It turns out that there’s a rare variant of a gene involved in Alzheimer’s Disease that protects the carriers against age-related cognitive decline. It even, apparently, protects against other known genetic risk factors for Alzheimer’s. This is totally the kind of thing I can imagine parents paying big bucks to have inserted into their kids — rare genes that already exist in the broader population, that confer disease resistance or other advantages, but which haven’t had time to become prevalent under natural selection, or which confer an advantage that won’t have obvious reproductive consequences. We’re going to start accumulating a library of these potential genetic revisions and, I suspect, within a couple of decades, making sure that our descendants carry them disproportionately.
Tag: technology
Twisted lights in the sky
Twisted light. Polarized in a new and different way? Or a way I just never heard of? Really? Or maybe it’s just a new application of circular polarization? Not sure. But anyway, 2.5 terabits of information a second would be nice to have for communicating in space, between probes and the homeworld. Between homeworlds in the cosmic civilization-scale jetlag.
Google Street View for building energy efficiency
Essess is doing drive-by thermal imaging in high density urban areas across the US, hoping to target possible building energy efficiency opportunities. Another company is using urban satellite imagery to choose the best rooftops for solar energy siting. Big Brother may be watching you… but at least occasionally he’s got the right idea.
Collusion tracks the trackers
There’s a cool experimental Mozilla plugin called Collusion which lets you see what other sites are being told about your web browsing habits as you surf around. Even with ad-blocking and do-not-track and a host of other privacy enhancing features turned on, the list of notified trackers grows pretty darned quickly!
The Corporate Surveillance State
A completely creeptastic article from the NY Times on how Target can figure out that your 16 year old daughter is pregnant before she’s willing to talk to you about it, based on what she’s buying and when. Big Brother isn’t a mustachioed Stalinist, he’s a mild-mannered statistician attending corporate board meetings and sending out personalized coupon books that purposefully camouflage just how much his computers know about you and your so-called “private life”.
Open Climate Science Course
The University of Chicago has created an Open Courseware style Climate Science 101, with videos of the lectures and self-assessment materials online. It’s aimed at non-science undergraduates. If you, or someone you know, want to get a little more in depth knowledge about climate science on their own time, it’s a great resource.
Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air
Sustainable Energy, without the Hot Air by David MacKay, is a book (available in its entirety online) looking at the sources of energy available, and the ways in which we use it today. There are lots of options, but any real discussion has to, at the very least, use numbers that add up.
Corporate Spy Agencies and NGO Spies
A vast signals intelligence industry exists, and will sell its wares (including satellite data interception and undersea fiber-optic cable tapping) to any and all comers. Ironically, they were infiltrated by agents from Privacy International, a London-based NGO. Apparently the industry isn’t yet using its own technology to defend against critics. One has to wonder how long that situation will last.
Why Is This Cargo Container Emitting So Much Radiation?
In Genoa, Italy a radioactive cargo container appeared. Nobody knew where it had come from, or where it was going, or what was in it. It took a year to get rid of it. It’s as if a pixel got stuck on, in the real world, not the digital world. I have to imagine given how automated the container transshipping is in some ports, that you could almost treat the insertion of something like this as a software problem. You just have to get a truck to pick it up without knowing who you are, or what you’ve loaded, and from there the 20 ton packet of reality moves, guided by a disembodied digital hand.
All your (drone) base are belong to us!
The virtual cockpits from which the US drone fleet are operated have been infected by a virus, anonymous Air Force sources tell Wired. Not only that, but officials at Creech AFB in Nevada where the deathly video games are played, apparently didn’t notify the Air Force’s network security organization of the breech. When you put this together with the extrajudicially authorized overseas executions of US citizens, well, it’s just a little bit too SkyNet for me to feel good about.