Science Ain't So Bad

A Meeting of Peers

THE EINSTEIN/NEWTON MEETING

 Did Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton have a secret meeting?  I was asked this question (sort of) on Quora.

Since Newton lived in the 1600s it was more of a “what if”.

Even Einstein’s far ranging intellect couldn’t have dragged him back to Newton’s time but what ifs never seem to bother anyone on Quora where the questions range from “What if we could go faster than the speed of light?” to “What if atheists believed in God?”

How would a meeting between and Einstein and Newton have gone?

If the discussion was limited to a single sitting, Newton, the father of modern scientific thinking, wouldn’t have been able to catch up to all the things that his wonderful brain had set in motion. Newton was maybe the greatest scientific and mathematical genius of the millennia but Einstein’s work pushed the envelope, even for the early 1900s. The formal stuff required field equations.

Field equations were the bane of Einstein’s existence. Newton wouldn’t have known anything about field equations or about David Hilbert, the great mathematician who’s work was required by Einstein. Hilbert basically beat Einstein to the finish line with his own paper on General Relativity but graciously stepped aside to allow Einstein to get the credit he deserved for his original ideas.

Another thing.

Much of Einstein’s work was motivated by the work of the great physicist, James Clerk Maxwell . Maxwell’s name wouldn’t have meant anything to Newton either.

Nor would Newton have heard of Michael Faraday who got Maxwell started on electromagnetism.

 That’s a lot of advanced math and physics for anyone – even Isaac Newton.

Okay, for argument’s sake, let’s say that Isaac Newton would have gone along with meeting this Jewish guy for a discussion about “natural philosophy”. He would have been intrigued, right? The “thought experiments” would have had to have kept him awake that night.

If he could accept premises for which he had no basis.

 My feeling? It is unlikely that Newton could have accepted Einstein’s conclusions without years of additional thought and study.

Let me add something.

Isaac Newton is such a deservedly beloved figure that several people on Quora felt compelled to defend him against any implications that he might have avoided a “Jew philosopher”.

There’s nothing that suggests that he had any problem with Jews. His private papers suggest he may have been fascinated by Judaism (though may have never met a Jewish person).

Great minds are a lot less prone to interpersonal stupidity than the rest of us, and yet, anti semitism was so pervasive in his time  that, even if Newton personally had no problem with a Jewish philosopher meeting him in his chambers, his peers might have been scandalized.

Newton’s views on Jews (whatever they may have been) shouldn’t distract us from his incredible contributions. Let’s not overreact to the mere mention of pervasive anti-semitism among his peers. I’m not trying to make anybody uncomfortable nor am I trying to sanitize history.

It is was what it was. I suggest you get over it.

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Illustration? That’s mine based on some available images.

MAYBE WE GET A REPRIEVE?

REPLACED BY MACHINES?

Sooner or later, robots will win. They will get all the jobs.

What will be do for money? Will we get weekly checks? From whom?

I wouldn’t worry. Our ever so smart political leaders are probably working out the details.

Aren’t they?

We’ll get to all that in another post.

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Today’s article is about the possibility that robots, even the cute ones with big eyes, could muscle us out entirely. Take aways our jobs? Sure. But, even worse, they could take it all.

Robots one. Humans zero.

Stephen Hawking says we could screw the pooch because we didn’t think things through when we had the chance. He says robots could pass us right by in the brains department. Once they’re smarter than us, the ungrateful little clankers won’t mind chucking us into the excess baggage bin.

Silly?.

Bill Gates agrees with Hawking. Elon Musk agrees with both of them. Musk says artificial intelligence is “summoning the demon”. It’s potentially worse than nuclear weapons. Others who, supposedly, know what they’re talking about – experts in artificial intelligence and such – agree too.

Seriously?

MISTER Science AintSoBad thought he better look into this. So he read up on it – especially stuff by Nick Bostrom (Founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford Martin School). Bostrom, well respected and influential in neuroscience, technology, physics, and philosophy, has written a book. SuperIntelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Bostron’s book is serious and thoughtful.

Here’s the thing.

Bostron says we’re jaded.  There’s been so much crazy talk about computers taking over that we have tuned out.

I’m not sure.  He could be right. You don’t need proof that computers are getting smart, do you? Phones, robots, navigation systems, refrigerators, thermostats. It’s weird how they know what you’re thinking before you do.

They’re just contraptions. They don’t really think. That’s for sure.

For pretty sure, anyway.

Could they develop a “sense of self” and become conscious as these experts warn?

There’s room to worry because the way these things get programmed is changing. The traditional techniques have taken us a long way but AI (Artificial intelligence) researchers have caught on to the idea that you can’t program a machine to be be self aware. They’ve tried it and it hasn’t worked. If there’s any hope of truly cognitive machines, computers have to program themselves to get smarter.

That’s the corner that got turned.

That’s what scares the crap out of Hawking and Gates and Musk.

After figuring out that we don’t know what kind of instructions would get computers/robots over the consciousness hump, researchers are trying out new approaches – things that might  lead to consciousness. These systems include genetic algorithms, neural nets, support vector machines, decision trees, and naive Bays.

Bostron says we probably won’t know there’s been a breakthrough until it’s too late. Once computers get close to human intelligence, they aren’t likely to stay at that level very long. They will quickly pass us. The danger is that they might not turn out to be sentimental types. If they don’t see a benefit in serving the human race, they may change course and become a nuisance. Or even worse.

With computers and robots controlling so much of what we depend on, those mischievous little devils could be a very big problem. We need to figure out exactly what we need to include in those computers so that we are reasonably protected against an emerging consciousness. We need to understand our responsibilities as owners of sentient things, as well as how we can insure that those sentient things are happy to work in our (and their) mutual interest.

This is a major undertaking as it requires worldwide cooperation – something that we aren’t very good at.

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad suggests that we get on it.

Now.

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The drawing is mine.

The light bulb that will save us

 LIGHTS THAT DON’T SUCK

Lights use up about a quarter of our electricity; they emit about 10% of all greenhouse gases. Newer LED bulbs, which are gradually replacing incandescents. use way less energy –  about 90% less.

If we replace everything with LEDs, we reduce greenhouse gasses significantly.

President Obama reached a deal with China that’s supposed to start lowering the actual level of greenhouse gases by 2030. New kinds of light bulbs are one way to get those levels down.

Are LED bulbs the best we can do?

You’re not going to believe this but Norihiro Shimoi. from Tohoku, University, has been showing around a new kind of light bulb that makes LED bulbs look like energy pigs. He and his team have a light that’s made from flat nanotube panels. It uses about a tenth the amount of energy as LEDs.

That’s right. a tenth of the energy of LED lights. A hundredth as much as incandescent lights.

The Shimoi light consists of ultra miniaturized nanotube diodes with phosphor screens. Not only are they ridiculously efficient, they can be made with a very low defect rate so they might turn out to be practical to manufacture. Mister ScienceAintSoBad doesn’t know how soon these things can show up on the shelves at competitive prices. For now, it’s all science, no impact.

I’ll keep one eye on these for me and the other for you.

ScienceAintSoBad Rating = FT for Fascinating and Too early to say.

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The drawing is mine.

BLINDED BY DIM BULBS

SHEDDING LIGHT ON A GREAT IDEA

If you drive at night, you’re pretty much guaranteed to run into situations where your hand flies up in front of your face.

“Yikes, I can’t SEE!”.

People forget to lower their high beams, giving oncoming drivers a glaring face full of bright light. On a foggy, twisty mountain road, a high beam can be temporarily blinding. If you get down in one piece, it isn’t because of your incredible skill. It is because of your incredible luck.

Night driving is three times as dangerous as driving during the day (The National Council on Highway Safety).

Robert Tamburo (Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute) has an answer. A “smart headlight” which he will be showing off at the European Conference on Computer Vision in Zurich. Sensors in the headlight track cars, drivers,  snow flakes, and rain drops.  The system blocks light that would otherwise shine in your eyes, while lighting up the rest of the roadway. It keeps light from bouncing around on snow/rain particles. Tambur’s headlight uses fast computer processing to model the “road space”. The light doesn’t come from a bulb; instead, it comes from a DLP device with an array of “cells” which work together to make up the beam. The cells are constantly switched on or off to perfectly protect the vision of other drivers and light the road. Along with lots of other stuff that will show up soon, Tamburo “smart headlight” should completely change how we drive.

What does MISTER ScienceAintSoBad think?

ScienceAintSoBad Rating for a smart headlight =  10. To drivers in the near future, today’s cars will seem like “death traps”.

For good  reason .

WHO GETS TO DRIVE??

SELF DRIVING SHIPS

Self driving cars are already on the roads. In a few years, you’ll own one.  We’re scrambling to get the laws and insurance rules done.

What about ships?

I’m serious.

Remember the Costa Concordia?

It actually hit a rock?

Ships don’t GO that fast. And rocks? They don’t go at all.

Would a computerized pilot get lost in somebody’s baby blue eyes? Would it cruise dangerously close to shore to show off?

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad doesn’t think so.

Why can’t we at least do what several  car models already do – the ones that  “grab the wheel” to save you from killing yourself? If it works for cars at 65 mph, it should work for ships at 19 mph.

You would think.

Ship owners would like to go further. They really like the idea of self piloted “ghost” ships.

Without a crew, ships would be smaller and simpler and more fuel efficient. And what’s a ship worth to pirates if there’s no crew?  Would you pay a big ransom for a scow full of tires?

Oskar Levander, VP of Innovation, Marine Engineering, and Technology at Rolls Royce, says we’re ready to do this. Rolls Royce has a simulated system to show off to potential customers; the company (or at least Levander) sees this as inevitable.

Here’s the thing.

It’s a great idea. But ships don’t get smashed against rocks by foolish captains very often.

The big risks are bad weather and propulsion systems that explode, catch fire, or fail, leaving the vessel to founder in the waves. A ship without power is in extreme danger in the middle of the ocean. Robots still aren’t as fast and flexible and reliable as a human in an emergency.

Would an automated pilot be able to respond properly to an oncoming rogue wave? Would it know what to do if the windows got blown out on the side of the ship?

MISTER Science AintSoBad likes techno stuff. It should, in principle, be possible to replace the crew with well designed, redundant systems but labor unions and regulators will be hard to convince.

Maybe that’s a good thing.

SHAKY

IT’S THE FIRE!

Remember the great San Francisco earthquake?

If you were living in southern california in 1906 you do.

It was as bad as it gets. We didn’t know how to build earthquake resistant buildings back then. Plus a lot of structures had been thrown together during the gold rush a few decades before and were cheezy to start with.

The shaking due to the quake was bad but the fire? That was unbelievable!  

Once the fire broke out, fire fighting equipment couldn’t get through the rubble strewn streets. Not that it would have mattered since there wasn’t any water in the mains.  The fires burned for days. When they were out, the smoke remained in the air. They said it would never go away. They said the air had changed – that sunlight would never look the same again. 

Eventually, the air did clear and return to normal but hundreds of thousands of people had to live in shelters and tents until  they found new homes.

The city recovered. It took years.

Much was learned from the San Francisco disaster. Building codes are much better. Engineers now know how to design a building that can “ride out” the typical movements of an earthquake and the building codes ensure that this knowledge will protect against future quakes.

However, if the gas lines go, it won’t matter.

There are a lot of gas lines.

Will there be another “great fire”? There have been plenty of earthquakes in California since 1906. Some were strong. One had a magnitude of 7.5.

There were no firestorms.

Maybe some of this was luck because – you know what? –  although shutoff valves have been installed, a lot of them are manual. PG&E tells us to keep a 12 to 15 inch wrench around in case it is needed in an emergency. That seems a little ridiculous, doesn’t it? Go find the stupid wrench during a quake?

Where the hell did I put my wrench?

Indescribable

There are also automatic shutoff valves. That’s the right way to handle things, isn’t it?  They activate when there is enough seismic activity or when there is a rupture in a gas line causing a large increase in the flow of gas. MISTER ScienceAintSoBad likes that idea and gives P&G’s new automatic valves a ScinceAintSoBadRating of 10. 

These automatic valves are installed when there’s new construction or when there are major alterations.

Great to hear.

In the meantime, those living in older buildings that haven’t been renovated had better not forget where they put that dopey wrench.

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The drawing is mine and the photograph (courtesy of Wikipedia) is in the public domain.

HIgher and higher with wood

  A LADDER TO THE SKY

The tallest building in the world is in Dubai. 163 stories plus another 46 in the spire. There’s more underground too. That’s where the parking is.

Was that thing built with two by fours?

What do you think?  Of course not. Nobody builds high rise buildings out of wood. That was concrete and steel. In fact, the engineers had to figure out new ways to get the concrete up that high – special heavy duty concrete pumps, the most powerful ever made.

It’s too bad that tall buldings can’t be made of wood. It’s a renewable resource, right? Wood buildings are cheaper to heat, cheaper to cool, and have a good “carbon footprint”. They also do better in a fire. Heavy wood structural members can burn but they don’t fold up suddenly like steel. They last longer BECAUSE they burn (instead of turning to jelly when heated). Burning – at least for heavy timbers – is slow.  If you’ve got a fireplace, you know what I’m talking about. A great big log can burn all night.You don’t WANT your nice building to catch on fire but – You know what? – If it ever does, you SURE don’t want it to collapse before you make it down the fire stairs. Another advantage of wood: wood buildings go together easier. The beams and columns are easier to lift and easier to fasten. You can even use nails and screws.

Well could that big building in Dubai have been made of wood? Wood has advantages but steel is stronger. Getting WAY up in the sky like that pushes everything to the limit. If you insist on a 200 story vanity tower, wood’s probably not a good choice. But could more modest high rise buildings be built of wood? What are the possibilities?

Tom Vilsak, US Secreatry of Agriculture wants to see more wood construction. His agency has put up a million dollars for the best designs of high rise buildings from wood.

Wood designs that reach for the stars.

Seriously.

Vilsak’s feels that new uses for wood and hybrid structural products of wood and other materials could put the US out front in new industries. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are already employed making wood products. A new market for wood would expand opportunities even more.

387 foot radio tower in Poland

Building high in wood isn’t a new idea. Some very high structures have been around for years.  There’s a 387 foot all wood radio tower in  Gliwice, Poland that was built in 1935. As for new stuff, current plans include a 34 story wooden building for Stockholm, Sweden, and a 30 story tower for Vancouver.

This new USDA initiative should encourage more.

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The cartoon is mine. The photo of the wooden radio tower is courtesy of Wikipedia.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

IS THIS ADORABLE?

TECHNOLOGY RUN AMUK?

We’re pregnant.

So happy to hear. Will you be wanting hard copy of that first ultrasound?  How about a 3D doll of the kid in utero?

3D Babies has announced a way to make plastic replicas of a fetus from the 3D ultrasound scans. Cute as all get out if you like that not-born-yet look.

Getting a good “shot’ ” of a fetus must be done v-e-r-y carefully. Xrays – any kind of radiation –  is pretty much out of the question, right? However, sound waves don’t hurt anything down there; so ultrasound (high frequency sound waves) is used  to harmlessly form a clear picture of  the infant .  Ultrasound is up around two million hertz. That’s like a hundred times more than the highest frequency anyone can hear . The  short wavelengths are the trick to making pictures with good detail. Some of the latest equipment also does a three dimensional version  which has information about width, height, and depth.

The founders of 3D Babies thought “Depth. Hmm.. With all that info plus a 3D printer, why couldn’t we make a real lifelike replica of the kid?“

That’s what they did.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME???

IS IT ACCURATE? (DOES IT MATTER?)

The web site says the company uses studies from bioengineeing to create a sculpture that “resembles” your baby. How close is the likeness? It’s hard to say. You probably have to more-or-less take their word for it since, by the time you see junor, he.she will have changed quite a bit.

Here’s the thing.

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad doesn’t have a problem with science, right? That’s obvious. And, you know what? Good taste isn’t a big deal with scientists either.  Darwin’s stuff was so offensive to his contemporaries he wouldn’t let it be published til he was gone.

Gallileo? They busted him for anti-biblicality. He was lucky to get off with house arrest.

If you want to capture Billy in all his pre-delivery glory, why would I object on the basis of good taste? Just remember that there might be some “artistic license” involved in getting from the 3D ultraound data to the plastic baby sculpture thing.

I’m not saying this is the perfect shower gift but if you want to scandalize your friends with something a little different, this might be what you were looking for.

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The photo is a promotional photo from 3D Babies.

The drawing is mine.

SOME CELLS LEFT?

THE PROBLEM WITH CANCER SURGERY

Cancer.

You’ve been “scheduled” even though you’re not sure you heard everything they said and aren’t sure you made the right choices.

How did this happen? Will everything be okay? Will your kids be orphaned?  Nobody answers these questions for you. It’s all about practical next steps.

You’re on a gurney talking to a nice doctor.

Isn’t she a little too young? Shouldn’t she be more reassuring?  Less “We’ll know a lot more after we get in there”?

You think she said  “We’ll take away the bad stuff and leave the good stuff.” 

That must be what she said. That’s what they do right?

THE BIOPSY

The surgeon’s job is to get rid of the diseased tissue. How is that determined?

Biopsies.

To see if all of the cancer has been successfully removed, a sample is put into a container with preservative. The sample is sent to the pathologist. After a gross exam ,  the sample is quickly frozen, stained, and sliced.  Other samples go into a cassette for a more complete analysis later. Those samples go into hot paraffin which, after a few hours of cooling, get sliced on a “microtome” for the eventual “thumbs up/thumbs down”.

This process is a cumbersome one. If the pathology lab says the quick frozen sample still has cancer, the surgeon has to take out more tissue, send a new sample, wait for the lab, and maybe even repeat again. When it’s all done, and the patient is supposedly recovering,  the lab gets a second vote based on the samples that were saved for further study.

The doctor wants to walk out to the waiting family and say things went great.  Good margins. All gone. Its embarrassing for the doctor and dispiriting for the patient and the family to find out that those margins might not have been so great after all.

A BETTER GRIP ON THINGS IN THE OPERATING ROOM

Two tools are trying to make their way to the operating room that could add more certainty and reduce the “standing around” time for the surgeon.

One of them, I mentioned last July. It’s a “hot knife” that does an instant analysis of the vaporized tissue. In early testing, the results were in perfect agreement but there is more testing to be done before the instrument is submitted for regulatory approval.

Another way to get at the problem is a pair of special glasses that make cancer cells visible to the surgeon.  Dr.  Samuel Achilefu, PhD, professor of radiology and biomedical engineering at Washington University is the project head. The system uses a “heads up” display to see cancer cells as small as one millimeter. The cells look like they are glowing when you look at them with the goggles. The trick is a contrast agent that is injected beforehand into the tissue.

Like the iKnife the googles aren’t ready for approvals. More testing has to be done with humans.

For now, we’re still stuck with the painstaking path lab process but this would seem to be the future of cancer surgery.

The sooner the better, I think.

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The drawing is mine.

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INVENTING: NO HUMANS NEEDED?

AUTOMATING CREATIVITY

What’s the opposite of the crazy guy inventor?  How about the ROBOTIC crazy guy inventor?

Alan Porter (Georgia Institute of Technology) is the principal investigator on a way to bulk up technology by using information from patents and publications. His system looks at the way  the citations in various patents reference each other. His system then uses that information to figure out  where the holes are in a collection of patents – the “intersections for new technology”. 

Cell phones have sensors for acceleration and brightness and temperature? Maybe you missed something. Look through the stuff about sensors. Anything good there? A key patent for automotive suspensions expires next month? That’s an opportunity, right? Patents tend to “cluster” in certain areas. You can see where new areas are starting to emerge by noticing the density of new categories.

“Patent maps” aren’t new. It’s the way corporations  look for where there’s weakness in the patent “portfolios” they own. Patents aren’t inventions anymore. They’re bullets in a war against evil competitors who are also trying to figure out what has to be invented, bought, or stolen to bulk up their own side of the patent wars.  The old system grouped patents into eight major categories. The new system is much more granular and, according to Jan Youtie, director of policy research services in Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute, it works a lot better.

MY VIEW

Do you want to know what MISTER ScienceAintSoBad thinks about a “systems approach” to inventing? Does he think a cold blooded technology based approach to invention is ever a real substitute for individual intuition, talent, and genius?

Not really.

In fact, I think it’s why big rich companies that have unlimited access to scientists and engineers, struggle so mightily to come up with the next biggie. They spend too much time gluing extra sensors and more pixels into their products.

They should spend more time in the garage.

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The cartoon is mine.