Last Month in New Scientist (The Best of August 2009)

For all the articles in the magazine that I've found interesting but not thought worthy of an entire blog entry devoted to them. I was aiming to mention about 4 articles per issue, with a paragraph each. Naturally, I've elaborate significantly in places (the Noel Sharkey interview became a full blown piece on it's own), and there were 5 magazine issues this month (opposed to the more usual 4). I'd say that it is, at the least, worth a scan through the article titles listed below, in case anything jumps out at you too.

I've not provided links to individual articles online, just the issue's index page, seeing as most people won't have full access to many of the articles anyway.

** 29 Aug:

+ "It's a small world - in a healthy brain" p14 -

The neuronal structures (in human cortices) display behaviour consistent with their connectivity being finely configured to a state of 'self organised criticality'. Basically that means cascades of activity are as unpredictable as earthquakes and the neurons form a structure more like human society (where one's only ever 6 degrees of separation from anyone else on the planet), rather than merely relying on neighbouring cells to pass signals on to their neighbours, etc. This comes as no surprise to anyone who's up to speed with the revolution of network theory from the beginning of this decade. And it doesn't elucidate much further as to how we think, let alone what makes us conscious/sentient.

The sited study looked at brains with Alzheimer's (which were seen to have long distance connections that were too random) and Frontal Temporal Lobe Dementia (which had too few long distance connections).

So I now wonder if something similar might be the cause of dyslexia (rather than macro-scale variations, like a particular brain region being smaller). For me dyslexia has meant: very slow reading speed in particular (even more prominently than blindness to certain spelling transliterations). What if my current condition also represents a structural deviation in my brain?; A decline in cognitive ability, particularly higher order (conscious) thought that, presumably, requires the most widespread cortical co-ordination, making it most susceptible to such faults.

Of course, even in an optimally order brain, each cell's activation threshold has to be carefully tuned, so that the network operates in a region of chaos, rather than epileptic fit or coma (too low threshold & too high threshold, respectively). Neuromodulation (by serotonin, melatonin, dopamine, adrenaline, etc) and variations in oxygen and glucose concentration can also be responsible for moving the brain away from it's optimal operating range.

+ "Air travellers get a robot chauffeur" p19 -

I (and some of my friends) have thought for a while that we could have entirely 'self driven' cars on the roads by now, from a technical stand point. The (good) reason why we actually have none, is that

On: Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson

For someone like myself who is a long time reader of 'Space Opera' with a splash of cyber-punk, this book takes a long time to get at all interesting. In fact, if I hadn't already known the hidden depth of the plot (from a review of this Hugo award nominee) I probably wouldn't have bothered wading through the first 14 chapters; set in the 1920s, there's no indication that the book wasn't written in the same period until the “Interlude” where the cool, cosmological scale stuff is finally, abruptly, revealed. 

The end was as expected, reasonably solid, with no extra twists or turns. Heart stings are pulled sparingly, and the fighting is also more about boringly grim realism than all gun's blazing heroics.

Major spoilers: I presume this wasn't a plot hole (because they needed to be there at the right time) but: Tom Compton and Guilford Law are down the Psion's hole, in the abandoned city, mid way through the book, when they both have ghost's riding in them to an extent, it seems silly that they leave and then have to fight their way back 45 years later, perhaps Wilson should have made that a aspect clearer. The explanation of how the simulated Earth became split in the first place is half hearted. But of course, any arbitrary event is equally as feasible during a war between God-like intelligences in a simulated universe at the end of real time: an inherent problem of writing a book in such a setting. It's not clear what happened to all the souls of Eurasia in the “Miracle”, it seemed implied that the Psions had access to them with Vale communing with the dead. But as long as the makers of the Achieve ('good guys') have complete backups of the galactic history it contains, then only the individuals that had chance to deviate from their original selves (thanks to the evil Psions) represent potential casualties.

This book seems to be trying to be fully hardened science fiction: apart from techno-babble about (currently hypothetical) Higgs fields, the galactic Achieve is built in a universe suffering 'heat death' from continued expansion (what cosmologists now expect), rather than a Tiplerian Singularity at the end of a closed space-time. Similarly, the standpoint on artificial conciousness appears to be a compromise between fully Strong A.I. and the limitations Roger Penrose claims exist: Wilson has it that a machine can indeed be conscious as long as it's thought processes utilise certain quantum effects (indeterminacy & waveform collapsing, etc), exploiting the obvious hole I've always seen in Penrose's arguments. While the 'bad guys' in the book are only pseudo conscious, algorithm based entities. They are cunning enough to understand human motivations and adaptable enough to fight an information based war against the collective mind of an entire post galactic super-civilisation, but they apparently don't have that 'je ne sais quoi'.... Wilson doesn't explain further.