Category: Science & SciFi

Caveat: Rogue Teratocytes

Banalities & Journaling / Science & SciFi

I was reading a blog I sometimes frequent, called slatestarcodex, authored by a rather polymathic psychiatrist who has some background in conworlding (which the context in which I first came across him). 

He mentioned in one of his collections of links a concept I hadn't come across before, which is the idea of "cell line infections." Since this was clearly related to cancer, and I've become a bit of a glutton for semi-hypochondrial cancer-related online reading, I followed the link and satisfied my curiosity.

Here is the article. I also did some reading in wikipedia. 

Cell line infections are scary. The idea is that a given cancer can "evolve" sufficiently that it can be transmitted like other infections vectors – e.g. bacteria or viruses or prions – to other individuals. There are now documented CLIs for dogs, clams, and tasmanian devils (and in the last case, it may be contributing to the rapid extinction of the species). Basically, the idea is that my cancer could end up in your body, and take root there and become your cancer. Infectious cancer. More fun.

From a biological perspective, these cell line infections are weird. These are things that behave, for all intents and purposes, like single-celled parasitic organisms, not unlike infectious bacteria. Yet genetically they are your relatives (well, they are the relatives of the particular individual in whom they first arose). To anthropomorphize a bit, they know you. In the documented instance, the dog CLI knows how to deal with a dog immune system, for example – because it is, in a genetic sense, just a weird manifestation of an actual dog – a sort of single-celled vector of a dog. 

Apparently, there is something similar in the always-wacky insect world, among what are called parasitoid wasps. These wasps' eggs and larvae (implanted in other insect species' larvae) send out single-celled vectors called teratocytes that manipulate the host individuals' metabolisms to make it a friendlier environment for the growing eggs. This is not the same as e.g. the infamous toxoplasmosis, which is a case of a kind of mutualistic/parasitic symbiosis between a single-celled organism and several multicelled organisms. Instead, these teratocyte vectors sent out by the wasps are members of the same wasp species, genetically – just a kind of strange phenotype.

So following on that insect-related terminology, maybe these mammalian cell line infections could be called "rogue mammalian teratocytes." 

Just when one feels one has a handle on what is biologically possible, something comes along that makes it all seem quite ephemeral, and ungraspable – the cohesive theoretic picture melts into a swirling, incoherent field of possibilities, like a poorly-realized science fiction novel.

[daily log: walking, 7 km]

Caveat: WWW via Teletypewriter

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Internet & Blogging / Science & SciFi

Here is a deliberately anachronistic approach to the World Wide Web, in celebration of its 25th anniversary. The WWW dates to 1990 and the work of Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. However, in this video, a rather deadpan presenter uses much older equipment, including a 1960s vintage teletype terminal, a rotary dial phone and an acoustic-coupling modem.

I will date myself by saying that even this older equipment is not entirely unfamiliar to me, for which I credit the fact that my uncle, enrolled in computer science classes in the early 1970s at the local university, took me along with him to learn about computers. Thus I have actually operated terminals quite similar to the ones shown, including doing some BASIC programming when I was 8 or 9 years old. I think it was on the DEC "mini computer" at the university ("mini" being a relative concept – it occupied a largish, excessively air-conditioned room in the computer science department, and had blinking lights on the front, just like in the movies. Its computing capacity was probably about the same as a modern "dumb" cell phone – not a smartphone, which exceeds the computing capacity of even supercomputers of that era.

I remember making a text-based "slot machine game" where it said "PRESS ANY KEY" and it would give an apparently random assortment of slot-machinish results, e.g. "BAR CHERRY LEMON" or "BAR BAR BAR". But I made it so that I could manipulate the results to increase my chances of winning depending on which "ANY KEY" I chose to PRESS, in an utterly undocumented way. It was a kind of rudimentary "easter egg" (a term of art among programmers and hackers) wrapped in a pointless game. I would press the various keys for hours, watching the statistical variations in the output. I suppose it gave me a good intuitive grounding in statistics, although it wasn't until university that I realized that's what I had been doing.

I also enjoyed playing a text-based "Star Trek" game that was wildly popular in the 1970s on mainframes (many javascript "ports" of the game are available, for example here), in the pre-home-computer era. Later, when my uncle acquired an Apple ][, I believe it had some version of that Star Trek  game, too, but I moved on to Hamurabi, and later Space Invaders when he shelled out for a graphics card for the Apple.

[daily log: walking, km]

 

Caveat: The Machines Have Arrived

Banalities & Journaling / My Photos / Science & SciFi

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As I was leaving for work today, I happened to walk past an open closet area near the lobby of my apartment building, and my eyes were drawn by a bunch of blinking lights – like Christmas tree lights. I thought, "why are they keeping a Christmas tree lit up in that storage room, but then I realized it was a bunch of blinking ethernet connectors. This, apparently, was my building's "switch room." I had a momentary thought, as I realized the vast majority of apartment buildings in Korea must have something like this, and the vast majority of Koreans live in apartment buildings. That's a lot of internet infrastructure. Staggering, even.

Meanwhile, a woman got attacked by a robotic vacuum cleaner. Actually, I suspect there may be some missing information, and, this being South Korea, I suspect that missing information involves alcohol. 

The machines have arrived.

I had a long day at work.

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly

Found Online / Science & SciFi

This "vine" (a new-ish, looping video format that is gif-like) was circulating on the intertubes this morning.

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This is Elon Musk's effort (well, his company's effort) to land the new SpaceX rocket on a column-of-flame+feet, like in old science fiction stories. Some internet wags (i.e. the Register, where I like to go for my tech news) were calling it "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly," which strikes me as a wonderful euphemism.

This is just the first try of a production model (and no one was hurt, and the International Space Station nevertheless received its payload without problem), so as failures go, it was pretty minor, I'd say. They'll get it working, I suspect.

And then, finally, we will be living in the future, because rockets will be taking off and landing the way they are supposed to, finally.

[daily log: walking, 6 km]

Caveat: meameamealokkapoowa oompa and other curiosities of googology

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Science & SciFi

Googology, apparently, is a subfield of mathematics dedicated to the study of large numbers. It has its own wiki. I found this wiki after attempting to read an old article by mathematician Scott Aaronson about big numbers. Actually, what surprised me about some of the material on the googology wiki more than anything else was that, in fact, I found myself making some effort to understand it, despite the dense mathematics.

I more-or-less understood the idea behind hyper-operators (and up-arrow notation), but became lost by what was called BEAF (a sort of systematic way of specifying functions with hyper-exponential growth, I guess), and I was eventually sidetracked by the plethora of whimsical terminology: big numbers beyond - way beyond – googol, with names like boogagoogolplex or meameamealokkapoowa oompa (which is defined by {{L100,10}10,10&L,10}10,10 , in case you were wondering – and no, I don't understand that).

There's a nice glossary of recently-coined, really big numbers (many created in response to Aaronson's original article) at an aesthetically-challenged web page called Infinity Scrapers. Note that the "meameamealokkapoowa group" appears at the bottom of the list (does this mean that it is really the biggest-of-the-big numbers? or just the most recently to be characterized?).

It is worth noting, for the uninitiated, that the absolute smallest of these numbers (but the largest which I can be assured that at least a few of my middle-school students, for example, might be aware of) is googol (= 10100), yet that number is still greater than the estimated number of elementary particles in the observable universe, 1086.

It's rare that I've tried so hard to penetrate a mathematical concept since my first year in college, when, after a semester of trying to make sense of the number-theoretical foundations of calculus under the unkind tutelage of Professor A. Wayne R__, nicknamed "B" Wayne R__ since he never gave A-grades. I concluded I wasn't cut out to be a math major, and abandoned ship for the more hospitable fields of the humanities surfing around to Religious Studies and English Lit before landing in Linguistics, which was a semi-return to the more rigorous fold. It's one of my few genuine regrets in life, I suppose. Not a regret at having jumped ship – rather, a regret to having found myself obligated to do so… which is to say, it's not really regret, more like disappointment with myself. 

[daily log: walking, { {}, {{}}, {{},{{}}}, {{},{{}},{{},{{}}}} , {{}, {{}}, {{},{{}}}, {{},{{}},{{},{{}}}}} } (=amount in km, represented set-theoretically using Von Neumann ordinals)]

Caveat: Lego Antikythera

Found Online / Science & SciFi

Do you know about the Antikythera Mechanism? I remember reading about it a few times, but recently found someone who made a working replica using Legos. It's not clear to me if it is merely a functional replica or if it also replicates the specific arrangement of gears – i.e., does it produce the results the original mechanism produced using modern gear arrangements, or does it use the actual reconstructed gear arrangements? I suspect the former, because I doubt there are Lego gears with the specific characteristics of the orginal mechanism.

[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]

Caveat: On Being Temporarily Radioactive

Banalities & Journaling / Cancer / Science & SciFi

My diagnostic PET scan at the hospital was delayed due to technical issues with their gadgets. I wasn't really upset by this, but it forced me to send a message to Curt telling him I would be late to work – later than already anticipated. Fortunately, someone was able to take my missed class, and I raced to work after the scan and went straight into my 6:40 class. 

"I'm radioactive," I announced. This, of course, required extensive explanation. 

I explained about Fluorine-18 radiotracer-tagged glucose (fluorodeoxyglucose – basically radioactive sugar) and how it shows hotspots of metabolic activity on the scan. It probably mostly went over their heads – elementary kids in Korea only know science well if they study it in hagwon, as the public elementary schools don't seem to do a very good job with science education.

I'm not sure the kids really cared that much – they didn't find it to be as interesting as I'd thought they might – sometimes with these kind of technological / medical issues, it's hit-or-miss.

I had a terrible headache this evening, but I suspect this has more to do with the requisite pre-scan fast than because of the radioactivity or injection or any of that. 

I go back tomorrow to get the result.

[daily log: walking, 7.5 km]

Caveat: Orphan Black Found

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Science & SciFi

When I was in the hospital last summer, my former coworker Grace gave me a bunch of tv shows to watch – mp4's and avi's on a thumb drive. One show that she gave me that I never watched last summer was a show called Orphan Black. ORPHAN-BLACKRecently, I started watching the episodes and found myself getting into it. I downloaded the more recent episodes and this morning I caught up to the most recent episode available. Contrary to my initial impression that it was a mediocre Canadian production in the sci-fi/thriller genre category, the series is in fact extremely well-written and well-acted too. Since the show is about clones, many of the lead roles all belong to one actress, and she does a good job switching back and forth. I've become quite riveted by the series, and recommend it.

[daily log: walking, 2.5 km]

Caveat: On Will

Found Online / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Science & SciFi

"Will is merely the drive to reduce dissonance between each of our active neural circuits." – An internet philosopher who goes by "Athene."

I'm really not sure what to make of this. At one level, it's pretty serious philosophy with strong grounding in the sciences. On the other hand, it seems gimicky in presentation, and I have some scepticism because of that. And what's with that voice? Something computer-generated, I think.

[daily log: walking, 7.5 km; running, 3 km]

Caveat: What Happens When Antibiotics Stop Working

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Science & SciFi

In my opinion, an across-the-board failure of antibiotics is much scarier than global warming. I was struck by the observation that if antibiotics stop working, things like my cancer surgery become nearly impossible, too – consider that without antibiotics, my post-surgery infection would have possibly been fatal. So when we sit and worry about the future of the world, let's worry about this rather than global warming, which seems much more "survivable" to my perception.

 

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: Alternative Energy

Banalities & Journaling / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / Science & SciFi

Lately electricity prices have gone negative during peak hours in Germany, according to an aside in a recent article about Elon Musk's photovoltaic empire-building in California. The meaning of the idea of negative electricity prices is that because of everyone installing solar panels on their roofs and being on the grid, during sunny afternoons (which are peak electricity consumption hours) these buildings are pushing more power onto the grid than they're drawing off of it. Normally, afternoons are peak consumption times, and so coal-fired plants are also scheduled to peak production at these hours. The result is that suddenly the German electricity market is flooded with excess electricity, and prices go negative. Imagine all these coal-fired generating plants suddenly having to pay to put their electricity on the grid. In general, Germany is turning into a literal powerhouse of alternative energy – which is very interesting vis-a-vis other political and economic trends, both in Europe and world-wide.

I've been doing a unit with my recently re-started debate class about the viability of nuclear power in South Korea, and part of that unit means discussing alternative energy sources as well – so this is worth reading and thinking about for me. Korea had placed some major bets over the last two decades on nuclear power, raising domestic dependency on nuclear power to around 30%, but the Fukushima disaster, so close-by, has been prompting some re-thinking.

So far, I've been impressed with the Korean nuclear regulatory authorities' commitment to safety – rather than go on blithely after Fukushima, they have closely inspected all their plants both from a physical and procedural standpoint, in a clear effort to prevent a "next Fukushima." The consequence has been a huge electricity shortage in Korea, with more than half the nuclear production facilities shut down for inspections and repairs and upgrades. People find this alarming, but in fact, this is exactly how nuclear power safety should proceed, to be as safe as possible. So I take much solace in it.

Nevertheless, the South Korean government has been examining the possibility of putting some of their eggs in other baskets, too. One possibility that is very promising here, on a peninsula surrounded on three sides by seawater, is tidal generation. The Shilwa project is an example of this.

The picture, below (taken in June), shows an "electricity holiday" (정기휴일) banner on a closed store that was across the street from my old apartment near Juyeop. Most stores have these government-mandated "electricity holidays," and it was the reason the electronics mart was mostly closed the other day when I tried to take Jacob there. I'm quite sceptical about their ability to enforce power conservation in this way, but it is indicative of the scale of the problem, anyway.


Powerholiday 002

Caveat: Visualizations

Cancer / Science & SciFi

One of the assistants in the radiotherapy department did me a favor. Last week I gave him a USB flash drive, and he put a bunch of images on that drive of my various scans. I got the USB flash drive back this morning.

Mostly, I was curious. Now, I have a lot of images – 2 full CT series (before and after), my pre-surgery MRI, my pre-surgery PET, and a “plan” image from the radiotherapy planning software.

To be honest, my lack of training is quickly manifest. I have no idea what I’m looking at. I can’t really even find my tumor in the “before” pictures. I have a guess, though. Here’s image 49 from my June 28th CT. See the bulge on the left side of my tongue (right side of image because it’s oriented “looking up the body”)?

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I added a red circle to where I think the tumor is. I could be totally wrong – I didn’t talk to the doctor directly about these images. But that bulge is slightly lighter in color and missing on the other side of my tongue. It matches to where I understood the tumor to be.

Here is a picture from the pre-radiotherapy “plan.” I think it’s based on a pre-surgery scan, so you can see a red oblong encircled area on the left side of my tongue area, again, and a sort of dark spot which I wonder might be a false-color selection of the tumor area.

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You can see where they’ve highlighted with lines and enclosing shapes the areas of soft tissue where they will go cancer-cell hunting with their ray-gun. It’s all very interesting. I wish I could be looking over their shoulders in the control booth when they drive the zap-o-matic.

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Caveat: and other yummy alright people in my right mind hey

Banalities & Journaling / Science & SciFi / The Wonders of Work

My friend Peter was playing with the auto-captioning feature on youtube, while watching the video I posted last week of my telling my cancer story to my 7th graders. Honestly, I had never played with this youtube feature before. I was vaguely aware of its existence but I had assumed that if the quality was anything like google translate, it wouldn’t be that useful.

I was right, but I’d underestimated its sheer entertainment value. Having watched my video in snippets with the captioning turned on, I’ve laughed several times.

Peter found and screenshotted one of the best, which he sent to me:

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I found this one, too, which matches up with me saying “I feel great.”

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I know the software is terrible, but seeing this nevertheless also induced some insecurities with respect to my enunciation, which of course is “re-learned” on my newly re-engineered tongue and vocal tract. I’ll keep working to improve on that. It’s important to me to provide comprehensible input to my students, and lately I’ve been worrying that they’re understanding even less than normal, and just being quiet out of pity or politeness. That’s a hard battle, in Korea.

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Caveat: Immobilization

Banalities & Journaling / Cancer / My Photos / Science & SciFi

I have DSL now, in my new apartment! Yay. Now, we just have to get the A/C repaired. Heh.
After my radiation this morning, I experienced a very severe dry mouth. That’s the worst symptom so far, that I’ve experienced that can be clearly attributed to the radiation therapy sessions. I bought some Gatorade, but since then the dry mouth keeps recurring – i.e., it doesn’t seem to respond to efforts at hydration. And it’s accompanied by a runny nose. Which, as Andrew observed, seems a bit unfair, to have both at the same time.
Anyway, it’s not so bad. I feel pretty high energy, still. I spent a good portion of this afternoon cleaning and scrubbing in my new apartment, while waiting for the internet guy to show up. And then he did, and I felt happy about that too because I communicated with him entirely in Korean. Not that there was much to say: I’m here waiting; come in; put it over there; does it work? etc.
Are you curious what I look like, encased in plastic and immobilized for the radiation? I was curious, so I had one of the technicians take some pictures of me after I was strapped in. He did a good job. Here I am. Don’t I look happy-as-a-buddha? Eheh.
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Caveat: S = k log W

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Science & SciFi

Boltzmann's entropy formula is S = k log W. I ran across this somewhere, and decided I wanted to understand it.

I failed to understand it, but I read about it for quite a while, skipping over the equations for the most part. Then I found some new blogs about various things and then I found this video about God and Nature instead, a blog called Preposterous Universe.

Caveat: Iain Banks RIP

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / Science & SciFi

pictureScottish author Iain Banks has died. I thought very highly of him – he was a talented writer of diverse abilities and genres. His novels, both in the “sci-fi” category and his “mainstream” ones (although I resist using those genre categories), are quite philosophical and intelligently written.

I first ran across him not that long ago – I recall distinctly that I acquired his novel The Algebraist in a Sydney bookshop in 2008, while shopping for something entertaining to read on my return flight to Korea. I ended up a fan and a “convert,” reading some half-dozen of his books over the next several years. I came to view Banks as the sort of novelist I would like to be, if I could get around to being a novelist.

Since my novel-reading slacked off so much after 2010, I’ve read less of his writing, obviously, but I feel inspired the next time I’m in a big bookstore to browse for another of his books.

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Caveat: Reading a Half-Made World

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Science & SciFi

I did something that haven’t done in many, many years: I read a book from front-to-back, linearly, in less than a week. I spent the greatest part of my unexpected day off, today, finishing it, having just started it on Monday morning – today was Korean Memorial Day, but with a late night at work last night and work bearing down on me again for tomorrow, I had nothing planned.

Furthermore, it was a novel.

Mostly, these days, I read history or philosophy. It’s been a very long time since I finished a novel or any piece of fiction (except some short stories) in less than half a year. Inevitably, at any given moment, I have maybe a dozen books “in progress,” and the majority of them never get finished at all in any conventional sense, because I read them the way some people surf the internet, essentially at random.

So I felt a little bit surprised, myself, with how I compulsively sat and paged my way through this 500-page book, not once looking ahead, not once skimming past a slow-moving section. This behavior may have had more to do with my circumstances: I continue to be painfully sick, thus not feeling healthy enough to go out exploring much; and I continue to feel a grinding dissatisfaction with my life as-it-is (e.g. with work and studies) that pushes me into a more widely-ranging and totalizing escapism than I’ve been wont to practice so much in recent years, maybe.

You’re wondering, what was the book that I read? I’m not even sure I can strongly recommend it. Superficially, it’s been characterized by others as a “steampunk fantasy western” which is basically a way to say it’s several genres mishmashed together. It had moments when it reminded me of something almost like one of the Latin American magic realists’ alternate worlds, or maybe those Nabokovian parallel Earths of lesser-known works like Ada or Pale Fire, but minus the pictureutterly unequalable virtuosity of that old Russian’s prose. It’s definitely not to the level of anything like those. Further, I agree with those reviewers who felt that the ending was rushed and unsatisfying, but I’m willing to forgive it.

There’s a lot going on politically and philosophically, and the protagonists are mostly unlikable – yet nevertheless ambivalently complicated, which I find makes a book more compelling and interesting in some strange way. I find myself wanting to see them self-destruct, or find some epiphanic solution to their problem, or save the world despite themselves. Then when they mostly fail I get to feel good about my ability to have judged them accurately.

That makes it sound terrible. It wasn’t. I liked it. I may even look for the sequel, allegedly recently released.

It was Felix Gilman’s The Half-Made World.

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Caveat: Pictures of the Electron Cloud

Found Online / Science & SciFi

Scientists have been taking pictures of hydrogen atoms. Or looking at  them, anyway, using imaging technology – it’s not really photography at this level, but I assume these false color images are based on data being collected, which makes them pictures at some level of abstraction – they’re graphs of what the atoms and their electron clouds look like. Let’s not forget that a photograph is a photograph – a graph of light.

Ku-xlarge

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Caveat: Entropy Engines

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Science & SciFi

I found this rather mind-blowing article at a website called Physics Buzz. It's about some theoretical modeling work being done in the field of AI (artificial intelligence). I can't begin to claim to really understand it – and that's just the layman's article, I wouldn't dream of trying to read the actual published paper. Apparently there are some interesting results emerging from a simulation program they call "Entropica" that suggest that just programming something to seek the "most possible future histories" (which sort of suggests something quantum-mechanical but I don't think it really does) leads to intelligent-seeming behavior. Is it really intelligent, if it's just trying to maximize entropy? Very weird and interesting. A few paragraphs from the summary:

Entropica's intelligent behavior emerges from the "physical process of trying to capture as many future histories as possible," said Wissner-Gross. Future histories represent the complete set of possible future outcomes available to a system at any given moment.

Wissner-Gross calls the concept at the center of the research "causal entropic forces." These forces are the motivation for intelligent behavior. They encourage a system to preserve as many future histories as possible. For example, in the cart-and-rod exercise, Entropica controls the cart to keep the rod upright. Allowing the rod to fall would drastically reduce the number of remaining future histories, or, in other words, lower the entropy of the cart-and-rod system. Keeping the rod upright maximizes the entropy. It maintains all future histories that can begin from that state, including those that require the cart to let the rod fall.

"The universe exists in the present state that it has right now. It can go off in lots of different directions. My proposal is that intelligence is a process that attempts to capture future histories," said Wissner-Gross.

I predict that if the research behind this article turns out to be "real" – in the sense that it isn't later falsified or found to be lacking in rigor – that it could be a more-than-incremental step in the development of AI (i.e. revolutionary).

Caveat: Evolving National Wealth

Found Online / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Science & SciFi

It's amazing the interesting things that can be done with survey data. This chart reposted at the I Love Charts tumblr (from a site called upworthy) is fascinating.

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I wonder where South Korea would be on this chart – I have a sort of suspicion it would be an outlier much like the US, and for similar cultural reasons – i.e. the prevalence of evangelical strains of Christianism.

I also would be curious to see the same chart with each US state separated out and treated as separate countries with their individual state-level survey results and varying individual state-GDP figures. Would there still be outliers? Or would you find each individual state cleaving closer to the curious curve that was discovered?

Caveat: A Consequence of Evolutionary Success

Found Online / Science & SciFi

The article at The Atlantic website begins with this striking observation: "More people die from suicide than from murder and war combined, throughout the world, every year." From there, the author, Brian Gabriel, develops the idea that depression may be a consequence of evolutionary success: which is to say, there is something positively adaptive about the genetics behind depression, related to both immune response and other, more behavioral results. Basically, if you're a member of hominid species that mostly dies of disease in youth, there may be an evolutionary advantage to reacting to stress by isolating yourself and sleeping all day.

This actually makes some sense. I'm not savvy enough to judge the bits about immune response – and I also seem to remember learning that depression actually lowers immune response – so I'm not sure how that works or what the interaction is.

Regardless, it's a very interesting, brief article.

Caveat: Total Precipitable Water GIF

Found Online / Science & SciFi

These things are very cool. Total atmospheric “precipitable water” (i.e. water suspended in the air) above each ocean point, presented by Univ of Wisconsin.

It’s animated – click on it.

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I found them here, after following a link from xkcd – of course (see previous post).

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Caveat: Incompetent Robots Make The Best Teachers

Found Online / Science & SciFi / Teaching & Methodology

pictureIt has been confirmed by research that incompetent robots make the best teachers – see this article at the New Scientist. This seems to make the task of automating my profession less challenging, and it may also explain the success of so many flesh-and-blood teachers, in a rather oblique way.

Well. We shall see.

What I’m listening to right now.

Space Buddha, “Mental Hotline.” Israeli psytrance.

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