The J Curve

Grumman Lunar Module Winch [Flickr]

2012-01-27T19:21:36-08:00

jurvetson posted a photo:

Used as ground support equipment and festooned with part numbers on each component. It comes from Art Romeo, who was the head of the Grumman Restoration Team at Bethpage Long Island, where they prepared two lunar modules for the Smithsonian and Cradle of Aviation museums.

LDW is the prefix used for the Apollo Lunar Module and the 420 series is equipment handling Equipment.

The Apollo LEM Familiarization manual described the part numbers as such:

“LDW 420-63120 Manually operated hoist. The manually operated hoist is portable, and operated with a hand crank. It is used in installation and removal of the descent stage propulsion tanks and engine. The ratio of the crank revolutions to cable travel is high, providing fine control of load position. LDW 420-53200 Cabin Equipment Installation fixture.”

This particular unit has part number LDW420-53254-3 as well as MRR L24-0029 LDW420M 53249-11. The Handle, itself has a large number stamped deeply into it: LDW420 53255-3 and on the nuts 1218c4 42 spg, so there is still a bit of mystery there. Approximately 7” x 9” It also has a female fitting that might be used to operate by electric or external mechanical drive, plus the handle, to operate manually.

Perhaps someone out there remembers working with these. One museum thought it was for deploying the Scientific Instrument Pallet from the LM.

Zombie-X AK-47 [Flickr]

2012-01-26T12:39:57-08:00

jurvetson posted a photo:

A work colleague, Vince Vannelli, gave me the Zombie Survival Guide for Christmas, and so, of course, my son has read it twice and has been asking if we can get some AK-47’s for our sniper nests on the roof.

Oh, we can do much better than that!

Perhaps just in time for the uprising comes the Doublestar J&T AK-47 with integrated chainsaw. It also needs the EOTech Zombie Stopper XPS2-Z Holographic Sight, which puts a biohazard symbol on lumbering targets instead of a red dot. (video tour and photo via Technabob)

Hopefully, this multi-modal weapon will appease the Zombieland purists who subscribe to Rule 9: “Guns Are for Hunting, Not for Zombie Killing: This one is simple. It's not a proper means for killing zombies as they run out of ammo and need reloading.”

But we'll just have to see. Spray and pray is fine, and blunt trauma is reliable. Best be prepared with both.

So, I lent my work friend my guide to surviving the robot uprising. We can compare notes.

On Lion's Pond [Flickr]

2012-01-24T20:48:31-08:00

jurvetson posted a photo:

The Okavango Delta of Botswana is the worlds' largest inland delta. Each year, 11 trillion liters of water flow in from the Okavango river from Angola, and disappear into the desert, never reaching the sea.

60% of the water is taken up by plants, and most of the rest evaporates directly.

But when we were there at the peak flood, the high waters corralled Africa’s greatest concentration of wildlife into a much reduced land area.

And even the big cats got near the water.

Painted Wolf in the Hunt [Flickr]

2012-01-23T20:38:24-08:00

jurvetson posted a photo:

At full stride, an uncropped photo at dusk, when the pack in South Africa comes alive from a day of rest and weaves through the bush at full tilt, like a sudden breeze that surrounds you and then slips through the trees to disappear in the blink of an eye.

They run at 65 km/hr to exhaust their prey, and they rarely fail (with a 90% success rate versus 30% for lions). They just keep running until the prey is caught.

No two have the same coat pattern. The tail serves as a flag so each can keep a peripheral view of the rest of the pack in the tall grass.

Slow Ride [Flickr]

2012-01-22T20:55:09-08:00

jurvetson posted a photo:

take it easy

— Foghat

Flying American [Flickr]

2012-01-21T14:38:35-08:00

jurvetson posted a photo:

With a guy playing mobile games in the cargo hold.

T. Boone and & the Gas Heads [Flickr]

2012-01-20T21:23:13-08:00

jurvetson posted a photo:

Some more quotes from the JP Morgan Alternative Investment Summit (AIS) this morning, with quite a different tone….

T. Boone Pickens:
“You can’t have a five minute conversation on energy in Washington. They run out of things they can talk about in less than five minutes.”

“There is more oil in Canada than Saudi Arabia. If we turn away the Keystone pipeline from Fort McMurray to the sea for China, we will go down as the dumbest nation in history.”

Robert Friedland, CEO of Ivanhoe Mines”
“The U.S. is institutionalizing stupidity by not importing Canadian oil.”

“If we can solve the porosity and access the gas, there more natural gas in Pennsylvania and New York than in China.”

“You can graph all human activity and you will see a steady increase in electrical consumption per person on the planet. And that will take more copper because copper is a better conductor than anything, except silver and gold. [incorrect, by the way] We will consume more copper in the next 20 years than the last 100 years.”

“If you don’t grow it, you have to mine it.”

“It’s a crime against humanity to make ethanol out of corn. We are driving up food prices. Just tap the gas.”

“We are trying a new fracking technology without chemicals; it used electro-magnetic pulses to free the formations. With all of the advances, we have $2.34 natural gas. Technology does not care about the idiots in Washington.”

T. Boone:
“I saw my first fracked well in 1953. I have fracked 3000 wells personally. I have not seen an aquifer damaged.”

“France has a no fracking rule. Noone has ever accused that crowd of being real smart.”

Barry Sternlicht, CEO of Starwood
“There are more communists in France than in China. They don’t do anything like the rest of us, but eat.”

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase
“Dodd Frank will work out OK. The game will not significantly change.”

“The housing problem is over. People hate projecting an inflection point and would rather say something less specific. We will have 13 million new Americans in the next 10 years and we don’t have homes for them. We destroy about 400 thousand homes a year. If we go back to 1.3 million new homes per year, then the homebuilding industry gets rid of half of the excess unemployment.”

(earlier photo I took of T.Boone)

I’m in Miami [Flickr]

2012-01-19T19:41:39-08:00

jurvetson posted a photo:

It’s surreal to be at this JP Morgan AIS Summit, and I can’t get LMFAO out of my head. =)

Bill Gates over dinner: “When I read the Steve Jobs biography, I thought I should have stayed in it for four of five more years and given him some competition.
But I learned that there is someone more rude than I am.”
Charlie Rose: “Ah, Walter Isaacson noticed that.”

On philanthropy in China: The Chinese billionaires are first generation so they have huge generosity. First generation fortunes are much more generous than inherited fortunes.”

“China is full of technocrats. You can sit and have a technocratic conversation. I n D.C., you hear “they’re wrong and I’m right.” How do you know? What are you talking about? It’s very easy to get confused in D.C. We need technocrats. In healthcare and education we spend twice as much and get worse results. Have you read Obamacare? I did. There is some crazy creative writing in there. Some analyst wrote that premiums for people in their 50s will not be greater than 2x people in their 20s. I’m just looking for an infusion of IQ. The issues are so complex, we need technocrats.”

“U.S. philanthropy goes 90% to the U.S., itself a wealthy nation, and 3% goes to poor countries. My awareness of global needs before my 40s was about nil. In India I would see a lot of poor people, but I have to get to a meeting. It changed when Melinda and I went to Africa.”

SOPA Soap Opera [Flickr]

2012-01-18T09:06:22-08:00

jurvetson posted a photo:

Media lobbyists seem to know no bounds. With a steady stream of successes under their belt, perhaps they have gone too far.

I remember when Lessig took them to the Supreme Court last time on the Mickey Mouse act, and lost, again. Every time Mickey Mouse comes up for expiration of copyright, Congress somehow finds a reason to extend the length of copyright.

Then there was the DMCA. That has been a frustrating exercise for me as lawyers working for Dreamworks and will,i,am have pulled down media that they don’t like from my flickr and youtube streams, with no justification or legal basis. One of my Obama photos was even used by Lessig to fight the AP on fair use.

Then I read in Lessig’s latest book on the corruption of Congress that he faced $1 billion lobbying against him.

“Since 1995, Congress has enacted 32 different statutes to further refine and strengthen the protection of copyright.” (56)

“Between 1998 and 2010, pro-copyright reformers were outspent by anti-reformers by $1.3 billion to $1 million—a thousand to one.” (59)

Many in Congress never even heard the counter-argument to Disney. Today’s protests may change that.

(More infographics from americancensorship.org)

My Neanderthal DNA [Flickr]

2012-01-17T21:27:04-08:00

jurvetson posted a photo:

I was just reading the latest New Scientist on Neanderthal thinking, and was reminded of the latest revelation from my family’s genotyping. My Mom looks to be quite the beast. =)

You probably saw the news last year that “Any human whose ancestral group developed outside Africa has a little Neanderthal in them – between 1 and 4 per cent of their genome. In other words, humans and Neanderthals had sex and had hybrid offspring. A small amount of that genetic mingling survives in "non-Africans" today: Neanderthals didn't live in Africa, which is why sub-Saharan African populations have no trace of Neanderthal DNA. It's impossible to know how often humans invited Neanderthals back to their cave (and vice versa), but the genome data offers some intriguing details. It must have been at least 45,000 years ago… suggesting that interbreeding occurred before those populations split. The timing makes the Middle East the likeliest place where humans leaving Africa and resident Neanderthals did the deed.” (New Scientist)

And a different IBM analysis of my paternal line shows my ancestors were in the second major wave out of Africa, settling in the Middle East at that very time. And presumably getting friendly with the locals.

More recently, palaeoanthropologists have learned a great deal about how Neanderthals think, and that was tonight’s reading:

“We know Neanderthal brains were a bit larger than ours and were shaped a bit differently. And we know where they lived, what they ate and how they got it.

Looking closely at the choices Neanderthals made when they manufactured and used tools shows that they organised their technical activities much as artisans... Like blacksmiths, they relied on "expert" cognition, a form of observational learning and practice acquired through apprenticeship that relies heavily on long-term procedural memory.

The only obvious difference between Neanderthal technical thinking and ours lay in innovation. Although Neanderthals invented the practice of hafting stone points onto spears, this was one of very few innovations over several hundred thousand years. Active invention relies on thinking by analogy and a good amount of working memory, implying they may have had a reduced capacity in these respects.

But while Neanderthals would have had a variety of personality types, just as we do, their way of life would have selected for an average profile quite different from ours. Jo or Joe Neanderthal were neophobic, dogmatic and xenophobic.

So we could have recognised and interacted with Neanderthals, but we would have noticed these significant cognitive differences. They would have been better at well-learned, expert cognition than modern humans, but not as good at the development of novel solutions. They were adept at intimate, small-scale social cognition, but lacked the cognitive tools to interact with acquaintances and strangers, including the extensive use of symbols.

In the final count, when Neanderthals and modern humans found themselves competing across the European landscape 30,000 years ago, those cognitive differences may well have been decisive in seeing off the Neanderthals.” (New Scientist, Jan 14, 2012)

Here’s a paper on the Neanderthal analysis by 23andMe.

FedEx Memphis [Flickr]

2012-01-16T19:48:42-08:00

jurvetson posted a photo:

On MLK day I am reminded of my visit to his fateful hotel in Memphis, the guest of Jim Phillips on the right… as well as Graceland and the FedEx hub package sort. I have the most memories of the last stop on our tour.

Around midnight, the planes land and the employment ranks swell to the largest in Tennessee. Based on inbound data on each of the incoming plane’s package load, they calculate the work that needs to be done and call every employee each night to tell them when to report to work to 10-minute precision. 11:10pm tonight.

It seemed to me that 2/3 of the employee base had jobs that entailed rotating packages do that the bar codes could be scanned by the automatic routing equipment. All of those jobs would become obsolete with RFID tags on the packages.

They had a mag lev system for the letter sort bins that was a blur of motion. On the bulk package systems, the fresh flower packages really stood out as it was Mothers' Day. If memory serves me right, there were no photos allowed (and I could see how market share analysis would be so each with a view into their hub). I also visited Mimeo across the street, a print-on-demand service that feeds directly into the FedEx hub .

And by 1am, the packages are routed and loaded for the refueled planes to take off again for overnight delivery.

Flying on a FedEx plane reminded me of Castaway.

Brass Propellant Discs [Flickr]

2012-01-15T09:15:25-08:00

jurvetson posted a video:

A bit of fun around the BBQ last night.... when lit from the bottom, they skip and spin across the driveway, until they get to the edge.

They're wafer thin. =)

Google's First Storage Rack [Flickr]

2012-01-14T16:33:18-08:00

jurvetson posted a photo:

I had heard of this from Larry and Sergey seven years ago, but saw it yesterday for the first time. The Google founders told me that their beta system used Duplo blocks for the chassis. They expertimented with generic brand plastic blocks, and they were not rigid enough, leading to a literal HDD crash.

The Google design approach reflects a presumption of rapid obsolescence of cheap hardware, which would not need to be repaired. That can also be seen in their first production server.

This is currently in the basement of Stanford's new Huang Engineering building, on loan from the CS Dept.

STVP EPIcenter [Flickr]

2012-01-13T19:30:23-08:00

jurvetson posted a photo:

As we were brainstorming at the STVP board meeting today, I noticed a number of interesting tidbits on the wall, and waited for the coffee break to catch them all.

The Entrepreneurial Thought Leader speaker series posters along the top bring back many good memories. I remember them fondly when I was an undergrad, and some, like Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia credit them for his entrepreneurial inspiration. Here is the lineup for the current quarter (open to the public).

With 11 million downloads, the podcasts are #1 in the Higher Ed category on iTunes.

Nancy Pelosi on the Next Four Years [Flickr]

2012-01-12T17:29:59-08:00

jurvetson posted a photo:

Speaking with the former Speaker of the House and now Minority Leader, I was wondering how best to bring up the topic of campaign finance reform, but she beat me to it.

We spent a fair bit of the afternoon with her today, and she came out blazing, saying how the Democrats will “outspend out-position and out-redistrict them.”

And, coming from the highest-ranking female politician in American history, I was pleased to hear her say that majority of the seats that they intend to win back will be women. “Women will take back the House.”

On the Republican Presidential candidates: “You don’t have the A team or the B team. They want to save their bid for the next election where they might win. You have a C-team of candidates.”

Then the open-ended question: what will the policy agenda be for the next four years? We spent 1.5 hours on this topic, but she started with one and only one imperative: election reform. I told her it was on my mind having just read Lessig’s book.

“The three steps are Disclose, Reform, Amend. 1) Disclose. Federal elections need to disclose the donors, like we do in California. 2) Reform and 3) a Constitutional Amendment to overturn the Citizens United Supreme Court case (whereby corporations were ruled to be like people in their ability to donate to campaigns as an expression of free speech, but bizarrely, they are unlike people in that they are not limited in the size of those donations and can remain anonymous.)”

“This will be the greatest change for our country.”

“Many Republicans will try to block it. They spent $75M trying to defeat me last time.”

“It’s for America. If the Republicans took it on, we should support them.”

And then in a sweet and kind voice: “I have to walk in their shoes, so I can fight them better.”

“In December 2004 I met with Steve Jobs and asked ‘Can you help us rebrand the Democratic Party?’ He replied ‘You can’t brand yourself when you don’t know who you are.’ He later offered “Energy is an issue you can work around. But you have to get private sector advice. No political branding people.’”

“Intel CEO Craig Barrett was emphatic – if you have one issue, it has to be energy.”

“Then Bush won and we had an ethical issue – corruption, cronyism and incompetence. They hired their friends. It was a cash and carry operation, pay to play. Then came Katrina.”

“Our message will be Rebuilding America, and the more specific the better. It will be broadband, water systems, and reigniting the American Dream.”

“For the Republicans, ‘it’s faith or science, take your pick.’ For us, it’s science, science, science, science. For healthcare, for the economy, for the environment, for education, it’s science. Anna Eshoo expressed her exasperation ‘You wouldn’t believe it. We are dealing with people who don’t believe in science.’ With the COMPETES Act, they fought it with tears in their eyes. This was a commitment to science in education. The Republican leadership opposed it.”

“The coal patch is the worst. They deny science.”

“We have smart kids who are undereducated. Nothing, nothing brings more money to the U.S. Treasury than education of the people. From early childhood to K-12 to adult reeducation and lifelong learning.”

“I was with Obama and pointed to Lincoln on the wall. ‘Public sentiment is everything’ he famously said. You have to explain what you have accomplished to the people.”

“The Republicans say there is no government role in clear air, clean water, public education, public safety, public health, Medicare, or social security. You need a public role to get that done for all. This particular breed of cat is not the Republican you know as your neighbor; this particular breed is dangerous to children and other living things.”

And that was the end. On the way out, I showed her the space artifacts in my office and she particularly liked the Apollo Fuel Cell =)

Presidential Greetings [Flickr]

2012-01-11T18:37:00-08:00

jurvetson posted a photo:

Clearing out the office a bit today, I took a closer look at the cool card from the President of Estonia.

A cup full of iPads this year?

Toomas Ilves told me that when he became President, the toughest part was giving up his Mac. Last I heard, he had just visited Apple and was working to switch the government to Macs.

Battle Face [Flickr]

2012-01-10T19:27:26-08:00

jurvetson posted a photo:

His facial scratches are from competitive fighting with fellow lions in the pride over small kills, like impala.

(untouched photo straight from the camera, so rare for me now given the ease of iPhoto, but there was nothing I wanted to tweak here)

Nursing Lions [Flickr]

2012-01-09T21:34:33-08:00

jurvetson posted a photo:

She was peacefully nursing her two cubs and then felt the arrival of a third, an adolescent interloper from the pride.

Mombo Camp, Botswana

Baobab Botswana [Flickr]

2012-01-08T19:32:31-08:00

jurvetson posted a photo:

so many memories out of Africa...

Finally going through all my photos; more to come

Winter Reading [Flickr]

2012-01-06T17:45:35-08:00

jurvetson posted a photo:

Consuming these two was a cognitive speedball. =)

First came Larry Lessig's downer book on the systemic corruption of Congress by the campaign contributions of companies and special interest groups, which corrodes our democracy and is at the root of our broken political system. For me, a newbie to all things political, the bizarre patterns of behavior in D.C. finally made sense.

You can read the opening chapter of Republic Lost over at Rolling Stone:

“Government is an embarrassment. It has lost the capacity to make the most essential decisions.”

“Everything our government touches— from health care to Social Security to the monopoly rights we call patents and copyright— it poisons. Yet our leaders seem oblivious to the thought that there’s anything that needs fixing. They preen about, ignoring the elephant in the room. They act as if Ben Franklin would be proud.”

“We must remember that harm sometimes comes from timid, even pathetic souls. That the enemy doesn’t always march. Sometimes it simply shuffles.”

“The great evil that we as Americans face is the banal evil of second-rate minds who can’t make it in the private sector and who therefore turn to the massive wealth directed by our government as the means to securing wealth for themselves.”

“This corruption has two elements, each of which feeds the other. The first element is bad governance, which means simply that our government doesn’t track the expressed will of the people, whether on the Left or on the Right. Instead, the government tracks a different interest, one not directly affected by votes or voters. Democracy, on this account, seems a show or a ruse; power rests elsewhere.

The second element is lost trust: when democracy seems a charade, we lose faith in its process. That doesn’t matter to some of us— we will vote and participate regardless. But to more rational souls, the charade is a signal: spend your time elsewhere, because this game is not for real. Participation thus declines, especially among the sensible middle. Policy gets driven by the extremists at both ends.”

“In a poll commissioned for this book, 75% of Americans believe ‘campaign contributions buy results in Congress.’” (p.88)

“in the most critical cases, the vast majority of contributions to a congressional campaign are not even from the voters in that district. 79% of contributions to California state legislators came from out-of-district contributors. It is clear ‘the funders’ are not ‘the People.’” (p.233)

Larry just spoke in San Francisco to the Long Now Foundation, available here

Chapter One opens with “In the summer of 1991, I spent a month alone on a beach in Costa Rica, reading novels.” And there I was in Costa Rica reading Lessig’s book, just like last time with Stewart Brand’s book!

Then came the upper, a pre-print of Diamandis & Kotler’s Abundance due to come out Feb 2012. This book is a compendium of many great books and speakers on the topic of techno-futurism.

I love his description of Craig Venter: “he has the appearance of a modern-day wizard — like Gandalf with a solid stock portfolio and a pair of flip-flops” (p.59)

They posit that we are entering an era of abundance driven by “the coming of age of the DIY innovator, a new breed of technophilanthropist, and the expanding creative/market power of the rising billion [from the base of the pyramid] —augmented by exponential technology. In fact, exponential technology could be viewed as their growth medium, a substrate both anchoring and nurturing the emergence of these forces.” (p.77)

“More than a trillion genetically engineered meals have been served and not a single case of GE-induced illness has turned up.” (p.103)

But overall, I would recommend Abundance if you want a synthesis by summary quotes of many great books on the subject by: Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Kelly, Matt Ridley (and more), Steven Johnson (and more), Stewart Brand, Stewart Kauffman, Geoffrey West, Neal Stephenson as well as great speakers and innovators: Nicholas Negroponte, Nathan Myhrvold, Bill Gates, Sal Khan, Richard Branson and Craig Venter.

The Joy of Rockets

2008-03-06T17:47:00.000-08:00

A short talk that I gave at TED, under the apt mavericks conference theme:

So many people have contacted me since this video went up to relay how rocketry inspired them in their childhood. Rocket science is tangible.

Here are some recent rocket photos and videos:

Silicon Valley boasts the largest rocketry club in the world. Yet, there is no "legal" launch site anywhere in the Bay Area, a situation that has become endemic across America.

There have been over 500 million Estes rocket launches in the U.S. alone. It's not for safety that rocketry has been pushed out of suburban areas; it's fear of the unknown. Local communities would rather forbid launches in their backyard than think about the systemic effect once all communities do so. This recently happened here, when Livermore shut down the last Silicon Valley site for launches. We are on the search for a new site (DeAnza college used to host sites, and we are currently pitching NASA Ames). If you have a large plot of land and would welcome some excited kids of all ages, please contact us at LUNAR. UPDATE: we succeeded in getting NASA Ames as our low-power launch site. Thanks!!!

GeekDad

2007-05-05T11:58:00.000-07:00

The words just warm the heart. WIRED recently launched the GeekDad blog with multiple contributors.

Parenthood is an atavistic adventure, especially for geeks who rediscover their child-like wonder and awe… and find that they can relate better to kids than many adults. The little people really appreciate arrested development in adults. =)

Another cause for celebration is the rediscovery of toys, but as an adult with a bigger allowance. Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, put it well in one of his GeekDad posts: “Get Lego Mindstorms NXT. Permission to build and program cool toy robots is not the only reason to have children, but it's up there.”

Here are my contributions so far:

• Beginner Ants with the NASA gel ant farm

• Beginner’s Video Rocketry to capture video feeds from a soaring rocket

• Peering into the Black Box: Household appliances become less mysterious when you take them apart

• Cheap Laser Art: amazing emergent images with just a laser pointer and a camera

• Slot Cars Revisited: modern cars with modern materials

• Rocket Science Redux : Trying to build the smallest possible rocket is a great way for children to learn rocket science

• Easter Egg Deployment by Rocket with a hundred little parachutes

• Celebrate the Child-Like Mind, a topical repost from the J-Curve

From what I can see, the best scientists and engineers nurture a child-like mind. They are playful, open minded and unrestrained by the inner voice of reason, collective cynicism, or fear of failure.

Children remind us of how to be creative, and they foster an existential appreciation of the present. Our perception of the passage of time clocks with salient events. The sheer activity level of children and their rapid transformation accelerates the metronome of life.

Happy New Year

2007-01-01T13:19:00.000-08:00

We broke out a wonderful bottle of bubbly with some friends last night, and discovered the official drink of The J Curve....

Starting in mid 2004, I blogged on a weekly basis, then bimonthly in 2005, and just twice in 2006. My creativity here has withered, supplanted by a daily photoblog on flickr.

I have wondered why I find it so much easier to post a daily photo than to sculpt prose on any kind of regular basis. For me, the mental hurdle for a daily photo post is so much lower than text. A photo can be a quick snapshot, without much care for quality, and this is immediately apparent to the viewer. You don't have to waste much time with uninteresting images. With text, if I dash off a few sloppy and poorly thought out paragraphs (like these ones =), the reader has to waste some time to realize that this is a throw-away post, or maybe meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I hold myself to a much higher quality hurdle for linear media — something thoughtful and provocative — and so I procrastinate. Many of my text posts are repurposed material that I wrote for external deadlines (magazines, conferences, congressional testimony), without which I may never had crystallized my disparate thoughts into something coherent.

Anyway, here are my 30 favorite photos and my best shot of 2006. Cheers!

The Dichotomy of Design and Evolution

2006-07-13T15:37:00.000-07:00

The two processes for building complex systems present a fundamental fork in the path to the future.

I just published an article in Technology Review which was constrained on word count. Here is a longer version and forum for discussion.

Many of the most interesting problems in computer science, nanotechnology, and synthetic biology require the construction of complex systems. But how would we build a really complex system – such as a general artificial intelligence (AI) that exceeded human intelligence?

Some technologists advocate design; others, prefer evolutionary search algorithms. Still others would selectively conflate the two, hoping to incorporate the best of both paradigms while avoiding their limitations. But while both processes are powerful, they are very different, and they are not easily combined. Rather, they present divergent paths.

Designed systems have predictability, efficiency, and control. Their subsystems are easily understood, which allows their reuse in different contexts. But designed systems also tend to break easily, and, so far at least, they have conquered only simple problems. Compare, for example, Microsoft code to biological code: Office 2004 is larger than the human genome.

By contrast, evolved systems are inspiring because they demonstrate that simple, iterative algorithms, distributed over time and space, can accumulate design and create complexity that is robust, resilient, and adaptive within its accustomed environment. In fact, biological evolution provides the only “existence proof” that an algorithm can produce complexity that transcends its antecedents. Biological evolution is so inspiring that engineers have mimicked its operations in areas such as artificial evolution, genetic programming, artificial life, and the iterative training of neural networks.

But evolved systems have their disadvantages. For one, they suffer from “subsystem inscrutability”, especially within their information networks. That is, when we direct the evolution of a system or train a neural network, we may know how the evolutionary process works, but we will not necessarily understand how the resulting system works internally. For example, when Danny Hillis evolved a simple sort algorithm, the process produced inscrutable and mysterious code that did a good job at sorting numbers. But had he taken the time to reverse-engineer his evolved system, the effort would not have provided much generalized insight into evolved artifacts.

Why is this? Stephen Wolfram’s theory of computational equivalence suggests that simple, formulaic shortcuts for understanding evolution may never be discovered. We can only run the iterative algorithm forward to see the results, and the various computational steps cannot be skipped.

Thus, if we evolve a complex system, it is a black box defined by its interfaces. We cannot easily apply our design intuition to improve upon its inner workings. We can’t even partition its subsystems without a serious effort at reverse engineering. And until we can understand the interfaces between partitions, we can’t hope to transfer a subsystem from one evolved complex system to another (unless they have co-evolved).

A grand engineering challenge therefore remains: can we integrate the evolutionary and design paths to exploit the best of both? Can we transcend human intelligence with an evolutionary algorithm yet maintain an element of control, or even a bias toward friendliness?

The answer is not yet clear. If we artificially evolve a smart AI, it will be an alien intelligence defined by its sensory interfaces, and understanding its inner workings may require as much effort as we are now expending to explain the human brain. Assuming that computer code can evolve much faster than biological reproduction rates, it is unlikely that we would take the time to reverse engineer these intermediate points given that there is so little that we could do with the knowledge. We would let the process of improvement continue.

Humans are not the end point of evolution. We are inserting ourselves into the evolutionary process. The next step in the evolutionary hierarchy of abstractions will accelerate the evolution of evolvability itself.

(Precursor threads from the photoblog: Stanford Singularity Summit, IBM Institute on Cognitive Computing, Santa Fe Institute’s evolution & scaling laws, Cornell’s replicating robots, and a TED Party)

Brainstorm Questions

2006-06-28T17:24:00.000-07:00

The editors of FORTUNE magazine asked four questions of the attendees of Brainstorm 2006. Ross Mayfield is blogging the replies and the ongoing conference. Here are my answers to two of the questions:

• WHAT THREE GLOBAL LEADERS WILL HAVE THE GREATEST IMPACT IN SETTING THE COURSE FOR THE NEXT DECADE?

None of the individuals named today.

I would bet that in 2016, when we look back on who has had the greatest impact in the prior 10 years, it will be an entrepreneur, someone new, someone unknown to us at this time.

Looking forward from the present, we tend to amplify the leaders of the past. But in retrospect, it’s always clear that the future belongs to a new generation. A new generation of leaders will transcend political systems that cater to the past. I would bet more on a process of empowerment than any particular person.

• WHAT DO YOU FEAR MOST?

I tend to be out of touch with fear as an emotion, and so I find myself rationally processing the question and thinking of the worst near-term catastrophe that could affect all of us.

At perhaps no time in recorded history has humanity been as vulnerable to viruses and biological pathogens as we are today. We are entering the golden age of natural viruses, and genetically modified and engineered pathogens dramatically compound the near term threat.

Bill Joy summarizes that “The risk of our extinction as we pass through this time of danger has been estimated to be anywhere from 30% to 50%.”

Why are we so vulnerable now?

The delicate "virus-host balance" observed in nature (whereby viruses tend not to be overly lethal to their hosts) is a byproduct of biological co-evolution on a geographically segregated planet. And now, both of those limitations have changed. Organisms can be re-engineered in ways that biological evolution would not have explored, or allowed to spread widely, and modern transportation undermines natural quarantine formation.

One example: According to Preston in The Demon in the Freezer, a single person in a typical university bio-lab can splice the IL-4 gene from the host into the corresponding pox virus. The techniques and effects are public information. The gene is available mail order.

The IL-4 splice into mousepox made the virus 100% lethal to its host, and 60% lethal to mice who had been vaccinated (more than 2 weeks prior). Even with a vaccine, the IL-4 mousepox is twice as lethal as natural smallpox (which killed ~30% of unvaccinated people). 

The last wave of “natural” human smallpox killed over one billion people. Even if we vaccinated everyone, the next wave could be twice as lethal. And, of course, we won’t have time to vaccinate everyone nor can we contain outbreaks with vaccinations.  

Imagine the human dynamic and policy implications if we have a purposeful IL-4 outbreak before we are better prepared…. Here is a series of implications that I fear:
 
1) Ring vaccinations and mass vaccinations would not work, so
2) Health care workers cannot come near these people, so 
3) Victims could not be relocated (with current people and infrastructure) without spreading the virus to the people involved. 
4) Quarantine would be essential, but it would be in-situ. Wherever there is an outbreak, there would need to be a hair-trigger quarantine. 
5) Unlike prior quarantines, where people could hope for the best, and most would survive, this is very different: everyone in the quarantine area dies. 
6) Where do you draw the boundary? Neighborhood? The entire city? With 100% lethality, the risk-reward ratio on conservatism shifts. 
7) How do you enforce the quarantine? Everyone who thinks they are not yet infected will try to escape with all of the fear and cunning of someone facing certain death if they stay. It would require an armed military response with immediate deployment capabilities. 
8) The ratio of those available to enforce quarantine to those contained makes this seem completely infeasible. With unplanned quarantine locations, there is no physical infrastructure to assist in the containment. 
9) Once word about a lost city spreads, how long would it take for ad-hoc or planned “accelerated quarantine” to emerge?
10) Once rumor of the quarantine policy spreads, doctors would have a strong perverse incentive to not report cases until they made it out of town…

Books I am Enjoying Now

2005-12-11T16:20:00.000-08:00

and the library they came from. Each image links to comments
. .

Keep On Booming

2005-10-29T13:28:00.000-07:00

(I thought I’d post an excerpt from testimony I gave to the WHCoA: the White House Conference on Aging. I tried to use language that might appeal to the current political regime. =)

Every 60 seconds, a baby boomer turns 60. In thinking about the aging demographic in America, let me approach the issue as a capitalist. Rather than regarding the burgeoning ranks of “retirees” as an economic sink of subsidies, I see an enormous market and an untapped opportunity. Many marketers are realizing the power of the boom, and some of our largest investors have made their fortune attending to the shifting needs of the boomers.

Aging boomers are numerous and qualitatively different. Compared to an older generational cohort, the average boomer is twice as likely to have college degree and 3x as likely to have Internet experience.

Envision a future where many aging boomers are happily and productively working, flex-time, from home, on tasks that require human judgment and can be abstracted out of work flows.

Fortunately, we are clearly entering an information age for the economy. The basis of competition for most companies and all real GNP growth will come from improvements in information processing. Even in medicine and agriculture, the advances of the future will derive from better understanding and manipulation of the information systems of biology.

In short, the boomers could be America’s outsourcing alternative to off-shoring. The Internet’s latest developments in web services and digital communications (VOIP and videoconferencing) lower the transaction costs of segmenting information work across distributed work organizations.

There is a wonderful economic asymmetry between those who have money and those who have time, between those who need an answer and those with information. This is a boomer opportunity. Imagine a modern-day Web librarian. Think of professional services, like translation, consulting or graphic arts. The majority of economic activity is in services, much of which is an information service, freely tradable on a global basis. Imagine an eBay for information. Boomers may be the beneficiaries.

The free market will naturally exploit opportunities in secondary education and retraining, telecommuting technologies for rich communication over the Internet, web services to segment and abstract workflow processes and ship them over the network to aging boomers, and technology to help all of us retain our mental acuity and neural plasticity as we age. Lifelong learning is not just about enlightenment; it’s an economic imperative.

Where can the government help? Primarily in areas already entrenched in regulation. I will point out two areas that need attention:

1) Broadband Access. Broadband is the lifeline to the economy of the future. It is a prerequisite to the vision I just described. But America trails behind twelve other countries in broadband adoption. For example, our per-capita broadband adoption is less than half that of Korea. The Pew Internet Project reports that “only 15% of Americans over the age of 65 have access to the Internet.”

Broadband is infrastructure, like the highways. The roads have to be free for innovation in the vehicles, or software, that run on them. Would we have permitted GM to build the highways in exchange for the right to make them work exclusively with GM cars? Would we forbid he building of new roads because they compete with older paths? Yet that is what we are doing with current broadband regulation.

2) Reengineering the FDA and Medicare. No small feat, but this should be a joint optimization. Medicare has the de facto role to establish reimbursement policy, and it often takes several years after FDA approval for guidelines to be set. This could be streamlined, and shifted to a parallel track to the FDA approval process so that these delays are not additive.

Why is this important? We are entering an intellectual Renaissance in medicine, but the pace of progress is limited by a bureaucracy that evolves at a glacial pace, relative to the technological opportunities that it regulates.

The FDA processes and policies will need to undergo profound transitions to a future of personalized and regenerative medicine. The frustration and tension with the FDA will grow with the mismatch between a static status quo and an exponential pace of technological process. Exponential? Consider that 80% of all known gene data was discovered in the past 12 months. In the next 20 years, we will learn more about genetics, systems biology and the origin of disease than we have in all of human history.

The fate of nations depends on their unfettered leadership in the frontier of scientific exploration. We need to explore all promising possibilities of research, from nanotechnology to neural plasticity to reengineering the information systems of biology. We are entering a period of exponential growth in technological learning, where the power of biotech, infotech, and nanotech compounds the advances in each formerly discrete domain. In exploring these frontiers, nations are buying options for the future. And as Black-Scholes option pricing reveals, the value of an option grows with the range of uncertainty in its outcome.

These are heady times. Historians will look back on the upcoming nano-bio epoch with no less portent than the Industrial Revolution. If we give our aging boomers free and unfettered broadband access, and our scientists free and unfettered access to the frontiers of the unknown, then our greatest generation, when the look to the next, can take pride in knowing that the best is yet to come.

XPRS: Big Rockets in the Black Rock Desert

2005-10-01T19:59:00.000-07:00

"In terms of sheer coolness, few things beat rocketry."
— Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder

I just had the most exciting weekend of my life.

For those who are not subscribers to my unified Feedburner RSS feed, the links here are to the relevant photos and commentary.

There was a steady stream of high power rockets, all day and into the night. Their roar quickens the pulse. Especially when they fall from the sky as supersonic lawn darts, shred fins at Mach 2, or go unstable and become landsharks. I had been warned about what happens when a supersonic rocket meets a Chevy Suburban.

The Hybrid Nitrous Oxide rockets and Mercury Joe scale model had glorious launches. To get my L1 Certification for high power rocketry, I had to build a rocket and H-size motor, and then successfully recover them after launch. I also tested my rocket videocam and GPS and altimeter systems.

Black Rock Desert in Nevada is the only place in the country with an FAA waiver to shoot up 100,000 feet, way beyond the end of the atmosphere.

I was camping with a member of the 100K team. It is a beautiful rocket, but this weekend a software bug brought the upper stage back to earth as a supersonic ground-penetrating “bunker buster” that tunneled and blasted a cave 14 feet under ground.

My inner child can’t wait for the next one…

Reverberations of Friendship

2005-07-23T21:11:00.000-07:00

On my flight to Estonia for a Skype board meeting, I was reading my usual geek fare, such as Matt Ridley’s Nature Via Nurture, a wonderful synthesis of phylogenetic inertia, nested genetic promoter feedback loops, bisexual bonobo sisterhoods, and the arrested development of domesticated animals.

While reading various interviews of Craig Venter, I stumbled across a nugget of sculptured prose from Patti Smith, which eloquently captures the resonant emotional filtration of a newfound friend and, in a more abstract way, the curious cultural immersion I felt in my Estonian homeland:

“There are those whom we seek and there are those whom we find. Occasionally we find – however fractured the relativity – one we recognize as kin. In doing so, certain curious aspects of character recede and we happily magnify the common ground.”

Ode to Carbon

2005-03-25T15:47:00.001-08:00

I took a close look at the benzene molecular model on my desk, and visions of nested snake loops danced in my head…

Is there something unique about the carbon in carbon-based life forms?

Carbon can form strong bonds with a variety of materials, whereas the silicon of electronics is more finicky. Some elements of the periodic table are quite special. Herein may lie a molecular neo-vitalism, not for the discredited metaphysics of life, but for scalable computational architectures that exploit three dimensions.

Why is the difference in bonding variety between carbon and silicon important? The computational power of nature relies on a multitude of shapes (in the context of Wolfram’s principle of computational equivalence whereby any natural process of interest can be viewed as a comparably complex computation).

“Shape based computing is at the heart of hormone-receptor hookups, antigen-antibody matchups, genetic information transfer and cell differentiation. Life uses the shape of chemicals to identify, to categorize, to deduce and to decide what to do.” (Biomimicry, p.194)

Jaron Lanier abstracts the computation of molecular shapes to phenotropic computation along conformational and interacting surfaces, rather than linear strings like a Turing Machine or a data link. Some of these abstractions already apply to biomimetic robots that “treat the pliability of their own building materials as an aspect of computation.” (Lanier)

When I visited Nobel Laureate Smalley at Rice, he argued that the future of nanotech would be carbon based, due to its uniquely strong covalent bond potential, and carbon’s ability to bridge the world of electronics to the world of aqueous and organic chemistries, a world that is quite oxidative to traditional electronic elements.

At ACC2003, I moderated a debate with Kurzweil, Tuomi and Prof. Michael Denton from New Zealand. While I strongly disagreed with Denton's speculations on vitalism, he started with the interesting proposition that "self-replication arises from unique types of matter and can not be instantiated in different materials... The key to self-replication is self-assembly by energy minimization, relieving the cell of the informational burden of specifying its 3D complexity... Self-replication is not a substrate independent phenomenon." (Of course, self-replication is not impossible in other physical systems, for that would violate quantum mechanics, but it might be infeasible to design and build within a reasonable period of time.)

Natural systems exploit the rich dynamics of weak bonds (in protein folding, DNA hybridization, etc.) and perhaps the power of quantum scanning of all possible orbitals (there is a probability for the wave function of each bond). Molecules snap together faster than predicted by normal Brownian interaction rates, and perhaps this is fundamental to their computational power.

For example, consider the chemical reaction of a caffeine molecule binding to a receptor (something which is top of mind =). These two molecules are performing a quantum mechanical computation to solve the Schrödinger equation for all of their particles. This simple system is finding the simultaneous solution for about 2^1000 equations. That is a task of such immense complexity that if all of the matter of the universe was recast into BlueGene supercomputers, they could not find the solution even if they crunched away for the entire history of the universe. And that’s for one of the molecules in your coffee cup. The Matrix would require a different approach. =)

A simultaneous 3D exploration of all possible bonds warps Wolfram’s classical computational equivalence into a neo-vitalist quantum equivalence argument for the particular elements and material sets that can best exploit these dynamics. A quantum computer with 1000 logical qubits could perfectly simulate the coffee molecule by solving the Schrödinger equations in polynomial time.

Of course this begs the question of how we would design and program these conformational quantum computers. Again, nature provides an existence proof – with the simple process of evolutionary search surpassing intelligent design of complex systems. Which brings us back the earlier blog prediction, that biology will drive the future of information technology – inspirationally, metaphorically, and perhaps, elementally.

Traditional electronics design, on the other hand, has the advantages of exquisite speed and efficiency. The biggest challenge may prove to be the hybridization of these domains and design processes.

TED Reflections

2005-03-06T22:01:00.000-08:00

TED is a wonderfully refreshing brain spa, an eclectic ensemble of mental exercise that helps rekindle the childlike mind of creativity.

This year’s theme was “Inspired by Nature”, which I believe has broad and interdisciplinary relevance, especially to the future of intelligence and information technology. By the end of the conference, there was a common thread running throughout the myriad talks, a leitmotif along the frontiers of the unknown. I felt as if I had been immersed in a fugue of biomimicry.

I am still trying to synthesize the discussions I had with Kurzweil, Venter and Hillis about subsystem complexity in evolved systems, but until then, I thought I’d share some of my favorite quotes and photos.

• Rodney Brooks, MIT robotocist:
“Within 2-3 weeks, freshmen are adding BioBricks to the E.Coli bacteria chassis. They make oscillators that flash slowly and digital computation agents. But the digital abstraction may not be right metaphor for programming biology.”

“Polyclad flatworms have about 2000 neurons. You can take their brain out and put it back in backwards. The worm moves backwards at first, but adapts over time back to normal. You can rotate its brain 180 degrees and put it in upside down, and it still works. Biology is changing our understanding of complexity and computation.”

• Craig Venter, when asked about the risks of ‘playing God’ in the creation of a new form of microbial life: “My colleague Hammie Smith likes to answer: ‘We don’t play.’”

“With Synthetic Genomics, genes are the design components for the future of biology. We hope to replace the petrochemical industry, most food, clean energy and bioremediation.”

“The sea is very heterogeneous. We sampled seawater microbes every 200 miles and 85% of the gene sequences in each sample were unique... 80% of all known gene data is new in the last year.”

“There are about 5*10^30 microbes on Earth. The Archaea alone outweigh all plants and animals... One milliliter of sea water has 1 million bacteria and 10 million viruses.”

• Graham Hawkes, radical submarine inventor, would agree:
“94% of life on Earth is aquatic. I am embarrassed to call our planet ‘Earth’. It’s an ocean planet.”

• Janine Benyus, author of Biomimicry (discussion):
“Our heat, beat and treat approach to manufacturing is 96% waste... Life adds information to matter. Life creates conditions conducive to life.”

• Kevin Kelly, a brilliant author and synthesizer:
“Organisms hack the rules of life. Every rule has an exception in nature.”

“Life and technology tend toward ubiquity, diversity, specialization, complexity and sociability…. What does technology want? Technology wants a zillion species of one. Technology is the evolution of evolution itself, exploring the ways to explore, a game to play all the games.”

• James Watson, on finding DNA's helix: “It all happened in about two hours. We went from nothing to thing.” (Photo and discussion)

• The Bill Joy nightmare ensemble: GNR epitomized in Venter (Genetics), Kurzweil (Nanotech) and Brooks (Robotics).

• The Feynman Fan club: particle diagrams take on human form =)
• GM’s VP of R&D on the importance of hydrogen to the auto industry.
• Amory Lovins on the inefficiency of current autos

• And, for entertainment, a Grateful Dead drum circle, Pilobolus, and polypedal studies.

• Bono, Streaming video of his TED Prize acceptance speech:
“A head of state admitted this to me: There’s no chance this kind of hemorrhaging of human life would be accepted anywhere else other than Africa. Africa is a continent in flames.”

Thanks for the Memory

2005-01-09T18:03:00.000-08:00

While reading Jeff Hawkins’ book On Intelligence, I was struck by the resonant coherence of his memory-prediction framework for how the cortex works. It was like my first exposure to complexity theory at the Santa Fe Institute – providing a perceptual prism for the seeing the consilience across various scientific conundrums. So, I had to visit him at the Redwood Neuroscience Institute.

As a former chip designer, I kept thinking of comparisons between the different “memories” – those in our head and those in our computers. It seems that the developmental trajectory of electronics is recapitulating the evolutionary history of the brain. Specifically, both are saturating with a memory-centric architecture. Is this a fundamental attractor in computation and cognition? Might a conceptual focus on speedy computation be blinding us to a memory-centric approach to artificial intelligence?

• First, the brain:
“The brain does not ‘compute’ the answers to problems; it retrieves the answers from memory… The entire cortex is a memory system. It isn’t a computer at all.”

Rather than a behavioral or computation-centric model, Hawkins presents a memory-prediction framework for intelligence. The 30 billion neurons in the neocortex provide a vast amount of memory that learns a model of the world. These memory-based models continuously make low-level predictions in parallel across all of our senses. We only notice them when a prediction is incorrect. Higher in the hierarchy, we make predictions at higher levels of abstraction (the crux of intelligence, creativity and all that we consider being human), but the structures are fundamentally the same.

More specifically, Hawkins argues that the cortex stores a temporal sequence of patterns in a repeating hierarchy of invariant forms and recalls them auto-associatively. The framework elegantly explains the importance of the broad synaptic connectivity and nested feedback loops seen in the cortex.

The cortex is relatively new development by evolutionary time scales. After a long period of simple reflexes and reptilian instincts, only mammals evolved a neocortex, and in humans it usurped some functionality (e.g., motor control) from older regions of the brain. Thinking of the reptilian brain as a “logic”-centric era in our development that then migrated to a memory-centric model serves as a good segue to electronics.

• And now, electronics:
The mention of Moore’s Law conjures up images of speedy microprocessors. Logic chips used to be mostly made of logic gates, but today’s microprocessors, network processors, FPGAs, DSPs and other “systems on a chip” are mostly memory. And they are still built in fabs that were optimized for logic, not memory.

The IC market can be broadly segmented into memory and logic chips. The ITRS estimates that in the next six years, 90% of all logic chip area will actually be memory. Coupled with the standalone memory business, we are entering an era for complex chips where almost all transistors manufactured are memory, not logic.

At the presciently named HotChips conference, AMD, Intel, Sony and Sun showed their latest PC, server, and PlayStation processors. They are mostly memory. In moving from the Itanium to the Montecito processor, Intel saturated the design with memory, moving from three megabytes to 26.5MB of cache memory. From a quick calculation (assuming 6 transistors per SRAM bit and error correction code overhead), the Montecito processor has ~1.5 billion transistors of memory, and 0.2 billion of logic. And Intel thought it had exited the memory business in the 80’s. |-)

Why the trend? The primary design enhancement from the prior generation is “relieving the memory bottleneck.” Intel explains the problem with their current processor: "For enterprise work loads, Itanium executes 15% of the time and stalls 85% of the time waiting for main memory.” When the processor lacks the needed data in the on-chip cache, it has to take a long time penalty to access the off-chip DRAM. Power and cost are also improved to the extent that more can be integrated on chip.

Given the importance of memory advances and the relative ease of applying molecular electronics to memory, we may see a bifurcation in Moore’s Law, where technical advances in memory precede logic by several years. This is because molecular self-assembly approaches apply easily to regular 2D structures, like a memory array, and not to the heterogeneous interconnect of logic gates. Self-assembly of simple components does not lend itself to complex designs. (There are many more analogies to the brain that can be made here, but I will save comments about interconnect, learning and plasticity for a future post).

Weaving these brain and semi industry threads together, the potential for intelligence in artificial systems is ripe for a Renaissance. Hawkins ends his book with a call to action: “now is the time to start building cortex-like memory systems... The human brain is not even close to the limit” of possibility.

Hawkins estimates that the memory size of the human brain is 8 terabytes, which is no longer beyond the reach of commercial technology. The issue though, is not the amount of memory, but the need for massive and dynamic interconnect. I would be interested to hear from anyone with solutions to the interconnect scaling problem. Biomimicry of the synapse, from sprouting to pruning, may be the missing link for the Renaissance.

P.S. On a lighter note, here is a photo of a cortex under construction. ;-)

Giving Thanks to our Libraries & Bio-Hackers

2004-11-25T20:17:00.000-08:00

As I eat a large meal today, I am reminded of so much that we should be thankful for. Most evidently, we should give thanks to the epiglottis, the little valve that flaps with every swallow to keep food and drink out of our windpipe. Unlike other mammals, we can’t drink and breathe at the same time, and we are prone to choking, but hey, our larynx location makes complex speech a lot easier.

Much of our biology is more sublime. With the digitization of myriad genomes, we are learning to decode and reprogram the information systems of biology. Like computer hackers, we can leverage a prior library of evolved code, assemblers and subsystems. Many of the radical applications lie outside of medicine.

For example, a Danish group is testing a genetically-modified plant in the war-torn lands of Bosnia and Africa. Instead of turning red in autumn, this plant changes color in the presence of land mines or unexploded ordinance. Red marks the spot for land mine removal.

At MIT, researchers are using accelerated artificial evolution to rapidly breed M13 viruses to infect bacteria in such a way that they bind and organize semiconductor materials with molecular precision.

At IBEA, Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith are leading the Minimal Genome Project. They take the Mycoplasma genitalium from the human urogenital tract, and strip out 200 unnecessary genes, thereby creating the simplest synthetic organism that can self-replicate (at about 300 genes). They plan to layer new functionality on to this artificial genome, to make a solar cell or to generate hydrogen from water using the sun’s energy for photonic hydrolysis (perhaps by splicing in novel genes discovered in the Sargasso Sea for energy conversion from sunlight).

Venter explains: “Creating a new life form is a means of understanding the genome and understanding the gene sets. We don’t have enough scientists on the planet, enough money, and enough time using traditional methods to understand the millions of genes we are uncovering. So we have to develop new approaches… to understand empirically what the different genes do in developing living systems.”

Thankfully, these researchers can leverage a powerful nanoscale molecular assembly machine. It is 20nm on a side and consists of only 99 thousand atoms. It reads a tape of digital instructions to concatenate molecules into polymer chains.

I am referring to the ribosome. It reads mRNA code to assemble proteins from amino acids, thereby manufacturing most of what you care about in your body. And it serves as a wonderful existence proof for the imagination.

So let’s raise a glass to the lowly ribosome and the library of code it can interpret. Much of our future context will be defined by the accelerating proliferation of information technology, as it innervates society and begins to subsume matter into code.

(These themes relate to the earlier posts on the human genome being smaller than Microsoft Office and on the power of biological metaphors for the future of information technology.)

P.S. Happy Thanksgiving, even to the bears… =)

Nanotech is the Nexus of the Sciences

2004-11-21T08:51:00.000-08:00

Disruptive innovation, the driver of growth and renewal, occurs at the edge. In startups, innovation occurs out of the mainstream, away from the warmth of the herd. In biological evolution, innovative mutations take hold at the physical edge of the population, at the edge of survival. In complexity theory, structure and complexity emerge at the edge of chaos – the dividing line between predictable regularity and chaotic indeterminacy. And in science, meaningful disruptive innovation occurs in the inter-disciplinary interstices between formal academic disciplines.

Herein lies much of the excitement about nanotechnology. Quite simply, it is in the richness of human communication about science. Nanotech exposes the core areas of overlap in the fundamental sciences, the place where quantum physics and quantum chemistry can cross-pollinate with ideas from the life sciences.

Over time, each of the academic disciplines develops its own proprietary systems vernacular that isolates it from neighboring disciplines. Nanoscale science requires scientists to cut across scientific languages to unite the isolated islands of innovation.

In academic centers and government labs, nanotech is fostering new conversations. At Stanford, Duke and many other schools, the new nanotech buildings are physically located at the symbolic hub of the schools of engineering, computer science and medicine.

(Keep in mind though, that outside of the science and research itself, the "nanotech" moniker conveys no business synergy whatsoever. The marketing, distribution and sales of a nanotech solar cell, memory chip or drug delivery capsule will be completely different from each other, and will present few opportunities for common learning or synergy.)

Nanotech is the nexus of the sciences. The history of humanity is that we use our tools and our knowledge to build better tools and expand the bounds of our learning. Empowered by the digitization of the information systems of biology, the nanotech nexus is catalyzing an innovation Renaissance, a period of exponential growth in learning, where the power of biotech, infotech and nanotech compounds the advances in each formerly discrete domain. This should be a very exciting epoch, one that historians may look back on with no less portent than the Industrial Revolution.

Clones and Mutants

2004-11-14T13:36:00.000-08:00

“Life is the imperfect transmission of code.” At our life sciences conference in Half Moon Bay, Juan Enriquez shared some his adventures around the biosphere, from an Argentinean clone farm to shotgun sequencing the Sargasso Sea with Craig Venter. From the first five ocean samples, they grew the number of known genes on the planet by 10x and the number of genes involved in solar energy conversion by 100x. The ocean microbes have evolved over a longer period of time and have pathways that are more efficient than photosynthesis.

• Clone Farms
Juan showed a series of photos from his October trip to a farm in Argentina. With simple equipment that fits on a desk, the farmer cloned and implanted 60 embryos that morning. All of the cows in his field came from a cell sample from the ear of one cow.

Some of the cows are genetically modified to produce pharmaceutical proteins in their milk (human EPO). These animal bioreactors are very efficient and could replace large buildings of traditional manufacturing capacity.

Whether stem cell research and treatment for ALS, or cloning cows, Argentina is one of the countries boldly going where the U.S. Federal government fears to tread.

• Three Wing Chickens
Juan also showed a genetically engineered three wing chicken. The homeobox gene that has been modified is affectionately called “Sonic Hedgehog” (his son really likes SEGA!)

The homeobox genes are my favorites. They are like powerful subroutine calls that have structural phenotypic effects.

I recommend Juan’s book As the Future Catches You for an exploration of the economic imperative of technology education, especially literacy in the modern languages of digital code and genetic code. And for a populist description of the homeobox genes, I recommend Matt Ridley’s Genome, a very fun primer on genetics. Here is a selection:

“Hedgehog has its equivalents in people and in birds. Three very similar genes do much the same thing in chicks and people… The hedgehog genes define the front and rear of the wing, and it is Hox genes that then divide it up into digits. The transformation of a simple limb bud into a five-fingered hand happens in every one of us, but it also happened, on a different timescale, when the first tetrapods developed hands from fish fins some time after 400 million years ago.”

"So simple is embryonic development that it is tempting to wonder if human engineers should not try to copy it, and invent self-assembling machines.”

One of Juan’s slides was the first hand drawn map of the Internet, circa 1969. Larry Roberts had drawn that map, and happened to be in the audience to brainstorm after the talk.

P.S. The most popular phone at our conference was the Moto Razor, Chinese edition.

P.S.S. The most popular blog photo so far (with over 12,000 visitors) is a simple message…

Spooks and Goblins

2004-10-31T16:30:00.000-08:00

As it’s Halloween here, I got to thinking about strange beliefs and their origins. Do you think that the generation of myths and folkloric false beliefs has declined over time?

In addition to the popularization of the scientific method, I wonder if photography lessened the promulgation of tall tales. Before photography, if someone told you a story about ghosts in the haunted house or the beast on the hill, you could chose to believe them or check for yourself. There was no way to say, “show me a picture of that Yeti or Loch Ness Monster, and then I’ll believe you.”

And, if so, will we regress as we have developed the ability to modify and fabricate photos and video?

For our class on genetic free speech, Lessig used a pre-print of Posner’s new book, Catastophe: Risk and Response. Posner relates the following statistics on American adults:
• 39% believe astrology is scientific (astrology, not astronomy).
• 33% believe in ghosts and communication with the dead.

Ponder that for a moment. One out of every three U.S. adults believes in ghosts. Who knows what their kids think.

People’s willingness to believe untruths relates to the ability of the average person to reason critically about reality. Here are some less amusing statistics on American adults:
• 46% deny that human beings evolved from earlier animal species.
• 49% don’t know that it takes a year for the earth to revolve around the sun.
• 67% don't know what a molecule is.
• 80% can't understand the NY Times Tuesday science section.

Posner concludes: “It is possible that science is valued by most Americans as another form of magic.” This is a wonderful substrate for false memes and a new generation of bogeymen.

Gotta go… It’s time to trick-or-treat… =)

The Photo Blog

2004-10-27T21:28:00.000-07:00

For those of you who are not receiving the Feedburner RSS Feed of this blog, you are missing the whimsical and visual postings. So, for Halloween, I thought I’d post links to some of the interesting photos and commentary:

• Fun with: Bush, Kennedy, Gates, Jobs, Moore, and Jamis in Japanese.

• Observations from the first screening of Pixar’s new film, The Incredibles.

• Beautiful Scenes from: Estonia, the Canadian Rockies, Singapore, Montage (Beach), and The Internet.

• Odd Photos: Halloween Horses, Climbing the Dish at Stanford, Extreme Macro Zoom, Elephants, Aquasaurs and Ecospheres, the Technorati Bobsled Team, and the NanoCar spoof (which continues to fool people even this week).

• It came from TED: Visual Material Puzzles (another) and the DeepFlight submarine.

• And, of course, Rockets, Detached Heads, Funky Pink Divas and Robot Women.

An eclectic mix…. Happy Halloween!

Defining “Don’t be Evil”

2004-10-18T13:26:00.000-07:00

Back in 1995, it was easy to rig search engine results. Some search engines would actually tell you how they parsed just the first 100 words on the page. And they would let you submit pages to be crawled for fast feedback on how page content modifications lead to search results. Stacking white keywords on a white background at the top of the page did the trick for a couple years.

Then Overture invented the pay for placement model, which Google disdained as “evil” and then adopted as its primary revenue model. Google got around their own evil epithet by clearly delineating paid search results from unpaid. This has been their holy line in the sand. From the Business Journal: "'Don't be evil' is the corporate mantra around Google…. When their competitors began mixing paid placement listings with actual search results, Google stayed pure, drawing a clear line between search results and advertising.”

So Overture and Google have made search engine results a BIG business, and several “consultants” sell advice on how to spike results, but their tricks are short lived.

So it was with some amusement, that I found a way to easily spike certain Google search results. This has worked for a few months now, and it will be interesting to see how long it lasts after this post… ;-)

A reader of this blog pointed out to me that my Blogger Profile gets the top two Google search results for IL-4 smallpox, a genetically modified bioweapon. This is when my blog had no content whatsoever in this area (it now does). My profile is also number one for genetically modified pathogen policy, over thousands of more relevant pages.

And my profile is number one for several areas of whimsy: Techno downbeat music, and Nanotech core memory boards, and Artificial life with female moths, and Viral marketing with Technorati, among others. (disclosure: we invested in Technorati and Overture). Of course, longer phrases are easier to spike, and not everything works for a top placement, but this still seems way too easy.

Why is this interesting? Well, Google owns Blogger, and they get to decide how to fold blog pages into search results. It’s not obvious how to rank a vapid Blogger profile page versus real content… or a competing blog service for that matter. And as Google offers more services like Blogger and Orkut, it will be interesting to see how they promote them in their own search results.

Every person I have met from Google is fantastic, and I don’t think this quirk is an overt strategy passed down from management (and I presume it will disappear as more people exploit it). On the other hand, this is the kind of product tying you would expect from Microsoft. And it begs the question, can a mantra to not do evil infuse into the corporate DNA and continue to drive culture as a company scales?

There's also the question of internal consistency. Thinking back to the holy line in the sand about disclosing advertising in search results, does it somehow not count if you own it?

Google has taken on the challenge of defining evil, which begs for an operational constitution. Neal Stephenson proposes one meta rule: in a climate of moral relativism the only sin is hypocrisy.

Childish Scientists

2004-10-15T11:44:00.000-07:00

In the comments to the Celebrate the Child-Like Mind posting, a wonderful quote came from Argentina:

"I know not what I appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore” – Sir Isaac Newton

Of course, this observation does not apply just to the Newtonian physicists. The September issue of Discover Magazine observes: “Einstein had the genius to view space and time like a child,” as with his thought experiments of riding a light-beam. "His breakthrough realization of the relativity of time turned on a series of mental cartoons featuring trains and clocks. General relativity, his theory of gravity, started off as a meditation on what happens when a man falls off a roof."

And the fantastic physicist Feynman (the first person to propose nanotechnology in his 1960 lecture “There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom”) is especially child-like: "When Richard Feynman faced a problem he was unusually good at going back to being like a child, ignoring what everyone else thinks and saying, 'Now, what have we got here?'" – The Science of Creativity, p.102.

For a humorous aside, the T.H.O.N.G. protesters remixed Feynman as "Plenty of Room at This Bottom."

Lest we think that childishness is reserved for physicists, I am reminded of my meeting with James Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix. His breakthrough technique: fiddling with metal models and doodling the fused rings of adenine on paper. I like this summary: “Watson can himself be quite the double helix – a sharp scientific mind intertwined with a child-like innocence.”

How far can this generalize? In Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi, the author “finds a childlike component in each of their creative breakthroughs.”

This final quote reminds me of a wonderful echo of Michael Schrage’s claim that reality is the opposite of play:

“One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike – and yet it is the most precious thing we have.”
– Albert Einstein

Notes from EDAY 2004

2004-10-11T09:09:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, IDEO mixed some fun and play with some great lectures:

• Stanford Prof. Bob Sutton: “Sometimes the best management is no management at all. Managers consistently overestimate their impact on performance. And once you manage someone, you immediately think more highly of them.” When Chuck House wanted to develop the oscilloscope for HP, David Packard told him to abandon the project. Chuck went on vacation” and came back with $2MM in orders. Packard later gave him an award inscribed with an accolade for “extraordinary contempt and defiance beyond the normal call of engineering.” When Leakey chose Jane Goodall, he “wanted someone with a mind uncluttered and unbiased by theory.” Sutton’s conclusion for innovative work: “Hire slow learners of the organizational code, people who are oblivious to social cues and have very high self-esteem. They will draw on past individual experience or invent new methods.”

• Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the Institute for Play, showed a fascinating series of photos of animals playing (ravens sliding on their backs down an icy slope, monkeys rolling snowballs and playing leapfrog, and various inter-species games). “Warm-blooded animals play; fish and reptiles do not. Warm blood stores energy, and a cortex allows for choice and REM sleep.”

Brown has also studied the history of mass murderers, and found “normal play behavior was virtually absent throughout the lives of highly violent, anti-social men. The opposite of ‘play’ is not ‘work’. It’s depression.”

“We are designed to play. We need 3D motion. The smarter the creature the more they play. The sea squirt auto-digests its brain when it becomes sessile.”

• Michael Schrage, MIT Media Lab Fellow, defined play as “the riskless competition between speculative choices. If it’s predictable, it’s not play. The opposite of play is not what is serious, but what is real. The paradox is that you can’t be serious if you don’t play.”

“We need to treat our tools as toys and our toys as tools. Our simulations, models and prototypes need to play.”

More Things Change

2004-10-08T13:48:00.000-07:00

I am at the World Technology Summit today. Just finished a panel on accelerating change, where John Smart made the following provocative points:

• Technology learns 100 million times faster than you do.
• Humans are selective catalysts, not controllers, of technological evolutionary development.
• 80-90% of your paycheck comes from automation.
• Catastrophes accelerate societal immunity. The network always wins.

If you want to take a deep dive into these topics with him, John is hosting Accelerating Change 2004 at Stanford, Nov 6-7. He is offering a $50 discount to readers of this blog (discount code "AC2004-J" with all caps).

Update: For those not subscribing to the Feedburner RSS feed, here are some new photos from WTS 2004 and the Awards Dinner.

Celebrate the Child-Like Mind

2004-10-03T15:16:00.000-07:00

Celebrate immaturity. Play every day. Fail early and often.

From what I can see, the best scientists and engineers nurture a child-like mind. They are playful, open minded and unrestrained by the inner voice of reason, collective cynicism, or fear of failure.

On Thursday, I went to a self-described "play-date" at David Kelley's house. The founder of IDEO is setting up an interdisciplinary "D-School" for design and creativity at Stanford. David and Don Norman noted that creativity is killed by fear, referencing experiments that contrast people’s approach to walking along a balance beam flat on the ground (playful and expressive) and then suspended in the air (fearful and rigid). They are hosting an open conference on Saturday, appropriately entitled The Power of Play.

In science, meaningful disruptive innovation occurs at the inter-disciplinary interstices between formal academic disciplines. Perhaps the D-school will go further, to “non-disciplined studies” – stripped of systems vernacular, stricture, and the constraints of discipline.

What is so great about the “child-like” mind? Looking across the Bay to Berkeley, I highly recommend Alison Gopnik’s Scientist in the Crib to any geek about to have a child. Here is one of her key conclusions: "Babies are just plain smarter than we are, at least if being smart means being able to learn something new.... They think, draw conclusions, make predictions, look for explanations and even do experiments…. In fact, scientists are successful precisely because they emulate what children do naturally."

Much of the human brain’s power derives from its massive synaptic interconnectivity. I spoke with Geoffrey West from the Santa Fe Institute last night. He observed that across species, synapses/neuron fan-out grows as a power law with brain mass.

At the age of 2 to 3 years old, children hit their peak with 10x the synapses and 2x the energy burn of an adult brain. And it’s all downhill from there.

This UCSF Memory and Aging Center graph shows that the pace of cognitive decline is the same in the 40’s as in the 80’s. We just notice more accumulated decline as we get older, especially when we cross the threshold of forgetting most of what we try to remember.

But we can affect this progression. Prof. Merzenich at UCSF has found that neural plasticity does not disappear in adults. It just requires mental exercise. Use it or lose it. We have to get out of the mental ruts that career tracks and academic “disciplines” can foster. Blogging is a form of mental exercise. I try to let this one take a random walk of curiosities and child-like exploration.

Bottom line: Embrace lifelong learning. Do something new. Physical exercise is repetitive; mental exercise is eclectic.

Quote of the Day

2004-10-01T21:57:00.000-07:00

"Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past.
It's good that we have museums to document them."
- Bill Gates, today at the Computer History Museum (former SGI HQ)

At the reception, Gates mingled in front of the wooden Apple 1, with a banner over his head: “The Two Steves.”

Transcending Moore’s Law with Molecular Electronics

2004-09-26T20:48:00.000-07:00

The future of Moore’s Law is not CMOS transistors on silicon. Within 25 years, they will be as obsolete as the vacuum tube.

While this will be a massive disruption to the semiconductor industry, a larger set of industries depends on continued exponential cost declines in computational power and storage density. Moore’s Law drives electronics, communications and computers and has become a primary driver in drug discovery and bioinformatics, medical imaging and diagnostics. Over time, the lab sciences become information sciences, and then the speed of iterative simulations accelerates the pace of progress.

There are several reasons why molecular electronics is the next paradigm for Moore’s Law:

• Size: Molecular electronics has the potential to dramatically extend the miniaturization that has driven the density and speed advantages of the integrated circuit (IC) phase of Moore’s Law. For a memorable sense of the massive difference in scale, consider a single drop of water. There are more molecules in a single drop of water than all transistors ever built. Think of the transistors in every memory chip and every processor ever built, worldwide. Sure, water molecules are small, but an important part of the comparison depends on the 3D volume of a drop. Every IC, in contrast, is a thin veneer of computation on a thick and inert substrate.

• Power: One of the reasons that transistors are not stacked into 3D volumes today is that the silicon would melt. Power per calculation will dominate clock speed as the metric of merit for the future of computation. The inefficiency of the modern transistor is staggering. The human brain is ~100 million times more power efficient than our modern microprocessors. Sure the brain is slow (under a kHz) but it is massively parallel (with 100 trillion synapses between 60 billion neurons), and interconnected in a 3D volume. Stan Williams, the director of HP’s quantum science research labs, concludes: “it should be physically possible to do the work of all the computers on Earth today using a single watt of power.”

• Manufacturing Cost: Many of the molecular electronics designs use simple spin coating or molecular self-assembly of organic compounds. The process complexity is embodied in the inexpensive synthesized molecular structures, and so they can literally be splashed on to a prepared silicon wafer. The complexity is not in the deposition or the manufacturing process or the systems engineering.

Biology does not tend to assemble complexity at 1000 degrees in a high vacuum. It tends to be room temperature or body temperature. In a manufacturing domain, this opens the possibility of cheap plastic substrates instead of expensive silicon ingots.

• Elegance: In addition to these advantages, some of the molecular electronics approaches offer elegant solutions to non-volatile and inherently digital storage. We go through unnatural acts with CMOS silicon to get an inherently analog and leaky medium to approximate a digital and non-volatile abstraction that we depend on for our design methodology. Many of the molecular electronic approaches are inherently digital and immune to soft errors, and some are inherently non-volatile.

For more details, I recently wrote a 20 page article expanding on these ideas and nanotech in general (PDF download). And if anyone is interested in the references and calculations for the water drop and brain power comparisons, I can provide the details in the Comments.

Recapitulation in Nested Evolutionary Dynamics

2004-09-17T11:14:00.000-07:00

I noticed the following table of interval time compression midway down the home page of singularitywatch.com:

“3–4 million years ago: collective rock throwing…
500,000 years ago: control of fire
50,000 years ago: bow and arrow; fine tools
5,000 years ago: wheel and axle; sail
500 years ago: printing press with movable type; rifle
50 years ago: the transistor; digital computers”

Then I burst out laughing with a maturationist epiphany: this is exactly the same sequence of development I went though as a young boy! It started with collective rock throwing (I still have a scar inside my lip)..... then FIRE IS COOL!.... then slingshots…. and the wheels of my bike…. then writing and my pellet gun.... and by 7th grade, programming the Apple ][. Spooky.

It reminded me of the catchy aphorism: “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (the overgeneralization that fetal embryonic development replays ancestral evolutionary stages) and recapitulation theories in general.

I’m thinking of Dawkin’s description of memes (elements of ideas and culture) as fundamental mindless replicators, like genes, for which animals are merely vectors for replication (like a host to the virus). In Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore explores the meme-gene parallels and derives an interesting framework for explaining the unusual size of the human brain and the origins of consciousness, language, altruism, religion, and orkut.

Discussions of the cultural and technological extensions of our biological evolution evoke notions of recapitulation – to reestablish the foundation for compounding progress across generations. But perhaps it is something more fundamental, a “basic conserved and resonant developmental homology” as John Smart would describe it. A theme of evolutionary dynamics operating across different substrates and time scales leads to inevitable parallels in developmental sequences.

For example, Gardner’s Selfish Biocosm hypothesis extends evolution across successive universes. His premise is that the anthropic qualities (life and intelligence-friendly) of our universe derive from “an enormously lengthy cosmic replication cycle in which… our cosmos duplicates itself and propagates one or more "baby universes." The hypothesis suggests that the cosmos is "selfish" in the same metaphorical sense that evolutionary theorist and ultra-Darwinist Richard Dawkins proposed that genes are "selfish." …The cosmos is "selfishly" focused upon the overarching objective of achieving its own replication.”

Gardner concludes with another nested spiral of recapitulation:
“An implication of the Selfish Biocosm hypothesis is that the emergence of life and ever more accomplished forms of intelligence is inextricably linked to the physical birth, evolution, and reproduction of the cosmos.”