse, Health industry collapses, public schools can’t educate anymore.

Mariner opts for the war with Mother Earth – global warming/climate change. The time is approaching when all the other worries will disappear because of extreme disruption to global economics, agriculture, viable living zones and human migration on a scale that has never been experienced. Governments will not be able to pay for wars, although groups of rebels around the world will cause as much destruction. Plutocracy will worsen then collapse as The US runs short on funding.

ProPublica, a much awarded and exceptional news company, published a report titled, “Climate Crisis Is on Track to Push One-Third of Humanity Out of Its Most Livable Environment”. One paragraph is presented below:

“The notion of a climate niche is based on work the researchers first published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, which established that for the past 6,000 years humans have gravitated toward a narrow range of temperatures and precipitation levels that supported agriculture and, later, economic growth. That study warned that warming would make those conditions elusive for growing segments of humankind and found that while just 1% of the earth’s surface is now intolerably hot, nearly 20% could be by 2070.”

 Add to that thought rising oceans wiping out the viability of dozens of nations, even making large areas of land become flooded or submerged. Current tax structures will be changed dramatically as the United States begins to feel social and economic pressures that remind us of World War II America. In the 1930s and 40s, the tax philosophy was to tax the rich so the poor would not have to underwrite government expenses. FDR, for example, put a 100 percent tax on income over $25,000 (about $500,000 today).

One wonders whether the new facemask telephones will matter even though they are one step closer to Matrix reality. The world’s environment is up in arms and that will dictate our pleasures. Can Alexa and Siri keep up?

Ancient Mariner

Mother Earth and humans

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When mariner worked as a project manager, he learned that certain individuals made it difficult to run the project. For many reasons related to power insecurity, bad personality, uncontrolled desire to change objectives and other distracting behaviors, these individuals were overhead that was not helping.

As a necessity to survive and complete the project, he developed a technique that avoided confrontation but indirectly suppressed the person’s interference. He calls it “taking away cards”. Here is a simple example:

You have a chain-smoking relative who prefers not to drive the car so they always ask you to buy cigarettes for them. You are concerned about their heavy smoking. You take away their control card by saying, “I don’t have time right now; I must do something else right now. Why don’t you buy your cigarettes?” Either the relative goes without or must resolve their distaste to drive. You, however, have avoided a face-to-face shout down. With luck, you may have altered a pattern of behavior.

Mother Earth is using this technique with humans. Some examples:

  • If you continue to pollute the air, I’ll stop enforcing dependable weather patterns.
  • If you continue to trash the environment and killing thousands of creatures, I’ll take away your clean water.
  • If you continue to make matters worse, I’ll melt all the ice at the poles and release methane from deep permafrost.
  • If you don’t learn to live within the constraints of your habitat, I’ll remove the habitat.

These are not future threats; they’ve been growing for decades if not centuries. Mother Earth is about to take away our control cards. Someone tell the fossil fuel industry.

Ancient Mariner

Are humans and the biosphere still in the Pleistocene?

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Traces of Homo genes have been found that existed more than 600,000 years ago but the variation that represents the beginning of humans as we would define them today (Homo sapiens) appeared about 300,000 years ago.

Here is a picture of our Great Grandfather:

Homo heidelbergensis

 

 

 

300,000 years ago is before the Industrial Revolution. It is before the invention of the wheel. It is before the idea of government. It is before rafts. It is before American slavery. It is before George Washington. It is before Texas and New York. It is even so far back that Henry Louis Gates Junior can’t trace ancestors on his “Finding Your Roots” show.

The point is this: We are 99.9 percent the same creature that walked around buck naked in the Pleistocene. The .1 percent that continued to evolve was the ability to have abstract thoughts – thoughts and imaginings that weren’t real. To this day our limbic system is confused and can’t tell what is real. There is no physiological chemistry designed to respond to railroad trains.

How did Homo sapiens relate to the environment? It’s a difficult question to answer. For a long time, Pleistocene folks were classified as herbivores who survived primarily by eating roots and grasses that are still around today. However, recent discoveries at one site showed plenty of bones. Most of the animal bones came from gazelles. Among the other remains were hartebeests, wildebeests, zebras, buffalo, porcupines, hares, tortoises, freshwater mollusks, snakes and ostrich eggshells.

It is unlikely that early man kept gazelles and buffalo in body-sized cages as modern man does. Our ancestors had to chase them down. That is why the limbic system is confused by railroad trains. An interesting footnote to this paragraph is that only 20 percent of water-sourced food remains from averages posted just 50 years ago. Something is happening that is different from the last 300,000 years. Further, arable land is disappearing due to many things from population to industrial consumption to climate change.

Speaking of climate change, it is not coincidental that Homo sapiens has been able to populate the planet in the blink of an eye – given evolutionary timelines. Generally speaking, the planet has been tough on life since the beginning. Consider an ice age that lasted millions of years and in modern times can run 200,000 years without blinking an eye. Volcanic eruptions are another phenomenon that raises its disturbances every so many thousand years. But fortunately, scientists have noted a very still, cooperative and generous period for the last 300,000 years.

But now there is foreboding activity. It is true that modern Pleistocene man has trashed the climate, biosphere and has driven the animal kingdom to extinction – that’s the result of abstract thinking. But Homo is not the only driver of change. Most of the methane comes from deep in the Earth, from a time before rafts were invented. Further, volcanoes seemed disturbed by an unbalanced spinning of the Earth’s core. Scientists already have proven that the planet has entered a stage where the polarity will switch – something that happens over many years but can be disruptive. Will polar bears and penguins have to switch places?

Let’s not add any significance to Donald but doesn’t he look like an old Homo heidelbergensis? Then, so does mariner’s Great Aunt Denise.

Good Luck Zees!

Ancient Mariner

Part 2 math –

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Mariner forgot to include his own example of quantum physics versus Einsteinian physics, which he believes describes more clearly the difference in definition between the two than Schrodinger’s cat:

You are driving on an interstate highway. The highway is not busy. For the moment, you are the only car you see on the entire visible highway – in front or in back and none on the other side.

Question one: At the moment, are you the fastest car or the slowest? Yes.

Finally, a car appears down the road in front of you. Are you fastest or slowest?

Second question: About this sudden event where a car becomes part of your reality, it appeared on your highway as a definable car, at the same clock time and the same measurable distance (Einstein).

However, Quantum says, “No, not so fast”. The car just didn’t assemble itself out of nothing the moment you saw it; what events caused the car to appear at that moment?

For example, did the car turn on the highway just over the hill or has it been on the road for two days coming from New Jersey? How did the driver come to be in the car at that moment? Why is it a Subaru? Why is it on that highway? What time did it depart so that you would experience it at that moment?

Quantum’s point being that nothing exists in an absolute state, in a precisely definable moment or at an absolute distance. In other words, mass, time, and space are not finite.

The closest human realization that mariner can conjure is when you suddenly meet an old friend at a surprising place. You say “Can you imagine the odds of us meeting?” Quantum can.

Ancient Mariner

A bit of mathematics

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Most phenomena lay beyond the existential reasoning of the mind. Those who want to explore this other world must learn the magic of mathematics. Here are a few samples that reveal logical conclusions beyond subconscious reasoning:

1 – Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Mathematical probability: Before any doors are opened you have a 1 in 3 chance of winning [ P= 1/3 ]. After the host opens door 3 which has a goat, the chance for winning the car with your current choice still is 1/3 because although the goat is revealed – the number of doors has not changed. The probability that the car is behind the chosen door still is 1/3 but the unopened door now has a 2/3 chance of winning because door three is known. The solution is that switching has a 2/3 chance of winning – so switch.

2 – Albert Einstein is famous for defining the universe as a relationship between mass, time and space. To the human mind, this still seems adequate (frankly it is) but the mathematics of quantum physics say space does not exist, solid subatomic particles do not exist as little billiard balls of energy and more abstractly, all subatomic activity occurs simultaneously regardless of ‘space’ – even 1 billion light-years away.

An experiment was performed a few years ago where the photons from two different stars were aimed at a device which needed two in-place photons to interact simultaneously. Using the star energy, the device acted as expected. This is tantamount to a magician letting you pull a card from his deck and it is matched simultaneously by a deck on the Sun.

The famous layman’s example is Shrodinger’s cat: A closed box is presented to you with a cat inside. Is the cat dead or alive? The answer is yes. This is kept simple by recognizing that whatever led to the state of the cat, time, space or distance, it is irrelevant to your instant experience. A time-distant event will appear instantly when the box is opened. If the cat is dead, did it die recently or a long time ago? Doesn’t matter to you; as far as you’re concerned the fact that it died happened when you opened the box because otherwise it would have been alive.

Don’t ask for the equations. Dozens of books laden with formulas have been written.

3 – This mathematical exercise will provide some relevant information for your real-time brain. Since 2018, 111 children have been murdered in the United States. Population has questionable stability in many nations including the United States. Will killing 111 children affect the future population of the US?

Yes. Using Bayesian probabilities, in 2060, there will be approximately 308 less people in the United States than if no children were murdered. [formulas in ‘the signal and the noise’ by Nate Silver, 2012 Penguin Press] basic formula:

The formulas have several sources on the internet if you want to play with them.

Ancient Mariner

New signs

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Bottom up power: [Politico] “The country’s 900 or so rural electric cooperatives serve remote rural customers and are member-driven, -owned and -controlled. Their nonprofit status has made it hard to make investments in low-carbon energy; unlike investor-owned utilities, they can’t go into debt or sell shares to pay for a solar farm. But getting them off of fossil fuels is essential to meeting climate goals.

Already five co-ops have either left or announced they will leave a major G&T (generation and transmission) called Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, which covers parts of four Western states.”

This tendency is happening in Europe as well. Despite all the ‘effort’ to stop using fossil fuel, oil companies are making record profits. Even Biden is allowing a new oil-drilling operation in Alaska – talk about plutocracy!

Mariner often writes about collective cultures. Collectivism includes concepts like extended families, local government, local cooperatives, community rules for equality of life, etc. To one degree or another, terms for collectives include cooperative, clan, communist, commune, tribe and many other terms denoting a localized group. The image below captures the general spirit:

Just being a small group does not automatically grant goodness. There are many small groups bent on anything but sharing and survival of all – NIMBY is one of countless examples that demonstrate the conflict between collectivism and the imposing needs of a much larger population.

Having learned from many sources over many years, mariner knows Homo sapiens is a tribal species, along with most of its primate ancestors. In past posts, he has cited authors who said things like “The maximum number of individuals that can be familiar to a human is 150”, “The further a person gets from a direct relationship with the environment, the more abusive the relationship becomes” and recently, “I’m first if its fair for everyone”.

When he studies the development of western nations, and the unimaginable wealth that suddenly appeared on the American continents, mariner is reminded of a group of hoodlums during a riot who break into a store and steal all its goods. Such tactics work for the hoodlums if there is plenty to go around. Western Capitalism is the fastest way to reorganize wealth.

Today, however, there is not enough to go around. Capitalism has an idiosyncrasy that doesn’t work anymore: Grow or die.

Because the West has achieved such wonders and accomplishments – especially when the achievements provide convenience, collective terminology is not popular and its advantages often are discounted. It is this resistance that makes it good news to mariner that there is a breakaway of self-owned electric companies from large conglomerates. There are other appropriate concepts of management that will work better in these challenging times. Bigger may not be better.

There are many more sociological points of interest but mariner can become boring.

Ancient Mariner