R.I.P Albert Hofmann

How many galaxies are there in the universe?

I suddenly realized that this is actually a coherent question and googled it. 125 billion. This bothers me! Not that the number is too small or too large but that it is a finite number. I guess I've known since I was a kid that if you keep going far enough in a straight line through space you end up at the place where you started, but somehow this hadn't really sinked in and I still thought 'universe' ought to mean 'everything' and thus 'infinite'. 125??

Edit: on second thought, this means that there are as many neurons in your brain as there are galaxies in the universe. Take that atheism!

Random rant brought on by cosmologist Sir Martin Reeves speaking at TED (18min):

One World One Dream

XKCD

I'm not a huge fan of XKCD, but sometimes he gets it just right, like today.

Miss Sexiest Brain Implant 2005

And the winner is..

"Under isoflurane anesthesia, experimental animals received bilateral electrode implants in their medial forebrain bundles (stereotaxic coordinates 3.8mm posterior to bregma, 1.6mm lateral to the midline, and 8.2mm deep) and ventral tegmental areas (5.2mm posterior, 0.9mm lateral, and 8.2mm deep). Each brain structure on each side received a single Teflon-coated, stainless steel microwire (100um in diameter) as part an electrode array custom-fabricated in our laboratory."

- Hermer-Vazquez et al, 2005

Google YouTube Ads (12min, lockergnome)

Open iPlant seminar in May

(work in progress)

I'll run an iPlant seminar at the University of Sussex in May.

The powerpoint presentation (currently nowhere near finished) is in the files section on the forum. Please have a look at it from time to time and let me know what you think.

Translation of 'Brors (2008) Reinfeldt svarar upp mot all kritik'

Reinfeldt pushes the envelope

By Henrik Brors, 12 April 2008, 18:33
Translated by Christopher Harris, April 2008

It should come as no surprise that Swedish prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt demanded the release of thirteen political prisoners during his visit to China. But the behavior of the opposition prior to the trip earns him additional points in domestic politics.

[Translator's note: search for 'China human rights' on iTunes for a 62 min Stanford lecture by Swedish ambassador in China Börje Ljunggren, describing Sweden's human rights work in China.]

Sweden has a long history of pushing the human rights question in China and supports, through Sida (Styrelesen för Internationellt Utvecklingssamarbete), human rights education programs at Peking University. The prime minister already brought up the issue when president Hu Jintao visited Sweden last year.

Before his visit to China, Reinfeldt was nevertheless criticized for his refusal to state in advance what human rights concerns he planned to raise with the Chinese leaders. The political opposition, led by Mona Shalin of the social democrats, accused Reinfeldt of cowardice and demanded he call for the release of four political prisoners. So now that the prime minister has demanded the release of thirteen prisoners he suddenly seems braver than Shalin, who "only" mentioned four names.

Clearly the social democrats are aware that it is not proper to announce a diplomatic demand to the press before it has been communicated to the recipient country. A forward-thinking Fredrik Reinfeldt has simply acted according to this rule, but it appears that Mona Shalin and her advisers were so focused on chasing political points that the rules of the diplomatic game were ignored.

Henrik Brors

The Biology of Freedom (92min)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efevDDasVTw

Origins of Norms: The Place of Value in a World of Nature (118min)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw7gSRaZ_JQ

Wii hack (6min, TEDtalks)

Go Johnny!

Book contract

Almost as good as a studentship on one of the BSR or DBS teams, or a strong financial backer, would be a publisher; a 12 month advance payment book contract, just enough to live, £10.000 say, and at the end of it the delivery of a manuscript, 200-300 pages, continuing what I've written so far. Research would start with interviews: an email to each and every BSR/DBS lab, institutional review board, brain surgeon, ethics committee and lawyer I could find; see who's got time for an interview, lunch, a phonecall. I'd do my presentation wherever they'd take me and collect responses, interest, develop the community and the roadmap. I'd get the T-shirts printed, register a company, watch and write. I'd go to Spain and find Delgado in his old age, see Asia; sample their conceptualizations and reactions to this half real, half imaginary existential paradigm-shift; this chunk of neuroscientific expressionism.

Computing day

Gordon Moore speaks about the evolution of the computer chip (28min, UCTV).

Jack Dongarra on high performance computing (55min, googletechtalks).

Ben Goertzel on the current state of artificial intelligence research (1h3min).

In the news this morning

40% of Swedes currently for an Olympics boycott.

Iran upgrades nuclear reactors.

US superdelegates urged to admit Obama kicks ass.

Google's next step towards world domination.


Geroge Grosz (1893-1959)

Finally, some goddamn sense

It seems the world is slowly starting to develop the attitude to global warming that I've had since the beginning of this spectacle: it's there but trying to stop it by taxing carbon emissions, shutting down factories and changing lightbulbs will cause much more harm than good.

Writes Pielke et al in Nature: "Enormous advances in energy technology will be needed to stabilize atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations at acceptable levels... The question is, to what degree should policy focus directly on motivating such innovation?"

Writes economist Jeoffry D Schas: “Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy.”

Writes Andrew C Revkin in the New York Times: "What is needed, Mr. Sachs and others say, is the development of radically advanced low-carbon technologies, which they say will only come about with greatly increased spending by determined governments on what has so far been an anemic commitment to research and development. A Manhattan-like Project, so to speak."

What should be the focus of this Manhattan project? Carbon capture and storage, electric cars and airplanes, and solar power are the usual suspects, but what this really translates into is accelerated scientific progress.

iPlant, anyone?

Global warming

April 6th 2008, southern coast of England

Technological anarchy

August 2006, Royal Institute of Technology proteomics unit

I don't need a calendar

3G mobile phone connection = 1mb/s. Seriously. Wow. Add smartphones with GPS-driven location based services and serve warm.

Peter Stuttmeier gives an interesting overview of China's research strategies for the 21st century (58min, UCTV). Less China-hype than what's usual these day.

Eric Schmidt at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference (51min, Google). Good talk. Here he is in a Q&A with journalists in Paris (55min, Google).

In Tibet (8min, BoingBoing TV)

Stay in shape and don't go crazy

Another day, another bag of bush meat.

It seems not just one or two politicians but the entire Norwegian government ready to boycott the opening ceremony of the Olympic games. It coincides with the jailing of Hu Jia. Would the rest of Scandinavia follow suit?

Not bad, not great

Chomsky on himself and his political mindset (59 min, YouTube).

William Overholt on Asia and Asia-US relations (1h6min, FORA.tv).

Stanford Computer Science Department Faculty: Future Challenges in CS (1h31min, iTunes).

Finally, the flying spagetti deity gets a statue:

Owl

It's finally warm enough to go for walks at night. The problem with this campus though is it's small and surrounded by dark forest and a lot of it is uphill. No good stretch for nighttime walking, unless you follow the motorway into town, nothing like Warwick. Takes 15 minutes to walk slowly down to the bus stop and past the library and back.

Dark forest. On the way back from the bus stop there was an owl doing it's owl howl in the forest. The countless animals in the forest at night, I think about them from time to time. Like Pryor says "That's their home. You gotta watch out or something'll just grab your ass." And they live like that. Every night. And so did we, until veery recently, when the first lighter was found, somewhere in Africa. No wonder we feel uncomfortable on our own.

Blue sky

Hat-tip to Laura for introducing me to Futures in Biotech @ twit.tv. The May 3rd 2007 interview with Larry Smarr is about the scaling-up of our internet connections and what it will mean for computing, biotech and life in general. Smarr is working on the next generation of internet infrastructure and says that the gigabytes/second PC connections already available to certain scientific institutions (e.g. CERN) and parts of Japan will be ubiquitous in a decade. Wrooom.