Australian scientists say they have created a “thinking cap” that will stimulate creative powers. The invention raises the possibility of being able to unlock one’s inner genius by reawakening dormant parts of the brain. It is based on the idea that we all have the sorts of extraordinary abilities usually associated with savants. According to scientists at the Centre for the Mind in Sydney, these hidden talents can be stimulated using magnetism. (04/21/02)
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Nathan Myhrvold recently disclosed to Technology Review, Intellectual Ventures has been working on a secret project for the better part of two years. The ambitious undertaking, which he is tentatively calling the Invention Factory, would bring together perhaps dozens of established and promising inventors to craft both significant innovations and methods to broaden their impact on the market. In fact, Myhrvold says he has been meeting with every significant inventor he can find to attempt to rope people into his still-evolving plan. “I’ve tried to speak to all of the world’s great inventors—but only the living ones,” he smirks. “I’m particularly interested in the ones who have made big scores.” (04/21/02)
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The Think! flag was created by the writer and software developer Dave Winer in the days after 9/11. “It’s the combination of love, strength and thought, which is the best of the USA,” Winer wrote at the time on his Internet journal, Scripting News. The image is unabashedly pro-American, and the challenge to exercise our brains and our freedom to use them is bracing. It ought to become the symbol of our national commitment to complexity. But that hardly seems to be the trend. Instead, Americans use a lot of other words to go with the flags they wave, words with meanings that come down to “Believe” or “Obey” or, simply, “Don’t Think.” If truth is the first casualty of war, then oversimplification has been a weapon of choice since last September. It was the weapon deployed in the emotional aftermath of 9/11, when John Ashcroft cowed Congress by equating dissent with disloyalty, and brandished by Bill O’Reilly to make himself a television star. And still people keep rolling it out. (04/21/02)
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Win Wenger writes: By the time as a kid I hit elementary school, I had already read, in my hunger for any kind of reading material, a lot of history, very unlike my agemates around me. Most of what I’d read to that point and for several years after was popular-level history which was always proposing or arguing cause-&-effect relationships. Thus, the concept of causality was pretty familiar to me by the time I hit elementary school. It didn’t occur to me until early this morning that because of this I was perceiving many relationships, and nearly all of even the most obvious of these relationships were quite invisible to my classmates. (And I think some of them were invisible even to most of my teachers.) To them, things “just happen.” Therefore, nothing has much meaning or significance, and there’s nothing anyone can do and nothing that can be done. I lived in a world of OhMyGoshWhatIf, and they lived in a world of duh. (04/21/02)
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Noam Chompsky writes: Current modifications of US rejectionism are tactical and so far minor. With plans for an attack on Iraq endangered, the US permitted a UN resolution calling for Israeli withdrawal from the newly-invaded territories “without delay” — meaning “as soon as possible,” Secretary of State Colin Powell explained at once. Palestinian terror is to end “immediately,” but far more extreme Israeli terror, going back 35 years, can take its time. Israel at once escalated its attack, leading Powell to say “I’m pleased to hear that the prime minister says he is expediting his operations.” There is much suspicion that Powell’s arrival in Israel is being delayed so that they can be “expedited” further. That US stance may well change, again for tactical reasons. … Meanwhile the US continues to “enhance terror,” to borrow the President’s words, by providing Israel with the means for terror and destruction, including a new shipment of the most advanced helicopters in the US arsenal (Robert Fisk, Independent, 7 April). These are standard reactions to atrocities by a client regime. To cite one instructive example, in the first days of the current Intifada, Israel used US helicopters to attack civilian targets, killing 10 Palestinians and wounding 35, hardly in “self-defense.” Clinton responded with an agreement for “the largest purchase of military helicopters by the Israeli Air Force in a decade” (Ha’aretz, 3 October, ’01), along with spare parts for Apache attack helicopters. The press helped out by refusing to report the facts. A few weeks later, Israel began to use US helicopters for assassinations as well. One of the first acts of the Bush administration was to send Apache Longbow helicopters, the most murderous available. That received some marginal notice under business news. (04/21/02)
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Elisabet Sahtouris writes: Of all the cooperative steps in Gaia’s dance, we saw that one of the most important was the invention of sex — the sharing of creature plans by uniting DNA from more than one source to create a new being. Because the exchange of genes among bacteria worldwide was and is so free and continual, biologists had to give up their attempts to classify species of bacteria — recall that species are identified by their DNA. We can only identify strains of them that keep recognizable forms despite the free trade. Remember that this kind of original sex had nothing to do with reproduction, as Margulis pointed out in tracing the origins of sex. It is because of this sexual freedom, this efficient communications system lost forever in later kingdoms of life, that bacteria could remain streamlined creatures with tremendous flexibility, able to trade information worldwide and thus solve almost any emergency situation. In the kingdom of protists, sex took some strange new twists, very likely quite by accident. These twists eventually linked and limited their sex to reproduction and to two partners within the same species. Thus the boundaries of sexual reproduction became our way of defining species boundaries. The within-species sex of the protist kingdom was passed on to multicelled creatures though sometimes different species co-evolved to help each other in their reproduction, as in the case of flowering plants cross-pollinated by birds, bats, moths, bees, or other insects. But before we get to larger creatures, let’s see just how the kind of sex we know — the production of offspring by the mating of two parents — came about among protists. (04/21/02)
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