They dream of a world where they can make us better. They won’t let things like morals and ethics stand in the way of their inexorable pursuit of knowledge and control. Their ever more mechanical view of human beings will make it difficult to see that we are more than the sum of our parts.
In a world where perception often seems to hold more weight than reality, I implore you to not let them define you. Don’t let them set boundaries for your potential. Don’t let them take away your dignity, your spirit, your dreams. Don’t let them extinguish your fire.
I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them.
I want to travel in Europe. And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it’s a most precious graveyard. Precious are the dead that lie there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them; though I’m convinced in my heart that it’s long been nothing but a graveyard. And I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in emotion.
I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach. One loves the first strength of one’s youth.
What greater sin could there be than a monopoly on knowledge? Academic publishing is one of the last bastions of greed to not feel the effects of modern technology, but it will be disrupted.
Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won’t guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but – wait for it – to academic publishers. Theirs might sound like a fusty and insignificant sector. It is anything but. Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities.
Everyone claims to agree that people should be encouraged to understand science and other academic research. Without current knowledge, we cannot make coherent democratic decisions. But the publishers have slapped a padlock and a “keep out” sign on the gates.
What we see here is pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it. Another term for it is economic parasitism. To obtain the knowledge for which we have already paid, we must surrender our feu to the lairds of learning.
It’s bad enough for academics, it’s worse for the laity. I refer readers to peer-reviewed papers, on the principle that claims should be followed to their sources. The readers tell me that they can’t afford to judge for themselves whether or not I have represented the research fairly. Independent researchers who try to inform themselves about important scientific issues have to fork out thousands. This is a tax on education, a stifling of the public mind. It appears to contravene the universal declaration of human rights, which says that “everyone has the right freely to … share in scientific advancement and its benefits”.
I’ve always felt that a people’s movies provide a hidden glimpse into their collective consciousness. It would seem that the equalization of humanity with other intelligent forms of life on this planet, and an appreciation for that belief’s consequences, has begun.
Rise is a character study of a super-intelligent chimpanzee named Caesar, beautifully realized by motion-capture maestro Andy Serkis, who rebels against his human masters. Not only will you be cheering him on, but you’ll also be left asking hard questions about the future of Homo sapiens and the ethical ambiguities of science. Rise is a delicious combination of humble, B-movie flimflam and genuine brilliance.
Unlike its predecessors in Apes franchise, Rise of the Planet of the Apes isn’t about time travel or alternate history. But what it does share with that franchise is a preoccupation with the mistreatment of animals, and what happens when humans are forced to confront animals as our equals.
Caesar is not a clumsy stand-in for black civil rights leaders the way he was in 1970s flick Battle for the Planet of the Apes. He is a chimp. His struggle is with a world where humans think they are the only animals who really matter. And thanks to gene therapy, he’s a chimp who has figured out that humans may not deserve their place at the top of the food chain. When we enter the world of science from Caesar’s perspective, we see forcefully how even the most benevolent impulses in medicine can spawn animal cruelty that is unnecessary and horrifying.
And thus begins Caesar’s unhappy journey into the world that many animals inhabit on a planet ruled by humans. Abused and neglected by his handlers at the shelter, Caesar comes to realize that his place is among his fellow apes — and his mission will be to liberate them.
Just take a minute to really ponder the implications. I don’t believe this is an aspect of reality that many people appreciate on a daily basis.
Time dilation arises in two situations. In one case, time appears to move slower the closer you are to a massive object, such as the Earth. So a person hovering in a hot-air balloon, for example, actually ages faster than someone standing below.
Time also ticks by faster for someone at rest relative to someone moving. Einstein dramatized this second strangeness with the twin paradox — one 25-year-old twin traveling in a rocket ship near the speed of light for what he perceives as a few months will return to Earth to find the other has reached middle age.
Now advances in laser technology and the field of quantum information science have allowed researchers to demonstrate Einstein’s theories at much more ordinary scales.
The researchers used two optical atomic clocks sitting atop steel tables in neighboring labs at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo. Each clock has an electrically charged aluminum atom, or ion, that vibrates between two energy levels more than a million billion times per second. A 75-meter-long optical cable connects the clocks, which allows the team to compare the instruments’ timekeeping.
In the first experiment, physicist James Chin-wen Chou and his colleagues at NIST used a hydraulic jack to raise one of the tables 33 centimeters, or about a foot. Sure enough, the lower clock ran slower than the elevated one — at the rate of a 90-billionth of a second in 79 years. In a second experiment the team applied an electric field to one clock, sending the aluminum ion moving back and forth. As predicted, the moving clock ran slower than the clock that was at rest.
The Ithaca College Tots on Bots project aims to mobilize infants with physical disabilities by setting them atop a “mobile robot” equipped with a Wii Balance Board to let the young operator steer by leaning.
The only reason life has any meaning is because it ends.
But as Weiner points out, there is a big problem with immortality. Traditionally, we have viewed our lives as unfolding in stages: Shakespeare’s seven ages of man capture our progression from infant to schoolboy to lover to soldier to justice to clown, ending finally in “second childishness and mere oblivion; sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Immortality could wind up being a terrible stasis. “A huge part of the action and the drama in the seven ages comes from the sense of an ending, the knowledge that all these ages must have an end,” Weiner writes. We might live forever in a state of unending boredom. And the technology might benefit the wrong people.
A new “tea bag” uses nano-fibers to suck contaminants and bacteria out of water, providing a desperately-needed, cheap solution for the billions of people without clean drinking water.
