sent2null space

A recent study posted the results of the first sequencing of the Cane Toad , Bufo Marinus. The article is interesting as it posits that one thing that can come from this is the ability to devise biological methods to control this Toad which is an invasive species any where outside of it's native region in South America. I found this interesting as the methods focused on involve various viruses that would be used to kill the toads in order to control their populations...but this is myopic thinking. In this age of rapidly advancing and accurate gene editing in the form of Crispr associated editing complexes we can do something far more than just make the Toads susceptible to a viral infection. In fact, thinking about the safety of this approach it leaves open the possibility that the virus modified to kill the toads could also have off species effects which could be very detrimental to those species where deployed. Instead we should consider one of the main factors that le...

The zeitgeist of Science fiction is filled with stories that paint a dystopian tale of how human desires to build artificial intelligence can go wrong. From the programmed pathology of HAL in 2001 a space odyssey, to the immediately malevolent emergence of Skynet in The Terminator and later to the humans as energy stores for the advanced AI of the Matrix and today , to the rampage of "hosts" in the new HBO series Westworld. These stories all have a common theme of probing what happens when our autonomous systems get a mind of their own to some degree and no longer obey their creators but how can we avoid these types of scenarios but still emerge generalized intelligence that will leverage their super intelligence with empathy and consideration the same that we expect from one another? This question is being answered in a way that is mostly hopeful that current methods used in machine learning and specifically deep learning will not emerge skynet or HAL. I think this i...

The blue represents the sky under which an arms race between good and bad agents endlessly runs. humans to humans, humans to gods, gods to gods So....the question begins....of how technological utopia could or could not save the world. From my writings in this blog it should be clear that I am a fan of using technology to save us from ourselves. The focus on these efforts I've termed SHI , to describe the creation of a self healing technological fabric that frees human beings of all current mandatory forms of labor. This would included everything from identifying resource needs to extracting and processing raw resources into finished products and services. The last 6 years has seen a revolution in the space of artificial intelligence now that machine learning models long thought to be inferior to formally modeled hard coded "intelligent" systems have taken the lead not only over those models for tasks like text reading and translation but also for things though...

What a great day for paleo-anthropology! Why? A couple of months ago a paper published the results of dating of remains that showed that homo sapiens sapiens of modern anatomy were living in North Africa by 300,000 years ago...this pushed back the homo sapien emergence time line some what as these finds were older than the well known finds in East Africa thousands of miles away. At the time, lazy and irresponsible conjecture on the matter supposed that the cradle of homo sapiens may not have been the rift valley but was instead north africa...this is nonsense for several reasons: 1) North Africa at the time did not present the complex combination of environmental factors that enabled the natural thriving of humans ...making it likely it was a place they moved to from some where else rather than evolved in situ. 2) Modern analysis of genetic lineages in Africa all center to lineages that are either in the east or southern regions of the continent...almost the furthest pla...

A recent advance in the ability to take immature female eggs to maturity in the petri dish prompted a deeper question regarding the connection of this advance to a plausible system for artificial wombs and ectogenesis of human beings and other organisms at some point in the future. The advantages of such a system for research should be clear, Scientists would be able to cultivate and grow new embryos without the need of an actual living parent as as surrogate. A range of experiments focused on understanding the development of natal diseases could be investigated in real time through a highly monitored and controlled birth environment on a continuous basis. In the social realm, a commercialized process for growing human embryos outside of a natural womb would allow women to forgo the risks of pregnancy entirely, freeing them from a natural source of social imbalance that has dogged their kinds since the dawn of our species. However a possible negative aspect to such developme...

Figure from recent paper on long genetic sequence reads using minION portal sequencers. Paper:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/157Bfpvtc47yPOrmAzt_QC-NgBcj_htYL/view?usp=sharing Saw this video about a month ago , it is very well done and paints a very dystopian and very unfortunately near term usage of this type of autonomous drone technology. Very Black Mirror . About 5 years ago I wrote a short story set in a far future where advanced drone tech becomes part of the lethal kit deployed with each soldier ...allowing one Man to do the damage of an entire platoon or larger in a conventional military unit. I called this future of AI assistant killers for soldiers Sentinels and Snitches as used by Sargent Dunning Spitz on mission some where in Africa. http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-view-to-day-of-autnonous-consensus-on.html?q=dunning The rogue danger though is not just one that can come from the use of autonomous electronic systems that are weaponized we ...

This headline Significance? So every so often I see a story that has me sitting at the keyboard for a few seconds...actually trying to make sure the story is not some kind of satire site because the headline reads immediately a nonsense. This headline did just that. So I proceeded to frantically click through and it appears it was a valid news item from a valid news source and my jaw hit the floor. Many of you know that we've been finding new planets outside of our solar system for about 25 years now. In fact the Kepler satellite and other ground observatories have been accelerating their rate of extra-solar planet discoveries in the last few years but those planets are all within our galaxy the Milky Way. The three major methods used to detect the bulk of planets thus far are wobble detection, radial transit and this method micro lensing which relies on a gravitational effect that was predicted by Einstein in his general theory ...

Significance? This will surely go down as a seminal advance in cancer therapy. It reads like magic: So this new approach looks for the specific proteins that are associated with a given tumors resistance to attack by the body's T cells, it then adjusts those T cells to be hyper sensitive to the specific oncogenic proteins targeted. These cells become essentially The Terminator​ T cells in the specific tumor AND have the multiplied effect of traveling along the immune pathway of spreading that the cancer many have metastasized. This is huge squared because it means you can essentially use targeting one tumor to identify and eliminate distal tumors that you many not even realize exist. This allows the therapy for treating cancer to, for the first time; end the "wack a mole" problem that has frustrated traditional shot gun methods of treatment involving radiation and chemotherapy ...which by their nature unfortunately damage parts of the body that are not cancer ...

In my research investigating the seeds of cognitive dynamics and the importance of emotion toward that emergence I looked closely at how the fundamental limits of physical systems in the form of the cells that store differential information about our experiences set the ultimate bounds on what those dynamics can be. I came over the last decade to the hard conclusion that the game theoretic possibilities that emrege from these dynamics are the toolkit from which any physical system for cognition must employ to build solutions. As a result ...knowing how such agents interact is fundamental to determining how a corpus of such agents in the form of a densely connected brain of such cells will or will not emerge a range of cognitive expressions. When I formalized the principle hypothesis of the salience theory of dynamic cognition the high level description asserted the importance of physical embedding to the driving dynamics of cognition. How this embedd...

Once upon a dream About 20 years ago I wrote a poem which sadly I can't find but the gist of the poem was the wonder I held at the fact that I had dreamed the night before, a dream so vivid as to be mistaken for reality by my sleeping consciousness.  I awoke that day and was so moved by the visceral nature of the dream that I penned the poem. What makes a dream seem real?  A combination of factors owing to spatial and temporal alignment to how the world evolves during our wake states. For one , time beats off roughly equally ....we don't experience dramatic speed up or slow down of time as can often happen in the dream state. Another obvious tell is that in dreams the laws of physics are often either non existent or dynamically pliable in a way that to our dreaming minds obviously puts them in the realm of fantasy. Other aspects stand out, like how things look or sound or taste. Ultimately the combination of flaws in our brains ability to properly correlate a dreamed ...