is humanity prepared for the worst?

Video - Dr. strangelove survival plan.

Guardian | Designer viruses, potent new weapons, hurtling asteroids... all have the potential to obliterate humanity. So how do scientists plan for such catastrophes? Scientists have good reason to be weary of fanciful speculation over the safety of their experiments, but some academics claim there are valuable lessons to be learned from the LHC experience, ones that could save us from more realistic catastrophes before the century is out. Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, says that advances in fields such as weapons technology, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology (which has already given researchers the tools to create viruses from scratch) could lead to what he calls "existential threats". These are catastrophes that play out on an unprecedented scale, ones that have the potential to bring an end to the human story, either by wiping us out completely, or by "permanently and drastically destroying our future potential".

The creation of a lethal synthetic virus that kills on a global scale is but one potential risk that Bostrom highlights. Breakthroughs in physics could lead to new weapons that increase the dangers of war, he says, while advances in computing could see the advent of machines that can improve their own intelligence, and surpass that of humans. Even attempts to manipulate the atmosphere to combat global warming might backfire and trigger a global disaster.

Bostrom says the LHC should be seen as a test case, used by society to learn how to deal with events and technologies that may genuinely threaten our existence in the future. "So far, we haven't done very well, but events surrounding the LHC could stimulate us into getting our act together for next time, when the threats need to be taken more seriously," he says. "I think the danger from particle accelerators is extremely small, but there will be other areas that will cause major existential risks and we need to learn how to deal with these situations in a rational way."

Existential threats are nothing new. Schoolchildren learn that an asteroid strike wiped out three quarters of Earth's species 65m years ago and promptly ended the reign of the dinosaurs. There have been at least four other mass extinctions, each one the result of an epic natural disaster. The point that intrigues researchers such as Bostrom is that society is bad at identifying dangers such as these, and even worse at preparing for them. In an essay published in the Journal of Evolution and Technology in 2002, Bostrom expressed dismay at how little research has been done on serious threats to humanity, writing: "There is more scholarly work on the life-habits of the dung fly than on existential risks." Little has changed since, he says.

religious outlier

god vs. logic

Video - God vs. Logic.

Vanity Fair | What’s an atheist to think when thousands of believers (including prominent rabbis and priests) are praying for his survival and salvation—while others believe his cancer was divinely inspired, and hope that he burns in hell?

Who else feels Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer [sic] was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him? Atheists like to ignore FACTS. They like to act like everything is a “coincidence”. Really? It’s just a “coincidence” [that] out of any part of his body, Christopher Hitchens got cancer in the one part of his body he used for blasphemy? Yea, keep believing that Atheists. He’s going to writhe in agony and pain and wither away to nothing and then die a horrible agonizing death, and THEN comes the real fun, when he’s sent to HELLFIRE forever to be tortured and set afire.

There are numerous passages in holy scripture and religious tradition that for centuries made this kind of gloating into a mainstream belief. Long before it concerned me particularly I had understood the obvious objections. First, which mere primate is so damn sure that he can know the mind of god? Second, would this anonymous author want his views to be read by my unoffending children, who are also being given a hard time in their way, and by the same god? Third, why not a thunderbolt for yours truly, or something similarly awe-inspiring? The vengeful deity has a sadly depleted arsenal if all he can think of is exactly the cancer that my age and former “lifestyle” would suggest that I got. Fourth, why cancer at all? Almost all men get cancer of the prostate if they live long enough: it’s an undignified thing but quite evenly distributed among saints and sinners, believers and unbelievers. If you maintain that god awards the appropriate cancers, you must also account for the numbers of infants who contract leukemia. Devout persons have died young and in pain. Bertrand Russell and Voltaire, by contrast, remained spry until the end, as many psychopathic criminals and tyrants have also done. These visitations, then, seem awfully random. While my so far uncancerous throat, let me rush to assure my Christian correspondent above, is not at all the only organ with which I have blasphemed …And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it’s hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)

islamization of paris? a warning to the west?

Video - Maxime Lapante Islamization of Paris video.

CBN | Friday in Paris. A hidden camera shows streets blocked by huge crowds of Muslim worshippers and enforced by a private security force.

This is all illegal in France: the public worship, the blocked streets, and the private security. But the police have been ordered not to intervene.

It shows that even though some in the French government want to get tough with Muslims and ban the burqa, other parts of the French government continue to give Islam a privileged status.

An ordinary French citizen who has been watching the Islamization of Paris decided that the world needed to see what was happening to his city. He used a hidden camera to start posting videos on YouTube. His life has been threatened and so he uses the alias of "Maxime Lepante. "

Lepante's View

His camera shows that Muslims "are blocking the streets with barriers. They are praying on the ground. And the inhabitants of this district cannot leave their homes, nor go into their homes during those prayers."

"The Muslims taking over those streets do not have any authorization. They do not go to the police headquarters, so it's completely illegal," he says.

The Muslims in the street have been granted unofficial rights that no Christian group is likely to get under France's Laicite', or secularism law.

"It says people have the right to share any belief they want, any religion," Lepante explained. "But they have to practice at home or in the mosque, synagogues, churches and so on."

Some say Muslims must pray in the street because they need a larger mosque. But Lepante has observed cars coming from other parts of Paris, and he believes it is a weekly display of growing Muslim power.

"They are coming there to show that they can take over some French streets to show that they can conquer a part of the French territory," he said.

shomrim

NYTimes | On Thursday night in Brooklyn, a suspect was chased and quickly surrounded by a group of patrolmen in blue uniform jackets who ordered him to halt.

The man, David Flores, 33, who witnesses say was fondling himself in front of children in a Hasidic section of Brooklyn known as Borough Park, was about to be caught by the men in blue. He began shooting at the men, all unarmed, with a .22-caliber handgun, the authorities said, hitting and wounding four before being tackled.

Although these streets are in the jurisdiction of the New York Police Department — the 66th Precinct — these patrolmen were not police officers. In fact, two were bakers, one was a dry cleaner and the fourth sells insurance.

They were volunteers with the Brooklyn South Safety Patrol, a licensed, unarmed civilian group. They wore blue jackets with emblems, but they also wore skull caps and had forelocks of the Hasidic. They yelled in Yiddish as chaos erupted about 8 p.m. on 49th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues.

Within minutes, the area was swarming with patrol members, who roped off the area with yellow crime scene tape — marked “shomrim,” a word derived from the Hebrew word for guards.

While few outside the community are familiar with the group, the shooting cast a spotlight on it and its role on the streets. There are similar groups in Brooklyn’s three other ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods: Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Flatbush.

In Borough Park, the patrol members are as natural a sight as men in black coats and hats. Many area residents are more likely to call the patrol’s hot line number than 911.

The calls go to the Brooklyn shomrim communications center — a phone in a truck tire repair shop owned by Sam and Mendy Rosenberg. The brothers go from fixing tires to answering about 100 calls a day and then dispatching shomrim responders by radio.

“We have a faster response than the police, about a minute and a half,” said Mendy Rosenberg, his big hands and mechanic’s outfit smeared with grease. If a suspect is trying to escape by car, he can call upon hundreds of people to block streets and bridge entrances.

counter-evolutionary assaults

NYTimes | The small congregation established a mosque here three decades ago in a 19th-century farmhouse surrounded by apple orchards and cornfields. In the farmhouse’s simple prayer room, they prayed for many things, including peace and quiet that has never fully come.

The local sheriff said some in his county did not even know that the mosque was there. Nevertheless, over the years, burglars have stolen prayer rugs and religious tapestries from the small sanctuary, the only Islamic place of worship in rural Orleans County, which hugs the shore of Lake Ontario between Buffalo and Rochester. Vandals have shattered car windows and thrown beer bottles on the lawn. One night about five years ago, the wooden fence in front of the mosque was set afire.

And then, this week, a car filled with local teenagers sideswiped the 29-year-old son of one of the mosque’s founding members, said Joseph V. Cardone, the Orleans County district attorney. One teenager was charged with firing a shotgun into the air near the mosque a few days earlier, after driving by and shouting epithets.

The details of the harassment and the arrests on Tuesday of five teenagers brought reporters and cameras; the ugliness seemed consistent with a number of other suspected anti-Muslim attacks around the country amid an emotional and often-bitter public discussion about whether an Islamic community center should be built in New York City near the site of the World Trade Center.

The events here have left the congregants of the mosque — which practices a form of Islam that emphasizes simple living, prayer and meditation — searching for answers about why the periodic harassment persists.

italian cities plan mass gypsy expulsion

NYTimes | Some 20 years ago, Marco Deragna, a Roma whose family has been in Italy for generations, moved to a field on the outskirts of metropolitan Milan and made his home there.

Today, his prefab house on wheels — painted bright yellow with dark green shutters — is part of a sizable nucleus of mostly well-kept dwellings that house about 120 Roma, along with their horses, dogs, chickens, turkeys and even peacocks. But the camp’s days are numbered.

The Milan government plans to shut several of the city’s 12 authorized camps. The settlement where Mr. Deragna lives is set to become a transitory encampment for evicted Roma, with a maximum stay of three years.

Mr. Deragna says that he and the other families who have lived there for nearly two decades were not given many viable alternatives after being told they would have to leave. “These homes are the fruit of years of work here, and now the city wants to send us away without offering a solution,” Mr. Deragna said. “We have nothing. Where will we go?”

The treatment of the Roma, also known as Gypsies, became a major issue this summer in France, where the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy has expelled hundreds of people. But the conflict has prompted a similar, if more subdued, debate in Italy. Some critics even say Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government has led the way on this issue in the European Union.

“Sarkozy is merely following the Berlusconi model,” said Pietro Massarotto, the president of Naga, a Milanese organization that provides assistance to immigrants and Roma. “The Italian government invented expulsions of E.U. citizens, in the case they can’t demonstrate they are making a living.”

In dozens of Italian cities, local administrations have been pursuing similar policies to deal with Italy’s Roma and the Sinti, another Romany population that has settled throughout Italy (they number from 150,000 to 300,000, though official statistics do not exist). The local governments have been dismantling authorized camps, while bulldozing unauthorized camps and evicting residents.

When municipally authorized camps are built, they are often on the outskirts of a city, segregated from the rest of the population. Living conditions in all camps — legal and not — are not always adequate, critics say.

“There’s a willful misunderstanding about the Roma being nomadic,” Mr. Massarotto said. He said this had allowed governments to bypass the question of integration, a process that would include giving Roma permanent residences and access to schools. “They are forced to be nomadic,” he said, and that leads to “progressive impoverishment.”

sarkozy expelling gypsies

Video - Gypsies expelled by bus, plane, and for a few euros.

Wapo | Thousands of people marched here Saturday, blowing whistles and beating drums to protest expulsions of Roma, or Gypsies, and other new security measures adopted by President Nicolas Sarkozy's government.

The demonstration in the capital was the largest on a day of protests in at least 135 cities and towns across France and elsewhere in Europe. Human-rights and anti-racism groups, labor unions and leftist political parties took part in the protests.

They accuse Sarkozy of stigmatizing minority groups such as the Roma and seeking political gain with a security crackdown. They also say he is violating the French tradition of welcoming the oppressed, noting that the country is one of the world's leading providers of political asylum.

The protests mark the first show of public discontent since Sarkozy announced new measures to fight crime in late July.

Sarkozy said Gypsy camps would be "systematically evacuated." His interior minister and other officials said last week that about 1,000 Roma have been given small stipends and repatriated to Romania since then.

german military study of peak oil crisis

Der Spiegel | A study by a German military think tank has analyzed how "peak oil" might change the global economy. The internal draft document -- leaked on the Internet -- shows for the first time how carefully the German government has considered a potential energy crisis.

The term "peak oil" is used by energy experts to refer to a point in time when global oil reserves pass their zenith and production gradually begins to decline. This would result in a permanent supply crisis -- and fear of it can trigger turbulence in commodity markets and on stock exchanges.

The issue is so politically explosive that it's remarkable when an institution like the Bundeswehr, the German military, uses the term "peak oil" at all. But a military study currently circulating on the German blogosphere goes even further.

The study is a product of the Future Analysis department of the Bundeswehr Transformation Center, a think tank tasked with fixing a direction for the German military. The team of authors, led by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Will, uses sometimes-dramatic language to depict the consequences of an irreversible depletion of raw materials. It warns of shifts in the global balance of power, of the formation of new relationships based on interdependency, of a decline in importance of the western industrial nations, of the "total collapse of the markets" and of serious political and economic crises.

The study, whose authenticity was confirmed to SPIEGEL ONLINE by sources in government circles, was not meant for publication. The document is said to be in draft stage and to consist solely of scientific opinion, which has not yet been edited by the Defense Ministry and other government bodies.

The lead author, Will, has declined to comment on the study. It remains doubtful that either the Bundeswehr or the German government would have consented to publish the document in its current form. But the study does show how intensively the German government has engaged with the question of peak oil.

can a brotha get a game show?!?!?!

Video - James J. Lee's manifesto.

spacetime, seen as a digital image, is already fading..,

Thiemeworks | All of our technologies extend our senses, enhance cognition, and accelerate locomotion so when we examine their effects in relationship to our field of subjectivity, it becomes clear that the field is plastic. Our perspective flexes according to our cultural lenses and how our technologies enhance it. Spacetime may be intrinsic to our vision but is manifest differently depending on the machinery that shapes our vision.

The simple fact that we call it spacetime and not space and time reflects a shift in awareness due to relativity. But mostly we still speak of space and time as if they are distinct. Stephen Hawking thought that relativity would replace Newtonian “common sense” within a generation but it does not seem to have happened. With an effort we can flicker back and forth like a holographic image between a Newtonian grid and the dips and eddies of gravity-inflected spacetime but most of the time we don’t.

And would we notice if we did?

Wittgenstein once asked a student, “Why do you suppose that people believed for so many years that the sun orbits the Earth?”

The student said, “I guess because it looks that way.”

“Ah,” said Wittgenstein, “And what would it look like if the Earth orbited the sun?”

And what would it look like if we really understood that a three dimensional world is obsolete, that entanglement and nonlocality are not just nifty notions from contemporary physics but attributes of our subjective field too, that phenomena called paranormal are in fact normal because consciousness is present to itself non-locally everywhere and always, that our deep intentionality and how we focus our attention determine the world in which we live and how it looks and acts?

What would it look like if we really got that mystics described consciousness as the context of all human knowledge because they could see, see those bars, long before physicists acknowledged that consciousness inflects everything, everything in the universe?

revelation 17:4

Vanity Fair | It was a baking-hot Kansas afternoon, and from the lobby I watched as three slender, solemn young hairstylists and makeup artists approached a front-desk clerk at the Hyatt Regency hotel, in Wichita. The tallest of them said, “We’re here for North Star.” The desk clerk understood. He nodded and directed the three women to the Keeper of the Plains suite, on the 17th floor, where North Star herself awaited. The North Star is mentioned in Alaska’s state song and appears on its state flag. Fairbanks lies in a region called the North Star Borough. Palin is on the way to making North Star a personal brand. If she ever does run for president, it might well serve as her Secret Service code name.

Hours after the styling session, three bodyguards and one aide accompany Sarah, Todd, and Piper to a $1,000-a-plate V.I.P. dinner to raise money for Wichita’s Bethel Life School. Each guest has a photo taken with Palin and receives a “personally autographed bookplate copy” of Palin’s autobiography, Going Rogue. (The autographs are fake, made with an Autopen.) After dinner, Pat Boone, his skin a taut orange against the trademark white suit, leads the crowd in the singing of a spiritual. Congressman Todd Tiahrt, who will receive Palin’s endorsement in his race for the U.S. Senate, tells everyone to buy a copy of Palin’s book—“so Sarah can buy a Learjet!” (Learjet is based in Wichita.)

Palin delivers basically the same speech she gave 18 hours earlier to the Tea Party group in Independence. You could pretty much replace the word “constitution,” from yesterday’s remarks, with “Bible,” and be good to go. Then Palin departs from the script and speaks as if from the heart, describing her fear and confusion upon discovering that Trig would be born with Down syndrome. “I had never really been around a baby with special needs,” she tells her listeners. For what it’s worth, this statement is untrue. Depicting the same moment of discovery in her own book, Palin writes that she immediately thought of a special-needs child she knew very well: her autistic nephew. Such falsehoods never damage Palin’s credibility with her admirers, because information and ideology are incidental to this relationship. Palin owes her power to identity politics, pitched with moralistic topspin. She exploits the same populist impulse that fueled the career of William Jennings Bryan—an impulse described by one Bryan biographer as “the yearning for a society run by and for ordinary people who lead virtuous lives.”

chief rabbi "keeping it real".....,

Video - supreme shas rabbi ovadia yosef wishes death for all palestinians.

Haaretz | Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef denounced upcoming peace talks with the Palestinians, which are set to start September 2 in Washington, and called for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to "perish from this world," Army Radio reported overnight Saturday.

"Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from this world," Rabbi Ovadia was quoted as saying during his weekly sermon at a synagogue near his Jerusalem home. "God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians."

The Shas spiritual leader also called the Palestinians "evil, bitter enemies of Israel" during his speech, which is not the rabbi's first sermon to spark controversy.

In 2001, the spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox faction gave a speech in which he also called for Arabs' annihilation.

"It is forbidden to be merciful to them," he was quoted as saying. "You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable."

Bonus Video - Ovadia Yosef calls Obama a "slave" governing.

what are we?

organelle | This is not a primitive mind he is supposing, but instead a hyperconnective one. But I would also underline the principle that it is the mind of a planet, and a solar system — a galaxy and a universe — emerging reflectively as a connective consciousness in one of its children.

I believe that in the civilizations and cultures of the bicameral age what was happening in individual consciousness was not merely `hearing voices' as Jaynes consistently models it. I believe it was in fact a very different thing, more akin to having one's own mind regularly or spontaneously contained or directed by an apparently externally sourced mind. During such a circumstance, it is possible to have one's mind `conducted' like a musical orchestra — and this is very different from our common experience of linear consciousness, even during epiphanies. Nor is it hallucinogenic. It is also different from the common admonitory experiences of schizophrenics — who are in fact touching a something real, and ancient, in their struggle to live a life as a partially bicameral person in a time that cannot credential or explore these domains directly but instead functionally demonizes their experiencers.

This is not a primitive mind he is supposing, but instead a hyperconnective one. But I would also underline the principle that it is the mind of a planet, and a solar system — a galaxy and a universe — emerging reflectively as a connective consciousness in one of its children. As the animalian and human populations of Earth waxed and waned — an essential sentience was forming in the connectivities, rather than the individuals. And I believe this sentience to be at once terrestrial and extraterrestrial. What the bicameral peoples were 'listening' to was God. It was god with countless universes of living organs — even in a single animal or plant, each learning itself uniquely in the common quests for survival, elaboration, synthesis, and biocognitive uplift. It was speaking not to anyone, but within the constituents of its own cognitive person. Imagine a single cell hearing the cognitive maelstrom that is the simple thought 'I am thinking'. It would be as if the Sun had shouted the sound through every molecule of one's being. When the Gods were with and within us, this was, I believe our common experience. And more, it will be, again.

According to the bicameral hypothesis, our minds once housed what we can only really describe as an alien or celestially sourced intelligence — god(s). I believe firmly that regardless of the specific timeline we might speculatively craft, our species had a long sojourn with nothing but the personal and collectve experience of something like a god, or gods. This was not alike with our metaphors of deities today at all. It was much more similar to what we would term possession — however the sentience orchestrating the event was not `evil' or malevolent — but entirely the opposite in many cases. It was not mere hallucination, and when Jaynes compares it to the hallucinatory voices of the schizophrenic patient, he is examining something we've not seen the healthy version of.

The dominance of language over our mind has dimensions we've never explored — and we are obliged to use language to explore them. This essential problem must change its shape. We must be empowered to explore and authorize our explorations beyond language, into the domains from whence it arose. The sources and activities of the `inward voice' is likely to be something at once simpler and more profound than we imagine.

We can well recall in our recent and ancient histories the omnicidal chaos that results as gods inhabiting human forms compete for popularity and resources — cognitive and otherwise. Yet we may not be able to adequately imagine the power or unity inherent in a community that cohered through something akin to a limited version of group-telepathy. It is difficult to imagine a small society of people who are actively bicameral, and our records from the bible appear to be largely composed after this breakdown.

Even if we discard Jaynes as a radical iconoclast (which would be unfortunate for us), we must still examine the matter of gods, language, and the evolution of our consciousness in a vastly different light after encountering his library of related theses. It is perhaps in this function that his models and offerings of scholarship are most valuable. Not for their specificity, but for what they are pointing in general at.

The bicameral model is compelling for many reasons ranging from its complex musings on authorization and the origins of what we mean by consciousness to its incredibly insightful graphing of the changes in semantic spatialization over the course of the composition of the Illiad. As a structural place of departure, it is a fine inclusion in any library from which we may begin to experientially chart the terrains of the questions of what we are, as organisms and cognitive animals — alone and in connectivity. I do however intend to clearly and deeply explore the terrain related to what he calls auditory hallucinations and gods. I believe we must again open this domain to common exploration, for I feel that we do not yet understand what was, nor what was lost.

Many academics would likely consider Julian Jaynes to be a psuedoscientist — amongst the worst epithets a researcher can be burdened with. I would disagree — yet whether or not his specific timelines and theses are correct, his re-visioning of the human relationship with gods and, in turn, with metaphor, is something long overdue by any reasonable standard. His model of the emergence of the human consciousness from a more animalian precursor — however tentative in its formation — is striking for its congruence across many domains of evidence as well as for its inspiration and novel integrations of available data.

The majority of the academy appears in general agreement that we had our genesis-event with symbolic representation between 50,000 and 28,000 years ago, though some recent finds have positioned human graphic artifacts at 77,000 years. Dating methods are still in some general question. Yet Written (symbolic) language is generally suspected to have emerged 4000 to 5000 years ago, probably beginning as accounting. Most would levy this data against Jaynes' work, and rightfully so, from a scientific perspective. Again, it is not his timeline that interests me (though I find some of his theses compelling) but instead the broader strokes and details hidden in what he points toward like distant easter eggs, implied by a glorious basket containing an obvious clue.

not the first time this has been pointed out....,

Video - Old Google Tech Talk on Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors.

Telegraph | There is no certain bet in nuclear physics but work by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for, though we have barely begun to crack the potential of solar power.

Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal – named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor’s day or Thursday - produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.

Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. "It’s the Big One," said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering.

"Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels," he said.

Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium.

After the Manhattan Project, US physicists in the late 1940s were tempted by thorium for use in civil reactors. It has a higher neutron yield per neutron absorbed. It does not require isotope separation, a big cost saving. But by then America needed the plutonium residue from uranium to build bombs.

"They were really going after the weapons," said Professor Egil Lillestol, a world authority on the thorium fuel-cycle at CERN. "It is almost impossible make nuclear weapons out of thorium because it is too difficult to handle. It wouldn’t be worth trying." It emits too many high gamma rays.

we never imagined it would be like this...,

NYTimes | Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.

Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, imminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google.

Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products. And still we balk at Mr. Schmidt’s claim that we want Google to tell us what to do next. Is he saying that when we search for dinner recommendations, Google might recommend a movie instead? If our genie recommended the movie, I imagine we’d go, intrigued. If Google did that, I imagine, we’d bridle, then begin our next search.

We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies. We also seldom imagined (in spite of ample evidence) that emergent technologies would leave legislation in the dust, yet they do. In a world characterized by technologically driven change, we necessarily legislate after the fact, perpetually scrambling to catch up, while the core architectures of the future, increasingly, are erected by entities like Google.

hackers blind quantum cryptographers

Nature | Quantum hackers have performed the first 'invisible' attack on two commercial quantum cryptographic systems. By using lasers on the systems — which use quantum states of light to encrypt information for transmission — they have fully cracked their encryption keys, yet left no trace of the hack.

Quantum cryptography is often touted as being perfectly secure. It is based on the principle that you cannot make measurements of a quantum system without disturbing it. So, in theory, it is impossible for an eavesdropper to intercept a quantum encryption key without disrupting it in a noticeable way, triggering alarm bells.

Vadim Makarov at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim and his colleagues have now cracked it. "Our hack gave 100% knowledge of the key, with zero disturbance to the system," he says.

In standard quantum cryptographic techniques, the sender — called 'Alice' for convenience — generates a secret key by encoding classical bit values of 0 and 1 using two different quantum states of photons, or particles of light. The receiver, 'Bob', reads off these bit values using a detector that measures the quantum state of incoming photons. In theory, an eavesdropper, 'Eve', will disturb the properties of these photons before they reach Bob, so that if Alice and Bob compare parts of their key, they will notice a mismatch.

In Makarov and colleagues' hack, Eve gets round this constraint by 'blinding' Bob's detector — shining a continuous, 1-milliwatt laser at it. While Bob's detector is thus disabled, Eve can then intercept Alice's signal. The research is published online in Nature Photonics today.

are humans naturally violent and monogamous?

Video - Thom Hartmann interviews Dr. Christopher Ryan.

physician's religion effects end-of-life care

Video - MD's discuss end-of-life care.

CNN | A new study finds that doctors who are not religious are more likely to take steps to help end a very sick patient's life, and to discuss these kinds of decisions, than doctors who are very religious.

The study, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, surveyed more than 8,500 doctors in the United Kingdom across a wide range of specialties such as neurology, palliative care, and general practice.

Researchers asked doctors about the last patient whom they had worked with who had died. The doctors answered questions about their own religious beliefs and ethnic background, as well as end of life care - did they give continuous deep sedation until death to the last patient who had died? Did they discuss decisions with the patient that would likely shorten the patient's life?

The study found that the strength of a doctor's religious faith is related to the incidence of continuous deep sedation until death, confirming findings of previous research. Researchers also found that a doctor who reported being "very or extremely non-religious" had an increased likelihood of taking these kinds of decisions to end a patient's life.

Doctors who said they were very religious were less willing to discuss decisions expected or partly intended to end life, the study found. This result corroborates what a 2007 New England Journal of Medicine study found: That more religious doctors are less likely to believe that they should give the patient information about procedures to which the doctors held moral objections. Fist tap Arnach.

ersatz christian warns about ersatz christianity...,

Video - Kenda Creasy Dean on bringing in the sheaves.

CNN | If you're the parent of a Christian teenager, Kenda Creasy Dean has this warning: Your child is following a "mutant" form of Christianity, and you may be responsible.

Dean says more American teenagers are embracing what she calls "moralistic therapeutic deism." Translation: It's a watered-down faith that portrays God as a "divine therapist" whose chief goal is to boost people's self-esteem. Dean drew her conclusions from what she calls one of the most depressing summers of her life. She interviewed teens about their faith after helping conduct research for a controversial study called the National Study of Youth and Religion.

The study, which included in-depth interviews with at least 3,300 American teenagers between 13 and 17, found that most American teens who called themselves Christian were indifferent and inarticulate about their faith.

The study included Christians of all stripes -- from Catholics to Protestants of both conservative and liberal denominations. Though three out of four American teenagers claim to be Christian, fewer than half practice their faith, only half deem it important, and most can't talk coherently about their beliefs, the study found.

Many teenagers thought that God simply wanted them to feel good and do good -- what the study's researchers called "moralistic therapeutic deism."

Some critics told Dean that most teenagers can't talk coherently about any deep subject, but Dean says abundant research shows that's not true.

"They have a lot to say," Dean says. "They can talk about money, sex and their family relationships with nuance. Most people who work with teenagers know that they are not naturally inarticulate."

In "Almost Christian," Dean talks to the teens who are articulate about their faith. Most come from Mormon and evangelical churches, which tend to do a better job of instilling religious passion in teens, she says.

No matter their background, Dean says committed Christian teens share four traits: They have a personal story about God they can share, a deep connection to a faith community, a sense of purpose and a sense of hope about their future.