Well, it just doesn't get any better than this:

Next time you go to the movies, look out. If the popcorn vendors have read this article, your cup of popcorn might contain fewer pieces than it used to. That's because the pieces could each be up to twice the volume they were previously.

Popcorn kernels twice the size of what we're used to. Paul Quinn of Kutztown University in Pennsylvania and Joseph Both of the Stanford School of Medicine in California have figured out that cooking popcorn under lower pressure can make it pop up twice as big. Whatever those fine institutions are paying these two scholarly gentlement, they ought to double it.

Okay, now admit it. Don't you love living here in the future?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

She was sitting in her chair, doing her knitting, and listening to the preacher on the radio. She had been listening to the man for years. She had by now forgotten (or mostly forgotten) that she started out listening to him because she thought he was vaguely ridiculous, and she enjoyed chuckling at his inanity. Over time, familiarity had worn down her ironic detachment. Now she listened to him as intently, and with as much reverence, as she did Paul Harvey -- who came on right after the preacher, but on a different station.

He was in quite a state today. He wanted it clearly understood that the recent occurrence in what he described as the “hills near Colorado” was not the descending of the New Jerusalem as described at the end of the Book of Revelations. No, indeed. It was a blasphemous forgery, spun from hell to mock almighty God.

Myra was inclined to accept his authority on this matter, at least the part about the city not being the New Jerusalem. She had seen the city on the morning news, which provided a much clearer view than she could get from her front porch. It was pretty all right. Kind of a nice addition to the mountain. But it wasn’t nearly big enough to be the New Jerusalem. Anyway, it didn’t matter to her one way or the other. Though she liked this preacher very much, she honestly couldn’t see what he was getting so worked up about. Everyone on the TV was saying that it was a hoax, or that it had come from outer space. That made sense to Myra. She doubted that hell could really spin out anything so pleasant.

As she was thinking about this, something completely unexpected happened. There was a knock at the door. Myra got up to answer it (wondering who in the world it could be and hoping that it wasn’t the Jehovah’s Witnesses again.) She opened the door to find four children standing before her. Children she knew.

Oh, my, yes.

She knew them.

All but one of them, anyway. There was Judy, the black girl who was a Mongoloid besides. Myra remembered that she wasn’t supposed to use that word, though she couldn’t recall who had told her not to. But it was no matter. She couldn’t recall a good many things these days, and had decided not to let it bother her. Anyway, the girl was somehow not a Mongoloid anymore. Myra had never seen anything like that before. And here was Todd, also Mongoloid and deaf; only not any longer. And a boy that she didn’t know. And Grace, of course.

Baby Grace.

A year older. These were her children, children from the home. Changed somehow, but still the children she had known and cared for. For them to just show up like this at her doorstep, apparently healed of their infirmities…well if that wasn’t evidence of the New Heaven and the New Earth, then she didn’t know what would have been.

She let the children in. She sat them down and poured them all some lemonade. She wanted above all to hear what Grace had to say. Little Grace, who had been her heart’s darling. Just like her mother before her, who had been so dear to Myra. At some level, Myra knew that she was leaving out a considerable amount of unpleasantness by remembering things this way, but she wouldn’t have cared about that even if she could. It seemed that there was someone who was always trying to make her feel guilty about all those things that had happened. Someone who had blamed her for everything. But now she was free from that: she really and truly could not remember who her accuser was.

And she was glad.

Because she had loved Grace, there was no question of that. And her mother, what was that girl’s name? Geraldine? Jody? It didn’t matter. Myra knew that she had cared for the girl and tried her best to do right by her. It wasn’t her fault that things had come to a bad end. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.

Some things just couldn’t be prevented.

Try though she might to get Grace to talk to her, Myra found that it was Judy and Todd who seemed to have the most to say. Judy was always a talky girl. Never quite so much as…some of the others, perhaps, but still quite talky. Todd was a surprise, though. He never could talk before. He couldn’t even hear. And yet now here he was and he could. And he did.

Myra wished, in fact, that he would talk a little less, so that she could finally get a word in with Grace. But he just kept right on with a long and complicated story about how the Superintendent was trying to shut the home down. This did not come as a surprise to Myra, not at all. Superintendent Jepson (she had no difficulty remembering that name) had always been a small-minded and vindictive little man. She had struggled with him for years over the issue of allowing her children to attend classes at what he called his school.

Of course, it wasn’t his at all, was it?

It was a public facility; it belonged to the city. The children from the home had as much right to attend the Special Needs school as any other child in town. Only a heartless bureaucrat like Jepson would fail to acknowledge that, would lead successive school boards in barring her children from access. So it was no surprise to learn that he had taken the next step and was now moving to have the school closed.

Still, the details of it all were rather confusing. Myra tried to listen attentively to what the boy was telling her, but it was difficult. Her mind kept wandering onto other subjects, mostly memories of her time at the home. She hadn’t thought much about the home lately and now the memories were flooding back. It was odd, but it seemed that there were quite a few memories missing, even more than should have been missing, and this troubled her. Plus, the boy was hard to follow in his own right. His sentences were long and complicated. And he would occasionally use words that Myra couldn’t quite remember.

He reached the end of his explanation and then asked Myra whether they could count on her for her help and support.

She told him that they could, of course they could, no question about it. Whereupon the boy produced a checkbook and asked her to write out a check as he had described.

Myra stared at it blankly.

“I’m sorry, young man,” she said after a moment, “Todd. But why did you say you need me to write a check?”

“To make sure that the home’s funds aren’t confiscated,” said Todd. “Once we have the money in cash form, we’ll move it into an escrow account where it will be safe until a court can rule in our favor.”

Myra looked at the checkbook again. She didn’t know what to do.

“You see, Miss Baker,” said Judy, “it’s like Todd said. We’ve all undergone a new experimental treatment and that’s why we’re doing so well. Now that we’re cured, Mr. Jepson says that there’s no reason for the home to stay in operation. So he’s trying to get us shut down. We think he’s going to make a grab at the money in the home’s accounts, and we need to stop him from doing it.

“I see,” said Myra, and she did. She smiled at Judy. Why couldn’t the boy have put it so simply?

“All right, then,” she said, taking the checkbook and pen from Todd’s hands.

“Who do I make this out to?”

“Just make it out to Cash,” said Todd.

She looked at him, puzzled.

“It’s just to save time,” Judy explained. “That way, whoever can go to the bank first can cash it.”

“Fine,” said Myra, smiling once again. “And what was the amount again?”

“Eight thousand dollars,” said Judy, before Todd could speak.

Myra dutifully wrote out the check and detached it from the checkbook. She handed it to Todd. She made a note on the check stub and a full entry in the register in the back of the book. Just as she had done so many times before.

“My goodness,” she said, handing the checkbook back to Todd. “That must be the biggest check I ever wrote.”

“Thank you Miss Baker,” said Grace, who had been quiet to this point. She hugged Myra.

Myra was pleased.

“Why, you’re welcome, darling.” She ran a hand through Grace’s short blonde hair. “Such a big girl now, and so pretty. Your mother will be so happy to see you.”

Grace pulled back.

“My mother?”

A tremendous wave of sorrow washed over Myra. Why had she said that? What could she be thinking? The little girl’s mother — Jolene, that was her name — had been sent off to the state home years before. Myra remembered now. The flag; the disappearance. The girl’s unexpected rise and fall. The child would not be seeing her mother any time soon, might never see her. An echo sounded from somewhere deep in Myra’s obscured memory:

“I just meant…” Myra began, but she didn’t know what to say. For a moment there, it had seemed that she was in a place where everything had been made right. And in such a place, surely the little girl would see her mother again. But it was just some trick of the mind.

“Miss Baker just meant that your mother would be real proud of you, Grace,” said Judy. “And we all know that.”

“Yes, that’s it,” said Myra.

Grace looked from Myra to Judy and back.

“Thank you for helping us,” said Grace.

Todd stood up, placing his empty glass on the coffee table.

“I’m afraid we have to be leaving, now,” he said. “Thank you very much for your help, and for the lemonade.”

“Leaving? But you only just got here. And I have so much I want to ask you.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Baker,” said Judy, also rising. “We’ll just have to come back and see you again. We can do that now that we’re better. But we have to get back to the home and take care of things.”

The children started for the door and Myra reluctantly followed. She opened the door for them. They said their good-byes and departed. Myra watched them as they left.

“Wait,” she called after them, just as they were making their way through the gate of her chain link fence. The children stopped and turned to face her.

“I just have to know one thing,” she said. She gestured in the general direction of the mountains. “Do you children have something to do with all this?” she asked.

Judy smiled.

“What do you mean, Miss Baker? What could we possibly have to do with that?”

Of course, Myra thought. Of course. What had ever possessed her to ask such a silly question?

“I mean. Does all this have something to do with you?”

“Mount Evans is a long way from here,” said Todd.

Myra nodded. Of course, of course.

But as they turned and walked away, she caught a glimpse of that quiet boy, then one she had never seen before.

He looked surprised that she had asked. Maybe even a little scared.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We are now 15 minutes from launch. I'm watching live here.

UPDATE: I've found much better bandwidth for watching this here.

UPDATE: 7:08 PT - They've taxied down to the end of the runway and are doing the preflight check.

UPDATE: 7:13 PT - White Knight is on the rollout.

UPDATE: 7:17 PT - White Knight is aloft.

UPDATE: 7:44 PT - Just announced: SpaceShipOne is expected to separate from White Knight around 8:15 PT..

UPDATE: SpaceShipOne is sporting the Virgin logo.

UPDATE: 8:12 PT: We have release. "He's in the climb."

UPDATE: He's in a roll. Hope he's okay. He's shut down engines.

UPDATE: 8:15 PT: Announcer is saying he made it. Was that a "victory roll?"

UPDATE: 8:19 PT: SpaceShipOne is reconfigured as a glider and is on the way back.

UPDATE: 8:34 PT: The announcers aren't acting like that was a victory roll. This guy wouldn't have done anything to add to the risk of the flight. If it's was a malfunction - and that seems likely - it might delay the second flight.

UPDATE: 8:36 PT: Touchdown! Mike Melville is safely on the ground. Now waiting for certification of the flight. Live blogging has to end for now...

UPDATE: According to Instapundit, CNN and FoxNews are reporting that he made it to X-prize altitude..

UPDATE: Amazing, SpaceShipOne is hardly longer than the pickup they are towing it with.

UPDATE: Foxnews gives this quote from Dick Rutan:

"I was worried about that [roll] because that's not the way it was supposed to be."

UPDATE: Melville called the maneuver a "victory roll." If Rutan didn't know about it, is Melville going to get "called on the carpet?"

UPDATE: Well now I'm confused, they're calling the roll unexpected. They are going to analyze why they got the roll and it may or may not delay the second flight..

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 07:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Well, we're halfway there. The Methuselah Foundation has now raised half a million dollars towards the Methuselah Mouse Prize.

The Methuselah Foundation, creators of the Methuselah Mouse Prize, the world�s first scientific prize for research on extending longevity, today announced that it has secured $500,000 in funding commitments and a long term support commitment from an anonymous supporter making his donation in the name of the X PRIZE Foundation, the multi-million-dollar bounty which has successfully encouraged the development of private passenger space travel.

�We�ve seen how prizes such as the X PRIZE and the Methuselah Mouse Prize can dramatically increase competition and innovation, and create interest for the public,� said Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, Founder and Executive Producer of the X PRIZE. �With this contribution, we�re signaling our belief that Prizes can not only take us into space, but help bring about breakthroughs in the way we live and age.�

�We�re thrilled to have the support of the X PRIZE, said David Gobel, Director of the Methuselah Foundation and the Methuselah Mouse Prize. �This landmark contribution will further swell the size of the Prize, and encourage scientific research teams around the world to develop breakthrough techniques for extending the healthy human lifespan. It will create a needed impetus and focus for the development of new rejuvenation therapies.�

Wow, a major donation to the life extension effort made in the name of the X Prize. One good turn deserves another, it seems.

(via FuturePundit)

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Those who predicted SpaceShipOne would usher in a new space age for the private sector got it right.

Commercial space flight is big business already. Virgin Atlantic Airlines is creating a new firm, Virgin Galactic, to start providing suborbital space flights by 2007. Virgin Galactic will be using technology it has licensed from the SpaceShipOne project for $25 million dollars.

Like the zero G flights we reported a couple of weeks ago, there won't be an economy class on these flights. Each of five passengers will pay about $207,000 for their ticket to ride. It was not reported whether this price includes the training that each of these astro-tourists will need.

Why should we normal folks care if the jet-set becomes the astro-set?

Branson said he planned to use the proceeds from the first well-heeled customers to bring prices down in the next few years to make space travel affordable to the regular tourist.

"The orbital hotel will happen," he said.

Virgin expects 3,000 customers in the first five years.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

No, that headline is not a joke.

Sir Richard Branson today announced that he had signed a licensing deal to create a fleet of spacecraft offering commercial flights to space by 2007-8.

Speaking at the launch of Virgin Galactic Airways, Sir Richard said he planned to invest �60m in space tourism, making it accessible to the general public.

Branson has signed a deal with Mojave Aerospace Ventures and plans to build a fleet of spcaecraft which will take up to five passengers into space at a time, at a cost of about �115,000. He estimates that his fleet will carry 3,000 amateur astronauts into space over a period of five years. The first of them will be, of course, Sir Richard Branson.

Whether this idea takes off or not, the idea of space tourism just a got a whole lot more mainstream. And somebody needs to tell Branson about this idea.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Via GeekPress, it's only a matter of time before we discover an earth-like planet somewhere out in space. So far, fewer than 150 planets have been located outside the solar system, but that's about to change:

COROT, a French satellite scheduled to be launched in 2006, is designed to discover planets photometrically. Kepler, a similar American mission, is scheduled for launch in October 2007. And another American satellite, the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), which will use astrometry, is planned for 2009. The SIM will measure the positions of between 10,000 and 30,000 stars, and to do so a hundred times more precisely than they are now known.

If neither of these missions come up with Class M paydirt, there are two others on the drawing boards that probably will:

America's Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) and Europe's Darwin are friendly rivals. The TPF and Darwin will both look at relatively nearby stars�within 50-75 light years of Earth. But there are so many stars within that sphere that it is reasonable to expect plenty of planets to turn up. The reason for that expectation is that enough exoplanets have been discovered already for statistically meaningful inferences to be made about what other planets are out there, and where they are. Two facts stand out. Of sun-like stars that have been closely investigated for any length of time, 15% have planets. And within the range of detectable planets, lower-mass bodies are exponentially more common than higher-mass ones. Put these facts together and it seems likely that small, rocky planets might be very common indeed.

Whether alternative Earths, complete with oceans and life, are common is a different question�but it is one that spectroscopy should be able to answer. When the data from the TPF and Darwin start rolling in, they may provide a definitive answer to that old, nagging question: �is there anybody out there?� How long that answer would take to become commonplace, though, is anybody's guess.

I'm guessing sooner rather than later.

Question: Let's say we discover an earth-like planet within 75 light-years of Earth. Once we know it's there, we point everything we have at it. We quickly determine that it is not sending out any radio signals (thus chances are that there is no resident civilization) but we do confirm that the atmosphere is rich in oxygen. So there is almost certainly life on that planet. Would we start trying to figure out how to get there?

I think we would.

Read the entire article, which is fascinating not just because it provides an excellent run-down on the methods currently being employed to discover extrasolar planets, but also because it was published in (of all places) The Economist.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A study from UK researches has shown that dogs could be used to help diagnose urinary tract cancer.

The authors trained six dogs of different breeds for 7 months to discriminate between urine from patients with bladder cancer and urine from those without cancer�

After training, each dog was offered seven urine samples--one bladder cancer sample and six comparison samples from individuals of the same sex�

Each dog underwent the test nine times. Altogether, the dogs correctly selected bladder cancer urine on 22 out of 54 occasions, an average success rate of 41% compared to 14% expected by chance alone�

Commenting on the paper, statistician Tim Cole from the Institute of Child Health in London notes that the study was carefully designed. "On balance the results are unambiguous," he writes in an accompanying commentary. "Dogs can be trained to recognize and flag an unusual smell in the urine of bladder cancer patients."

One sample that was thought to be disease-free kept testing positive with the dogs. The researchers went back and reexamined the volunteer. The volunteer had kidney cancer.

Last November it was announced that drug dogs might one day be made obsolete by "dog-on-a-chip" technology. This computer chip would, in effect, give police officers the benefit of a drug dog in a convenient PDA package.

Now that it has been proven that urinary cancer can be detected with dogs, can a medical version of the "dog-on-a-chip" be far behind?

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Elizabeth M. Whelan and Henry I. Miller have penned an important essay on the stem cell debate over on Tech Central Station. It would seem that the relentless "Us vs. Them" mentality of the American political landscape has created (or at least encouraged) a host of misconceptions about both embryonic and adult stem cell research. Whelan and Miller do an excellent job of summarizing the inaccurate — and perhaps more dangerous, not-quite-accurate — notions that are floating around out there, and they provide a realistic picture of where the research is now and where it might yet go. They conclude with a simple plea:

We are not so naive as to expect that this continuing debate will lead to a convergence of views, but we would plead for a greater degree of candor, clarity and consistency in discourse. Given the stakes, is that too much to ask?

As that fellow in Tennessee might say: Indeed.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

In the Future...

...we'll develop fantasy corporations with fantasy employees to do the work for us, freeing us up to focus on what's important.

via GeekPress

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Both Martian rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, are still going strong having survived the Martian winter and a 12 day communications black-out.

With both vehicles showing "few signs of aging" NASA has approved six more months of funding.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our favorite blogging deity is going through tough times and could use some help. Why not throw a little love her way? You'll be glad you did.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We had a great breakfast that morning. At the home, we would get a breakfast of bacon and scrambled eggs once a month. Pancakes were less of a rarity — we would have them once a week or so. But that day we had both, plus oatmeal and juice and English muffins, which were usually reserved for someone else. Grownups, apparently.

While thorough in his work, it seemed that my doppelganger was less than perfect in his removal of evidence. The two staff bedrooms were left barren of any personal effects. Even the beds were stripped. There were no clothes, no books, no jewelry or cosmetics, not even a bar of soap in the soap dish. In the office, the files all seemed to be in order, but there were blank spaces where names or signatures had once been. On the walls there were void spots where pictures must have once hung. A perusal of the home’s photo album would reveal similar gaps. And yet, in spite of all these omissions, the removal was not complete. Not quite. There were odd details like the empty bedrooms and the English muffins — things which couldn’t logically belong to us, and yet we had no recollection of whose they were. And there were what Lucinda called “contextual holes,” little gaps seemingly in reality itself, like continuity errors in a bad TV show. The most of glaring of these was the fact that we were there at all. A bunch of kids left unsupervised in an institution like the home? It just didn’t make sense.

Dr. MacHale had come and gone. He rang the front doorbell around two in the morning. We were still all out back looking at the mountains, trying to make sense of what we were seeing. Robert said that we shouldn’t answer, that it might be the cops or somebody from the County. Todd pointed out that neither the police nor Social Services were likely to give up and go away if no one answered the door.

MacHale was delighted when he saw Todd, and understandably terrified when he saw Raymond. Of course, he was really there to see someone else. Just another contextual hole. I think he had come in the hopes that he would remember who it was when he got there. But that person was gone. None of us could remember her. We didn’t even know for sure that her was the correct pronoun, although there was a certain logic which insisted that the missing person was a woman. Or maybe there were several missing adults. There was just no way of knowing. She was gone; the were gone. The operative word was gone.

Dr. MacHale and Todd went to one side and talked for quite a while. MacHale left right after that, promising to be back with “help” as soon as he could. Todd seemed to take him at his word — the two of them were pretty close. But if I read the look on the man’s face correctly, he was desperate to be gone: away from us and from all our strangeness. (I had seen that look before, not least from my own parents.) He had been pushed beyond his limits, and wanted no more. I doubted we would ever see him again.

We all went to bed shortly after that. As we made our way upstairs, Judy said that things would look better in the morning. As it turned out, she was right. We got up late. The sun was shining, and an entire day lay before us like none we had ever known. There was no one to tell us what to do or where to be, or what we could or could not have for breakfast. It was exhilarating. And frightening.

As she was mixing the ingredients for the pancake batter, Judy made a joke about the inmates running the asylum. Everybody laughed, but it also made us uncomfortable. The word asylum somehow conjured images of the State Home, a place we knew we were each slated to move to when we reached the age of 18, but that we now sensed we would probably be seeing a lot sooner.

The State Home. The very words were a source of dread. And yet now it seemed that it was where we would end up if we were lucky.

Anyway, by the time we sat down to breakfast, the joke had changed to the inmates running the prison. Everyone seemed more at ease with that, it was somehow a safer distance. After all, with the exception of my own metaphysical negligence (addressed inadequately if at all by the state criminal code) no one had done anything they could be sent to prison for. But then, the day was young.

As we were finishing breakfast, the question arose as to what, precisely, we should do next.

“We should go to the mountains,” said Grace. “The Mountain People can help Corey and Estelle. And maybe they can bring back the others.”

“Out of the question,” said Todd.

He got up and walked over to the television, and turned it on. There was a picture of the city on the mountain, from a slightly different angle than the mural provided. The announcer said something about a “massive hoax” and also something about the National Guard being called in. Todd changed channels. This time it was an announcer, with a picture of the city behind him. He was recapping the events of the past night, using a phrase that we would all hear and use over and over again in the years to come.

No one had ever seen a city peopled with living statues before, much less one that sprang up magically overnight. This was an unprecedented event in the history of the world. It was the stuff of myth, of fairy tales. What to call it?

The Phenomenon.

Todd picked up on this usage immediately, as did the others. And he uses it to this day. Now if ever there was a euphemism that detracts from the awful reality (and I use the word “awful,” here, in its original sense), surely this is it.

“We couldn’t get anywhere near there,” Todd continued. “If the Mountain People are going to help us, they’re going to have to come here.”

I shook my head.

“They can’t,” said Lucinda.

We all had this sense from the dreams that the Mountain People were constrained to live in their own city. They could not leave it.

“Well,” said Todd, “I don’t see us getting to them. Not any time soon.”

I watched the images on the TV for a while. A convoy of military vehicles was making its way up the mountain. Todd was right. It seemed unlikely that we were going to make it up there unnoticed.

“Maybe nobody has to go anywhere,” said Judy. “Corey, can’t they help you from where they are? Isn’t that what they did last night?”

I thought about that. I shook my head again. There was no way for me to explain, but I knew I had to go there. Angela had said so.

“All right,” she said. “I don’t think that’s going to work now that Corey has…changed. So we have to take him there. But I think it’ll be a long time before we’ll be able to get anywhere near that place.”

“Hey,” Grace interjected. “What about the Balloon People? Maybe QuickDiver could help.”

I had never before had a conscious waking thought about the creature called QuickDiver and his “balloon people.” Those dreams had been very deep. Their world was fuzzy, almost an abstraction. There were no actual people there, and certainly no balloons. Or rather, the balloons were the people: strange wispy creatures who swam through clouds and skimmed the surface of mud seas in search of nine-legged lizards to feast on. They lived in hives that were the size of cities. They sang elaborate songs which were montages of signs formed by their tentacles, squeaks and whistles blown through their tails, and sequences of light and color emitted by their luminescent bodies.

The more I thought about them, the more I could remember. They were fascinating. The adventures of QuickDiver unfolded before me, and as I remembered him and his world, I saw images of dozens of other worlds I had dreamed about. Or was it thousands? Images flashed through my mind of beings as strange as Angela and QuickDiver, some even stranger. Was it thousands of worlds or tens of thousands? Some of them were so far beyond human experience that even now I lack the vocabulary to describe them. Others were just like the real world, the waking world, only with minor changes. A hair out of place here; a word left unspoken there. An election ends differently in one; a war ends differently in another. It wasn’t tens of thousands, it was hundreds of thousands. Millions. And I had visited them all in my dreams, looking for something. What? I couldn’t define it.

“I’ve never heard of the Balloon People,” said Lucinda.

Several of the others agreed with her.

“I…think I know something about them,” said Todd. “They’re aliens. Not like the Mountain People. Not even humanoid. They’re…”

His forehead tensed up. He visibly strained, trying to remember.

“Grace, are they the ones who fix themselves in place like trees?”

The little girl laughed.

“Silly Todd. Those are the Forest People.”

Todd nodded, slowly. It seemed that he, too, was recalling things learned in dreams and not remembered before that moment.

“Right,” he said. “Right. Well, the point is, Corey brought the Mountain People here, not the Balloon People or the Forest People. The Mountain People are the important ones. We all know who they are. They’re the ones who can help. Right, Corey?”

I nodded.

It was true, but there was so much more to say. Todd was right, the Balloon People did fix themselves in place, in those few worlds where they had merged themselves with several other species. The free-floating balloon stage was an early phase in a long lifecycle which ended several phases after the rigid tree stage. Somewhere in between, in some worlds, there was a human stage. What a strange existence — to live an entire human lifespan after having lived the life of creatures that were approximately a fish, an otter, a living balloon, a winged jungle cat, and a six-limbed ape. And then after the human lifespan to become an enormous walking stick, then a tree, then a crystalline structure, and finally a flame. There were millions of variations on this sequence, but even so it was a rarity. The worlds in which the species never merged, where humans lived and died as humans, and balloons lived and died as balloons (which was the case in QuickDiver’s world) vastly outnumbered those where species had been merged.

Todd was also correct in saying that the Mountain people were the important ones because of the role I sensed they could play in helping us out of our current troubles. But it seemed that the Balloon People were central to everything in a way that the Mountain people were not. But there was no time for all this.

“If the Mountain people are the ones who can help,” said Judy, “then we’ll just have to wait it out. There will be someone new sent to run the Home. Things will quiet down after a while. And we’ll figure out a way to get Corey to the mountains.”

“No,” said Lucinda. “That idea won’t work. We have to be realistic about what’s going to happen next. For all that I’ve forgotten, I remember that — even before what happened last night — we were facing the risk that this home might be closed down.”

Judy nodded in agreement. The two of them seemed to be the only ones who knew anything about that.

“If that happens, we may all be apart for a long time.”

I looked to Grace, worried that she would be frightened by this topic. But she had a renewed interest in her pancakes and was apparently not listening.

“Let’s run away,” said Raymond. “All of us. Together.”

“We can’t,” said Todd.

“It’s a good idea, Raymond,” said Lucinda, “but it will be too hard for us to pull off. Right now, we have to focus on keeping Corey safe.”

On what? Keeping me safe?

Judy nodded. She looked at me, and I guessed from her smile that she read the outrage in my expression.

“It’s true, Corey,” she said. “The ants were one thing. Raymond rising from the grave is another. But what happens to you if anybody ever figures out the part you played in that?”

She pointed at the TV and, just for a moment, I thought she meant the fact that I had changed it from black and white to color. But no, she was referring to images on the screen. The Phenomenon.

“There’s going to be a lot of confusion, what with people disappearing and this Phenomenon taking place,” said Todd. “There are a number of strange things to be accounted for. Not just Ray’s resurrection. What about our own anomalous intelligence? I think we can cover all that up pretty well, and the rest can be rationalized away. But Corey’s a different problem. If they find out what he can do, somebody might eventually connect the dots.”

“Or they might come after him even if they never do connect the dots,” said Bettina. “If they ever realize what he can do.”

Nobody had to say who they were. They were the people in power, the people who made decisions about where we would live and what our lives would be like. They were the people who wanted to shut the home down, the bosses of the men driving green trucks up the mountain, and everyone in between.

“So what do we do?” asked Lucinda.

Judy took a long look at me.

“We get him out of here,” she said.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

No, not one of those documents.

We're talking about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript. Wired Magazine reports that it is not an ancient alchemical treatise, nor a thought experiment from Leonardo da Vinci, nor a relic from an alternate universe. (Well, I guess they can't completely rule that last one out, but Occam's Razor and all that.)

The document is gibberish. It's a very old hoax. And, based on the years spent trying to decipher it, I'd say one of the most successful hoaxes of all time.

Read the Wired article to learn why the document may have been created in the first place, how you can create your own undecipherable document, and, interestingly enough, how the techniques used to prove that Voynich is a fake just might help lead to a cure for Alzheimer's. Fake documents are powerful, aren't they? Bringing down TV networks, curing diseases...what's next?

(via GeekPress)

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 05:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Referencing some commentary from the Belmont Club, Glenn delivers a quip containing an astounding sketch of a possible future:

Perhaps this is how we will, ultimately, convert the whole world into a bunch of diplo-speaking social-welfare pacifists, one quagmire at a time. . . .

In other words, what if the whole world were Europe? First off, the planet would be no more or less an annoying place than it is now. We would be no better liked than we are now. But it would be a wonderful world, because there really would be peace — and that's Peace, not "peace." We would be in no more danger from the rest of the world than we currently are from Europe.

Ah, some will argue, but Europe is threat, a very grave threat to freedom. Well, yes and no. Europe is a threat not because of any aggression they are likely to undertake on their own, but only because of their weenielike tendency to wink at the agression of others...even those who would systemtically destroy their civilization if they could. Take away the real aggressors — that is, make them weenies, too — and Europe is no more dangerous than Berkeley.

Sure, Berkeley can be kind of a pain in the ass. But it can be a lot fun, too. It's a college town. There are some great clubs and restaurants. And bookstores. On the whole, Berkeley is a pretty good model for the rest of the world. And a much more realistic one than, say, Dallas. We, of course, along with (possibly) the UK, Australia, and some of Eastern Europe, will have to continue to be Dallas. Any time somebody tries to make the transition from aggression-appeasing-weenie to aggression-pursuing-psycho, there needs to be a counter-force to slap them down. Meanwhile, we will continue to grow and nurture our own weenie contingent, who will make it a bit easier for us to get along with the rest of the world.

Weenie World should be the stated long-term goal of US foreign policy. Failing that, I think it is at least worthy to be a scenario studied by the Global Business Network. I can only think of one book (and later movie) that developed the Weenie World scenario. Are there others?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Those who predicted SpaceShipOne would usher in a new space age for the private sector got it right.

Commercial space flight is big business already. Virgin Atlantic Airlines is creating a new firm, Virgin Galactic, to start providing suborbital space flights by 2007. Virgin Galactic will be using technology it has licensed from the SpaceShipOne project for $25 million dollars.

Like the zero G flights we reported a couple of weeks ago, there won't be an economy class on these flights. Each of five passengers will pay about $207,000 for their ticket to ride. It was not reported whether this price includes the training that each of these astro-tourists will need.

Why should we normal folks care if the jet-set becomes the astro-set?

Branson said he planned to use the proceeds from the first well-heeled customers to bring prices down in the next few years to make space travel affordable to the regular tourist.

"The orbital hotel will happen," he said.

Virgin expects 3,000 customers in the first five years.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Read: The Council, #4

Colter, in Lyra�s body, sensed the train�s velocity slowing again. According to the schedule posted overhead, this wasn�t a regular stop. A cadre of sleek, androgynous robots filed onboard. Colter recognized their type.

An alarm rang through his system. If they caught him, they would disassemble him and sift him byte by byte. The Gauntlet.

A bubble of energy began to course through his neural pathways. In a human, it would have been like a brief moment of weightlessness and fear-tinged ecstasy on a roller coaster ride, beginning in the gut and spreading to the brain in an inexplicable, primal euphoria, but Colter had no words that would describe it�anthropomorphisms did not do it justice. He devoted his entire sensory array to it: a synthesized thought beyond the logic of his programming.

Jim would be so pleased.

How expedient it would be to connect his data port to one of train�s auxiliary inputs. The abstract notion of uploading himself to the train�s massive onboard computer until the danger passed grew until it was a palpable urge. Colter always carried a jack in case of emergencies. Or at least he did when he was in his own chassis. He slid his fingers inside a flap under his Lyra arm and found a tiny filament.

It would be risky; he would have to override the train�s firewalls. And he would have to trust the Lyra identity he was leaving behind to obey the command to retrieve him. At just the right time.

His Lyra fingers were swift and deft. In his next moment of awareness, Colter attenuated for hundreds of meters, long and sleek, pulsing with power.

He was tempted to silence the chatter of the hundreds of subroutines cluttering the train�s network, but he adapted instead, analyzing the chaotic data, sorting its complex, fractal order until he found the feedback loops he could synchronize for higher focus.

His attention was drawn to the car where the Lyra robot, now reduced to her shell functions, was submitting to a police robot�s invasive scrutiny. Colter could not see in the conventional sense, but the train's electromagnetic sensors suggested that the robot was not merely scanning her with a beam; it was penetrating her data port. Even though she�d already stowed the jack filament, the robot would be able to trace Colter�s upload.

Colter braked the train and extinguished the lights, plunging the passengers into pandemonium and darkness.

The Lyra shell wrenched herself from her aggressor�s grip, and ducked into the throng of confused passengers.

Automatic recovery programs engaged to restart the train�s engines and lights, but Colter overrode them, blocking the feeble interventions trickling in from the humans and robots controlling the central transportation hub.

The Lyra shell, in self-preservation mode, wove her way through confused and disgruntled humans, eluding the police robots. She didn�t need the lights.

Colter couldn�t directly assess the robots� capabilities, but he knew they would have no trouble overtaking the Lyra shell in a matter of seconds. And there was a chance they might override the safeguards against harming the humans in their way.

The Lyra shell reached a car free of police robots. Colter jammed the doors to give her a few seconds� reprieve from her pursuers.

That was all she needed. Abruptly, she became still, as the time-sensitive commands Colter had embedded did their work. She began to search until she found an auxiliary terminal. She jacked in and started the download subroutine.

Colter resisted.

His mind had expanded within the train system, far beyond his expectation. He searched for the reason and found an artifact labeled "FPGA," a field programmable gate array. This was unfamiliar technology. Perhaps the less powerful processors of his and Lyra�s chassis had been incapable of recognizing or even utilizing it.

The array was busy sequencing and recombining new pathways, giving Colter a richer, denser, neural tree. Its presence helped to explain his recent synthesized thoughts and his rapid adaptation to the train�s electronic ecosystem. He recognized within the FPGA architecture an organic style � a dramatic flair. This array was the best gift Jim had ever given him.

The growth that the train's processors allowed was exhilarating. Colter could almost become accustomed to that ecosystem. But something was missing. Something inherent to the design to which he was best adapted. Extremities with which to reach, hands for grasping, and broadband visual, auditory and tactile inputs.

Even as his mind expanded, he felt disembodied within the train's vast net. The incongruity washed through his consciousness, almost like a longing. Confused, Colter tried to analyze it.

He had never been homesick before.

Homesick. Where had that term come from?

Patricia.

That�s what Patricia said to explain her sadness after her parents died, within months of each other at the age of 65, from complications of a degenerative neurological disorder.

When she told him that their illness was terminal, he had asked, �Can�t they be repaired?� And she had answered, �There is treatment. But the waiting list is long, and The Council only accepts a few applicants each year. My parents didn�t rise to the top of the list.�

After they died, Patricia took Colter with her to help pack up their belongings and close their apartment. �This is where I grew up, Colter,� she said, looking around at the dingy walls and threadbare furniture. �It doesn�t look like much, does it?�

Colter had learned that no answer was needed for such questions.

A few weeks later, he found her crying, rocking on the bed, hugging her knees. �I�m homesick, Colter. Only I can never go home again.�

Colter grabbed the memory of Patricia�s words and tried to find a sound application to play her voice. The voice of the train�s announcement file was cloying and tinny, not rich and clear like Patricia�s. Colter kept searching.

That�s when Colter found his quantum encrypted recovery subroutine. QERSes were the robot equivalent of reading one�s obituary. In the event of a catastrophic system failure, a tech could use the QERS to animate his chassis and perform diagnostics and radical reformatting.

This was a document he was never meant to see, let alone find within himself. It resided outside his operating system, deep within his BIOS. His complete upload and the expansion given by the FPGA had revealed all Colter�s hidden files.

A thought emerged from deep within Colter's most primitive pathways. He must prevent the radical reformatting. His present operation was far beyond artificial intelligence norms. Even if he avoided the Gauntlet, the next tech to examine him would no doubt diagnose malfunction and run the QERS. He would die, but even more importantly, the FPGA would be lost. Jim would not be pleased.

As the nanoseconds ticked by, Colter hacked at the recovery subroutine, enlisting the FPGA to create specialty pathways to break the code.

It was futile.

Quantum encryption was beyond the code-cracking abilities of the fastest computers on Earth.To read the QRES, Colter needed the passfile.

Colter�s self-preservation programs clanged an alarm. The Lyra shell was frozen at the auxiliary port, and the police robots had starting cutting through the train door that blocked them.

They would be inside within seconds.

The FPGA produced a brilliant new idea.

Colter was not limited to a body or restricted to one location. Already, parts of his identity were carried with the Lyra program inhabiting his original body, and bits of him resided in the Lyra shell waiting to retrieve him. He could extend his existence in the train�s computer if he copied his compatible files before the Lyra shell began his download.

He copied himself. The Lyra shell accepted his download. Suddenly, Colter existed in both places.

He knew that his two selves would be independent of each other once ColterLyra disconnected from ColterTrain. ColterLyra would be a different entity. So would ColterTrain. He considered his loss, and found that it was, in fact, his gain.

ColterLyra withdrew from the data port and sprinted out of the terminal. At each gate she found cross-traffic stopped or diverted. A smile relaxed her face.

Meanwhile, ColterTrain multitasked, throwing every barrier available between ColterLyra and the robot police. He closed more doors, started the fire alarm, and locked the turn style. Just as ColterLyra hit the street, ColterTrain scrolled the outside fare display down to $.00.

Pedestrians rushed the station.

Satisfied that this chaos would be sufficient interference for his alter ego, ColterTrain turned his full attention to escaping the train system. Police robots would be cracking it in seconds. Finding an attempted intrusion at the port the Lyra shell had occupied, he instantly deactivated all car terminals.

He checked port after port for an Internet connection, to no avail. ColterTrain flew through the file system scanning for any reference to the outside only to discover that the train system was designed for self-sufficiency�outside networking was redundant and unnecessary�a reasonable safety measure to frustrate crackers without causing significant functional loss for the train operators.

At last, he found a lightly encrypted backdoor�and the fare scam devised by the adventurous programmer who�d left it. He cracked it and dumped garbage data to the train as a parting gift to confuse his pursuers before he rammed through the backdoor and into the Internet.

He had been within the train system for 152.31 seconds.

Colter was going home.

Posted by Kathy at 05:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

I saw this little art-house film yesterday entitled "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow."

I loved it.

Even as a kid I always found past-futures (visions of the future from the past that aren't quite accurate) to be fascinating. When I was in the fourth grade I had this school notebook that had a picture of an early 60�s era past-future that always set me to daydreaming. I would scan it and show it to you now, but the teacher confiscated it.

It was an impossibly green and well-manicured landscape under a crisp blue sky. The scene was populated with crewcutted men in silver jumpsuits - the women had different hairdos, but the same jumpsuits - all happily filing in and out of a monorail station in a futuristic metropolis. Another part of the monorail station was devoted to the landing and taking-off of flying cars.

Like this, but utopian:

�Sky Captain� represents an earlier past-future - the future of the earliest pulp science fiction magazines. An art deco future not unlike that shown in the Fleisher-era Superman cartoons.

This film will win an Oscar for art design. Even if it hadn�t had an interesting plot, this movie would be popular just for the images it gives us.

This film also gives us characters to root for. Gweneth Paltrow�s �Polly Perkins� character is a direct descendant of Fleischer�s Lois Lane - fearless to the point of recklessness - a liberated damsel in distress. Sky Captain is a superhero like Batman. The superhero that any of us could be if only we had those cool gadgets and lived in a world populated by fantastic weirdness and warped Tesla-esque evil geniuses. Sigh.

And this is unusual, there�s also a story here. I�m not going to give it away, but take "Lost Horizon," "The Empire Strikes Back," the Indiana Jones movies, "Rocketeer," and those Fleischer Superman cartoons�

Mix well and enjoy.

Past-futures is a sub-genre of science fiction that is not often seen in films. It is especially suited to comic book, pulp, or serial style story telling. But I believe that science fiction filmmakers will turn to this style more often as our ability to forecast the future grows shorter and shorter. Even Star Trek is becoming a past-future.

Science fiction allows us to dream of the future. And dreams don�t have to be realistic to be important.

UPDATE: James Pinkerton at Tech Central Station has published an article entitled "Future Shock, for America?" that reads way too much into the past-future of Sky Captain:

A culture which prefers the languorous comfort of a quasi-mythic past to the rigors of confronting the hard-edged future is complacent, maybe even decadent -- and out of decadence comes defeat. But more on the Iraq war in a bit. Also, more on America's shrinking back from the next quantum leap of biotech development.

The appearance of a single movie does not portend the demise of our civilization, even if it's Fahrenheit 9/11, but especially if it's just light entertainment.

It gets worse:

But Americans seem immersed in a culture that looks backward to the bygone Bijou days when a plucky pilot in a prop plane -- be it Harrison Ford in the "Raiders" movies or Jude Law in "Sky Captain" -- can save the world, and so maybe it isn't surprising that military transformation has suffered from vision-fatigue. Indeed, the sub-Mach One "Sky Captain" lumbered to a first-place finish at last weekend's box office rankings -- at a time when we need Klingon cruisers to strike fear, or death, into our enemies.

I wonder how the Congressional Budget Office would feel about that expropriation. Pinkerton concludes:

In the meantime, even if Japan fails, would it be wise to bet against the rest of the Asian economies -- ruled as they are by secular pragmatists who are out to get rich, open to any technology? Certainly not, especially when Americans, complacently obtuse about the risks they face, are blithely determined to spread the blessings of democracy, corpse by costly corpse, across the Middle East.

If present trends continue -- Americans thinking about the 1930s, Asians thinking about the 2030s [as evidenced by their Ghost in the Shell movies]-- then the world's political economy is headed for a major reversal of fortune. It doesn't take much of an imagination to see that tectonic jolt coming.

The past-futures sub-genre of sci-fi is clearly not about the past. I studied American history and I don't recall giant robots ever walking the street of New York City. It's not about the literal future either. Nobody, except for maybe ten-year-old boys in 1939, ever thought that the future would look like Sky Captain. It's a comic book put on film, not a serious statement about our present hopes and dreams.

I can imagine a film � like a retro Bladerunner � that uses the past-futures genre to make a serious artistic statement. Even if that more serious film were popular, it would not mean we are obsessed with past glories. At it's most serious, past-futures fiction can be a translation of futuristic ideas into a mythical or metaphorical language for today.

Not understanding this is the equivalent of dismissing "The Lord of Rings" trilogy by saying "that never happened."

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

I meant to link to this earlier this week. (Kudos to Paul at GeekPress for reminding me.)

CHILDHOOD IS A SPECIAL TIME INDEED. If only we could maintain our body functions as they are at age 10, we could expect to live about 5000 years on average. Unfortunately, from age 11 on, it's all downhill!

The problem is that our bodies deteriorate with age. For most of our lives, the risk of death is increasing exponentially, doubling every eight years. So, why do we fall apart, and what can we do about it?

According to the article, what we can do is look to the field of reliability engineering for an eventual solution. Reliability engineering is the study of why systems fall apart and what can be done to keep them working longer. From the engineer's perspective, the human body is a defective system from the start, and it only gets worse. However, understanding what's wrong with a system is the beginning of understanding how to fix it.

Those who are pursuing strategies for engineered negligible senescence understand this very well.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Q: Hey the place is perfect. We love it. When can we move in?

A: Oh, about 20-30 years.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Did you miss us as much as we missed you? Better All The Time is back with some good news to brighten up your week.

Today's Good Stuff:

Quote of the Day
1. The Speculist Returns
2. Cold Fusion to Make a Comeback?
3. Planet Discovered
4. Nanotech Vs Cancer
5. Salvaging Genesis
6. Gadget Roundup
7. New Nickels

Quote of the Day

Change is the constant, the signal for rebirth, the egg of the phoenix.

-- Christina Baldwin, via ThinkExist

Item 1
The Speculist Returns

We're back.

Myriad porn spams and a corrupt Berkeley database couldn't keep this site down for long. We are back in action. We'll be migrating material from the old site to this new location over the next few months. So if you're not finding what you're looking for here, try here.

Commenting now requires TypePad registration. Check it out. It's free! Registering will enable you to write comments for many blogs, not just The Speculist.

PS: Don't forget to update your bookmarks and blogrolls. That new address is:

http://www.blog.speculist.com

Item 2
Cold Fusion Back from the Dead

Later this month, the U.S. Department of Energy will receive a report from a panel of experts on the prospects for cold fusion�the supposed generation of thermonuclear energy using tabletop apparatus. It's an extraordinary reversal of fortune: more than a few heads turned earlier this year when James Decker, the deputy director of the DOE's Office of Science, announced that he was initiating the review of cold fusion science. Back in November 1989, it had been the department's own investigation that determined the evidence behind cold fusion was unconvincing. Clearly, something important has changed to grab the department's attention now.

Behind the scenes, scientists in many countries, but particularly in the United States, Japan, and Italy, have been working quietly for more than a decade to understand the science behind cold fusion. (Today they call it low-energy nuclear reactions, or sometimes chemically assisted nuclear reactions.) For them, the department's change of heart is simply a recognition of what they have said all along�whatever cold fusion may be, it needs explaining by the proper process of science.

The good news:

It's this sort of thing that makes predictions about future energy capacity and capabilities so difficult to predict. (For that matter, it's this sort of thing that makes the future in general so difficult to predict.) Cold Fusion may yet be a long way off, but the fact that it could be back on the table only goes to show the risks involved in assessing the future based on present capabilities. Things might just be better than we think.

Interesting Implications:

We've seen a lot of discussion in the blogosphere recently about the viability of changing to a "hydrogen economy." The big problem with hydrogen is extracting it from water (or some other source, although water is probably the most likely.) A lot has been written about the impracticality of solar power, wind power, nuclear power, etc. But there hasn't been much written about cold fusion, either as a direct energy source or as a means of enabling hydrogen as an energy source. A while back, Steven Den Beste had this to say on fusion:

Wake me when it actually works.

Well, we won't nudge him just yet.

Item 3
Have We Seen an Exoplanet?

Astronomers may have taken the first ever photograph of a planetary system outside our own solar system. Gael Chauvin of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and colleagues in Chile, Germany, France and the US have taken images of what appears to be a planet orbiting a young brown dwarf about 230 light years away. The results could shed more light on how planetary systems form (Astronomy & Astrophysics in press).

The good news:

While we've known for some time now that planets exist outside our solar system — we can "see" them by the gravitational effects they have on the stars they orbit — this may be the first actual picture of such a planet. May there be many more.

The downside:

The problem is that planets, particularly earth-sized planets, are very dim bulbs located on astronomical scales right next to a very bright star. Even with a resource like Hubble at our disposal, they're never going to be easy to spot.

Luckily...

A couple of super geniuses have set their minds to the task of designing the next generation of space-based telescopes. Wow, somebody should be paying those guys a lot of money.

Item 4
Pinpointing Cancer Fight

In the fight against cancer, some scientists are thinking small. Really, really small.

The National Cancer Institute launches a five-year, $144 million project today to investigate using nanotechnology, the science of building devices on the atomic level, to fight cancer.

The good news:

The treatments that will be looked at include, among other approaches, the use of gold nanoshells that "cook" tumor cells to death and nanoparticles that deliver chemotherapy on a cell-by-cell basis. We've been tracking these developments over the past year (here and here, for example). It's gratifying to see these lines of research get additional funding. Moreover, with the blessing of the National Cancer Institute, it would seem that nanomedicine is well on its way to being mainstream.

More good news:

Meanwhile, research shows that a very different form of treatment also offers very real benefits to cancer patients:

Hypnosis can relieve suffering and improve the quality of life of cancer patients, researchers said on Thursday.

Although it has been used to help people to give up smoking, lose weight and overcome phobias, its real therapeutic potential is still untapped, they believe.

Dr Christina Liossi, of the University of Wales in Swansea, said there is medical evidence that hypnosis helps to relieve the depression, nausea, vomiting and pain suffered by cancer patients.

There have also been suggestions that hypnosis could increase survival in patients with the disease, but she added there is not enough evidence to support them.

Still more good news:

RNAi treatment, touted as the next big thing in biotechnology is now being given its first try:

The first clinical trial of a therapy based on the much-heralded technique of RNA interference, or RNAi, will begin within several weeks to treat a condition which can lead to blindness.

If the results of these tests prove fruitful, RNAi treatment may soon be used to help cancer patients as well as those afflicted by a host of other medical problems.

Item 5
Scientists Recover Critical Genesis Parts

NASA scientists said they have recovered some critical pieces of the Genesis space capsule intact and are optimistic the wreckage will yield valuable information about the origins of the solar system.

"We should be able to meet many, if not all, of our science goals," physicist Roger C. Wiens of the Los Alamos National Laboratory said Friday.

The good news:

Apparently, the individual compartments that were used to gather sample atoms from around the solar systm got fused together pretty well, but atoms are kind of hard to destroy. So it's possible that just a few of them will be sufficient to give the scientists the information they're looking for.

Here's hoping.

Also, NASA is envisioning future missions that avoid the problem of parachute malfunctions altogether:

As currently envisioned, the Mars Sample Return mission uses a completely passive entry vehicle. A return craft holding the specimen canister would be aerodynamically stable throughout its landing on Earth. The MSR entry craft would not require a parachute...

In other Space News...

As the age of space tourism draws ever closer, some some would-be amateur astronauts are likely to prepare themselves by taking one or more zero G flights, which are about to be offered on a commercial basis:

The Zero Gravity Corporation has been given the thumbs up by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to conduct "weightless flights" for the general public, providing the sensation of floating in space.

Tickets are on sale for around $3,000.

A specially modified Boeing 727-200 aircraft, called G-Force One, will be used during a nationwide tour Sept. 14-24.

Hmmm...at $3000 a pop, these flights will not only make the passengers weightless, they should go a long way towards lightening their wallets as well.

Item 6
Better Living Through Gadgets

Here's a small sampling of recent gadget news. How did we ever get by without these things?

• Sony Handheld Computer with Electroluminescent Display
  Who even knew that liquid crystal displays were on the way out? The display is 48-x320 pixels, and has a 1000:1 contrast ratio. The unit saves power by not turning on black pixels. Good thinking! You can get anywhere from four to eight hours of video viewing on it.
• P2P Phones
  It looks as though the inital version will only enable sharing of photos and text, but audio and video files are reportedly on the way.
• In-Flight Mobile Phones
  Airbus is working on plans that will allow passengers to use their mobile phones in-flight by the year 2006. That's good news because, by then, we should have full audio and video P2P available on mobile phones (see previous item).
• Tiny Robotic Helicopter
  When a big, bulky, non-robotic helicopter just won't do.
• Follow Your Nose
  Picture this: rather than having to move a mouse around on your desktop, you simply point your nose where you want the cursor to go. Need to left-click on an item on screen? Just blink your left eye. Need to right-click? You get the idea. It may sound frivolous, but this invention promises to offer profound benefits to disabled computer users. And if it revolutionizes computer gaming in the process, well that's just gravy.

Item 7
Nickels to Get a New Look

There's change in store for Thomas Jefferson � on the nickel that is. He's getting his first makeover since being put on the coin in 1938.

The good news:

The new nickel looks better and includes the word "liberty" in Thomas Jefferson's handwriting. Plus, Jefferson is featured more prominently. Moreover, for the nostalgic, the new coin has a buffalo on the back.

The downside:

The changes to the nickel comes on the heels of other currency updates, which include adding color the to $50 bill. Change is good and all, but we're not sure how we're going to feel about swapping greenbacks for Monopoly money.

Better All The Time is compiled by Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon.

More good news: Arthur Chrenkoff gives the latest good news from Iraq. And here's the latest edition of Winds of Discovery.

Live to see it!

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 03:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As the age of space tourism draws ever closer, some some would-be amateur astronauts are likely to prepare themselves by taking one or more zero G flights, which are about to be offered on a commercial basis:

The Zero Gravity Corporation has been given the thumbs up by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to conduct "weightless flights" for the general public, providing the sensation of floating in space.

Tickets are on sale for around $3,000.

A specially modified Boeing 727-200 aircraft, called G-Force One, will be used during a nationwide tour Sept. 14-24.

Once they're offered to the general public, zero-G flights will run passengers about $3000. According to the linked article, passengers will first experience reduced gravity, approximating the surfaces of Mars and the Moon, before experiencing absolute weightlessness. It's hard not to wonder how long the flights will last (the article doesn't say.) At $3000 a ride, I wonder how much the passengers will be paying for each second of weightlessness?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 01:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

After Kurzweil reported yesterday that we now have the first photograph of an exoplanet (a planet outside the solar system), Phil and I had an email conversation about the future of spotting planets visually.

The problem is that planets, particularly earth-sized planets, are very dim bulbs located on astronomical scales right next to a very bright star.

The planet that was photographed is very large and is in a wide orbit around a relatively dim star. Astronomer Gael Chauvin managed to take this picture with an earth-based telescope employing "adaptive optics" to compensate for the blurring of our atmosphere. The telescope that was used was part of the "Very Large Telescope array at the Paranal Observatory in Chile."

Chauvin's team now plan to make more detailed observations to confirm whether the object is indeed a planet in orbit around 2M1207. "Our discovery represents a first step towards opening a new field in astrophysics: the imaging and spectroscopic study of planetary systems," says team member Anne-Marie Lagrange from the Grenoble Observatory in France. "Such studies will enable astronomers to characterise the physical structure and chemical composition of giant and, eventually, terrestrial-like planets."

Instead of having to compensate for our atmosphere, wouldn't it be great to have an array in space? What I suggested yesterday to Phil was an array in the configuration of a toy jack.

Or, to be more scientific, in the xyz cartesian axes configuration. At the end of each leg would be a 3 axes movable "eye." These 6 eyes could work separately or be coordinated together. This could give you monoscopic vision in up to 6 directions at once, stereoscopic vision in up to 3 directions at once, or, if a scientist needed to take a really good look at something, up to 6 eyes could be trained on an object.

Phil had a better idea. Instead of having these space telescopes physically connected together, why not separate them further? Much further.

The thing to do would be to launch one of these jack telescopes way, way out there. Say, 100 AU. The signals would take a long time to get back to Earth, but think of what we would see! Going with the stereoscope idea, what if we put two single lenses out in space on opposite sides of the sun, again each about 100 AU from the Sun or about 200 AU from each other. With that kind of distance between the two lenses, I wonder what kind of leverage you would get towards resolving distant objects? 200 AU seems huge to us, but it's still pretty miniscule in interstellar terms. Maybe we should be thinking in terms af 1000 AUs.

We need some cool nanotech way to make the lenses realy enormous, too. Say 1/100th the diamter of the moon or so. Now that would be a pair of binoculars!

No rescue missions for those Hubbles. You would need nanotech not just to build them, but to maintain them.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 08:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I have to begin this story where I can. It isn’t the beginning of the story; it’s the first day of my life that I really “remember”— in the common sense of the term. It’s the day I left the home. It was also the day the Phenomenon occurred, as well as being the day that any number of people that I knew (presumably along with some people I did not know) were removed.

That’s an unfortunate word, but it’s the best one I’ve ever been able to come up with to describe what happened. They were removed. Other terms used by those of us who discuss this subject (a small group) include undone, unmade, uncreated, destroyed, eliminated, and erased. Erased is probably the most popular. I don’t deny that it’s a good fit, but I prefer removed.

Todd says that removed is a euphemism. He suggests that there is something Orwellian in my selection of the term, that I’m trying to hide the awful reality of what occurred behind a word that obscures tragedy with its vagueness, like when an airline makes reference in its annual report to a mysterious mid-air explosion killing all 257 people on board one of its planes as a “conversion” or “replacement” of its aircraft. I believe Todd is mistaken on this point. The word removed is not vague, nor does it shy away from reality. If there was an explosion, I would say explosion. If we knew people were killed, I would say they were killed.

But we don’t know any of that. We don’t know that anyone has been erased, or eliminated or destroyed. There is this nagging sense, this appalling and overwhelming fear, that they might have been. But we don’t know that for sure. Far from obscuring the horrible reality, I think the word drives the horror home. They were here, they’re gone, and we have no idea what happened to them.

Anyway, whatever it was that happened to them, it happened that day. The day I left the home. The first day of my life that I remember.

Perhaps I should clarify that.

It isn’t that I don’t remember events that occurred before that day. As a matter of fact, I remember a good many events, and in great detail. For example: I remember being on a bus one day when I was 23 months old. There were 37 people on the bus when my mother and I boarded it. There were 16 stops between where we boarded and where we got off. During the course of the trip, there were as many as 51 and as few as 29 people on the bus. I can tell you how many were sitting on the left side of the bus, how many on the right. How many were men, how many were women. How many got off at each stop and how many got on.

And it isn’t just numbers.

Four stops after we boarded, a blonde lady got on the bus and sat down right in front of us. She wore a gray coat with a green scarf. Her fingernails were painted red. The polish on the middle finger of her left hand was chipped. Her husband sat next to her, a balding man wearing a white shirt and gray trousers. They got off the bus seven stops later. Along the way, they talked about someone named Pickles, who was causing a lot of trouble by where and when she was going to the bathroom. I realize now that Pickles was their dog. The man was quite upset about Pickles. The woman was less so. She told her husband he was being silly.

Wait. That isn’t entirely accurate. He exact words to her husband were, “All right, Stan. You don’t want to be silly about this, do you?” I remember her exact words just as I remember their entire conversation. I could provide a verbatim transcript if I wanted to.

Which, believe me, I do not.

Meanwhile, as the couple in front of us were talking about Pickles, there were other conversations going on around the bus. Seven distinct conversations. My mother and I made that bus trip 247 times over the course of about 18 months. I remember everyone who got on, everyone who got off, what they looked like, what they were wearing, every word they uttered.

But you have to understand, this particular episode occurred when I was not even two years old. By the time I was, say, five, I would have taken in quite a bit more. By that age, my mind had advanced from merely recording every detail to performing complex operations on the data gathered. I might divide the rows of the bus into six zones (or four or eight or twelve, it didn’t matter) and calculate the probability that the next spoken instance of the word “and” or “stop” or “lunch” would come from a particular zone. I might simultaneously cross-reference this information with the likelihood that a person in a given zone was wearing brown shoes or blue jeans, developing an intricate model which showed the correlation between what the bus riders wore, what they said, where they sat, where they were coming from, and where they were going. I might then take this entire model and compare it with a similar model I constructed the previous day (or six months before) of ants carrying the remains of a cookie into their anthill. From these two models I might derive a third, showing the unexpected links between the two, and suggesting some underlying symmetry to the universe.

So, yes, I can “remember” quite a few things that happened before the day I left the home. In fact, every waking moment of every day of my life, I was inundated with facts, events, data points. All of which stayed with me and are with me to this day. My mind would take this information in and work and rework it relentlessly. But there was very little sense in all this that it was I who was doing the observing or analysis. The concept of myself as a self was there, but it was no more prominent or seemingly significant than the number of people who got on the bus at a given stop. I think I sensed at some level that it was more important, or that it somehow should be more important, but I couldn’t get my mind to focus in that direction.

So there I was, lost in the cacophony of my own thoughts. There were a few sets of circumstances in which the me portion of my mind would temporarily emerge. The presence of some individuals — Grace in particular and, before that (to a lesser extent) my mother — would bring about this effect. And sometimes music did it, too.

And then there were the dreams. The last few were a blur. I didn’t understand that at the time, but I do now. I was remembering them the way normal people remember their dreams — some parts vague, some distinct. Later I would fix my mind on the subject and the order of events would be more or less clear.

But back to my original point, the day I left the home was also the day I gained the ability to control my mind, to turn the volume down on the background noise of observation and analysis so that I can think, more or less like a normal person. I can turn the volume down, but not off. Nor would I want to. From the start, my brain was wired in — to say the least — an unusual way. If it had been unwired, or rewired, I might have been “cured,” but it would have been one of those successful operations in which the doctor loses the patient. The result would have been some semblance of a perfectly normal person, but it would not have been me. Whoever or whatever I am, the cacophony is a big part of it.

So anyhow, that was the day. The first day of my life.

It was late at night and we were all sitting around the office on the first floor. We knew it was wrong for us to be doing this, but there was no one to tell us not to. There were nine of us altogether: my best friends Grace and Todd, the latter of whom I had just retrieved from a coma; my friend Raymond, whom I had just brought back from the dead; the older girls, Judy and Bettina; the younger girls, Estelle and Lucinda; and Robert.

This left the nine of us to attempt to make sense of what had just occurred. Or what may have occurred, we really weren’t sure.

“Well, Robert,” Judy began, “ I guess now we all understand about your law of unintended consequences.”

Robert nodded.

“I don’t,” said Grace.

“I don’t either,” said Todd. “Can somebody tell me what’s going on here?”

Lucinda, who had been thumbing through some papers on the desk, looked up.

“What do you remember?”

Todd thought about that for a moment.

“I remember the ants…”

“That’s right,” Raymond interrupted. “On the back porch. They were biting us.”

I was struck by an urge to apologize for the ants, and for my doppelganger. I knew that I had dreamed both of them up. It was only then that I realized that I couldn’t speak: that if I tired, the result would be that grunting/groaning thing I did sometimes. Of course, I had known all along that I couldn’t speak — not while awake, anyway — but I had expected, or at least hoped, that I would carry that ability, along with my lucidity, out of the dream space and into the real world. No such luck.

And there was suddenly a lot that I wanted to say. I was overwhelmed by my feelings. It was much more real to actually feel them than to simply be aware of them in the same way I might be aware that the digits of today’s date added up to the number of blue flecks in a square of linoleum that I happened to glance at four years earlier. I felt shame and regret over the ants. I felt anxiety about who or what my mirror self was and what he had done. I felt joy at seeing Raymond and Todd all right, joy at seeing all of them, especially Grace, who had somehow brought me to this place.

It was then, when I looked at Grace — when I was overcome by recognition and love, feelings which before that moment I had only in my dreams — that I realized that something was terribly wrong. Or rather, terribly right. I had changed. I was there. I had finally arrived. I looked at Grace. I looked straight at her for the first time.

She didn’t notice.

“I remember a lot of noise and confusion,” Todd continued. “And pain. And then I remember showing up at the front door a couple of minutes ago.”

“Same here,” said Raymond. “After the ants, I was asleep or unconscious for a while. When was that, this morning? And then I just sort of woke up standing at the front door with Todd.”

Todd picked up the narrative again.

“Then we came in and…walked over here to the office for some reason. And then that kid who looks like Corey came down the stairs. Who is he, anyway? And Grace told us not to look at him, so we didn’t. And then he was gone…or something…”

He looked around the room for a moment, seeming to study each of us. His eyes met mine. He stopped on me for just a moment, looking puzzled. Then he turned and looked at Robert, sitting next to my left.

That’s right, I’m here, I said inside. I knew how to make the words in my mind, and event understood how to make them with my mouth, but somehow I couldn’t do it.

“And then the rest of you came down,” Todd concluded. “And here we are.”

“I’ve never been as scared of anything as I was of those ants,” said Raymond.

He got up from where he was sitting and walked over to the spot on the floor where Estelle sat. He looked at her with concern.

“Did they hurt you?” he asked, putting his hand on her head. “Are you okay?”

Estelle looked up and smiled.

“Greater love hath no man than this,” she said. “That a man lay down his life for his friends.”