Tuesday, September 4, 2018

The Quantum Astrologer’s Handbook by Michael Brooks review – maths contests and the nature of the universe

This superb book by Michael Brooks is in part a biography of the mathematician Jerome Cardano. But it delves into the most fundamental questions

Steven Poole

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A detail from The Cardsharps by Caravaggio … Cardano drew on his knowledge of mathematics when gambling. Photograph: Alamy

What, you might ask, is a quantum astrologer? This beautifully written book is a kind of experimental scientific biography that mashes up science with what seems to be non‑science, the better to explore the boundaries of what we still don’t know. If quantum astrology were a thing, after all, it wouldn’t be any more ridiculous than what modern physics asks us to believe.

The book’s hero, the alleged quantum astrologer, is one of those Renaissance men for whom the term “Renaissance man” itself seems insufficient. Jerome (or Gerolamo) Cardano was a 16th-century doctor and mathematician from Milan. He produced horoscopes for the great and the good, but he also invented the mathematics of probability to help him win at gambling, so that he could pay his way through medical school. He invented the “cardan joint”, which to this day is used in the power transmission of cars. He was, too, the first to accept the existence of imaginary numbers, which are the square roots of negative numbers. In so doing, Brooks argues, he laid the necessary foundations for modern quantum theory.

The literary conceit here is that periodically throughout the text Brooks (himself a trained physicist) speaks directly to his subject, visiting Cardano in his cell where, now an old man, he is held by the Inquisition. They discuss the nature of the universe (and, amusingly, the trials of science writing) and the various difficulties of Cardano’s life. These are punctuated with vividly described cloak-and-dagger scenes involving senators who cheat at cards, women who poison their brothers or viciously ungrateful offspring.

While doing all this, Brooks also patiently explains things to the reader, in characteristically stylish fashion. He shows clearly how imaginary numbers can crop up in surprisingly simple mathematics and turn out to be concretely useful. Particularly clever is the way he explains the infamous “double slit experiment” in quantum physics using an analogy that Cardano himself could have followed quite easily: “Imagine an archer trying to fire arrows into the watchtower of a fortified medieval castle … Now imagine a trebuchet that throws a huge bucketful of water at the wall.” Arrows are particles and the water is a wave. The scandal is that electrons, photons et al are somehow both at the same time – or even more scandalously, that they cunningly decide to behave as one or the other depending on what experiment is being conducted.

Among the many incidental pleasures in this short but idea-rich book is a terrific discussion of public maths contests in early modern Europe, when two rival mathematicians would set each other difficult puzzles – to the solution of which only they held, or so they hoped, the secret key. It sounds rather like the east Asian tradition of martial artists challenging one another to public fights – and the maths battles enjoyed a similar level of public interest and engagement. They brought “entire populations to the city square”, Brooks writes, with “cheering and catcalling, a referee, champions and underdogs – all accompanied, of course, by drinks and snacks”. Meanwhile, a polemical exchange of letters between Cardano and another mathematician, Tartaglia, had “the unexpected side effect” that the public learned mathematics “in order to follow the soap opera”. It sounds even better than Twitter.

Renaissance man … Gerolamo Cardano (1501- 1576). — Renaissance man … Gerolamo Cardano. Photograph: Alamy

Popular historians of science often condescend to figures from the past, portraying them as groping more or less ineffectually towards what we splendid moderns today understand perfectly. Brooks’s book is a quietly polemical assault on such attitudes, for example in its insistence that what we now call the scientific method did not begin, as is usually said, with Copernicus. Indeed methodical work was being done much earlier: “What we haven’t absorbed, largely because of cultural bias, is the long Islamic history of experimentation. In 1021, for example, the Islamic scholar Ibn al-Haytham used a camera obscura to prove that light travels in a straight line to the eyes.”

And what have we actually learned since Cardano’s time? For sure, staggering advances in knowledge and technology have been made, but about fundamental questions such as the nature of time and space, and reality itself, we are no less confused. It turns out that this is really a book about intellectual humility, and how we have not advanced as far beyond our forebears as triumphalist pop science often likes to pretend. The problem is, the book shows, that quantum mechanics enables us to predict things very well and engineer cool stuff such as smartphones, but it says nothing about what the universe is really like. Indeed, as Brooks writes aggressively, it is “utterly bankrupt when it comes to explaining the physical world”.

To explain the physical world, you have to sign up to one of the competing “interpretations” of the mathematical model, and all of them are more or less outrageous. Is reality fundamentally undetermined until we look at it, or is there an infinite number of abstract universes, or are all the particles in the universe entangled with one another, or can information flow backwards in time? None of it makes any sense.

This, he thinks, ought to worry the professionals more than it does. Brooks wryly describes attending a physics conference in Vienna: “I sat at tables where grown men and women would agree on the facts of an experiment and then disagree entirely about what had actually happened.” He sees a kind of philosophical complacency in this state of affairs, and prefers to ally himself with the restless intellect of his Renaissance hero. In our quest to understand the universe, he decides, we are still only a few steps beyond Cardano himself. What might in other hands seem like a downbeat message somehow works here as an inspiring conclusion to a quite superb book.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/24/the-quantum-astrolgers-handbook-by-michael-brooks-review

Full Speech Of Rabbi Rabbinovitch - Jews responsible for World Wars & Destruction of Christianity

Full Speech Of Rabbi
Rabbinovitch Found
Commentary

By Rose Rabbinovich

rabbinovich@bluemail.ch

Former Zionist

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
11-30-3

Hello again Jeff,

Thank you for posting my commentary last week 'Our Race Will Rule Undisputed Over The World' http://rense.com/general45/race.htm , it seems that this article shocked many Jews around the world. I have been inundated with hundreds of e-mail. I would like to apologise to many of you for not replying, I promise that I will reply to each one of you in time. If any of you had email 'problems' trying to contact me, please try again.

One question which was repeated in many of the emails to me was: 'How can we find the full Rabbinovich speech?'

I searched the Internet, but all websites with Rabbi Rabbinovich speech have been 'cleaned up' or blocked (I assume by the Zionists, as usual). Since I remember hearing from my grandfather about this speech already in the fifties, I decided to contact my Rabbi. He searched his favourite website http://abbc.com/ and found the full article. I am enclosing here the full speech by Rabbi Rabbinovich (Rabinovich).

To tell you the truth, I was surprised at the fantastic reaction of your readers to this speech. After all there is little new in that speech, and most people who read the Elders Of Zion Protocols are already very familiar with this information. Unfortunately we Jews are NOT allowed to read the Protocols, as the Zionists want to keep us uninformed to the hidden agenda of Zionism.

Some of the email I received claimed that The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion are a forgery.

To this I have five comments:


1. If it is a 'forgery', it implies that there is an original somewhere, WHERE IS IT? WHO WROTE IT?

2. Whether it is a forgery or not IS IRRELEVANT for the simple reason that our Zionist 'Jewish' 'brothers' have already implemented most, if not all of it. That is a fact. Every Jew who reads the Protocols knows that it was written by Jews, NO ONE ELSE could have written them.

3. The gentiles are really stupid (sorry), until now, they did not realise yet that the Zionists essentially control them.

4. It is VERY sad that most honest and honorable Jewish thinkers and intellectuals' articles are posted today on Moslem websites only.

5. As a person who grew up on Jewish ethics, I am at a great loss and shame to see our Zionist Rabbis justifying the present Moslem holocaust in the name of God and our Jewish religion. One thing I am sure of, if there is God, he is NOT 'Zionistically' Jewish. After reading many non-Zionists Jewish websites, I started believing as do many Rabbis in New York, that Zionism is: Satan hijacking our Jewish religion.

Some of the emails were complaints that they could not buy The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion. This is true, as we Jews control most of the printing and book distribution in the USA and many other countries. I had to go myself to: http://churchoftrueisrael.com/protocols/

I printed it and made 100 copies, and distributed them to ALL my friends and ALL members of my synagogue. I encouraged everyone to distribute them to as many friends as possible. Unless the stupid gentiles understand the Zionist agenda, we are marching blindly into WW3 as lemmings off the cliff.

I would like to thank you, Jeff, for your wonderful website and for being the best source of knowledge on the Internet for Jews. I took the time to write you this second comment as I feel that it is OUR responsibility as Jews to alert the world to the dangers of Zionism.

Sincerely,

Rose Rabbinovich
rabbinovich@bluemail.ch
Former Zionist
Melbourne, Victoria,
Australia

****

http://abbc.com/quotes/q001-050.htm

RABBI RABINOVICH'S SPEECH OF JANUARY 12TH, 1952

A report from Europe carried the following speech of Rabbi Emmanuel Rabinovich before a special meeting of the Emergency Council of European Rabbis in Budapest, Hungary, January 12, 1952: "Greetings, my children; You have been called her to recapitulate the principal steps of our new program. As you know, we had hoped to have twenty years between wars to consolidate the great gains which we made from World War II, but our increasing numbers in certain vital areas is arousing opposition to us, and we must now work with every means at our disposal to precipitate World War III within five years [They did not precipitate World War III but they did instigate the Korean War when on June 25, 1950 they ordered the North Korean army to launch a surprise attack on South Korea. On June 26, the U.N. Security Council condemned the invasion as aggression and ordered withdrawal of the invading forces. Then on June 27, 1950, our Jewish American President Truman ordered air and naval units into action to enforce the U.N. order. Not achieving their full goals, they then instigated the overthrow of South Vietnam Ngo Dinh Diem, Premier under Bao Dai, who deposed the monarch in 1955 and established a republic with himself as President. Diem used strong U.S. backing to create an authoritarian regime, which soon grew into a full-scale war, with Jewish pressure escalating U.S. involvement].

The goal for which we have striven so concertedly for three thousand years is at last within our reach, and because its fulfillment is so apparent, it behooves us to increase our efforts and our caution tenfold. I can safely promise you that before ten years have passed, our race will take its rightful place in the world, with every Jew a king and every Gentile a slave (Applause from the gathering). You remember the success of our propaganda campaign during the 1930's, which aroused anti-American passions in Germany at the same time we were arousing anti-German passions in America, a campaign which culminated in the Second World War. A similar propaganda campaign is now being waged intensively throughout the world. A war fever is being worked up in Russia by an incessant anti-American barrage while a nation-wide anti-Communist scare is sweeping America. This campaign is forcing all the smaller nations to choose between the partnership of Russia or an alliance with the United States. Our most pressing problem at the moment is to inflame the lagging militaristic spirit of the Americans. The failure of the Universal Military Training Act was a great setback to our plans, but we are assured that a suitable measure will be rushed through Congress immediately after the 1952 elections. The Russians, as well as the Asiatic peoples, are well under control and offer no objections to war, but we must wait to secure the Americans. This we hope to do with the issue of Anti-Semitism, which worked so well in uniting the Americans against Germany. We are counting heavily on reports of anti-Semitic outrages in Russia to whip up indignation in the United States and produce a front of solidarity against the Soviet power. Simultaneously, to demonstrate to Americans the reality of anti-Semitism, we will advance through new sources large sums of money to outspokenly anti-Semitic elements in America to increase their effectiveness, and we shall stage Anti-Semitic outbreaks in several of their largest cities. This will serve the double purpose of exposing reactionary sectors in America, which then can be silenced, and of welding the United States into a devoted anti-Russian unit. (Note: -- Protocol of Zion No. 9, para. 2, states that anti-Semitism is controlled by them. At the time of this speech they had already commenced their campaign of anti-Semitism in Czechoslovakia). Within five years, this program will achieve its objective, the Third World War, which will surpass in destruction all previous contests. Israeli, of course, will remain neutral, and when both sides are devastated and exhausted, we will arbitrate, sending our Control Commissions into all wrecked countries. This war will end for all time our struggle against the Gentiles.

We will openly reveal our identity with the races of Asia and Africa. I can state with assurance that the last generation of white children is now being born. Our Control Commissions will, in the interests of peace and wiping out inter- racial tensions.

Forbid the Whites to mate with Whites. The White Women must cohabit with members of the dark races, the White Men with black women. Thus the White Race will disappear, for the mixing of the dark with the White means the end of the White Man, and our most dangerous enemy will become only a memory. We shall embark upon an era of ten thousand years of peace and plenty, the Pax Judaica, and our race will rule undisputed over the world. Our superior intelligence will easily enable us to retain mastery over a world of dark peoples.

Question from the gathering: Rabbi Rabinovich, what about the various religions after the Third World War?

Rabinovich: There will be no more religions. Not only would the existence of a priest class remain a constant danger to our rule, but belief in an after-life would give spiritual strength to irreconcilable elements in many countries, and enable them to resist us. We will, however, retain the rituals and customs of Judaism as the mark of our hereditary ruling caste, strengthening our racial laws so that no Jew will be allowed to marry outside our race, nor will any stranger be accepted by us. (Note: Protocol of Zion No. 17 para. 2, states: 'Now that freedom of conscience has been declared everywhere (as a result of their efforts they have previously stated) only years divide us from the moment of the complete wrecking of that [Hated] Christian Religion. As to other religions, we shall have still less difficulty with them.')

We may have to repeat the grim days of World War II, when we were forced to let the Hitlerite bandits sacrifice SOME of our people, in order that we may have adequate documentation and witnesses to legally justify our trial and execution of the leaders of America and Russia as war criminals, after we have dictated the peace. I am sure you will need little preparation for such a duty, for sacrifice has always been the watchword of our people, and the death of a few thousand lesser Jews in exchange for world leadership is indeed a small price to pay. To convince you of the certainty of that leadership, let me point out to you how we have turned all of the inventions of the White Man into weapons against him. His printing presses and Radios are the mouthpieces of our desires, and his heavy industry manufactures the instruments which he sends out to arm Asia and Africa against him.

Our interests in Washington are greatly extending the Point Four Program (viz. Colombo Plan) for developing industry in backward areas of the world, so that after the industrial plants and cities of Europe and America are destroyed by atomic warfare, the Whites can offer no resistance against the large masses of the dark races, who will maintain an unchallenged technological superiority. And so, with the vision of world victory before you, go back to your countries and intensify your good work, until that approaching day when Israeli will reveal herself in all her glorious destiny as the Light of the World." (Note: Every statement made by Rabinovich is based on agenda contained in the "Protocols of Zion.")

Source:

Here is what Sir John A MacDonald did to Indigenous People
by Tristin Hopper

johnedited: Sir John A. Macdonald pictured in old age, when he implemented all the most damaging policies against Canadian Indigenous.

johnedited: Sir John A. Macdonald pictured in old age, when he implemented all the most damaging policies against Canadian Indigenous.

Right now, Canada is experiencing another spasm of controversy over the legacy of its first prime minister, John A. Macdonald. Although he undoubtedly laid the foundations of modern Canada, he also personally set in motion all the most damaging elements of Canadian Indigenous policy.

Here, in brief, is an accounting of the toll that Macdonald had on Canada’s First Nations.

“I have reason to believe that the agents as a whole … are doing all they can, by refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation, to reduce the expense,” Macdonald told the House of Commons in 1882.

It’s one of the most damning quotations ever attributed to Macdonald. And yet, in the parliament record it’s immediately followed by an even more damning comment as the Liberal opposition benches accuse Macdonald of not starving Indians enough.

“No doubt the Indians will bear a great degree of starvation before they will work, and so long as they are certain the Government will come to their aid they will not do much for themselves,” said David Mills, who had served as minister of the interior under the Liberal government of Alexander Mackenzie.

This was clearly an Ottawa that had no time for the rights and culture of what they would have called “savage” nations. Even in that context, over his career Macdonald would pursue an Indigenous policy so draconian that even his contemporaries would come to accuse him of going beyond the pale.

“Macdonald basically had Indigenous people locked down so tightly that they became irrelevant after 1885,” said James Daschuk, the author of the bestseller Clearing the Plains, from which many of the primary sources quoted in this article were obtained.

When Macdonald took office for the second and last time in 1878, the plains were in the grip of what is still one of the worst human disasters in Canadian history.

The sudden disappearance of the bison, caused largely by American overhunting, had robbed Plains First Nations of their primary source of food, clothing and shelter. Suddenly, all across the prairies were scenes reminiscent of the Irish Potato Famine only 30 years prior.

Around what is now Calgary, Blackfoot had been reduced to eating grass. White travellers described coming across landscapes of up to 1,000 Indigenous so starved that they had trouble walking.

Macdonald did not cause the famine. Nor did he draft the Indian Act or most of the West’s treaties, which had been created under the prior Liberal government.

Hayter Reed was one of the principle figures implementing Macdonald’s policies in the West, including the pass system. Here he is in costume for a historical ball on Parliament Hill.

But Macdonald would capitalize on prairies wracked with famine. His Conservatives had returned to office with an ambitious “National Policy” that included quickly driving a railroad to the Pacific.

To do this, Macdonald effectively gave himself near-autocratic control of the prairies, including supervision of Indian affairs and the Northwest Mounted Police

© Library and Archives Canada Hayter Reed was one of the principle figures implementing Macdonald's policies in the West, including the pass system. Here he is in costume for a historical ball on Parliament Hill.

“Indian matters … form so great a portion of the general policy of the Government that I think it necessary for the Prime Minister, whoever he may be, to have that in his own hands.” Macdonald wrote in 1881.

In government archives, Daschuk found ample primary evidence showing that Macdonald’s Indian agents explicitly withheld food in order to drive bands onto reserve and out of the way of the railroad. A Liberal MP at the time even called it “a policy of submission shaped by a policy of starvation.”

But the hunger did not stop under government care. In some cases, it got worse. Reserves were equipped with meagre agricultural equipment and relocated natives were expected to immediately grow enough food to sustain themselves.

The policy was an almost total failure, and when reserves inevitably began to tip back into famine, Indian agents kept rations low enough to ensure constant hunger and discourage the expectation of “gratuitous assistance” from Ottawa.

Even then, food provided was often rancid thanks to corrupt suppliers. In one case mentioned in the House of Commons, “flour” provided to a starving Cree reserve was nothing more than sweepings from a grist mill. In 1883, tainted government flour killed up to 20 people at what is now Alberta’s Kainai First Nation.

The squalid conditions ensured that Macdonald spent much of the 1880s overseeing near-constant famines and epidemics on federally controlled reserves. In only five years between 1880 and 1885, the population of Plains First Nations dropped from 32,000 to 20,000, according to analysis by the Cree-Saulteaux academic Blair Stonechild,

“I saw the gaunt children dying of hunger … although it was thirty to forty degrees below zero their bodies were scarcely covered with torn rags,” the Catholic missionary Father Louis Cochin reported in the winter of 1883.

Indian agents had near-dictatorial powers over their charges. With the job treated as a patronage post, a whole reserve could be placed under the thumb of an outright sadist simply because he was owed a favour by Ottawa.

Thomas Quinn pictured in 1884.

In a particularly notorious incident in 1884, Indian agent Thomas Quinn gathered his emaciated charges in front of the on-reserve ration house, before declaring them the victims of an April Fool’s joke and turning them away with nothing.

Federal policy had placed natives under the sway of “low and unprincipled characters,” Cree writer Robert Steinhauer wrote in 1886.

The pattern of irresponsible or sadistic leadership would continue in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools, which Macdonald introduced as a nationwide program of assimilation in 1883.

“When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with his parents who are savages; he is surrounded by savages … He is simply a savage who can read and write,” Macdonald told the House of Commons.

In the downtowns of Kingston or Montreal, Canadians remained relatively oblivious to the harsh realities of Macdonald’s policies, and largely assumed that the humane assimilation of natives into white society was going ahead as planned.

It was only in the wake of Louis Riel’s 1885 North-West Rebellion, that stories began to trickle east of starvation and suffering.

“In the (United States) the Indian was the prey of the frontiersman and the cattle driver, in Canada he has been the prey of the government,” Liberal MP Malcolm Cameron told the House of Commons in 1886. He charged Macdonald of being “culpably negligent” in his duties to the Indians.

Even fellow Conservative began to turn on Macdonald. In 1886, Northwest Territories politician Thomas Jackson, a self-described “follower of Sir John Macdonald for twenty-five years”, told an outraged crowd of seeing starving, half-frozen Cree turned away by government agents at Fort Qu’Appelle.

“In the case of one Indian… within two months seven of his children died because they had not the necessaries of life,” he said.

An 1888 cartoon from the now-defunct Grip magazine showing Macdonald and Indian Commissioner Edgar Dewdney callously ignoring starving Cree.

Jackson had particular venom for Macdonald’s Indian Commissioner, Edgar Dewdney. “He has raised a bitter feeling that will not be eradicated for generations; he has taught the Indians to fight against the government, “ said Jackson.

But Macdonald, now 70, stuck with Dewdney and reacted to the rebellion by tightening the leash on Plains First Nations still further.

Macdonald authorized the pass system, which required First Nations to obtain permission from their Indian agent to leave their reserve. His government also criminalized powwows and potlatches. Both policies would persist well into the 20th century.

A pass issued in 1892 allowing Pat Grasshopper to leave the Sarcee reserve near Calgary.

Under Macdonald’s authorization, in 1885 crowds of hungry Cree were herded together around what is now Battleford, Sask. to silently witness the mass execution of eight fellow Cree.

The eight had killed nine white men while the North-West rebellion was simultaneously occurring several hundred kilometres to the east.

Although the killings have been called the Frog Lake Massacre, it was really more of a “settling of personal scores,” according to Daschuk. Notably, the aforementioned “April Fools” Indian agent was among the victims. In fact, the North-West Rebellion fizzled out so quickly in large part because so many Plains Cree leaders had explicitly avoided joining Riel.

Regardless, even in a Canada that had just outlawed public hangings, authorities made absolutely sure that their death would be a spectacle.

“The executions of the Indians … ought to convince the Red Man that the White Man governs,” Macdonald wrote to Edgar Dewdney.

Macdonald’s staunchest defenders do not deny that he embodied a belief system that would today be called white nationalism. Among white society in the Victoria-era British Empire, it was a mainstream belief that it was a morally righteous thing to supplant Indigenous nations with European civilization. Even the Victorian equivalent of a social justice campaigner would have wanted Christ, assimilation and “uplift” for Indigenous peoples, not a retention of their existing culture.

In one way Macdonald was oddly more progressive on Indigenous policy than his contemporaries.

On the eve of the North-West Rebellion, he had proposed a measure that would extend voting rights to Canadian Indigenous — a measure that Canada wouldn’t actually adopt until 1960. “I hope to see some day the Indian race represented by one of themselves on the floor of the House of Commons,” he wrote in a letter to friend Peter Jones, a Mississauga Ojibwa chief.

Peter Jones, the first Indigenous physician in North America. He was also a valued political organizer for Macdonald, and regular correspondent.

Liberal MP David Mills ridiculed the bill by saying that it would allow Indians to “go from a scalping party to the polls.”

In a particularly remarkable quote from 1880, Macdonald did something that would be quite familiar to the Canadians of 2018: He disparaged his forebears for the awful plight of Canada’s first peoples.

“We must remember that they are the original owners of the soil, of which they have been dispossessed by the covetousness or ambition of our ancestors,” he wrote in a letter proposing the creation of the Department of Indian Affairs.

“At all events, the Indians have been great sufferers by the discovery of America and the transfer to it of a large white population.”

To Daschuk, Macdonald’s apparent sympathies with First Nations makes his actions in the West all the more sinister. They reveal that the first prime minister was not a “cartoon racist” bent on genocide. Rather, he brought the hammer down on Plains First Nations simply because they were an obstacle in the way of his national dream.

“He was doing this strategically,” said Daschuk.

In his 2011 Macdonald biography Nation Maker, historian Richard Gwyn took a charitable view of federal actions in the West, saying that Macdonald had merely been overwhelmed by a famine that had been “inflicted on him.”

“While clearly he could have done better, Macdonald was unquestionably the best available man for a task that, at its core, was near to impossible,” wrote Gwyn.

Defenders of Macdonald contend that he was merely guilty of negligence. He was a man in his 60s heading up a shaky new country while simultaneously orchestrating one of history’s largest infrastructure projects. The fate of whole peoples was in the hands of a man who had no idea what the West even looked like, and had no time to care.

“He developed the habit of putting aside some of his most challenging files to be looked at later,” wrote historian Donald Smith in an essay on Macdonald’s relationship with Aboriginal Canada. “New incoming files soon buried these old ones.”

Cree chief Big Bear. Although he had initially resisted the signing of Treaty 6, hunger eventually drove him and his people onto reserve.

If a Canadian government was carrying out Macdonald’s policies today, there’s no question it would instantly become an international pariah. Daschuk uses the term “ethnic cleansing” to refer to Macdonald’s intentional removal of Indian bands from southern Saskatchewan. He notes that it’s no accident that there are virtually no Saskatchewan native reserves along the route of the Canadian Pacific Railroad.

Of course, all this was happening in an era that was comparatively brutal almost everywhere. It was in this same time period that Belgium’s King Leopold II turned the Congo into his own personal slave state, killing up to 10 million Africans in the process.

When Macdonald went to London to negotiate the creation of Canada in 1866, British India was still recovering from a famine — exacerbated by colonial inaction — that had killed more than a million people.

The United States, meanwhile, would forcefully seize their country from Indigenous tribes through decades of wars and massacres. Even the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, brutally put down a Sioux rebellion with a mass-hanging that still ranks as the largest in U.S. history.

“The leading feature of Sir John’s Indian policy was to keep the Indian alive during times of scarcity, and gradually wean him from his wild ways into habits of settled industry,” wrote a glowing 1891 biography of Macdonald published soon after his death.

Despite Macdonald’s “infinite patience” in the matter, however, the book added that Indians had a “peculiar” penchant to “actually allow themselves to die.”

Robert Jefferson was a teacher in the Battleford area at the height of Macdonald’s policies in the west, and came away with a much more cynical view of what Ottawa had in store for the plains.

“It was not intended that the Indian should become self-supporting,” he wrote. “He was only to be kept quiet till the country filled up when his ill will could be ignored.”

Beginning in earnest shortly after Macdonald’s death, hundreds of thousands of European settlers poured into the prairies. Aside from the occasional arrowhead turned up under their ploughs, they had little knowledge of what Canada had done to prepare the lands for settlement.

As Jefferson predicted, the plight of Canada’s Indigenous virtually disappeared from history books, political discourse and the general Canadian consciousness. “For close to a century, to be an Indian was to be invisible, so far as the government and the majority of Canadians were concerned,” wrote Richard Gwyn in Nation Maker.

Cree students at the All Saints Indian Residential School in Lac La Ronge, Saskatchewan in 1945, 54 years after Macdonald’s death.

For Macdonald’s contemporaries, it would have been clear that their “Old Chieftain” had definitively solved the “Indian Question.”

It’s reasonable to assume that almost anybody else in the prime minister’s chair at the time would have similarly pursued an assimilationist policy against Canada’s First Nations. Tellingly, in 1898 Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberals would repeal one of Macdonald’s few positive legacies for Canadian Indigenous; a slimmed-down voting rights act that had briefly given the franchise to certain Ontario First Nations.

But it’s similarly reasonable to believe that another man in Macdonald’s place would not have been so cruel.

“He had a deadline,” said Daschuk, “and that’s why he put the screws on so tight.”

Source: https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/here-is-what-sir-john-a-macdonald-did-to-indigenous-people/ar-BBMzmHB?li=AAggNb9&ocid=mailsignout

Saturday, September 1, 2018

Ginkgo Bioworks is Poised to Upset Almost Every Industry You Can Think Of

Bryan Johnson
Founder @KernelCo @OSFund & Braintree
Aug 21

Re-writing Nature’s Recipe Book: How Ginkgo Bioworks is Poised to Upset Almost Every Industry You Can Think Of

Ginkgo Bioworks, based in Boston, has been in the headlines lately:
Ginkgo will “bring biodesign to the masses”. (Fast Company.)
Ginkgo will “convince you to love GMOs”. (The Atlantic.)
Ginkgo are the “DNA Cops” helping to “stop a new class of biological weapons from being created”. (Bloomberg.)
Ginkgo will “reinvent Moore’s Law”. (Forbes.)

What does all this mean? How can one company do all that?

I recently spoke with Ginkgo Bioworks co-founders Tom Knight and Jason Kelly about the future of manufacturing and how the secrets of biology will be the secrets to unlocking the next Industrial Revolution.

Ginkgo Bioworks is More Than A Biology Company — They’re Assembling Instruction Manuals For the Entire Natural World

Tl:dr: Biology is nanotechnology that works.

Named after the Ginkgo tree, Ginkgo Bioworks is trying to bring industrial efficiency to biology and biological efficiency to industry by rethinking how almost everything is made.

Co-founder Tom Knight’s path from computer hardware to molecular biology is the stuff of legends, and is critical to understanding the Ginkgo story. Knight began a decades-long affiliation with MIT while he was still in high school, when he took some of the first ever computer programming classes and spent his summers in the then-nascent artificial intelligence lab. He ultimately graduated through an MIT PhD onto the MIT faculty, where he worked on the ARPANET — a very early version of the internet — and co-founded startups to commercialize his computer hardware inventions. One of the companies he co-founded — Symbolics — had the first registered .com domain name and eventually went public.

While teaching an integrated circuit design course, Knight challenged his students to predict the end of Moore’s Law — the operating principle that computing power would double just about every two years. Knight saw that the end of that pace of improvement was very near and wondered, ‘What’s next? What do you do about the fact that the core technology, which is the basis of high performance computing, is coming to an end?’”

He began to hunt for the answer, and found it in molecular biology. At 50 years old, with a PhD and decades of work at the highest levels of the computer engineering fields, he went back to school, starting with a sophomore level molecular biology class. He eventually founded a molecular biology lab within the computer science department at MIT, and began to test his hypothesis around leveraging biology to solve problems he’d previously contemplated using silicon.

They say necessity is the mother of invention, and Knight bumped up against a need: to run his experiments on gene-edited bacteria (more on that later,) he first needed to create the bacteria. It was time consuming, repetitive work, and his engineering brain produced an epiphany: there had to be an engineering solution to create gene-edited bacteria in a scalable, efficient way. At its core, his epiphany pointed to a critical question: what separates bio- and genetic engineering from physical engineering? What becomes possible if we think about them in the same way?

Knight’s decades of computing and engineering expertise applied to relatively new education in molecular biology led to a critical insight: applying an engineering mindset to the discovery process — making it possible to more rapidly and predictably engineer genomes — would take industrial microbiology to a new scale.

The Power of Bacteria

Ginkgo focuses on bacteria. It turns out that if you give these tiny prokaryotes the right instructions, they can make almost anything biology can.

“When we think about all the things we need in industry — energy storage, converting electrons into chemicals, etc — it turns out there are plenty of bacteria that have already solved these problems,” Knight told me.

Let’s start at the beginning: everything that is made in the biological world follows a specific recipe, like an instruction manual. Peptide A plus protein B plus phospholipid C plus nucleic acid D and voila, you’ve got an organism (like a plant), a protein (like keratin, the key structure that makes up our hair and the outer layer of our skin), or a chemical defense mechanism (like caffeine, which is a way plants make themselves unattractive to insects, but also happens to boost our cognition).

Building instruction manuals for bacteria — thousands of them, developed by rapidly engineering and prototyping generation after generation of gene-edited bacteria — is an efficient, cost-effective, and scalable process for making biological material. This is the motivating vision for Ginkgo. Tom, Jason, and their team want be a kind of Foxconn for biology, able to manufacture almost anything in the world cheaply, quickly, and at global scale.

Knight offered an eye-opening analogy: the utility of engineering biological molecules is “very similar in many respects to some of the basic motivations for technology like silicon, in the semiconductor world. There you have a base technology, in the case of silicon the ability to design and pattern and power-up semiconductor devices, very complex ones. The technology is agnostic to the application: you could be using it for making microprocessors or for cars. You can make television sets out of it. You can make iPhones.”

“One of the things we’re capitalizing on here at Ginkgo, is the generality of the platform,” Kelly added, “We’re designing biological molecules without a specific application in mind, knowing that we’ll use that technology across a whole variety of industries,” Kelly explained.

Ginkgo’s generalized platform will do for biology what the fabrication lab did for the semiconductor world: pave the way for automated technological production.

“In general, you can take the biology that is applicable to farm animals and apply it to plants. You can take the same technology that’s applicable to brewing beer and make antibodies with it,” Kelly explained, “because they all run on the same operating system — DNA.”

But what about all those headlines? The future of manufacturing? Biodesign? Bioweapons? DNA cops? All from bacteria?

That’s right, all from bacteria operating according to highly specialized instruction manuals, developed at scale according to a model unique to Ginkgo that applies a technological engineering approach to the task. More on the model in a bit, but first, Knight and Kelly took me through a few examples of what’s in process..

Example #1: A Little Bit Jurassic Park, A Little Bit Fern Gully, a Little Bit Chanel №5

Have you ever wondered what flowers smelled like in the Cretaceous? Would you buy Eau de Fern Crushed Under Your Feet During the Cambrian?

Using samples from the Harvard Herbarium, Ginkgo is hoping to produce novel scents for perfumers. By extracting DNA from flowers that have been extinct for hundreds of years, encoding that DNA in bacteria and growing it in yeast, they believe they can bring to market fragrances no living humans have ever smelled.

One major benefit of moving production into bacteria is speed. Which in industry is of course the same thing as cost. It takes months or even years to grow generations of plants, whereas bacterial generations can be produced in under 30 minutes.

Even if you’re not into Victorian-era scents, the ability to produce a scent via genetic manipulation of bacteria has important ramifications. Without it, if a perfumer wants to buy a fragrance molecule, they need to depend on farmers to harvest the whole plant. One ounce of Chanel Number 5 requires more than a thousand flowers. Extrapolate that across every product in every industry reliant on scents — from rose water to detergent to lotions, and yes, perfumes — and that’s a lot of crops. Relying on whole plants for scent molecules is wasteful and environmentally expensive, and, let’s face it, it sounds so 20th century, doesn’t it?

Ginkgo wants to resurrect ancient plants for rare perfumes. 1 oz of Chanel requires around 1,012 flowers!

“Sometimes those crops don’t work for some reason during a particular year. And so if you’re a perfumer and you’re depending upon that crop, it can be a serious problem,” Knight said.

But if you take the fragrant chemical’s instruction manual, plop it into a bacteria, and print any bespoke chemical — ancient, modern, or maybe even brand new — on demand, you’ve just revolutionized a billion-dollar industry and removed the need for water and space-craving crops.

Example #2: We Can Make All Plants Into Self-fertilizing Plants

Let’s think bigger. Saving-our-planet bigger.

One of Ginkgo’s flagship projects, Joyn Bio, is a joint venture with Bayer to engineer a new class of nitrogen-fixing bacteria which would bind to the roots of corn and wheat and greatly lessen their need for fertilizer.

The idea is to transfer the microbial skills from one species (say, soybeans, which can trap their own nitrogen via bacteria that live in their roots) to another species of plant (wheat and corn, which can’t trap their own nitrogen), translating the instruction manual from one species to another.

If it works, corn and wheat crops will soon be able to fertilize themselves and replenish the soil, greatly reducing the amount of energy needed and greenhouse gasses emitted to sustain the world’s food supply.

Example #3: Biosecurity Meets National Security

As a side effect of being the largest designer of DNA in the world, Ginkgo has a large internal database of designed DNA, which gives them a library of sequences to compare any new unknown sequence in a cell, organism, virus, or pathogen. As part of a group in partnership with IARPA, Ginkgo is hoping to be able to answer questions about any new organism or DNA strand the government or health sector may come across, including whether it may be pathogenic (i.e. disease-causing), whether or not it was “man made” or whether or not it may be dangerous in some other way.

Example #4: A Fantastic Voyage Into the Body Could Revolutionize Medicine

The same idea — swapping instruction manuals — behind the production of custom or ancient fragrances and modified soil microbes could be applied to making medicines, too. Ginkgo, in a partnership with Synlogic, is exploring how gut bacteria can modulate disorders of both the body and mind. Like the Joyn Bio project is about engineering microbes that live with plants, this one is about engineering microbes that live in the gut. Ginkgo may one day be able to turn our gut bacteria into pharmaceutical factories — able to print any drug, cheaply, on demand, from inside the body.

“We might be able to do that by, again, copying what might be extracted out of a plant and moving that production capability into yeast or bacteria,” said Knight.

Ginkgo Bioworks fermentation engineer Kar Mun Neoh works in Bioworks2. Image credit: Ginkgo Bioworks

The Ginkgo Difference

The possibilities are remarkable. So too is the Ginkgo model that converts potential into reality. It’s helpful to understand how they’re different than the typical biotech company.

The industry standard process goes like this: first, sign a contract to make a specific compound, for a specific purpose. Then, hire an army of molecular biologists and seat them at lab benches where they design and test genetic pathways. If you hired really good molecular biologists, they might be able to fairly quickly design, assemble, and test a half dozen pathways to find one or two that work for the specific purpose they’re hunting for.

Ginkgo turns that process on its head, thanks to Tom and Jason’s engineering mindset. Ginkgo works much more like in the silicon world — they treat the biology as an outcome-agnostic technology, rather than as a limited purpose-specific tactic.

So at any given time, Ginkgo teams are working on dozens of projects, producing pathways and organisms that could be applied to any number of specific purposes. Remember how silicon is agnostic to whether it’s powering an iphone or a car? Same here. The basic platform of bacteria, instructed in countless ways, is as agnostic to whether it’s powering medicine or scents or nitrogen-fixing roots? This is how Ginkgo has that vast library of DNA I described in example #3. This is the bacteria factory.

When Ginkgo gets a new project, they don’t need to hire a team of PhDs to sit at lab desks. Instead, they spin up an internal team to engage the factory to quickly design pathways, do the gene editing, apply it to generations of bacteria or yeast, and test and analyze them. If the designed organisms are producing the compound they’re looking for, they’re transitioned to a facility that produces them at scale. If not, they can rapidly repeat the process.

“So all along that path, there is a set of teams that are not project-specific but rather technology-specific in exactly the same way that you would find in the semiconductor fabrication facility where you have people who are good at designing masks and then people who are good at baking silicon wafers and then another set of people who are good at slicing those wafers up and packaging them,” Knight noted.

Kelly added, “Now notice that the team at each stage of production is good at what they are responsible for, and it doesn’t make any difference whether they’re making silicon for an automobile or a cell phone. The sequence of things that gets done is exactly the same, regardless of what the end product is.”

The Ginkgo team has made bioengineering “real engineering” — just as Tom hoped.

Ginkgo is Designing the Future

I asked Knight to think a little sci-fi. What will the future be like, with a Ginkgo Bioworks in charge?

Knight imagined growth in the field of predictive biology, where the designs can be even more efficient by simulating whether different instruction manuals will work, in which organisms, and when.

Outside of our own bodies printing medicines we need, self-fertilizing plants, or resurrecting fragrances, what might we imagine? Designer trees whose structural blueprints have been reprogrammed to grow into house shapes instead of log shapes? (I’m in. I want to live in a gigantic treehouse.) Roads made of self-healing concrete?? Almost all the world’s chemicals and energy being made in huge, environmentally-friendly, quiet, and clean silos in the middle of America?

As Knight noted, “Asking the question of what’s to come for synthetic biology is like asking Bardeen, the inventor of the transistor to ‘please predict iPhones’ in 1948. You can’t predict it. You can make guesses what’s important today but we don’t have a clue for the future.”

In other words, the sky… and the ground, and the seas, and humanity…essentially, the world, is the limit.

Source: https://medium.com/future-literacy/re-writing-natures-recipe-book-how-ginkgo-bioworks-is-poised-to-upset-almost-every-industry-you-4e516a78bebb

Frog’s Slime Could End Flu Season For Good

Newly Discovered Frog’s Slime Could End Flu Season For Good

Posted by Annette Choi 20 Apr 2017

Scientists hunting for the next antimicrobial found one that could be even more promising than they had hoped for: on the gooey backs of a newly discovered South Indian frog, they discovered a molecule that can wipe out influenza viruses while leaving cells unharmed.

The researchers were studying Hydrophylax bahuvistara, a colorful frog first described in 2015 and known for its antimicrobial secretions. After catching the amphibians, they gave them a small zap of electricity to collect some of their germ-killing mucus and then released them back into the wild, unharmed. The study was published in the journal Immunity.

The goo contained four peptides, or short chains of amino acids, that seemed to fend off viruses. Three were toxic to human red blood cells, but the fourth wasn’t. They named the peptide urumin, which comes from the word “urumi,” an Indian whip-like blade.

In the lab, the researchers tested urumin’s virus-killing abilities on mice. They first vaccinated mice with urumin and then injected them with a deadly amount of the H1 virus—also known as the swine flu. The mice survived, and after some more probing, the team discovered that the compound endowed protection by binding to hemagglutinin, a protein found on the surface of influenza viruses. Beth Mole, writing for Ars Technica, has more:

Moreover, urumin had an interesting effect on the virus: it made them explode. Usually, antiviral peptides that latch onto an HA simply block HA and keep the virus from invading cells with it, but viruses treated with urumin were destroyed. The researchers aren’t sure why, but they hypothesize that after urumin binds HA, it exerts electrostatic forces on the surface of the particle that cause the whole shell to rupture.

However it does it, “urumin represents a unique class of anti-influenza virucide,” the authors conclude, and it needs follow-up research.

Because no other antiviral peptide known to scientists has been so precise, the study authors are baffled by how the demolition process actually works.

But if researchers are able to crack the urumin secret and prove it safe in humans, it could be used as a potential therapy and help scientists embark on a vaccine that tackles all strains of influenza.

Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/nature/newly-discovered-frogs-slime-could-end-flu-season-for-good/?utm_source=FBPAGE&utm_medium=social&utm_term=20180831&utm_content=1744668388&utm_campaign=NOVA%20Next&linkId=56165754

Moore's Law - Have we reached the saturation point? Nope !!!!

Moore's Law

What is 'Moore's Law'

Moore's Law is the observation made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every year while the costs are halved. In 1965, Gordon Moore noticed that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since their invention. Moore's law predicts that this trend will continue into the foreseeable future.

Although the recent pace has slowed for Moore's Law, the doubling of installed transistors on silicon chips occurs closer to every 18 months instead of annually. The 18-month mark is the current definition of Moore's law.

Moore's law suggests exponential growth. Thus, it is unlikely to continue indefinitely. Most experts expect Moore's law to hold for another two decades. Many experts believe Moore's Law hit its physical and economical limitations in 2017 and has slowed.

The extension of Moore's law is that computers, machines that run on computers and computing power all become smaller and faster with time, as transistors on integrated circuits become more efficient. Transistors are simple electronic on/off switches embedded in microchips, processors and tiny electrical circuits. The faster microchips process electrical signals, the more efficient a computer becomes.

Costs of these higher-powered computers eventually came down too, usually about 30 percent per year. When designers increased the performance of computers with better-integrated circuits, manufacturers could create better machines that could automate certain processes. This automation created lower-priced products for consumers, as the hardware created lower labor costs.
Contemporary Society

Fifty years after Moore's law, contemporary society sees dozens of benefits from his vision. Mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers, would not work without tiny processors. Smaller and faster computers improve transportation, health care, education and energy production. Just about every facet of a high-tech society benefits from the concept of Moore's law put into practice.
The Future

Thanks to nanotechnology, some transistors are smaller than a virus. These microscopic structures contain carbon and silicon molecules aligned in perfect fashion to help move electricity along the circuit faster. Eventually, the temperature of the transistors makes it impossible to create smaller circuits, because cooling the transistors takes more energy than what passes through the transistors. Experts show that computers should reach physical limits of Moore's law in the 2020s. When that happens, computer scientists can examine entirely new ways of creating computers.

Rather than physical processes, applications and software can improve the speed and efficiency of computers moving forward. Cloud computing, wireless communication, the Internet of Things and quantum physics may all play a role in innovating computer technology. Many designers, engineers, and computer scientists agreed in early 2016 that Moore's law might run its course within 10 years. Progress achieving the doubling of the number of circuits has slowed, and integrated circuits cannot get much smaller as transistors approach the size of an atom.

At some point, software or hardware breakthroughs may keep the dream of Moore's law alive. However, the computer industry seems ready to move on to another course.

Read more: Moore's Law https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mooreslaw.asp#ixzz5PuHqAn2z

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