Ten years ago, Netscape’s explosive IPO ignited huge piles of money. The brilliant flash revealed what had been invisible only a moment before: the World Wide Web. As Eric Schmidt (then at Sun, now at Google) noted, the day before the IPO, nothing about the Web; the day after, everything.
Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the Web’s core idea – hyperlinked pages – in 1945, but the first person to try to build out the concept was a freethinker named Ted Nelson who envisioned his own scheme in 1965. However, he had little success connecting digital bits on a useful scale, and his efforts were known only to an isolated group of disciples. Few of the hackers writing code for the emerging Web in the 1990s knew about Nelson or his hyperlinked dream machine.
At the suggestion of a computer-savvy friend, I got in touch with Nelson in 1984, a decade before Netscape. We met in a dark dockside bar in Sausalito, California. He was renting a houseboat nearby and had the air of someone with time on his hands. Folded notes erupted from his pockets, and long strips of paper slipped from overstuffed notebooks. Wearing a ballpoint pen on a string around his neck, he told me – way too earnestly for a bar at 4 o’clock in the afternoon – about his scheme for organizing all the knowledge of humanity. Salvation lay in cutting up 3×5 cards, of which he had plenty.
Although Nelson was polite, charming, and smooth, I was too slow for his fast talk. But I got an aha! from his marvelous notion of hypertext. He was certain that every document in the world should be a footnote to some other document, and computers could make the links between them visible and permanent. But that was just the beginning! Scribbling on index cards, he sketched out complicated notions of transferring authorship back to creators and tracking payments as readers hopped along networks of documents, what he called the docuverse. He spoke of “transclusion” and “intertwingularity” as he described the grand utopian benefits of his embedded structure. It was going to save the world from stupidity.
Wired
Planting trees can create deserts, lower water tables and drain rivers, rather than filling them, claims a new report supported by the UK government.
The findings – which may come as heresy to tree-lovers and most environmentalists – is an emerging new consensus among forest and water professionals.
?Common but misguided views about water management,? says the report, are resulting in the waste of tens of millions of pounds every year across the world. Forests planted with the intention of trapping moisture are instead depleting reservoirs and drying out soils.
NewScientist
GENETICALLY modified crops have bred with a native species to create a new herbicide resistant plant which environmentalists yesterday branded Britain’s first “superweed”.
It was previously thought that the weed, charlock, would not be able to interbreed with genetically altered oilseed rape plants.
But government scientists have found a hybrid plant at the margins of a field where a trial crop had been planted. Tests showed it was unaffected by the same herbicides that the GM crop was designed to resist.
Scotsman
Humans have a “robust” capacity to learn and retain new information unconsciously, retaining so-called habit memory even when conscious or declarative learning is absent, memory experts at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and the San Diego Veterans Affairs Health System report in the July 28, 2005 issue of Nature.
Declarative memory is based on active learning and memorization, and is dependent on a region of the brain in the temporal lobe that includes the hippocampus. When the hippocampus and related structures are destroyed, the human patient loses the ability to learn new memories and to access recent memories.
Habit learning occurs when information is stored unconsciously, through repetition and trial-and-error learning. These memories are believed to be retained in a different region of the brain, called the basal ganglia. In monkeys with lesions in the hippocampus, it had been shown that in contrast to humans with similar hippocampal lesions due to injury or disease who have difficulty learning certain tasks over a certain time period, the monkeys can learn the tasks at a normal rate, apparently as habits.
Science Daily
J. CRAIG VENTER
With such a broad topic I had no idea where to start, so I decided to start with the whole planet’s genome. John told me I had to present something modest here. So, as many of you know, the human genome was sequenced in the year 2000 and that gave us the complete repertoire of human genes. And slowly, as we’re adding more and more gene space to that ? and we’ve gone up two orders of magnitude now just in the last year from new genes in the environment, and I’ll be talking about that more on Thursday ? we’re starting to look at the world in terms of gene space instead of genomes and species, and this gets us down to component analysis.
RAY KURZWEIL
Let me try to build on what Craig has said. We just heard some very exciting applications which are in the early stage, moving on from the general project where we essentially collected the machine language of biology and we’re now trying to disassemble and reverse engineer it. And I come to this from a couple of perspectives. I’ve actually had these two disparate interests in my life. One has been computer science. Both Rodney and I have worked in the AI field. And then I’ve had an interest in health.
RODNEY BROOKS
John asked us to talk about the intersection of biology and information science, and I’m going to try and stick with that a little bit, and start off with some conventional stuff. The things that Craig has done, and others, on sequencing genomes have really relied on algorithms that have been developed in the information sciences. And the work in genomics proteomics et cetera that’s going on now uses a lot of machine learning techniques ? statistical machine learning techniques. Developed largely out of work of theoretical computer scientists and then applied by clever people like Craig into biology.
Edge
“Lawyers for the Defense Department are refusing to cooperate with a federal judge’s order to release secret photographs and videotapes related to the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.
[...]
In early June, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of Federal District Court in Manhattan ordered the release of the additional photographs, part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union to determine the extent of abuse at American military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan and at Guant?namo Bay, Cuba.
Judge Hellerstein… rejected arguments from the government that releasing the photographs would violate the Geneva Conventions…”
CommonDreams
The 30 cm octopus was a vivid reddish-orange color, had a membranous web of skin between its tentacles and possessed two small flipper fins just behind the eyes (hence the common name of dumbo octopus). This animal is one of only two octopus species in the world that are known to bioluminesce. The suckers along the arms have evolved into light-emitting organs that glow blue-green in the perpetual darkness of its habitat.
There’s a short video of one here: East of Cape Hatteras, September 1989, dive # JSL I 2621. Drifting in a bell-shaped posture, sculling with fins.
via root.cellar
How do the microprocesses of cultural transmission affect the macro structure of culture, its content, its evolution? The microprocesses, the small-scale local processes I am talking about are, on the one hand, psychological processes that happen inside people’s brains, and on the other hand, changes that people bring about in their common environment? for instance the noise they make when they talk or the paths they unconsciously maintain when they walk?and through which they interact.
Just as the human mind is not a blank slate on which culture would somehow imprint its content, the communication process is not a xerox machine copying contents from one mind to another. This is where I part company not just from your standard semiologists or social scientists who take communication to be a coding-decoding system, a transmission system, biased only by social interests, by power, by intentional or unconscious distortions, but that otherwise could deliver a kind of smooth flow of undistorted information. I also part company from Richard Dawkins who sees cultural transmission as based on a process of replication, and who assume that imitation and communication provide a robust replication system.
Edge
Better known for his sculptures.
President George W. Bush is taking anti-depressant drugs to control his erratic behavior, depression and paranoia, Capitol Hill Blue has learned.
The prescription drugs, administered by Col. Richard J. Tubb, the White House physician, can impair the President’s mental faculties and decrease both his physical capabilities and his ability to respond to a crisis, administration aides admit privately.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” says one aide. “We can’t have him flying off the handle at the slightest provocation but we also need a President who is alert mentally.”
Tubb prescribed the anti-depressants after a clearly-upset Bush stormed off stage on July 8, refusing to answer reporters’ questions about his relationship with indicted Enron executive Kenneth J. Lay.
“Keep those motherfuckers away from me,” he screamed at an aide backstage. “If you can’t, I’ll find someone who can.”
Capital Hill Blue
A sculpted and polished phallus found in a German cave is among the earliest representations of male sexuality ever uncovered, researchers say.
The 20cm-long, 3cm-wide stone object, which is dated to be about 28,000 years old, was buried in the famous Hohle Fels Cave near Ulm in the Swabian Jura.
The prehistoric “tool” was reassembled from 14 fragments of siltstone.
BBC
It is usually a good idea to keep water away from electrical equipment but researchers in Japan have discovered a new effect by breaking this rule. Masahide Gunji and Masao Washizu of the University of Tokyo have shown that electric fields can be used to move water droplets around a solid surface. Their work could lead to new ways to perform chemistry experiments much faster than is possible at present (J. Phys. D38 2417).
PhysWeb
The Dalai Lama is one of those
people I?ve always just sort of uncritically accepted. I never gave him
much more thought than being this sort of vaguely pleasant dude with a
robe and a smile and a massively successful franchise in contemporary
spiritual markets. Recently, I came across some rather public
information about him and his past which puts that all in quite a
different perspective. He?s a CIA man!
Communist China asserted it?s claim on Tibet in 1950,
and for the first few years allowed the Lamas to maintain local
control. According to Wikipedia, ?Prior to Chinese rule, over 700,000
of Tibet?s population of 1.2 million were in serfdom? – working on
lands owned by the lamas, under a feudal society of warlords and even
slavery. This system continued for a few years after the Chinese
takeover, ruled comfortably by the lamas – that is, until the Chinese
instituted a policy of land reform and redistribution in accord with
communist principles. Then things started to get hairy:
Just a few weeks ago we posted an article called First human robotic arm implant slated, however it appears that they’ve been beaten to the punch.
Jesse Sullivan lost both of his arms in May 2001. He has been given replacement, “bionic” arms by researchers at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. These arms are a dramatic improvement over previous prosthetics, in that they can be controlled directly by his brain, and they also provide the ability to feel sensations such as touch, hot, and cold. He can pick up an egg without breaking it.
Ironically, the final cost of the bionic arm, once perfected, is expected to be $6 million.
From here, here, and here via SciScoop
This technology out just in time to jive with the new Bionic Knee.
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