Globally Detrimental Problem

A perpetual motion machine is a something that, once started, will continue to move forever without any further input; think about a swing that once you've pulled the seat back a few feet and let it go, rather than it swinging forward back and forth in ever decreasing arcs, before slowly coming to a rest back in the centre, the swing continues to swing back and forward, always swinging to the same height on each side, never loosing an inch, never coming to a stop, never needing another push to get it back up to speed.

In energy production terms, perpetual motion machines are the Holy Grail. Imagine a power plant that once you chucked in your first shovelful of coal, the big pistons started moving and never needed a second shovelful - it would basically be free energy forever after, no more coal burning, no more pollution; it would change the world.

Unfortunately for us, despite our best efforts, perpetual motion machines don't exist. Coal power stations still need more coal, oil plants still need more oil and my laptop still needs recharging.

This concept of "always more" is synonymous with how we think about our economies. Economically speaking, in order for a country's economy to be doing well, it needs to be growing; if it stops growing, well, the power plant breaks down and we have a recession. This growth is measured mainly using a single metric, Gross Domestic Product or GDP, which is the sum total of everything of monetary value that gets made or sold in a country in a given time period. At its most basic level, GDP is simply the amount of money spent in total by everyone and everything in that country over time (you, me, businesses, government, net exports etc).  There are other things that can be used to measure an economy, such as employment and investment levels, but GDP is really the primary factor.

When GDP is growing well, life in that country is generally a bit nicer - employment is up, wages are up, investment is up and so on. When GDP growth is slow you see the inverse happening - high unemployment, lower wages, investment spending cuts. Any of this sounding familiar? Guess which is happening at the moment. Our power plant requires more coal, or economically speaking, we're going to run out of steam.

Perhaps this wouldn't be so bad, globally speaking, if it were only happening to us, but as we know from the relentless torrent of financial doom and gloom in the news, this is happening pretty much everywhere. The US recently shook the financial world with the unprecedented downgrade of its financial rating from triple A as it teetered on the edge of defaulting on its $14 trillion debts, brought on in part by the insane wrangling of the Tea Party and the Eurozone continues to shudder as Greece and other struggling Euro nations have their empty accounts refilled by the more affluent likes of France and Germany, who aren't keen on a third round of ever more expensive I.O.U.s.

This global, or certainly Western, slowdown of GDP growth has been a long time in the making. Since the concept of measuring GDP was invented back in the mid-Thirties, after the massive post-World War Two boom in Western economies started to even out, economy growth rates started to slowly tail off. Over the next decades, on average, growth continued to slow, leaving growth rates between 2000 and 2007 at just 2.7%. When the 2008 financial collapse came about, economies had very little room to play with and since then we,ve seen all manner of innovative ways of trying to prop up the rapidly deflating GDP balloon.

So where does this leave us? Well, not anywhere particularly enjoyable. There seems to be two main schools of thought about how to resolve an economic slump and kickstart an economy, either scale back public spending and cut regulation and tax in the private sector to encourage business growth, as favoured by those on the right, or to raise taxes and increase spending on the public sector side, reinvesting in the economy, which is more favoured by those on the left. Both aim at a net increase in GDP over a given period.

To me though, although I certainly favour one of the above options over the other, the whole concept seems to be based on the premise that successful economies always have to be growing, that no matter what the "real" circumstances of that country are, it must always be doing more; equilibrium is death.

The idea that economic growth is a mandatory factor to success, or even normality, seems somewhat unsustainable. As mentioned above, historically speaking we've seen a general downward trend over the last 50 years or so anyway, so the fact that we now have to force our economies to squeeze out the last tenth of a percentage of growth in order to stay afloat seems not just counter intuitive but completely unrealistic.

Economic expansion, as we know, comes not without its costs; whether industrial expansion and its effect on the environment or financial expansion and its effects upon our debts, these ideas seem to smack of a 20th century ethos, of an unreal  so-called "golden era" of naivety that humanity could do whatever it wanted and consequences be damned. The generations before ours have exploited everything they could, have pushed the resources of our planet to the limit, almost to collapse. They have constructed a system so engrained with the military-industrial complex, with every aspect and every level built around a need to always do more, to always build more, to mine deeper, to consume greater, to create a bigger profit. To continue down this path without any kind of miracle cure leads only to a bleak future for those generations after ours; a planet ruined by climate change and environmental destruction, draconian states serving the interests of corporations over citizens, a disparity of wealth distribution so great that it will make the have-nots of today look like landed gentry by comparison. This is all great stuff for a dystopian sci-fi novel, but it's no way to plan our future.

Perhaps as we move into the 21st century, it is time we re-assessed the yardstick by which we measure ourselves, after all, GDP's drive for more is only a construct of our devising. To me it seems, like a lot of the mindset of the 20th century, that the thinking is we have is that because they system is set up in a certain way now, that to change it in any way seems impossible. Since its inception in the mid-30's, GDP may have been the driving force behind the way the world has run but, as we all know, the  world is a changing place; old technologies make way for newer ones, governments come and go, nations rise and fall.

Rather than base our world on the coal power plant that always requires more fuel, perhaps we should look to the perpetual motion machine as our inspiration, to the idea that once something has settled into something of an equilibrium, that it requires no further pushing to maintain speed, that perhaps the focus should be on the quality of the parts, rather than how many we can make. Maybe we should allow the more settled Western economies to reach that point of equilibrium, the seemingly inevitable point when growth simply stops and a country reaches what we could call its  "potential".

One such example of this is the tiny nation of Bhutan, which is the first nation to base its success on not GDP, but what it calls "Gross National Happiness". GNH attempts to define the success of a nation by determining the quality of life and social progress for its citizens, rather than the sum total of the country's financial worth. While you might initially think this may seem unquantifiable, GNH is actually based around many economic factors such as sustainable development and good governance; as we know from GDP, happy people tend to come from economically successful places, they have jobs, they have education, they have rights. GHN takes into account that the nation of Bhutan, with its 750,000 inhabitants, has a finite amount of resources and therefore once it has reached a moderate economic level, its focus became not that of relentless expansion but more internally focused on of well-being; that's not to say that GNH prevents growth, as increased happiness, as we said, has massive related economic impact, but that growth no longer becomes the only measure of success.

That's not to suggest that GNH is the final answer to the GDP problem, there are several other main contenders out there for measuring economics, for instance the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) measures economic factors of sustainability and welfare of the nation in a similar way to GNH but retains several of the growth-based metrics of GDP at the same time. One of the main drawbacks of both GNH and GPI is their susceptibility to political influence (to measure happiness, you must first define what happiness is) but one would perhaps naively hope that at a global level that a general definition could be found.

It's my view that over the first half of this century, the world will change a great deal. Perhaps by refocusing the way we measure our success at a global level, we can ensure that some of that change will be for the better. Perhaps the first perpetual motion machine should be not one that produces energy and powers our homes, but one that powers our thinking, that drives our achievements, one that provides a sustainable future for the generations after ours.

Hello, well done if you made it this far, much appreciated! As I've put this post together using my phone, there are no links included in the above text; I assure you there are some, I've not just made it all up! I'll put them in when I'm next near an actual computer. I hear there's this great website called Google which is full of links to useful information, so you should try that in the mean time. Until then, yours, always looking forward (uncertainly), Luke.

ps. If you wanted to retweet / share this post while you're at it, that'd be most appreciated too...

Multiversey Star Parks

Yesterday, the BBC science news website ran a story about how the a study of the cosmic microwave background, which is basically the very faint echo of the Big Bang that reverberates around through space, has added significant weight to the theory that our universe is one of many others and exists in a kind of "multiverse".

Up until now, the multiverse theory has been just a theory, albeit one that is popular in modern physics, but as you can imagine, is pretty hard to test for - mainly because it was generally thought that in order to find out if there was anything outside our universe, we'd have to somehow be able to actually see outside it. As we already know, we can't even see across to the other side of the Universe, as light from there would not yet have had time to travel all the way to us (which, considering the Universe is 13.7 billion years old, means that that is an unbelievably large distance) and that the other side of our universe is accelerating away in the opposite direction doesn't help much either. So, not knowing where the edge of our universe is is one problem, but even if we knew that, how you get beyond there is anyone's guess and probably impossible, so there's not really much chance we're going to see what's outside and if there's other universes just hanging around out there, putting out their own universey vibe.

The general idea behind the multiverse theory is that other universes exist in their own bubbles of space and time, just like ours, and as these universes have popped in and out of existence, if they're nearby, they occasionally bump into ours. It's these collisions, and the patterns they may leave in the cosmic microwave background, that may enable us to test whether these other universes exist or not.

The current tests suggest that there may indeed be these patterns in the CMB but more data is needed before any more solid conclusions can be drawn. Next in line to run some tests is the cutting-edge Planck space telescope, which can measure the CMB in far greater detail, but results won't be available until 2013 so we're going to have to wait 'til then to find out more (well, I guess we've waited this long, so what's another 18 months...).

So far, so good. I think we're all relatively alright with the idea of other universes as a general concept, it's just extrapolating the scale up another level - our planet near other planets, our solar systems near other solar systems, our galaxy near other galaxies - why not more universes? It does tend to make you think "then what?" or "so what are those universes in?", but it seems that those might be the wrong kind of questions.

Quite reasonably, we tend to think that our universe is a big place, full of things, all bundled in there in a nice 3D kind of way. It turns out that this may be completely wrong; our universe may in fact be a hologram.

Now, unlike with multiverses, this is not quite as easy to explain so I'll skip over most of the detail and try and get the main points.

If you imagine a plain white ball and onto that ball you cleverly projected an image of a man onto it so that it looked like the man was inside the ball. Next, when you rotate the ball, the projection also makes it look like the man is rotating at the same rate so, no matter how you move the ball, it always looks like there's a man inside it, even though you know there isn't. If you did this well enough, it would be impossible to tell whether you were really looking at a man in a ball or a projection of a man in a ball. By using the projection of the man, we have essentially encoded the surface of the ball with all of the information that our eyes need to be convinced they're actually seeing a man in the ball, even though they're not.

This is a bit like how the hologram theory suggests the Universe might work, that we are the man in the ball. From our perspective, inside the ball, you'd think we wouldn't be able to tell whether we were really in the ball or just a projection on the outside - we're just the man in the ball - but it may be emerging that we've found out a way to actually test this without having to step outside the ball (or Universe, which as we said before was probably impossible).

The problem with the man in a ball analogy is that it would actually be impossible to make the projection absolutely perfect, that the surface of the ball couldn't quite contain enough information on its 2D surface to render the 3D man perfectly. For the Universe, the same should be true, that if we are a projection on the outside of the Universe, we should be able to tell if we can find any points at which the 3D universe isn't perfectly rendered.

Now, we know that Spacetime, the thing that makes up our physical universe, is grainy, a bit like pixels on a screen - while the picture looks fine and mulitcoloured mostly, if you got really close you could see the individual pixels which would all be one colour each. By undertanding the Spacetime is made up of these small pixels, we know that these must be the smallest things can get, as they're the most basic building blocks of our physical universe.

The problem is that in an experiment in Germany in 2008, a super-sensitive motion detector, looking at gravitational waves, picked up measurements that were actually smaller than it should be possible to actually detect. These measurements were a bit of a fluke, so now require their own dedicated tests to confirm, but by suggesting that there's something smaller than the building blocks of Spacetime, this adds weight to the theory that we're the projected version of the man in the ball, rather than a real one. If we're the projected version, then we're not really inside the ball at all, we're information about the man, projected onto the 2D surface on the outside.

A bit lost? Fair enough, I don't really get it either. This is head melting stuff; that we're a 2D projection of ourselves (as well as everything else) on the surface of the Universe, somewhere about 42 billion light years over there, is outstandingly high-concept stuff. For the most part, for us, it wouldn't matter either way if were "real" or a hologram, as we've seemed to get on mostly fine so far.

I'm not that convinced that hologram theory will hold up to much in the end; to me it seems that perhaps our understanding of the facts we think we know are more likely to be incorrect than the more esoteric hologram suggestion. This all heads merrily off down Stephen Hawking heavy physics string theory and M-theory routes so we're all pretty out of our depths from here on in.

In conclusion: Space is mental. The end.

All The News In The World

I've been trying to write this post now for nearly two weeks and, frankly, it's been impossible.

As anyone who's not been hiding down a hole recently will know, Britain is currently going through some rather dramatic revelations regarding, largely, illegal phone hacking undertaken by our then best selling Sunday tabloid "newspaper" The News of the World. This has, at the time of writing, resulted in the shock closure of said 'paper, the arrest of ex-editor and ex-Head of Communications for the Conservative Party, Andy Coulson, the resignation of the NotW's ex-editor and parent company News International's CEO, Rebekah Brooks, FBI investigations into State-side phone hacking, huge payoffs signed off by Murdoch junior, the complete replacement of the Press Complaints Commission and two judge-led inquiries, one into the general hacking and police payments scandal and another into the culture and ethics of the British media.*Phew*

In fact, it turns out that even just what I've written there is now already out of date. I just Googled "phone hacking arrests" and it turns out Rebekah Brooks has now been arrested too. 53 minutes ago and counting. Basically, no matter how fast I type, I have to bear in mind that this is already a historical document. If you're reading this on Monday, you might as well be reading the Dead Sea Scrolls.

With such dramatic news conditions taking place, in which the expression "breaking news" has started to lose all meaning - red hot stories have about 30 minutes until they're reduced to room temperature by the next slab of sizzling revelations - it leaves the more casual opiner (i.e. those of us not doing this for a living) woefully behind the curve to get digital pen onto virtual paper before the world has moved on. In the hour or so that I get of a lunchtime at work, I usually try and pull together useful links and quotes and such for the next post; this week, most of my notes were irrelevant by home time.

It's not just me though, anyone who reads a daily newspaper must be feeling the same. I'd often catch the headlines of The Metro on the way in to work, only to find that by the time I'd had a look at the BBC website, The Metro was already yesterday's news. Flicking through my mate's daily copy of The Guardian, who were responsible for breaking most of this story, seemed oddly quaint compared to the online onslaught.

To me it seems kind of ironic that a relentless pace of a news story about the conduct of newspapers is demonstrating the slow transition to irrelevance that many newspapers now face. Getting the initial 'scoop' aside, once a story is out in the wild, once daily paper-printed updates seem somewhat archaic. This week I imagine journalists must have been submitting their articles of an evening, praying that nothing new broke that either required a significant late-night rewrite or simply made the whole thing seem like ancient history before people started buying a copy in the morning.

The online spread of information is delivered in minutes, even seconds; whether it's Guardian journo George Monboit's or C4's Jon Snow's blogs, or Alistair Campbell's or John Prescott's instantly tweeted commentary, the latest breaking news is there at your fingertips just as quick as you can search. 24-hour news channels pump out updates with mechanical regularity, looping the coverage round and round, updating and amending the narrative as it happens.

So where does this leave the (real) newspapers? Do we still need them or are they, like their news stories, rapidly heading out of date?

To me it seems that the printed press has three distinct advantages: its ability to break stories by investing time and money into its journalists, the in-depth analysis they have room to provide and the fact that by being a physical medium it presents all the information in the same place. The BBC may tell you all the same facts, but they won't give you much of the back story or three different people's opinions while they're at it, or not usually without watching three different programs. Online reporting may be first off the blocks, but they can't guarantee the weight of impact that the morning press can (or perhaps not yet). Most online breaking news is also intended to have a very short shelf life, hastily written in the race to be first, never intended to set the world alight with its insight; similarly if it doesn't make the homepage there's a greatly reduced chance it will get read at all. Journalist's personal blogs are good swift opinion, but always seem mindful of saving the best for their more lucrative main events; those sites that do specialise in more heavyweight analysis, like Truthdig for instance, also seem slightly restricted by it, sacrificing fluidity of reporting for depth of content.

So while I think the printed press is not without its limitations, it still holds its niche in its ability to provide both ends of the spectrum in one handy format. The problem for their future, it seems, may not just lie with the delivery of the content, but probably more in the time that people can dedicate to reading it. People aren't buying newspapers because they don't want to read one, they're not buying them because they don't have time.

It's hard for me to say what it was like 20 years ago, being 10 and not overly interested in the news at the time, and why the pace of life has supposedly increased as such that we can't enjoy a newspaper every day. Perhaps there are more distractions today, more things vying for our attention that we feel sparing a whole 30 minutes or an hour with The Independent is too much. Probably its more likely that we pick up the basics from The Metro, more news through osmosis from the internet throughout the day and top up with Channel 4 News over dinner to warrant any extra time dedicated to a whole other newspaper (cynics might suggest that perhaps a greater percentage of the population would prefer to top up with Hollyoaks and the problem lies down that road instead).

Whatever the true reason for the decline of (real) newspapers, I think that they still currently provide news in a way, both content and delivery-wise, that isn't quite available elsewhere. If we are moving to a print-news free world, I think that we should be careful not to lose more than we gain. I'm not saying that we should all buy papers we don't want or read, but that perhaps those newspapers or other similar services need to think about that gap in the online market and exploit it.

As for Rebekah Brooks' arrest all those paragraphs before, that was hours ago now. A quick Google already shows thousands of links, blogs, tweets and articles offering their own slant on the event; the first part of my post is already history. What do you think I'll do now, wait for tomorrow's papers to catch up on the facts or have a look on Twitter and see what else has happened since?

All Your Secrets Are Belong To Us

On Thursday night, the hacker collective Anonymous, as part of their Antisec campaign, released the third installment of their Chinga La Migra attack on the police force of Arizona. The hack released huge volumes of the officer's personal information and email history - some of which contained extremely embarrassing content for the force, including racist remarks about torturing terror suspects, anti-Obama propaganda and the police force's efforts to spin the fact they were employing a convicted sex offender - as well as terrorising and shutting down a number of their websites.

The Chinga La Migra (which loosely translates as "Fuck the Border Patrol") hacks are a direct response to what Anonymous are calling the "racial profiling anti-immigrant police state that is Arizona", who recently introduced the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, a very controversial anti-illegal immigration policy which requires all aliens over the age of 14 to register with the US government and carry identification with them at all times. As you can imagine, this has led to numerous racially tense situations with US citizens from racial minority backgrouds being arrested as "illegal immigrants" as they didn't happen to have documentation proving they were US citizens with them at the time; the assumption here being "guily until proven innocent".

This particular online attack was initiated by the Anonymous splinter group LulzSec, short for Lulz Security, six hackers who decided to run a 50 day campaign of "high-quality entertainment at your expense". It was LulzSec who were famously responsible for bringing down the Sony Playstation Network, claiming to have comprimised the usernames, email addreses and passwords for over one million PSN accounts (although Sony claims it was far less). The Sony hack was claimed to be in response to Sony's legal action against George Holz for cracking the allegedly watertight Playstation 3.

LulzSec went on to compromise and steal data from a raft of corporate and government databases and post it online, along with a basic description of how easy it was for them to invade the local system, the main objective of which being to embarrass the victim company by exposing their often extremelty weak security. This "grey hat" hacking doesn't aim to maliciously exploit the data it steals, or use it for personal gain (like black hat hacking) but does often break the law in order to expose the holes in the company's system's security (unlike white hat hackers, who are often security consultants hired directly by the company).

This kind of "hacktivism" isn't really a new thing but LulzSec's activities have gained it a lot of exposure in the media spotlight both for the sheer scale of their exposures and the witty delivery of the results in their releases and Twitter feed, mainly by their spokesperson, Topiary (not really what you'd expect in a hacker name - I don't imagine that the Matrix would have had the same impact if when Keanu Reeves is fighting Hugo Weaving, the dialogue goes: (Smith) "Goodbye, Mr Anderson", (Reeves) "My....name...is...Topiary!"). After Sony was brought down, certainly in the UK, LulzSec was making its way onto mainstream news programs - Channel 4 News even ran a whole article on them - always amusing to see their logo used in a serious report.

The LulzSec Logo

At the end of the 50 day LulzSec lifespan, LulzSec called it quits and its six members merged back into the anonymous Anonymous horde, citing a new combined approach to a larger campaign, Operation Anti-Security, or AntiSec. AntiSec's aims follow the initial examples set out by LulzSec but with a much more politicised agenda, specifically targetting Government agencies, corporations and banks and utilising the combined power of Anonymous rather than the limited resources of just the six LulzSec members.

Operation AntiSec has been running for nearly two weeks now and largely it's living up to its word, causing myriad problems online, taking down both the Brazilian and Chinese government's websites, the US Navy website and dumping 12,000 usernames, email addresses and passwords from the NATO online bookshop. Some of their corporate targets have seemed, to me at least, more opportunistic than particularly interested in direct protest, with Disney, EMI, Universal Music and the online game Battlefield Heroes all coming under fire.

Whilst engaging with Anonymous in Operation AntiSec has clearly given LulzSec's activities a number of benefits, it also could be seen as something of a retreat, or at least a regrouping. Media claims that the arrested Essex-based hacker Ryan Cleary was a core LulzSec member seem to have been somewhat exaggerated as although the MET charged him under the Computer Misuse Act for DDOS attacks on the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the IFPI, the SOCA attack's dates line up with LulzSec's attacks but the IFPI charges date back to November 2010 - way before LulzSec even existed, as they themselves pointed out via Twitter (they also seem to claim that Cleary wasn't part of their attack on SOCA but he may picked up on what they were doing and joined in). Whether Cleary was a LulzSec member or affiliate or not, it's fairly obvious that the six members of the team must have been starting to feel the heat from their actions, with both police forces and other rival hacker groups such as TeaMp0isoN (seriously) racing to identify them. By slipping back into the blanket anonymity of Anonymous, LulzSec have perhaps wisely hidden themselves, at least for now, from any returning fire.

Operation AntiSec seems to now be gaining some further momentum and expanding its influence, with plans for a WikiLeaks-style website, based on stolen rather than leaked material, a kind of HackerLeaks if you like. This shows something of a maturing attitude from the initial "just for the Lulz" approach and may prove to be a bigger thorn in the side of the authorities than WikiLeaks itself. While WikiLeaks had.its spokesman and media friendly face in the form of Julian Assange, he was also their easiest and most obvious target. Conspiracy theorists would tell you that the rape charges eventually brought against Assange were a meticulously planned "honeytrap" to bring down WikiLeaks; whether that's true or not, Anonymous certainly has no such frontman to target.

What I think LulzSec realised, in the support for their actions from the general online population, is that in Operation AntiSec, they could galvanise the online community under the blanket banner of Anonymous to enact a new level of protest. As I stated before, there's nothing that new in what they're actually doing but it's just never been done on such a massive and mainstream scale before.

In our Western democracies, it's been proven multiple times in recent years that normal forms of protest are becoming less and less effective. As stated on Wikipedia, in early 2003, some sources claim that up to 36 million people across the globe took part in almost 3,000 protests against the Iraq war and yet our governments still went ahead with their plans. Similarly in March of this year, anywhere between a quarter and a half a million people came to London to protest against our Coalition government's proposed spending cuts and were met with almost complete indifference from those in charge. The media agencies covering the recent London protests chose to spend their time reporting on the small amount of breakaway violence that occurred, whilst the police force imposed heavy handed "kettling" tactics against numerous peaceful but determined groups.

In the form of protest that Operation AntiSec aim to undertake, you could argue that the few anonymous individuals involved, rather than the millions that marched, could have more power in influencing government through inciting voters via exposures of corruption and leaked or stolen documentation. In taking down governmental websites and databases they continue to prove that they're one step ahead, both strategically and technically than their targets, although its harder to see the same levels of support across the population for similar attacks against online games companies like Battlefield Heroes or multinational record companies battling bankruptcy like EMI. For me, Operation AntiSec needs to focus its efforts on more legitimate targets in order to widen its support; the Chinga La Migra hacks are an undeniably powerful political statement, the more of which we see, the strong AntiSec's influence will grow.

However you choose to classify the propagators of Operation AntiSec: as a nuisance or as terrorists, as self-indulgent geeks or as revolutionaries, they are capable of showing us something - that sometimes, it's not the actions of the many that make the difference, it's the actions of the few. They're capable of being more than the sum of their parts; they're a movement, they're a force for change, fighting to show us that it's not this government or that corporation that's the problem, that the problem is the system itself.

Back in 1995 there was an Angelina Jolie film called Hackers, in which a small group of (unrealistically attractive) computer nerds saved the planet. Being 15 at the time, I obviously loved it and its naively optimistic view of the world (and still do). Operation AntiSec isn't as glamourous, doesn't involve Angelina Jolie and presumably doesn't involve as much bad CGI, but will it change the world? Maybe. Even if it's just a little bit.

President Bachmann

Last Monday, the Republican Party of America set out it's seven potential candidates to challenge Barack Obama at the Presidential election in 2012 in a warm up debate in New Hampshire. Thrusting her way into the limelight, the percieved big winner of the debate was Michele Bachmann. Bachmann's performance was reportedly slick, strategic and full of stage presence; a strong-minded, attractive and resolutely American-blooded woman, the current darling of the Tea Party and second to only Sarah Palin in their crazy Fox News universe.

Palin, of course, has so far neglected to stand for the forthcoming election and although you might think that's a good thing, Palin is such a devisive figure in the States, that many think although she'd get the backing of the more right-wing half of the GOP demographic audience, that the more moderate Republicans would abandon ship, leaving Obama with a clear path to victory. Palin might very well be the very worst chance the Republicans have to regain the seat behind the desk in the Oval Office.

It's also interesting to discover that recently, for the first time, more than fifty percent of Republicans support the creation of a new third US political party, most likely in the form of the separation of the Tea Party from its Republican Party host. Over sixty percent of Tea Partiers would prefer a three party system and it's not hard to imagine that a lot of the more moderate Republicans are equally frustrated in being lumped in with the more extreme elements of their party.

However, splitting the Republican party down the middle has some very obvious downsides for them, namely that no one is splitting up the Democrats too. If the Tea Party decides to go it alone, then there are serious concerns from within the GOP that Obama could simply coast to the finish next November. More bad news for the Grand Old Party then.

So this leaves us with the possibility of a Bachmman / Obama contest in 2012 and, as many of you would probably agree, right now the stakes could not be higher. In order for any of us to stand a chance in the forthcoming century, we need forward thinking, modernist leaders withn sound econonimic and scientific understanding of the world, people willing to push things forward rather then letting them slip into reverse. Although you might agree that in some respects Obama might not represent enough of those things or always endorse or enforce them in ways we might wish, Bachmann doesn't represent any. Bachmann is, in my opinion, not just a bad choice, she's frankly a dangerous one.

The possiblity of President Bachmann, or maybe just even her existence, prompted Truthdig's columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr to pangs of "nostalgia for Bush". Based on his previous articles and has he himself states, that's not something he ever expected to have.

Bachmann has already called for the closure of the US's Environmental Protection Agency (created by Republicans, actually) as part of her swathe of spending cuts and obviously diametrically opposes the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare, as she'd call it) and pretty much every other form of government aid as "socialism". You could argue that this is just down to politics though and that sacrifices have to be made somewhere; the environment and healthcare might not be the first choice of everyone but they're usually fairly close when it comes to the Right getting to weald the spending cleaver (our NHS anyone?). Hoever, I think there's something far more worrying about hearing it come from Bachmann - the fact that she's a hardline fundamentalist Christian (described by possibly my favourite website - Conservapedia - as a "Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod").

This puts Bachmann firmly into the climate change denying Creationist camp, something she's gone on record about several times. In 2006 she claimed that “there is a controversy among scientists about whether evolution is a fact… hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel prizes, believe in intelligent design.”, which as the linked site rightly points out, is so completely false it's borderline farcical. She's spoken out similarly fantastically incorrect fashion about Global Warming on several occasions too, claiming as recently as 2009 that “[T]here isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas. There isn’t one such study because carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas, it is a harmless gas. Carbon dioxide is natural. It is not harmful. It is part of Earth’s life cycle.”. Needless to say Bachmann is also pro-life and pro-guns (always a bewilderingly illogical combination, I think).

To me, this kind of denial-based reasoning, the hide-your-head-in-the-sand attitude, is the most terrifying aspect of Bachmann. Her extreme religious views propel her forward, certain under the knowledge that she is correct because God tells her she is. I find it very hard to believe that she would ever even bother listening to a reasoned scientific argument that didn't already support one of the views she already holds. In September of this year, we'll be remember how religious fundamentalism flew some planes into a building and killed a whole load of people; if Bachmann's fundamentalism takes the Presidency next year, I am confident we will see a much bigger crash and a much more severe collapse, of which the fallout will not just kill a few thousand but that its effects will be epochal. We're well known to be on the brink of a paradigm shift in the world; it's a knife edge, one last chance to step back from the void; with Bachmann, the Americans seriously risk seeing the ground give out beneath both them and us.

That said though, I have hope that the American's are simply not that stupid. We, over here in the jostling, secular world of Europe, often tend to regard our US cousins with a fairly dim view when it comes to religion. We can't really understand how middle America obsesses over Christian values, how their nation struggles with separating morality and rationality from religion, how they give face time to Fred Phelps and Fox News. The nearest we get to religious interference is when a bishop has a bit of a go at a few Coalition policies and even then most of us, even the non-religious, respect the fact that although he's a holy man, he's also talking about non-religious things; we might not agree with Dr Rowan Williams about his his choice of deities, but that doesn't mean we can't agree with him about anything else.

I suppose the hope comes from facts like the potential divide looming in the Republican party. We have to hope that those elements that have arisen to power within the GOP remain cowed by the moderates on whose votes they depend. We have to hope that the moderates see through the smokescreens and outright lies to see exactly who and what they're voting for. If I had to offer any advice, I would call that moderate Republicans should stand up and defy this new wave of ridiculous Tea Party candidacy, they should vote with their voices, their actions and frankly, their votes. Maybe they should vote Obama, just to show Bachmann how it really is.

Dionne is right when he says that against such candidates, one would wish for the return of Bush. He may have invaded Iraq because "God told him to", but at least we weren't very worried that he might actively be seeking the End Times.

Oh yes, one last stat I forgot to add in, the one that inspired this whole article actually... As you'll remember we recently managed to avoid 21st May's notably absent Rapture, as prophecised by the US televangelist Harold Camping. A recent national poll of the GOP primary voters revelead that although Bachmann at the time was only supported by nine percent of the pollsters, a staggering thirty-five percent of them believed the Rapture was really going to happen. Compare that will Palin, who was second place for potential Rapturees (is that a word?) who was way down at seventeen (which is still obviously worrying).

Perhaps we should have a little more faith, if you like (small "f"), in our more sensible American cousins. Clearly, most of them thought the idea of the Rapture was ridiculous and hopefully enough of them will think Bachmann is too. I couldn't name you a single person I know that would come out in defence of Bachmann and I'm sure if I was in America that would still be the case.

Really though, America, it's time to pull your socks up. This kind of thing is going too far.

Antimatter Anticertainly

So this week, as you may have read in the paper, some rather clever fellows at CERN have managed to create some anti-hydrogen and hang onto it for about fifteen minutes.

Anti-hydrogen is the antimatter equivalent of hydrogen (I think you'd probably already worked that out) and, in this instance, was created by getting some positrons (which are anti-electrons) to orbit some antiprotons, thus creating said anti-hydrogen. This isn't the first time this has been done but what's remarkable about this instance is that they held on to them for so long - fifteen minutes is literally ages in atomic physics terms.

As I understand it, as matter and antimatter are true opposites, if they both exist in the same place they will cancel each other out. Think of it a bit like having +1 and -1 in an equation; if you put them together, you just end up with zero. Therefore, one of the main gists of CERN's experiment will ultimately be to determine why we live in a universe with so much matter in it, when the Big Bang happened and huge equal  amounts of matter and antimatter were created, why was so much matter left over afterwards (when they should have added up to zero and left nothing)?

Anyway, I watched a BBC news article about this, loosely explaining the above, with helpful on-screen magic like turning half of the picture to negative colours when explaining antimatter. Well, I say helpful but I actually mean not really very helpful at all.

Reading back over what I've written above, it just makes me think how virtually impossible this sort of thing is to understand. When the BBC demonstrate antimatter as being a bit like a negative colour screen, or I compare it to plus and minus one, you think "yes, ok, I get it" but in reality it's nothing like either of those things. I can get my head round the facts presented and even understand them in a (moderately) scientific kind of way but what I can't do is relate them in any way to anything I can actually comprehend.

For example, let's take an obvious question: what does antimatter look like? You would imagine the opposite of matter to look like nothing, like a vacuum; something and nothing are opposites, right? Wrong. Antimatter plus matter equals nothing, so what we were saying before is that we know what the +1 and zero parts look like but not the -1 part.

Now, if I say that mathematically I understand the concept of minus one, but I'm fine with the fact you can't have, say, minus one apples in your hand so this is a bit like antimatter I'd be wrong again. Antimatter is a physical thing and given enough of it you could theoretically hold it in your hand, test tube or Large Hadron Collider. If it is a thing, what does it look like?

Now I know I'm jumping the gun here and we can't really be expecting lovely press shots of a substance we created in super-micro amounts for a matter of minutes. My point is that when we get on to topics like this, cutting edge sciences and so on, is that there's no real way to explain them in layman's terms.

The LHC also rustled up something called quark-gluon plasma this week too. This stuff is the densest material we've ever created; denser than a neutron star and a hundred thousand times hotter than the centre of the sun, the only things we think may be more dense are black holes; a cubic centimeter of quark-gluon plasma would weigh around forty billion tons. Great stuff, anyone understand that? Not really.

(Which kind of reminds me of watching The World's Strongest Man and the commentator saying that the giant rock the ridiculously massive bloke has just picked up weighs "as much as two baby rhinos" or "a chest freezer full of food". Do I know how much those things weigh? Of course not. A lot?)

The problem is, I guess, that in science the numbers are getting so big or small, the concepts so esoteric and exotic and the background understanding required becomes more deep or specialised, that it's increasingly difficult trying to make these things into palatable subjects for consumption by normal people.

My concern is that as cutting edge science moves steadily off over the horizon, normal people will lose sight of why it's important. I've said it before about climate science but I think it applies across the board; science and scientists need to think about the way they communicate about what they're doing and why and how it might affect the rest of us.

Perhaps antimatter is a harsh example; it's probably up there with the most complicated things we've ever done. Perhaps science is already doing a remarkable job in even distilling that understanding down to a point where particularly interested people like me can write about it.

I love all this stuff and I find it genuinely engaging, interesting, meaningful and important and I think other people should too. I just don't think you should have to be a particle physicist first.

NB. Just in case you were wondering, I've just written this whole post using my phone. This is a) pretty cool, b) quite difficult and c) has taken absolutely ages. Any nonsensical sections, bad spelling or wild grammar should be forgiven until such time as I've looked at it on a proper screen!

Utopia or Dystopia?

Last night I was back at the British Library for another Out of this World talk, this time discussing ‘Utopias and Other Worlds’, with a panel consisting of Gregory Claeys, Professor of the History of Political Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London, and the authors Francis Spufford and Iain M. Banks (with an M, as he was there with his sci-fi hat on…). Overall, it was a bit more of a generalised discussion of the topic than some of the previous Out of this World talks but overall it focused on what utopias and dystopias are, why we have them and how they’re reflected in literature, especially science fiction.

As we got round to audience questions, I posed the panel a question around the nature of utopias and dystopias, a kind of thought experiment to see which way they’d go on a given potential outcome of our society. It went a little something like this (a little less eloquently at the time, but forgive me my poetic license):

“Within the next one hundred to two hundred years, Humanity continues down its current path of environmental exploitation and destruction, leading to a catastrophic event which renders the planet largely inhospitable to human life. At the same time, we also invent a way in which to upload our conscious thought onto computers and, merging with artificial intelligences and so forth, create a digital paradise in which the “surviving” members of the human race can live on forever in total happiness, regardless of the damage done to the outside world. Would you say this was a utopia or dystopia?”

All the panel were in agreement that this scenario would be a dystopia, based on the fact that we’d caused widespread destruction to the planet and a significant proportion of humanity, mainly the poorer half, will have perished en route. Francis Spufford also argued that it would be a dystopia because humanity had lost all physical, or real, interactions with the outside world and each other and Banks, quite rightly, pointed out that those who did survive would just be total bastards. Claeys highlighted some of the gaps in my question and how it took a broad brush to a plethora of issues, about which he’s obviously correct but a) I thought this up about 30 seconds before I asked it, so give me a break and b) it’s my question, so I can assume whatever I like anyway.

Now, you’d probably agree with all of the above points (and so do I for the most part) but I think that although we may not like the circumstances in the situation’s arrival, it doesn’t mean that we can’t argue that it is a utopia. My basic justification for this is that the people who do survive get to live in a paradise and although it’s potentially a paradise for the few at the sacrifice of the many, it is still a paradise (although I didn’t actually specify in the question that we hadn’t managed to upload everyone before said disaster).

In Banks’ own utopia, the Culture, he talks about the fact that his vast civilisation made many mistakes along the journey to being the galaxy spanning wonderland that it is. Who’s to say that similar situations to the one above wasn’t one of them (apart from Banks, obviously)? You can’t make an omelette… right?

I suppose the definition of a utopia is that it’s defined by those outside that are perceiving it as such, rather than the theoretical (or otherwise) individuals who live in it. If you’re already living in one person’s idea of a utopia then the likelihood is that your idea of a utopia is somewhere else that you perceive to be better than your own situation. We currently live in a utopia by the standards of the entire of human history, however that doesn’t mean that we have to think it’s paradise. In my proposed world, those citizens of the digital paradise live in an all encompassing heaven, so by the assumptions set in the question, therefore they must live in a utopia of sorts from our perspective.

Also, I don’t think that dismissing their perception of “fake” reality as being any less true than our “real” one counts for much either way as, as is often spelled out in many science fiction novels, reality tends to be a blurry thing once you have more than one (am I a man dreaming of a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of a man, for instance).

In summary, I think that I agree that all of the panellist’s main points about the situation that I laid out are totally valid and obviously the situation is a bad one, although I have trouble labelling it as either a utopia or dystopia though as I think it fails to be either. The situation is awful by nature’s standards, but humanity continues in a form (let’s not get into digital animals) so the situation isn’t a total nightmare scenario. If we assume that everyone got “copied over” at the start, then on a human scale the loss is a trade of one perception of reality for another. A dystopia for the natural world then, perhaps?

The citizens still have to live with the guilt of their actions from the previous “reality” and their circumstances are still under threat from external “real” forces, earthquakes etc, so the paradise is definitely tainted in some aspects. Mankind has a reasonably short memory for guilt though so perhaps they’ll get over it (well, I guess that goes with death, so with immortal computer people, who knows?). Maybe they’ll invent a way to get back “out” into the real world eventually and sort things out.

Ultimately, it goes without saying that I’m not suggesting we pursue the proposed course of action but I think that it’s an interesting way of showing that perhaps from some perspectives a utopia or dystopia isn’t necessarily what we might normally assume it is.

I do agree with Banks though, those digital citizens would definitely be total bastards.