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Friday, December 05, 2003
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We have flu here in California. Our clinical census has doubled since last Friday. It is a mean flu with high fever, pain and cough. It may kill 60,000 Americans this year. ... Get your flu shot now!
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 John Brockman writes: In 1991, in an essay entitled "The Emerging Third Culture," I put forward the following argument: "In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person today. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost." Twelve years later, that fossil culture has been essentially replaced by the "third culture" of the essay's title—a reference to C. P. Snow's celebrated division of the thinking world into two cultures, that of the literary intellectual and that of the scientist. This new culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, have taken the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are. The scientists of the third culture share their work and ideas not just with each other but with a newly educated public, through their books. Focusing on the real world, they have led us into one of the most dazzling periods of intellectual activity in human history. The achievements of the third culture are not the marginal disputes of a quarrelsome mandarin class; they affect the lives of everybody on the planet. The emergence of this new culture is evidence of a great intellectual hunger, a desire for the new and important ideas that drive our times: revolutionary developments in molecular biology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, chaos theory, massive parallelism, neural nets, the inflationary universe, fractals, complex adaptive systems, linguistics, superstrings, biodiversity, the human genome, expert systems, punctuated equilibrium, cellular automata, fuzzy logic, virtual reality, cyberspace, and teraflop machines. Among others. (12/05/03)
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 We humans are great at not believing what we don’t want to believe. There are none so blind as those that will not see, nor none so deaf as those that will not hear. During World War II, there was much evidence that Hitler was systematically exterminating the Jews of Europe. This evidence reached the eyes and ears of the leadership of the both England and the United States years before our soldiers actually entered the concentration camps, and brought the truth before the world press. It was not believed. The will not to believe runs strong in humanity. Even today, fifty years after Hitler killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, there are many living humans that still deny that crime ever took place. ... Today George Monbiot writes: The oil industry is buzzing. On Thursday, the government approved the development of the biggest deposit discovered in British territory for at least 10 years. Everywhere we are told that this is a "huge" find, which dispels the idea that North Sea oil is in terminal decline. You begin to recognise how serious the human predicament has become when you discover that this "huge" new field will supply the world with oil for five and a quarter days. Every generation has its taboo, and ours is this: that the resource upon which our lives have been built is running out. We don't talk about it because we cannot imagine it. This is a civilisation in denial. Oil itself won't disappear, but extracting what remains is becoming ever more difficult and expensive. The discovery of new reserves peaked in the 1960s. Every year we use four times as much oil as we find. All the big strikes appear to have been made long ago: the 400m barrels in the new North Sea field would have been considered piffling in the 1970s. Our future supplies depend on the discovery of small new deposits and the better exploitation of big old ones. No one with expertise in the field is in any doubt that the global production of oil will peak before long. (12/05/03)
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 New Scientist -- Recycling paper could be made simpler by a new disappearing ink that can be erased from paper by heating. Toshiba's erasable ink can be used in ordinary laser jet printers and pens. A printed sheet is wiped clean by passing it through an erasing machine. The "decolourable" ink, which has been tinted blue to help distinguish it from ordinary, non-erasable, ink, has been named "e-blue". It consists of three different chemical components. Two of these naturally combine to give the ink its colour. The third element reverses this process when heat is applied, causing the ink to become transparent. The paper can then be printed on again. It takes roughly 2 hours to erase 200 pages of paper using Toshiba's desktop erasing machine. ... Toshiba plans to sell e-blue printer toner, pens and erasing machines in Japan starting Monday. (12/05/03)
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 New Scientist -- The European Commission says EU fishing boats should be allowed to catch the same amount of North Sea cod in 2004 as they were allowed this year. Yet the scientists who advise the Commission say the cod are so desperately overfished, that all cod fishing should stop in the North Sea, or the fishery could collapse. The scientists recommended that last year, too, but the Commission allowed fishermen to catch, officially, 22,659 tonnes of North Sea cod. In Brussels on Thursday it proposed the same quota next year. The proposal must be approved by fisheries ministers later this month. The Commission also ignored scientists' pleas to stop fishing for cod west of Scotland and off Denmark, and for sole in the English Channel and hake off Spain. Instead it proposed reducing catches by about half - because, as scientists predicted, this year’s catch reduced those stocks. "We recommended closing the cod fishery, and we're sticking to that," Hans Lassen, chief fisheries adviser at the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), told New Scientist in response to the Commission’s announcement. But the Commission says its proposals "will ensure the continuity of economic activity in the fisheries concerned." Closing North Sea cod to fishing would cause mass unemployment in fishing communities. The cod swims alongside other fish such as haddock, and is caught in the same nets, so a cod ban would mean other fisheries would also have to be severely cut. Last year when the ICES called for no cod fishing in the North Sea, the Commission cut the catch 65 per cent. This year, however, it is keeping the same quota. Fisheries models say this should maintain the cod population at least at the minimum ICES recommends. (12/05/03)
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 BBC Technology -- Scientists have described their first complete design of an implant that will take the place of light-sensitive cells in the retina of a damaged eye. Current implants use chips that convert light into electrical impulses that are fed to the brain via the optic nerve. The new device will work differently. It will be placed on a damaged retina and convert light into chemicals that will stimulate nerve cells. The prototype is being constructed at Stanford University in California. Dr Stacey Bent of Stanford University calls the device "the holy grail of prostheses". It takes a new approach to replacing a damaged retina, the layer of cells at the back of the eye that detect light and send signals to the brain. Trauma or disease can damage or destroy retinal cells. Over the past few years implants have been developed to replace them based on electronic chips that turn light into electrical pulses. But there are difficulties in placing electronics into the eye. "The problem with electronic implants is while they are very good it is difficult to make them biocompatible," Dr Bent told BBC News Online. "What we a trying to do is a different approach from the current attempts using electrodes to stimulate nerve cells in the eye." The new device works chemically rather than electronically. "Instead of using electrical stimulation from a chip that converts light into electric impulses, we are using an implant that releases neurotransmitters just as the retina does naturally." The researchers want light to strike the chip, causing it to release a small amount of neurotransmitter fluid that will stimulate retinal nerve cells. (12/05/03)
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 BBC Environment -- A disease which has destroyed many thousands of Californian oaks has been found for the first time in several well-loved British tree species. It is a fungus called sudden oak death, and till now it had been found only in UK shrubs and a tree native to the US. But the Forestry Commission says the disease has now struck beech, horse chestnuts and holm oaks in Cornwall. There is no known cure for the disease, which kills the trees' bark and is thought liable to affect other species. The fungus, known as Phytophthora ramorum, has killed 80% of one oak species in the western US. It was discovered last year in viburnum plants in British garden centres, and there have been more than 300 subsequent outbreaks in plant nurseries, and in some wild rhododendrons. But the disease did not appear in a British tree until November, when it was identified in a southern red oak in Sussex - a tree imported from the US. The news that it has now surfaced several hundred miles to the west, in Cornwall, is disturbing enough. Worse, though, is the fact that its latest victims include a native British species, the beech, which is common across much of the UK. One of the other infected species, the holm oak, was brought here from Europe, and the horse chestnut is also an introduced species. (12/05/03)
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9:13:13 AM 
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I am way too busy at clinic. We have flu here in California. If you haven't got you flu shot yet don't tarry!
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John Brockman writes: In 1991, in an essay entitled "The Emerging Third Culture," I put forward the following argument: "In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person today. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost." Twelve years later, that fossil culture has been essentially replaced by the "third culture" of the essay's title—a reference to C. P. Snow's celebrated division of the thinking world into two cultures, that of the literary intellectual and that of the scientist. This new culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, have taken the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are. The scientists of the third culture share their work and ideas not just with each other but with a newly educated public, through their books. Focusing on the real world, they have led us into one of the most dazzling periods of intellectual activity in human history. The achievements of the third culture are not the marginal disputes of a quarrelsome mandarin class; they affect the lives of everybody on the planet. The emergence of this new culture is evidence of a great intellectual hunger, a desire for the new and important ideas that drive our times: revolutionary developments in molecular biology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, chaos theory, massive parallelism, neural nets, the inflationary universe, fractals, complex adaptive systems, linguistics, superstrings, biodiversity, the human genome, expert systems, punctuated equilibrium, cellular automata, fuzzy logic, virtual reality, cyberspace, and teraflop machines. Among others. (12/05/03) | |
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We humans are great at not believing what we don’t want to believe. There are none so blind as those that will not see, nor none so deaf as those that will not hear. During World War II, there was much evidence that Hitler was systematically exterminating the Jews of Europe. This evidence reached the eyes and ears of the leadership of the both England and the United States years before our soldiers actually entered the concentration camps, and brought the truth before the world press. It was not believed. The will not to believe runs strong in humanity. Even today, fifty years after Hitler killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, there are many living humans that still deny that crime ever took place. ... Today George Monbiot writes: The oil industry is buzzing. On Thursday, the government approved the development of the biggest deposit discovered in British territory for at least 10 years. Everywhere we are told that this is a "huge" find, which dispels the idea that North Sea oil is in terminal decline. You begin to recognise how serious the human predicament has become when you discover that this "huge" new field will supply the world with oil for five and a quarter days. Every generation has its taboo, and ours is this: that the resource upon which our lives have been built is running out. We don't talk about it because we cannot imagine it. This is a civilisation in denial. Oil itself won't disappear, but extracting what remains is becoming ever more difficult and expensive. The discovery of new reserves peaked in the 1960s. Every year we use four times as much oil as we find. All the big strikes appear to have been made long ago: the 400m barrels in the new North Sea field would have been considered piffling in the 1970s. Our future supplies depend on the discovery of small new deposits and the better exploitation of big old ones. No one with expertise in the field is in any doubt that the global production of oil will peak before long. (12/05/03) | |
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New Scientist -- Recycling paper could be made simpler by a new disappearing ink that can be erased from paper by heating. Toshiba's erasable ink can be used in ordinary laser jet printers and pens. A printed sheet is wiped clean by passing it through an erasing machine. The "decolourable" ink, which has been tinted blue to help distinguish it from ordinary, non-erasable, ink, has been named "e-blue". It consists of three different chemical components. Two of these naturally combine to give the ink its colour. The third element reverses this process when heat is applied, causing the ink to become transparent. The paper can then be printed on again. It takes roughly 2 hours to erase 200 pages of paper using Toshiba's desktop erasing machine. ... Toshiba plans to sell e-blue printer toner, pens and erasing machines in Japan starting Monday. (12/05/03) | |
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New Scientist -- The European Commission says EU fishing boats should be allowed to catch the same amount of North Sea cod in 2004 as they were allowed this year. Yet the scientists who advise the Commission say the cod are so desperately overfished, that all cod fishing should stop in the North Sea, or the fishery could collapse. The scientists recommended that last year, too, but the Commission allowed fishermen to catch, officially, 22,659 tonnes of North Sea cod. In Brussels on Thursday it proposed the same quota next year. The proposal must be approved by fisheries ministers later this month. The Commission also ignored scientists' pleas to stop fishing for cod west of Scotland and off Denmark, and for sole in the English Channel and hake off Spain. Instead it proposed reducing catches by about half - because, as scientists predicted, this year’s catch reduced those stocks. "We recommended closing the cod fishery, and we're sticking to that," Hans Lassen, chief fisheries adviser at the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), told New Scientist in response to the Commission’s announcement. But the Commission says its proposals "will ensure the continuity of economic activity in the fisheries concerned." Closing North Sea cod to fishing would cause mass unemployment in fishing communities. The cod swims alongside other fish such as haddock, and is caught in the same nets, so a cod ban would mean other fisheries would also have to be severely cut. Last year when the ICES called for no cod fishing in the North Sea, the Commission cut the catch 65 per cent. This year, however, it is keeping the same quota. Fisheries models say this should maintain the cod population at least at the minimum ICES recommends. (12/05/03) | |
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BBC Technology -- Scientists have described their first complete design of an implant that will take the place of light-sensitive cells in the retina of a damaged eye. Current implants use chips that convert light into electrical impulses that are fed to the brain via the optic nerve. The new device will work differently. It will be placed on a damaged retina and convert light into chemicals that will stimulate nerve cells. The prototype is being constructed at Stanford University in California. Dr Stacey Bent of Stanford University calls the device "the holy grail of prostheses". It takes a new approach to replacing a damaged retina, the layer of cells at the back of the eye that detect light and send signals to the brain. Trauma or disease can damage or destroy retinal cells. Over the past few years implants have been developed to replace them based on electronic chips that turn light into electrical pulses. But there are difficulties in placing electronics into the eye. "The problem with electronic implants is while they are very good it is difficult to make them biocompatible," Dr Bent told BBC News Online. "What we a trying to do is a different approach from the current attempts using electrodes to stimulate nerve cells in the eye." The new device works chemically rather than electronically. "Instead of using electrical stimulation from a chip that converts light into electric impulses, we are using an implant that releases neurotransmitters just as the retina does naturally." The researchers want light to strike the chip, causing it to release a small amount of neurotransmitter fluid that will stimulate retinal nerve cells. (12/05/03) | |
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BBC Environment -- A disease which has destroyed many thousands of Californian oaks has been found for the first time in several well-loved British tree species. It is a fungus called sudden oak death, and till now it had been found only in UK shrubs and a tree native to the US. But the Forestry Commission says the disease has now struck beech, horse chestnuts and holm oaks in Cornwall. There is no known cure for the disease, which kills the trees' bark and is thought liable to affect other species. The fungus, known as Phytophthora ramorum, has killed 80% of one oak species in the western US. It was discovered last year in viburnum plants in British garden centres, and there have been more than 300 subsequent outbreaks in plant nurseries, and in some wild rhododendrons. But the disease did not appear in a British tree until November, when it was identified in a southern red oak in Sussex - a tree imported from the US. The news that it has now surfaced several hundred miles to the west, in Cornwall, is disturbing enough. Worse, though, is the fact that its latest victims include a native British species, the beech, which is common across much of the UK. One of the other infected species, the holm oak, was brought here from Europe, and the horse chestnut is also an introduced species. (12/05/03) | |
9:11:50 AM
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2004
Timothy Wilken.
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