Are We a Blog? oh the irony....

Oh the irony. I decided it was time to post another thought which has occurred to me for some time, and probably to many others, and was confronted with a deliciously ironic search result.

To start with - the thought in question is simply this:

Is it not possible that "we" (the reason for the "quotes" will become obvious very soon) are already in communication with alien intelligence?

When I say "we" what I mean is "we" as a planetary phenomenon - not just the human race using machines to search for messages and to send their own specific messages, but "we" as part of a biosphere, and "we" as including the machines we have deployed. And could not the entirety of the transmissions and emissions that our planet now produces constitute deliberate messages to other similar "beings"?

E.O.Wilson has argued strongly that ants are best understood as a superorganism - his point is that the behavior of individual ants is insufficient to describe the richness of the behavioral activities of ant colonies as a whole.

This argument could be applied to our 6.69 billion strong colony of humans, or to the five million trillion trillion bacteria thought to exist in and on earth, but for the purposes of my position the colony i am thinking of consists of a combination of the both, plus everything in between, plus our machines.

Of course to argue that the entire biosphere merits consideration as a single entity is not new, but to consider it as one capable of communication may be. In fact it's even more contentious than E.O.Wilson's position - he has spent decades peering at ants whereas I am lounging in my musty old philosophers' arm chair, fumbling down the back for loose change. But bear with me.

Consider for a moment our broadcasts as encoded information about a biosphere - not just about humans and their interests, but both directly and incidentally about the nature of the earth as whole - it includes data on gravitational strength, biological history, chemical composition and more. In short, the human oeuvre is a holographic representation of the planetary reality, deeply compressed and only just beginning to be transmitted as data.

But there is more data than just what we capture in our own messages - there is (undoubtedly) data in the patterns of interaction between all of the systems of our biosphere which are much more abstract. and perhaps all the parts of this earth system I am talking about come together to create a total much, much greater, one which is rich enough to in fact have a sentience capable of information processing and information creation at a level utterly unintelligible to us. The ebbs and flows of the ages, the seasons, the animal kingdoms, air traffic, and the TV schedule may all work in combination to process data and to think about things entirely alien to individual human consciousness. And it may want to make its opinions on these obscure matters known, and even to ask questions.

If this is the case, "we" may in fact already be replying to a message from alien intelligence. "We" may be part of an elaborate interstellar society. "We" may even be at war.

What is the irony of all this? Well, when I thought to write this down I thought it best to perhaps search for a SETI blog and see if the idea was already out there... and I found a blog called "Are We a Blog?"

I'm still not sure it what the people running that blog meant by their title, but whether it is or it isn't there intention to suggest we are the blog of a Gaia-like superintelligence, the fact that the idea can be discerned elsewhere in the biosphere, albeit in holographically transformed ways, does (ironically!) support my thesis!

Where to start a program for right sizing humanity - with flight of course!

How to right-size humanity? How to create a trajectory and momentum towards smaller human body forms with smaller energetic profiles?

Computation is one of the key costs of being human - but the transition from biological computation systems to inorganic is already very well discussed.

In this post I will concentrate on the physical and social aspects.

Firstly - motivation is the key - the offer must be obviously, demonstrably, persuasively better than current existence. This can be achieved negatively via deterioration of the real world environment to a point where lower quality simulations, or even cessation, becomes attractive (e.g. Chinese WoW Gold Farmers, Japanese suicide cults).

However to be optimistic about the future, we must attempt to construct positive pathways to the same goal, using the technology we have now. And I believe that we are very close to this point. Consider this:

The convergence of prosthetics technology and robotics is accelerating rapidly. The need to have biological limbs to function in richer urban societies is fading. In some cases it could even be said that limbs may even no longer be a prerequisite for a pleasurable existence (a good life).

Consider also that humans have always dreamed of flight, and that we naturally understand that weight is a key issue in achieving flight.

What better motivation is there than the dream of flight? If a smaller body is required for a human to be able to fly on a day to day basis as part of normal life, is it a price worth paying? For many people I think the answer is unequivocally "You bet!"

But to make sense, the cost of flight (in energy) must be lower than the cost of traditional human limbs.

Insect muscle is the most active tissue known to man, and therefore a great candidate for a meta-biological flying platform. With organ printing technology, fabrication of a pseudo-muscle may be possible using insect stem cells combined with more traditional substrates (plastics, metals.)

One interesting fact that may be worth bearing in mind is that insect muscle runs on Trehalose, a sugar which is also implicated in the biological mechanism of anhydrobiosis - the ability of plants and animals to withstand prolonged periods of desiccation. This means that artificial, detachable wings/muscle systems could potentially be stored for long periods and shipped cheaply.

These factors make possible a single-use unit approach (rather than a rechargeable unit approach)- and this reduces the complexity of an artificial wing/muscle system design by some orders of magnitude, and reduces time to market. And while single use may seem contradictory to the aim of reducing energetics footprints, the fact that the product can be entirely biodegradable is undoubtedly an important consideration.

So the target needs to be - what is the minimum size that a human body can be revised to, and still be viable, and what is the largest size an artificially created insect muscle/wing system can be constructed?

A Modest Proposal - Right Sizing Humanity for a smaller footprint

It is tautologically uncontroversial that closed systems have limits. It is also relatively well understood that from a practical perspective the biosphere is and will be for the foreseeable future, a closed system.

Self awareness is the phenomenon which has punctured the limits of this closed system - and is now disrupting the system itself with the side effects of non-biological chemical synthesis and energetics.

At the same time the primary agents of that change - humans - remain firmly a part of their greater biological context. They proceed with the same motivation and desire for resources and procreation that is manifested by the less conscious elements of the bioshpere.

In short, they love their children.

How to solve the problem that lies therein? By successfully subverting the biosphere to our own advantages we have willed into being many billions of us - the vast majority of whom wish to will into being their own children to love. But the closed system has limits and those limits are finite.

We are now at the critical point where our own self-awareness tells us that to create children is to not love them. However our biological impulses are incapable of accepting this anti-biological reality, and instinct holds the trump card.

Bearing these 2 points in mind I have a modest proposal;- understanding that humanity is more numerous than is feasible, and understanding that humans will continue to desire to procreate, is not the logical solution to reduce the size of those offspring?

Island or Insular dwarfism is a somewhat uncontroversial theory which explains evolutionary reduction in body size of species in constrained ecological environments.

With our unprecedented capabilities of biological manipulation, and our urgent ecological issues, I believe it is now the time to investigate making humans smaller.

There will be many many issues associated with this proposal - technological, social, ethical, political, and biological (parents want their kids to grow up big and strong after all).

But from a philosophical perspective I can see nothing wrong with the idea. Can you?

The mechanics of a metal ecosystem

We are living through the next great evolution of ecosystem complexity and it is the era in which metallic and mineral materials become incorporated as structural and electrical components of biological systems.

Until very recently carbon compounds (keratin, chitin, cellulose) have been the main structural substrates in known biological systems. With the rise of humans and human technology (the anthropocene period) has come increasing utilization of metals for structural purposes, and as time progresses the incorporation of metals into biological systems will become more and more intrinsic.

Of course the anthropocene period has also seen the rapid decline in viability for a large number of living species constituted from traditional materials. However even with catastrophic collapse of the global biome we can anticipate that the majority of information accumulated in the planetary genome will survive - the level of redundancy of information retained in DNA will ensure this, and the tiny but rapidly growing amount of this data encoded into artificial computer systems will play its part also.

As the trend continues we will see deeper application of biological concepts to information processing and robotics systems, and increasing amounts of incorporation of metal technology into biological systems.

At some point the the two trends will converge, and metals fabrication and manipulation will become encoded and embedded into the biological system or new proto-biological systems.

Use of metal in structural contexts delivers extreme advantages - this is the reason we name the some of the ages of human civilization after metals.

But metal purification requires high energy processes (heat or chemical) and reductive environments - both of which are currently inimical to most life and to computing (biological or otherwise).

The critical step as the ecosystem transforms into a metal utilizing one will be the development of powerful computation systems which can operate at very high temperatures and in hostile chemical environments.

If this sounds unlikely (yet familiar)it might be because it is analogous to an earlier transition; the one which occurred when life moved from the sea to the land.

Language evolved from swearing

Swearing has a long and illustrious history. I believe however that its prehistory is much much longer.

Swearing at its purest is monosyllabic and entirely emotional. Its context is now.

People swear from pain, during sex, before battle, when disgusted or exhilarated.

At its most general the function of swearing is to communicate, and thereby relieve, stress.

The need for this function exists in all social animals. Any animal that vocalizes is, essentially, swearing.

I believe that human language evolved from swearing when humans developed a longer perspective on time than just the immediate, and consequently learned to modify the meaning of swearing across time. No longer was it just "Fuck!"; now it could be "was fucked" and "will be fucked".

(with acknowledgments to Will Self: Great Apes)

Chatting with Gaia

If Gaia can be defined as a "consciousness" then it should follow that Gaia would like to communicate with "like minded" entities. Individual humans do not in any way possess minds which are like Gaias'. But it might be fair to say that humanity as a whole increasingly does.

Here is another way of putting it. If we envisage a "consciousness space", in which each point in the space represents a set of parameters which gives rise to consciousness, then the point which represents a Gaia consciousness, and the point which represents the global human consciousness (including all peripherals such as the internet etc) are closer to each other than a human consciousness is to Gaia. It might also be reasonable to say that the global human consciousness is traversing through points towards the point which is Gaia.

If we accept this then we can also ask - is there any way to communicate with Gaia? What kind of things are interesting to such a being? How would a message be transmitted? Are we capable of composing such a message?

We can for instance visualise Gaia as a closed consciousness only aware of itself. But this leaves it with no communication channels. If we make it dimly aware of its surroundings, then we can imagine it perceving positive and negative gradients towards and away from things which are good and bad for Gaia.

If we increase its awareness further then we can perceive of it forming plans, developing strategies and holding opinions, and so on.

Once we start looking at Gaia this way we can put humanity into a similar perspective.

A physical metaphor might be that humanity consciousness is a kind of phase-change for Gaia consciousness, like when a liquid turns into a gas. This transformation could be a runaway transformation towards a new. completely different, stable state.

Using a biological metaphor, perhaps humanity is like a malignancy; a consciousness which has evolved and now flourishes within a larger one, and has now reached a point where is it breaking the bonds and causing effects great enough for Gaia to detect.

If the physical metaphor is most accurate, then Gaia and humanity consciousness are not entities capable of communication but instead points along a reaction cycle.

If the biological metaphor is correct then maybe Gaia and humanity consciousness are able to communicate, in the same way a cancer makes itself known to its host. As the cancer becomes more evident and the host suffers, then the host can in turn communicate by attempting to cure the cancer.

I dont believe either metaphor is adequate. The concept of Gaia by necessity presupposes physical and biological systems as a basis. If Gaia was not something qualitatively more than a physical or biological system, then there would be no use for the concept.

You can see as we move from the physical to the biological metaphor that the level of communciation possible between Gaia and humanity consciouness increases. This means that if Gaia's relationship with humanity is richer than just biological, as I have suggested, then the potential for communication is also higher.

But I don't know what exactly it is.

Hyperdemocracy

Modern-era democracy (as a corpus of human behaviors and beliefs) has passed through a number of stages of maturity.

One of the most important transformations was the development and integration of the Fourth Estate as a component of democracy. Structurally the Fourth Estate provided a relatively low resolution, macroscopic, or compressed reflexion upon the democratic processes it analysed.

It is relatively compressed because the technology of delivery of the fourth estate was for the most part limited to broadcast. This was a natural cap on the number of channels available for message delivery and necessarily implied massive compression, editorial, and analysis of the message. The Fourth Estate also evolved to be financed almost entirely by advertising creating a commensual relationship between the Fourth Estate and productive entities.

By providing a single, relatively simplified image of the democratic system back to itself, the Fourth Estate engendered a simple narrative to the data of democratic events, eventually resonating on broad wavelengths with the system it reflected.

In all, the Fourth Estate as a broadcast network system was well integrated into the democratic process, resulting in a large scale, relatively balanced system of positive and negative feedback.

This is no longer the case. The democratic narrative is no longer told in broad strokes to majorities of populations. We are accelerating towards a state where the number of narratives equals and then exceeds the number of listeners. This is an extraordinarily different system to the broadcast Fourth Estate democracy as described above. I call it hyperdemocracy but please don't assume I mean that in a good way!

A hyperdemocracy may be so multi-stranded that no human can follow its narrative, no matter how compressed. The question then is who, or what, will follow it?

Us vs Them...can't have one without the other

For the vast majority of the species' time on earth, human social evolution occurred in a world of little tribes which competed with each other for resources - co-operation within the group to achieve success in group competition.

From this origin arose the finest things about humans - advanced social skills, language, consciousness etc. And obviously a lot of the bad things arose from this origin as well - xenophobia, war etc.

In general our ever-growing cognitive skills have been able to rise above the instincts we inherited from the little tribes of our fore-folk. This is illustrated by the very existence of cities and states where strangers co-exist relatively peacefully, and by the onward march of ever increasing population.

However the "us vs them" instinct which helped tribes to grow and prosper in subhuman times has not gone away, and is not even deeply buried in our psyches. It is explicit and manifest in the cities and the states themselves, in the international institutions which acknowledge the rights of nations, in sport and in everyday life, and human relations everywhere on every level. It is an integral part of human nature, as instinctive as sweating.

However, we are now at an epochal moment in evolution when the "us" is becoming sufficiently large and integrated that there is no more "them". Infinitely fine networks of economics, communication and environment are enmeshing the lives of all together.

Beyond this moment the purpose of the "us vs them" instinct is no longer valid. The automatic desire to strive and achieve and own and control more than our neighboring communities no longer confers an advantage on our offspring - in fact it endangers them. We - "us" - cannot continue to profit at the expense of "them" because "they" are not there anymore. "They" are now "us".

Is it possible for human cognitive capacities to once again overcome ancient instincts, as has happened in the past? Fear of strangers was surmounted to create the city, acceptance of leadership by strangers allowed us to create the nation. But all of these earlier steps left some other "us" to be "them".

Humans are highly adaptable and I don't discount the possibility we can rise above this basic need for us-ness and them-ness. But its also fair to say this next step is altogether greater and different from earlier ones.

More likely I think is that we will identify something else to be "them"- and it's most likely to be extraterrestrial life. The discovery of Gliese 581c caused bookies to drop their odds of finding "them" from 1000-1 to 100-1. We are on a roll and things will only accelerate from here.

When extraterrestrial life is found the implications for ontology, teleology and religion generally are incalculable. Whatever differences people may perceive between themselves on religious, racial or other grounds will vanish to irrelevance in the face of life on another planet, let alone intelligent life.

With extraterrestrial life we will have another "other", a "them" for our "us". Our instincts (which evolution created, not us) will kick in once again and we will do what we have traditionally done with "first contacts" - hide behind a rock and see what we can make of them.

Then maybe all of us can sneak up on them!

Framing: Global Broiling not Global Warming!

Tim Flannery reckons we have not responded to the threat of global warming partly because recent human evolution was focused on surviving the cold of the ice age. The word "warming" therefore conveys to us subconsciously comforting feelings of safety.

Well if politicians can do "framing" so can the "climate community".

STOP CALLING IT GLOBAL WARMING.

Lets try instead phrases like:

"PLANETARY SEARING"

"UNIVERSAL FRYING"

"BIOLOGICAL BOILING"

or just plain

"GLOBAL HEATING" for starters. Any other ideas most appreciated.

Framing is critical - there is no time to lose.

note to Google: save the world please

Google promises "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".

It would be fair to say that the vast majority of the worlds information is in living things - their genes, bodies and minds, and ecosystems. And for a very long time this will be the only feasible way to store that information.

But global warming is threatening to crash the server. If Google wishes to achieve its goals it better start working out how to stop global warming and save this stuff quick.

Sergey, Larry, you have an obligation to your shareholders!

Consciousness is a natural disaster - lets work with it

This article on ice core evidence for how radically we are increasing carbon percentage in the atmosphere must be pretty depressing, even for our most optimistic advocates of reduced carbon production. Tim Flannery and Jared Diamond try hard in their writings to avoid filling their audience with a sense of hopelessness, but it difficult not to notice that often they seem to feel hopeless as well. This further evidence of the danger we are in cannot be helping!

What I feel should be separated a little from the issue is our personal and collective emotions about the developments. Yes we are the cause of carbon increase and thus global warming, and yes we could hypothetically have acted earlier to avert potential disaster, but we are also a product of the environment ourselves, and just because we are conscious beings does not mean we are instantly capable of transcending our instincts as an evolved species.

Humans have dominated via the development of a unique social system - we are tightly networked groups of highly intelligent individuals. This model has allowed us to overwhelm all other life forms with our collective powers. But it does not mean we are perfectly suited to scaling to a global level.

In the past humans competed amongst groups, and our network architecture is finely tuned to an Us versus Them way of thinking. This persists to this day - we see it everywhere in the form of sport. But at global level there can be no "them" and without "them" we struggle to see an Us we can identify with.

In this way consciousness is a natural product of an evolving environment and can be compared to any other discontinuity, or natural disaster, which might befall such a system. Whatever the organism that evolves social consciousness in this model, and whatever the environment in which it evolves, it is inevitable that some resource will be identified and utilized by that organism to a point of collapse.

We should not fall prey to guilt about this eventuality - guilt (like the Us vs Them mentality) is an emotion evolved to benefit survival of small social groups, and has no value in the face of global calamity.

What we should do is view the situation as the most glorious intellectual challenge humanity has ever faced, and as an opportunity for a next step in human evolution to occur. This framing helps us to use our emotional baggage as tools rather than impediments. Rather than being paralyzed by guilt we can use pride to drive us to solve this problem.

The 4 elements: fire fire burning bright

There is nothing like fire under the ocean. This may sound pretty stupid but it is of interest when you consider the evolution of life and of civilisation.

First - what is fire? It is a rapid and runaway oxidation reaction which releases energy and consumes local fuel until it is exhausted.

Why can't we have fire under the ocean? Well in fact we can - there are certain chemicals which when mixed and subjected to ignition will commence a runaway oxidation reaction. But these chemicals do not occur naturally, as does wood and air.

There is another exception to this point which I feel I should also address. By stretching the definition a little we could perhaps say that life (which is a heavily modulated oxidation reaction) is itself a type of fire.

And by stretching the definition of fire in this way to include life I have actually managed to refute my first assertion. Life evolved in water and life does exist in water. Please bear with me.

Why do we have fire in our world? A good way to think about this question is to ask - what burns? And when you think about it - life burns. Before life left the oceans there was nothing - no oil, no wood, no people - to burn. So the modulated oxidation reaction called life that began in the oceans evolved up and onto land and carried with it oxidisable material to where it could burn. Thus fire.

It has been argued that life is only likely in places where liquid water can exist. This is because water is a unique molecule, whose electromagnetic properties are predisposed to generation of complex surfaces, films and structures, among many other specialities. This generative nature of water give rise to a wildly heterogenous environment of liquids, solids and gases and it for this reason (the argument goes) that life formed on earth.

Could we argue that water gives rise to fire?

exponentially exponential

Jared Diamond likens humanities' global activity and related impact to a race in which two competing forces are accelerating exponentially.

The first force is the brute impact as population grows and consumption grows. Assuming there is a physical limit, the closer we get to that limit the more dramatic the effect of each increment of load on the system. Jared also talks (as do other complexity scientists) of non-symmetrical effects due to positive feedback; that is, no turning back from the tipping point.

The second force is our awareness and response to the change. It too accelerates exponentially. If it was just will-power alone we might consider the situation hopeless. But it is more than just will power; it is the cumulative and network effect of the information collection and processing which occurs when all minds turn to the same problem. Maybe it is enough?

The manhattan project is a primitive example. The technical expertise developed in the few short years of the project in response to a massive social threat are one of humanities wonders and horrors. Splitting the atom is truly a tipping point whether you are a star or a society.

And the manhattan project has further resonances too. As the world looks for ways to respond to an exponential threat, nuclear power is back on the agenda big time. Ironic that this tipping point should attract the product of another earlier one, and offer the same dilemma of creation and destruction once again, with exponential force. Again.

Tipping Points - Climate Change - how fast can you re-arrange the deck chairs?

Recognition of the reality of climate change is cyclical. A balmy winter is merely nice, and news from Southern Hemisphere heatwaves is faint, and obscured by the other natural disasters the South is routinely subject to.

Clarity increases every northern summer as the largest populations of first worlders max out their communal power supplies in search of personal cool breezes.

It is for this reason that it this summer of 2006 that concensus has finally been reached - even the most rabid small government neoconservative has gotta admit its kinda hot.

The tipping point for our minds has been reached. Too bad it is probably ten years after the physical tipping point.

social R & D

Is it possible to do true Social R&D?

A lot of the Web 2.0 services currently talked about start serendipitously; they are wanderings in the social-systems space, and once they begin to hum they produce a gravity that attracts participants, they distort the opportunity space for later entrants, and then finally they produce an "exhaust" which may or may not be valuable. They are Research in the pure sense not the applied sense; they seek only to prove or falsify the proposition that they are useful. And they are Development only in the sense that some of them stick and then go on to begin to change how society functions; they are not Development in sense of the pragmatic application of research results for commercial gain. They cannot be Development in this sense, purely because they cannot be tested on a closed user group or in controlled environments. They only work on the entire population.

The question I want to ask is; can there be social R & D? Is there any way to do applied social research and then pragmatically develop commercial propositions from it? Or is the combined positive feedback from the waves and waves of cost free collaboration that is currently being implemented too seductive to resist and too transformative to predict?

We are by definition the most reciprocally altruistic organism to evolve. For individual users, the net has moved the cost of minor altruistic behavior near to zero, and the compound benefit that is derived from massive amounts of minor altruism may be the greatest of all transformations of the social space to occur. And it is very likely that it is still in its earliest stages.

casual gaming to decide the lounge room wars?

In this round of the console wars the stakes are high. This time, they are not just fighting each other; this time the players want to own the lounge room and everybody in it. And to do so they need to take it from the TV networks.

TV networks and the studios are fighting scared right now; and a scared opponent can be the most dangerous. The broadcast business model may be dead but the will to live is strong and the TV execs have the contacts and the contracts to corral the content for a while yet. And they have already started to be creative to meet the challenges - Warner Brothers and Bittorrent - who would have thought?

In a high stakes slug fest like this the outcome can sometimes turn on the tiniest detail which is overlooked by everybody - even the winner. And for this particular slugfest I think I know what it is.

Consoles are bought, installed and maintained by hardcore gamers. They are a demographic - a pretty broad one but still a subset of the total lounge room market. Other demographics have been targetted by console guys (see Playstation for DDR and the Eyetoy franchises, and Nintendo generally) but in these forays into new demographics there has always been a disconnect between the marketing and the demand, and between the demand and the buying power. Despite the best efforts the big question for the console guys has continued to be how to reach those other demographics.

Cue casual gaming: so far the biggest surprise in this round of the console wars. Long resigned to keeping septuagenarians' grey matter sparking as they wait for their next email, casual gaming is making a spectacular comeback. Microsoft has deployed ArcadeLive on the Xbox360 platform and frankly everybody involved has been amazed at the results.

Why is this? The answer is deceptively simple. There is no demographic for TV and there is no demographic for casual games.

Put it another way. Nearly everybody likes TV and nearly everybody like casual games. If anything is going to make some kids' mum pick up a game controller, it is going to be something like Tetris. And every kid with an Xbox360 likes Tetris. Presto! The two finally meet and they meet on the console guys' turf.

The timing couldn't be better either - blockbuster fatigue has hit the games business big time and everybody, players and developers, wants to have fun again. Casual games are fast and cheap to create. New business models are coming into play via online and they are turning out to be reliably profitable too. The niche-like, PC-based, casual games industry can now get to the lounge room.

What happens then? Well maybe the console is no longer a satanic black invertebrate designed to trip over the person who vacuums the room. Now it is a tool mum uses and likes. Now she might play some music through it, or a DVD. Now she might go into a different menu and find another game, or somebody to play online, or play a round with her daughter, or husband. Now she might talk about it with her friends and work out that they can play together too.

And suddenly the lounge room wars are over. And unless Sony really pulls its finger out it has been won by Microsoft.

totems, Intellectual property, animal rights

Humans need animals. Not just as food, or as company or for security. Humans also need animals for a deeper reason; animals - as beings - are windows to other ways of being. As highly conscious animals, humans can see the world differently through animals, and in doing so see ourselves differently, and become different. Animals allow us to transform ourselves.

This need has manifested itself since humanity began. Totems (associations between family lines and specific animals) have existed in many cultures since time immemorial. Dogs have been buried with humans for around 12ooo years. In fact the capacity to vividly imagine what another being is is a good definition of the human condition.

As humanity developed language, myths grew and evolved, and from the basic need was born a fantasmagoria of minotaurs and angels, pans and kheirons, each of them expressing the human minds hunger for the animal. In more literate times fables have illustrated moral virtues and vices by explicit comparison to animals.

The most famous ant researcher in history. E.O.Wilson has described something like this "animal need" with the word "biophilia"; an innate appreciation of animals and life. And while this sense can be blunted by the organic sterility of life in cities, we need only scan the TV guide to see that nature documentaries are very popular, and that urban life may even accentuate the hunger.

And even if we ignore the slightly worthy topic of documentaries, we don't have to look far to see that totems still exist. Football teams are named after animals, as are cars, and many company logos rely for their power on the natural potency of animals. Some companies go all the way and present a pantheistic image where the entire animal world is their logo - Optus.

What is often jarring about the use of this imagery is the fact that it is commonly used to promote consumption on a scale which is clearly detrimental to the environments and viability of the actual animals that are being used. The companies themselves add further irony to the situation when thery sponsor rare examples of their mascot species in zoos.

What is needed is explicit recognition of the animals' rights, in much the same way that celebrities are rewarded for use of their image. These could be thought of as "Commercial Totems" where a royalty is paid by any commercial organisation using an image of an animal, and that revenue used to maintain and protect territories where that animal is resident.

anti-search engines

When a search request produces no result, most often it is because of a typo. In such cases, it is useful when the engine offers alternatives.

But sometimes it is not because of a typo but rather because the requested item is not on the web at all. In those cases the search request is a bit special, and defines the limits for the set of data within the web.

This anti-search engine information is valuable and, with enough examples, it could be used to identify areas where fruitful research could be directed, patents applied, web addresses registered, and products and services produced.

autism and the placebo effect

There is an argument that the placebo effect works because there is an evolutionary advantage in our ability to respond to treatment (no matter what), but I think that one thing worth considering is the fact that medication very often represents treatment by others.

Perhaps as social organisms our awareness of being valued by others is reason in itself to respond to placebos. This could be the case when we are provided with medication by another person (representing to us our value or worth to others) or in the case of an ill person with dependents, self administration would be symbolic of the dependents' need for the ill person. In either case the medication or treatment becomes a token of social status and worth.

By this reading the placebo effect could be explained as part of the same spectrum of phenomena that includes at one end very ill people's apparent capacity to live long enough to see important events in their lives (births, marriages etc.) and at the other end the clearly detrimental effects of treatments representing low worth (e.g. solitary confinement.)

Autism is (as I understand it) the inability to read social cues. If that is the case it may be worth investigating whether autistic people have a relatively diminished response to placebos...