Archives for October 2016

I know, I know, you’ve been waiting your whole life to have a, middle aged, white guy explain race relations to you. I mean, how the hell would you know what to think if you’re not told what to think by one such as me? And, in all honesty, I wouldn’t do this in a million years but someone I consider a friend admitted that she’s scared of white people. And that saddened me to the core. Especially since I can’t blame her. I see the same things going on in our world you do, and she does. And they scare me too. But if we’re going to have this discussion we can’t have one of those horrid PBS things where everyone talks in dulcet tones and dances around the truth. The truth is simple, racism exists. There are whites who hate, or fear, blacks. There are blacks who hate, or fear, whites. There are people of every color who hate, or fear, those who are not like them. This is true. And any conversation must start there. So that’s where I’ll begin.

First, a little about me. I was raised in a conservative, Catholic, home by my grandparents. The reason I was raised by them was due to the fact that, in those days, illegitimate babies born to Irish mothers, like I was, were often shunted to Catholic orphanages where they could be raped, used as sex slaves, or sold into child labor. Families knew this even if the world at large did not.

My grandmother was one of the more liberal members of our family. For example, there was an Italian family who was having visa problems. My grandmother would take them, twice a week, from our home in Melrose Park to the Loop, so they could deal with them. They didn’t speak any English so a neighbor of theirs, who spoke both Italian and English, would make sure my granny had all the paperwork so she could guide them to the offices they needed to attend.

She would proudly talk about this with her sisters. Often mentioning how the family were all “good Dagos.”

It wasn’t until I was fifteen, when I met a man named Ron who worked with me at the Riviera Bowling Alley, that I was disabused of the concept that nigger was an adjective. You have to understand I was raised knowing a man named Nigger Joe, with the knowledge that a Cadillac was a Nigger Mobile, wide collared shirts were Nigger Clothes, the black janitors at Ford, where my grandfather worked, were Good Niggers, and so on. I hope you can better comprehend my confusion.

I should add my mother’s last husband was a ranking member of the Klan. So it isn’t like the Age of Aquarius enlightened everyone.

Now you know a little about me.

And, if you know me at all from previous blogs or personal experience, you will not be surprised in the slightest to find out the next part of this story takes place in a liquor store.

By now, I’m fifty-five if you’re curious, I thought I’d put the racism bugaboo well behind me. I have a diverse, and wonderful, collection of friends and acquaintances, who make my life better. I have worked with, and dated, pretty much every race on Earth and never put much thought into the amount of melanin they brought to the conversation.

It turns out I was wrong.

On July 2nd of this year I moved to South Chicago. On July Fourth I went to the local liquor store to buy liquor. It seemed like a logical idea. While there a black man, about my age, asked me if I was voting for Trump. When I said no he said “I figgered all you honkies were voting for him.” The vehemence of my response caught me off guard. The conversation, quickly joined by a Chinese man, a Mexican man, and the Indian store owner, escalated rapidly.

At one point I was unsure if this was going to end with me being stabbed or hugged. Either way, there was nothing to do but see it through to the end.

I finally realized the little boy who thought nigger was an adjective still clung to the darker reaches of my soul. So I reached in, yanked him out, and told them what I told you. I explained how I was raised. All of it.

And they shared their stories. And they were fucking brutal. The conversation was about as profane as you could imagine. Every variation of the word fuck we could conjugate was used. Every racial epithet, and there are many, was tossed into the ring. But we were talking. We were bringing our darker demons out to let them die, hopefully, in the light.

An hour or so later, neither hugged nor stabbed, I left having made some new friends, or fewer enemies anyway, and with a lot to think about.

That’s where we’re at. I believe this is the conversation we need to have. Not the gentle hand wringing. Not the one loaded with Power Point slides and pious pontification. No, we need to have the one filled with vitriol and spite. We need to honestly look inside and drop our souls on the table. We need to understand, truly and fully, why we hate. Why we fear. How we got to where we’re at. We need to look each other in the eye and never flinch, not even when we have good reasons to do so.

And we can’t do it on a national scale. That’s too much, too easy to hide behind. No, it must start like mine started, one to one. Eye to eye. Fear to fear.

I can’t tell you this conversation cured me. That would be disingenuous. But I can tell you I know where that little bastard is hiding in my soul, and I have my eye out for him now.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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(1) In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth (2) And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. – Genesis (KJV). That’s not a bad allegory for the Big Bang Theory, all things considered. From nothing came something. I can hear scientists from numerous branches lighting torches and sharpening pitchforks. I hope they’ll bear with me since this isn’t for them. This is, instead, for the nice folks at home who come here for introductory level stuff so they can grasp the initial concept before dumpster diving into the minutae. It’s also a nice place to bring people up to date on discoveries thus far. Today we’re going to talk about the fun we can have chatting with aliens. Or, if you’re a believer in God, our galactic cousins who were brought forth into the firmament by Him. See, if He created everything, then he created them. That’s how “everything” works.

Two months ago I wrote about a team of Russian scientists who claimed to have discovered an alien signal. They later claimed that the signal came from a cloaked Russian satellite that was launched in the 60’s. Or, maybe, later. Since, if Kruchev and pals had that kind of tech in the 60’s, it would mean we’d all be speaking Russian today and, obviously tovarich, we’re not, I feel safe in setting that particular excuse aside for now. I should also note that other scientists, this time in Italy, requested additional research be done for a myriad of reasons. Mostly because they thought the initial claim, and not the satellite one, was valid. Or, at least, credible.

So time is being spent hunting that bugger down. As of that writing it was the second signal discovered which warranted attention. The first being the famous WOW Signal from 1977.

But the times, they are a changin’.

Shannon Hall, over at New Scientist, reports that two Canadian scientists are claiming they have found not one, not two, not three, but two hundred and thirty four alien signals. That’s out of about ten billion solar systems they tested.

Before we go any further I’ll let Shannon tell you the rest.

It’s a bold claim. Two astronomers think they have spotted messages from not just one extraterrestrial civilisation, but 234 of them. The news has sparked a lively debate in the field as other astronomers think the claim is premature and are working fast to get to the bottom of the signals.

In 2012, Ermanno Borra at Laval University in Quebec suggested that an extraterrestrial civilisation might use a laser as a means of interstellar communication. If the little green men simply flashed a laser toward the Earth like a strobe light, we would see periodic bursts of light hidden in the spectrum of their host star. They would be incredibly faint and rapid, but a mathematical analysis could uncover them.

“The kind of energy needed to generate this signal is not crazy,” says Borra. In fact, Borra showed that technology we have on Earth today – specifically the Helios laser at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – could generate that kind of signal, should we want to reveal ourselves to the cosmos.

With this in mind, Borra’s graduate student Eric Trottier combed through 2.5 million stars recorded by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in search of such a signal. He found it, down to the exact shape, in 234 stars.

The overwhelming majority of those stars are in the same spectral class as the sun, which Borra says supports his hypothesis that this signature must be the result of extraterrestrial intelligent life. And with the data in hand, he thinks that 234 distinct civilisations are beaming pulses of the same periodicity (roughly 1.65 picoseconds) toward the Earth.

Borra and Trottier ruled out other possible explanations for the pattern, like rapid pulsations in the atmospheres of the stars themselves and rotational transitions in molecules. “We have to follow a scientific approach, not an emotional one,” says Borra. “But intuitively – my emotion speaks now – I strongly suspect that it’s an ETI signal.”

Extraordinary claims

Other astronomers think that Borra’s intuition might have run away with him.

“They don’t consider every natural possibility and jump prematurely to the supernatural – so to speak – conclusion,” says Peter Plavchan at Missouri State University in Springfield. “I think it’s way too premature to do that.”

“There is perhaps no bolder claim that one could make in observational astrophysics than the discovery of intelligent life beyond the Earth,” says Andrew Siemion, the director of the SETI Research Centre at the University of California Berkeley. “It’s an incredibly profound subject—and of course that’s why many of us devote our lives to the field and put so much energy into trying to answer these questions. But you can’t make such definitive statements about detections unless you’ve exhausted every possible means of follow-up.”

So that’s exactly what the Breakthrough Listen Initiative—a project headed by Siemion that searches for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth—will do. The team plans to observe several stars from Borra’s sample with the 2.4-meter Automated Planet Finder telescope at the Lick Observatory in California.

Borra is excited to see that others are taking the reins. “At this stage, the signal is so strange, that although our detailed analysis seems to indicate that it is a real signal, it has to be validated with more work,” he says.

Still, the Breakthrough Listen team doesn’t share Borra’s enthusiasm. According to a statement, they have rated the detection as a zero to 1 on the Rio Scale for SETI observations, meaning that it is insignificant.

In fact, Siemion thinks the spectral patterns were likely caused by errors in calibration or data analysis. And Plavchan agrees. He points to several steps in the team’s data analysis that “scared him” because they didn’t consider how those steps might affect their results—a red flag in any scientific claim. At the end of the day, the signal probably comes down to a human error, he says.

“It’s not a bad idea to look for a signal, it’s just that they didn’t do their homework,” says Plavchan.

Journal reference:  Borra Trottier Paper

The skepticism held by the two scientists noted, and by many others, is exactly what this type of research needs. When supposition replaces fact we end up in bad places. Or, if you prefer, Dark Ages.

That said, the paper from Borra and Trottier adds to a growing pile of data that is starting to weigh on the side of the teeter totter that says “here there be aliens.”

Part of that data is the is the century old study of Tabby’s Star a/k/a KIC 8462852. It was named after Tabetha Boyajian, the woman who led the team that discovered its behavior . The numeric thing is just a catalog number but you can use it to win bets at nerd parties if you wish.

Back to the star.

Stars. They start out gassy, like your Uncle Elroy after a burrito as big as his head, then they form, attain their maximum level of brightness, begin to wane, and then die. Sometimes spectacularly – like novas, sometimes not. What they do not do, unless they’re pulsars, which Tabby’s Star is not, is oscillate. There are no galactic discos which require a strobe light. Nor do they begin to dim in the prime of their lives. Especially not in a definable band. Stars don’t grow rings.

Obvious reasons, such as an exploding planet or a ring of comets caught in its gravity, don’t account for the steady dimming viewed since the late 1890’s. If any of those reasons were valid the star would appear dimmer and stay at the same, reduced, luminosity. That is not what’s happening here. Each year it gets a little dimmer in a certain band. Just as if someone was building a structure around it to harness its energy. Here on Earth we call such things Dyson Spheres. I have no idea what the aliens call them. Or if they name things at all.

Naming, after all, is a human convention. Nothing in the universe demands names.

When I first wrote about this in January of this year I had this to say;

Just for giggles, I posted on a NASA blog what I thought it could be. A ringworld. I expected to get laughed out of the room. Larry Niven’s flight of fancy, a single structure to replace all the planets in a system, has very little practical value.

Except …. it kind of fits. If you were building something like that there would be periods of massive dimming and periods of increased brightness. Also, since the structure would only be capturing solar energy, there would be no transmissions to track. Plus, once completed the dimming would be constant. So my stupid suggestion got added to the list of possibilities. I’ll keep you posted.

While no one is saying this thing is really an alien structure, fewer are dismissing the concept out of hand. As one scientist said to me, after a few adult libations and sandwich, “We know more and more what that fucker ain’t. But ain’t no one gonna sit on that thin limb and say what it is.”

Yes, drunk scientists are fun.

However, at some point  we’re going to run out of options. Then what? Put it on our “to do” list for when we develop interstellar travel?

For now, let’s not say “we have proof” one way or the other. Instead, let’s say, damn, that looks interesting, let’s check it out.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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Once upon a time humans thought of themselves as some pretty important shit. Top of the food chain and all that. We had it all figured out. Everything from how a god would behave, and subsequently expect from us, all the way down to how to use our resources in a safe and beneficial manner. If you’re not laughing yet you may either wish to stop reading now or seek therapy. Of course there’s nothing from preventing you from doing both. Go ahead and overachieve. Anyway, humans were the bomb, so to speak. There was nothing that could compare on the evolution ladder to us. But, and I do like big butts, while we were gazing up the ladder confident of our eventual assent into heaven, we never looked down and noticed that monkeys had entered the stone age, thus beginning their own climb to the stars.We did not notice that one of man’s basest insults “you’re a motherless child” was slowly, inexorably, becoming reality.

Yeah, folks, we’re being replaced.

Sarah Knapton, over at the Telegraph, shares the uncomfortable truth.

It was always thought that only a female egg could spark the changes in a sperm required to make a baby, because an egg forms from a special kind of cell division in which just half the number of chromosomes are carried over.

Imagine that you could take skin cells and make embryos from them. This would have all kinds of utility.

Sperm cells form in the same way, so that when a sperm and egg meet they form a full genetic quota, with half our DNA coming from our mother and half from our father.

But now scientists have shown embryos could be created from cells which carry all their chromosomes which means that, in theory, any cell in the human body could be fertilised by a sperm.

Three generations of mice have already been created using the technique and are fit and healthy and now researchers are planning to test out the theory using skin cells.

Dr Tony Perry, a molecular embryologist and senior author of the study, said: “Some people say start the day with an egg, but what this paper says is that you don’t necessarily have to start development with one.

“It has been thought that only an egg cell was capable of reprogramming sperm to allow embryonic development to take place.

“Our work challenges that dogma, held since early embryologists first observed mammalian eggs in around 1827 and observed fertilisation 50 years later, that only an egg cell fertilised with a sperm cell can result in a live mammalian birth.

“We’re talking about different ways of making embryos. Imagine that you could take skin cells and make embryos from them. This would have all kinds of utility.”

For the initial experiments, scientists “tricked” an egg into developing into an embryo using special chemicals which makes the egg think it has been fertilised. Crucially the cells in an embryo copy themselves completely when they divide, and so mirror closely most other cells in the body, such as skin cells.

When scientists injected the embryos with sperm, they grew into healthy mice which went on to produce their own litters.

Yes, for infertile families this is a great step forward. For those in need of an evil clone, it’s a great step forward. For the socially disenfranchised, this is a great idea. For humans hoping to evolve beyond our present state and maybe justify our existence, not so much. Since you’re using the same generation of biological source materials the variances needed to move humanity forward are removed. Of course, we could get lucky and have the resulting organisms be completely unrelated to us as they develop. So that could be fun. And, if nothing else, this current election cycle has shown us how well humans react to those who might be a little different than us. Naturally, we should all expect our newly formed genetic cousins to be welcomed with open arms.

Then tackled to the ground and subsequently lynched.

Yeah, never mind.

But, just in case the above referenced scenario does come true? What will happen then. Well, as Devin Coldewey reports, science has that covered too.

They’re training robots to hunt, and kill, all humans.

Nope, not even a little made up.

You know how sometimes you look at a piece of research and think, “I suppose it’s an interesting technical problem, but isn’t teaching an AI to hunt and kill humans a pursuit fundamentally dangerous to the continued existence of mankind?”

This is one of those times.

Some traitors to the species at Carnegie Mellon have applied the ever-applicable neural network approach to create an AI that is literally a killing machine. Or perhaps I should say fragging machine, because it’s only doing the killing in a Doom deathmatch. Now, you can of course say it doesn’t count because the death is virtual, but why should that matter? To computers, everything is virtual. Think about it.

You have a question: How does this differ from the bots we’ve had in games since forever? Computer players have been around forever!

You are an acute observer, reader, but consider: Those bots are programs running within the game itself, aware of all the variables, coordinates, edges, the locations and specs of guns and health kits. Like any non-player character, they are programmed to act in certain ways in reaction to certain in-game variables.

The AI created by Guillaume Lample and Devendra Singh Chaplot plays the game the way we humans play: by looking at the screen, identifying our character’s situation and orientation, finding our way around the map and shooting at anything that moves. It’s essentially a level up from the AIs that use similar methods to learn the methods governing simpler games, like Space Invaders, and find the inputs that maximize score in those.

Here it is in action:

The network was trained mostly on pixel data — that is, what you actually see on the screen — but its creators had to cheat a little by giving it some basic insight from the game engine on whether there was an enemy or item on screen.

Its reinforcement strategy was this: It got attaboys for picking up items, moving a lot and racking up kills, but was reprimanded for taking damage and dying. There was also a light rap on the wrist for shooting, since otherwise the machine decided firing indiscriminately and waiting for enemies to wander into its crosshairs was the best technique. Reassuring!

The system that resulted from this setup outperformed the in-game computer players and humans alike. The former weren’t exactly advanced when Doom came out, so they’re pretty much cannon fodder.

It’s actually split into two systems, or lobes if you will. There’s a navigation side, which drives while moving around and collecting things, and presumably learned how to interpret environmental imagery. Then there’s a shooting side, which takes over when there’s an enemy on screen, pointing the gun at the right place and pulling the trigger.

Are we witnessing the birth of Skynet? Or, perhaps, a startup that will soon pitch us with a universal adversarial AI for multiplayer games? Both are pretty scary.

Lample and Chaplot’s paper describing the FPS-playing AI is available for free on Arxiv.

To recap, monkeys are evolving sentience, robots are being trained to kill us, as they continue to strive towards sentience, and David Mills, the Rosa Parks of Sex Bots (yes, that’s what he calls himself), uses humor to help us get ready for our silicone soul mates.

That way we will be too busy to form any sort of meaningful group as the monkeys give the robots orders.

Goodbye sweet earth. Cathal Mo Chroi sings your elegy.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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