Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for December 13, 2019
A new way to transfer energy through a vacuum; An information security expert argues against encryption "back doors" for government; A discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of using 5G wireless for broadband at home; The European Space Agency has announced a mission to retrieve space junk from orbit; and a Steem post with an embedded video discussion of the nature of consciousness
Straight from my RSS feed | Whatever gets my attention |
Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.
- Space Heater: Scientists Find New Way to Transfer Energy Through a Vacuum - In general, heat has only been known to transfer by two mechanisms. Two objects can touch, and wavelike vibrations between atoms - called phonons - transmit the heat; or else the heat can be carried by photons, particles of light. A new study in Nature describes a newly observed process where heat is transferred through a vacuum by harnessing properties of quantum mechanics. The study's senior author, Xiang Zhang, explains it by saying that, "Vacuum is never totally vacuum". Instead, the vacuum is dynamic, with so-called virtual particles that are constantly popping in and out of existence. Theoretical physicists have been arguing about whether these transient virtual particles could be used for phonons to transfer heat across a vacuum, and now Zhang and his team claim that they can, and they have observed the process in action. To accomplish this, the team spent four years crafting experiments that made use of "two silicon nitride membranes, each roughly 100 nanometers thick." The sheets were placed in a vacuum chamber, with one mated to a heater and another mated to a cooler, and the team observed the vibration speeds with laser as a measure of temperature. By repeating this experiment numerous times, and ruling out heat transfer around the edges of the chamber, the team said they were able to demonstrate phonon heat transfer through a vacuum.
- Scaring People into Supporting Backdoors - Bruce Schneier reports on a continuing multi-decade process where government takes rights away by reference to the so-called, "Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers", adding "Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four." Schneier says that the pendulum swung to terrorism after 9/11/2001, and now seems to be drifting towards child porn, but the goal of increased control remains the same. In response, Schneier says that of course these are important problems, but the harms from disabling encryption outweigh the benefits. I thought the "encryption wars" were won in the 1990s, but here we are again. As I get older, I'm starting to realize that time works in the favor of the control-seekers, because it's very hard to sustain activism across years or even decades. Here is the crux of Schneier's argument:
Let me be clear. None of us who favor strong encryption is saying that child exploitation isn't a serious crime, or a worldwide problem. We're not saying that about kidnapping, international drug cartels, money laundering, or terrorism. We are saying three things. One, that strong encryption is necessary for personal and national security. Two, that weakening encryption does more harm than good. And three, law enforcement has other avenues for criminal investigation than eavesdropping on communications and stored devices.
- Can 5G replace everybody’s home broadband? - 5G on millimeter wavelengths can deliver the necessary bandwidth speeds, but it suffers from distance limits and can't get through walls. 5G on 24GHz frequencies (and up) supports the needed distances, and passes through walls, but it doesn't offer the speed that would be needed. Online reviews of Verizon's millimeter wave 5G show both the possibilities and the challenges, with some reviewers complaining about lack of availability, and others praising the speed. Still other reviewers note that just the presence of 5G services for home Internet has improved the services of the incumbent cable providers. In contrast, T-Mobile has said they'll make 5G home Internet available to 9.5 million people by 2024, apparently through signal multiplexing their 600 MGZ spectrum with Sprint's 2.5 Ghz, but they leave the door open for data throttling.
- ESA wants to grab a chunk of space debris and pull it out of orbit in 2025 - The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced a 2025 mission, called ClearSpace-1, which will be the first mission tasked with the objective to clear abandoned space junk from orbit. The initiative is driven by ClearSpace, a Swiss startup company. The target for the first mission is a piece of hardware called, VESPA, that weighs 265 pounds and was used in 2013, before being abandoned by the ESA. Other firms that are working on space junk removal include the UK's RemoveDebris, and Japan's Astroscale.
- STEEM Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness | Answers With Joe
- In an embedded video, @answerswithjoe opens with an experiment where a robot was able to demonstrate self-awareness, then moves on to discuss works by Roger Penrose, author of The Emperor's New Mind and Shadows of the Mind. Particularly, Penrose argues that conventional physics cannot explain consciousness, so it needs to be explained at the quantum level. This work was extended by Stuart Hameroff, who speculated that microtubules inside the brain may provide the quantum mechanism for consciousness. Many scientists, however, argue that the brain is too "warm, wet, and noisy" to effectively harness any type of quantum behavior. In passing, the video also mentions David Chalmers' idea of the hard problem of consciousness (without mentioning Chalmers by name). In closing, the video covers concepts from Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain
(which sounds like something similar to A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers
) arguing that the conscious experience is sort-of an illusion, where our internal neural network provides a number of "modules" that operate independently and then pass information on to an "interpreter module" that weaves it all into a unified experience that we call "consciousness". (A beneficiary setting of 10% has been applied to this post for @answerswithjoe.)
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Bruce Schneier is always right. I think he was wrong once, but it was such a trivial matter that I don't even remember what it was. What he says about computer security is what we should do.
Regarding space junk, I reckon that shit was expensive as hell to get to where it is, and we're gonna need shit just like it where it is soon, so we should be looking at harvesting it for use manufacturing in situ IMHO.
Consciousness is far trickier than folks think, I reckon. It's not one thing. I am aware that I have several consciousnesses and this is not schizophrenia, but the result of lucid dreaming. I know now when I am dreaming that I am conscious of dreaming. Dreams are still difficult to recall, and I don't make any special effort to do so, but I remember being irked just last night at the ridiculous scenario I was crafting (all my consciousnesses are me) for me to suffer dreaming.
I have experienced three separate consciousnesses during my dreams, all separate, and all me. The first is the dreamer, or the script writer. The second is the clueless noob being subjected to the usually bizarre reality of the dream, and the third is me, watching from the cheap seats and shouting advice to the actor, like 'Don't get out of the car!' or 'Always triple tap when they're down!'. Shit like that. I suspect I am particularly mean to me when writing dreams, and the resulting existential terror caused me to invoke my conscious me consciousness me (sigh, this gets very difficult to wrap my head around verbally) so that I could add my strength to wrassling the scripwriter to craft scenarios that weren't terminally terror inducing. When my kids were young, I, being merciless, crafted dreams in which my kids were perennially killed horribly, falling off cliffs, out of airplanes, and what not. Being damned intent on them not falling off cliffs and what not, when the script called for my kid's hand to slip out of mine, or the rocks to crumble, or whatever, I, the strong arm help, would STOP. REWIND. REWRITE. and catch my kids hand, or whatever was necessary for them to not perish in front of my eyes.
I think that's how I started becoming aware of the multiple me's being me. Additionally, because of my grasp of this consciousness being effected, reckon there are other me's too, like the me invoked for various tasks I undertake. I note the automotive mechanic me has a terrible memory, and the biologist me has a great memory, for example. Thuja plicata. Upupa epops. Ajaia ajaja. I have no particular reason to remember these latin names, other than liking the way they roll off the tongue. The thingamajigs comprising a doodad in the framistan, however, I find very difficult to remember, perhaps because I am naming and learning of them while invariably upside down in a puddle of molten ice bearing various particulates in solution that inevitably include decomposed corpses and poop, engine drippings, and my own blood oozing from some particularly pain sensitive appendage.
Not sure at all about how consciousness is effected by the brain, but am aware that it's derived from a myriad of circuits, or networks, that each contribute concepts bubbling into consciousness from which an ego is assembled, if that makes any sense to you. It is via the ongoing assembly mechanism that we choose who to be, by choosing beliefs and attitudes, and being aware of this enables me to change my mind more easily rather than being bound by cognitive dissonance. In fact I think cognitive dissonance is caused by lack of awareness that who we are is voluntary, and folks feel bound to be who they have been and are, which makes them resistant to changing their minds.
Anyway, enough speculative, anecdotal drivel from me. I probably dreamed it all up, anyway.
Thanks!
Thanks for the reply!
I don't always agree with Bruce Schneier when he ventures into politics, but I agree with you that his technology views are nearly always correct. He's achieved his public visibility for a reason. And I definitely agree with his argument about strong encryption. I almost can't believe we're having this argument again, because I thought it was settled decades ago.
On consciousness, it's interesting to observe the differences between the professions. Neurourgeons seem to think we're a lot closer to understanding it than many other professions. I have no experience with lucid dreaming, but it seems like an interesting concept.
You touch on one of the things that I think is the most interesting. I forget when/where - maybe one of the edge.org posts, but for one of the posts in this series, I remember someone arguing that the entire nervous system goes into creating our conscious experience, not just the brain.
I am aware of my heart beating, and now, so are you. This is part of our consciousness. Nerves suffuse our bodies, and clearly contribute data to our sense of being, our consciousness. We know so little about how that sense of self is effected that there aren't even any arguments against the ideas that have been put forward that our whole bodies generate our consciousness, and not just our brains.
We just have no idea from whence the snippets of it come, nor how they're assembled into the gestalt we undertake to be. I feel in my heart that what my gut tells me is correct =p.