*michael parekh on IT*

ON DRIVEN TO DISTRACTION

LOOK MA, NO HANDS

Today California joins a host of states that make it illegal to drive while using a cell phone in one's hand.  While the logic of the move seems reasonable, as we've seen state after state pass this law, there is growing evidence that cell phone use while driving, regardless of whether held to one's ear, or with a head-set/speaker-phone arrangement, can be equally distracting and dangerous. 

The LA Times notes:

"Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says the new law will reduce accidents. "Getting people's hands off their phones and onto their steering wheels will save lives and make California's roads safer," he said earlier this month.
That, however, is not what the research finds. Scientists say that when mixing cellphones and driving, the number of hands available for the tasks is not the limiting factor.
Instead, it's a driver's attention and processing capacity. These are often stretched beyond safe limits when someone juggles the complex tasks of negotiating traffic and conversing with another remotely."

The article goes on to quote some studies that provide some evidence of this phenomena.  A 2005 study for example, found that:

"Compared with drivers exceeding the legal blood alcohol limit, users of cellphones -- hand-held or hands-free -- reacted 18% more slowly to braking by the car in front and were more likely to get in a rear-end collision.
What's more, the talkers seemed to compensate for their slowed response time by falling farther behind the car in front -- a pattern likely to slow traffic and exacerbate congestion."

It'll be difficult for politicians and regulators to ban both hand-held AND hands-free cell phone use while driving. 

What'll likely need to happen  over time is that cars will get additional technology that assist the drivers while they're driving, whether they're distracted or not.  This CNN piece from last year, gives some examples:

"The next generation of environment-sensing cars will use more than just radar and infrared sensors to watch for signs of trouble. Video cameras will look for stoplights that have turned red and for children who are running toward the road. Distance-sensing lasers will check for vehicles in the driver's blind spot and the passing lane.These sensors won't do anything that a vigilant driver can't already do, but what if they could? What if your car could sense road conditions and traffic problems that are out of your sight? That's coming too.

The next giant leap in sensing will be radio networking that enables cars to exchange information.

"Communication [between cars] will be like an additional sensor," says Ralf Herrtwich, director of vehicle IT research at DaimlerChrysler.

Car-to-car communication will ensure that your automobile is impeccably informed about road conditions ahead. And this extra "sensor" will have almost unlimited range, because information can be instantaneously relayed from one vehicle to the next, to the next, and so on."

It'll be a while until these types of technologies are mainstream realities, but they're no longer in the realm of science fiction. 

The ideal technology of course would be self-driving cars, with or without the robot driver as in the classic 1990 Schwarzenegger sci-fi movie Total Recall.

Until then let's all be really careful while driving and using cell phones, hands-free or not.

ON LIFE IN THE REAL DEEP

LOOK OUT BELOW

If you're in the mood for some Science on the wild side this Wednesday, look no further than this piece by evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson.  Titled "Meet the Interterrestrials", it lays out the case for an immense amount of microbial life deep in the rocks below sea-level:

"Then there are the “intraterrestrials” — the organisms that live in rocks deep in the earth, the creatures of the “deep subsurface biosphere.” Bacteria have been found in rock samples taken several hundred meters below the sea floor, even when the sea floor itself is 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) below sea level.

We don’t know how many organisms are living in this (to us) alien environment. But based on what’s been found in rock samples so far, the numbers are likely to be gigantic. One recent study found between 1 million and 1 billion bacteria per gram of rock (a gram is 1/28 of an ounce). It may be that a large proportion — perhaps as many as a third — of all bacteria on Earth live in rocks below the floor of the sea. That would be a lot of bacteria."

The piece goes on to explain how scientists are just beginning to understand the implications of all this on the evolutionary geology and biology of the planet.

"...in chiseling away at rocks, in leaching out minerals to consume, and by excreting waste products, they alter the chemical composition of rocks — and also the composition of the seawater that circulates through the pores and fractures in them. Perhaps — though no one yet knows for sure — they do so on a grand scale, contributing substantially to the composition of rocks and oceans."

Fascinating stuff, to say the least.  If you're in the mood for more science along these lines, also check out Olivia's piece a few weeks ago on microbial life permanently living in the clouds high above us all:

"Mostly, the cloudy residents are bacteria of various kinds. Samples of clouds taken from a meteorological station at the summit of Puy de Dôme, a mountain in central France with an elevation of more than 1,400 meters (almost 5,000 feet), turned up more than 71 strains of bacteria, as well as a variety of fungi; owing to the way the sampling was done, this is a massive underestimate of who’s up there. Of the bacteria detected, many appear to have come from the oceans."

Looks like we're just really figuring out the scale of these huge, microbial populations and their migratory habits.

Can't wait for the inevitable Pixar movie where a microbe from the clouds falls in love with a microbe in the deep "West Side Story" style.

ON NEW AUTO LIGHTS

BRIGHT SPOTS

As I've mentioned before, I'm not buying another laptop without a back-lit LED screen, given it's cool brightness and lower power consumption.  Now we may have to look for that option in our cars as well.  This Gizmodo piece explains:

"The innovative R8 supercar from Audi is now available for the first time with full LED headlamps.
In addition to the standard Audi-signature 24-LED running lamps it's always had, this extremely expensive option (£3,590 converts to $7,100 USD) adds LED high and low beam headlamps and LED turn signals to the front fascia of the mid-engine sports car."

What's the big deal, you ask?

Gizmodo provides some answers:

"The latest craze in automotive lighting, LED bulbs don't utilize a filament like halogen lamps or gas plasma like HID lamps. Instead, they create light from the movement of current across a semi-conductor chip.

They are smaller, more vibration resistant, and much more efficient than traditional bulbs. According to Audi, the light from the LEDs has been designed to closely resemble daylight and provides a greater contrast to be easier on the human eye. LED illumination is also designed to last the lifetime of the vehicle."

It may not be as green as driving a hybrid, but it's pretty cool by any measure.  Can't wait for it to be a mainstream feature in most new cars.

ON OUR HARD WORK IN SPACE

ONE STEP AT A TIME

The international effort to finish building the third brightest object in the sky, after the Sun and the Moon, got a boost today with the successful launch of the Space Station Discovery.  The New York Times explains:

"The space shuttle Discovery, with its crew of seven astronauts, lifted off Saturday afternoon for a mission to take a tour-bus-sized science laboratory to the International Space Station, the $1 billion “Kibo” module.

The module is the largest part of three shuttle payloads that will bring the full Kibo assembly up to the station. It will be the largest “room” on the station, and will eventually sport an exposed area, like a back porch, where some experiments will be exposed to the harsh vacuum and temperature extremes of space."

This is the 123rd Shuttle mission, and nine more will be needed before the International Space Station (ISS) is complete, in all it's glory, spanning over two football fields.

As this Wikipedia excerpt remind us, it'll take almost a decade to finish:

"At an estimated cost of €100 billion (~$156 billion) for the ISS project from its start until the program's end in 2017,^[9] the ISS will be the most expensive object ever built by humankind.^[7]"

It's easy these days to take Shuttle flights and Space Stations for granted, going on in the background as it were (unless of course when something going horribly wrong, which has happened more than we'd all like).

But it was a a beautiful, picture-perfect Shuttle launch today, and the work of science aloft continues.  Great to see it live on TV every time.

ON REAL SUPER-HERO FLYING

FINALLY

Every boy from 2 from to a 100 (and a bit more), is going to like this story titled "Rocket man flies on jet-powered wings", as told by MSNBC:

"Former fighter pilot Yves Rossy, 48, accelerated to 186 miles an hour May 14, 2008, over the Swiss Alps during his first public flight while strapped to his self-made, jet-powered wings."

The piece goes into the actual experience (and has a video to boot):

"Steering only with his body, Rossy dived, turned and soared again, flying what appeared to be effortless loops from one side of the Rhone valley to the other. At times he rose 2,600 feet  before descending again with a trail of special-effects smoke in his wake.

"It's like a second skin," he later told reporters. "If I turn to the left, I fly left. If I nudge to the right, I go right."

And Rossy's next challenge:

"He said he is ready now for a bigger challenge: crossing the English Channel later this year. The stunt, which will be shown on live television, will test his flying machine to the limit. Rossy said he plans to practice the 22-mile trip by flying between two hot-air balloons."

Forget joy-rides into outer-space for folks willing to pay the freight.  This is the ride most of us boys (and I suspect quite a few girls), would happily sign up for, as and when available for mere mortals.

ON A NEW APPROACH TO WAVE POWER

FROM THE DEEP

For a long time now, the one alternative energy source that has most captured my imagination has been wave power, for a variety of reasons.  This article in CNET, titled "Riding the power of undersea waves",  captures some of them in this excerpt:

"Wave power, at least according to its advocates, could become a staple in renewable energy over the next two decades. Waves are far more predictable than wind and solar conditions. Satellites can track wave trains out at sea and give utilities and power providers advance estimates of how much power they can hope to generate from the sea. Water is 800 times denser than air; thus, a few devices planted in a relatively small area can generate as much power as a large wind farm."

However, the piece goes on to add:

"But there is the catch. Wave power devices have to sit in some of the harshest environments on the planet and function fairly flawlessly to be economical. Right now, virtually all wave power systems are prototypes."

The piece then focuses on a company called WaveRoller trying a different approach to wave power than many of it's peers:

"The company, based in Espoo, Finland, says it has devised a way to generate electricity from waves without buoys or other floating devices, the mainstay of other wave power companies.

Instead, the company wants to plant oscillating fiberglass/steel plates on the sea bed. Waves rolling in push over the plates, which rebound after the wave passes to only be knocked down by another wave. The back-and-forth motion of the plates drives a piston and creates hydraulic pressure. The pressure ultimately gets fed to a turbine to generate electricity.

By being completely submerged, WaveRoller's device could help quell some of the NIMBY-ism that comes with building in coastal areas..."

The number of this approach shake out as follows for now:

"The plate in the latest prototype measures 4x4 meters and can generate 10 kilowatts to 13 kilowatts of power. Commercial units will likely consist of three plates lined up near each other and produce around 45 kilowatts, he said. Thus, you'd need about 22 three-plate devices for a megawatt. A single WaveBob can produce more than a megawatt of power."

It's a long time ago before these systems are commercial contributors to the energy problem, with the earliest estimates in the 2010 to 2015 range.  But it's fascinating to watch the rapid changes in the underlying technologies while we wait.

ON ACCIDENTAL EMPIRES IN WIND-POWER

SOMETHING IN THE AIR

The Wall Street Journal has a page one story on Tulsi Tanti, who founded a thriving wind-power business in India and turned him and his family into India's recent billionaires.  Mr. Tanti, who hails from the same town I was born in, had a pretty serendipitous journey into this industry over a decade ago, as the Journal story explains:

"Mr. Tanti was born in Rajkot, an industrial town in the northwestern Indian state of Gujarat. After studying commerce and mechanical engineering in the 1970s, he went to work for his family's cold-storage business.

In the early 1980s, Mr. Tanti and his three brothers moved to Surat, a textile center in Gujarat, and set up a company to make polyester yarn for saris and dresses. The company's name, Suzlon, combined the Gujarati word for intelligence and the English word loan.

Suzlon struggled. One big problem, Mr. Tanti says, was electricity. India grants agricultural users in some states subsidized or free power, leaving industrial users to bear some of the world's highest electricity costs. Even so, supply is erratic.

So Mr. Tanti decided to power his factory with windmills. In 1994, he bought two small turbines from Vestas."

The rest as they say, is history:

"By 2005, foreign money was pouring into India's stock market. Suzlon was meeting sales targets and, because of low manufacturing costs, had profit margins of more than 20%, compared with the industry average of 8%.

Later that year, Suzlon raised $340 million in an initial public offering. Citibank sold a majority of its stake in the IPO, and expects to make a $1 billion profit in all from its Suzlon investment.

Mr. Tanti became one of India's richest people overnight. The extended Tanti family owns about 66% of the company, worth about $11 billion at the stock's height earlier this year and more than $7 billion currently. Mr. Tanti owns about 16% of Suzlon, according to the Mumbai Stock Exchange."

The Journal piece has some interactive charts that show the global wind-power business in perspective. Particularly interesting is that "wind represented over 30% of the electricity generating capacity added in the U.S. in 2007, compared to less than 1% in 2002.  Yet wind-power accounted for only 0.4% of the power generated".

Looks like there may be some opportunities for some more home-grown fortunes in wind-power to come in the US alone.

ON DECODING BLACK PROGRAMS

HUMOR IN UNIFORM

This New York Times article titled "Inside the Black Budget" reads like an April Fool's joke, only it isn't.  Here's why:

" Skulls. Black cats. A naked woman riding a killer whale. Grim reapers. Snakes. Swords. Occult symbols. A wizard with a staff that shoots lightning bolts. Moons. Stars. A dragon holding the Earth in its claws.

No, this is not the fantasy world of a 12-year-old boy.

It is, according to a new book, part of the hidden reality behind the Pentagon’s classified, or “black,” budget that delivers billions of dollars to stealthy armies of high-tech warriors. The book offers a glimpse of this dark world through a revealing lens — patches — the kind worn on military uniforms..."

It gets better:

"One patch shows a space alien with huge eyes holding a stealth bomber near its mouth. “To Serve Man” reads the text above, a reference to a classic “Twilight Zone” episode in which man is the entree, not the customer. “Gustatus Similis Pullus” reads the caption below, dog Latin for “Tastes Like Chicken.”

Military officials and experts said the patches are real if often unofficial efforts at building team spirit.

The classified budget of the Defense Department, concealed from the public in all but outline, has nearly doubled in the Bush years, to $32 billion.

That is more than the combined budgets of the Food and Drug Administration, the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Those billions have expanded a secret world of advanced science and technology in which military units and federal contractors push back the frontiers of warfare. In the past, such handiwork has produced some of the most advanced jets, weapons and spy satellites, as well as notorious boondoggles."

The piece reads like a template to the Da Vinci code, updated for modern times. 

It shows that boys will be boys, wherever they are, and whenever they are in chronological age.

I've already Amazoned my copy of the book.

No fooling.

ON YOUR SUGGESTIONS FOR POSTS

BESPOKE BLOG POSTS HERE

As I highlighted a few weeks ago, I've been blogging here consistently for over three years now, and it's been a terrific experience thus far. 

I've tried from the beginning to hopefully have something interesting to say and/or point to in a post every single day.

That's been easy on some days and distinctly hard on others. And in most cases, I've been governed in my choices with what piqued my interest at the time.

A new site called Skribit thinks there may be an additional option for bloggers.  Here's what they're about:

"Skribit is a user-generated content suggestion application for blogs. Effortlessly assemble what your readers really want to hear."

And it offers bloggers an easy way to add a widget to their blog in order to drive this reader democracy.

It may not be a bad idea, and I'm game to try it if you are.

I've added the Skribit widget on the far right column, right under "Recent posts".  Would be happy to entertain suggestions on topics for this blog, or for that matter, my Twitter blog (www.twitter.com/mparekh).

A resulting blog post may not come immediately, but all suggestions will be most welcome, not to mention read and considered.

Happy Skribiting to us all.

ON 21st CENTURY POLICE GADGETS

EYE IN THE SKY

Being a geek fan of unmanned flying objects, one can't but note that the Miami police department may be the first in the country to take us into the 21st Century we know via science fiction movies and books.  Here's the report from Engadget:

" We didn't even flinch when we heard that hovering drones employed by Big Brother were going to work in the UK, but somehow those buggers have managed to wander over to America's east coast.
Granted, the pilotless drones -- crafted with good intentions by Honeywell -- that are slated to report in to the Miami police department aren't exactly the same, but they are expected to be used for similar duties.
More specifically, they'll be loosed in order to oversee "urban areas with an eye toward full-fledged employment in crime fighting."
According to a department spokesman, the fuzz are only looking to use it in "tactical situations as an extra set of eyes," but don't be shocked to see flashing lights from a vehicle without wheels next time you're rolling (a little too) quick down South Beach."

Now if they only make it look like a little flying saucer in the next version.

ON FAST TALKING CHIPS

NO LIGHT TASK

Sun Microsystems is trying to pull of a technology innovation that has a 50/50 probability of success but a thousand to one payoff if it works.  Here's how the New York Times piece describes it:

"Sun has found a way to reconnect the chips so they can communicate with each other at such high speeds that computer designers can build a new generation of computers that are faster, more energy-efficient and more compact.

The computer maker, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., plans to announce on Monday that it has received a $44 million contract from the Pentagon to explore the high-risk idea of replacing the wires between computer chips with laser beams.

The technology, part of a field of computer science known as silicon photonics, would eradicate the most daunting bottleneck facing today’s supercomputer designers: moving information rapidly to solve problems that require hundreds or thousands of processors.

Processor and memory chips are currently made by etching hundreds or thousands of identical circuits onto a single wafer of silicon and then slicing that wafer into fingernail-size chips. That manufacturing process ensures that if there is a defect at a single spot on the giant wafer it will not ruin the entire batch of chips.

The drawback in the approach is that wires have to connect the chips in a computer. This causes a fundamental limit in processing power because data moves between chips at lower speeds, creating significant bottlenecks."

The piece goes on to explain how a number of computer companies around the world are engaged in making this approach work, and how it'd be an end-run around Moore's Law if it succeeds.

From my perspective, it's an interesting twist on the holy grail of optical computing, that's been pursued by the industry for so many years.  It'll take a few years to know if all this has a commercial payoff, but it's a cool development nevertheless.

ON SOME BRAIN BUSTING TED TALKS (Part II)

MOVING IMAGES

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about one of the best presentations I'd seen at the 2008 TED Conference (Technology, Entertainment and Design).  Here's how I described it:

"One of the most powerful presentations of the afternoon for me was the one by Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist who gave an incredible, personal account over an 18 minute presentation of her own stroke almost a decade ago, and the long path to fully recovery. "

It was one of the most emotionally moving presentations of the five-day conference.  Now, the full video of the 18 minute presentation is available on the TED site.  Here's the video:

The TED team has also put up some other notable videos up on their web-site.  I'd also recommend Craig Venter's presentation on the current progress on creating synthetic life...it's both scary and exciting. 

Exciting because it promises extraordinary advancements like fourth generation fuels...scary, because these technologies could also potentially have unexpected negative consequences, especially in the wrong hands.  "Brave new world" barely begins to describes it.

ON THE SOLAR THERMAL OPPORTUNITY

SUNNY DAYS

The New York Times has a piece worth reading on how Solar power may finally be ready for it's close-up.  Titled "Turning glare into watts", it lays out the base case:

"After a decade of no activity, two prototype solar thermal plants were recently opened in the United States, with a capacity that could power several big hotels, neon included, on the Las Vegas Strip, about 20 miles north of here. Another 10 power plants are in advanced planning in California, Arizona and Nevada.

On sunny afternoons, those 10 plants would produce as much electricity as three nuclear reactors, but they can be built in as little as two years, compared with a decade or longer for a nuclear plant. Some of the new plants will feature systems that allow them to store heat and generate electricity for hours after sunset."

The economics, while getting competitive with sky-high fossil fuel and coal alternatives, still require subsidies:

"The power they produce is still relatively expensive. Industry experts say the plant here produces power at a cost per kilowatt- hour of 15 to 20 cents. With a little more experience and some economies of scale, that could fall to about 10 cents, according to a recent report by Emerging Energy Research, a consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass. Newly built coal-fired plants are expected to produce power at about 7 cents per kilowatt-hour or more if carbon is taxed.

The solar plants receive a federal tax subsidy, like other types of renewable energy, which makes the economics work for builders but also feeds skepticism about the technology’s long-term potential. “Unless there’s a subsidy involved, it doesn’t seem like a very attractive technology,” said Revis James, a renewables expert at the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility industry consortium."

The whole piece is worth reading, especially if you've been wondering about what all the recent hoop la around solar is all about.  Along with wind, geo-thermal and wave energy, it's a critical part of the global renewable energy crusade.  It's going to be a long, bumpy road, but the journey may be worth it in the long run.

ON A TRUE FLIGHT OF FANCY

NO LIGHT TASK

The third and last full day of TED 2008 was full of memorable talks and ideas.  See both Bruno Giussani and Ethan Zuckerman's blogs for a fuller flavor of the highlights.

You can get some of my impressions from my Twitter blogging on the day here.

I think the one image that stays with me most from yesterday, was this photo of Stephen Hawking enjoying his first Zero-Gravity moment, thanks to a concerted effort by a core group of his ardent fans.  Ethan Zuckerman's post on this is an excellent summary:

"Peter Diamandis shares a wonderful, brief story with us, and a terrific photo. He runs a business that allows people to experience weightlessness via parabolic flight.

He was able to give professor Stephen Hawking the chance to experience weightlessness - they brought a large medical team, expecting that Hawking might have physiological problems in space. He had such fun, the team ended up taking him through eight different parabolas.

It’s pretty unmistakable that that’s joy on his face."

 

Yes, it is, and thanks to Peter Diamandis and his team's efforts, a whole new example of "Yes, we can". 

ON A PICTURE-PERFECT UNIVERSE

COME TOGETHER

A pretty full first day at TED 2008 yesterday, as can be seen from TED's Bruno Giussani's post here (Ethan Zuckerman and Boing Boing also have great posts on the day's proceedings).  There were emotional extremes with speakers discussing the various forms of Evil in this world, and our definition of Beauty.

The one that stayed with me the most was this presentation by surfer physicist Garrett Lisi.  Here's how Boing Boing's Mark Frauenfelder describes it (image from Lunch Over IP):

" Garrett Lisi is introduced as a surfing physicist working on a grand unified theory - E8. He wants to find all the particles and forces that make a complete picture of our universe. He starts by making fun of himself, coming onto the stage and saying "Woah dude, check out those killer equations!"

But he wants to talk about particle physics without using equations. He starts showing images of corals. Coral polyps branch into copies. So do universes.

He shows a funny slide of the Shroedinger's Cat problem (for comic effect, he puts Erwin in the box, and the cat gets to run the experiment). We see Shroedinger branching like a coral polyp in the unopened box. Quantum physics says "Everything that can happen does."

The four different known forces have different kinds of charges. The hypothetical Higgs particle gives mass to things, and the  Large Hadron Collider that's about to go into operation will hopefully prove the existence of Higgs particles.

Electric charges are combinations of two different charges, hyper charges and weak charge.

Strong interactions between quarks are happening millions of times a second, holding atomic nuclei together. These particles are at the very limit of our knowledge. The known pattern of charges could come from a more perfect pattern that gets broken. to do these we need to introduce new charges with new directions.

He shows a colorful animated pattern of elementary particle interactions. The interactions are taking place in the 8th dimension. Some of the places where there should be particles are blank. They need to be filled in with currently unknown particles.

What's one reason E8 is so appealing to him? "At the heart of this mathematics is pure, beautiful geometry."

There were a number of presentations at TED by rocket scientists laying out the latest bits of how we understand the universe.  Garret lisi was the first one to suggest, and show with beautiful animations, how the equations that describe these theories, may come together into something that is utterly beautiful and symmetrical (I'll update this post with links of the presentation and animations  from TED when available). 

A lot of this is still unknown, and a lot more needs to be researched and understood.  But it was good to be able to think that the universe could be a deeply pretty picture.

ON A BRAIN BUSTING KICKOFF TO TED 2008

MIND TRAVELS

TED 2008 kicked off it's five-day conference strong in Monterey, CA and Aspen, CO yesterday, with presentations by folks like Stephen Hawking and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (the spiritual leader, not Ravi Shankar, the musician. and father of Norah Jones).

You can get a good sense of the proceedings from the TED blog here, the Twitter feeds by many attendees here, and this terrific rundown by Bruno Giussani here.

One of the most powerful presentations of the afternoon for me was the one by Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist who gave an incredible, personal account over an 18 minute presentation of her own stroke almost a decade ago, and the long path to fully recovery. 

Like so many others, I have a loved one (my mom), who experienced a stroke a few years ago, and have struggled trying to understand what something like that really involves since then.

Bruno describes Jill's presentation well with this passage, along with a picture of the real human brain she used to explain what was going on where:

"Jill Bolte Taylor is incredible: she's a neuroanatomist (brain scientist) who has suffered a stroke and studied it "from inside", as it happened, while her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness.
It took her eight years to recover, and to become a spokesperson for the possibility to come back.

"I studied the brain because I have a brother who's been diagnosed with a brain disorder, schizophrenia. What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals diagnosed as "normal" and those diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder?
On the morning of December 10 1996, I got my own mental illness: in the course of four hours I watched by brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process information. I could not walk, talk, think.

If you've ever seen a human brain (she shown a real human brain -- picture above): it has two hemispheres.

The right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor, while the left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. So they process information differently, they think about different things, they care about different things, and I would say that they have very different personalities. Our right  hemisphere is all about this very moment, right here right now. It thinks in pictures, Information in the form of energy sterams in simultaneously through all of our sensory system and then  it explodes into what this present moment feels like. I'm an energy being connected to the energy alla around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. And through that we are all connected. And in this moment we are perfect, whole, and beautiful.

Our left hemisphere is a very different place. It thinks linearly and methodically. It's all about the past and about the future. It's designed to take that collage of the present moment, and pick out details after details, categorize them, associate them with all of what we have learned in the past, and project into our future possibilities. It thinks in languages. It's the internal chatter that connects us to the external world. It's the calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry. And most important it's the voice that tells me "I am". And as soon it says that, I become separate from you. That's the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke.

On that morning I woke up to a pounding pain on the back of my eye. It just gripped me, then released me, then gripped me, then released me. I got up trying to perform my usual routine, jumping on my exercise machine, and I realize that my hands look like claws. It's like as if my consciousness had shifted away.

I got off the machine and walked and realized that my body had slowed down, every step was very rigid. I stood in my bathroom ready to go into the shower and looked down at my arm and realized I could no longer define the boundaries of my body, of where I begin and where I end, the molecules of my arm were like blended with those of the wall, am all I could detect was energy flowing.

Then the chatter in my brain went silent. For a moment I was shocked to be in the total silent. Then in an instant my left hemisphere came back online, and I realized that I needed help; then I drifted out again, into "la-la-land"; then in again. I was walking around my apartment, telling to myself: I have to get to work. Then I realize: I'm having a stroke. And my left hemisphere tells me: wow, this is so cool, how many brain scientists have the chance to study that from the inside?

But I need to get help. I get to my office, I pick up a card, I can't figure out what's on it, my brain is back in la-la-land. Then I have a wave of clarity. Drifting in and out. (She goes on describing the difficulties of dialing a phone number and communicating to get help, unable to read the number, "because the pixels of the words blended with the pixels of the background"), and then I would wait for a wave of clarity. It took me  45 minutes to find the right number.

I'm in an ambulance towards the hospital and I realize that I'm no longer the choreographer of my life. Maybe the doctors will give me a second chance, maybe not. And right there, I just feel my spirit surrender -- I say goodbye to my life.
When I awoke, I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. My life was now suspended between two strains of reality: information streaming in but I could not pick voices out from the background noise. Sounds were so loud and chaotic. I just wanted to escape because I could not identify the position of my body in space. I felt enormous and expansive, and my spirit soaring.

I found nirvana. I remember thinking: there is no way that I can squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside my tiny body. But then I realized: I am still alive. And if I found nirvana, then anyone who's alive can find nirvana. And I pictured a world full with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate people who knew that they can come to this space at any time. What a gift a stroke can be to the way we live our lives. That motivated me to try to recover.

Two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage, the surgeons went in and removed a blood clot the size of a tennis ball. It took me eight years to completely recover. So who are we?

We are the life horsepower of the universe, and we have the power to choose moment by moment who we want to be in the world, we can choose the consciousnesses of our right hemisphere or that of our left hemisphere.

These are the "we" inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe the more time we spend choosing the peace of our right hemisphere, the most peace we will project into the world and more peaceful our planet will be."

I've excerpted the full presentation from Bruno's post to try and convey the emotional impact of a presentation like this.

It was a riveting presentation, and I'll put up a video link from TED when available.  It really is a big step towards not taking one's brain for granted.

By the way, I'll be twittering (aka Twitter blogging) a fair bit from TED most of this week, joining in the conversation by many other TED attendees who're also twittering the conference.  This list by Austin Hill is a good place to keep track of these tweets.  My twittering of the conference can be accessed at my Twitter link here.

More to come.

ON ATTENDING TED 2008

HERE WE GO AGAIN

I'll be attending the TED 2008 conference in Monterey, California over the next few days.  If your plans bring you there as well, and would like to connect, do drop me a line here. 

As the TED website describes it, TED is about:

"Many people come to TED seeking something out of the ordinary. A chance to mentally recharge. A chance to step back and consider the really big stuff that's happening. A chance to understand life in a richer way."

Mostly, TED is an opportunity to catch up with old friends and new, across the fields of Technology, Entertainment and Design.  As in the past, I'll post about interesting presentations and encounters.

See you there.

ON MERCURY RISING

RETURN JOURNEY

For the record, I'm a big fan of unmanned space missions, especially inter-planetary spacecraft.  So it's with great interest I read today's New York Times article on NASA's latest probe reaching Mercury, the innermost planet in the solar system.  Here's what the spacecraft, called the Messenger, is expected to do on it's half a billion dollar, multi-year mission:

"The robot spacecraft, the first to visit the planet in more than three decades, was to pass about 124 miles above Mercury’s cratered surface at 2:04 p.m. Eastern time before continuing off on a path that is to bring it back three more times in the next three years before settling into orbit."

Mercury is a fascinating planet, particularly for it's extremes in temperature:

"It also has the most extreme temperature swings of any planet, with heat approaching 800 degrees Fahrenheit in the sunlight while the night side can reach 350 degrees below zero. Yet, radar readings from Earth suggest possible deposits of water ice in permanently shaded craters near the poles."

Reminds you of the planet in Pitch Black, the terrific sci-fi movie from 2000, starring Vin Diesel.

ON A LOST ISLAMIC ARCHIVE

SEEING THE LIGHT

This page one article in the weekend Wall Street Journal titled "The Lost Archive", had me riveted this morning.  Here's the sub-title:  "Missing for half a century, a cache of photos spurs sensitive research on Islam's holy text", which of course is the Koran.

The story has a beginning that sounds like something out of an Indiana Jones movie:

"On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.

The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God's word. The wartime destruction made the project "outright impossible," Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.

Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars -- and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave."

Scholars are just now getting their heads around the implications for secular research of these documents, something that could take decades and be fraught with all sorts of personal, social and political risks.

Here's an example of something that could be unsettling to the current interpretation of what happens to Islamic martyrs:

"A scholar in northern Germany writes under the pseudonym of Christoph Luxenberg because, he says, his controversial views on the Quran risk provoking Muslims.

He claims that chunks of it were written not in Arabic but in another ancient language, Syriac. The "virgins" promised by the Quran to Islamic martyrs, he asserts, are in fact only "grapes.""

That could get "Christoph Luxenberg" the Salman Rushdie treatment in a hurry.

The challenge here of course is that Islam is just now getting the secular analysis that other religions like Christianity and Judaism have undergone over the past few hundred years.  And it's something that's obviously a powder keg of major proportions.

A thought occurred to me as I was reading the article. 

What if the entire archive were released on the Internet, say on Wikipedia or Google Scholar? 

What if it was then available to any and all scholars, researchers and interested parties to study, discuss and debate the findings?

What if the participants could choose whether to reveal their true identities or publish/discuss under pseudonyms, like many do on the internet today?

Would it diffuse the  risks of a project like this, or would it exacerbate them?

This is something that obviously wouldn't have been possible a few years ago.  But it could be an alternative approach on dealing with this re-discovered treasure.

Something to think about.

ON A HOLE IN THE UNIVERSE

SOMETHING OLD BUT NEW

Hope everyone's having a great Thanksgiving holiday with family and friends.

This bit from New Scientist is one mind-bender for me this evening, especially as I, like so many others, deal with a two-day Thanksgiving food coma:

"The void: Imprint of another universe?

IN AUGUST, radio astronomers announced that they had found an enormous hole in the universe. Nearly a billion light years across, the void lies in the constellation Eridanus and has far fewer stars, gas and galaxies than usual.

It is bigger than anyone imagined possible and is beyond the present understanding of cosmology. What could cause such a gaping hole? One team of physicists has a breathtaking explanation: "It is the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own," says Laura Mersini-Houghton of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

It is a staggering claim. If Mersini-Houghton's team is right, the giant void is the first experimental evidence for another universe. It would also vindicate string theory, our most promising understanding of how the universe works at its most fundamental level."

Going to have to keep track of this, as the experts try and get their minds around this.
Happy Thanksgiving weekend, all.

 

ON A HISTORIC VOLCANO

AWAKENINGS

Amidst all the events of this past week, this story may have missed your attention.  It almost missed mine.  This AP story titled "Indonesian Volcano roaring to life" explains:

"ANAK KRAKATAU, Indonesia -- Sending a boom across the bay, the offspring of the fabled Krakatau volcano unleashes another mighty eruption, blasting smoke and red-hot rocks hundreds of feet into the sky.

Even on its quiet side, the black sand on the now-forbidden island is so hot that a visitor can only briefly set foot on it.

This week's display by Anak Krakatau _ or "Child of Krakatau" _ is impressive, yet it is a mere sneeze when compared to the blast in August 1883 that obliterated its "father" in the most powerful explosion in recorded history.

That blast was heard as far away as 2,500 miles and choked the atmosphere with ash and dust, altering weather patterns for years. Some 36,000 people were killed in the eruptions and ensuing tsunamis.

Now the 985-foot peak growing from the ocean where Krakatau once stood is erupting, one of several Indonesian volcanoes that have roared to life in recent weeks.

They illustrate the awesome seismic forces at work deep below the surface of this island nation.

No lives have been lost in the latest round of activity, but thousands of villagers have been evacuated from the slopes of Mount Kelud on Java island."

Krakatau has fascinated me since I was a boy, when I first saw the 1969 movie  about it, "Krakatoa, East of Java". 

I remember rushing home and reading everything I could about the 1836 explosion in my Encyclopedia.

It's most recent rumblings certainly deserve our attention and respect.

ON A MULTI-LINGUAL WEB

BABY STEPS

One of the most dramatic ways the Internet has chance the beginning of it's commercialization in early 1990s, is on the language front.  Over a dozen years ago, English was the primary language for most internet content.

Today, the figure is less than thirty percent, and it's going lower.

This is an increasingly important trend to keep in mind, as an internet user, geek, or investor.

Of course, the major web companies are all over this trend, as one might expect.

Google for example, had an interesting announcement on this front today, as highlighted by this post by the Google Operating System:

"Google switched the translation system from Systran to its own machine translation system for all the 25 language pairs available on the site. Until now, Google used its own system only for Arabic, Chinese, and Russian."

I've been tracking Google's system for some time, using it's English-Arabic translation system to gauge the progress.  (I grew up in the Middle East, so Arabic websites are of personal interest*). 

For example, this translation tour is a good example, where one can search for a phrase like "Dubai Tours" in English, which then goes onto to query Arabic language websites, and return results back in English.

You can then go to the various websites that show up in the results page, and see the various Arabic pages translated back in English.

While this stuff won't work on poetry or novels that well, it's OK for news and information sites as this page illustrates.  There's still a lot of "noise" in the results, but one can get the gist.

Most importantly, one can get the "Contact Us" pages translated, where an email and/or phone call in English will more than likely get a human reply back in English.

And that's a good start, despite the very long road ahead for these systems.

*P.S.  As an aside, it's interesting that Hindi, which is the national language of India, is still not available in Google's language pairs. 

I bring it up in the context of the billion people market available in India over time.  Other Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc., are well represented. 

It probably has to do with the fact that English is the de facto primary language in India for most of the middle class, while that can't be said for other countries like China or Japan.

This trend is not Google specific, as most U.S. technology companies, including Microsoft, Dell, Apple, Yahoo! etc., tend not to have Hindi versions of it's products and services as a high priority, especially as compared to Chinese. 

Possible subject for a separate post.

ON MUSIC AND OUR HEALTH

UNEXPECTED DIVIDENDS

An TV commercial for AIG while watching CNBC today caught my eye.  It made the claim that singing helps reduce stress and can add up to fifteen years to one's life.  I hadn't seen that before and got me wondering what the source of that claim might be.  A cursory Google search didn't turn anything up, so will have to dig around some more.

In the meantime, the Wall Street Journal had this interview on it's Health Blog with renowned literary neurologist Oliver Sacks that highlighted the following:

"Music has a deep connection to the workings of the brain. In his new book Musicophilia, literary neurologist Oliver Sacks writes about how rhythm and melody can trigger symptoms of neurological disease in some patients and help ease the conditions of others...

He describes how music helped him heal from a serious injury. He also connects the role of music in his own recovery with its role for patients stuck in a trance-like state decades after a sleeping-sickness epidemic. Their miraculous but temporary recoveries (prompted by a drug, not by music) were described in his book Awakenings, which was later made into a movie.

And Sacks explains how listening to music activates the region of the brain associated with motion–suggesting deep biological roots of dancing, or tapping our feet to music. Even when we imagine music, the brain’s motor cortex is activated. Imagining music, Sacks says, “is very real.”

Guess I need to spend more time with my iPod and iTunes.  Especially since Apple reduced prices for DRM-free music tracks on the service today. 

Also, can anyone recommend a good Karaoke machine?

ON THE OCEANS VIA THE INTERNET

LIVE-SCIENCES

This New York Times article titled "Bringing the Oceans to the World-High Tech", takes a few seconds to sink in with it's importance:

"Thousands of miles of fiber-optic cables are strung across the world’s oceans, connecting continents like so many tin cans in this age of critical global communication. So the fact that about 800 more miles of fiber-optic cable will soon thread the sea floor off the coast of the Pacific Northwest might not seem particularly revolutionary. Until you meet John R. Delaney, part oceanographer, part oracle.

“This is a mission to Planet Ocean,” said Mr. Delaney, a professor at the University of Washington. “This is a NASA-scale mission to basically enter the Inner Space, and to be there perpetually. What we’re doing is bringing the ocean to the world.”

Under a $331 million program long dreamed of by oceanographers and being financed by the National Science Foundation, Professor Delaney and a team of scientists from several other institutions are leading the new Ocean Observatories Initiative, a multifaceted effort to study the ocean — in the ocean — through a combination of Internet-linked cables, buoys atop submerged data collection devices, robots and high-definition cameras. The first equipment is expected to be in place by 2009.

A central goal, say those involved, is to better understand how oceans affect life on land, including their role in storing carbon and in climate change; the causes of tsunamis; the future of fish populations; and the effect of ocean temperature on growing seasons.

Oceanographers also hope to engage other scientists and the public more deeply with ocean issues by making them more immediate. Instead of spending weeks or months on a boat gathering data, then returning to labs to make sense of it, oceanographers say they expect to be able to order up specific requests from their desktops and download the results."

But then it hits you like a ton of bricks...making you think, "Why hasn't this been done already?" 

It's almost trite to say that studying the deep oceans is as important as studying the heavens in terms of learning new, basic things about our environment that we still don't know.  Not as glamorous in a "Right Stuff" kind of way, but potentially far more rewarding to humanity in the form of tangible rewards in the short-term (in the next few decades).

This program seems like a tiny foot-step in the right direction.  And we can watch it happen real-time on the Net.  Hope Google is already on this and thinking "Google Ocean".

ON PMARCA'S SCI-FI RECOMMENDATIONS

FUTURE DREAMS

Marc Andreessen just got me to spend over $150 on Amazon this morning, and it's not even 5:30 am. 

In one of the best round-ups I've seen of late of the current crop of "must-read" science fiction, Marc (aka pmarca online), gives a detailed, but brief run-down of who's who and what's what in the world of science fiction in the '00s.

Like most mere mortals, I was a voracious reader of science fiction growing up, but stopped paying attention to the genre in my later years.  Keeping up with the genre took a much greater amount of "active passion' than I could muster in recent years.

And like most mere mortals, I became a much more passive consumer of science fiction, mostly through movies and television (as a recent post attests).  Science fiction books went by the way-side, I'm sorry to say.

So I'm much more able to discuss the nuances of the worlds of Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis, than I am the recent works of a Charles Stross or a Richard Morgan.  Those are the first two sci-fi authors Marc starts off with, and damn, if he doesn't get you to hit that 1-click order button on Amazon in 60 seconds flat!

The biggest takeaway beyond specific titles to order from Marc's post, is how inventive the world of science fiction continues to be, judging from Marc's vivid synopses of various books.

It makes one wonder where Hollywood's head is of late when it comes to adapting science fiction into movies and TV shows.

If one looks at Hollywood science fiction fare over the last decade, anecdotally, the only science fiction author they seem to be focused on is Philip K. Dick. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of PKD, who gave us a brilliant collection of novels and short stories, and then passed away at a way too early age in 1982.  Sadly, it was long before he was able to see how right he was in many of his prognostications.

His Hollywood "career" as it were started with the now iconic "Blade Runner", followed by the Stephen Spielberg helmed "Minority Report", and the most recent snoozer "Next", starring Nicolas cage (wait for that one on cable).

As this Wikipedia entry notes, at least eight of Dick's novels and short stories have been adapted for film and television.  There's almost a Hollywood myopia around his work, with a biopic planned next, by Paul Giamatti. 

Not that it's not well-deserved, but there just seems to be so much good new stuff to adapt to the big and small screens, judging from Marc's post.

So as I wait for my batch of science fiction books to arrive via Amazon, I have a question for Marc, who has as much an "active passion" for movies as he does for science fiction.

If you were advising Hollywood, which of the books you highlight in your terrific post, would you also love to see on the big or the small screen?

I can't wait to put together my own list after reading through the recommended titles.

ON THE SEARCH FOR PERSONAL DNA TESTS

GETTING CLOSE

Interesting tidbit in Engadget today:

"Just we always wanted, a DNA tester to call our very own! We've been waiting for them to break that crucial $15k pricepoint, and now Spartan Bioscience has finally accomplished such a feat with its Spartan DX Personal DNA Analyzer.

The thing can do 4 samples at a time, and takes about 30 minutes to run a Polymerase Chain Reaction to identify the perp."

By itself, this is of interest to a few geeks.  But think about where this hockey puck is going, and a personal DNA tester that's affordable by mainstream audiences are not far away.  If not the gadget, than the ability to get personal DNA reports at your doctor's office are within reach.

Makes Google's investment in co-founder Sergey Brin's wife's biotech startup look all the more reasonable. 

After all, if we're going to start mapping our own DNA, we'll need to put it somewhere and then search for it.

As GigaOm's Om Malik pointed out a few weeks ago,

"If Google wants to really organize the world information, it needs to consider DNA, the most personal of data."

Now if they only put one of these in a future iPhone.

ON SQUIRMY, SLINKY ROBOTS

NATURALLY INSPIRED

It's so easy to get jaded with the phrase "think out of the box".  It's used liberally all around us in so many mainstream contexts.  Taco Bell's "Think Outsde the Bun" campaign is but a trivial case in point.

Yet, this New York Times article on a promising new direction for robotics, is a great example on some true thinking out of the robotic box. 

Titled "In the Lab:  Robots that slink and squirm", it introduces a new type of robot to think about, the "soft-bodied robot":

"At Tufts University, a multidisciplinary team of researchers wants to take a softer approach. The Biomimetic Technologies for Soft-bodied Robots project is trying to make an ersatz caterpillar that will move around in pretty much the same way as the real thing.

The researchers see the potential to use the squishable, relatively simple creations to find land mines, repair machinery in hard-to-reach spots and even diagnose and treat diseases."

Mind you, we're a little bit away from actually seeing commercial versions of "soft-bodied robots". 

But there is something inherently appealing about this idea. 

Admit it.  Part of the appeal of when any of us first played with a Slinky toy as a child, was that it seemed to somehow be "alive".

So I'm all for slinky, squirmy robots being developed to help make our lives better.  As long as don't "come alive" and do us harm, as this tongue-in-cheek YouTube piece illustrates:

Almost as bad as traditional robots going all Terminator on us.

But seriously, the New York Times piece is a great mainstream introduction to the early baby steps (dare I say "baby slinks"?) this direction.

ON THE "GLOBAL" IN GLOBAL WARMING

CAUSE AND EFFECT

Fred Wilson has some of the best discussions going on his blog.  A case in point are some of the responses to his recent post titled "Late May in January".  Fred makes his point as follows:

"It's 70 degrees in NYC today...

I expect a few more people are making a commitment to buy a hybrid the next time they buy a car."

I know Fred was trying to be provocative here in order to start a discussion and he's done a great job again here.

But anecdotally, this knee-jerk response connecting the concern over global warming with buying a hybrid car, is something I've seen over half a dozen times in cocktail party conversations on both coasts.

At a time when over 2 billion people in the developing world out of the six billion souls on the planet are racing furiously towards "developed world" status, the solution to the global warming is of course a bit more complicated than everyone in the developed world buying a hybrid car.

This point was made more eloquently by a Steve, in a comment responding to Fred's post:

"The desire to see cause and effect in chaos is one of the strongest core components of the human psyche, and arguably explains why organized religion evolved and retains such a strong grip on human society despite (because of?) the lack of any empirical evidence regarding the presence of a deity.

Frighteningly, this aspect of our chemistry or DNA or whatever now powers the urge to see every bad storm or period of odd-ball weather as somehow attributable to a new God -- global warming.

As you know from my previous writings, I believe global warming is occuring. But to turn it into a religion (or a "moral crusade" as Father Gore calls it) can only have painful and counterproductive results.

For example, if all we all do is go out and buy a new car, even a hybrid, we can be assured that environmental change will be far worse than if we keep our heads and take coordinated rational collective action.

Check it out for yourself: food supply livestock around the globe accounts for vastly more greenhouse gas emissions (methane, principally from bovine digestion) than from internal combustion engines in vehicles.

Even more damaging is the continuing changover of the world's surface from wilderness (of any kind, pristine, picturesque or ugly and useless) into farmland. If we think global warming is really such a mortal threat