Over at GreatVanishing.com, my friend Richard Leis is serializing a (non-fiction) book about what happens when the technological becomes biological--integrated into our bodies and Nature. Throw augmented/virtual reality and artificial intelligence into the mix of world-changing technologies. Follow his site if it interests you anywhere near as much as it does me. This topic has, I'm sure, spawned a thousand dystopian stories, but it can't be all bad, can it? Imagine being able to access, say, Wikipedia, just by thinking about a topic. Hell, imagine being able to edit Wikipedia just by thinking about it! What if, instead of ranked search terms as a measure of a topic's popularity, you could see a live aggregate view of all conscious thought on a subject?

First you need a mind-machine interface (preferably without clunky headgear). I've seen some amazing research in this area, but suffice it to say, it should be possible. Will we become Borg? Now of course the Borg were slaves to their technology, completely lacking in independent will. We will have to find a way to avoid that fate (though for Apple fans, it seems it is already too late).

Besides becoming immensely more capable, by becoming biological, our technology will also become immensely more energy-efficient. It bothers me that, while you always hear about how green technologies cannot by themselves meet the world's growing energy demands, there is no coordinated effort to reduce that growth itself. Our devices are getting better with each new generation, doing more with less power, but the number of devices has increased by a larger factor. However, there is much more room for gains in efficiency.

Would it drive you crazy if ads could be pushed into your thoughts? I guess they could just hit you at a lower level and create, say, the compulsion to buy a particular product. Given all the potential downsides, I think it is all the more important that these future technology platforms be completely open....

When I was 12, I read a book about Leschi, a chief of the Nisqually tribe which formerly inhabited the area, around the south Puget Sound. After broken treaties and encroachment by settlers, he led a resistance movement, but was captured and executed. It was just one injustice of many in American history of course. A few years ago, I finally got around to reading Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee which provides a more comprehensive look at our genocidal past. I was surprised to learn that Tucson, my adopted home for many years, was featured in one prominent incident: the Camp Grant Massacre.

The story is that a band of Apache made peace with the U.S. government after years of fighting. They surrendered and encamped near an Army fort, in the area where the Aravaipa and Gila rivers meet, northwest of Tucson, in 1871. However, at the same time, a different band of Apache continued to make raids in southeast Arizona (then a Territory). People were outraged that the U.S. was feeding and sheltering these Apache and when they learned of the attacks, it boiled over. Led and armed by some prominent Tusconans, a gang of white settlers, Mexicans and Tohono O'odham Indians decided to take matters into their own hands. (Mexico and the O'odham both had long histories vs. the Apache). Turns out the camp was mostly women and children, over one hundred in all, but they slaughtered them, only keeping some children for their own (or to sell).

This horrific story has gotten renewed attention in recent years with the publication of three books by three different authors about it: Massacre At Camp Grant, Big Sycamore Stands Alone, and Shadows At Dawn.

Outside of Tucson, the massacre was widely condemned, including a condemnation from then-president Grant. A trial was put together within the same year, but owing to the location of the trial (Tucson), the jurors were sympathetic and return a not-guilty verdict in a matter of minutes. One of the ringleaders was elected mayor soon after and another is remembered principally for the neighborhood that bears his name (Sam Hughes, evidently the guy who provided weapons).

Historian Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, author of the first book, recently gave a talk for the Tucson Archaeological and Historical Society. [As a light-hearted aside (for people of a certain age), if you want to feel young, I can now highly recommend going to a historical society meeting]. He's done some pretty amazing research on the topic and, among other things, presented several strands of evidence that the raids really were not done by Apache at Camp Grant. (I haven't read any of the three books yet, so I don't know if the killers believed this in error, or used it to justify their attack, but they did use it afterwards as a defense when tried in court). Another interesting thing he showed was quotes from anti-Apache editorials in the local paper by a dude named Wasson (the tallest peak in the Tucson Mtns is named after him).

It's not all one-sided of course (my opinion here): the default mode for the Apache in the southwest seems to be one where raiding and terrorizing neighboring peoples is fairly prominent. However, I don't think anyone with a modern perspective would think that what happened in 1871 was in any way justified.

But today, as then, there are still racists who will completely dehumanize any group we happen to be fighting. Furthermore, there is something of a contemporary parallel here in Tucson again, with the spin-up of an unsolved borderlands murder into an anti-immigrant backlash, spurred on by right-wingers in the media and our own elected officials. It even has a similar ring: that the federal government isn't doing enough to protect us or even (among the more paranoid) is aiding the enemy.

Forty years ago, a British mathematician named John Conway invented something he called the "Game of Life." It's not the silly board game you probably played in your youth. It is, rather, a type of cellular automaton or "CA" which is really a very simple type of computer program. The display is a grid of squares. In the grid, any kind of pattern may be placed by filling in squares. The rules of the game--the code of the program in essence--describe how a square will change with each run of the program. For instance, a square remains filled if it has either two or three neighbors. You can see some animated examples on the wikipedia Life page or at this interactive online version. From a set of very simple rules, the behavior is quite unpredictable, even life-like (hence the name) in a crude way.

But just recently, something totally new came about. A student, Andrew Wade, invented a pattern that produces a new version of itself. I.e. it reproduces. This had never been accomplished in the Conway Life CA, though many had tried. It's called a "spaceship" or "glider" because, as each new generation appears, it glides across the grid. It was given the name "Gemini" because of it's dual-lobed structure. You can see a picture of it, though in actuality, it is some 4 million squares in either direction. It takes over 30 million iterations to create the child copy, cannibalizing itself in the process. The scale of these numbers, if it is the smallest self-replicating entity in Conway's Life, give you an idea of why it was only just now invented after 40 years. I say "invented" because it was the product of an intense, concerted effort, using software to build and refine until the goal of self-replication was achieved. Now that's what I call intelligent design.

But could have such a pattern arisen by accident? After all, Conway's Life has been incorporated into screensavers, so it's probably had millions of cpu-hours testing randomly-generated patterns. On Sun's OpenLook desktop, it was the default screensaver, where filled cells used the Sun logo, color-coded with the number of steps that they'd been "alive." However, the grid was only a few hundred cells, and on the hardware it ran on, 30 million iterations would take about a year!

But I'd have to guesstimate that even on a grid with many billions of cells running for many trillions of iterations, Gemini or something like it would be very, very unlikely to occur by pure chance. The rules of Conway Life are extremely harsh, necessitating a very complex pattern to reproduce, as you can see in Gemini with all of it's structure.

The fascinating thing about that is, kinda like a real organism, it has all this defensive structure, which basically allows it to live just long enough to create the copy. As the defensive structure is being broken down, there's a tape structure in the middle, containing patterns that are used to build up the new structure.

Now of course the interesting question is, can we draw any conclusions about the evolution of life on Earth? It's too different I think, the rules are much more complex. Further, by contrast, those rules drive many processes that would tend to build things up: think about tides pushing sediments into pools, being filtered by buoyancy, and pumped with energy. A closer analog may be interstellar space, which you might even model using a CA, to see what it takes to build up, say, amino acids. In his book A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram (creator of Mathematica) tries to make the case that modeling physical processes in terms of simple computational steps (in other words, a CA) can be a good alternative to equations, which is the traditional way, but become unwieldy as the complexity of a simulation grows. This is becoming more common; for example, at our summer team meeting last year, one of the geologists showed the results of a CA simulating the growth of stromatolites.

I never liked Walt Whitman's When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer. It's gotta be one of the most popular sections of Leaves Of Grass, perennially, included in samplings of Great American Poetry, particularly those taught to schoolkids. To me, it came off as kind of anti-science, to the belief that science operates at the expense of wonder, while I believe the absolute contrary, that science is the greatest source of wonder.

Later, I made a re-appraisal: the poem is more about gasbag lecturers who present science as a dry accumulation of facts--they are the ones who've sucked out all the wonder--and it was against them that Whitman, slipping away in the starry night, rebelled.

I was reminded of this poem when coming across ICP's 'Miracles' video, a literal fuck-you to scientists for sucking all the 'magic' out of everything (lyrics). I really wish they had seen it the other way....

But now check out this SNL parody video that mercilessly skewers 'Miracles'!

This week, millions of Arizona citizens will be asking themselves a now critical question: "Could I be mistaken for an illegal immigrant?" Those same citizens have something else in common... their racial appearance. Yes, we have explicit assurances that racial profiling will not be done. In other words, one or more other factors such as activity, behaviour, location (location, location...), dress, etc have to play into the determination. But--let's be honest here--race is always going to be the first-order term in this equation. To meet the definition of profiling, it would have to be the only term in the equation.

And so, because of this new anti-immigrant law, legitimate Arizonans of Latino descent have cause to worry, to imagine scenarios of a sort somewhere between worst-case and every-day, where they are challenged to present their papers. The usual right-wing canard applies: "if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear." How fearful would you be, having to ponder the consequences of being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong skin color?

Better make sure we always have our driver's licenses handy, they'll say. For some reason, that seems to be an acceptable form of ID, despite the lax requirements to get one. Maybe next year it will be more stringent; liberty being ratcheted down. That family picnic a little ways up the mountain now seems distinctly unwise, better just to go to the park downtown. Fascism in action.

The perception of an illegal immigrant problem outweighs the reality. Yes, there is border violence, there is drug trafficking. Just recently, a rancher was killed. A few years ago, a Park ranger was killed also. These crimes have received a lot of attention. The Mexican teen who was shot and killed for throwing a rock at a Border Patrol agent barely made the news. Hundreds of migrants die in the desert every year, but those who leave water caches for them are arrested for "littering." And many places along the border have had a big increase in crimes in general. What gets people up in arms, however, is not the trouble along the border. I recently overheard a woman in a hospital waiting room complaining vehemently about how illegals were getting treated "for free." I've heard it elsewhere too--these are supposed crimes that have outraged off many middle-class Arizonans--that illegals are an internal friction in the system, taking services without paying taxes. Arizona's right-wingers have, of course, stoked this outrage while benefiting from it politically.

What I've read presents a very different picture. The vast majority of illegals are doing exactly what you or I would do in their situation: find a way to support our families. And it is a fact that there is a substantial labor shortage here in Arizona, but not one in Mexico. Take into account to, that getting into America legally as a labourer is a byzantine process requiring years of persistence. They've committed no crime other than the shortcut to get here. But they're politically an easy target, and it's an election year.