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Saturday, December 31, 2016

A new spin on Artificial Intelligence


New research from Tohoku University (1) demonstrating pattern finding using low energy solid state devices, representing synapses (spintronics), has potential to reduce the hype of contemporary artificial intelligence and move the field forward incrementally. Computer scientists have been wasting time with conventional computers and inefficient software solutions on what they hope to be a replication of intelligence. However, it has been clear from the inception of the field that engineering processes and know-how fall significantly short of its intended goals. The problem has always been hardware design and the fact that there are more software engineers in the world than those who focus on hardware, has acted as a brake on progress.

The brain has always been a bad model for artificial intelligence. A massive energy hog that has to prop itself up on a large and fat storing gut just to survive, has always been an inefficient design to create intelligence. Largely designed to keep track of routine systems, the brain accidently took on a foreign role that allowed abstract thinking. The over design of the system meant that it could do so with relatively small incremental cost. Computer scientists' attempts to replicate the energy inefficient organ, designed primarily for routine and repeating tasks, on the promise of intelligence have left many skeletons in the long and unsuccessful path to artificial intelligence. The fact that there is unabated noise in the universe of millennials about artificial intelligence is symptomatic of a lack of understanding of what could be possible.

Practical mathematicians and engineers are a bad combination for effecting ground breaking innovation. In the 60s, this potent combination of technologists designed the neural nets - to simulate what they felt was happening inside the funny looking organ. For decades, their attempts to "train," their nets met with failure with the artificial constructs taking too long to learn anything or spontaneously becoming unstable. They continued with the brute force method as the cost of computers and memory started to decline rapidly. Lately, they have found some short cuts that allows faster training. However, natural language processing, clever video games and autonomous cars are not examples of artificial intelligence by any stretch of the imagination.

To make artificial intelligence happen, technologists have to turn to fundamental innovation in hardware. And, they may be well advised to lose some ego and seek help from very different disciplines such as philosophy, economics and music. After all, the massive development of the human brain came when they started to think abstractly and not when they could create fire and stone tools at will.


  1. William A. Borders, Hisanao Akima, Shunsuke Fukami, Satoshi Moriya, Shouta Kurihara, Yoshihiko Horio, Shigeo Sato, Hideo Ohno. Analogue spin–orbit torque device for artificial-neural-network-based associative memory operationApplied Physics Express, 2017; 10 (1): 013007 DOI: 10.7567/APEX.10.013007

Thursday, December 29, 2016

Coding errors

A recent publication in Nature Communications (1) seems to confirm that DNA damage due to ionizing radiation is a cause of cancer in humans. The coding engine in humans has been fragile, prone to mistakes even in the absence of such exogenous effects. As humans attempt interplanetary travel, their biggest challenge is going to be keeping their biological machinery, error free. Perhaps what humans need is an error correction mechanism that implicitly assumes that errors are going to be a way of life. Rather than attempting to avoid it, they have to correct it optimally.

Error detection and correction have been important aspects of electronic communication. Humans do have some experience with it, albeit in crude electronic systems. The human system appears to be a haphazard combination of mistakes made over a few million years. They have been selected for horrible and debilitating diseases and every time they step out into the sunlight, their hardware appears to be at risk. It is an ironic outcome for homosapiens who spent most of their history naked under the tropical sun. Now ionized radiation from beyond the heavens render them paralyzed and ephemeral.

Perhaps it is time we have taken a mechanistic and computing view of humans. The clever arrangement of $26 worth of chemicals seem to last a very short period of time, stricken down by powerful bugs or her own immune system. Now that bugs have been kept at a safe distance, it is really about whether the system can code and replicate optimally. The immediate challenge is error detection and correction at a molecular level. If some of the top minds, engaged in such pointless activities as investing, death curing and artificial intelligence, could focus on more practical matters, humans can certainly come out ahead.


(1) http://esciencenews.com/articles/2016/09/13/study.reveals.how.ionising.radiation.damages.dna.and.causes.cancer

Saturday, December 17, 2016

Does life matter?

Philosophical, ethical and religious considerations have prevented humans from defining the value of life. Short sighted financial analysis that defined the value of life as the NPV of the future utility stream, is faulty. Additionally, there is a distinct difference between personal utility and societal utility that do not coincide. The more important deficiency in the approach is that it does not account for uncertainty in future possibilities and the flexibility held by the individual in altering future decisions. And in a regime of accelerating technologies that could substantially change the expected life horizon, the value of life is increasing every day, provided expected aggregate personal or societal utility is non-negative.

The present value of human life is an important metric for policy. It is certainly not infinite and there is a distinct trade-off between the cost of sustenance and expected future benefits, both to the individual and society. A natural end to life, a random and catastrophic outcome that is imposed by exogenous factors, is highly unlikely to be optimal. The individual has the most information to assess the trade-off between the cost of sustenance and future benefits. If one is able to ignore the excited technologists, attempting to cure death by Silicon, data and an abundance of ignorance, one could find that there is a subtle and gentle slope upward for the human’s ability to perpetuate her badly designed infrastructure. The cost of sustenance of the human body, regardless of the expanding time-span of use, is not trivial. One complication in this trade-off decision is that the individual may perceive personal (and possibly societal) utility, higher than what is true.  Society, prevented from the forceful termination of the individual on philosophical grounds, yields the decision to the individual, who may not be adept enough to do so.

Humans are entering a tricky transition period. It is conceivable that creative manipulation of genes may allow them to sustain copies of themselves for a time-span, perhaps higher by a factor of 10 in less than 100 years. However, in transition, they will struggle, trying to bridge the status-quo with what is possible. This is an optimization problem that may have to expand beyond the individual, if humanity were to perpetuate itself. On the other hand, there appears to be no compelling reasons to do so.

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Milking data

Milk, a new computer language created by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) promises a four fold increase in the speed of analytics on big data problems. Although true big data problems are still rare, albeit the term is freely used for anything from large excel sheets to relational data tables, Milk is in the right direction. Computer chip architecture designs have been stagnant, still looking to double speed every 18 months, by packing silicon ever closer with little innovation.

Efficient use of memory has been a perennial problem for analytics, dealing with sparse and noisy data. Rigid hardware designs shuttle unwanted information based on archaic design concepts never asking the question if the data transport is necessary or timely. With hardware and even memory costs in a precipitous decline, there has not been sufficient force behind seeking changes to age old designs. Now that exponentially increasing data is beginning to challenge available hardware again and the need for speed to sift through the proverbial haystack of noise to find the golden needle is in demand, we may need to innovate again. And, Milk paves the path for possible software solutions.

Using just enough data at the right time to make decisions is a good habit, not only in computing but also in every other arena. In the past two decades, computer companies and database vendors sought to sell the biggest steel to all their customers on the future promise of analytics once they collect all the garbage and store it in warehouses. Now that analytics has "arrived," reducing the garbage into usable insights has become a major problem for companies.

Extracting insights from sparse and noisy data is not easy. Perhaps academic institutions can lend a helping hand to jump start innovation at computer behemoths, as they get stuck in the status-quo.

Monday, December 12, 2016

Democracy's event horizon

Recent results from a survey (1) of 2200 Americans showing over 1 in 4 believe that the sun goes around the earth is problematic for democracy. The system, that reflects the aggregate opinion of all participants, has served humanity well in recent years. However, the same characteristic could be its Achilles' heel as its leaders will have to reflect its population. If aggregate knowledge present in a democratic society falls below a threshold value, it can act like the event horizon of a black hole. Once through it, there is no turning back as it will spiral down to a singularity.

There have been telltale signs in many democratic societies for some time. In the world's largest democracy, elections were decided by last names and not policy choices. In Southern Europe, star power has been more dominant. More recently, powerful democratic countries have opted for less optimal outcomes. All of these may imply that democracy, as a system, is running out of its originally intended use - assure optimum outcomes for society in the long run. Instead, it is now more likely to reinforce low knowledge content, if it is dominant.

One democracy appears to have resisted the race to the bottom. Down under, where penalties are imposed for those not bothering to vote, high turn-out has assured that knowledge content of the voters is above the democratic event horizon. It appears that the prescription for ailing democracies returning sub-optimal results is to enhance voter turnout, possibly by the imposition of penalties. The biased selection in the non-voter cohort may be just enough to keep the system from the plunge to the unknown.

(1) http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/02/14/277058739/1-in-4-americans-think-the-sun-goes-around-the-earth-survey-says

Monday, November 28, 2016

The irony of Artificial Intelligence

The indiscriminate use of the term "Artificial Intelligence," by analysts and consultants, demean what it was originally meant to be and is still supposed to imply. Those who have worked in this area for decades, much before the internet, search and autonomous vehicles existed, know fully well that there is nothing "artificial" about it. A lack of definition for "consciousness," has constrained computer scientists and philosophers alike from conceptualizing intelligence. Faster computers, memory and unlimited capital are unlikely to advance the field any further unless we return to thoughtfully studying the underlying issues. Let's do that before a few gamers think that they have accidently invented the "artificial mind."

Intelligence, something solely attributed to humans till very recently, is now shown to be present in a plethora of biological systems. Biological systems, however, are not an infinite array of on-off switches nor do they process information as computer systems do. So the idea that one can network a large number of silicon based idiot boxes, using mathematics from the 60s, to replicate the brain is fraught with issues. The recent fad of "artificial general intelligence," - the ability to teach a computer virtually anything such that it can not only replicate a human but also become a lot better, is a nice fantasy. What the technologists may be missing is that it is not a software problem. The millennials have become good at software but projecting what one is good at onto hard problems may not the best path forward.

Nature had nearly 3.8 billion years to perfect the underlying hardware to deliver intelligence. It was a slow and laborious process and it was never a software problem. Once the hardware was perfected, it was able to run virtually any software. This may give a clue to those plunging head first into teaching machines to "think," using software and age old mathematics. More importantly, the current architecture of computing representing calculators is not amenable to modeling intelligence. Just as there is a distinct difference between Arithmetic and Mathematics, conventional computers differ significantly from a true quantum computer. Adding and subtracting numbers fast is one thing but conceptualizing what it means is quite another.

The unfortunate term, "Artificial Intelligence," has led many mediocre lives astray. And God, with an immense sense of humor, seem to still lead them down blind alleys.

Friday, November 25, 2016

Expert complexity

A new tool rolled out by a research institution (1), allows decision-makers reach better decisions by surveying experts. Specifically, a related paper published in Nature Energy concludes that wind energy costs will fall by 24-30% by 2030 (2). To understand what method of alternate energy production is most viable, one has to disaggregate the problem into two distinct questions:

1. What's the status-quo economics - i.e what is the total cost of production per unit of energy for all available modalities - including, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, nuclear, fossil and others? And, it is important to understand total costs, however "green," the manufacturers of the turbines and solar cells claim to be.

2. How is this cost likely to decline by scale or newer technologies or both?

The first question has significant available data and does not require any expert opinion. The second question has two parts to it - scale based decline in cost and the probability of the arrival of a technology discontinuity. The former is also an empirical and engineering question that does not require experts to open up their infinite wisdom and the latter is mere speculation that experts could certainly contribute to.

More generally, alternative energy production techniques have comparable status-quo metrics that informs which method is dominant. The idea that "we should try everything," is fundamentally faulty as there is only one best design. The scale question requires more analysis and thought - part of this is related to total available quantity (i.e. how much energy could the world produce if it were to harness the source with 100% efficiency) and the other is related to efficiency gains that will accrue due to scale and learning effects. Both of these questions are well explored in many fields and thus we can easily create forecasted metrics of cost per unit of production across production modalities, without troubling the experts.

Scientists and policy-makers have a tendency to complicate simple problems. But it typically does not add much value, even with software, experts or research. Numbers are more reliable predictors of the performance of engineering systems than experts.

(1) https://carnegiescience.edu/news/new-tools-assess-future-wind-power
(2) http://esciencenews.com/articles/2016/09/13/new.tools.assess.future.wind.power




Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Eaten alive

Recent research from the University of Texas (1) sets the timing of the genius Homo excursion out of Africa to an earlier time and a harsher reality. They "mingled," with saber-toothed cats, wolves and hyenas and they ate only as many times as they were eaten. With a brain size smaller than half that of the modern human, their tools were primitive and their processes less compelling. They were effectively scavengers, with a badly designed and fragile infrastructure, that was no match to the mighty cats.

Human ego may have overlooked some information in the past as they had imagined their ancestors tall, dark and sturdy, leaving Africa, with a highly sophisticated technology, the hand ax. The UT team, based on a large sample over a 4 hectare area, argue this is not the case. The finding has implications, not only for history but also for biases that systematically creep into academic studies. In this contemporary world, where possibly half the population is likely unaware that its seven billion inhabitants are closely related, regardless of their outward appearances, scientists may need to do a better job in education. For without education, entire countries could walk back decades of progress and entire continents could move toward punishing tactical conflict. And, that would not be significantly different from what existed 1.8 million years ago, in architecture and context.

Humans have paid a big penalty because of their incessant curiosity, exploring foreign lands before they were possibly ready but what they brought to humanity is valuable knowledge. It will be a shame if modern humans lose it.

(1) http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/11/meet-frail-small-brained-people-who-first-trekked-out-africa

Sunday, November 20, 2016

The great money experiment

Cash, an ancient form of monetary value facilitating transactions, is still dominant in most parts of the world. Initially, cash represented precious objects, an idea that forms the foundation of the gold standard, yet another archaic concept pursued by those who do not know that the world has changed. More recently, the English East India Company, that minted coins to send to the East to buy spices and borrowed the term "cash" from Sanskrit, may have been solely responsible for the adoption of cash across the empire. It is only apt that India is getting rid of "excess cash," the source of corruption, tax evasion and terrorism.

Paper money has substantially expanded monetary incompetence across the globe. If electrons can count and fly across the globe instantly to account for credits and debits, it is unclear why humans carry metal and paper in their pockets to transact. Bad habits die slow and in a world that does not barter, cash was a crutch, that is no longer needed. Those who say politicians lack vision should look East, albeit, it is a singular experiment that breaks open new possibilities. Physical forms of cash has been inefficient, archaic and problematic for centuries but none had the guts to get rid of it. To time such a catastrophe, when the eyes of the world is transfixed on the other side of the world, is pure genius.

Yes, the unexpected policy change is going to bring tactical strife to a billion people, except those who had some early warnings to move their "excess cash," to Switzerland. But it may still be utility maximizing for a country that is becoming the largest in the world with a population languishing without technology and information. The prime minister appears forward  looking but it is going to take more that a few trips to Google, Microsoft and Facebook, to prop up a country that seems to have lost its way. Sure its engineers and doctors are sought after but the soul of the country, struggling to find its place, has failed to instill confidence to propel it beyond the third world status, it has been afforded.

Getting rid of corruption and excess cash is the first step. But to go further, India has to provide technology and information to its masses in an architecture that is based on free markets and free trade and not what its socialists leaders proposed from inception.



Saturday, November 12, 2016

Light Medicine

Recent research from the University of Bonn (1) that demonstrates light pulses are effective in jump starting a dying heart, opens up a long neglected pathway of electromagnetic spectrum in the treatment of diseases. Medicine, dominated by chemistry for many centuries, has been languishing. The complexity in the biology of humans, a haphazard combination of mistakes and happenstances has given those with an engineering mindset, hope. But they have been slow to recognize that the beneficial effects they find by the introduction of finely tuned chemicals are often followed by unknown, unanticipated and uncertain toxicity. Such was the domination of chemistry in medicine that they delegated physics to mere diagnostics. However, ancient cultures have been more aware of the effect of magnetism and light on the human body, albeit by unsystematic and unproven guesswork.

A new dawn is close at hand in which physics and computing will propel human health to hitherto unknown levels. We may finally recognize that specificity of intervention that is often accompanied by toxicity in chemistry is not the case in physics. In fact, it is just the opposite. The particles that propagate light and magnetism could be finely tuned and directed to the compartment of the human body that is not performing as expected. Once humans master the quantum effects exhibited by these particles, they may be in a position to hold and impact microscopic parts of the human body without pain or loss of control. The light defibrillator is exactly in this vein that spares the patient from any level of discomfort as it restarts the organ attempting to take a break.

The convergence of medicine and physics is a welcome trend. As the theoretical physicists struggle with beautiful but unprovable fantasies such as string theory or spend most of their careers measuring things they have no clue about such as dark matter and dark energy, perhaps they can devote a few hours of their time to something more practical. If they do, it can change medicine and dethrone ideas we have been pursuing from the middle ages.

(1) http://esciencenews.com/articles/2016/09/13/termination.lethal.arrhythmia.with.light

Monday, October 31, 2016

Missed by a whisker

As the string theorists work out the mathematics of the "theory of everything,", as the particle zoo keeper adds yet another particle to the compendium of knowledge, as the space agencies and private companies clamor to dominate space and send humans to Mars, as the environmentalists lament about the impending gloom and doom and as the activists burn and pillage to redirect policies, a large asteroid passed by the Earth peacefully, missing it by a mere 300K kilometers last night, a literal blink of an eye. And more, a lot more, is in the channel heading for the blue planet. I wonder why there was nothing in the news about it.

Humans habitually worry about the tactics and forget the big picture. There is an evolutionary basis for this as most of their history has been about tactical survival. The African Savannah was not a friendly place and as she descended from the trees, she exposed herself to danger all around her. The human psyche, thus, is programmed to worry about tomorrow and not next year for the probability of the later having any meaning for the individual was low. As the "Nobel laureates" attempt to mend the environment, they have to at least understand that the likelihood of Earth surviving a hit by a reasonable sized asteroid is small. And, there are an unimaginable number of objects in the splintered neighborhood of the solar system. The failed star, Jupiter, does her best but sweeping up all the dangerous objects that shower down from beyond her is almost an impossible task.

Those with a few billion $ to invest to create a "legacy," may be best advised to analyze the risks and rewards of their investment choices, Sure, creating a "space colony" and "curing death," are indeed great ideas but if they want humanity to survive (without whom their "legacy," will have no value), they may need to focus on something entirely different. Those who have been chasing "singularity," may need to consider that even "Artificial General Intelligence," will be dead and gone by the physics of impact. Creating robots of immense talent is good, but protecting a fragile environment built over five billion years may be more valuable.

It will be indeed ironic if the "advanced humans," are wiped out by a similar incident that lend mammals, an opening to dominate.

Saturday, October 29, 2016

Live forever?

Recent findings that appear to indicate that aging can be stopped in mammals by starvation and possible introduction of simple chemicals is encouraging for those who may want to live longer. Humans, a plumbing system designed by bacteria to consume and dispel nutrients favorable to them, have found it difficult to sustain life beyond thresholds established at their inception. Anti-bacterial agents did extend life tactically by a decade or so but it appears that they are hitting against some hard constraints. Engineering systems, specializing in plumbing tasks, have limited life and humans appear to fall into this category.

Although humans carry a specialized quantum computer on their shoulders, the action has largely been in their gut, thus far. A crude tubular structure, able to break down a variety of materials to feed its occupants, has been the main design feature. But just as any other such mechanical designs, the scaffolding deteriorates over time and the structure itself loses flexibility and crumbles after certain number of cycles. So, it is not surprising to imagine that life can be extended by starvation as that will reduce the number of cycles imparted on the most important aspect of a human - her gut.

The more important question for humans is what they are likely to do with a possible extension of life. Would they use the extra time to seek knowledge or fight with those who do not look or think like themselves? Would they use the extra time to advance society or segregate themselves into neatly fractured boxes? Would they look forward or be encumbered by their past, driven by simple objective functions? Would they attempt to create and leave a legacy or understand that legacy is meaningless in an advanced society? Would they attempt to understand themselves or be misunderstood forever?

Monday, October 24, 2016

Extreme skew

Over 100 billion humans lived on the earth since they have arrived hundred thousand years ago. However, most of the fundamental knowledge they have gained from fire to quantum mechanics over this time period came from an incomprehensibly few number of people, perhaps as few as 100. This is a hard constraint for humans to advance knowledge as it depends very much on the arrival of a unique individual, perhaps in a few generations. Increase in abstract and fundamental knowledge does not seem to depend on anything else except the presence of that special individual who propels humanity across a discontinuity. Forecasting of knowledge progression in such a regime that follows a smooth stochastic evolution with an extremely small probability of a jump, is a futile exercise. 

Why is this the case? The variation in intelligence across humans appear very small and their physical abilities as good as perfect cloning. But a single person out of one billion appears to possess special powers, albeit all measurable characteristics of that individual are within expected norms. If the probability of this error solely depends on quantity and not on time, then, there could be as many as 7 such individuals who could be present in today's world. This does not seem to be the case as there has been little advancement in fundamental knowledge for close to hundred years.

Systems that exhibit time based errors are similar to electrical systems such as computers and not mechanical systems that can move. The hundred errors seen over 100 thousand years appear evenly spaced in time and show no acceleration in the presence of much larger number of contemporary experiments. If these errors were part of a natural process such as evolution, humanity would have produced a dozen such fundamental leaps in a single generation by now. However, all indications are that there is no difference in the arrival rates of the genius who changes the human mind.

If the universe were a rules based simulation or driven from a random initial state, then larger experiments will unambiguously lead to larger number of errors. It appears to be programmed to regime shift only with time, implying a game with possibly prescribed and controlled end outcomes. 

Thursday, October 13, 2016

Space contamination

Space agencies world over have been on a quest to send a feeble human out of the world and most likely to Mars. Now that the president has also joined the game, more investments will be going in that direction. And many private companies are on the same track as well. But is there any reason other than nourishing own ego to attempt a trip to the red planet?

Humans have ably demonstrated that they are incapable of taking care of the environment they live and breed in. To send a specimen of the human kind to another planet would be the first step to initiate an irreversible catastrophe. Some have argued that sterilization of robotic equipment travelling to other planets is overdone and even suggested that humans should seed any rock they can find with bacteria and virus. Sure, the single celled cousins may jump at the suggestion, but is that wise?

Exploration has been integral to the human experience. But history also shows that their explorations have resulted in irreversible damage to what they found. They have been unable to learn by observation and bad habits picked up in the past hundred thousand years invariably has led to scorched earth policies. Now that the horizons are expanding beyond the struggling blue planet, there is no indication that humans have learned from their mistakes.

God does seem to have a sense of humor as she appears to have imposed daunting space-time constraints on a species who has acquired a quantum computer, by sheer accident. To make matters worse, the canopy, humans could observe is infinitely bigger than they could ever experience and akin to an ironic twist in a horror movie, they find that such observations are fleeting as the whole universe runs away from them at an accelerating rate.

Those who sit back in awe of the abundance of ignorance surrounding them, often have no desire to drive the truck to the next planet. But the engineers among us live for such meaningless tactics without ever thinking what it really means.

Monday, October 10, 2016

How long?

A recent survey from Columbia (1) shows some interesting results. They asked 1600 participants between the ages of 18 and 64, how long they prefer to live. It appears that close to half of the surveyed population would not want to live more than the average life expectancy and almost 1/6 indicate a preference lower than that. Beyond the obvious correlation to expectations of the quality of life in old age, the data also shows significant relationship to race - with African Americans and Hispanics wanting to live a lot longer than White/Caucasians.

This is an important question and a rich area for further research. Till recently, humans had conquered most of the pathogens but they succumb to auto-immune diseases in which the body attacks itself. Heart disease, cancer and diabetic complications top the list - all of which portend lower quality of life in later years. This coupled with a brain that is bored could be a potent combination for humans, whose infrastructure was never designed to go beyond a few decades. In spite of the billions going down the drain to “cure all diseases,” it is clear that homo-sapiens may require outside help to get over their genetic deficiencies.

How long does one want to live? I think it should depend on whether one is able to add value to society.

  
(1) http://esciencenews.com/articles/2016/08/25/how.long.do.you.want.live.your.expectations.old.age.matter

Sunday, October 2, 2016

Sugar & Salt

For nearly hundred thousand years, humans were without two ingredients that will cut their life short substantially. In the last few thousand years, sugar and salt rose to prominence and are now considered responsible for a large spectrum of human diseases including heart disease and metabolic syndrome that includes diabetes. The economics of these chemicals has been attractive from inception. Recent evidence that the sugar lobby (1) has been involved in suppressing the evidence that sugar played a major role in CHF is symptomatic of the fact that there has been powerful forces behind these industries. Little did Gandhi knew that his salt march in India, nearly a century ago, could have been deleterious to the health of Indians.

The taste buds of Homo sapiens are finely tuned to pick up these toxins, for small quantities are absolutely essential for health. The evolutionary forces could not anticipate that these chemicals will be manufactured and consumed by modern humans in such frequency and quantities that their organs simply give up, unable to cope with them. These materials have become a sign of wealth and power and nations warred to take control of their sources and production. More recently, they have been disbursed in colored and famous water world over, to fundamentally transform human health. 

Two toxins, salt and sugar, are responsible for possibly half the health care costs in the world. However, there are no signs of any abatement in their production and consumption.

(1) http://esciencenews.com/articles/2016/09/13/historical.analysis.examines.sugar.industry.role.heart.disease.research


Friday, September 16, 2016

They are already here

As a chunk of investments go down the drain seeking extra-terrestrials, drug resistant bacteria that cause two million illnesses and 23 thousand deaths in the US alone (1), have gotten little attention. These true extra-terrestrials, who got here hitching a ride on an asteroid, have been powerful and robust over a few billion years. They have transformed the planet, oxygenated it and prepared it for larger organisms, that would fall prey to them. They could dance in unison, divide and multiply and evolve in short horizons, aided by almost countless experiments. They will create organisms that could walk and eat, to satisfy their every whim, with an intelligent control system, that "advanced life," calls the microbiome. They could trigger feelings, switch their occupants' brain on and off, get them to eat what they would like and even decide on an expiry date for the host. Such is the power of the single cell organism, they have dominated the blue planet since their arrival, perhaps by chance.

ET is already here and they have been for over four billion years. As the greatest scientists fear, they are indeed more intelligent as they have not only designed an environment for themselves but also populated it with organisms they could control for their own benefit. As the chemists seek soil from far and wide to conquer the fully optimized machines they could only observe under a microscope, as the pharmaceutical companies run away from declining economics of third world diseases, as the NIH struggles to figure out how to advance thoughts and action, as the foundations that proclaim to lift humanity from disease and strife stop at mosquito nets and commercials, the single cell organism organizes further to consolidate control.

The worst idea of human history is the thought that they are "advanced."

(1) http://esciencenews.com/articles/2016/09/09/how.fight.drug.resistant.bacteria

Monday, September 5, 2016

ROE - Return on Education

As the political season heats up, politicians appear to be mired in tactics, symptomatic of lack of vision and strategic intent. A society deserves the politicians they are afforded but increasingly policies that affect the long term health and prosperity of the nation are unlikely to be affected by the appointed leaders, whoever they may be. Some want walls and others Wall street, but neither can lift the spirit and ambitions of 320 million beating hearts across the continent. As space enthusiasts search for extra-terrestrials, technologists build artificially intelligent bots and medical experts seek methods to ameliorate pain and defeat micro-organisms - politicians, caught in a time warp struggle to stay relevant. The younger generation has left them, for they have seen the light at the end of the tunnel, where they could imagine and build a world for the future.

As the blue planet spins and rotates to stay alive from its perpetual plunge into the center of the sun, protected from countless debris by its venerable cousin, Jupiter, its inhabitants, blinded by ignorance, appear to be ready to fight. They fight with ideas, races, countries, localities, genders and the gender-less, as if their whole life depends on it. They shout on TV and against those on the idiot box, they soften and harden policies at will, they own and disown coal, make speeches to the top bankers for money, refuse to release tax returns and proclaim wealth without understanding there is a liability side to the balance sheet. They visit churches of color, dance to show approval only to break down a few minutes later. They seek money for charities funded by the straight and the crooked, they meet lobbyists and people, shake hands and hold babies as if the whole country is melting down at the sheer sight of them.

Politicians, possibly a new species, could be endangered species, especially if the world educates itself with freely available information. Education has the highest return compared to any other investment by an individual or society. It can help sort out fake politicians who assert their past and your future, confidence tricksters, non-replicatable academic studies, drugs that lose efficacy over time, financial advisers who do not know finance, advertisements that promise the impossible, religious fanatics who perform magic, insurance policies that do not pay, charlatans who shout buy and sell as markets close and space agencies who spawn manned space missions for their own sake.

Such is the state of misinformation that education has higher returns now than it ever had.