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By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 1, 2005; Page A03
Scientists said yesterday that they have determined the precise order of the 3 billion bits of genetic code that carry the instructions for making a chimpanzee, humankind's closest cousin.
The fresh unraveling of chimpanzee DNA allows an unprecedented gene-to-gene comparison with the human genome, mapped in 2001, and makes plain the evolutionary processes through which chimps and humans arose from a common ancestor about 6 million years ago.
By placing the two codes alongside each other, scientists identified all 40 million molecular changes that today separate the two species and pinpointed the mere 250,000 that seem most responsible for the difference between chimpness and humanness.
"Now we can peek into evolution's lab notebook to see what went on there," said Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, which funded the $25 million effort at 18 institutions in five countries.
On a practical level, researchers said, the work is likely to explain why chimps are resistant to several human diseases such as AIDS, hepatitis, malaria and Alzheimer's disease -- information that could lead to new ways to prevent or treat many human ills.
More profoundly, however, the achievement promises to help answer the alluring but loaded question of what, exactly, makes us truly human.
But the answer will not come easily.
"We're not going to stand up and say that these 14 things make us human," said Eric S. Lander of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., a facility run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, which along with Washington University in St. Louis led the chimpanzee genome sequencing effort. "But it's not trivial to be able to say, 'Here is an inventory of the most important differences, and now go at it and figure out which of these differences contain the signatures of what is distinctively human.' "
As predicted by preliminary studies, the human and chimpanzee genetic codes are essentially 99 percent identical, a testament to how fundamentally similar the two species remain. At the same time, it is powerful evidence that seemingly modest changes in molecular code can lead to very different stations in the web of life.
Because of that 1 percent difference, experts noted, humans now dominate every ecosystem on Earth while chimpanzees and other great apes -- a group that also includes bonobos, gorillas and orangutans -- are at risk of becoming extinct within the next few decades, largely because of human activities.
Well aware of that awkward reality, several scientists yesterday used the occasion of the chimp genome's unveiling to focus attention on the creatures' plight, calling for renewed conservation efforts and new rules governing the use of great apes in research.
"There is a deep irony in the fact that the sequencing of the chimpanzee genome coincides with the potential demise of great apes in the wild," wrote Ajit Varki of the University of California at San Diego, and colleagues, in a commentary accompanying the main research report in today's issue of the journal Nature.
The DNA analysis -- the first of a non-human primate and the fourth of a mammal (after human, mouse and rat) -- was done on blood drawn from a chimp named Clint, who lived at a research center in Atlanta until dying in January from causes unrelated to the project. Key scientific findings and related commentaries fill about 100 pages in today's Nature and tomorrow's issue of the journal Science.
The human and chimpanzee genomes are distinguished by 35 million differences in individual DNA "letters" -- each the result of a tiny, random mutation -- and another 5 million larger differences in which entire chunks of DNA were either added to or deleted from one genome or the other.
All told, the two sequences differ by 4 percent. But three-quarters of the differences seem to be in non-functional parts of the genome, suggesting that a mere 1 percent variation makes all the difference.
Put another way, the difference between the human and chimp genomes is 10 times as great as the difference between any two humans.
Among the genes that appear unique to humans are some involved in brain development and body plan and one that has been postulated as being crucial to the development of language. But most of the differences between chimpanzees and humans seem attributable not so much to the genes themselves but to how genes that both species share are regulated -- that is, the timing and level of intensity under which those shared genes operate.
"The class of genes that has changed the fastest in humans compared to chimps are the genes that control other genes," said Tarjei S. Mikkelsen of the Broad Institute.
Developmental changes are behind many of the differences between human and chimp brains. Human brain cells divide several more times than chimp brain cells during fetal development, a fact that contributes to the adult human brain's growth to three times the size of the chimpanzee's. Much of that increase is in the cerebral cortex, home to higher cognition.
But scientists confess to knowing little about how such changes might add up to differences in intellect and behavior.
"We are woefully ignorant about how genes build brains, and how the electrical activity of the brain builds thoughts and emotions," wrote Marc D. Hauser, co-director of Harvard's Mind, Brain and Behavior Program, in Nature.
Chimpanzees have repeatedly toppled conceptions about the ways in which humans are purportedly unique. They fashion and use tools, including hammers, anvils, probes for fishing termites from the ground and seats to rest on, though unlike humans, they make all their tools by modifying found objects and never by putting complementary pieces together.
Chimps also medicate themselves, swallowing rough leaves and chewing on bitter stems to treat a type of intestinal infection.
And in perhaps their cheekiest aping of humanity, chimpanzees display remarkable political acumen. They form complex alliances and trade grooming services, sex and food. Like many denizens of the world's great cities, they lobby, demand bribes, repay favors and, when crossed, extract revenge.
Yet precisely because chimpanzees are so similar to humans (most medicines are absorbed, metabolized and excreted by chimps just as they are in people, for example), they make excellent stand-ins for humans in medical labs.
Medical studies on chimpanzees are no longer done in most countries other than the United States, where about 1,100 are now in research labs. Several scientists yesterday predicted that release of the chimp genome would escalate a debate as to whether U.S. research restrictions -- including an eight-year-old federal moratorium on breeding chimps for research -- should be tightened or loosened.
Pascal Gagneux of the Zoological Society of San Diego and two colleagues wrote in a Nature commentary that a stricter code of ethics for chimpanzee research is needed. They recommend rules similar to those now in place for research on humans who cannot give meaningful informed consent because of their age or mental status.
Others, recalling the initial importance of chimpanzees as research tools when AIDS first emerged, argue that newly emerging medical challenges demand renewed breeding for research.
Acknowledging recent challenges by proponents of intelligent design, a proposition that posits the need for an intelligent creator, several scientists said the genome study offered elegant confirmation of Darwin's vision of evolution.
One analysis, for example, showed that the accumulation of deleterious mutations in the human and chimp genomes is greater than in the mouse and rat genomes in just the proportion predicted by one of the mathematical corollaries of the theory of evolution.
"I can't imagine Darwin hoping for a stronger confirmation of his ideas," said Robert H. Waterston, who led the Washington University team.
I'm getting all emotional over going to Burning Man - good emotions - longing, love, community spirit, the cool people and places just around the corner and just out of sight, awaiting my discovery and delight.
Playa here I come!
OH
MY
GOD!!!
Via Futurismic:
It shouldn't be a big surprise to those paying attention to Branson and Co., but SS-3 is planned to be an orbital vehicle if SS-2 is successful.
today, a young woman on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one conciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves... now here's tom with the weather...
"All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography." -- Federico Fellini
When I was a child I would occasionally experience a dissociation of my conscious perception from its usual somatic hardware. To put it simply, my conscious mind would leave my body, sometimes for mere moments, other times for the space of a few minutes. Instead of adhering to this temple of flesh and blood, the indwelling spirit would upwing itself into a corner of the ceiling, leaving my body breathless and numb where it lay. At such times it was my distinct experience that the locus of my personal consciousness — the cognitive ‘I’ that normally functions as a cybernetic hyperlink between eyes, ears, and hands, thereby interlocking the senses with the mind and the heart as an integrated whole - was in all actuality a glittering electromagnetic cloud of wildly spinning electrons that was in no way bound to or dependent on the body for its continuity of existence.
This cloud, often enough adhering itself to the inner and outer contours of the material body — thereby both permeating and ensheathing the flesh with a conscious, interactive awareness of one's own localization in time and space - could also dissociate itself from its wonted 'man-shape,’ becoming a more or less diffused bubble of glimmering particles that was now free to voyage where it would, continually altering its density and profile in response to any environing contours — but always retaining a nonlocal, holographic unity of conscious perception and awareness.
In the case of my own childhood experiences of this phenomenon, my perceptual sense of self would first diffuse itself throughout the room, ballooning into an enlarged sphere of unqualified awareness, then condense itself into a tightly-packed globe about the size of a golf-ball, which would often enough hover in a far corner of the ceiling, enjoying its newfound lightness of being, the room below suddenly seeming rather exaggerated and disproportionate in size.
What triggers this phenomenon? I've often referred to it as 'meditating with my eyes open,' but that phrase offers very little in the way of defining the technique. In fact, there is no consciously employed technique per se; it is simply a happenstance that seems to naturally occur whenever my mind is quiet and relatively free of the self-referencing qualifiers we call 'thoughts.' For when the mind is quieted as such, the personal ego fizzles out like a dying ember, but the individual locus of conscious perception remains. The amorphous cloud of whirling electrons is liberated from the illusory taint of the ego, and no longer leans upon the material body as a localized viewpoint. My disembodied consciousness is then free to traverse and explore the world in ways that its somatic vehicle can only dream. (In fact, I believe our dreams may be exactly that - our diffused loci winging here and there in playful interaction.)
Not having at all disciplined myself in this practice, I experienced the phenomenon quite often as an adolescent, frequently at inappropriate or inopportune occasions. I'd be in the company of peers when my conscious sense of self would balloon out and fill the entire room, leaving me speechless and wan. Though I was always gratefully stupefied at the wonder of it all, it would render me incapable of functioning normally in a social setting.
As this continued to occur more and more, I began to assuage the increased awkwardness of social events by retreating and distancing myself from any sincere interaction, which would often enough trigger the experience once again. Dissociating myself from the crowd, I became lost in myself; and my sense of self would then in turn become 'lost' in the room around me.
As I got older, leaving my awkward, but mystic adolescence behind me, I found I was able to focus and direct this diffusion of my conscious perception in ways I had never thought possible. Empathizing with another man or woman, to such an extent as to lose all thought of my own egoistical self, my perceptual locus would blossom into cloud, and then narrow itself into a funneling whirl which would then enter threadlike through the eyes of this person before me, thereby enabling 'me' to fully encounter that person's total experience of 'self’ - their richness of memory, their hopes, dreams, aspirations, their loves and desires, even glimpses of the pathway their past had forged into the future.
The invisible sea of atoms which distances us one from another crumples back into an enfolded potentiality - and with the distance parted, there remains no ultimate difference between myself and any other. The interference pattern I refer to as ‘myself’ trickles away momentarily, back into the unmanifest, and my locus of perception is suddenly and blissfully free to ebb into the evanescent rippling you refer to as ‘you.’
Not only have I thereby discovered the true conscious Oneness of the human condition, the singular World Soul that fills and sustains every atom of our existence, I have also been able to live through innumerable lives in mere moments, this whirling cloud of electrons I call my conscious ‘self’ always retaining the charismatic human warmth it discovers in the lives of others as it returns back to my body. Now it can happen in a matter of seconds: a glance of the eyes, a nod of the head, and my soul expands to embrace another with a permeating fullness only mystics and madmen have known this side of the grave.
Front page news from today's Chicago Tribune. -- It's unfavorable reviews like this that give transhumanist goals a bad rap. What can we do to counter the negative press?
The cold, hard facts on cryonics
Progress aside, don't hold your breath for immortality
By Howard Witt
Tribune senior correspondent
Published August 22, 2005
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- Such is the breathtaking pace of modern scientific advancement that in the three short years since the technicians at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation famously severed baseball star Ted Williams' head from his torso and deep-froze the parts for anticipated resurrection at some future date, there have been a number of improvements to the preservation process.
Antifreeze much better than anything in your car is now pumped into a client's corpse. State-of-the-art cooling techniques are used to chill the body parts down to minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit before they are stored inside tall stainless steel tanks that look like they might have come from a microbrewery. The battered bicycle helmet that used to be strapped onto the deceased's head during the cooling phase is soon to be replaced with something more clinical-looking.
But the experts here, who have been struggling to perfect their techniques since 1972, still haven't quite conquered the ultimate bane of cryonics practitioners everywhere: the unfortunate phenomena known in the trade as "acoustic fracturing events."
In layman's terms, those would be the audible cracking noises made by the brain and other internal organs as they shatter from the effects of the extreme cold.
"It's exactly that kind of noise when you drop an ice cube into a glass of Coke," explained Tanya Jones, Alcor's director of technical operations. "In the best-case scenario we've ever had, it was only five fracture events. We are working on the engineering to see how to eliminate this problem."
And what will happen to all those fractured organs if the bodies can someday be thawed out and revivified?
"It should just be a matter of stitching them back together," Jones said. "You might be able to glue them together, but we don't have repair technologies on that scale yet."
Achieving immortality, it turns out, is not going to be easy. But that's no discouragement to the true believers in cryonics, the study of freezing freshly deceased bodies so that they might one day be revived and treated for whatever caused them to perish.
There are now at least five cryonics facilities in the United States, of which Alcor claims to be the largest. The oldest one, the American Cryonics Society ("Freezing people for more than three decades") was founded in 1969 in Cupertino, Calif. The newest company, Suspended Animation, recently received zoning permission to open a facility in Boynton Beach, Fla., which puts it at the heart of a burgeoning retiree market that presumably has the most urgent need of such services.
`It's a crapshoot'
Mainstream biologists may scoff at cryonics, rating the successful reanimation of a frozen human being about as likely as re-creating a cow from a pound of frozen ground beef. And even the most devout cryonicists acknowledge that no technologies currently exist to realize their resurrection dreams.
But the critics, they point out, will be long dead a few centuries from now. And the flash-frozen expect to have the last laugh.
"It's all iffy, but if I don't try it, for sure I won't be reanimated," said Dr. David Hall, a retired psychiatrist in Pasadena, Calif., who has arranged to join the 68 other frozen clients currently padlocked inside Alcor's vats when he dies. "It's a crapshoot. But you know, it might work."
Cryonics is very much a "now and later" science, requiring of its adherents a lot of cash now--Alcor charges $150,000 to preserve a whole body, $80,000 for just the head--and a lot of faith later that what seems like science fiction will someday become fact.
"As far as the unproven aspect of the technology, cryonics is no different than the folks who are trying to find a cure for cancer," said Joseph Waynick, Alcor's CEO and president. "There's no cure for lung cancer, for example. Yet we spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year searching for one. It's no more speculative than that, or any other advanced medical procedure that's experimental right now."
Alcor says it has 765 members who have paid their fees, many by purchasing life insurance policies for the purpose. New customers are generated through referrals and events such as Cryofeast 2005, a potluck picnic scheduled for later this month in Sunnyvale, Calif. ("Fridge available," the invitation notes.)
Processing a `patient'
Members who die become "patients" in the Alcor vocabulary, and what happens next is not for the squeamish.
Ideally, a volunteer Alcor paramedic team will be able to rush to the hospital or hospice and begin cardiopulmonary resuscitation to keep blood flowing to the brain and internal organs while a preservation solution is pumped into the veins.
Those who can't be reached immediately and are shipped off to funeral homes face inevitable ischemia as their organs rapidly decompose from lack of oxygen. Alcor will still freeze them, but their future prospects are not considered as bright. And if the funeral home has already embalmed a patient with formaldehyde, or the patient has been autopsied or committed suicide with a gunshot to the head, they are really in trouble.
The patient is next packed in ice and transported to Alcor's Scottsdale facility, which is in a nondescript office park next to an interior design company. There, in a makeshift operating room, the blood is drained from the patient's body and replaced with a special glycerol antifreeze.
If the patient has opted for preservation of just the head--the assumption being that future scientists will be able to grow a new body for it or else extract the personality and memories from the brain--it is detached from the body and placed in a special plexiglass box. In either case, holes are drilled into the skull to observe the brain and make sure the antifreeze is infusing evenly, and then the holes are plugged with wax.
Finally, the patient is frozen in nitrogen gas and lowered with a crane into one of the large storage vats, which can each hold up to 10 whole clients alongside several heads.
There's also a vat for pets of members, and it now contains about two dozen cats and dogs.
"Oddly enough, the pets can have better preservation right now than humans," said Alcor's Jones, "because a veterinarian can come in and euthanize them, so at the time of death we can be all prepared, no surprises."
Attractive to celebrities
There's no telling whether any given Alcor patient will end up bumping elbows with Williams, Alcor's most famous client, whose head and torso are stored separately here. Alcor officials do not like to talk much about the baseball legend, whose interment in 2002 after a protracted family squabble over his last wishes landed the company in the headlines.
The only other near-celebrity who has been publicly identified as an Alcor member is Charlie Matthau, son of Walter Matthau. The late actor resisted his son's entreaties to join. Alcor also boasts bona fide scientists and physicians such as Hall among its members, which company officials believe further boosts the legitimacy of their efforts.
But ask credentialed cryobiologists--scientists who specialize in the behavior of organisms at low temperatures--what they think of cryonics and they universally cringe. They fear that their little-understood field, which seeks better ways to temporarily preserve organs for transplant or buy time for critically injured soldiers on a battlefield by slowing their metabolism so they can be transported to a field hospital, has been hopelessly confused with cryonics.
"What they are pursuing is not science, and they are banned from membership in our bylaws," said John Bischof, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota and an official of the Society for Cryobiology. "There's absolutely not one shred of evidence that they will ever be able to reanimate these people. The science doesn't exist."
Courtesy of Flicker magazine generator.
I can't contain my excitement about this.
Jamais over at our favorite blog World Changing, has this to say:
"Researchers from the University of Texas, Dallas, and Australia's CSIRO have developed a way of making strong, stable and amazingly useful ribbons and sheets made of multiwall carbon nanotubes. Their system pushes the material out at seven meters/minute; a Quicktime video of the process in action is here. If you've been following the development of nanotubes, you know what kind of accomplishment this is. In my view, this is the biggest technology breakthrough of the year, quite possibly of the decade."
The reason I'm so excited is this is exactly the type of breakthrough we need to brings us one step closer to building a Space Elevator. The strength of the material made from this method is still not strong enough, but it was the mass-production part that has always been considered the biggest hurdle.
Halliburton, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Electric, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics. These are the servants of the dark archons, perpetuating armed conflict to maintain their profit margins. The leaders of these occulted corporate organizations have abandoned all hope for salvation and given their lives to Murder Inc. Do they find solace in the demons and lords of red war and black hearts? Indeed, their deal with the Devil was a great one for the Dark Prince.
One could imagine the archons like giant insectoid machines as tall as mountains sucking off the bilious hate and fear bleeding out of humanity in the throes of eternal warfare. Inside each one, strapped into the driver’s seat, is an executive. How thick must be the illusions they construct around themselves to sleep even a wink?
War is big business. Building armies, supplying weaponry, selling security and protection, destroying cities and rebuilding them… The so-called defense industry sells to all sides to maintain a perpetual state of conflict, skimming profits like blood off the surface of an oil slick.
The ethereal shadow of emotions darkens with suffering and loss, fear and isolation. Imagine the oceans of the world filling with tears while the summits of our greatest mountains glow with love and idealism. This is the aetheric landscape of humanity, higher than deep but wetter than dry. Our dreams are great and lofty, but are constantly weighed down by the burden of suffering. Human suffering is natural and necessary but only on it’s own course. It should never be commodified or monetized.
War profiteers encourage conflict and violence, manipulating nations and races against each other. Just like small arms manufacturers selling guns to minority youth. Every murder brings more customers. Fear breeds like rats in cities and slums where violence is real. Media spreads the plague into the homeland and the heartland. You never know who might be your end. You should look into buying some protection…
When the war profiteers take control of the military, there are great profits to be made. Dick Cheney went from being Bush Sr’s Secretary of Defense, presiding over the first war in Iraq, to leading global engineering titan, Halliburton, after Clinton took office. He left Halliburton to become Vice President under the second Bush administration. Since his appointment Halliburton has been awarded all of the no-bid contracts for rebuilding the oil infrastructure of Iraq. They’ve also recently received a no-bid contract to expand the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. At the same time they’re establishing similar contracts in Iran. Do you see the pattern? The business of war has seized the war machine itself. The US government invades to satisfy it’s resource needs, then gives all the occupation contracts to it’s corporate leaders (who are all congressman and cabinet members anyhow). Terrorism is a marketing ploy to drum up business for the industry.
This is the ultimate form of Satanism. It is human sacrifice for mammon, plain and simple. As long as the blood flows, the archons will be fed and the war pigs will take the worldly rewards. Imagine the orgone of this suffering and death, the collective aetheric smog choking the spirit of humanity. It’s a heavy weight dragging us down, impeding our evolution and liberation. Meanwhile, executive teams dance under Molok at Bohemian Grove plotting the next invasion.
The current Iraq war is unimaginably biblical. The West returns to the cradle of civilization, spilling blood into the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Like all deaths, it’s a return to the womb. War rages in the Holy Lands, as it always has. If it’s a new Crusade, a battle of mythologies, then our captains will surely end up like Spielberg’s Nazi’s opening the Ark of the Covenant. Their greedy eyes will be burned away by the light of the Absolute.
Though perhaps the atrocities of war pigs are necessary to the proper unfolding of the human drama. Maybe it’s just a phase. The blatant abuses of Halliburton might be the required shock to the system, waking us all up enough to start reeling in our government. Maybe it’s a great sacrifice to the the dying gods, laying a carpet of fire for the radiant child of the new aeon, the Child of Peace.
The word “hippie” has been sadly denigrated and confounded, rebranded by conservatives and progressives alike to be synonymous with dirty, ineffective stoners. But hippies, it should be noted, stood up to the Vietnam war in a time when nobody questioned the US government. Hippies were the ones who started shouting about the military industrial complex. Just 10 years ago this term was considered conspiratorial. Now it’s a given fact.
But most importantly, hippies elevated the goal of Peace into the mainstream of western society. It was a movement that informed every other aspect of the 60’s. Civil Rights, another laudable accomplishment of the hippie generation, was simply peace and equality between all races. The Equal Rights movement sought peace and equality between sexes. Peace and equality is to the military industry what health and fitness is to the tobacco industry. Bad for business.
And maybe this is our ace up the sleeve. If the aetheric seas of humanity are darkened by suffering, then produce compassion. Bring the waters to greater clarity by cultivating peace and equality in every occasion. Fear cowers under community and connection. We are social creatures, destined for love. The most evil among us are victims of love’s absence in their lives. Pitiless parents and sadistic peers beat evil into the tormented soul. Those who know compassion, who know peace and equality and optimism and hope, make it manifest further in their world.
It’s like there’s this balance within every heart weighing Hate against Love. Every experience in some way tips the balance. Some swell with radiance, others fall into darkness. We can only strive to cultivate love in our lives if we are to combat the archons. When one is at ease, positive karma proceeds from will. Negativity is absorbed and transmuted, stalled and diminished. Karma, after all, is simply the inertia of one’s actions. It’s what tips the balance of the global heart.
I had this vision of death as a boat. Through our lives our boats are at port, tied to the dock. With our actions, our thoughts and dreams, hopes and fears, we load our boat, day in and day out, preparing for the journey ahead. Finally at death, it’s time to set sail off into the Great Sea. As we sail, we slowly unburden our vessel, jettisoning the cargo of our lives into the deep blue waters of creation. Imagine all of the millions upon millions of boats plying the tides, getting lighter and lighter as the sea fills with their memories received and absorbed into the saline solvent of the Great Mother…
Wouldn’t we live more lightly if we considered every thought and action as a memory to be offered to the Sea of Life? This is the greatest weapon against the archons.
I chose that title, because in many ways Japan is already 10 years ahead of the rest of the world in may ways. I think the main reason is because they had to spend their wealth on making the country a better place, rather than on spending one third of it on building the largest military on earth. Livingry vs. Weaponry.
Featured here is an Auto-Door by Tanaka. Although this particular device isn't going to save the world, its a perfect 10 in the cool department. Here is a demo video (real video).
From Gizmodo:
Cleanliness, efficiency, compactness, cool-factor… for a variety of reasons, automatic doors have become a standard feature of Japanese shops. While the typical sliding star-trek style design has proven itself, the tanaka auto door aims to improve upon a good concept. This new design entails strips equipped with infrared sensors that open to the approximate shape of the person or object passing through, minimizing entry of dust, pollen, and bugs while keeping precious air-conditioning in. The technology for the new design seems to be in it’s infancy, but Japan has proven once again that it’s a least 10 years ahead of everyone else.
Some notable scientists have used marijuana, psychedelics, and other drugs.
(From Stoned Scientists -- Cannabis Culture)
Stephen Jay Gould
Yet Gould did not admit to being a pot head. "I was reluctant to try it because I have never smoked any substance habitually, and didn't even know how to inhale. Moreover, I had tried marijuana twice… and had hated it." Yet chronic use of medicinal marijuana robbed Gould of none of his intellectual vigor. His critically-acclaimed The Structure of Evolutionary Theory was researched and written over the two decades that Gould was using pot heavily to maintain his health.
Sagan disputed the "myth" of the pot high – that the insights achieved while stoned are illusory. "I am convinced that this is an error," wrote Sagan, "and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day."
Feynman was a brilliant scientist long before he sampled marijuana and LSD while in his mid 50's, but he did claim to have learned from the mind-expanding experiences. Feynman was a friend of John Lilly, a researcher who pioneered the use of the tanks, studied psychedelics and consciousness, and is best known for his work with dolphins. Feynman's use of these illegal substances was mostly in the context of experimenting with his own consciousness while in a sensory deprivation tank.
Andrew Well
Sigmund Freud (cocaine)
Ralph Abraham
Timothy Leary
From an excellent New Scientist article:
"Maybe, just maybe, after more than 30 years in the wilderness, this powerful, misunderstood but potentially mind-healing class of drugs is ready to be rehabilitated."
By way of Mark Pesce, comes this story:
Even the most ignorant cannot know less than nothing. After all, negative information makes no sense. But, although this may be true in the everyday world we are accustomed to, negative information does exist in the quantum world. Small objects such as atoms, molecules and electrons behave radically different than larger objects -- they obey the laws of quantum mechanics.
What could negative information possibly mean? In short, after I send you negative information, you will know less. Such strange situations can occur because what it means to know something is very different in the quantum world. In the quantum world, we can (in some sense) know too much, and it is in these situations where one finds negative information. Negative information turns out to be precisely the right amount to cancel the fact that we know too much.
While all this might appear to be very mysterious, negative information, can be put on a rigorous footing. I will try to explain how to do so here, in a manner which I hope is accessible to all. This description is intended for those who have an interest in this subject, but may not have a background in quantum information theory. Most of this text should be understandable by anyone willing to put in a bit of effort, and the rest should be understandable by anyone with some knowledge of quantum mechanics (or by anyone willing to put in a lot of effort). So if there are parts which continue to be unclear after some time, please let me know [email J.Oppenheim (at) damtp.cam.ac.uk], and I can modify this text to make things clearer.
“The new free spirits must overcome the fear of technology in the hands of government and recognize it for what it is: government in the hands of technology.” - Ramsey Dukes, 1979
Government, like commerce, is a necessary evil. Though lately both have seemed more evil than necessary. Commerce used to be trade. One item exchanged for another item of equal value. As technologies lumbered along into the Iron and Bronze ages, metals became available and accorded high value. These metal bits were traded and standardized into coin setting value to the weight of a specific material. Soon you could trade seven silver sheckles for 2 pigs. But the pig owner wasn’t a metal worker so he traded his newfound sheckles for feed. Before long you have a currency that you can carry in your pockets.
Government probably has it’s origin in simple organizational structures designed to coordinate early hominids. Pair that with an alpha male evolutionary strategy and you have a control hierarchy. From leading the hunt to leading the tribe, then leading a business interest or a political faction, the alpha male expanded his dominion over greater and greater swathes of people and resources. Of course, the power base is constantly being assailed and challenged by competitors. Thus the city-state is guided by fear first and foremost. For rival apes, rival tribes, rival armies or corporations , conflict is ever-present, even in times of peace.
With the economisation of value abstracted into currency, rulers gained power by wealth and affluence, governing the exchange of value within the tribe and siphoning off a nice tithing for the crown (public works, you know). Taxation funds greater armies to defend against the rival tribes always eyeing covetously your precious resources. The line between businessman, soldier, and governor continues to blur. The real leader is expected to be all, sustaining the weight of the domestic city-state while constantly defending against threats, real or imagined. Surely all such leadership must spiral around great heights and depths of megalomania and paranoia.
Government exists only by conflict. If there were no conflict, why would you need government? People must be regulated or they might walk out on their jobs and start looting department stores and murdering children. The state always assumes the worst about humanity. And it probably should, for now. Although we think we’re so special and evolved and “Chosen", the truth is that we’re barely out of the cradle, still baring our teeth and tucking our tails. A simple survey of the global sociopolitical zeitgeist reveals a species driven in large part by ape politics. Resource hoarding, tribal warfare, fear of the Other, sexual and physical dominance and submission, and an overall lack of self awareness - all these characterize modern human existence. Some tribal cultures have managed to find an equilibrium of harmony and sustainability, simple and peaceful. Others whirl out of control driven mad by imposed scarcity and repressive socialization or marched into oblivion by fearful men of god. The ongoing expansion of commerce ensures that the simple cultures will be duly “civilized” and taught how to make Nikes and buy cigarettes. Every ape is a potential contributor to capitalism.
In the modern world abstractions of commerce are the foundation of power. You cannot become powerful without acquiring wealth, for wealth buys allies and servants, tools and weapons. Money must constantly flow into seats of power to sustain their consumption of resources and constant warfare against the competition. The business must continue to grow or someone else might take your marketshare. The government must continue to develop it’s scientific abilities in order to create better weapons than the Russians or the Saudi’s or the terrorists or the drug lords. Peace is constantly at war. Business must go on and fear is really big business. Consider the arms industry or the prison industry or the security industry. Do you think they want a peaceful world?
How to control large numbers of apes:
1) Keep resources scarce. Apes must be in a constant state of competition and servitude in order to survive. Only the strongest will climb their way up and by the time they’re near the top they’ll either be ready to serve with the power elite or lulled into complacency by the narcotic of luxury.
2) Cultivate fear and discourage education. Apes must be willing to make sacrifices in order to stay safe, and they must be suspicious of others. Intelligence tends to make apes question incompetence, law, and bureaucracy.
3) Keep the apes restrained by a narrow moral code and an invisible, all powerful parental deity ready and willing to dole out eternal suffering. Fear laws. Fear foreigners. Fear terror. Fear god. Fear each-other. If you’re good enough, you might be rewarded with a pillowy afterlife in the clouds.
The system perpetuates these elements whether it tries to or not. Ape biosurvival is predicated on obtaining resources and defending against competition. Somewhere along the way you mate and produce viable offspring. Commerce has removed value from product and replaced it with labor. We work for our sheckles so we can buy the pig that has been locked behind corporate doors. In the process we’ve lost the ability to effectively be the apes we still are. If it all shut down tomorrow, would you be able to survive on your own, grow your own food, fight off the unwashed hordes? Our adaptability as animals has been traded for a relatively stable sense of security, as long as we keep working for The Man. It’s not so much a conspiracy as an outdated program of civilization.
So what do we do? Well, make sure government stays addicted to technology. Technology provides most of the value within commerce so anything that satisfies a market demand will come to reality. Nanotech fabrication of material substrates? High efficiency solar conversion? Advanced communication technologies? Global information repositories? If there’s a profit, business will find a way to make it, even if it means side-stepping government. Indeed, business has almost completely replaced government. But they’ll always take the quick gain, oblivious to the long-term consequences. Sell them the internet! Sell them nanotech! Sell them video cameras and computers! Sell them the very tools that will be the ultimate undoing of business and government. Rupert Murdoch votes Republican because they protect his profits. But he still runs progressive shows like The Simpsons, or radically conspiratorial shows like X-Files, because they ARE his profits. Power-hungry apes will always sell out the future to their own greed. Even their own future.
And do whatever you can to assist religion - and all fanaticism - in continuing to lose hold on the civilized mind. There are plenty of good Christians and Muslims out there, but the majority are caged by fear and dogma, forcing their ideologies on the world, condemning anyone who follows another path. Religion holds great power and continuously meddles in business, technology, and government, inflicting it’s apocalyptic denial of flesh on the simple apes still nostalgic for the Savannah plain. Nanotech is an affront to god. Stem cell research is evil. Your body is governed by Our Lord, not you. Give us enough tithings and we’ll put in a good word for you to the Big Guy. And if you want our votes next term, Mr. President, you’d better well make sure that our will is made law. We can always tell our pastors to drop your name in their sermons. Are you on the side of The Lord, Mr. President?
Communicate and build communities. Play a role in local politics (probably the only politics that really matter anymore). Give any money or support you can to foundations that enable humanistic technologies. Defend schools against religious parents and institutions and budget-hungry legislators. Talk about the future dream as if it’s real and right around the corner. Today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s technology. Get enough people believing in it, seduce them with your narrative of our future, and they’ll demand that it be delivered. Witness cyberspace. You know someone’s going to create the ultimate human interface for the VR-enhanced version of EverQuest. Then we’ll all be living in William Gibson’s mind.
Technology is ours. It flows from the human mind, accreting around thoughts and giving them life and persistence and shared utility. It’s our greatest evolutionary adaption and continues to be driven by the need to gain control over our world and free us from those ancient instincts of biosurvival that make us so fragile and needy. Until the phantom pains of our vestigial tails are finally gone, apes will gain power and attempt to divert the flow of technology to serve their will alone. No tool has remained in the hands of a single individual.
Classical evolution may focus on the fitness of the individual, but it’s really the species that’s being perpetuated or snuffed. Technology is in service of the human species, not George Bush or Rupert Murdoch or Bill Gates. The adaptive utility of government and commerce and religion is highly suspect as of late. It might not be long before someone comes along and invalidates them all with an entirely new set of technologies far more appropriate for our current trajectory along the arc of evolution.
Now let’s close with one more quote from Ramsey Dukes, just for the sake of symmetry: “It is not people that rule us, but fashions, beliefs, demons and gods.”
Clifford Pickover wanted us to know of this new book he's just published. For those who haven't read Cliff's books, you're missing out on a real treat. I look forward to reading it. Here is the link to detailed chapter headings.
From networked performance.
The VIRTUAL PLAYA PROJECT is a navigable 3d digital Burningman environment using Microsoft Flight Simulator as a platform. It is intended to be an open-ended project that invites participation at various levels. It can be downloaded for home use; played on a giant screen at a Burningman event, or even be used as a design tool for a theme camp or artist wishing to plan an installation before it ever gets to Black Rock City.
The ultimate wish for the project however, is for the Virtual Playa to be the Burningman Cyber Regional. Using multi player technology, it can become a portal through which we can meet on line, and share experience with other cyber burners from anywhere in the world in real time. This takes the project from just being a cool piece of collaborative digital art, to a true meeting place for the cyber-tribe. Download it for free, copy it, send it to pals, leave it on buses, give it away as a gift.....spread the word.
Air America talk show host recommends space shuttle flights and LSD for world leaders
On the Friday, Agust 5th broadcast of the Al Fraken Show on Air America, while discussing the space shuttle mission with co-host Katherine Lanpher, Al Franken suggested that the UN HQ should be relocated to space, and that members of the UN should "drop acid" to get a better perspective of "Spaceship Earth, man."
Franken's comments came after discussing the current Discovery shuttle mission in which Shuttle Commander Eileen Collins noted to Japanese officials and press that the Earth is showing visible and worrying signs of continual environmental degradation. Franken also suggested that President Bush be sent into space.
Franken was only half-joking when he made the comment about the UN HQ being relocated to space, prefacing it with, "This is an idea I've had since high school." He then added the comment, "... and they should drop acid," as an aside, repeating it multiple times. Katherine Lanpher, Franken's co-host, responded, "How do you know they aren't dropping acid already?"
It's limiting to assume magick must enchant in apocryphal aleph bets and wear the masks of dead gods in order to be "magick". Magick describes an evolving set of technologies that 1) allow access to and provide context for transcendent and liminal states of awareness, 2) function to bring the individual into some greater degree of connection and alignment with the macrocosm, and 3) enable the translation of imagination and will into material change. I'm on the side of Grant Morrison and Doug Rushkoff: magick is everywhere and we're all magicians. We just need to take responsibility for that power and manifest the world that's most in line with the collective will and the balance of nature.
The term "magick" itself is encumbered with associations and connotations, perhaps too weighty for it's own good. Labels are ultimately misleading and confining so it's probably best to simply let go of them. The language of magick needs a complete upgrade, anyway. Experience fuels insight. Insight breeds action. Action begets experience. This may be all we need to know about living. The esoteric toolkit is a set of technologies that can drill through the ego complex of identity to reach the core depths of the self. Magick may hint at demonic powers but the true strength is in self mastery. Without the steady smoothing of the stone of mind (or the sudden shattering of the mirror of self) we walk around like cattle, driven by base want and fear of the blade.
Jack Parson's realized the revolutionary value of magick. Ramsey Dukes understands this as well. True knowledge of self eschews all law and servitude. Corruption is a festering wound eating at the soul of Democracy. Laws are for sheep incapable of taking responsibility for their actions. Control fears illumination of the populace. Why do you think American education is so underfunded?
Supposedly, the state once represented the populace, acting in accord with the will of the people. If this was ever true, it's not anymore. In the modern era, power is underwritten by money and it quickly came to pass that industrialists possessed far more of it than governors. So they began buying up the seats of power. Our democracy nurtured and tutored the great corporate archons who've now come of age and left the nest. There's no corporate allegiance to Mother America. We're simply a marketplace with too many laws. But we've got a kick-ass military which can be readily employed to defend global market interests and force the adoption of "democracy", a term that has somehow become interchangable with "capitalism".
But while the corporate barons grab seats of power to push around other seats of power, the collective will is wiring up into the global mind, sharing it's dreams and fears and realizations and technologies. And it's moving far more quickly than the reptilian cunning of the archons. The tools that serve information seem overwhelmingly in support of it's grand ambition to be free. Free information allows technology to iterate on itself faster and faster. Restrictions are seen as maladaptions and quickly bypassed. As memes applied genetic selection to ideas, so too must this evolutionary trait affect information technologies. The backbone of cable and fiber and wireless (and the human brain) are co-evolving to serve the replication and transformation of memes. The whole apparatus of recursive information moving through distributed networks of mind and machine is a dynamic, evolving natural system fed and tended by humanity.
Control systems buckle under information overload. Bureaucracies shudder and grind to a halt if the data becomes too cumbersome or doesn't adhere to the prescribed format. The archons kept us brainwashed through the media, controlled as it was by their own CEO's. Now the media has broken free, the technology was limiting the flow of information, restrained and coerced to carry only dis-info and corporate propaganda. Reality TV is the last gasp of a failing corporate media hoping to capitalise on the ceaseless human hunger for experience.
The web is usurping media control, tearing it away from the corporate governors and putting it in the hands of everyone. Daily Kos does not tow the party line like Fox or fear the wrath of sponsors like CNN. GNN will run the articles that the Times fears will hurt circulation. And someone will always post video of riot cops kicking the crap out of non-violent protestors.
The light of truth runs through fiber optics. Human TV broadcasts 24-7. Culture feeds on novelty and experience, connection and community. The water in our cells swells to the full moon along with the salty tides and the turning heavens. So much change is happening so quickly, but life just wants to keep living. Use the tools you have to experience it all, as much as possible. Then upload it to the global mind and share it with your neighbors on the other side of our planet. We'll all find that we're far more similar than different. We might even start to realize the urgency for a collective vision of the human path into the future.
