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July 11, 2006
"I'm allergic to microwaves. They release space hamsters into my bloodstream."
Psilocybin scientifically studied, sought sacred psychological symptoms successfully sighted.
In the study, more than 60 percent of subjects described the effects of psilocybin in ways that met criteria for a "full mystical experience" as measured by established psychological scales. One third said the experience was the single most spiritually significant of their lifetimes; and more than two-thirds rated it among their five most meaningful and spiritually significant. Griffiths says subjects liken it to the importance of the birth of their first child or the death of a parent.
Two months later, 79 percent of subjects reported moderately or greatly increased well-being or life satisfaction compared with those given a placebo at the same test session. A majority said their mood, attitudes and behaviors had changed for the better. Structured interviews with family members, friends and co-workers generally confirmed the subjects' remarks. Results of a year-long followup are being readied for publication.
Psychological tests and subjects' own reports showed no harm to study participants, though some admitted extreme anxiety or other unpleasant effects in the hours following the psilocybin capsule. The drug has not been observed to be addictive or physically toxic in animal studies or human populations. "In this regard," says Griffiths, a psychopharmacologist, "it contrasts with MDMA (ecstasy), amphetamines or alcohol."
PGP's tech officer has a relatively strong defense of strong crypto's strength. via
Imagine a computer that is the size of a grain of sand that can test keys against some encrypted data. Also imagine that it can test a key in the amount of time it takes light to cross it. Then consider a cluster of these computers, so many that if you covered the earth with them, they would cover the whole planet to the height of 1 meter. The cluster of computers would crack a 128-bit key on average in 1,000 years.
If you want to brute-force a key, it literally takes a planet-ful of computers. And of course, there are always 256-bit keys, if you worry about the possibility that government has a spare planet that they want to devote to key-cracking.
Now of course, there are other ways to break the system.
They could know something we don't. They could know some fundamental truth about mathematics (like how to factor really fast), some effective form of symmetric cryptanalysis, or something else. They could know about quantum computers, DNA computers, systems based upon non-Einsteinian physics, and so on. Yes, it's possible. But this quickly gets into true paranoid thought.
They could be hacking people's systems.
However, there are things that we know that they *are* doing. One of them is relevant to this particular case. That is work on cracking the passphrases that people use to protect their keys. The cryptography we're using is itself uncrackable, but about 2/3 of the people in the world use a password (not even a passphrase) that directly relates to a pet or loved one.
We know that at least one government has a password cracker that is based upon building a psychometric model of person who owns the key and constructing passphrases on that model.
My old friend and colleague, Drew Gross, who is a forensics expert, has said, "I love crypto; it tells me what part of the system not to bother attacking."
The last bit of evidence we have that suggests that they can't break the crypto is that they are apparently devoting a lot of effort to traffic analysis. Look at what we've learned in the last few months. Listening for keywords is so twentieth century. They're looking at call patterns, message flow, and so on.
The critical threshold of rain, magnets, and unraveling "the mathematical thread of reality" :
In the June issue of the respected journal Nature Physics, he and J. David Neelin, UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, report that the onset of intense tropical rain and magnetism share the same underlying physics.
"We studied properties of that relationship that are also observed in equivalent quantities for systems with 'continuous-phase transitions' like magnets," said Peters, a research scientist with UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and a visiting scientist at the Santa Fe Institute.
"The atmosphere has a tendency to move to a critical point in water vapor where the likelihood of rain dramatically increases. The system reaches a point where it's just about to rain; it's highly susceptible. Any additional water vapor can produce a large response."
"Our study showed that absolutely everything we dreamed of finding was actually there," Peters said. "The predictions from critical phenomena showed up in the data. This is a huge step forward in self-organized criticality and critical phenomena. There really is a critical point. We observed the system in a whole range of different water vapors. This is the strongest evidence for any physical self-organized critical system to really have a critical point."
How does a critical threshold point work?
Consider a pile of rice, Peters said. You can add a single grain of rice and measure its effect on the pile. After slowly adding rice grains, at some point you eventually trigger an avalanche; the release is very fast. A similar principle is behind the coin machines you can find in casinos, where it looks as if dropping in one or two quarters will create an avalanche of coins that will come crashing down for you. In fact, it is much more likely that it only looks like the system is at a critical point; you are more likely to lose your quarter.
Imagine that you add one raindrop into a cloud. Like the pile of rice, where adding a single grain can produce an avalanche or nothing at all, or like the coin machine, the one additional raindrop could trigger a huge downpour, but most of the time produces nothing. You can heat a magnet to a point where it loses its magnetization; it no longer has a north and south direction.
"When a magnet is near the critical temperature, a slight perturbation can cause it to switch north and south," Peters said. "When the system reaches the critical point and is so susceptible, a slight change — one more grain of rice, one more coin — can produce a massive response of the system. This phenomenon can be studied using statistical mechanics and critical phenomena."
The sun slowly evaporates water from the oceans, pumping water into the atmosphere. Much of that water vapor is stored and transported in the atmosphere before there is any rain, Neelin noted.
What finally triggers the rain?
Complex interactions among the cloud motions organize the rainfall into clusters in space and a cascade of smaller and larger rain events. And these share the same mathematical structure as systems that physicists have studied.
"Whenever you find different systems that are governed by the same mathematical laws, you are hitting on something fundamental. You have found a thread in the mathematical fabric of reality. This study raises the concept of 'self-organized criticality' to a higher status. It's not just a far-fetched possibility."
Here's an astounding interview with physicist Lawrence Krauss, whom you might recall from The Physics of Star Trek. via
We knew the answer. There was a symmetry and the number had to be exactly zero. Well, what have we discovered? There appears to be this energy of empty space that isn't zero! This flies in the face of all conventional wisdom in theoretical particle physics. It is the most profound shift in thinking, perhaps the most profound puzzle, in the latter half of the 20th century. And it may be the first half of the 21st century, or maybe go all the way to the 22nd century. Because, unfortunately, I happen to think we won't be able to rely on experiment to resolve this problem. When we look out at the universe, if this dark energy is something that isn't quite an energy of empty space but its just something that's pretending to be that, we might measure that it's changing over time.
Then we would know that the actual energy of empty space is really zero but this is some cockamamie thing that's pretending to be energy of empty space. And many people have hoped they'd see that is because then you wouldn't need quantum gravity, which is a theory we don't yet have, to understand this apparent dark energy. Indeed, one of the biggest failures of string theory's many failures, I think, is it never successfully addressed this cosmological constant problem. You'd think if you had a theory of quantum gravity, it would explain precisely what the energy of empty space should be. And we don't have any other theory that addresses that problem either! But if this thing really isn't vacuum energy, then it's something else, then you might be able to find out what it is, and learn and do physics without having to understand quantum gravity.
Right now it's clear that what we really need is some good new ideas. Fundamental physics is really at kind of a crossroads. The observations have just told us that the universe is crazy, but hasn't told us what direction the universe is crazy in. The theories have been incredibly complex and elaborate, but haven't yet made any compelling inroads. That can either be viewed as depressing or exciting. For young physicists it's exciting in the sense that it means that the field is ripe for something new.
The great hope for particle physics, which may be a great hope for quantum gravity, is the next large particle accelerator. We've gone 30 years without a fundamentally new accelerator that can probe a totally new regime of the sub-atomic world. We would have had it if our legislators had not been so myopic. It's amazing to think that if they hadn't killed the superconducting Super Collider it would have been already been running for ten years.
The Large Hadron Collider is going to come on-line next year. And one of two things could happen: It could either reveal a fascinating new window on the universe and a whole new set of phenomena that will validate or refute the current prevailing ideas in theoretical particle physics, supersymmetry etc, or it might see absolutely nothing. I'm not sure which I'm rooting for.
But what is intriguing to me is that while everything is consistent with the simplest models, there's one area where there's a puzzle. On the largest scales, when we look out at the universe, there doesn't seem to be enough structure — not as much as inflation would predict. Now the question is, is that a statistical fluke?
That is, we live in one universe, so we're a sample of one. With a sample of one, you have what is called a large sample variance. And maybe this just means we're lucky, that we just happen to live in a universe where the number's smaller than you'd predict. But when you look at CMB map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's crazy. We're looking out at the whole universe. There's no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe.
The new results are either telling us that all of science is wrong and we're the center of the universe, or maybe the data is imply incorrect, or maybe it's telling us there's something weird about the microwave background results and that maybe, maybe there's something wrong with our theories on the larger scales.
Posted by Jon Rubin at July 11, 2006 09:45 PM
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