Ray Jay Perreault's Blog, page 10

And the bacteria gets organized….

And the bacteria gets organized….

Here is a thought provoking article from Scientific American. If you don’t have a subscription you’ll only be able to read the teaser. Seems to me there is a Sci-Fi story in here somewhere. Why can’t an advanced alien get our bacteria organized and maybe even unionized then they’ll put them to work overthrowing the human race.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experimental-drugs-target-bacteria-s-social-network/

The article talks about new methods to fight evolutionary pressure within bacteria. A problem we’re all facing is bacteria’s evolution makes it immune to our drugs. New ways to fight this need to be found. One of the bacteria’s vulnerability is how it lives within a community and actually communicates and they help each other.

Forget the army of nano bots, we have to worry about the army of bacteria that talk to each other; scary stuff.

Through biology the bacteria communicates with each other and they work together to improve their environment and as they work together that cooperation helps them build immunity to our drugs. So, the scientists are finding ways to mess up their communication so their evolutionary growth won’t let them build immunity.

Ray Jay Perreault

http://rayjayperreault.wordpress.com

 

Take a dump SO you can go to work.

Take a dump SO you can go to work.

Here is a great article about the energy potential of human waste. Read it the next time you’re on the throne and maybe put it in your next Sci-Fi story.

http://www.livescience.com/48918-beyond-the-poo-bus-the-many-uses-of-human-waste.html?cmpid=558621

I never realized how energy packed human waste is. For example I didn’t know that if a person collects all of their urine for a year, they’ll have enough fertilizer to grown all of the grain they need to eat. I guess you can that a closed cycle.

This has been done for centuries in different parts of the world. In China it’s a major part of the energy production in the rural areas. Apparently they have toilets made to separate the key ingredients.

The solid waste we produce is just as productive. Storing it and letting our little bacteria friends work on it turns it into great fertilizer also. While it decomposes it creates bio-methane which is better than natural methane. It burns cleaner and produces the same amount of energy.

The article talks about a bus that runs on bio-methane. So the time spent on the toilet can be productive and it will help you get to work.

I think this material would be great in future human sci-fi. This type of waste management along with a water allotment where people are given a certain amount of water per year and they have to decide on spending 70 gallons for one avocado, or 50 gallons for a walnut is worth it. A fully closed society where 100 percent is recycled. Maybe I’ll put this on my list of stories to write.

 

Ray Jay Perreault

http://rayjayperreault.wordpress.com

Will we create the Aliens we meet?

#IAN1 #SciFi

http://www.popsci.com

In the points of interest of the January 2015 Popular Science there was an interesting article.

The article talked about NASA’s efforts to cleanse space vehicles. It spoke in detail about how the Curiosity Rover was cleaned prior to launch. They cooked it to 230 Degrees F. Then prior to launch they swabbed the vehicle and found 54,000 organisms from 377 bacterial strains.

Wow, that is scary.

The article went on to describe how in other tests they have put acid on the bacteria, hit them with ultraviolet light, scrubbed them with lye and dehydration. Much of the bacteria laughed at some of the attempts to kill them.

There was bacteria called Gracilibactilas that eats the salts in rocket fuel and which occurs naturally on Mars. It actually might eat the soil of Mars.

So what will happen in the future, will we visit the oceans of Europa and then come back 100 years from now and find it overrun with stuff we left? By then it will likely have mutated and maybe it will be pissed off. Will we ultimately be invaded by an aggressive life form that we deposited?

Food for thought, but be careful it might contain bacteria.

Ray Jay Perreault

http://rayjayperreault.wordpress.com

Artificial Intelligence; I’d be worried if I were a cat.

Artificial Intelligence: Friendly or Frightening?

http://www.livescience.com/49009-future-of-artificial-intelligence.html

Here is another great article on artificial intelligence. I enjoy this subject because it is in so many sci-fi stories and represents, to a large extent, the future of science. Worm holes, faster that light travel, aliens sucking out your brain are all possible but most likely they’re a ways off. AI is something that we’re toying with now and it already impacts us on a daily basis. In 20 or 30 years it will be a large part of our lives.

This article references a couple of other stories that I’ve passed on but it summarized some of Google’s efforts which I thought was interesting when put in context with Steven Hawking’s interview and the other AI efforts. It also talks about something interesting called the Turing test which I find a somewhat humorous test. Simply, the Turing test is having a bunch of scientist interact with a group of people and computers and by asking questions they’re supposed to pick if who they are interacting with is a computer or person. The press gets all excited and uses the results to scare us about AI. This year 33% of the scientist thought a computer posing as a foreign boy with limited English skills was a person when it was really a computer.

This is interesting but it doesn’t deserve the amount of hype that it gets from the press. It’s merely an interesting measure of how computers are progressing but it isn’t cause for concern.

One thing I did find interesting was Google’ work in deep learning which is something I’ve written about before and which I have in my series SIMPOC. Deep learning is a complex ability to recognize patterns then make judgment decisions with that information. Something the human brain excels at and something which computers aren’t doing well. The fact that Google was able to put 16,000 computers together and program it to recognize a cat, demonstrates the gap between computers and our brains.

I don’t think we’re at risk any time soon; but then again I’m not a cat.

 

Ray Jay Perreault

http://rayjayperreault.wordpress.com

SIMPOC at Amazon: http://amzn.com/B00KCAB6L0

 

Will A.I. doom the human race?

Will A.I. doom the human race?

Here is another great article on artificial intelligence.

Stephen Hawking: Artificial Intelligence Could End Human Race

http://www.livescience.com/48972-stephen-hawking-artificial-intelligence-threat.html?cmpid=558754

I agree with the concerns this article presents although it is a matter of interpretation and I suspect that the BBC and the person who wrote the article enlarged the concern rather that expressing it clearly. After all you get more readers if you interpret the comments with GIANT RAMIFICATIONS.

I haven’t been able to read the actual comments Mr. Hawking said so I can’t comment on those.

I worked a great deal with computers during my career and I was responsible for huge systems. I agree there is some risk with AI but I think responsible controls are all that’s necessary. I think the risk is less than other risks posed before us.

AI could run amuck if the computer was self-learning, which we have a little of now. It would also be a concern if it could modify its own programming; which is a higher form of self-learning. But for the computer to be a true risk it must control its power supply and have a mechanism to manipulate its environment. Both of these are easily controlled by a human.

Acting like a human is much different than thinking like a human. Computers can be made to search giant data bases but they make decisions based on objective data instead of subjective data. If the result of their search is 12, they will make a decision based on that result. Building in the mechanism to do more than that is the challenge. One of our great strengths is the ability to use our past experiences to modify our decisions. The computer power to accomplish that is huge and will take computers a long time to replicate.

True if AI had the power to modify its programming and manipulate its environment we might be in trouble. After all it could go through 10,000 generations of evolution in the blink of an eye.

In my series SIMPOC I’ve tried to replicate that point in time where computers can think, manipulate their environment and act to defend themselves. I picked that point in time based on current research predicting that point should occur in 40-50 years.

It will be interesting to see how computer technologies change and given Moore’s Law who knows it might happen faster rather that sooner.

Even in SIMPOC I have the ALL POWERFUL ‘OFF’ SWITCH.

 

Ray Jay Perreault

http://rayjayperreault.wordpress.com

SIMPOC Series link:  http://amzn.com/B00KCAB6L0

 

Has Star Wars ruined sci-fi?

How ‘Star Wars’ ruined sci-fi

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/02/opinion/beale-star-wars/

I’m not sure if I agree with this CNN author. He feels that the type of science fiction shown in Start Wars has hurt people’s concept of Sci-Fi.

To some degree I agree but from a different direction I believe in the ‘drip effect’. I agree Star Wars is packaged Sci-Fi, it is heavy on entertainment and light on thoughtful science fiction. I do agree with the author, that ‘packaged Hollywood Sci-Fi’ doesn’t do the genre justice, although the author doesn’t blame Hollywood enough for their inability to visualize a good Sci-Fi plot.

The ‘drip effect’ as I mentioned earlier is simple. If you get 50 million people to watch what they think is Sci-Fi, then a certain percentage of them might actually pick a Sci-Fi book up and read it. Then a smaller percentage will feel they discovered something and become Sci-Fi enthusiasts.

I enjoy great Science Fiction and I also enjoy Star Wars. Unfortunately some of the great Sci-Fi takes too much of a commitment to enjoy, and most of the movie going audience doesn’t want to think too much; because it hurts. They would rather be entertained for a short period of time and walk out without their concepts of reality being threatened.

I admit I fall into that category many times. When I want great Sci-Fi I’m willing to sit down and make a commitment to reading and visualizing and visiting the planet or culture, but many times I just want a bucket of pop-corn, and some quality time with my wife and a fun afternoon.

My Grand Theory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_field_theory

Now for the BIG theory. I remember, many years ago, in one of my college physics classes we had a discussion about the Uniform Field Theory. Basically it’s an attempt to bring all of the forces together under one theorem. That theory will describe the molecular, electrical, magnetic, and gravitational forces within one definition.

Many similarities have been found and there is an obvious connection between electricity and magnetism but the highest profile outlier has been gravity.

Recent research postulates that even gravity and time might have a constituent particle.

Ok without going on in too much detail I have an opinion which I’m going to weave into many of my Sci-Fi stories. Let me preface it a little. Everywhere in science there is a right and a left. Up and down, and in and out. Seems simple but many sub-atomic particles have mirror images. In fact that is how many of them were found. The scientist found one particle and because it acted unpredictably they found a similar particle but with opposite characteristics.

In science there is always symmetry and balance. Each force tends to have an opposite force. Each action has a re-action. Ok where is this all going?

A recent post I presented in my blog talked about how there are temperatures below absolute zero. When discussions occur about dark mater, anti-matter, quantum mechanics, multi-verses there is always some kind of symbiotic relationship; A is balanced by or reflected by B – there are always opposites. Speculation within quantum mechanics is that the variations they are seeing at the particle level might be some kind of interactions with other dimensions.

Einstein’s theories say that as you approach the speed of light, the FTL power curve shows that mass and energy required increases towards infinity. I wonder if the power curve for FTL travel is reflective and in some multi-verse, energy curves are opposite. In that multi-verse more energy makes the particle move slower. Perhaps we could ‘cross’ over into that universe and exceed the speed of light? As far as I know no one has said that multi-verses have to follow the same laws of physics that ours does.

Just some ridiculous musings of a Sci-fi writer. I want to apologize for making some farfetched extrapolations of very complex principals; but then again isn’t that the fun part of writing science fiction.

 

Another attack on the EPA and public health

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/energy-environment/224412-another-attack-on-the-epa-and-public-health

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME?

Basically what I see is a bill attempting to water-down the opinions of the scientific community with experts(?) who have a vested interest in the outcome and who, incidentally, contribute a great deal of money to those Republican Congressmen. Am I the only one that sees something pretty smelly going on here? The only positive point is, this bill will never make it through the senate and signature.

If you don’t have time to read the article, the bill forbids ‘experts in their fields’ whose papers have passed the review of many others, from testifying in front of the EPT Scientific Advisory Board or (SAB). The opinion of the creator of the bill, is that their testimony is biased and the presenter has a vested interest in what they wrote. He wants ‘industry experts’ to present their dissenting views to balance the input of the scientific community.

Nobody is saying the scientific community is perfect. But that’s why a paper is reviewed many times by people in many related fields of study before they are published. The points in the paper are analyzed by others who may disagree and will do anything they can to find holes in the logic or numbers. When it is passed by that review, then it is published.

Oh wait a minute. I’m totally convinced that a large Oil company will do unbiased research and when they tell me that renewable fuels aren’t good for the ecology; I’ll believe them. After all that is what they told our congressmen and we believe that our congressmen will listen to us instead of their major contributors. (Excuse me while I cough!)

Someday I hope to proudly say that I’m a Republican. But I’m suspect that won’t happen for a while.

I remember a couple of years ago a major oil company advertised how they spent X Millions on renewable energy research. Everyone was impressed until someone discovered that they spent (X times 10) Million advertising it.

Get involved in what your congressmen say and do, and THIINK before you vote. Hopefully they’ll think AFTER you vote.

 

Ray Jay Perreault

Http://rayjayperreault.wordpress.com

A temperature below absolute zero: Atoms at negative absolute temperature are the hottest systems in the world

A temperature below absolute zero: Atoms at negative absolute temperature are the hottest systems in the world

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130104143516.htm

Here we go again, another great article to think about. For those who forgot, absolute zero is -273 C or zero Kalvin. At that temperature all molecular activity ceases. Said another way, the total energy is at the lowest level. Total energy is the sum of potential and kinetic.

A funny thing occurs at the colder temperature. Per something called the Boltzman distribution. Every temperature is made up of molecules at many energy levels. As they are heated the distribution between high and higher increases and theoretically at the highest possible temperature there would be an even distribution of high and higher energy molecules.

At a certain point the definition of temperature fails and as more energy is added, the density of highest energy molecules increases. But the type of energy that increases is the potential energy. Using a variation of the classic definition of temperature implies that molecules at this state are at the ‘highest’ possible temperature. So the disconnect is once you go below absolute zero, you reach the absolute highest temperature?

From a practical perspective what does this mean to us? No much, except that someday we might have an internal combustion engine that is greater than 100% efficient. Calm down, we’re not creating anything, we just need to re-define some terms or at least make the definitions more encompassing.

Another funny result is, molecules at these temperatures attract each other but they are stable in that attraction. Said another way, they have a ‘negative’ attraction.

From an astrological perspective, material at these temperatures perform in many ways like dark matter. Perhaps a better understanding of temperature will yield a definition that answers why galaxies are accelerating in their movement away from each other.

To me, it seems that a pattern of discovery is emerging. I’ve had other posts about multi-verses, faster that light (FTL) travel, and quantum mechanics. To me (a dumb engineer) there seems to be some amazing potential for discovery as we begin fitting these tiny pieces of the puzzle together. I’ve got another post on this subject coming out in a day or two.

 

Ray Jay Perreault

http://rayjayperreault.wordpress.com

Parallel Worlds Could Explain Wacky Quantum Physics

http://www.livescience.com/48806-parallel-worlds-quantum-mechanics-theory.html?cmpid=558618

Another great article which is not only worthy of discussion but it might have profound effects.

First off for those of you who haven’t heard of muli-verses, those are an infinite number of parallel universes like ours. Every variation imaginable and they go on forever.

Quantum Physics is the scientific effort to understand reactions at the sub-molecular level. Right now there are interesting things going on that don’t seem logical, but yet they occur. For example one particle performs a certain way and if it is ‘entangeled’ to another particle miles away, any change in particle A instantaneously changes particle B.

A funny thing happens when someone tries to measure sub-particle A. When the measurement is taken, other particles change their reaction. In some ways, it appears that the sub-particle is in two (or more) places at the same time. The position of the ‘other’ particle is described by the ‘wave theory’.

The article above suggests that every time a scientist measures a sub-particle many of the ‘other’ positions actually break off and create separate dimensions which are slightly different from the first.

Wow, that’s a lot to digest. The proposition of the article can’t be proven wrong mathematically, so it may be correct. Parallel or multi-verses can be a very fertile place for Science Fiction writing.

For anyone that thinks quantum physics don’t apply in our lives need look only as far as your flash drive. They are erased using a concept called Quantum Tunneling.

Ray Jay Perreault

http://rayjayperreault.wordpress.com