A Fungus Among Us

The fungus Armillaria ostoyae, commonly known at root rot, has become the world's largest living organism thanks to an outbreak in Prairie City, Ore.

Currently the fungus form dubbed the "humungous fungus" by the U.S. Forest Service underlies 2,200 miles of land outside the Oregon city and wildlife officials are at a loss how to stop its growth, The (Portland) Oregonian said Sunday.

With some estimates placing the fungus' age at 8,000 years old, the natural organism has had plenty of time to spread throughout the region as other life forms unknowingly moved above. To that end, the fungus now spreads across an area equal to 1,600 football fields and is only noticeable in areas where it has claimed trees.

A far more recent fungal organism has taken root in our midst and is growing by precipitous leaps and bounds, inside, outside, and all around us....., that's the one I really, really want you to think about, as you mull over those playstations supercomputing and shit. Officials are at an even much greater loss how to stop its growth....,

Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with Eight PlayStation 3s

"The interest in the PS3 really was for two main reasons," explains Khanna, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth who specializes in computational astrophysics. "One of those is that Sony did this remarkable thing of making the PS3 an open platform, so you can in fact run Linux on it and it doesn't control what you do."

He also says that the console's Cell processor, co-developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba, can deliver massive amounts of power, comparable even to that of a supercomputer -- if you know how to optimize code and have a few extra consoles lying around that you can string together.

"The PS3/Linux combination offers a very attractive cost-performance solution whether the PS3s are distributed (like Sony and Stanford's Folding@home initiative) or clustered together (like Khanna's), says Sony's senior development manager of research and development, Noam Rimon.

Cover Blown - Watson Disavowed

Official cover is a term used in espionage to refer to operatives who assume positions in organizations with diplomatic ties to the government for which they work.

Official cover operatives are granted a set of governmental protections, and if caught in the act of espionage, they can request diplomatic protection from their government. In other words, official cover operatives are agents officially recognized by their country. In contrast, non-official cover (NOC) refers to operatives who assume positions with no ties to their government, and whose actions are officially disavowed by that government.

Update: Lab suspends DNA pioneer Watson

The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory had already distanced itself from the scientist's comments but its trustee board has also now suspended him.

A statement from the Long Island, New York, institution said the action was being taken "pending further deliberation by the board".

FAS condemns comments made by Dr. James Watson:

The Federation of American Scientists condemns the comments of Dr. James Watson that appeared in the Sunday Times Magazine on October 14th.

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) is outraged by the noxious comments of Dr. James Watson that appeared in the Sunday Times Magazine on October 14th. At a time when the scientific community is feeling threatened by political forces seeking to undermine its credibility it is tragic that one of the icons of modern science has cast such dishonor on the profession.

The scientific enterprise is based on the promotion and proof of new ideas through evidence, however controversial, but Dr. Watson chose to use his unique stature to promote personal prejudices that are racist, vicious and unsupported by science.

While we honor the extraordinary contributions that Dr. Watson has made to science in the past, his comments show that he has lost his way. He has failed us in the worst possible way. It is a sad and revolting way to end a remarkable career.

Others, including Watson are in deep denial:
"I am mortified about what has happened," Watson said. "More importantly, I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said.

Several longtime friends of Watson insisted he's not a racist.

"It's hard for me to buy the label `racist' for him," said Victor McElheny, the author of a 2003 biography of Watson, whom he's known for 45 years. "This is someone who has encouraged so many people from so many backgrounds."

So why does he say things that can sound racist? "I really don't know the answer to that," McElheny said.

Biologist and Nobel laureate Phil Sharp at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who's known Watson since 1971, said, "I've never considered Jim a racist. However, Jim likes to use statistics and observations to provoke people, and it is possible that he is provoking people by these comments."

Calling Watson "one of the great historical scientific figures of our time," Sharp said, "I don't understand why he takes it upon himself to make these statements."

Mike Botchan, co-chair of the molecular and cell biology department at the University of California, Berkeley, who's known Watson since 1970, said the Nobelist's personal beliefs are less important than the impact of what he says.

"Is he someone who's going to prejudge a person in front of him on the basis of his skin color? I would have to say, no. Is he someone, though, that has these beliefs? I don't know any more. And the important thing is I don't really care," Botchan said.

"I think Jim Watson is now essentially a disgrace to his own legacy. And it's very sad for me to say this, because he's one of the great figures of 20th century biology."

What's Up Atlanta?

Throat too dry to speak up?

update: Georgia seeks water disaster declaration - With water supplies rapidly shrinking during a drought of historic proportions, Gov. Sonny Perdue declared a state of emergency Saturday for the northern third of Georgia and asked President Bush to declare it a major disaster area.

What if Atlanta's faucets really do go dry?

So far, no real backup plan exists. And there are no quick fixes among suggested solutions, which include piping water in from rivers in neighboring states, building more regional reservoirs, setting up a statewide recycling system or even desalinating water from the Atlantic Ocean.

An unprecedented drought stretching across the southeastern United States has forced some of the region's largest cities to declare water emergencies.

The situation has become so serious that officials in Atlanta, where rainfall totals are more than 16 inches below normal, said they could run out of drinking water in a matter of weeks.

I read that it's supposed to rain tonight but dayyum! Quiet as it's kept in the MSM - folks'd almost think everything's just hunky dory. For what it's worth, I'm thinking about you.

Africans are Less Intelligent than Westerners says DNA "Pioneer"

"All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really"

The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when "testing" suggested the contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

His views are also reflected in a book published next week, in which he writes: "There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."

It’s the Oil!

Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. ‘The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,’ the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked. ‘They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.’ As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush.

Read the entire article in Thursday's London Review of Books

Information and Biological Revolutions

Global Governance Challenges — Summary of a Study Group

It was this subtitle that really, really baked my noodle and sent me down the rabbit hole of spiraling cogitations and digital collaborations concerning the nature of things as they presently stand - and the shape of things to come.

This report summarizes the issues that arose and the discussions held during the meetings of a 1998-1999 study group focusing on global governance of information technology and biotechnology. The goal was to bring a policy perspective to bear on a discussion of new technological developments through a series of free-flowing and exploratory presentations and discussions.

Download it and read it in its entirety when you get a chance...,

Regulatory Rethink on Human Hybrids

A radical Government re-think on the law governing hybrid embryos will allow scientists to carry out virtually any work they like - if it is approved by regulators.

The move opens the door to experiments involving every known kind of human-animal hybrid. These could include both "cytoplasmic" embryos, which are 99.9% human, and "true hybrids" carrying both human and animal genes.

In addition "chimeras" made of a mosaic-like mix of cells from different species, and "human transgenic embryos" - human embryos modified with animal DNA - will also be allowed under licence.

Provision has also been made for the regulation of hybrid embryo research to incorporate any unforeseen developments that might arise in the future.

The revised Bill does more than even the committee asked for. It effectively removes the barriers completely, permitting the creation of all four currently envisaged types of hybrid embryo, subject to a licence being granted by the relevant regulatory authority - in this case the HFEA.

Allowing scientists to work on human-animal hybrid embryos will greatly speed up progress in stem cell research. Researchers hope to use embryonic stem cells (ESCs), which can transform into virtually any kind of body tissue, to investigate the causes of human diseases and develop new therapies for currently incurable conditions such as Parkinson's and type 1 diabetes.

Fading in Spirals

My son, who's in the third grade, has a project to complete by the beginning of November. He has to;

1. Write a paper

2. Make a presentation

3. Construct a diorama

Explaining his understanding of the plight of an endangered species.

On his own, he selected the blue whale as the subject of his meditation.

When I was his age, I clearly recollect being inordinately fascinated by blue whales. Funny how the spirals dictate certain tendencies across generations. As I helped him organize his information gathering approach yesterday afternoon - I was reminded of an article I read a while back on the organelle website.

If you haven't done so already, I encourage you to explore organelle. It is easily one of the most thought provoking and substantively rewarding sites on the public Internet.

From an ant’s-eye view, Nature is the domain of gods and giants — universes of incredibly alien diversity are everywhere appearing — at scales local and distant in size. At the ant’s scale, terrain is thousands or millions of times vaster than ours, time is different — everything shifts in relation our scale, speed and attitudes of approach. Much of what might be sensed as nearby motion harbors danger of injury, predation or crushing.

The world of Life as seen from the ant’s scale, contains vast catalogues of participants of enormous size. Some of these creatures feed upon ants. But there is a single creature that does something literally unlike with Life, as a general biocognitive momentum. This creature exterminates ants, and builds artifacts which change their biological, cognitive and experiential universe in bizarre and often deadly ways.

Let us switch scales to the large. From the perspective of a blue whale, most of the universe of life is small, or even tiny. Yet again, there are universes organized by the small (humans) which are embodied specifically to eliminate

The primary expression of human relationship with whales is not predation — predation is something that we can observe in many scales of living symmetry — it is instead extermination, something that happens only with technologies of knowing and their mechanized or industrial artifacts and metaphors. The most serious threat to each of the species at risk or erased by human behavior is virtual, arising in our cognition, and flowering in our activity. At the core of these momentums are simple models of value couched in metaphoric relationships between tokens. For the whales, these tokens have proven deadly, and almost exterminative.

If animals use representational systems of knowing, however different from our own they may be, we can be fairly certain that they are wondering what went wrong with the monkey-people. They are probably desperately hoping that they do not succumb to the same fate, or fall victim to one of the many bizarre machine-rituals which the monkey-people are constantly at labors to elaborate and support. Somehow, our species has earned the dubious distinction of becoming the authors or parents of mere systems of relation, which result in life-eating machines that exhibit a terrifying mimicry of part of Life’s reproductive agenda. These are irreal constructs, which functionally demand and obtain authority over real living organisms, and their natural symmetries of scale. Instead of using their own energies and resources for reproduction, they use the biosphere’s, as well as the living forms, activities, and resources of its children. They are virtual tyrants

Our species’ dances with the tokenization of our relationships and connectivities with our world is costing the living planet its future, and this cost extends deeply into the terrains of our human minds, and our individual lives, in ways we may not yet see as obvious, yet which are consistently expressed in each moment of our own biocognitive activity, experience and elaboration.

In humans and our societies, the containers of such tokens are alive, and thus, the tokens we choose come to life, informed by the abilities and potentials of the animalian consciousness which contains and transports them. When we empower mechanized tokens over those which are more inclusive and flexible, we end up with a devastating cost, which grows geometrically over time, and is expressed in atrocity, and the mutilation of people, cultures, ecosystems, and our planet.

Living planets do not build or support machines — their domains of expression are chemistry, uniqueness, biology and cognition. Earth is unlikely (at best) to be found forcing the expenditure of irreplaceable resources in order to specifically torture or erase her children (which are her body and mind), or whole domains of related children for the sake of a few briefly embodied machines. Yet one of her children is doing this .

Earth, and most of her children, creatively generate universes of living cognitive jewels each instant, at countless billions of scales. She’s been doing this, purportedly, for at least a thousand million years. Machines are not her game. Children are. When we value machines over children, we’re paying predators of our own creation to erase us, and our world. whales, and these momentums have nearly succeeded. This would be something like rats organizing themselves into collectives who variously persecuted and exterminated humans from airships of 2 to 3 times our size or smaller.

We might observe that we relate with flat maps cognitively in a way that results in a species of inward machines, which tend, over time, to result in outward machines. Once these are thoroughly entrenched, they form a kind of expanding catastrophe-clock. Given time and resources, they will erase a living planet, and their living parents. As time progresses, due to their effects of presence upon the organisms who created them, this circumstance will increase geometrically in two domains: velocity of expansion, and deniability. The presence of machines literally breaks the minds of organismal sentience-networks — with noise, or by essentially replacing living connectivity with mechanized (co-opted) transports which mimic what they replaced.

Such a process grows less obvious to its host in a geometric spiral — partially because it first co-opts the organismal features required to detect or resolve the circumstances correctly — much in the way an auto-immune disorder may create a structural breakdown in the system in place to defend against it.

Cultures are like species, as well. Some are predators, some are prey. Many are endangered, and many have been permanently lost. “I think cultures are kinds of virtual realities where whole populations of people become imprisoned inside a structure which is linguistic and value-based.”

Whose Prosthesis Are We?

“I think cultures are kinds of virtual realities where whole populations of people become imprisoned inside a structure which is linguistic and value-based.”

“Now, if we’re gonna become a planetary being, we can’t have the luxury of an unconscious mind, that’s something that goes along with the monkey-stage of human culture. And so comes then the prosthesis of technology, that all our memories and all our sciences and our projective planning abilities can be downloaded into a technological artifact which is almost our child or our friend or our companion in the historical adventure.”

(Terence McKenna 1998)

Discrimination in Academia?

Frank Douglas has resigned from MIT.

On June 3, I resigned from faculty and administrative positions at MIT, effective June 30. I did so because I perceived an unconscious discrimination against minorities and because my colleagues and the institute authorities did not act on my recommendations to address these issues. The timing was such that many of my colleagues thought I was resigning over the case of James Sherley, who was denied tenure in 2004 and went on a hunger strike earlier this year in protest. But my decision was based on the complex, insidious nature of discrimination in a university context.

I will go into more detail about my decision below, but several things have become clear to me throughout my decades of experience in industry and academic science. Academia is where the leaders and change agents of society and the world are educated, imprinted and nurtured. Selecting and preparing these future citizens and leaders has historically relied on various methods. Foremost is that done on the basis of excellence, whether it is in ability to recite, repeat or find new solutions to historical problems. This is the discrimination of excellence to the discipline, and is widely held to be a good thing.

The other two methods are not considered as positive because of the role that personal preferences - that is, prejudices - plays in them. One, the curious phenomenon of fraternities, sororities and special clubs, which discriminate along social lines, is the discrimination of social acceptance. The other, based on a behavioral or style component supportive of the goals of the department or discipline, is the discrimination of best fit. What makes these selection methods particularly troublesome for minorities is that discrimination of excellence to the discipline is impacted by the other two criteria. Recent events at MIT have been no exception to this pattern.

The Full Monty including interesting and mostly supportive commentary is available at The Scientist

Brother Douglas is not lying about his motives being complex and discrimination being insidious and highly resistant to change within the scientific establishment. Frankly, I'm confused as all get out about the BiDil connection - because I don't appreciate the scientific validity of a "race drug" - but the rest of it I understand and fully appreciate. My concerns about a "race drug" stem from my disbelief that the folks pursuing that aim possess the objectivity to do so in good faith. In fact, anything smacking of racial science raises the hairs on the back of my neck because the entire field of endeavor has a history of being polluted by bad intentions to its very core.

In The Beginning

Today is a very good day to start a blog.

Any day now Craig Venter - geneticist, yachtsman and Vietnam veteran - will announce that he has achieved one of the greatest feats in science: the creation of artificial life.

The DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.

There is a distinct possibility that this changes everything with regard to the future of humankind. For the past several years, I have been very pessimistic about our prospects because of Peak Oil and the way some of us have acted in response to that challenge. For more time than I care to recount, I have contemplated and planned for a dystopian patch of road just around the signpost up ahead. Economic crash, societal disruption, and the prospect that our species has entered an evolutionary blind alley.

Our teaming masses have badly overshot sustainability, and our ecological footprint is crushing the life out of the natural biosphere. I suspect that the next major breakthroughs in physics (and thus matter/energy) would require a substantial improvement in our level of consciousness. Having despaired of the latter, I had discounted the likelihood of the former. Now however, by a process of looking inward, as deep inward as it is possible for our science and our consciousness to look, it appears that we stand on the precipice of a major breakthrough that will absolutely revolutionize our place in the world. If Venter's team has done what is claimed, as a species, we have at long last reached our childhood's end.

I'm very excited about what this may mean for the future of my own children. Possibly a utopian rather than a dystopian future. I'm equally excited about what it means for the deeper understanding of where we've come from and to whence we appear to be returning.