Recently in human life Category

Although I've read a great deal about the fantastically oblique heraldry and insignia of the purported "black world" of the U.S. military -- namely in the (recommended) work of Trevor Paglen -- I've never come across it in the flesh, er, vinyl decal. Imagine my joyful surprise at discovering a treasure trove of mission stickers, identifiers, and decals at the small-aircraft annex of the Portland International Airport this week. Apparently pilots of all stripes pass through and leave their mark. Decode at will, and read more here.

As a blogger, I usually willfully delineate a giant chasm of non-communication between myself and political issues, preferring to dabble in the absolute: time, space, theoretical technological infrastructures, and, recently, aliens. I wrote one very reticent entry in 2005 about chimeric research, prefacing it with the pronouncement that "this blog will rarely concern iself with Pressing Science Ethics Issues," a statement that has proven in the intervening years to be true.

However, I can't deny that my love of the sciences has blossomed under the steely wing of one of the most anti-science political administrations (and social climates, to boot) of the modern era. If it's not the suppression and censorship of reports on subjects like climate change and pollution, it's the stacking of scientific advisory panels, the stem-cell debacle, ridiculously under-qualified NASA appointees, the insanely dubious removal of scientific information from government Web sites, or the misguided millions pouring into Prez Bush's "New Vision" for space exploration. Remember when the Bush administration removed the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet" from NASA's mission statement? Really?

It is with a profound sense of purpose, then, that I bring you this information about the respective science policies of the two Democratic candidates for president of the United States of America. Most of this information comes from statements made by the candidates' surrogates at a science policy debate in Boston last week, as well as from the candidates' official websites and press releases.

Basic Research

Obama: Plans to double federal spending for basic research over five years, supports making the Research and Development tax credit permanent, and plans to strengthen funding for biomedical research, as well as better improve the efficiency of that research by improving coordination both within government and across government/private/non-profit partnerships. Supports stem-cell research despite the alternatives, stating that "embryonic stem cells remain unmatched in their potential."

Clinton: Clinton plans to "end the war on science" by doubling the budget, within ten years, of the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the basic and applied research at the Department of Defense and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Plans to rescind the ban on ethical embryonic stem cell research and to straight-up ban political appointees from unduly interfering with scientific conclusions and publications. Lastly, plans to require that federal research agencies set aside at least 8% of their research budgets for discretionary funding of high-risk research, and plans to increase investment in the non-health applications of biotechnology in order to fuel 21st century industry ("the future").

Climate Change

Obama: Plans to reduce Carbon Emissions 80 Percent by 2050 with a market-based cap-and-trade system requiring that pollution credits be auctioned off. Plans to build incentives that reward forest owners, farmers, and ranchers when they plant trees, restore grasslands, or undertake farming practices that capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Plans to invest $150 billion over 10 years to advance the next generation of biofuels and fuel infrastructure, accelerate the commercialization of plug-in hybrids, promote development of commercial-scale renewable energy, invest in low-emissions coal plants, and begin the transition to a new digital electricity grid (as opposed to the slow electromechanical switches and relays used today). Also plans to establish a 25 percent federal Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) to require that 25 percent of electricity consumed in the U.S. is derived from clean, sustainable energy sources, like solar, wind and geothermal by 2025.

More information about Obama's energy plans here.

Clinton: Clinton's plan would ostensibly reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of global warming, and cut foreign oil imports by two-thirds from 2030 projected levels, more than 10 million barrels per day. Major components of this plan: increased fuel efficiency standards, helping automakers retool their production facilities through $20 billion in "Green Vehicle Bonds," a new cap-and-trade program that auctions 100 percent of permits, and a $50 billion Strategic Energy Fund, paid for in part by oil companies, to fund investments in alternative energy. Plans to revive and expand the national assessment on climate change, expanding the assessment to include not only the anticipated impacts of climate change, but also how U.S. regions and economic sectors can respond to climate change through mitigation and adaptation.

Also: plans to require that all federal buildings designed after January 20, 2009 will be zero emissions buildings. Cute!

More information about Clinton's energy plans here.

Science Education

Obama: Wants to increase the number of foreign students in U.S. graduate school and "give them a path to citizenship," as well as improve minority scholarships. Plans to provide additional resources for public schools to adopt proven science, technology, engineering and math programs.

Clinton: Clinton plans to triple the number of National Science Foundation fellowships and increase the size of each award. Plans to create new fellowships at the National Science Foundation to allow math and science professionals to become teachers in high-need schools. Supports initiatives to bring more women and minorities into the math, science, and engineering professions.

The Internet and Technology

Obama: Believes in an open Internet! Strongly supports the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet. Supports the basic principle that network providers should not be allowed to charge fees to privilege the content or applications of some web sites and Internet applications over others. Furthermore, encourages diversity in the ownership of broadcast media, and plans to create "Public Media 2.0.," the next generation of public media that will birth the "Sesame Street of the Digital Age."

Wants to implement sensible safeguards that protect privacy online, and supports restrictions on how private information may be used, as well as technology safeguards to verify how the information has actually been used.

Plans to "bring government into the 21st century:" wants to implement wikis, social networking tools and other transparent communications technologies in daily governmental operations, plants to modernize internal, cross-agency, and public communication and information sharing to improve government decision-making. Lastly, plans to appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century.

Much more information about Obama's technology plans here.

Clinton: The Clinton camp seems to have only one major stance when it comes to the Internet, which is a plan for the federal government provide tax incentives to encourage broadband deployment in underserved areas, and, correlatively, a plan to financially support state and local broadband initiatives. Clinton was quoted on Meet The Press as saying "I want to have as much information about the way our government operates on the Internet so the people who pay for it, the taxpayers of America, can see that. I want to be sure that, you know, we actually have, like, agency blogs." Also, her website is not as cool as Obama's.

Space Exploration

Obama: Obama hasn't released any information about his official plan in regards to space exploration, although there's some buzz that it will happen this month. In the interim, nerds are aflutter over an alleged leaked space plan, which you can read here. The leaked plan, if there's any truth to it, is very awesome, and includes some smart (and realistic) initiatives, such as support of unmanned missions, a vow to keep weapons out of space (yay), and some space-based climate change surveying. The leaked plan, however, does support the new Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) and the Ares I Launch Vehicle, which is a disappointment to me because I can't stand to think of any Bush space policies lingering around after his dismissal.

Clinton: The Clinton camp has made several statements about space exploration and aeronautics. Clinton plans to pursue a "21st century Space Exploration Program," by implementing a balanced strategy of robust human spaceflight, expanded robotic spaceflight, and enhanced space science activities. Furthermore, Clinton plans to develop a comprehensive space-based Earth Sciences agenda, including full funding for NASA's Earth Sciences program and a space-based Climate Change Initiative. Most surprising of all, in my opinion, is her call of reversing funding cuts to NASA's and FAA's aeronautics R&D budget.

More Information:
Obama Campaign Science Fact Sheet
Breakdown of all the candidates' science and technology stances (From Popular Mechanics)
Clinton's Innovation Agenda

Dr. Oliver Sacks is a rare bird in the world of medicine: not only is he one the country's top neurologists, but he also has a knack for weaving clinical profiles of his most exceptional patients into lovely, thoughtful books that open up the complex workings of our minds to the peering eyes of layfolk. His charm has much to do with the fact that he's the embodiment of a long-musty archetype of scientist: blustery, with a lisp, brilliant, and eccentric, a member of the American Fern Society, and fascinated with fluorescent minerals.

His latest book, Musicophilia, tackles our intimate mental connection to all things musical, dallying in the experiences of rhythymically-inclined Parkinson's patients and virtuosic amnesiacs, to name a few.

Thanks to the Willamette Week, and as a preface to his Portland lecture next week, I had a chance to chat with Dr. Sacks on the phone -- the result was a sincere, often suprising mish-mash of observations about iPods, pots and pans, and, of course, the fascinatingly complex relationship between our minds and music.

This is almost certainly irrelevant, last-minute information, but for those of you readers who are both a) Portland residents, and b) free this evening, I will be presenting a once-ever-only immersive Power Point environment at PICA's Time-Based Arts festival tonight. It will be around 10:30pm at this year's "The Works," the Wonder Ballroom, at 128 NE Russell St.

This event presumably costs some money, but will be excellent. Other than myself, Lucky Dragons, Hooliganship, and Mean Age will present information and music. Also screening will be a pantheon of animated films from such luminaries as Takeshi Murata, E*Rock, and Michael Bell-Smith.

More information here.

Every year, a few people decide to have their bodies frozen after death, in the hopes that the future will cure all that ails them. It's called cryonic preservation. You forgot it existed, right? So did I, but like all interesting things, cryonics is something that continues to exist, completely independently of your awareness of it.

As a literary trope, life-extension through procedures homologous to cryonics is as old as the hills; even Benjamin Franklin proposed the idea, and it's stuck around ever since, popping up in the works of Jack London, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Arthur C. Clarke. In these contexts, cryonics aids space travel, shutting down biological operations during century-long interplanetary flights, or transports characters through time, plopping them into the strange new words that are the fait accompli of science fiction. Presumably, the kinds of alienation endured by newly-awoken time travelers in science fiction novels and movies have a lot to do with our almost ubiquitous cultural cold-shouldering (so to speak) of the practice.

Still, it isn't fiction. Modern cryonics, after a tinfoil-hat boom in the mid-1970s, is more of a reality than ever. As it stands, it's only practiced by a handful of non-profit groups and satellite organizations around the United States: namely the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan. Alcor and CI's beginnings were, of course, dubious; and their rivalry, understated and surreal. The first Alcor conference in the early 1970s only attracted 30 attendees, and it conducted early cryopreservations out of a mobile surgical unit in a large van. Over the years, both organizations have accrued legitimacy despite Cease and Desist orders and macabre PR stumbles, including a 1994 scandal in which a Riverside county coroner ruled that an Alcor client was murdered with barbiturates before her head was removed by the company's staff (yikes!). Alcor contends that the drug was administered after her legal death, and I believe 'em, because of the inevitably rampant misconceptions about this kind of thing, and because of this devastating quote from the much-misunderstood Alcor's website: "sincere idealism is not fraud. While reading the many articles by physicians and scientists on this website, we ask you to remember one thing: We mean it."

Important Mythbust #1: Cryonic preservation is not "freezing." Freezing a human body damages it irreversibly, as ice crystals form between cells, causing straight-up mechanical destruction. What Alcor and CI perform is a process called vitrification: the replacement of more than 60% of the water in human cells with protective chemicals, which can reach sub-zero temperatures without forming any ice crystals. The chemicals involved in the process, called "cryoprotectants," aren't perfect, either, and cause significant biochemical damage while retaining the structure of the tissue. It's sort of a win-lose, but cryonics organizations seem dead-set (again, no pun indented) on the viability of repairing this damage in the future.

Important Mythbust #2: Although the prospect of immortality plays a large part in the decision-making process, cryonic preservation is considered by devotees to be a forward-thinking medical practice more than anything else, a chance for the terminally ill to benefit from therapies still unknown to the current medical establishment. The majority of people who undergo preservation consider it to be a sort of extended coma from which they will one day emerge, ripe for the skilled hands of advanced doctors.

Gory Reality #1: Although they tread lightly on the issue, cryonics institutions often do preserve just heads. These are referred to in cryo subculture as "neuros," and Alcor's clientele is about 2/3 heads, one of which belongs to baseball great Ted Williams (although his got a little banged up in the process). After all, our brains are the only part of our bodies that are absolutely essential to personhood. Everything else is just noise and limbs. If nanotechnology progresses to a point where vitrified human bodies can be resuscitated without brain damage, then perhaps we will also see massive advances in cell regeneration. Alcor firmly enthuses the possibility that "future technologies developed for healing trauma victims will someday regrow an entire new body around the brain." Why the fuck not? It's the future! Is there anything more vast?

The place that cryonics holds on the crackpot-scale all hinges on your definition of death. You hear terms like "legal" or "clinical" death thrown around all the time on TV, but, as an increasingly unfuckwithable amount of research shows, those things aren't really dying. In a way, the declaration of legal death is just a certification that there's nothing more contemporary medicine can do for a dying patient. See, cardiac arrest is one thing, but the death of all the cells in your body is something completely different; I know it's hard to swallow, but honestly -- even if your heart has stopped, you are technically and biologically still alive for a couple more hours, or until all your cells die. This is medical truth. What's arguable is the cryonics angle: that if a team of surgeons gets your head chopped off and vitrified in time, you might one day return to consciousness.

Robert Ettinger, the father of modern cryonics and author of the surprisingly readable Prospect of Immortality, explains it thusly: "a man does not go like the one-horse shay, but dies little by little usually, in imperceptible gradations, and the question of reversibility at any stage depends on the state of medical art."

I'm not going to waste our time together here in the blogosphere trying to convince you that cryonics is a plausible, or, worse, reasonable practice. What scientific evidence there is pretty much speaks for itself, and the rest just depends on the amount of trust you're willing to place on the future. Disclaimer: I'm almost entirely convinced we'll all be telepathic techno-immortals by the time I'm 60. And I love crackpots with a profound tenacity.

The philosophical questions raised by this relatively simple idea are almost overwhelming. If cryonics can be used to secure treatment for persons suffering from currently untreatable maladies, is the medical establishment barbaric not to practice it? Can our identities be preserved after our frozen brains are thawed out? What right do we have to impose our degenerate bodies on our descendants? Who will want us? Who will debrief us, help us adapt to an undoubtedly isolating future? Will our cowardice cause disastrous overpopulation? Robert Ettinger argues that the weight of a human life transcends these sorts of questions, and that thawed patients "will not find themselves idiot strangers in a lonely and baffling world, but will be made fully educable and integrated," by virtue of the human responsibility to others.

I hope you're right, dude.

I've been thinking a lot about über-couple Charles and Ray Eames recently; those of you who attended last week's Urho Talks will know the territory I'm about to shlep into.

If you don't know, Charles and Ray were designers, architects and filmmakers who are responsible for many classic, iconic designs of the 20th century (Thanks, Wikipiedia!). Notably, a great deal of wonderful furniture, the IBM Pavilion of the 1964 World's Fair, ground-breaking exhibition designs, and over 100 short films.

Their place in the world of "Design" (whatever that means) is both unclear and totally manifest, maybe because of their uncanny understanding of scale: They managed to tenderly articulate the relative dimensionality of the universe while molding chairs out of fiberglass, as though those two things were part and parcel of the same practice.

Charles Eames once called modern architecture "a philosophy of life," as opposed to a style. Obviously, because the Eames' architectural practice extended far beyond putting buildings together: They were architects of form (furniture), sure, but maybe more than anything else, they were information architects. They did with ideas what they did with furniture, by always arranging shapes and structures into their most minimal components. The end product is always radically simplified, both aesthetically unfettered and popular, in the sense of being comprehensible to all, without bias. It was often said of their low side chairs and molded plywood furniture that they were both "strong," and "light;" in the same sense, their films and exhibition designs articulated inordinately complex ideas (strong) without ever being bogged down (light).

Of course, they weren't scientists, but they explained the world the way scientists should. I know everyone saw this movie in grammar school, but Powers Of Ten is a monument of humility and grace, as well as a perfect example of the Eamesian tendency to talk simply about complicated things -- here, the relative size of the Universe. And yes, the opening scene of the Robert Zemeckis film Contact bites this experiment of "adding another zero" with considerable tinseltown panache, to be honest.

While on the science tip: the Eames office made a series of "Mathematical Peepshows" for IBM, including some animated films that simplified the conceptual workings of computers. These, as well as their wonderful film about Polaroid's SX-70 Sonar Camera, are worthy of seeking out. You can find them on the Films of Charles and Ray Eames DVD set (Netflix has 'em).

Theme #2 echoing throughout the 50-year Eames tenure is a ceaseless elevation of the seemingly mundane; a great deal of their short films are simple celebrations of the lives of material objects. The 15-minute Tops, for example, shows a beautiful collection of tops in every stage of spin and rattle, while Bread is a series of panning shots of fresh-baked bread of all forms (at the original screening, Ray Eames orchestrated bread-smells through the theater's ventilation system). Toccata for Toy Trains places antique toys in a fanciful, collaborative environment with one another. The Eameses collected knick-knacks from all around the world; to them, objects had presence, rights, onus, and the correct use of quotidian objects was essential to human well-being, as well as pleasure. From the 1972 film, Design Q&A:

Q: Does design imply the idea of products that are necessarily useful?
A: Yes— even though the use might be surely subtle.
Q: It is able to cooperate in the creation of works reserved solely for pleasure?
A: Who would say that pleasure is not useful?

It makes sense that they would be so obsessed with making documentary-style films about objects, since all they did in their careers was sacralize quotidian, functional things. They are most known for designing chairs, for crying out loud: how much more pragmatic can you get?

Both of these prevailing ideas -- the radical simplification of form and the celebration of the mundane -- are rooted, I think, in the same all-encompassing ethic. Charles and Ray Eames understood that all artists are also, to a certain extent, curators. Painters collect forms and color into a predetermined personal space, the canvas, and all their work has something to do with this, no matter how conceptual: all we do in life is collect ideas and re-arrange them. The Eameses got it, and I don't think they ever considered that they were stepping outside of their architectural or design practice by making films, photographs, textiles, or toys. It was all part of the same thing: a desire to curate the world into a comprehensible, beautiful, and efficient place.

Eames Office
Library of Congress' Eames Exhibition

Based on the theory of General Relativity, Albert Einstein knew that a man hurtling through the emptiness of space wouldn't be able to detect whether or not he was falling; he called this "a happy idea.” Of course, not enough people are experienced in the field of free-fall space-floating to corroborate this notion. It seems that some variables would have to be in check -- does the parachute work? can I breathe? where is land? -- before joy could creep into the equation; even then, the vision of Frank Poole careening through black space in 2001: A Space Odyssey, is difficult to shake.

Still, there must be something to it. After all, the Apollo 11 landing module was impulsively dubbed the “Eagle,” and we all know how the Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov, only the second man in space and the first to stick around in low-Earth orbit for more than 24 hours, famously replied to a call from mission control with the elated cry: “I am Eagle! I am Eagle!”

For some, it’s a happy idea to find oneself among -- or beyond -- the birds, exempt from the rules of up-and-down. Take for example the parachutist and former French army colonel Michel Fournier, whose planned leap from 130,000 feet above the snowy fields of Saskatchewan this year will shatter the world records for both free-fall and human balloon flights. He can’t help but think of eagles, either.

“When you're in the air,” affirms Fournier, who has 8,600 parachute jumps under his belt, “you are struck with such a high dose of adrenaline that you immediately take yourself for the most beautiful of birds, the bald eagle. Only parachutists truly know why the birds sing."

I know that I once publicly decried Fournier's leap as being a feat of "human extremist frivolity," but after corresponding with him over email and getting an idea of his myopic sincerity, I've changed camps. Besides, I love space and am in no position to lambaste the dreams of others.

Fournier’s leap, which will take place in August of this year (after many postponements), has been dubbed the"Super Jump," or “Grand Saut.“ It's been in the works for over 14 years, despite a flock of financial setbacks -- advertising space, incidentally, is still available on the balloon gondola that will bring him to altitude -- persistent equipment failures, and the general incredulity of the scientific community.

The sexagenarian Frenchman is not easily dissuaded; he has an initial budget of 12 million dollars. Flanked by a litany of press attachés, engineers, astronauts and launch technicians, decked in a special “space suit” designed by the French Textile Institute, and high on 4 hours of pure oxygen inhalation, Fournier will reverse Neil Armstrong’s legendary axiom: One giant leap for man, maybe, but one small step for mankind.

Of course, this is not so much about mankind; Fournier frames his feat, rather, as a rare moment of pure individualism in a world -- and a scientific community -- increasingly defined by structures of collectivity. With the success of his jump, his website preens, Michel Fournier will become “an archetype of the Happy Man That Lives Out His Dreams.”

Moreover, it will dwarf the previous record set at the dawn of the space age by Joseph Kittinger, the US Air Force test dummy of “Project Excelsior,” an Air Force venture ostensibly created to explore the increasingly important issue of flight crew safety at high altitude. Kittinger, arguably the first man in space, floated up to 102,800 feet in a military-issued balloon, strapped a camera to his helmet, and dove off, arms splayed. He fell for 4 1/2 minutes at the speed of sound through the nether regions of space before passing through the familiar clouds and into the thick atmosphere of Earth. The footage of this feat is literally crazy to watch.

In Einstein’s defense, parenthetically, Kittinger plummeted to Earth so quickly that he didn't feel as though he were falling: It was only by looking at the rapidly receding helium balloon that he even realized in which direction he was going. Fournier will climb higher, and fall faster. It stands to reason, then, that he might have more fun.

Now that commercial space travel looms closer, however, and NASA’s slated to send men back the moon, what’s the big idea with Fournier’s jump? Is this self-avowed altitude-junkie trying to grab onto a long-musty trophy, or does another staggering parachute leap through the ether warrant scientific merit of its own? The Super Jump team stresses the feat’s scientific worth; regardless of how strongly its solitude smacks of daredevilism (“I find myself perpetually battling the solitary nature of this,” Fournier acquiesced to me), the project is among the first to address the human body’s reaction to breaking the sound barrier, and emphasizes that establishing a high-altitude human presence will ultimately aid astronauts during pivotal moments of take-off and landing.

Fournier gives credit where it’s due, however, “Joe Kittinger is my idol,” he gushes, “I've always been obsessed with this notion that I could fly even higher than him.”

Perhaps Einstein was right, although not quite how he might have imagined to be. It may not be the emptiness of space, nor the feeling of disconnect from gravity’s influence that elicits such a strong desire to fly through the air, but rather the knowledge of being the one who flew the highest.

1. Because I love to share my human and technological developments with you, readers, I proudly present, in the unabashed tradition of the Uniarian Brotherhood (incidentally, my latest Unarius E-Flash informs me that they've digitally remastered "Infinite Perspectus"), my Very First Flash Animation. It took me a very long time to make and is almost completely inspired by this piece of new-age propaganda sent to me by Sarah Anderson, who has something of an Infinite Perspectus herself.

2. To legitimize the borderline fluff of this entry, let me include my own Universe E-Flash: an increasingly magic-obsessed Jona (YACHT) and I will be red-eyeing to New York City tomorrow evening, in order to perform our latest Power Point oeuvre for the good people of Rhizome.org. The performance will take place on April 16th at the Hiro Ballroom of the Maritime Hotel, be MC'ed by Cory Arcangel, and be appropriately expensive. It also boasts a mind-melding flyer image by Takeshi Murata. It is a benefit for a good cause (new media art).

James Gardner is part of a new breed of complexity theorists: an armchair philosopher that goes beyond the epistemological, who posits broad, celebratory theories about the nature of the future of the universe. His first book, Biocosm, proposed the "Selfish Biocosm" hypothesis, which suggests that intelligence doesn't emerge in a series of Darwinian accidents, but is hard-wired into the cycle of cosmic creation; it's a really beautiful idea, putting us right at the center of a living, breathing, intelligent universe, which, incidentally, is the title of his newest book.

Dude also rolled with J.P. Sartre in 1967, edited the Yale Law Journal, counts Ray Kurzweil among his colleagues, and was a six-year Oregon State Senator. I also went to elementary school with his son.

Thanks to the good people over at the Willamette Week, I had the opportunity to pursue some really metaphysical, extended e-mail conversations with Jim Gardner, the most interesting of which is featured below. Get deep with me: it's worth it.

Universe: I'm interested in the process of explaining complex scientific ideas to a lay audience. There are moments of great elegance in your book, in terms of how compactly you manage to lay out huge ideas. Is this something you find difficult -- or, as a self-avowed "scientific generalist," does this sort of synthesis come naturally?

Gardner: The composition of both Biocosm and The Intelligent Universe was excruciatingly difficult for me. The two books presented the most daunting set of intellectual challenges I have ever confronted, both in terms of coming to grips with the implications of some very unusual ideas and then communicating those ideas and implications to a lay audience. That being said, there were extraordinary “Aha!” moments I experienced throughout the process of writing both books that were truly exhilarating—moments that more than compensated for all the pain.