Podcasts I listen to

For the last couple of years I've been listening a lot of podcasts, and some of them I still listen to as soon as they have a new episode. Once you get up to a few hours of newly produced podcasts per week you have to find every possible time you can to listen to them. The time it takes to walk, bike or commute somewhere is great. I usually put my headphones on as soon as I go out alone, or if working on my own on something mundane like laundry or dishes. Listening while working is pointless since I either stop writing code, or stop listening. The podcasts listed below all demand full focus from the listener if you are to learn anything from them.

Digital Planet
Digital Planet from BBC is an easy going technology podcast that will discuss the latest general news in the IT area. Usually quite short and not very technical, but a good news update anyway.

In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg
This is another high quality BBC podcast, but it is quite "high brow" compared to Digital Planet and very broad in it's content. The episodes usually consist of a small group of British professors, together with the fast speaking host Melwyn Bragg, talking for an hour about anything from quantum mechanics to philosophy, or some major historic event. Very educating, but not a podcast to listen to when you are tired.

Linux Outlaws
Linux Outlaws is produced by Dan and Fab and is a humorous show about all kinds of Linux related news. It's lighthearted and I usually laugh out loud several times per episode. It is a fun way to keep updated on new releases (System Rescue CD?) and other Linux community information. The typical discussions usually include something like this:
Fab - "It's crap! I'll cut their balls off!"
Dan - "Yeah, let's keep an eye on that! Hmm, ok, lets move on then shall we."

LinuxLink Radio
LinuxLink Radio is a podcast about embedded Linux development produced by TimeSys. It is a highly technical show and usually each episode goes through a solution to a specific problem that you might run into when working with embedded Linux devices. Very informative and a news update on the embedded world.

SALT - Seminars About Long Term Thinking
The Long Now Foundation invite some great speakers and they always have very interesting speakers. The podcasts are usually over an hour and usually start with Stuart Brand introducing the speaker and topic of the evening. Unfortunately some presentations are a bit too image focused and because of that hard to follow as a podcast. At the end of each presentation Kevin Kelly asks the questions collected from the audience during the presentation. The shows are not that many, and they are all worth listening to. They will make you think about time with a different perspective.

Science Talk - The Podcast of Scientific American
This podcast is closely connected to the Scientific American magazine and usually discuss the articles comming in the next paper issue with the author of each article. My favorite part every week is the bogus news quiz where they list four strange news stories and you have to guess which one is false.

Software Engineering Radio - The podcast for professional software developers
If deep and highly technical podcasts about software development suits your taste, this is your podcast. Sometimes it might feel a bit too abstract or a very narrow topic, but you will defenitely learn a lot. There's quite a big archive over at the SE-radio site.

The Java Posse
Java Posse is one of the longest running podcasts I listen to and currently they're at episode number 276! Tor Norbye, Carl Quinn, Dick Wall and Joe Nuxol do the talking and the episodes vary from recordings of discussion panels and interviews, to theme episodes and pure news updates. The tone is cheerful and full of jokes and not always on topic, but that's a good thing.

This American Life
If you like long detailed stories, this is the podcast for you. The show consists of one or more interviews per episode about a certain type of life changing event. A high quality production.

Three Moves Ahead
This is a strategy gaming podcast from Flash of steel where Troy Goodfellow, Tom Chick, Bruce Geryk and Julian Murdoch discuss boardgames and computer strategy games. There's a lot of "in-jokes" and references to old games and the tone is very casual. Even if I'm not much of a gamer any more, it's still interesting to stay up to date on what is happening in that area.

WNYC's Radio Lab
This extremely well produced podcast from WNYC is hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. They talk about a wide variety of scientific subjects and use a lot of sound effects and music. It is a podcast suitable to everyone since the language used is very clear and the topics are all interesting.

Word of Mouth
This is the podcast version of the long running Word of Mouth radio show from NHPR. It feels more like a normal radio show than a typical podcast and have a good mix of quick news and deep interviews.

I gladly recommend all the podcasts mentioned above and they are worth every minute it takes to listen to them.

Zeitgeist: Addendum

Zeitgeist: The Movie was by far my favorite “provocative documentary” of 2007, and a month ago a new movie by the same team called Zeitgeist: Addendum was released.

I'd say that this new movie is less provocative and more informative and inspiring than the first one. The topics are still the same, that the banks control the world more than you think, the war on terror is a scam and that religion is just one of many ways to keep the general public from asking too many questions.

Chapter I (0:06:45)

The first fifteen minutes gives a good introduction to the monetary system that controls the world we live in today. The movie goes through how loans and debt is involved in the creation of money and how much power the banks get because of this and makes it clear how the fractional reserve system of monetary expansion gives rise to more inflation. According to the director Peter Joseph, The Federal Reserve is the main culprit behind all of this and the whole purpose is to transfer true wealth from individuals to the banks. It's a system of modern slavery because with the current system, society will never be debt free since the money needed to repay interest on loans can only be created by even more debt.

Chapter II (0:25:10)

This part starts with a very interesting interview with John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. The quote shown in the intro of this chapter describes it very well:

There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation.
One is by the sword. The other is by debt.

- John Adams (1735-1826)

The movie shows how often economic threats, corruption and sabotage is used instead of a flat out physical war, mostly because it is way cheaper and much less visible. The later part of the chapter discuss another US favorite topic, terrorism, and what it is really all about.

Chapter III (0:54:25)

Chapter three of the movie is a long interview with Jacque Fresco of the The Venus Project, extended with commented short video clips. This 92 year old man is looks much younger than he is, and he clearly describes what the Venus Project is all about.

Basically they want to totally redesign our whole culture to be more ethical and humane. The only way to do this, according to Jacque Fresco, is through technology and social awareness. Money, politics and religion are described as false institutions since they can not change the current system. The profit based society we currently have will never be sustainable or efficient because scarcity is the only way to keep the profits high.

Chapter IV (1:32:42)

The last chapter starts with a description of emergence and begs you to challenge your current belief system and become more aware. They ask for intelligent management of the earths resources in a way that can't be done in a monetary system. The later parts of the chapter gives some suggestions of how to combat this monetary system using technology available to us right now. The points listed for moving towards this goal is:

1. Expose the banking fraud by boycotting the banks behind it.
2. Boycott the TV news networks and use the internet instead.
3. Don't ever join the military. Ever.
   
4. Boycott the energy companies and use renewable energy instead.
5. Reject the political system and focus on technology.
6. Join the Zeitgeist Movement for social change.
   

The movie ends with a scene where people stand in a blurry Manhattan intersection and think of what they are doing with their life, and realizing that they have to do something about it.

Watch it!

The two hour long Zeitgeist: Addendum movie is packed full of information that will make you think. Even if you don't agree with everything in the movie, you should be provoked enough to question the current structure of our society. The movie is somewhat US-centric, but the implications are still global. Please don't stay ignorant, visit http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com right now and let everyone you know hear about it!

I, for one, await March 15th 2009...

Minix 3.0

Was surprised to see this ad in my Gmail today:


I usually get a lot of Linux and embedded hardware related ads because of the OpenMoko mailinglists, but Minix 3 was really a surprise. I tried running it in VMWare about two years ago after reading a nice introduction to it on OSNews. Can't say I was impressed. It sure didn't look like much back then (and still doesn't, it's just X), but microkernels are very interesting.

There are a lot of L4 kernel based operating systems, and a few of them even run on the Neo1973(Video from here). Hopefully this one will too some day.

There will always be some overhead when using a microkernel compared to a monolithic kernel because of the extra IPC, but the modern implementations are not that far behind. It will be interesting to see how useful the different versions will become, although there's little hope some of them will ever be completed...

Einstein quote

The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery - even if mixed with fear - that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms-it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvellous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavour to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.

-Albert Einstein, The world as I see it

Lies

For some strange reason studies of liars seem to pop up all over the net right now. NYmag has a long and very interesting article about why kids lie and how they learn it from their parents. Kids start as early as age 2 or 3, and the smarter the kid the earlier they start lying. Telling the truth is easy, but making a believable lie takes a lot more effort.

The always excellent Radiolab had a show last week about lies where they presented the results from several studies on the subject. They interviewed the famous psychologist Paul Ekman about facial expressions and how to tell if people are lying. The whole concept of microexpressions is fascinating. And Ekman's vow he took when his daughter was born to never lie again seems incredibly difficult to keep.

Another part of the program discusses a study Yaling Yang did on pathological liars. Brain scans of them showed that they had a lot more white brain matter in their prefrontal cortex compared to the control group, but less gray matter. The researchers believed that the huge increase in connections in the brain made lying practically effortless for these individuals and they could reply instantly with a plausible lie.

The radio show continues with a segment about a con-woman called Hope and how she used unsuspicious people by constantly lying.

People who are good at lying are generally more happy and have greater success in life. People with serious depressions are "too realistic" and seem unable to twist the truth into a brighter version. Being able to lie to yourself as well as others have many advantages even when you don't abuse it to the fullest.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to interact with people and even more observing what people do and how they react. If I had no moral or empathy there's no limit to how much I could take advantage of peoples good will. Most people want to help and trust other peoples "good nature", but I'm afraid there's too many who don't have that in them. I'll be sure to keep my eyes open for the slightest "leakage", be it a microexpression or an inconsistency in the story. Just never let people know you caught them lying, that just makes them more careful next time and harder to catch.

This cynical post is written while listening to Billy Talent - Lies

Our future climate concerns me

A few days ago IPCC (United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) released a document they "succinctly" call Policymakers' Summary of the Synthesis Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment. It's a complete summary of all the data on climate change, densely packed into 23 fact filled pages. (The full reports are much longer.)

The summary quickly showed up everywhere in the news, even at my favorite Ars. Reading through the document does make you think about the future of our climate. 11 of the last 12 years rank among the 12 warmest years ever measured since they started in 1850. For me personally, it has been some great warm and long summers and not a negative thing. For people living in northern Europe like I do, global warming will mostly make things better. The forests and crops will grow better, warmer summers, less freezing winters. The only downside for us will be an increase in precipitation. Most places will not be this lucky.

Although the temperature will increase the most at the poles, it's the places that are already dry and hot that will get the most serious problems. Serious droughts will follow, an increase in wild fires and agriculture and livestock will suffer. That might eventually lead to malnutrition and on top of that, clean drinking water will become a problem. The number of cyclones and storms is likely to increase too, and in low coastal regions and river deltas, increased risk of flooding.

Global increase in temperature for 2099 compared to 1999

The study also expects that in the long term, if the warming continues, the ice caps on Greenland will melt completely and raise the sea level with about 7 meters. This will take some thousand years or so, but it will be a noticeable increase just in the next 100 years.

Fossil fuel is the pink fields in these graphs

The primal cause for the emission of green house gases (GHG) is the use of fossil fuels. The concentration of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere is exceeding by far the natural range seen in the last 650,000 years. We need to cut down on the green house gas emissions on a global scale right now, and even using the most optimistic scenarios still points to an increase in global temperature.

A global increase of 1.5-2.5 degrees Centigrade would endanger 20-30% of the species assessed of global extinction. Most scenarios in the summary suggests a much higher increase in temperature...

If all future investments in infrastructure and energy plants are shifted to get the lowest possible CO2 emissions, the additional investment costs would be around 5-10% higher. That's not much at all, and simply increasing efficiency of energy supply and industrial processes would do a lot to stabilize GHG emissions on a global scale. It's good to see that UK is helping China to get started on this.

Maybe we have no choice in lowering our oil consumption. A recent article in Wired states that most likely we will be unable to maintain the current consumption because we just can't pump the oil up fast enough. Some says 10 years more is all we have.

My personal opinion is that oil based fuels are way too cheap. If prices were at least doubled, maybe driving around in a petrol car won't be the cheapest way to travel medium distances any more. Electric or hydrogen fuel cell cars, although still very expensive, would become a more viable option. Flying is also cheaper than it should be, and even though it's nice to be able to afford to fly away for vacation, I wish there was a less polluting option for long trips. I really do.

Science and Nature Writing

I just finished reading The best American Science and Nature writing 2006. This is the seventh version of this book series and I definitely wish I had found out about it earlier. Each book is made up of about 25 articles that a guest editor selects from about a hundred articles chosen by Tim Folger.

The 2006 edition is edited by Brian Greene who just happens to be one of my favorite physics writers. The articles span everything from bittorrent and blogs to animal psychology, anthropology and advanced physics. Coming from sources like Scientific American, The New York Times and Wired, most articles are easy to read and don't get detailed to the point of being boring. I had actually managed to read some of the articles already, but the others were a great way for me to be introduced to areas of science I knew very little about.

Some of my favorite articles are Dr Ecstasy about the chemist Alexander Shulgin, His brain, her brain about the differences between the male and female brain, and The coming death shortage describing how the increasing life expectancy of humans will affect us.

I encourage everyone interested in widening their scientific horizons to read this book. It's only 280 pages long and reading one chapter per night before falling asleep was perfect. 9 out of 10 points for this book from me.

X86 processors and chipsets

It's not easy to stay on top of all the latest developments in the CPU world but luckily you hardly have to any more. All new computers are fast enough for most users, unless you absolutely want to play the latest games. But for the ones that want to know I've put together a summary of what has been going on during the last few years, what happens right now, and some rumors of the future.

There is still a lot happening on the CPU front, even if it might feel like the increase in performance is not as fast paced as it used to be a few years ago. The most notable change lately is that almost all new processors have two or more cores on each chip, but let's start from the beginning shall we?

NetBurst and K7

Everyone even remotely interested in computer hardware know that NetBurst, the architecture used in the Pentium 4 processor, was far from elegant. Released in late 2000, it was built purely for high clock frequencies. The first NetBurst CPU had a 20 stage pipeline, compared to the 10 stages in the Pentium III and the AMD K7 Athlons. The long pipeline made it easier for Intel to push the clock frequency way up and soon enough the old Athlons were falling behind. AMD was simply unable to increase the clock frequencies any more with their current design and manufacturing processes.

K8

When AMD released their K8 based Opteron processors in the autumn 2003 the picture changed completely. The new CPUs completely left the NetBurst Pentium 4's in the dust. They had a completely different design, using a short 12 stage pipeline, compared to the 20 stages long pipeline used in the Northwood Pentium 4, and doing a lot more Instructions Per Clock (IPC). The K8 architecture could perform three complex x86 instructions per clock, compared to one for the Pentium 4. It had three integer and three floating point ALUs, compared to four integer and one floating point ALU for the contemporary NetBurst revision (More details here).

The Opteron also added AMD's x86-64 instruction set, making it possible to use more than 4GB ram without any inefficient work-around. The extension also included doubling the number of registers from 8 to 16, as well as doubling the size of the registers from 32 to 64 bit. Combined with a modern and efficient HyperTransport bus and a low latency on-die memory controller there was just no way Intel could compete. They did their best, using their more advanced manufacturing process to add more cache to the CPU die and increased the pipeline length even further. The seventh revision of the NetBurst architecture called Prescott had 31 stages in the pipeline, but it just wasn't enough. Yet, all the Pentium 4 did was to get smoking hot.

Pentium-M and Core

Luckily for Intel, their engineers in Israel had been working on a new power efficient processor for use in laptops and came up with a real gem. Called a Pentium III on kryptonite, the Banias was built to keep power dissipation down. Released 2003 in laptops under the Centrino brand, enthusiasts quickly noticed they could overclock it to perform better than any desktop Pentium 4, and even better than the latest Athlons. Intel gave up on NetBurst and continued to develop the Pentium-M into what would be come the Core architecture.

The first Core based CPU, code named Yonah, was released in laptops as the Core Duo in January 2006. They performed way better than AMD's laptop offer, the Turion CPUs, who were both slower and consumed more power. Later in the spring Intel brought the Core architecture to the desktop with the Conroe processor. It was released under the name Core 2 Duo and was an instant success. The chips were about 33% faster than the Athlon 64's at the same clock frequency and they also included AMD's x86-64 extensions.

AMD tried to answer up to Intels offering, but now they were once again the having the inferior architecture. And just as before, they were unable to push their processors to the frequencies needed to compete with the Core 2 CPUs on the competitive desktop market. Debuting at 2.2 GHz in 2003, the fastest Athlon 64 FX was still stuck at 2.8 GHz in mid 2006 while the Core 2 Duo with twice the cache was already available at 2.933 GHz.

Fortunately it was still going well for AMD in the lucrative 4+ CPU server space. Intel's Core 2 Xeon server chips were still stuck with an old Front Side Bus (FSB) and were unable to compete on four-sockets or more. AMD, now with the knife at their throat struggled to get Barcelona, the processor based on their new K10 architecture, ready for consumers.

Future - K10 and vPro, Bulldozer and Nehalem

The long awaited Barcelona quad core processor will be released in mid September this year. AMD are still keeping a tight lid on all the details surrounding the chip, but some leaked benchmarks from The Inquirer sure look promising. The results show that the Barcelona could be pushed to over 30,000 3DMarks 06 and 11GB/s memory bandwidth compared to Intel's fastest "quad core" having 7.5 GB/s bandwidth. Architecturally they seem to be equals, but the question is if AMD will be able to compete for the top spot when they're always a step behind Intel in the manufacturing process.

To steal some thunder from AMD, Intel will release a new platform called vPro at the same time. First presented in 2002 under the name LaGrande, together with Microsofts controversial Palladium initiative, these extensions are now known as Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). Intel have announced three new Core 2 Duo processors for use with the vPro platform. Intel is trying to push it as the ultimate virtualization technology, which it is in some ways, but it can also be used as a very powerful DRM. Hopefully people will realize what this means and how "Big Content" can use it to lock you out from using your files as you want to. Hannibal describes his concerns well in his Ars Technica article about vPro.

Next year Intel will start releasing systems using their new Common System Interface (CSI), finally replacing the old FSB that's been a bottle neck for way too long. Initially it will be intended for multi socket servers, but the technology will trickle down to desktops and laptops later on.

For AMD the future seem to be about Bulldozer. It will be the first CPU with SSE5 and will be build with AMD's new modular Fusion architecture. The idea is to be able to mix several types of cores on the same die, including on-die Graphics Processing Units (GPU). To be released in 2009, they will be up against Intel's next chip architecture called Nehalem.

Tip of the iceberg

I've intentionally left the EPIC, SPARC, CELL and POWER architectures out of this. They might be technically more interesting, but they're not x86. Maybe that's something I should get back to another day, if only to make fun of the Itanic or to admire IBM's POWER6 beast. IBM are producing the CPUs for all three new consoles, the Wii, the XBox360, and the PS 3, and there's a lot to say about all of them. I've also avoided talking about what's happening in the rapidly growing System On a Chip world. Mobile computing is exploding and there's many chip manufacturers who want a piece of the action.

I've listed several well written articles at the end of this post if you really want to dig in to details like vector processing instructions, memory bandwidth or the different manufacturing processes, they are all worth reading.

My favorite tech writer, Jon "Hannibal" Stokes have recently released a book called "Inside the Machine". I'm ashamed to say I haven't read the book yet, but it's definitely something I will do as soon as I can. Expect a review of it.

While reading forums and comments to articles about processor architectures I've come up with this modified version of Goodwin's Law, we can call it Mogren's Law:

As an online discussion about processor architecture grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Alpha or RISC approaches one.

The Alpha was a beautiful design though, too bad EV79 and later was canceled. Luckily the clever guys behind the Alpha design were quickly hired to work on other things...


Into the Core: Intel's next-generation microarchitecture - Jon Stokes - April 05, 2006

Inside Barcelona: AMD's Next Generation - David Kanter - March 16, 2007

Intel Core 2 Duo - Franck Delattre and Marc Prieur - June 22, 2006

Core 2 Duo and the future of Intel - Rob Hallock - November 5, 2006

AMD K10 Micro-Architecture - Yury Malich - August 17, 2007

The Common System Interface: Intel's Future Interconnect - David Kanter - August 28, 2007

Intel's new vPro: two steps forward for x86... as well as for DRM and P2P? - Jon Stokes - August 27, 2007

The Seashell on the Mountaintop

I just finished reading The Seashell on the Mountaintop, the Swedish version. Picked it up as a cheap pocket book and I was pleasantly surprised. The book was a fascinating read and showed many of the troubles scientists faced during 17th century, both political and religious.

The story involves Nicholas Steno, born in Denmark as Niels Stensen and starts when he has just finished his anatomy studies. Being exceptionally skilled with the scalpel, Steno is the first to discover the saliva glands and the tear canal and his public dissections are quickly becoming famous events. He travels all over Europe, through Amsterdam, Paris, Florence and Hannover, spending most of his time working at the then famous Accademia del Cimento in Florence. The academy was funded by the brothers Ferdinando II and Leopoldo de Medici and was the first one focusing solely on "experimental philosophy".

After years of thinking about the problem of seashells being found inside rocks and mountains everywhere Steno figured out the final piece in the puzzle. By carefully studying layers of rocks in hills of Tuscany he realized that sediments in water were deposited at the bottom with the largest particles first and then smaller and smaller particles on top. Steno concluded that the layers and strata in the cliffs and mountains had been deposited in the same way with the newest layers in the direction of the smaller particles above the bigger ones. He also suggested that the seashells inside were real seashells from the sea, not growing inside the rock. He realized the significance of being able to tell the age of the layers of rock apart and opened the way to study the ancient history of Earth.

In 1669 he published his findings in a short booklet called De solido intra solidum naturaliter contento dissertationis prodromus, that translated means Preliminary discourse to a dissertation on a solid body naturally contained within a solid. This was the first published study of geology performed in a completely scientific way that included the previously ignored time dimension that's so clearly embedded in the rock layers.

The rest of the book describes how Steno continues his studies of sediments and mountains, but also his increasing devotion to Catholicism eventually earning him the title of bishop. The book is well written and I could not put it down until I finished reading the last page.

Something that surprises me with the book is the amount of famous scientists and philosophers that Steno meets. He becomes friends or colleagues with such celebrities as Baruch Spinoza, Giovanni Borelli, the contemporary members of The Royal Society of London, Gottfried Leibniz and many more. Opinions and observations concerning Stenos interests in anatomy and geology made by thinkers like Descartes, Da Vinci and even earlier Aristotle is also included in the book.

Even if the world feels a lot smaller now with easy communication and quick traveling across the globe, it's still inspiring to see how people have always liked to travel and exchange ideas. The Seashell on the Mountaintop made history feel more vibrant to me than it has in a long time.

Altruism, empathy and morality

Recent research shows that when you do something totally unselfish, the same regions in the brain that responds to food or sex lights up. The study, originally published in October 2006 by Jorge Moll and Jordan Grafman, got a lot of publicity in the press lately. Some good summaries could be found in the Washington Post and Science Daily, and also in some blogs from people interested in this topic.

My personal uneducated take on altruism is that I know it feels good. My brain rewards me when I help someone, when I make someone else happy. The evolutionary benefit from this is a bit harder to pinpoint, but the articles mentioned above has some good theories. Scott Huettel draws the following conclusions from his study:

"Our findings are consistent with a theory that some aspects of altruism arose out of a system for perceiving the intentions and goals of others."

and

"To be altruistic, you need to see that the people you’re helping have goals, and that your actions will have consequences for them."

The also studies show that people with damage to a specific part of the frontal lobe lacked empathy and would solve tricky emotional problems in a cold "the-end-justifies-the-means" way. This sounds a lot like Asperger's syndrome to me. Now every other kid with a slight communication problem seems to get this diagnose, but I wouldn't be surprised if this condition has something to do with them having a slight error in parts of their frontal lobe.

Marc Hauser has done psychological experiments showing that people all over the world process moral questions in the same way, suggesting that moral thinking is intrinsic to the human brain, rather than a product of culture. That morality is comparable to language in the way that they are both intrinsic in humans. He suggests that people reach moral conclusions in the same way they construct a sentence without having been trained in linguistics. A quote from this excellent summary of a Nature article:

Thus, the findings confirm the notion that there are at least two neural systems involved in making moral decisions: one in which emotions are involved, and one which performs a cost-benefit analysis. [... ...] It is believed that the emotion-based system for making moral decisions evolved first, perhaps in a situation where small numbers of people lived in kin groups. [Antonio] Damasio says, “A nice way to think about it is that we have this emotional system built in, and over the years culture has worked on it to make it even better”.

A consequence of this kind of study is that we might have to rethink what is immoral and not. If morality is automatic and unconscious process, why are we so quick to differ on what's right or wrong in a moral dilemma? The Washington Posts article says:

U.S. law distinguishes between a physician who removes a feeding tube from a terminally ill patient and a physician who administers a drug to kill the patient. Hauser said the only difference is that the second scenario is more emotionally charged -- and therefore feels like a different moral problem, when it really is not: "In the end, the doctor's intent is to reduce suffering, and that is as true in active as in passive euthanasia, and either way the patient is dead."

The difference sounds clear at first thought since it feels like an active choice to administer a lethal drug. But removing a feeding tube is equally active and the two situations should defintely be equal before the law.

Anyway, I guess we should try to think more about the end results instead of moral. A good comment on this from an interesting blog called Atheist's Wager:

"Morality is about doing the right thing when no one is watching."

Let's all do the right thing.

Classifying species

There's been a lot of articles, blog posts and news about the 300 year anniversary of Carl von Linné (Carolus Linnaeus) lately. He was born today, May 23:rd 1707 in Älmhult, Småland in southern Sweden as the son of a preacher.

In 1735 he published the first version of his now world famous Systema Naturae. It was 11 large pages that classified the natural world and humans were for the first time grouped together with other primates. The eleven pages in the first edition grew to three thousand pages in the final and thirteenth edition, published in 1770.

The system that made him famous was a simple two part naming system based on the physical attributes of the organisms. The two terms are the genus name and the specific descriptor.
The so called Linnaean taxonomy is the base for the system of scientific classification used in modern biology. Linnaeus hierarchy started with the division into three kingdoms, Animals, Plants and Minerals. The Kingdoms were divided into Classes and the Classes into Orders, which were divided into Genera, which were divided into Species. The classifications have changed a lot since Linnaeus' first version and only the groups in the Animal kingdom remain to this day, although heavily updated.

There have been some discussions about improving this centuries old classification style to something more modern, like a tree based nomenclature based on the recent discoveries from DNA studies. It's quite clear that even if animals or plants look the same, they can come from families very far apart. A classic example is the Hyrax that looks like a big guinea pig, but the closest relative is actually the Manatee. (It's also closely related to the Elephant but that's not the closest relative, even if they share the same ancestor.)

A system called PhyloCode grew out of a workshop at Harvard University in 1998 and it's still in the draft stage. Maybe the simplicity of the Linnaean system will prevail anyway. It seems to have worked quite well for the last 272 years...

Parasites

Parasites are scary and fascinating at the same time. It's disgusting to have a creature living and breeding inside another living animal, but the tricks they have to control their hosts can be surprising, weird and most of all scary.

There's been some talk about Toxoplasma gondii again because of this soon to be published paper. The paper describes how Toxoplasma gondii removes all fear of cats from rats infected with it. The reason for this is that the parasite only reproduces in cat bellies and of course the way to get there from the rat is to make it's host get eaten by one. The rats still had their normal anxiety and could learn to get frightened of other things.

It's strange how the the tiny parasite can control something so very specific. It's a common parasite too, about half of all people on earth are carrying it. It's not dangerous to humans unless you have a very weak immune system, like people with AIDS. Pregnant women should avoid getting it too. People get it the same way rats or other animals does, contact with cat litter.

Studies of humans infected with Toxoplasma have shown some subtle changes in personality. Quoting from this article:

Those infected, he found, show a small, but statistically significant, tendency to be more self-reproaching and insecure. Paradoxically, infected women, on average, tend to be more outgoing and warmhearted than controls, while infected men tend to be more jealous and suspicious.

There's not total consensus on this yet and it seems like only a few of all infected people have any notable issues with it. Toxoplasma infection has also been linked to schizophrenia, and medicine against schizophrenia made infected rats afraid of cats again. Why and how is not clear yet.

I would not be the slightest surprised if all of the truly cat-obsessed people are carrying Toxoplasma gondii.

Another classic example of a parasite controlling it's hosts is the Lancet Fluke. It has a complex three host cycle involving cattle, snails and ants. They live in sheep or cow livers where they mate and then leave their eggs out in the host’s feces. Snails eating that gets infected and to protect themselves they make slimy balls filled with parasites that they leave behind. Ants finding these slime balls eat them and get infected. Every night the fluke takes control over the and and makes it climb to the tip of a grass straw, hold onto it with it's mandibles and stay like that until the morning. Then it goes back to looking for food as normally, until the sun goes down. Finally, once some grazing animal accidentally eat the ant with the grass, the fluke is back in a host where it can reproduce.

There's more examples like this too. One fluke reproducing in wading birds makes infected fish shimmy and jump to make it easier for the birds to find and catch them. A certain hairworm who infect grasshoppers takes control of it's host when it is ready to leave it and makes the poor grasshopper suicide by jumping into some nearby water. The worm will be back in the water where it wants to be. (More hairworm here(pdf). Mind controlling parasites at LiveScience.)

I hope I'll never get a parasite infection. Especially not some slimy, crawling animal. Wikipedia has more information and links about this than you ever want to know...

Population, Coriolis and more myths

There's a common rumor that there's more people alive now on Earth than have ever lived. I've always found this to be unlikely, but haven't really done any calculations on it. Luckily, some guy has already done the calculations. (See here)

Counting with very low estimates, starting with two homo sapiens 50,000 years ago and using the lower limit of estimated growth and populations, Carl Haub still got the estimation that slightly over 106 billion people had ever been born. The current 6.5 billion is not even close.

Another common rumor is that water running down a drain spins in different directions on the northern and southern hemispheres, but that's not true either. The Coriolis force is just too weak on smaller scales. (See here)

More interesting facts about urban myths and legends can be found at snopes.com

The bottom of the sea

I have a feeling we don't know as much as we should about the life at the bottom of the oceans. About 70.8% of the surface of the Earth is covered by water and even if we know the topology of the bottom and the currents quite good from all satellites and sonar scans, most of it is still unchartered when it comes to creatures and plants. The discovery of the black smokers in 1977 near the Galápagos Islands showed that there are some very odd echo systems down there.

The problem deep down under water, like at 2000m - 2500m down where most black smokers have been found, is the lack of energy. No sunshine reaches these depths so the plants and creatures needs to use other sources to get their energy from. The strange environment with the darkness and high pressure gives rise to truly weird lifeforms.

A good example is a snail found in 2001 around some black smokers in the Indian Ocean. It uses Pyrite (aka Fools Gold) and Greigite to build a metallic shell. Covered with an iron plate mail it's like a miniature knight in armor. National Geographic did a nice article on this gastropod and Anders Warén, the lead researcher on this metal wearing snail, says they have found several thousand more new species around this kind of hydrothermal vents, and that's just counting mollusks.

The deepest dive ever made was done in 1960 by Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh with the bathyscaphe Trieste. They reached the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench spending 20 minutes at the bottom. At the depth of 10916 m the pressure is extreme, about 1250kg per square centimeter, and currently no vessel exists that can withstand it.

The Japanese DSV Shinkai 6500 is currently the deepest-diving manned submersible in the world with a maximum depth of 6500m. It was put into service in 1989, 18 years ago, but it's still new compared the next best one, United States Alvin (the one used to find the black smokers). Alvin was commissioned in 1964, but has been updated several times, last time in 2001. It can stay at a depth of 4500m for 9 hours with three people on board.

Good to see that the National Science Foundation is well on the way to a new improved 6,500m capable deep diving vehicle that can reach more than 99% of the sea floor. I'm sure it will find plenty of interesting things.

New state of matter

The last few days some interesting physics articles about string-net liquids have popped up. It began with Robert Laughlin's Nobel Prize for the discovery of particles with a fractional charge, a completely new type of matter. It was shown that sometimes several electrons can congregate in a way that they appear to have fractional charges.

Xiao-Gang Wen studied these particles together with Michael Levin and they came up with a theory they call string-net liquids. The theory suggest that all fermionic particles are endpoints of long open strings and that light is represented by fluctuations in a closed string. Simulations of vibrations in nets made of these strings gave rise to Maxwell's Equations and to other kinds of fundamental particles.

The slides from his presentation at a quantum computer conference early March can be found here. It includes some very complicated equations, but what he wants to show in the end is that fermions and light emerges from the collective motion of strings that fill the vacuum of space. A condensed string will be have like a single particle.

Interesting stuff, and hopefully this way of looking at the fundamental particles could get us another small step closer to figure out what this whole place is all about.