Quickthink

Ok. King Richard III was trapped on the battlefield at Bosworth. His army was defeated and he was at extreme personal risk from his enemies. Shakespeare gives him the immortal line “… My kingdom for a horse!”

Here is the young king (his facial structure was rebuilt from his recently discovered skeleton)

But the problem was not so easily solved. There was no escape. He had to die. And he was killed on the battlefield. But what happened after he was killed? Well, his body lay there, right? But did his consciousness disappear?

Probably not right away. Consider this:

Consciousness After Death: Strange Tales From the Frontiers of Resuscitation Medicine | Wired Science | Wired.com
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/04/consciousness-after-death/all/

For those of you who don’t feel like reading the article, it relates to a doctor whose job is to bring you back from the dead —- if he can. And these days, doctors can do this within a limited time frame given the right conditions. And they do it. That is amazing enough. But there is something more weird about this. Those brought back often report that they could see and hear what was going on around their body … while they were supposed to be dead.

What is this? Whatever it may be, it is not neural activity. There is none. It is something else that the doctor cannot explain. And it raises the question about where our consciousness comes from.

Does this matter? Consider this. If King Richard was nothing more than a bag of bones and neurons, his consciousness would have died with him and his story was finished. But if his consciousness existed beyond that bag of bones and neurons, the story was not completely over yet. It may not be over now.  So too for all of us.

And on a more day to day level — are we just bags of bones? Or does our consciousness use those bags of bones? Can we transcend our bags of bones in ways not well explored?

Mysticism? ESP? No no. I am not advocating that we start pretending to do stuff that we actually cannot. I am just responding to the data that has been offered to us by the good doctor.  Something that we cannot explain — yet.

And we might see the “flow” of experiences that we call conscious thought differently. Csikszentmihalyi exhorts us to focus on doing things rather than being someone. And if our consciousness is larger than that one self anyway, the advice sounds rather obvious.

An Odd Fact

Consider that your brain has around 100 billion active neurons. Each of these is firing electric impulses more than once per second to help shape your thinking. So in a room with ten people … we have 1 trillion neurons hard at work.

That is a hell of a lot of neurons!

In case you feel stressed out these days because life seems complicated, take heart. It is complicated. But there is some good news in that. The added complexity makes us smarter. Or at least, that is what research suggests.

So, my question - as we get more interactive using social media, will the capacity to learn from that increase as well? I sure hope so.

The immune system is mysterious. So much so, that doctors readily confess that they have no idea how it works. They know what it does, but they don’t understand the process. Sadly, this means that they have only a limited grasp of what to do when the immune system doesn’t work. And immune system disorders generally are not curable.

Uggh. So we face a challenge. And in the meantime, we are starting to use what we already know in new ways. Like modifying the immune system to fight cancer. How?  NYT has the story from Philadelphia

To perform the treatment, doctors remove millions of the patient’s T-cells — a type of white blood cell — and insert new genes that enable the T-cells to kill cancer cells. The technique employs a disabled form of H.I.V. because it is very good at carrying genetic material into T-cells. The new genes program the T-cells to attack B-cells, a normal part of the immune system that turn malignant in leukemia.

The altered T-cells — called chimeric antigen receptor cells — are then dripped back into the patient’s veins, and if all goes well they multiply and start destroying the cancer.

This nearly killed 6 year old Emma Whitehead. Then the treatment worked. Her leukemia is now in remission. Wow!

I used to think that drones were amazing. But the only amazing thing about drones is that mankind had not used them extensively earlier. It didn’t occur to us until the conflict in Afghanistan that we could exploit the advantages of fully robotic aircraft instead of risking pilots — if we developed the technology.

Hmmm … and what about outer space? Interesting. There has been an argument raging for some time whether space exploration should be primarily about human adventure or about using machines. With reduced budgets, we have been using more robots. But, is this really an “either or” proposition? Either people or robots? Wouldn’t it be better to use both? Let machines do what they do best (take serious risk and do heavy lifting) and humans do what they do best (cognate). Leverage the capacities of each?

That is exactly what NASA is thinking. Space exploration will be a partnership between humans and robots. With the robots doing the heavy lifting. Wired offers us the story.

So, back on earth this means increased demand for better robot designs. Designs that better connect humans and robots over distance and over time. Call the robots avatars or whatever. But people will be using more remote controlled devices — that we don’t have yet.

The countdown begins at 8:00 ET (US)

Worried about how to back up your data? Would it help you if you could store 700 terabytes in one gram of storage space? How much is 700 terabytes?

that’s 14,000 50-gigabyte Blu-ray discs…. To store the same kind of data on hard drives — the densest storage medium in use today — you’d need 233 3TB drives, weighing a total of 151 kilos.

According to Extreme Tech, researchers at Harvard have figured out how to store that much data in a gram of DNA. That would be a droplet that could sit on your fingertip. Or, if we are talking about DNA, why not store that much data in your fingertip? Hmm … that may be possible in the future.

According to Space Flight Now

Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) today won a $440 million contract with NASA to develop the successor to the Space Shuttle and transport American astronauts into space.

So we may see a manned SpaceX flight in three years.

NASA is about to land a 2,000 pound rover.  The Gleaner has the story. And for the time being, the story is that this will be a highly complex maneuver. It will take place on August 5th.

I am ok with electrons. And I almost can grab onto the idea of a proton. Neutrons? Well, they’re like in-laws I guess. While I can’t see any of this stuff, I am reassured that only one can occupy a given space at a time. Cool. They are polite.

But now I hear that there is a mechanism that gives them that condition. The Higgs field. And there is other stuff that is not so polite. And it degenerates quickly. No wonder. I’ll need to work on that idea for a while. This article from Atlantic helped me a bit, but I find this to be pretty deep water to swim in.