dark matter

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pages: 265 words: 79,944

First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time by Emma Chapman

Albert Einstein, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Arthur Eddington, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, endowment effect, Ernest Rutherford, friendly fire, Galaxy Zoo, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, Neil Armstrong, Olbers’ paradox, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the long tail, uranium enrichment, Wilhelm Olbers

‘Normal’ matter is made of baryons, which interact with light so that we can see their presence, using some part of the electromagnetic spectrum at least. Dark matter doesn’t interact with light, so escapes all of our traditional telescopes and even our most modern ones. We have never directly detected dark matter and this is no insignificant thing as we think dark matter makes up 85 per cent of the total mass within the Universe. It’s not that first stars scientists disregarded dark matter entirely – more that we thought that dark matter could only noticeably interact through gravity. Dark matter creates a factory floor on which to construct the first stars. In the early Universe, after recombination 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the gas was hot, too hot to collapse into anything approaching a star: there were no lucky clouds of gas at all.

Once the gas has coalesced into a star within the web of dark matter, however, we have little need to consider dark matter. It’s on the wrong scale to matter, just as dark matter has little effect within the scale of our Solar System. Or so we thought. What the EDGES result implies is that something is interacting with the gas to make it colder, and the only thing hanging around in the Universe colder than the gas is dark matter. Given a hot cloud of gas and a cold cloud of dark matter, energy is passed from the former to the latter until the two are in thermal equilibrium: the gas cools and the dark matter warms up a bit. But hang on – dark matter is famous for not interacting with stuff; it’s even in the name WIMP.

However, to the best of our knowledge, and there is some argument about this, dark matter was cold. Cold stuff can collapse, so collapse it did. Our models show that the dark matter condensed into dense filaments, a cosmic web covering the entire Universe. It didn’t collapse further, say into stars or galaxies made of dark matter because, while it was cold enough to condense a bit, it cannot interact electromagnetically (that is, with photons) to lose heat like baryons can. Because dark matter couldn’t lose this heat, the internal pressure was much higher. This kept the dark matter from condensing into anything much smaller than regions of gravitationally bound dark matter, called halos, of about 1 million solar masses, at the junctions of the filaments.


pages: 340 words: 91,416

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder

Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, double helix, game design, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Skype, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method

They’ve been seeing this signal for more than a decade. Such an annual modulation is what we would expect from dark matter because the probability that a dark matter signal is detected depends on the direction from which dark matter particles fall in. Since Earth moves through the presumably existing dark matter cloud on its way around the Sun, the direction of the incoming dark matter flux changes over the course of the year. Unfortunately, other experiments have excluded that the DAMA signal can be caused by dark matter because if that were so, it should have shown up also in other detectors, which hasn’t happened.

At 1017 Kelvin, therefore, we start with a soup composed almost entirely of matter and dark matter. Space-time reacts to this matter by beginning to expand. This cools the soup and enables the formation first of atomic nuclei and then of light atoms. Initially, the particle soup is so dense that light gets stuck in it. But once atoms form, light can travel almost undisturbed. Dark matter, since it doesn’t interact with light, cools faster than normal matter. In the early universe, therefore, dark matter is the first to start clumping under its own gravitational pull. Indeed, without the dark matter’s early clumping, galaxies wouldn’t form in the way that we observe, for the gravitational pull of the already clumpy dark matter is needed to speed up the clumping of normal matter.

The first attempt at modified gravity, known as modified Newtonian dynamics, did not respect the symmetries of general relativity, and this very much spoke against it.15 Newer versions of modified gravity respect the symmetries of general relativity and still explain the observed galactic regularities better than particle dark matter.16 But they don’t do well on distances far below or far above galactic size. The solution might be somewhere in between. Recently a group of researchers has proposed that dark matter is a superfluid, which at short scales resembles modified gravity but at long scales allows the flexibility of particle dark matter.17 This idea combines the benefits of both without the disadvantages of either. And despite the different terminology, the mathematics of modified gravity and the mathematics of particle dark matter are almost the same. As Katie says, for modified gravity one adds new—so far unobserved—fields.


pages: 194 words: 63,798

The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy by Moiya McTier

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Burning Man, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edward Charles Pickering, Ernest Rutherford, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Webb Space Telescope, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, overview effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

But that simple relation only works if most of the mass is concentrated in the middle. Since my dark matter halo is so huge and holds most of my mass, it affects the speeds of my outer stars. They move faster than they would if they were just reacting to the mass of the luminous material…the shiny stuff. They move so fast that some of them could even have escaped if I didn’t have as much dark matter as I do, holding them in place. The slope of that radius-speed relation, aka the rotation curve, depends on the amount of dark matter the galaxy has, and it’s how your astronomers learned about dark matter in the first place. Your physicists first hypothesized dark matter in 1933, but you didn’t find evidence until 1968, when Vera Rubin realized stars were moving faster than she expected.

The biggest but dimmest part of my majestic body is my halo, which has three overlapping parts: stellar, circumgalactic, and dark matter. The stellar component is a messy spherical field of stars and globular clusters3 left over from previous interactions with other galaxies, and it extends out to about 100 kpc. The circumgalactic halo is a cloud of warm gas that I can use to fuel my star making. The dark matter halo is my most extensive and massive “organ,” you could say. It’s not called “dark” because it’s inherently wicked or threatening. In fact, dark matter was instrumental for all of us in the beginning. Without dark matter’s cold clumpiness, galaxies like me wouldn’t have been able to hold on to mass and form stars in the early, hot universe.

Back in the beginning, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, when the first protogalaxies were being born, the universe was too hot for all that non-dark matter, or the baryonic matter as your scientists call it, to bind together gravitationally. Gas particles were moving around so fast they would have overcome the gravitational attraction of the other baryons. But what if there was already some cooler material that clumped more easily and could still attract the warmer particles? Dark matter is like a scaffold you might build to help your plants grow. So we all owe our existence to that dark matter. But dark matter doesn’t come without downsides. As we know because of the conservation of angular momentum, the stars farther out in a galaxy’s disk should move more slowly than close-in stars.


pages: 198 words: 57,703

The World According to Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, gravity well, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, information security, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, post-truth, power law, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, supercomputer in your pocket, the scientific method, time dilation

You would need a light-year’s thickness of lead shielding to have even a fifty-fifty chance of blocking them. You could say that they are, to all intents and purposes, ‘dark matter’. However, they cannot be the dark matter that we are searching for because, being so light, they travel at near light speed—too fast to remain bound within galaxies and thus to explain galaxies’ anomalous properties. We refer to neutrinos as hot dark matter, because they move so fast. And as if the unresolved problem of dark matter weren’t big enough for physicists, we now know of another mysterious substance filling the universe, which plays a vital role in shaping it.

The observed higher-than-expected orbital speeds of these outer stars suggest that there must be some additional invisible stuff present, extending out beyond the visible matter we can see and providing the extra gravitational glue to stop the outer stars from flying off. Dark matter can also be seen from the way it curves space around it. This phenomenon manifests itself in the way light bends while on its path from very distant objects to our telescopes. The amount of bending can only be explained by the extra gravitational curvature of space provided by the dark matter of galaxies that the light passes on its way to us. So, what do we know about dark matter other than that it provides this necessary extra gravitational attraction? Might this not be accounted for by something less exotic than a new form of matter?

The existence of dark matter also seems necessary to explain the structure of the early universe. In contrast with normal matter, which through its interaction with the electromagnetic field kept its energy high, dark matter cooled down more quickly as the universe expanded and therefore started to clump together gravitationally earlier. One of the most important results in astrophysics in recent years has been the confirmation from sophisticated computer simulations of galaxy formation that we can only explain the real universe if it does indeed contain large quantities of dark matter. Without it, we would not get the rich cosmic structures we see today.


pages: 381 words: 120,361

Sunfall by Jim Al-Khalili

airport security, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bletchley Park, Carrington event, cosmological constant, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Attenborough, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, imposter syndrome, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off grid, pattern recognition, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Turing test

Technical Note on Dark Matter The central premise of the odin project rests on the behaviour of dark matter. But how accurate is this scientifically? Well, let me make a couple of things clear. Firstly, dark matter is real. It is what holds galaxies together. In fact, there is five times more dark matter in the universe than normal matter. The problem is that, as of the time of writing in December 2018, we still don’t know what dark matter is made of. Whatever its constituent particles are, they are nothing we currently know of. Physicists refer to it as ‘non-baryonic matter’. We know dark matter feels the force of gravity but not the electromagnetic force (which is what allows it to pass through normal matter as though it weren’t there).

But, as I hope you all know by now, dark matter doesn’t feel the presence of normal matter, by which I mean it’s not affected by the electromagnetic force. So, just as dark matter passes through normal matter as if it weren’t there, it will also be oblivious to the presence of the magnets, regardless of how powerful those magnets are.’ The background murmuring began afresh as many in the audience suddenly understood what seemed to be a fundamental flaw in the scheme. Marc took a couple of steps closer to the front of the stage. ‘So, here’s the plan. We don’t make beams of neutralinos, the usual dark-matter particles, to begin with, but heavier versions of them.

His institute in China had been developing a mini dark-matter accelerator for the past five years and he’d been heavily involved in getting it funded. Now it seemed that it would play its part in the latest test of the Odin Project. It was to be placed on-board a ship that would float above the point where this beam would emerge on the other side of the planet. Darklab would itself produce a small amount of dark matter and fire it down into the sea to meet the Mag-4 pulse head-on. The tiny energy created would then be picked up by the vessel’s detectors. She turned to Qiang. ‘But if it’s just to see if two colliding dark-matter beams can create energy inside the Earth, wasn’t that what the Antarctic tests confirmed last month?’


pages: 71 words: 20,766

Space at the Speed of Light: The History of 14 Billion Years for People Short on Time by Becky Smethurst

Apollo 13, Cepheid variable, dark matter, Galaxy Zoo, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Stephen Hawking

We call the rest of the matter that doesn’t interact with light “dark matter.” It doesn’t give out light, or reflect or absorb it, so we have no way of “seeing” it. Unlike an isolated black hole, which traps light beyond its event horizon (we could, perhaps, class that as “absorbing” light), dark matter pervades the whole universe. Even in the solar system, we think there’s about two protons’ worth of dark matter in every teaspoon of space, and yet we’ve no way of interacting with it. So, how do we even know dark matter exists? Well, just like black holes, although light is not an option, dark matter does interact with gravity and so bends space in exactly the same way as normal matter.

But it does have some problems—the biggest being the fact that it doesn’t incorporate dark matter at all. So, there are now some particle physicists trying to extend their beautiful theory into something a bit clunkier to shoehorn dark matter in there. To do that, they need to find what dark matter is made of—by detecting some of it. How to search for something that tiny, something incapable of interacting with light or even other matter, for that matter, is a big problem. One method is to attempt to detect when a particle of dark matter collides with a normal particle of matter that we can detect. We should then be able to identify the change in momentum, or energy, of the other particle, like a cue ball hitting a colored ball in a game of pool.

What this finding suggested was that most of the mass in galaxies isn’t found in the center—it’s found on the outskirts. Yet when we look at a galaxy, we don’t see more stars on the outskirts; the greatest concentration of stars occurs in the center. So, that means there must be a huge amount of matter that we can’t see surrounding a galaxy, in something we’ve come to call a dark matter halo. The second piece of evidence for dark matter came from comparing how much mass gravity suggested was in galaxies to how much we could detect in starlight. As Einstein said, massive objects curve the spacetime that light travels along. This might sound like an odd concept, but lenses also change the path of light.


pages: 279 words: 75,527

Collider by Paul Halpern

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, gravity well, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, horn antenna, index card, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, time dilation

Another field eagerly awaiting the LHC findings is astronomy. Astronomers hope that new results in particle physics will help them unravel the field’s greatest mystery: the composition of dark matter and dark energy, two types of substances that affect luminous material but display no hint of their origin and nature. 9 Denizens of the Dark Resolving the Mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy I know I speak for a generation of people who have been looking for dark-matter particles since they were grad students. I doubt . . . many of us will remain in the field if the L.H.C. brings home bad news. —JUAN COLLAR, KAVLI INSTITUTE FOR COSMOLOGICAL PHYSICS (NEW YORK TIMES, MARCH 11, 2007) There’s an urgency for LHC results that transcends the ruminations of theorists.

Apart from neutrinos, MACHOs, and WIMPs, another option, a hypothetical massive particle called the axion, postulated to play a role in quantum chromodynamics (the theory of the strong force) and tagged by some theorists as a leading dark-matter contender, has yet to be found. The search for the universe’s missing mass has been at an impasse. Enter the LHC to the rescue. Perhaps somewhere in its collision debris the secret key ingredients of cold dark matter will be revealed. Prime contenders would be the lightest supersymmetric companion particles, such as neutralinos, charginos, gluinos, photinos, squarks, and sleptons. Presuming they have energies on the TeV scale, each would present itself through characteristic decay profiles that would show up in tracking and calorimetry. If dark matter were the main cosmic mystery, physicists would simply be clenching their teeth, crossing their fingers, and waiting expectantly for results at the LHC or elsewhere to turn up a suitable prospect.

Something was pressing the gas pedal instead of the brakes—and it couldn’t be any of the known forces. University of Chicago theorist Michael Turner dubbed this unknown agent “dark energy.” While both have mysterious identities, dark energy could not be the same as dark matter. In contrast to dark matter, which would gravitate in the same way as ordinary matter, dark energy would serve as a kind of “antigravity,” causing outward acceleration. If dark matter walked into a party, it would serve as a graceful host introducing people and bringing them together, but if dark energy intruded, it would act like the riot police dispersing the crowd. Indeed, too much dark energy in the cosmos would be no fun at all—the universe would eventually tear itself apart in a catastrophic scenario called the Big Rip.


pages: 326 words: 84,180

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, British Empire, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, disinformation, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, ghettoisation, Google Glasses, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, lifelogging, machine readable, mass incarceration, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, r/findbostonbombers, Scientific racism, security theater, sexual politics, transatlantic slave trade, urban renewal, US Airways Flight 1549, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Works Progress Administration

DARK MATTERS DARK MATTERS ON THE SURVEILLANCE OF BLACKNESS SIMONE BROWNE Duke University PressDurham and London2015 © 2015 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Designed by Natalie F. Smith Typeset in Arno Pro by Graphic Composition, Inc., Athens, GA Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Browne, Simone, [date] author. Dark matters : on the surveillance of blackness / Simone Browne. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8223-5919-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-2-8223-5938-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8223-7530-2 (e-book) 1.

Its distribution cannot be measured; its properties cannot be determined; and so it remains undetectable. The gravitational pull of this unseen matter is said to move galaxies. Invisible and unknowable, yet somehow still there, dark matter, in this planetary sense, is theoretical. If the term “dark matter” is a way to think about race, where race, as Howard Winant puts it, “remains the dark matter, the often invisible substance that in many ways structures the universe of modernity,” then one must ask here, invisible to whom?18 If it is often invisible, then how is it sensed, experienced, and lived? Is it really invisible, or is it rather unseen and unperceived by many?

If one were to read these lectures “optimistically,” as Nicholas Mirzoeff has suggested, “had he lived longer, Fanon might have moved away from his emphasis on masculinity to imagine new modes of postrevolutionary gender identity, as part of this analysis of the racialized disciplinary society, a connection made by many radical black feminists in the United States from Angela Davis to Toni Cade Bambara and bell hooks.”9 I enter Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness with this sense of optimism in mind: that in Fanon’s works and in the writings of black feminist scholars, another mode of reading surveillance can be had. Dark Matters begins with a discussion of my failed attempt to get my hands on any information from the CIA pertaining to Fanon, his FBI FOIA file, the short notes that remain from his lectures on surveillance, and an excerpt from his letter to a friend recounting the “night and day surveillance” that he experienced as he was on the brink of death as a way to cue surveillance in and of black life as a fact of blackness.


pages: 157 words: 47,161

The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything by Michio Kaku

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, fudge factor, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Olbers’ paradox, place-making, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, uranium enrichment

In fact, even today there are huge swimming pool–sized detectors (with vast amounts of fluids containing xenon and argon) that may one day capture the spark created by a photino collision. There are about twenty active groups searching for dark matter, often deep inside mine shafts below the Earth’s surface, away from interfering cosmic ray interactions. So it is conceivable that the collision of dark matter may be captured by our instruments. Once dark matter collisions have been detected, then physicists will study the properties of dark matter particles and then compare them to the predicted properties of photinos. If the predictions of string theory match the experimental results on dark matter, this would go a long way toward convincing physicists that this is the correct path.

Perhaps evidence for string theory is hidden all around us, but we have to listen for its echoes, rather than try to observe it directly. For example, one possible signal from hyperspace is the existence of dark matter. Until recently, it was widely believed that the universe is mainly made of atoms. Astronomers have been shocked to find that only 4.9 percent of the universe is made of atoms like hydrogen and helium. Actually, most of the universe is hidden from us, in the form of dark matter and dark energy. (We recall that dark matter and dark energy are two distinct things. Twenty-six point eight percent of the universe is made of dark matter, which is invisible matter that surrounds the galaxies and keep them from flying apart.

Search for Dark Matter Dark matter is strange, it is invisible, yet it holds the Milky Way galaxy together. But since it has weight and no charge, if you tried to hold dark matter in your hand it would sift through your fingers as if they weren’t there. It would fall right through the floor, through the core of the Earth, and then to the other side of the Earth, where gravity would eventually cause it to reverse course and fall back to your location. It would then oscillate between you and the other side of the planet, as if the Earth weren’t there. As strange as dark matter is, we know it must exist.


pages: 489 words: 136,195

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demand response, Google Earth, Lewis Mumford, megacity, Minecraft, oil rush, out of africa, planetary scale, precariat, sovereign wealth fund, supervolcano, the built environment, The Spirit Level, uranium enrichment

And the remaining missing 27 per cent of the universe’s mass is thought to be made up of dark matter – the particles of which almost wholly refuse to interact with baryonic matter. Dark matter is fundamental to everything in the universe; it anchors all structures together. Without dark matter, super-clusters, galaxies, planets, humans, fleas and bacilli would not exist. To prove and decipher the existence of dark matter, writes Kent Meyers, would be to approach ‘the revelation of a new order, a new universe, in which even light will be known differently, and darkness as well’. Dark-matter physicists work at the boundary of the measurable and the imaginable.

Dark-matter physicists work at the boundary of the measurable and the imaginable. They seek the traces that dark matter leaves in the perceptible world. Theirs is hard, philosophical work, requiring patience and something like faith: ‘As if’ – in the analogy of the poet and dark-matter physicist Rebecca Elson – ‘all there were, were fireflies / And from them you could infer the meadow’. Presently, the particle thought most likely to be the constituent of dark matter is known wryly as a WIMP – a weakly interacting massive particle. What we know of WIMPs suggests that they are heavy (up to more than a thousand times the weight of a proton), and that they were created in sufficiently vast quantities in the seconds after the birth of the universe to account for the missing mass.

Dave Webb (2006). 44 ‘For the first time in millennia . . . the vast majority of people a few generations ago ‘: Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead, p. 31. Chapter 3: Dark Matter Pages 55 shielded from the surface by 3,000 feet of halite, gypsum . . . clay and topsoil: on the strata sequence at Boulby, see ‘Lithological Log of Cleveland Potash Ltd’, Borehole Staithes No. 20, drilled September–December 1968 to a depth of c.3500 feet (BGS ID borehole 620319, BGS Reference NZ71NE14). 58 ‘the revelation of a new order . . . and darkness as well’: Kent Meyers, ‘Chasing Dark Matter in America’s Deepest Gold Mine’, Harper’s Magazine (May 2015), 27–37: 28. 58 ‘As if. . .you could infer the meadow ‘: Rebecca Elson, ‘Explaining Dark Matter’, in A Responsibility to Awe (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001), p. 71. 75 ‘I suddenly thought. . . it seems to have stuck’: Paul Crutzen, quoted in Howard Falcon-Lang, ‘Anthropocene: Have Humans Created a New Geological Age?’


pages: 147 words: 39,910

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts by Shane Parrish

Albert Einstein, anti-fragile, Atul Gawande, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bitcoin, Black Swan, colonial rule, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, feminist movement, Garrett Hardin, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Bogle, Linda problem, mandelbrot fractal, Pepsi Challenge, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, Richard Feynman, statistical model, stem cell, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem

_ It was Rubin’s observations of the Andromeda galaxy that led to her to collect the first evidence in support of the theory of dark matter—a substance that does not emit energy or light. Dark matter is an excellent theory with a lot of explanatory power. As Lisa Randall explains in Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, measurements of dark matter so far fit in exactly with what we understand about the Universe. Although we can’t see it, we can make predictions based on our understanding of it, and test those predictions. She writes, “It would be even more mysterious to me if the matter we can see with our eyes is all the matter that exists.”9 Dark matter is currently the simplest explanation for certain phenomena we observe in the Universe.

“How Vera Rubin confirmed dark matter.” Astronomy.com, October 4, 2016. Retrieved from: http://www.astronomy.com/news/2016/10/vera-rubin 7 Larsen, Kristine. “Vera Cooper Rubin.” Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1 March 2009. Jewish Women’s Archive. Retrieved from: https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/rubin-vera-cooper 8 Panek, Richard. “Vera Rubin Didn’t Discover Dark Matter.” Scientific American, December 29, 2016. Retrieved from: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/vera-rubin-didnt-discover-dark-matter/ 9 Randall, Lisa. Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs. New York: HarperCollins, 2015. 10 Sagan, Carl.

One possible explanation was something that had been theorized as far back as 1933, by Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky, who coined the phrase “dark matter” to describe a mass we couldn’t see, but which was influencing the behavior of the orbits in the galaxies. Dark matter became the simplest explanation for the observed phenomenon, and Vera Rubin has been credited with providing the first evidence of its existence. What is particularly interesting is that to this day no one has ever actually discovered dark matter. Why are more complicated explanations less likely to be true? Let’s work it out mathematically. Take two competing explanations, each of which seem to equally explain a given phenomenon.


pages: 292 words: 88,319

The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless by John D. Barrow

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Charles Babbage, cosmological principle, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, Isaac Newton, mutually assured destruction, Olbers’ paradox, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, scientific worldview, short selling, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

Their heaviness means they move more slowly and they can condense into regions small enough to explain the existence of cold dark matter in galaxies. This is an exciting frontier of modern cosmological research that brings together particle physicists with their candidates for the cold dark matter particles, astronomers with their observations of how much dark matter there seems to be, computational astrophysicists running huge computer codes to simulate the formation of galaxies dominated by slow-moving dark matter, and experimental physicists searching for the tell-tale signatures of the dark matter particles flying through their detectors deep underground. Until just a few years ago the observations pointed stubbornly to a Universe that did not contain the critical density of material needed to halt its expansion in the future.

Remarkably, wherever we do this we discover that things are moving as if they are under the influence of the gravity of about ten times more matter than we see shining in the dark. We call this other unseen material 'cold dark matter'. A small fraction of this dark matter is composed of ordinary atoms and molecules, but the identity of the rest is a mystery. (see Figure 7.5). Two of the great quests of modern cosmology are to pin down the quantity and the quality of the cold dark matter. Fig 7.4 A composite satellite photograph of the Earth at night.11 Notice that the most brightly illuminated areas are big Western cities. The regions of greatest population in Asia and Africa are almost completely dark.

There was growing evidence that they possessed a tiny mass, about ten billionths of the mass of a hydrogen atom, and that seemed to give just the right density of neutrinos to account for the mysterious abundance of cold dark matter today. Unfortunately, over the last twenty years it has become clear that the known types of neutrino, of which there are three, cannot be the cosmic dark matter. A combination of laboratory experiments and observations of stars where neutrinos are produced has constrained their masses to be so low that they are almost certainly not the cosmic dark matter. Equally problematic have been the studies, using some of the most powerful computers in the world, of what would happen to the luminous matter if it felt the gravitational pull of a universe of lightweight neutrinos.


pages: 695 words: 219,110

The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, dematerialisation, Eddington experiment, Hans Lippershey, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Murray Gell-Mann, power law, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, urban renewal

And so, like an audience that infers the presence of a dark-robed mime even though it sees only his white-gloved hands flitting to and fro on the unlit stage, astronomers concluded that the universe must be suffused with dark matter—matter that does not clump together in stars and hence does not give off light, and that thus exerts a gravitational pull without revealing itself visibly. The universe’s luminous constituents—stars— were revealed as but floating beacons in a giant ocean of dark matter. But if dark matter must exist in order to produce the observed motions of stars and galaxies, what’s it made of? So far, no one knows. The identity of the dark matter remains a major, looming mystery, although astronomers and physicists have suggested numerous possible constituents ranging from various kinds of exotic particles to a cosmic bath of miniature black holes.

But even without determining its composition, by closely analyzing its gravitational effects astronomers have been able to determine with significant precision how much dark matter is spread throughout the universe. And the answer they’ve found amounts to about 25 percent of the critical density.21 Thus, together with the 5 percent found in visible matter, the dark matter brings our tally up to 30 percent of the amount predicted by inflationary cosmology. Figure 10.5 A galaxy immersed in a ball of dark matter (with the dark matter artificially highlighted to make it visible in the figure). Well, this is certainly progress, but for a long time scientists scratched their heads, wondering how to account for the remaining 70 percent of the universe, which, if inflationary cosmology was correct, had apparently gone AWOL.

These are the most standoffish of the supersymmetric particles—they could nonchalantly pass through the entire earth without the slightest effect on their motion—and hence could easily have escaped detection.9 From calculations of how many of these particles would have been produced in the big bang and survived until today, physicists estimate that they would need to have mass on the order of 100 to 1,000 times that of the proton to supply the dark matter. This is an intriguing number, because various studies of supersymmetric-particle models as well as of superstring theory have arrived at the same mass range for these particles, without any concern for dark matter or cosmology. This would be a puzzling and completely unexplained confluence, unless, of course, the dark matter is indeed composed of supersymmetric particles. Thus, the search for supersymmetric particles at the world’s current and pending accelerators may also be viewed as searches for the heavily favored dark matter candidates. More direct searches for the dark matter particles streaming through the earth have also been under way for some time, although these are extremely challenging experiments.


pages: 225 words: 65,922

A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering by Ann K. Finkbeiner

Albert Einstein, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, digital map, Galaxy Zoo, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Magellanic Cloud, Skype, slashdot

And now, after recombination, the universe was a gas of hydrogen atoms. The mountains of dark matter were still growing, connecting up into chains. All around the dark matter mountains, the ripples of ordinary hydrogen are still spreading, overlapping with other ripples. All together the ordinary and dark matter have laid down a shadowy pattern of lower and higher densities. Along this pattern, gravity begins to win, acting on dark matter and ordinary hydrogen alike. Gravity pulls the hydrogen into the mountains of dark matter, pulls the dark matter into the rings of hydrogen, mixes the dark and ordinary matter together.

Matter is of two kinds: the protons and electrons that make up ordinary atoms and the extraordinary particles—no one knows what they are—that outweigh the ordinary ones by six to one and that are called dark matter. And gravity is gravity: it pulls on everything, dark and ordinary matter alike, and the bigger something is and the closer you are to it, the more strongly you’re pulled. At a redshift of 3,000, matter and light were in a kind of uproarious equilibrium. The universe was expanding 120,000 times faster than it is now, and was 8,000 K; it was a plasma so furiously hot that the matter, the protons and electrons and dark matter, all raced around freely. The photons of light traveled with them; they couldn’t travel alone or very far in this dense universe before electrons would scatter them off in other directions, and scattered photons meant the universe was opaque.

Gravity would have liked to make the cooler, denser hills bigger, but with ordinary matter, it couldn’t: at these temperatures, the photons in the hills carried enormously more energy than the protons and blew the protons out of the hills into rings, shells around the hills, little ripples that spread out farther and farther, so small—only one part in 100,000—that they hardly disturbed the universal equilibrium. Those energetic photons, however, couldn’t touch dark matter, so gravity was free to pile the hills of dark matter higher, then higher yet, up into mountains. And the universe kept expanding and cooling, dark and chaotic. When the universe was around 400,000 years old, at redshift 1,000, it dramatically shifted state. The temperature had fallen to 3,000K, and photons had now lost enough energy that they could no longer interfere with protons.


pages: 312 words: 86,770

Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo by Sean B. Carroll

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Brownian motion, classic study, dark matter, Drosophila, Gregor Mendel, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, the scientific method

This is the “dark matter” of the genome. Just as dark matter in the universe governs the behavior of visible bodies, the dark matter in our DNA controls where and when genes are used in development. This chapter is all about the dark matter in DNA and how, by virtue of controlling how tool kit genes are used, it contains the instructions for making and patterning body parts. These instructions are embedded in the dark DNA as genetic switches (my second analogy). You may not have heard about switches before this book. They have not received nearly as much attention, either in the lab or in the press, as they deserve.

Seeing in the Dark In cosmology, biology, as well as other sciences, the existence of particular entities is detected either directly, by observation, or indirectly, by observing the effects on other entities that are more easily visualized or measured. The evidence for dark matter in the universe is all indirect, based upon observation of the velocities and rotation of galaxies and the deduction that there must be a great deal of mass inside galaxies that cannot be seen. Cosmologists and physicists are not yet sure what dark matter is made of. Our understanding of dark matter in the genome is much better because we know what it is made of (DNA) and we can isolate it and study its properties both directly and indirectly.

One of the most powerful ways to study noncoding “dark” DNA is to hook a piece of it up to a gene that encodes a protein that is easily visualized, such as an enzyme that will make a colored reaction product, or a protein that will fluoresce in a beam of light. By inserting these engineered pieces of DNA back into a genome and then visualizing color patterns in a microscope, we can see what instructions, if any, are contained in a given piece of dark matter (a stripe here, a spot there, etc.). Most dark matter contains no instructions and is just space-filling “junk” accumulated over the course of evolution. In humans, only about 2 to 3 percent of our dark matter contains genetic switches that control how genes are used. I will focus all of this chapter on how genetic switches work to control animal development, and much of the rest of the book on how changes in these switches shape evolution.


pages: 297 words: 84,009

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

But we give it all back by just investing in your T-bills. You Americans earn more by investing in businesses overseas.” That is another way of putting the “dark matter” point, and again it reflects the American willingness, and indeed eagerness, to seek out higher-yielding (and riskier) equity-based investments. There is no general agreement on how large this “dark matter” phenomenon might be. Hausmann and Sturzenegger in their original work suggested a figure as high as 5.6 percent of GDP per year, with an accumulated stock of dark matter as high as 40 percent of GDP (a 2006 estimate). If that is true, rather than foreigners having a net claim of $2.5 trillion on the United States in the form of capital assets (a 2005 estimate), the United States has a net claim of $724 billion on foreigners—a big difference in value.16 A lot of subsequent writers have expressed skepticism that dark matter gains could be so high, and the dark matter hypothesis fell out of favor during the financial crisis, when American investments overseas lost a lot of their value and the chaos made a lot of these values yet harder to measure.

This American overseas investment probably represents a significant net gain to the citizens of the United States.15 One way of thinking about this net gain is to consider that domestic U.S. firms invest a good deal overseas, and at fairly high rates of return. The gains from these investments are sometimes called “dark matter,” because the gains cannot be observed easily and thus their size is the subject of debate. In economics, the “dark matter hypothesis” first became popular in 2005–2006, when the U.S. trade deficit was unusually large but, contrary to many predictions, the dollar showed no signs of collapsing and most of the time was not even falling. How could this be? Some economists, most notably Ricardo Hausmann and Federico Sturzenegger, suggested a new hypothesis: that America’s actual trade deficit might be much lower than measured if we took into account intangible American exports overseas, typically bundled with American investment abroad.

To make that more concrete, if there is a McDonald’s franchise in Europe, America is also exporting some brand-name capital, some organizational know-how, and some managerial expertise, but these will bring future rather than current returns, unlike exports narrowly measured. The upshot is that America’s net foreign position is much better than it looks on paper. And that is why the phrase “dark matter” is used, as a hat tip to a hypothesis in physics that says most of the matter in the universe is essentially invisible to our measuring instruments. Of course, this point about economic dark matter is a restatement of the earlier observation that American capital markets help bring higher rates of return to this country. I once had a chat with a leading Korean economist, who lamented to me: “We work so much harder than you do to export!


pages: 335 words: 95,280

The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far by Lawrence M. Krauss

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, Plato's cave, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, the scientific method, time dilation

Moreover, calculations that I and others performed more than thirty years ago showed that the remnant abundance today of the lightest supersymmetric particle left over after the Big Bang would naturally be in the range so that it could be the dark matter dominating the mass of galaxies. In that case our galaxy would have a halo of dark matter particles whizzing throughout it, including through the room in which you are reading this. As a number of us also realized some time ago, this means that if one designs sensitive detectors and puts them underground, not unlike, at least in spirit, the neutrino detectors that already exist underground, one might directly detect these dark matter particles. Around the world a half dozen beautiful experiments are now going on to do just that.

So, we are in potentially the best of times or the worst of times. A race is going on between the detectors at the LHC and the underground direct dark matter detectors to see who might discover the nature of dark matter first. If either group reports a detection, it will herald the opening up of a whole new world of discovery, leading potentially to an understanding of Grand Unification itself. And if no discovery is made in the coming years, we might rule out the notion of a simple supersymmetric origin of dark matter—and in turn rule out the whole notion of supersymmetry as a solution of the hierarchy problem. In that case we would have to go back to the drawing board, except if we don’t see any new signals at the LHC, we will have little guidance about which direction to head in order to derive a model of nature that might actually be correct.

Beyond these particles, as I shall soon describe, we have every reason to expect that other elementary particles exist that have never been observed. While these particles, which we think make up the mysterious dark matter that dominates the mass of our galaxy and all observed galaxies, may be invisible to our telescopes, our observations and theories nevertheless suggest that galaxies and stars could never have formed without the existence of dark matter. And at the heart of all of the forces governing the dynamical behavior of everything we can observe is a beautiful mathematical framework called gauge symmetry. All of the known forces, strong, weak, electromagnetic, and even gravity, possess this mathematical property, and for the three former examples, it is precisely this property that ensures that the theories make mathematical sense and that nasty quantum infinities disappear from all calculations of quantities that can be compared to experiment.


One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B. J. Novak

Bernie Madoff, carbon-based life, citation needed, dark matter, do what you love, F. W. de Klerk, Nelson Mandela, Saturday Night Live

But those who were there for both contests knew what was so special about what they had witnessed: slow and steady wins the race, till truth and talent claim their place. Dark Matter “And that’s the puzzling thing about dark matter,” said the scientist at the end of our planetarium tour. “It makes up over ninety percent of the universe, and yet nobody knows what it is!” People on the tour chuckled politely, like Wow, isn’t that a fun fact? But I looked closer at the scientist, and I could tell something from the smirky little smile on his fat smug face: This motherfucker knew exactly what dark matter was. “So as you look up at the skies tonight, I hope you have a little more perspective, knowing more about what we know—and don’t know—about our vast and magical …” etcetera etcetera.

Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Jacket design by Hum Creative v3.1 To the Reader CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication The Rematch Dark Matter No One Goes to Heaven to See Dan Fogelberg Romance, Chapter One Julie and the Warlord The Something by John Grisham The Girl Who Gave Great Advice All You Have to Do ’Rithmetic The Ambulance Driver Walking on Eggshells (or: When I Loved Tony Robbins) The Impatient Billionaire and the Mirror for Earth Missed Connection: Grocery spill at 21st and 6th 2:30 pm on Wednesday I Never Want to Walk on the Moon Sophia The Comedy Central Roast of Nelson Mandela They Kept Driving Faster and Outran the Rain The Man Who Invented the Calendar The Ghost of Mark Twain The Beautiful Girl in the Bookstore MONSTER: The Roller Coaster Kellogg’s (or: The Last Wholesome Fantasy of the Middle-School Boy) The Man Who Posted Pictures of Everything He Ate Closure Kindness Among Cakes Quantum Nonlocality and the Death of Elvis Presley If I Had a Nickel A Good Problem to Have Johnny Depp, Fate, and the Double-Decker Hollywood Tour Bus Being Young Was Her Thing Angel Echeverria, Comediante Superpopular The Market Was Down The Vague Restaurant Critic One of These Days, We Have to Do Something About Willie Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Missing Bicycle Regret Is Just Perfectionism Plus Time Chris Hansen at the Justin Bieber Concert Great Writers Steal Confucius at Home War If You Love Something Just an Idea Heyyyyy, Rabbits The Best Thing in the World Awards Bingo Marie’s Stupid Boyfriend Pick a Lane “Everyone Was Singing the Same Song”: The Duke of Earl Recalls His Trip to America in June of 1962 The Pleasure of Being Right Strange News Never Fall in Love The World’s Biggest Rip-Off The Walk to School on the Day After Labor Day Kate Moss Welcome to Camp Fantastic for Gifted Teens There Is a Fine Line Between Why and Why Not The Man Who Told Us About Inflatable Women A New Hitler Constructive Criticism The Bravest Thing I Ever Did Rome The Literalist’s Love Poem J.

“I can’t imagine they would have gotten the rings of Saturn wrong,” he said. “Oh, unless maybe you mean the mural at the entrance? The one for tots?” “Yeah, that,” I said. We walked toward the corner and when we got there I grabbed the string of the tour badge around his neck and twisted it and choked him hard. “What is dark matter?” I said. “What is it?” “I don’t know,” he coughed. “Nobody knows.” I pulled the cord tighter. “We can measure its effects,” he said. “We only know what it isn’t.” “Well, work backwards, bitch! You know what it isn’t, so what is it?” I pulled the cord tighter, and with my other hand I started pinching him in cutesy, creepy ways.


Life Is Simple by Johnjoe McFadden

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Astronomia nova, Bayesian statistics, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, COVID-19, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, horn antenna, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, lockdown, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, William of Occam

One of the most controversial is the theory put forward by theoretical physicists Lisa Randall and Matthew Reece, of Harvard University, Massachusetts. They reason that dark matter killed the dinosaurs.3 Randall and Reece proposed that our solar system’s rotation around the galaxy periodically brings it close to a thin disc of dark matter in the galactic plane that disturbs the orbits of comets and asteroids to send showers of rocky destruction tumbling towards the earth. At first sight, it would seem that both neutrinos and dark matter are entities beyond necessity in our universe, particularly if you happened to be a dinosaur. To discover why neither we, nor dinosaurs, would have existed without them, we need to probe the origins of matter and particularly its living variety.

At first, Rubin didn’t believe the data but she and Ford repeated the measurements for more and more stars and obtained exactly the same result. They eventually concluded that spiral galaxies contained about six times more matter than visible stars and that this dark matter was responsible for accelerating the outer stars of the Andromeda galaxy.5 Rubin and Ford’s observations have subsequently been confirmed by many more observations of distant galaxies. Each seems to be surrounded by a halo of unseen cold dark matter. Continuing star formation is due to this invisible halo of dark matter. The halo acts as a kind of gravity shield that deflects much of the supernovae ejecta back into the galaxy. There it can condense to form new stars, such as the sun, but also rocky planets such as the earth.

Far from being entities beyond necessity, the universe would be a very dull place without these almost massless neutral particles. A dark ecology Dark matter, the material that may have been responsible for exterminating the dinosaurs, makes up about 27 per cent of the universe. A whopping 68 per cent of our universe is made of another mysterious entity known as dark energy. The visible sun, stars and planets account for only 5 per cent of matter-energy. Why has the universe wasted so much of its resources making such a lot of dark and apparently superfluous stuff? In fact, far from being an entity beyond necessity, dark matter has played at least two key roles in our existence. The first was to help make galaxies.


pages: 171 words: 51,276

Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand: Fifty Wonders That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe by Marcus Chown

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Carrington event, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, gravity well, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, microbiome, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

In fact, there are recent claims that some but not all of this missing stuff has actually been found in the guise of hot filaments of gas, forming a kind of web of tenuous matter between the galaxies.1 But, in addition to the 4.9 percent ordinary matter, 26.8 percent—almost six times as much—is in the form of dark matter. This gives out no light or at least too little light to be detected by our most sensitive astronomical instruments. We know of its existence only because its gravity tugs at the visible stars and galaxies, causing them to move in a manner different from the prediction of Newton’s law of gravity. As for the identity of the dark matter, your guess is as good as mine. Speculations range from as-yet-undiscovered subatomic particles to fridge-sized black holes surviving from the earliest moments of the Big Bang to relics from the future in which time runs backwards (seriously!).

But, in addition to the 4.9 percent ordinary matter and the 26.8 percent dark matter, a whopping 68.3 percent of the mass of the universe is dark energy (remember: all energy has an equivalent mass—it weighs something—according to Einstein’s famous E = mc2 formula). The dark energy is invisible, fills all of space, and has repulsive gravity. The repulsive gravity is speeding up the expansion of the universe, which is how the dark energy was discovered in 1998. That’s not long ago at all. Just imagine. Until only a couple of decades ago, science had overlooked this major mass component of the universe. Now, if physicists are baffled by dark matter, they are utterly at sea when it comes to dark energy.

The new planet was named Neptune. Its discovery created a sensation and made a superstar of Le Verrier.2 It even set him on a true wild-goose chase—searching for a hypothetical planet orbiting closer to the sun than Mercury and dubbed “Vulcan.”3 Newton’s theory of gravity has proved to be the gift that keeps on giving. Dark matter is the Neptune of today. We know it outweighs ordinary matter by a factor of six because we can see it tugging with its gravity on the visible stars and galaxies. But, as yet, we have no idea what it is. 23. LORD OF THE RINGS Galileo thought Saturn was a planet with…ears “The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.”


pages: 203 words: 63,257

Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, New Journalism, race to the bottom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, Skype, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

Since neutrinos are the second most numerous particles in the universe after photons, even if each one has only a smidgen of mass, the total could add up to a lot. So some cosmologists had hoped that neutrinos would account for much of the mysterious dark matter, whose presence is only “seen” through its gravitational influence on galaxies and galaxy clusters. But the neutrino’s mass has turned out to be way too tiny to explain dark matter. That means some other particle or particles, hitherto unknown to physics, must exist. The hunt is on, but no good candidate has turned up yet. The findings of Super-K and SNO also set the stage for other neutrino experiments, focused on making precise measurements of how different neutrino flavors morph into one another.

Understanding CP violation is central to figuring out how matter came to predominate over antimatter in the early universe. Crab Nebula: The gaseous remnant of the supernova that was seen in 1054, located in the constellation Taurus, with a neutron star near its center dark matter: Invisible material whose existence is inferred from its gravitational influence on visible matter in galaxies and galaxy clusters. Dark matter appears to be much more abundant than normal matter, but what it’s made of remains a mystery. At one time, scientists thought that neutrinos could be a major constituent, but now we know that their mass is too small. deuterium: An isotope of hydrogen whose nucleus contains a neutron as well as a proton, instead of a lone proton.

For astronomers, who have had to rely almost exclusively on electromagnetic radiation in the form of visible light, radio waves, and X-rays from distant celestial bodies, neutrinos offer an exciting new window on the most violent phenomena in nature. In fact, neutrinos may have a lot to do with triggering spectacular stellar explosions in the first place. Some scientists have proposed that a sterile variety of neutrinos could account for so-called dark matter, which makes up nearly a quarter of the universe but remains undetected except through its gravitational tug on galaxies. The imprints left by primordial neutrinos on the faint afterglow of the big bang, which is still measurable with microwave telescopes, could reveal the conditions very soon after the universe was born.


pages: 492 words: 149,259

Big Bang by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Astronomia nova, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon-based life, Cepheid variable, Chance favours the prepared mind, Charles Babbage, Commentariolus, Copley Medal, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Hans Lippershey, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, horn antenna, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Index librorum prohibitorum, information security, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Paul Erdős, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, unbiased observer, Wilhelm Olbers, William of Occam

Other candidates for dark matter come under the heading of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), which includes various types of particles that do not form objects like MACHOS, but which might permeate the entire universe, hardly making their presence felt, except through the force of gravity. As yet, there are only vague clues to the nature and amount of dark matter in the universe, which is rather frustrating because cosmologists need a respectable understanding of dark matter before they can fill in some gaps in the Big Bang model. For example, the gravitational influence of dark matter would have played a major role in attracting more ordinary matter in the early stages of the universe, thereby helping to form galaxies. And, at the other end of the timeline, dark matter might play a decisive role in the ultimate fate of the universe. The universe has been expanding ever since the Big Bang, but all of the mass of the universe should have been pulling the matter inwards and gradually slowing down the expansion.

Something else that keeps Big Bang cosmologists awake at night is dark matter. Observations show that stars orbiting the periphery of galaxies have tremendous speeds, yet the gravitational pull of all the stars closer to the heart of the galaxy is not enough to prevent these peripheral stars from flying off into the cosmos. Therefore, cosmologists believe that there must be vast quantities of dark matter in a galaxy, namely matter that does not shine but which exerts enough of a gravitational pull to keep the stars in their orbits. Although the idea of dark matter dates back to Fritz Zwicky at Mount Wilson in the 1930s, cosmologists are still unsure of its true nature, which is rather embarrassing as calculations imply that the universe has more dark matter than ordinary stellar matter.

Although the idea of dark matter dates back to Fritz Zwicky at Mount Wilson in the 1930s, cosmologists are still unsure of its true nature, which is rather embarrassing as calculations imply that the universe has more dark matter than ordinary stellar matter. Some candidates for dark matter are so-called massive compact halo objects (MACHOs), a category which includes black holes, asteroids and giant Jupiter-like planets. We would not see such objects in a galaxy, because they do not shine, but they would all contribute to the gravitational attraction within a galaxy. Other candidates for dark matter come under the heading of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), which includes various types of particles that do not form objects like MACHOS, but which might permeate the entire universe, hardly making their presence felt, except through the force of gravity.


pages: 310 words: 89,838

Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science by Ian Sample

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

Observations of our cosmic neighborhood have led scientists to notch up 70 percent of whatever’s out there to dark energy, the mysterious force that is driving the expansion of the universe. No one knows what dark energy is, and finding out is a major goal in physics. The Standard Model describes but 4 percent of the matter we can see in space. The rest, about a quarter, is dark matter. The name is intentionally unilluminating. Dark matter doesn’t shine or radiate heat, and you can’t see it by bouncing light off it. Many theorists think dark matter is made of supersymmetric particles called “neutralinos,” the lightest kind the supersymmetry theory predicts. Not everyone is a fan of supersymmetry. Critics challenge aficionados with a simple question: If the universe is supersymmetric, where are all the other particles?

“It would be really strange if everything that exists out there was stuff that our bodies feel. There is simply no reason why we should be so special,” he says. Scientists already know that the universe contains matter that we cannot see or feel. There are vast clumps of dark matter that lurk around galaxies that only reveal their presence by exerting a gravitational pull on the celestial objects around them. Cosmologists believe that dark matter makes up around a quarter of the mass of the universe. How are these worlds hidden from us? Take a good look at the world around you. Everything, including this book in your hands and the chair you are sitting on, is made up from simple building blocks.

By far the largest is the aptly named Atlas detector, from “A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS,” which is so big it would barely fit in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. The 7,000-metric-ton Atlas and the not-so-small CMS detector were designed with the Higgs particle in mind. They might see far more, though, such as exotic particles of dark matter or extra dimensions. The Higgs boson might pop into existence in any of several ways inside the Large Hadron Collider, but scientists predict the most likely route to be when two gluons—the particles that bind quarks together inside protons—slam together and fuse. The energy released in the collision would theoretically create a Higgs particle with ease, though it would decay immediately afterward.


pages: 634 words: 185,116

From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time by Sean M. Carroll

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Columbine, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, dematerialisation, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low earth orbit, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pets.com, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Schrödinger's Cat, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, synthetic biology, the scientific method, time dilation, wikimedia commons

An earlier version of this argument can be found in Penrose (1979). 241 Most of the matter in the universe—between 80 percent and 90 percent by mass—is in the form of dark matter, not the ordinary matter of atoms and molecules. We don’t know what the dark matter is, and it’s conceivable that it takes the form of small black holes. But there are problems with that idea, including the difficulty of making so many black holes in the first place. So most cosmologists tend to believe that the dark matter is very likely to be some sort of new elementary particle (or particles) that hasn’t yet been discovered. 242 Black-hole entropy increases rapidly as the black hole gains mass—it’s proportional to the mass squared.

But matter itself comes in different forms: “ordinary matter,” including all of the kinds of particles we have ever discovered in experiments here on Earth, and “dark matter,” some other kind of particle that can’t be anything we’ve yet directly seen. The mass (and therefore energy) in ordinary matter is mostly in the form of atomic nuclei—protons and neutrons—but electrons also contribute. So ordinary matter includes you, me, the Earth, the Sun, stars, and all the gas and dust and rocks in space. We know how much of that stuff there is, and it’s not nearly enough to account for the gravitational fields observed in galaxies and clusters. So there must be dark matter, and we’ve ruled out all known particles as candidates; theorists have invented an impressive menu of possibilities, including “axions” and “neutralinos” and “Kaluza-Klein particles.”

So there must be dark matter, and we’ve ruled out all known particles as candidates; theorists have invented an impressive menu of possibilities, including “axions” and “neutralinos” and “Kaluza-Klein particles.” All told, ordinary matter makes up about 4 percent of the energy in the universe, dark matter makes up about 22 percent, and dark energy makes up about 74 percent. Trying to create or detect dark matter directly is a major goal of modern experimental physics. See Hooper (2007), Carroll (2007), or Gates (2009) for more details. 48 So how much energy is there in the dark energy, anyway? It’s about one calorie per cubic centimeter. Note that the “calories” used to measure the energy content of food are actually kilocalories (1,000 standard calories).


pages: 357 words: 98,853

Junk DNA: A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome by Nessa Carey

dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, epigenetics, Higgs boson, hype cycle, Kickstarter, mouse model, phenotype, placebo effect, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs

Typeset in Janson Text by Marie Doherty Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc For Abi Reynolds, who is always by my side And for Sheldon – good to see you again Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Nomenclature An Introduction to Genomic Dark Matter 1. Why Dark Matter Matters 2. When Dark Matter Turns Very Dark Indeed 3. Where Did All the Genes Go? 4. Outstaying an Invitation 5. Everything Shrinks When We Get Old 6. Two is the Perfect Number 7. Painting with Junk 8. Playing the Long Game 9. Adding Colour to the Dark Matter 10. Why Parents Love Junk 11. Junk with a Mission 12. Switching It On, Turning It Up 13. No Man’s Land 14. Project ENCODE – Big Science Comes to Junk DNA 15.

Consequently, throughout much of this book we will explore the darkness by using the torch of human genetics. There are many ways to begin shining a light on the dark matter of our genome, so let’s start with an odd but unassailable fact to anchor us. Some genetic diseases are caused by mutations in junk DNA, and there is probably no better starting point for our journey into the hidden genomic universe than this. 1. Why Dark Matter Matters Sometimes life seems to be cruel in the troubles it piles onto a family. Consider this example. A baby boy was born; let’s call him Daniel. He was strangely floppy at birth, and had trouble breathing unassisted.

JUNK DNA Also by Nessa Carey The Epigenetics Revolution JUNK DNA A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome NESSA CAREY Published in the UK in 2015 by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: info@iconbooks.com www.iconbooks.com Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA or their agents Distributed in the UK, Europe and Asia by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road, Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest, NSW 2065 Distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball, Office B4, The District, 41 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock 7925 Distributed in India by Penguin Books India, 7th Floor, Infinity Tower – C, DLF Cyber City, Gurgaon 122002, Haryana ISBN: 978-184831-826-7 Text copyright © 2015 Nessa Carey The author has asserted her moral rights.


pages: 282 words: 89,436

Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics by Paul Halpern

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, luminiferous ether, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, time dilation

As Zwicky’s claim was not taken seriously, it took another half century before the search for dark matter began in earnest. The trigger was the finding by astronomers Vera Rubin and Kent Ford that Andromeda and other galaxies don’t have enough visible matter to keep their outer stars moving as fast as they actually do. Galaxies seem to act like merry-go-rounds, with speedy outer horses pulled by unseen mechanisms. Starting in the 1980s, astronomers and particles physicists have conducted searches for dim astronomical objects and/or invisible particles with enough gravitational oomph to constitute dark matter. The focus began to center on cold (slow-moving) dark matter particles that respond to the weak force and gravity but not to electromagnetism (hence their invisibility).

Searches for such particles have been conducted in converted mine tunnels deep underground, to avoid the “noise” of ordinary particles, as well as in space. At the time of this writing, conclusive evidence for dark matter particles has yet to be found. If dark energy and dark matter were rare phenomena, perhaps we could hold off on explanations and try to tidy up other loose ends in physics. On the contrary, together they constitute 95 percent of everything in space. According to recent astronomical estimates, a whopping 68 percent of the universe is dark energy and fully 27 percent is dark matter, leaving only 5 percent that can be explained through the standard model combined with conventional general relativity.

Not if you look at the glaring omissions that neither theory can explain. Dark energy, the agent for accelerating the universe, and dark matter, the invisible substance that keeps galaxies from flying apart, represent mysteries on par with those that challenged the quantum pioneers. We have mentioned how the former seems to match the cosmological constant term proposed (and later retracted) by Einstein and later advocated by Schrödinger. However, no one knows the physical source of dark energy, which acts as a kind of antigravity. The nature of dark matter offers another modern-day conundrum. First identified in the 1930s by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in his study of the Coma cluster, it constitutes the unseen mass gravitationally required to keep astronomical structures stable.


pages: 281 words: 70,908

Ringworld's Children by Larry Niven

dark matter, friendly fire

Tunesmith waved into a recorded view of neon paint streaming through oil. "Dark matter. The missing mass. Instruments in Einstein space can't find it, but it huddles close around suns in this other domain you've been calling hyperspace. Dark matter makes galaxies more massive, changes their spin--" "We rammed through that?" "Wrong picture, Louis. My instruments didn't record any resistance. We'll test that later. It might have been different if this had reached us." A deep violet comma-shaped shadow. "We find life everywhere we look in this universe. Would it be surprising if an ecology has grown up within dark matter? And predators?" Maybe Tunesmith was mad.

Tunesmith barely glanced at the view. "They'll be a few minutes matching. We have time. Hindmost, show us what we recorded in this last hyperdrive jump." The hypercamera's record was blank. Louis snickered. Tunesmith reproved him. "Louis, there's nothing to see. We're outside the envelope of dark matter that collects around our star. Where there almost isn't any dark matter, there almost isn't space either! This is why we can travel faster than light does in vacuum, because distance in this domain is drastically contracted. "Now I need only learn why there is more than one characteristic velocity. I'll get that by studying Long Shot.

"I only held us in hyperdrive for a moment," Tunesmith said, "but these hypothetical predators only have one speed, Louis, and it's fast. 'Singularity' is a mathematical term. Certainly there are mathematics involved, but they may be more complex than just places where an equation gives infinities. Inside this morass of dark matter, the characteristic speed may be drastically lowered. The proof is that we live." "We are being observed," the Hindmost said. "I sense ranging beams from ARM and Patriarchy telescopes and neutrino detectors. Ships begin to accelerate inward. The ship from Sheathclaws houses telepaths of both species, though they can't reach us yet.


Wonders of the Universe by Brian Cox, Andrew Cohen

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Eyjafjallajökull, Ford Model T, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route

They are thought to have giant halos of dark matter, a new form of matter unlike anything we have discovered on Earth and which interacts only weakly with normal matter. Despite this, its gravitational effect dominates the behaviour of galaxies today and most likely dominated the formation of the galaxies in the early Universe. This is because we now think that around 95 per cent of the mass of galaxies such as our own Milky Way is made up of dark matter. In some sense this makes the luminous stars, planets, gas and dust an after-thought, although because it is highly unlikely that dark matter can form into complex and beautiful structures like stars, planets and people, one might legitimately claim that it’s rather less interesting.

In some sense this makes the luminous stars, planets, gas and dust an after-thought, although because it is highly unlikely that dark matter can form into complex and beautiful structures like stars, planets and people, one might legitimately claim that it’s rather less interesting. The search for the nature of dark matter is one of the great challenges for twenty-first-century physics. We shall return to the fascinating subject of dark matter later in the book. The word ‘galaxy’ comes from the Greek word galaxias, meaning milky circle. It was first used to describe the galaxy that dominates our night skies, even though the Greeks could have had no concept of its true scale. Watching the core of our galaxy rise in the night sky is one of nature’s greatest spectacles, although regrettably the light of our cities has robbed us of this majestic nightly display.

It began 13.75 billion years ago with the Big Bang, and in this embryonic period, known as the Primordial Era, the Universe was a place without the light from the stars, although in its early years the swirling hot matter would have glowed as brightly as a sun. For the first 100 million years, the conditions were far too violent for stars to form. This changed when the Universe had expanded and cooled sufficiently for the weak force of gravity to begin to clump the primordial dust, gas and dark matter into galaxies. With this came the dawning of the second great epoch in the life of our universe: the Stelliferous Era, the age of stars. The moment the first stars were born is one of the most evocative milestones in the evolution of the cosmos. It signals the end of an alien time when the Universe was without structure – a formless void.


pages: 186 words: 64,267

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apple Newton, Arthur Eddington, bet made by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, Brownian motion, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking

If we add up the masses of all the stars that we can see in our galaxy and other galaxies, the total is less than one hundredth of the amount required to halt the expansion of the universe, even for the lowest estimate of the rate of expansion. Our galaxy and other galaxies, however, must contain a large amount of “dark matter” that we cannot see directly, but which we know must be there because of the influence of its gravitational attraction on the orbits of stars in the galaxies. Moreover, most galaxies are found in clusters, and we can similarly infer the presence of yet more dark matter in between the galaxies in these clusters by its effect on the motion of the galaxies. When we add up all this dark matter, we still get only about one tenth of the amount required to halt the expansion. However, we cannot exclude the possibility that there might be some other form of matter, distributed almost uniformly throughout the universe, that we have not yet detected and that might still raise the average density of the universe up to the critical value needed to halt the expansion.

Coordinates: Numbers that specify the position of a point in space and time. Cosmological constant: A mathematical device used by Einstein to give space-time an inbuilt tendency to expand. Cosmology: The study of the universe as a whole. Dark matter: Matter in galaxies, clusters, and possibly between clusters, that can not be observed directly but can be detected by its gravitational effect. As much as 90 percent of the mass of the universe may be in the form of dark matter. Duality: A correspondence between apparently different theories that lead to the same physical results. Einstein-Rosen bridge: A thin tube of space-time linking two black holes.

If we could observe them, it would provide a good test of this picture of a very hot early stage of the universe. Unfortunately, their energies nowadays would be too low for us to observe them directly. However, if neutrinos are not massless, but have a small mass of their own, as suggested by some recent experiments, we might be able to detect them indirectly: they could be a form of “dark matter,” like that mentioned earlier, with sufficient gravitational attraction to stop the expansion of the universe and cause it to collapse again. About one hundred seconds after the big bang, the temperature would have fallen to one thousand million degrees, the temperature inside the hottest stars.


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

CyberPoint’s solution to all this ethical wrangling was not to stop targeting dissidents, journalists, or Americans; just the opposite. Evenden and his team were told that their contracts would be shifted from CyberPoint to an Emirati LLC called Dark Matter. They would no longer be on loan from the State Department. They would be working directly for the Emiratis, without constraints. Evenden’s bosses gave CyberPoint’s employees a choice: they could join Dark Matter, or CyberPoint would pay for their relocation back to the United States. No questions asked. Half switched over to Dark Matter. Evenden warned his former colleagues to think this through. “You are going to be targeting Americans,” he told them. Either they were in denial or blinded by their fat Emirati paychecks.

Those who opted not to join Dark Matter were ousted from friend circles. “People we regularly had drinks with, who we’d had over to our house, stopped communicating with us.” And then they were kicked out of the shop. CyberPoint took away key cards and shut down personnel accounts. Evenden and the others who’d chosen to leave had to wait until the company could schedule their moves back to the United States. And once they got back to the States, once they had reckoned with what they had left behind, Evenden sent a tip to the FBI. By the time Evenden reached out to me in mid-2019, Dark Matter was under FBI investigation.

Their accounts are available at Christopher Bing and Joel Schectman, “Inside the UAE’s Secret Hacking Team of American Mercenaries,” Reuters, January 30, 2019, and “White House Veterans Helped Gulf Monarchy Build Secret Surveillance Unit,” Reuters, December 10, 2019. I learned about Dark Matter’s hacking of FIFA, Qatari officials, and the dragnet that included former First Lady Michelle Obama from my interviews with Evenden and other CyberPoint and Dark Matter employees. This book was the first time any of the details of the hack of Mrs. Obama has been reported. I was able to flesh out the details of Mrs. Obama’s visit via contemporary news articles, including the Associated Press, “First Lady Michelle Obama Arrives in Qatar for Speech,” November 2, 2015; Nick Anderson, “First Lady Urges Fathers Worldwide to Join ‘Struggle’ for Girls’ Education,” Washington Post, November 4, 2015; and Paul Bedard, “Michelle Obama’s 24 Minute Speech in Qatar Cost $700,000,” Washington Examiner, December 9, 2015.


pages: 334 words: 100,201

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cepheid variable, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Haber-Bosch Process, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, nuclear winter, Paris climate accords, planetary scale, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, Yogi Berra

But it takes a lot of energy to fuse protons because their positive charges repel each other, and temperatures were falling fast just after the big bang, so it was impossible to fuse more protons to form the nuclei of larger atoms. This explains a fundamental aspect of our universe: almost three-quarters of all the atoms in it are hydrogen, and most of the rest are helium. A lot more matter consists of dark matter, stuff we don’t yet understand, though we know it exists because its gravitational pull determines the structure and distribution of galaxies. So, a few minutes after the big bang, our universe consisted of vast clouds of dark matter in which were embedded crackling plasmas of protons and electrons with photons of light flowing through them. Today, we find plasmas only in the centers of stars. Now we must pause and wait about 380,000 years (almost twice as long as our species has existed on Earth).

Normally, isolated atoms are electrically neutral, because the positive and negative charges of their protons and electrons cancel each other out. So when the first atoms of hydrogen and helium formed, most of the matter in the universe suddenly went neutral, and the tingling plasma evaporated. Photons, the carriers of the electromagnetic force, could now flow freely through an electrically neutral mist of atoms and dark matter. Today, astronomers can detect the results of this phase change, because photons that escaped the plasma generated a thin background hum of energy (the cosmic microwave background radiation) that still pervades the entire universe. Our origin story has crossed its first threshold. We have a universe.

Together, gravity and matter provided the Goldilocks conditions for the emergence of stars and galaxies. Studies of the cosmic microwave background radiation show that in the early universe, there was little structure at large scales. Think of a gossamer-thin mist of hydrogen and helium atoms floating in a warm bath of dark matter permeated with photons of light. And all of it at more or less the same temperature. We know the early universe was homogenous because we can measure temperature differences in the CMBR, and we find that the hottest parts of the early universe were only about one one-hundredth of a degree warmer than the coolest parts.


pages: 338 words: 106,936

The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable by James Owen Weatherall

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, Claude Shannon: information theory, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jim Simons, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, martingale, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, power law, prediction markets, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, tulip mania, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile

Einstein proposed a simple way of figuring out the lower bound for the total amount of dark matter in the universe. He argued that the density of dark matter in the universe as a whole was at least as much as the density within a galaxy (or rather, a group of galaxies known as a cluster). Osborne decided he didn’t buy the argument. For one, Einstein seemed to be making a series of bad assumptions. Worse still, the best evidence that anyone had in 1946 showed that most dark matter was restricted to certain parts of a galaxy, with basically no dark matter in empty space (this still seems to be true). So if anything, you should expect the density of dark matter to be higher in a galaxy than in space as a whole.

To learn as much about the theory as he could, he picked up a book by Einstein, The Meaning of Relativity, in which Einstein offered an argument about how much dark matter could exist in the universe. Dark matter — literally, stuff in the universe that doesn’t seem to emit or reflect light, which means that we can’t see it directly — was first discovered in the 1930s, by its effects on the rotation of galaxies. Devotees of popular physics know that today, dark matter is one of the most puzzling mysteries in all of cosmology. Observations of other galaxies suggest that the vast majority of the matter in the universe is unobservable, something that is not explained by any of our best physical theories.


pages: 400 words: 99,489

The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Astronomia nova, back-to-the-land, Beryl Markham, classic study, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, data science, Drosophila, Elon Musk, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, scientific mainstream, sensible shoes, Suez canal 1869

VERA RUBIN RIDGE A special issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research detailing discoveries in the Vera Rubin Ridge is slated to be released in 2020. EVIDENCE OF DARK MATTER Vera C. Rubin, W. Kent Ford, Jr., and Norbert Thonnard, “Rotational Properties of 21 SC Galaxies with a Large Range of Luminosities and Radii, from NGC 4605 (R= 4kpc) to UGC 2885 (R= 122 kpc),” The Astrophysical Journal, 238 (1980), pp. 471–487; J. G. De Swart, Gianfranco Bertone, and Jeroen van Dongen, “How Dark Matter Came to Matter,” Nature Astronomy, 1, no. 3 (2017), p. 0059. 85 PERCENT OF THE “Synopsis: How Dark Matter Shaped the First Galaxies,” American Physical Society (Oct. 2, 2019). LEARNED TO TELL TIME Interview of Vera Rubin by Alan Lightman, Niels Bohr Library and Archives, American Institute of Physics (College Park, Md.: April 3, 1989).

She also received a National Medal of Science in 1993, the highest scientific award in the United States. Many also believe she should have been awarded a Nobel Prize for her work; see: Randall, “Why Vera Rubin Deserved A Nobel,” The New York Times, and Sarah Scoles, “How Vera Rubin Confirmed Dark Matter,” Astronomy (June 2016). “TO HAVE A FAMILY” Vera Rubin, Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters (New York, Springer Science and Business Media: 1996). SHE HAD FOUR CHILDREN Overbye, “Vera Rubin, 88, Dies; Opened Doors in Astronomy, and for Women,” The New York Times. BECAME A PLANETARY GEOLOGIST Dave Rubin is a sedimentologist in the department of Earth and planetary sciences at U.C.

* * * — BY THE TIME I joined the science team, Curiosity had holes in its wheels, and its poor drill was beginning to show signs of wear. It had been roving for four years. But the mission was about to enter into one of its most interesting phases: an ascent of the Vera Rubin Ridge, named after the extraordinary scientist who discovered the first evidence of dark matter, mysterious particles thought to comprise roughly 85 percent of the total matter in the universe. As a girl, Rubin had learned to tell time by how the stars outside her window wheeled across the sky. As a young woman, she was encouraged to pursue a career not in astronomy but in painting astronomical objects.


pages: 661 words: 169,298

Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Cepheid variable, classic study, Commentariolus, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, delayed gratification, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, planetary scale, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, source of truth, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

Analysis of this literally universal experiment confirms that most of the stuff of the universe is invisible—the “dark matter” problem—and that much of this invisible stuff cannot be ordinary matter, like planets and stars, but must be of some exotic form, like the particles predicted by string theories. (String theory, along with M-theory, which portrays the strings as membranes, continues to be a promising method for constructing a unified, quantum theory of gravity, but it remains unfinished.) Important clues to the nature of dark matter were found by astronomers studying supernovae. One class of these exploding stars, the type la supernovae, all seem to reach about the same maximum brightness (once one corrects for idiosyncracies such as differing abundances of nickel and other elements.)

Supersymmetry theory, as we saw in the previous chapter, predicts the existence of enormous numbers of as yet undetected particles left over from the early universe.* If the theory ripened to the point that it could specify the masses of these particles, it might be possible to test it by looking for them. A ghostly clue that there may be such undetected material in the universe today is proffered by what astronomers call the “dark matter” problem. The masses of galaxies and their clusters can be deduced by measuring the velocity at which stars orbit the centers of the galaxies to which they belong, and at which galaxies orbit the centers of clusters of galaxies.† In case after case, this turns out to add up to something like five or ten times the mass of all the visible stars and nebulae.

The problem that engaged the attention of Guth, and of his Cornell colleague Henry Tye, was that the grand unified theories predicted the production of far too many magnetic monopoles—roughly one hundred times more monopoles than there are atoms. Given that most of the matter in the universe is invisible—the “dark matter” question—cosmologists generally welcomed the suggestior that massive subatomic particles might make up the deficit, but this was an embarrassment of riches. Searches for monopoles had turned up null results: One event had been recorded, on Valentine’s Day, 1982, on a device built by Bias Cabrera in a basement laboratory at Stanford, but Cabrera’s result had never been repeated, at Stanford or anywhere else.


pages: 364 words: 112,681

Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, failed state, financial engineering, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Global Witness, high net worth, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, income inequality, joint-stock company, land bank, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, medical malpractice, Navinder Sarao, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Sloane Ranger, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

After a while, you will find yourself speaking this way yourself. So, how much money is there out there, hiding behind this palisade of circumlocution? This is a difficult question to answer: the money is invisible, and kept invisible by well-paid, imaginative and highly intelligent people. It is dark matter and, like dark matter, it can only be studied by recording its effect on things that we can see. Gabriel Zucman, the French economist who has studied Swiss banking, has tried to make these calculations. By analysing the statistical anomalies that banking secrecy creates, he estimates that 8 per cent of all the world’s financial wealth was held in tax havens in 2014: $7.6 trillion, out of a total of $95.5 trillion.

The misuse of diplomatic immunity by extremely wealthy people has gone under-remarked, Lethal Weapon 2 excepted. 11 – Un-write-about-able The story of Bill Browder’s life as a fund manager in Russia, and his conversion into a human rights activist, is told in his Red Notice: How I Became Putin’s No. 1 Enemy (New York: Simon & Schuster and London: Corgi, 2015). The film that was never shown was directed by Havana Marking, and it was really good. Thanks to Daria Kaleniuk and others for appearing in it. 12 – Dark Matter The 2015 Deutsche Bank paper ‘Dark Matter: The Hidden Capital Flows that Drive G10 Exchange Rates’ by Oliver Harvey and Robin Winkler is available online, and links much of the secret money moving into Britain to Russia. It is ironic that two years later, that same bank paid fines of $630 million to settle US and UK charges that it had moved $10 billion of hidden capital out of Russia in so-called ‘mirror trades’.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. eISBN 978 1 78283 333 8 CONTENTS 1 Aladdin’s Cave 2 Pirates 3 Queen of the Caribbees 4 Sex, Lies and Offshore Vehicles 5 Mystery on Harley Street 6 Shell Games 7 Cancer 8 Nasty as a Rattlesnake 9 The Man Who Sells Passports 10 ‘Diplomatic Immunity!’ 11 Un-write-about-able 12 Dark Matter 13 ‘Nuclear Death is Knocking Your Door’ 14 Say Yes to the Money 15 High-end Property 16 Plutos Like to Hang out Together 17 Breaking Switzerland 18 Tax Haven USA 19 Standing up to Moneyland Notes on Sources Acknowledgements Index 1 ALADDIN’S CAVE When the French rebelled in July 1789 they seized the Bastille, a prison that was a symbol of their rulers’ brutality.


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Illustrated Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe by Stephen Hawking

anthropic principle, Apple Newton, cosmological constant, dark matter, Johannes Kepler

If we add up the masses of all the stars that we can see in our galaxy and othergalaxies, the total is less than one-hundredth of the amount required to haltthe expansion of the universe, even in the lowest estimate of the rate of expan-sion. But we know that our galaxy and other galaxies must contain a largeamount of dark matter which we cannot see directly, but which we know mustbe there because of the influence of its gravitational attraction on the orbits ofstars and gas in the galaxies. Moreover, most galaxies are found in clusters, andwe can similarly infer the presence of yet more dark matter in between thegalaxies in these clusters by its effect on the motion of the galaxies. When weadd up all this dark matter, we still get only about one-tenth of the amountrequired to halt the expansion. However, there might be some other form ofmatter which we have not yet detected and which might still raise the averagedensity of the universe up to the critical value needed to halt the expansion.The present evidence, therefore, suggests that the universe will probablyexpand forever.


The Last Stargazers by Emily Levesque

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, it's over 9,000, Kuiper Belt, Kwajalein Atoll, lolcat, Magellanic Cloud, mass immigration, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, the scientific method

After puzzling over the results for months, Vera realized that her data could be explained perfectly if each galaxy had, in addition to its visible stars, gas, and dust, an invisible halo of matter contributing to its mass. She had identified the first observational evidence of dark matter. Today, we still don’t know what dark matter actually is, but we certainly know it exists. After Vera’s discovery, dark matter became a linchpin of how astronomers explain the history and evolution of the cosmos, and new observations continued to confirm immense quantities of invisible mass in the universe. The discovery spawned entire new subdisciplines of physics, and Vera went on to eventually win just about every prestigious prize offered to a professional astronomer (with the exception of the Nobel in Physics, which has long had a sizeable blind spot for groundbreaking research done by women).

The behemoth was twenty-three stories tall and weighed six hundred tons, but despite all that, it could be steered and focused on the sky with pinpoint precision thanks to operators like Pete, who had all been specially trained to run the telescope. It had observed the birthplaces of newborn stars, was instrumental in the discovery of dark matter, and had conducted an exhaustive survey of the sky to assemble a list of any objects emitting radio light. Its size and bright white color had made it a landmark in the area. Driving north on Route 28, it couldn’t be missed, looming over a hill behind a local farm. Except Pete hadn’t seen it. He was scheduled to work the day shift at the 300 Foot on November 16, 1988, and made the drive so often that it took a moment to register what he had—or rather hadn’t—seen that morning, but as he kept driving, an oddity stuck persistently in his head.

The discovery spawned entire new subdisciplines of physics, and Vera went on to eventually win just about every prestigious prize offered to a professional astronomer (with the exception of the Nobel in Physics, which has long had a sizeable blind spot for groundbreaking research done by women). During most of her research on dark matter, she remained one of the only women working at the observatories that granted her time. Some years later, Vera was observing with a colleague, Deidre Hunter, at Las Campanas Observatory on an evening when, as it turned out, all the astronomers working on the mountain were women. Vera gathered the whole group into one of the control rooms for a photograph to commemorate the event.


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The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, card file, Cepheid variable, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Ernest Rutherford, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, index card, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, pattern recognition, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Observatory Pinafore The Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert & Sullivan Players gave an abridged concert performance of The Observatory Pinafore at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Cambridge on October 26, 2000, as part of a banquet and centenary symposium honoring Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. The so-called dark matter demonstrated by Robert Trumpler’s research was interstellar dust. It should not be confused with the mysterious invisible entity given the same name by modern astronomers, who believe dark matter is what holds galaxies together. CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Miss Cannon’s Prize After Harlow Shapley announced the wedding of Cecilia Payne and Sergei Gaposchkin, Miss Cannon made a note on the appropriate page in her diary.

Trumpler came to these conclusions by observing one hundred open clusters—close associations of stars that were not as densely crowded together as in globular clusters. He calculated each open cluster’s distance two ways, by its apparent brightness and also its apparent diameter. Both values predictably decreased with distance, but the open clusters faded in brightness much faster than they shrank in size. Some form of “dark matter” definitely intervened to absorb their light. As far as Trumpler could tell, the mysterious absorbing medium was confined to the Milky Way, but unevenly distributed; it concentrated along the plane of the galaxy and dissipated near the poles. Shapley had banked on transparency when he estimated the galaxy’s extent at three hundred thousand light-years.

After she returned to Princeton and married astronomer Bancroft Sitterly in 1937, she continued working, and later became manager of the program in atomic spectroscopy at the National Bureau of Standards. Vera Rubin, who attended Vassar College because of its historic association with Maria Mitchell, received the 2003 Bruce Medal for her measurements of galaxy rotation, which led to the discovery of dark matter. Sandra Moore Faber, the 2012 winner, did her graduate work at Harvard but has spent her career at the University of California Observatories, pursuing the formation, structure, and clustering of galaxies. In 2013 she was one of twelve recipients of the National Medal of Science. The telescope named for Miss Bruce, which Shapley praised as “the great galaxy hunter of the Southern Hemisphere,” was decommissioned in 1950.


pages: 491 words: 131,769

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global reserve currency, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, value at risk, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

247 The debate over current account imbalances: Nouriel Roubini, “Global Imbalances: A Contemporary ‘Rashomon’ Saga,” November 2006, online at http://www.centrecournot.org/pdf/conference9/Nouriel%20ROUBINI.pdf. This section draws on this paper. 248 “dark matter” explanation: Ricardo Hausmann and Federico Sturzenegger, “U.S. and Global Imbalances: Can Dark Matter Prevent a Big Bang?” November 13, 2005, online at http://www.cid.harvard.edu/cidpublications/darkmatter_051130.pdf. 248 This argument has been challenged: Roubini, “Global Imbalances: A Contemporary ‘Rashomon’ Saga,” November 2006. See also Barry Eichengreen, “Global Imbalances: The New Economy, the Dark Matter, the Savvy Investor, and the Standard Analysis,” March 2006, online at http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/~eichengr/matter.pdf. 249 “global savings glut”: Ben S.

They point to the fact that the United States is getting a better return on its foreign investments than foreigners are getting on their U.S. investments, which is hard to explain in the context of a massive current account deficit. But their explanation is simple: there is no current account deficit. It is, they explain, “just a confusion caused by an unnatural set of accounting rules.” Instead, there is “dark matter” out there that the existing accounting has failed to capture. This valuable dark matter is difficult to price because it consists of intangibles that the United States provides: things like insurance, liquidity, and knowledge. The authors put particular emphasis on knowledge, arguing that superior “know-how deployed abroad by U.S. corporations” isn’t captured in the statistics, and that all this talk about a current account deficit is nonsense.

So we must clear the air by addressing a few key questions: Why have these imbalances materialized in recent years? Are they sustainable? And if not, who should address them, and what policies should they pursue? One of the more specious attempts to account for the current account deficit is the “dark matter” explanation. Proponents of this fairy tale—the economists Ricardo Hausmann and Federico Sturzenegger, among others—deny that the current account deficit is really as big as official figures suggest; if it were, they argue, the United States couldn’t possibly be borrowing from the rest of the world at such low rates.


Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

In addition, these white dwarfs will slowly accumulate weakly interacting dark matter particles that orbit the galaxy in an enormous diffuse halo. Once trapped within the interior of a white dwarf, the particles annihilate each other and provide an important source of energy for the cosmos. Dark matter annihilation will replace conventional nuclear burning in stars as the dominant energy source. The power produced by this process is much lower than that produced by nuclear burning in conventional stars. White dwarfs fuelled by dark matter annihilation produce power ratings measured in quadrillions of Watts, roughly comparable to the total solar power intercepted by Earth (approximately 10 17 Watts) .

His primary research interests are in the fields of astrophysical cosmology (baryonic dark matter, star formation, future of the universe), astrobiology (anthropic principles, S ETI studies, catastrophic episodes in the history of life) , as well as philosophy of science (risk analysis, foundational issues in quantum mechanics and cosmology). A unifYing theme in these fields is the nature of physical time, the relationship of time and complexity, and various aspects of entropy-increasing processes taking place throughout the universe. He wrote one monograph ( QSO Absorption Spectroscopy and Baryonic Dark Matter; Belgrade, 2005) and translated several books, including titles by Richard P.

White dwarfs fuelled by dark matter annihilation produce power ratings measured in quadrillions of Watts, roughly comparable to the total solar power intercepted by Earth (approximately 10 17 Watts) . Eventually, however, white dwarfs will be ejected from the galaxy, the supply of the dark matter will get depleted, and this method of energy generation must come to an end. Although the proton lifetime remains uncertain, elementary physical considerations suggest that protons will not live forever. Current experiments show that the proton lifetime is longer than about 1033 years (Super­ Kamiokande Collaboration, 1 999) , and theoretical arguments (Adams et a!., 1 998; Ellis et a!. , 1983; Hawking et a!.


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The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

Company cultures, which shape worker incentives and determine how a business reacts to changes in the marketplace, have become much more important in the digital age. Today, more than 80 per cent of the value of Standard & Poor’s 500* firms is ‘dark matter’: the intangible secret sauce of success; the physical stuff companies own and their wage bill accounts for less than 20 per cent: a reversal of the pattern that prevailed in the 1970s.27 A large proportion of that dark matter is an amorphous ‘know-how’: the culture, incentives and tacit knowledge that make a modern company tick. The Economist is like that; our journalists gather information from all over the world, analyse it, and filter it through our editorial structures in order to generate pieces of journalism people want to buy.

Firms can and do fail, and not simply because competitors are offering clearly superior goods or services. This culture, or what economists often call ‘intangible capital’, is increasingly a firm’s most important technology. Knowing what information matters and what to do with it is the difference between a wildly profitable company and a bankrupt one. DARK MATTER AND DISRUPTION Intangible capital consists of the hard-to-grasp behavioural infrastructure that makes modern firms tick. It rests at the heart of most successful firms, from Apple to Goldman Sachs to Honda, and determines how people work and what sort of salary they are able to earn in return.

A recent analysis considered how much it would cost to duplicate the average firm on the S & P 500: that is, how much you’d have to spend to obtain the machines, buildings, technology, workers and so on that represent the visible components of a company. In the 1970s, the value of those components added up to more than 80 per cent of the firm’s valuation. The rest of the valuation constituted what was then defined as ‘dark matter’: the stuff you can’t just go out and buy. Today, however, these proportions of value are reversed. More than 80 per cent of the value of top firms resides in these intangibles – stuff that simply can’t easily be accounted for; the buildings and salaries and all the rest of it are only a small chunk of what makes a valuable firm valuable.3 This momentous shift occurred as firms shed prosaic operations that could be outsourced to other firms, and concentrated instead on the critical, value-generating work of the business.


pages: 481 words: 125,946

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

In general I’m happy to have them around and to have them improve. There is of course a danger that such machines will make harmful decisions, but a danger probably no greater than from humans making such decisions. Having these machines won’t answer the questions about the world that are the most important to me and many others: What constitutes the dark matter of the universe? Is supersymmetry really a symmetry of nature that provides a foundation for and extends the highly successful Standard Model of particle physics we have? These and similar questions can be answered only by experimental data. No amount of thought will provide such answers. Perhaps, given all the information we have about nature, some machine will actually come up with the right answers; indeed, perhaps some physicists have already come up with the answers.

Perhaps, given all the information we have about nature, some machine will actually come up with the right answers; indeed, perhaps some physicists have already come up with the answers. But the true role of data is to confirm which answers are the correct ones. If some physicist or some machine figures it out, they have no way to convince anyone else that they have the actual answer. Laboratory dark matter detectors or the CERN Large Hadron Collider or possibly a future Chinese collider might get the needed data, but not a thinking machine. ARE WE GOING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION? SCOTT ATRAN Anthropologist, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris; author, Talking to the Enemy: Violent Extremism, Sacred Values, and What It Means to Be Human Machines can perfectly imitate some of the ways humans think all of the time, and can consistently outperform humans on some thinking tasks all of the time, but computing machines as usually envisioned will not get human thinking right all of the time, because they process information in ways opposite to humans’ in domains associated with human creativity.

Our most important machines aren’t machines that do better at what humans do but machines that do things we can’t do at all. Our most important thinking machines won’t be faster or better at thinking what we can think; they will think what we can’t think. To solve the current grand mysteries of quantum gravity, dark energy, and dark matter, we’ll probably need intelligences other than human. The extremely complex questions that will come after them may require even more distant and complex intelligences. Indeed, we may need to invent intermediate intelligences that can help us design yet more rarified intelligences that we couldn’t design alone.


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Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State by Dana Priest, William M. Arkin

airport security, business intelligence, company town, dark matter, disinformation, drone strike, friendly fire, Google Earth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, information security, Julian Assange, operational security, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, WikiLeaks

A United Nations resolution had authorized the NATO alliance to use military force to stop Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi from brutalizing opponents to his rule. But the air strike on his command-and-control compound in Tripoli, in which one of his sons and three grandsons died, seemed to indicate he had gotten himself on a kill list, too. CHAPTER ELEVEN Dark Matter Besides the damage inflicted on the enemy by the CIA’s killer drones, paramilitary forces killed dozens of al-Qaeda leaders and hundreds of its foot soldiers in the decade after 9/11. But troops from a more mysterious organization, based in North Carolina, have killed easily ten times as many al-Qaeda, and hundreds of Iraqi insurgents as well.

Its commanders—headquartered at Fort Bragg and the adjoining Pope Air Force Base in Fayetteville, North Carolina—still consider the organization to be officially “unacknowledged,” meaning its true purpose and everything it does is classified, and therefore, as far as the public is concerned, it does not exist. “We’re the dark matter,” a strapping U.S. Navy SEAL once explained. “We’re the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen.” When its officers are working in civilian government agencies or U.S. embassies abroad, which they do quite a lot, they dispense with uniforms, unlike the rest of their military comrades.

After 9/11, they had come up with all sorts of new names to hide their secret military subunits: The Secret Army of Northern Virginia, Task Force Green, Task Force Blue, Task Force 11, then Task Force 20, then Task Force 121. In fact, they change their task force numbers so often that even their American colleagues sometimes “aren’t sure who we are,” one officer explained, acknowledging that obscurity was the goal. All these task forces are part of JSOC, which sits at the center of the secret universe as the dark matter that shapes the world in ways that are usually not detectable. Like the CIA, the Joint Special Operations Command has become the president’s personal weapon against terrorists, one both Presidents Bush and Obama have wielded often over the years, with little or no input from Congress or the larger public policy community that has weighed in on life-and-death policy options since the beginning on what is now the country’s longest war, the war against al-Qaeda.


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The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, British Empire, charter city, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Republic of Letters, rolodex, social contagion, social web, sparse data, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, wikimedia commons, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Yet by wrapping these values, motivations, and worldviews together, giving them God’s blessing, and linking them to a contingent afterlife, some Protestant faiths created powerful cultural recombinations that not only produced even WEIRDer psychologies but also contributed to economic growth, the effectiveness of democratic institutions, and higher suicide rates. Dark Matter or Enlightenment? In the 17th and 18th centuries, a complex of interrelated ideas about constitutional governments, liberty, impartial law, natural rights, progress, rationality, and science had begun to consolidate in the minds of leading European intellectuals such as John Locke, David Hume, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Thomas Paine, and Adam Smith. This flotsam of WEIRD ideas had been accumulating for centuries, pushed along by the swelling river of psychological dark matter—individualism, dispositionalism, analytic thinking and impersonal prosociality—that I’ve been analyzing throughout this book.

This flotsam of WEIRD ideas had been accumulating for centuries, pushed along by the swelling river of psychological dark matter—individualism, dispositionalism, analytic thinking and impersonal prosociality—that I’ve been analyzing throughout this book. This psychological dark matter—invisible and hard to detect like physical dark matter—has long been manifesting in the charters and constitutions of free cities, monastic orders, and universities, as well as in canon law. Enlightenment thinkers drew from and recombined these ideas and concepts using minds equipped with a proto-WEIRD psychology. Both Locke and Rousseau, for example, saw society as built on a social contract between individuals in which the government’s authority derived from the consent of the governed. That is, they began to understand society as a voluntary association—specifically, as a corporation.

Market Mentalities How Work Became Virtuous Be Yourself: The Origins of WEIRD Personalities It’s Big, but How Big? Part IV: Birthing the Modern World 12. Law, Science, and Religion Universal Laws, Conflicting Principles, and Individual Rights Representative Governments and Democracy The WEIRDest Religion Dark Matter or Enlightenment? 13. Escape Velocity Wiring Up the Collective Brain More Inventive? Psychology and Innovation in the Modern World Escaping the Trap 14. The Dark Matter of History Guns, Germs, and Other Factors Globalization and Its Discontents Appendix A. Milestones in the Marriage and Family Program Appendix B. Additional Plots Appendix C. The Psychological Impacts of Relational and Residential Mobility Notes Bibliography Index Also by Joseph Henrich A Note About the Author Copyright Farrar, Straus and Giroux 120 Broadway, New York 10271 Copyright © 2020 by Joseph Henrich All rights reserved First edition, 2020 E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71045-3 Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use.


Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

“to take the sting out”: Anjana Ahuja, “‘Grief Tech’ Avatars Aim to Take the Sting Out of Death,” Financial Times, December 20, 2022. landmark 2015 book: Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015). “This is a difficult archive to write about”: Browne, Dark Matters, 91–92. “a biometric technology”: Browne, Dark Matters, 91. “Branding in the transatlantic slave trade”: Browne, Dark Matters, 91. “an object among other objects”: Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 89. “relate to our self in the third person”: Nancy Colier, “The Branding of the Self,” Psychology Today, August 15, 2012.

She logged back on and posted, but reluctantly; she knew there was something wrong with a culture that valued public performances of a virtuous self over more tangible solidarities and relationship building. These views are born of my students’ own experiences and enhanced by our readings, particularly Simone Browne’s landmark 2015 book, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Browne, a professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, traces the origins of modern-day branding to the literal branding of African people in the transatlantic slave trade. “This is a difficult archive to write about,” Browne observes, “where iron instruments fashioned into rather simple printed type became tools of torture.

consumers content moderators copyrights and trademarks Corporate Self university course Counterlife, The (Roth) Covid pandemic; as bioweapon; China and; conspiracy theories about; as culling the herd; Disinformation Dozen and; far right and far-out alliance and; “Five Freedoms” and; Gates and; gyms during; health and wellness cultures and; individualism and; lockdowns in; long Covid; masks in; origin of the virus; as portal for change; profiteering from; race and class disparities and; relief programs during; religious people and; risk factors and; schools and; shock doctrine in; social media and; tech companies and; tests for the virus; Trump and; workers and Covid vaccines; adverse reactions to; Freedom Convoy and; mandates, passports, and apps; nanoparticles in; Nazi Germany analogies and; patents on and profits from; racial oppression analogies and; reproductive health and; restaurants and; shedding claims about; “slavery forever” video and; vaccine-autism myth and Crackdown Croatia Culture and Imperialism (Said) Cuomo, Andrew currency customization DailyClout Daily Command Brief Dark Matters (Browne) Darwin, Charles Darwish, Mahmoud data Davis, Angela Davis, Mike death de Bres, Helena Debt Collective Deception (Roth) DeepBrain AI Inc. deep state Deepwater Horizon de Hooge, Anna Delingpole, James dementia Demjanjuk, John democracy Democratic Party denial Depression, Great Descent of Man, The (Darwin) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Diagolon diagonalism; “body people” and; far right and far-out; Querdenken Dickens, Charles Didulo, Romana diphtheria disabilities; changeling myths and; forced sterilization and; Nazi Germany and; see also autism disaster capitalism disaster doppelgangers Discourse on Colonialism (Césaire) Disinformation Dozen doi’kayt (“hereness”) Don’t Look Up doppelgangers and doubling; aging as; Brunelle’s portraits of; in Capgras delusion; in changeling myths; confrontations with; diet and fitness and; digital disaster; evil twins; fascist; Freud’s views on; Israel-Palestine conflict and; in literature and film; machine-made; in multiverse stories; originals replaced by; origin of “doppelganger”; parent-child relationship as; racial; self-branding as; souls as; taking on life of their own; thinking as; twinning Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Double, The (Dostoyevsky) Double, The (film) Double, The (Saramago) Dowd, Maureen drug companies, see pharmaceutical companies Dual Du Bois, W.


pages: 673 words: 164,804

Peer-to-Peer by Andy Oram

AltaVista, big-box store, c2.com, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, dark matter, Dennis Ritchie, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, independent contractor, information retrieval, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, Marc Andreessen, moral hazard, Network effects, P = NP, P vs NP, p-value, packet switching, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, power law, radical decentralization, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, semantic web, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, slashdot, statistical model, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vernor Vinge, web application, web of trust, Zimmermann PGP

Slashdot moderation system, A reputation system that resists pseudospoofing: Advogato Aiken, Alexander, Reputation metrics AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) attacking by shilling, Attacks and adversaries protocol-centric addressing, Nothing succeeds like address, or, DNS isn’t the only game in town–An explosion of protocols AIMster, Immediate information sharing: The new instant messaging services Akamai Technologies, Active caching and mirroring Albert, Rka, Initial experiments, Simulating fault tolerance all points payment model, The difficulty of distributed systems: How to exchange micropayments among peers node-specific tickets and, Micropayments in the Free Haven context all you can eat business models, All you can eat alt newsgroups, Usenet America Online (AOL) and Gnutella, Gnutella’s first breath amortized pairwise payment model, The difficulty of distributed systems: How to exchange micropayments among peers Anderson, David, Contents of this book, SETI@home–The peer-to-peer paradigm, Contributors Anderson, Ross, Document revocation , The Eternity Service anonymity analysis of, An analysis of anonymity–An analysis of anonymity attacks on, Attacks on anonymity computational, An analysis of anonymity–An analysis of anonymity Crowds software and, Crowds Freenet and, Requests on the Internet, Risks involved in web server logging, Special problems posed by peer-to-peer systems Napster users and, Napster partial, Partial anonymity peer-to-peer, Anonymity and peer-to-peer–Anonymous Gnutella chat, Privacy in data-sharing systems perfect forward, An analysis of anonymity–An analysis of anonymity reliability and, Reliability with anonymity–Reliability with anonymity types of, Anonymity for anonymous storage–Partial anonymity vs. accountability, A case study: Accountability in Free Haven why it is needed, Risks involved in web server logging Anonymizer.com, Acknowledgments, Anonymizing proxies anonymizing proxies, Anonymizing proxies, Other anonymity tools anonymous digital cash (see digital cash) Gnutella chat, Anonymous Gnutella chat macropayment digital cash (see macropayment digital cash schemes) publishing systems, Trust in other systems Eternity Service, The Eternity Service Freenet, Freenet–Conclusions, Freenet problems with, Content certification Publius, Publius–Publius in a nutshell searching technologies, Trust and search engines–Deniability remailers, Mixmaster Remailers–General discussion servers, Peer-to-peer models and their impacts on accountability storage (Free Haven), Anonymity for anonymous storage–Partial anonymity anti-censorship strategy, Red Rover–Acknowledgments AOL (America Online) and Gnutella, Gnutella’s first breath application service provider (ASP), PCs are the dark matter of the Internet application-to-application conversations, Conversations and peers Arecibo radio telescope, Radio SETI Arnold, Ken, Remaking the Peer-to-Peer Meme ARPANET, A revisionist history of peer-to-peer (1969-1995) ASP (application service provider), PCs are the dark matter of the Internet Asthagiri, Nimisha, Contents of this book, Security–Taxonomy of Groove keys, Contributors asymmetric algorithm, default, Security characteristics of a shared space asymmetric bandwidth, Asymmetric bandwidth, Users as consumers, users as providers asymmetric keys, Taxonomy of Groove keys authenticators (MAC), Mutually-suspicious shared spaces fetching lost messages, Fetching lost messages supporting message fanout, Message fanout–Message fanout author-anonymity, Anonymity for anonymous storage, An analysis of anonymity automatic pass-along participation and Napster, File sharing: Napster and successors avatars, selling, Reputation for sale—SOLD!

Even if you assume that the average DNS host has 10 additional addresses of the form foo.host.com, the total number of peer-to-peer addresses now, after only 4 years, is of the same order of magnitude as the total number of DNS addresses, and is growing faster than the DNS universe today. As new kinds of Net-connected devices like wireless PDAs and digital video recorders such as TiVo and Replay proliferate, they will doubtless become an important part of the Internet as well. But for now, PCs make up the enormous majority of these untapped resources. PCs are the dark matter of the Internet, and their underused resources are fueling peer-to-peer. Real solutions to real problems Why do we have unpredictable IP addresses in the first place? Because there weren’t enough to go around when the Web happened. It’s tempting to think that when enough new IP addresses are created, the old “One Device/One Address” regime will be restored, and the Net will return to its pre-peer-to-peer architecture.

Instead of trying to store these files in a central database, Napster took advantage of the largest pool of latent storage space in the world—the disks of the Napster users. And thus, Napster became the prime example of a new principle for Internet applications: Peer-to-peer services come into being by leveraging the untapped power of the millions of PCs that have been connected to the Internet in the last five years. PCs are the dark matter of the Internet Napster’s popularity made it the proof-of-concept application for a new networking architecture based on the recognition that bandwidth to the desktop had become fast enough to allow PCs to serve data as well as request it, and that PCs are becoming powerful enough to fulfill this new role.


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

Technology also fights back against climate change: from vat-grown meat, to genetically modified plastic eaters, to direct air capture, to space-based solar power, there is, in the end, no shortage of answers. Much else is revolutionised. This novel toolkit re-accelerates fundamental science, allowing researchers to unravel the dark matter and dark energy, profound mysteries that sit at the heart of our understanding of the cosmos. We might even detect the ‘dark force’, an even more mysterious fifth force of nature acting as a bridge to dark matter and energy. We should expect great and popular new art – the Shakespeare of computer games, the Beethoven of VR, the J.K. Rowling of DNA. There is scope for major new genres and new media to emerge.

A Nature poll of 1500 scientists found that 70 per cent had failed to reproduce results.42 In some fields up to 50 per cent of studies fail to replicate.43 The figures compound corrosive evidence of methodological error like small sample sizes, inaccurate statistical analyses, bias and even fraud in much scientific work, a system in which the gaming of results for maximum impact trumps rigour.44 What's more, as in cancer research, the accumulation of science generally creates its own problem: there is simply too much relevant material for scientists to consume. Important, often older work is thus regularly missed.45 Some, like the physicist Lee Smolin, maintain that progress on the most fundamental challenges has been particularly disappointing. Questions like the relationship between quantum theory and gravity, or the nature of dark matter and dark energy, remain unanswered. He argues that from the end of the eighteenth century physics leapt forward in twenty-year intervals. This progress has stopped: ‘since the end of the 1970s there has not been a genuine breakthrough in our understanding of elementary-particle physics.’ 46 Sabine Hossenfelder is blunter still: ‘Nothing is moving in the foundations of physics,’ she argues.

Science is supposedly built around an organised scepticism; but there is a chance that it has calcified into arrogant scientism, buying too heartily into its own dogmas; cutting itself off from strange or seemingly unproductive avenues for reasons of bureaucracy or narrow-mindedness. As I write, I've been leafing through a recent edition of Scientific American. It contains multitudes: the largest ever experiment to detect neutrinos, experiments to find new particles and identify dark matter, pioneering research on supermassive black holes in the early universe, explorations inside neutron stars and studies of quantum entanglement. It doesn't feel like a struggling area, and that isn't the word I'd use. Instead science is both an inspiring success and also subject to increasingly potent diminishing returns, especially in its most radical and fundamental guises.


Science...For Her! by Megan Amram

Albert Einstein, blood diamond, butterfly effect, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, double helix, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, pez dispenser, Schrödinger's Cat, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Wall-E, wikimedia commons

A NEUTRON STAR: 16,800,000,000,000 lbs. Real Khloe Kardashian over here. HELL: 9,357,753,975,867,564,57 9,846,735,732,342 lbs. HEAVEN: 0 lbs. ;) A BLACK HOLE: 0 lbs. ;) Heating Up & Cooling Down * * * Thermodynamics is the study of how heat is transferred from one thing to another. Dark matter is good at absorbing heat. Um, speaking of “dark matter?”—I love black men! ;) FIG. 3.2 Sorry to be TMI but they are great lovers! I got bit by the jungle fever bug (malaria) when I was like thirteen and I have not looked back. FIG. 3.3 FIG. 3.2 FIG. 3.3 THREE FUN WAYS TO ENJOY A DATE Even If You Are White and Your Date Isn’t the Same Race as You * * * Go to a movie that involves lots of races!

., x Chelsea, xvii chemistry, 31–61, 63, 190 of cooking, 32–35 childbirth, 23 children, 10–11 Chloe, viii Chris, xiii Christina, ix Christine, xv Christmas trees, 97–99 chromosomes, 18 Chunky Love, ix Claire, xii Claire-Marie, ix Clara, ix Class, 24 Claudia, xi climate change, 103 coal, 102 coma, 23 computers, 151 confabulating, 101 Cookies, ix cooking, 32–35 Cori, Carl Ferdinand, 174 Cori, Gerty, 174 Courtney, xiv covalent bonds, 55 cover letter, girlfriend, 134–35 cover-ups, 79, 89 Craigslist, 154 Cris, ix Cristy, ix crocus, 100 Crystal, ix Crystal Glass, ix Curie, Irene, 170 Curie, Marie, 60, 170, 173, 174 Curie, Pierre, 174 Cynthia, xv D daisy, 100 Dana, xvii Dani, xix Daniella, xviii Danielle, xiv dark matter, 72 Darwin, Charles, 26 dating, 154–59 online sites for, 154–56 Davida, viii Dawn, xv Day-Lewis, Daniel, 15 death, 20–23, 50, 51 Debbie, xv Deen, Paula, 33–35, 89 dendrology, 91–99 Denise, xviii depression, 128 Dereka, xii Deschanel, Zooey, 80 Devil Wears Prada, The (Weisberger), 119 diagnosis, 126 diamonds, 45, 102 Diana, xvii Diaz, Cameron, 15 disease, 123–26 displacement, 65 DNA, 17–18, 138 Donica, xix Donna, xvi double helix, 17 Drew, xiii driving, women and, 65–68 drugs, 90, 131–32 E Earth, 147, 150 age of, 147 earth sciences, 87–114 Eat, Pray, Love (Gilbert), 119 E. coli, 130 economics, 159–61 Edna, xvi eggs, 2–3, 18 freezing of, 157 egg whites, 34 Einstein, Albert, 75 electronic music, 162 electrons, 55 elements, 46–49, 57 Eliana, viii Elizabeth, xi Ella, ix Ellen, viii Ellie, xiii e-mail, 151 Emily, xi Emma, xi employment, 174–75 Erica, xiv Erin, xiv Eryn, xviii Esther, viii ethanol, 39 eukaryotes, 14 Eve, 28 Evelyn, x evolution, 26–28 vs. religion, 27–28 expiration dates, 130 extinction, 26 extraterrestrial life, 150 Ezri, xv F face mash, 19 Faith, xi fallopian tubes, 136 Family, 24 fats, 33 female orgasms, 107 fertilization, 3 Fifty Shades Freed (James), 119 Fifty Shades of Grey (James), 119 final exam, 190–91 floriculture, 100–101 flowers, study of, 100–101 Fluffy, xix Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 131 food poisoning, 130 formaldehyde, 45 4-vinylguaiacol, 44 Francesca, xi Franklin, Rosalind, 138 fruit salad, 34 G G., ix Gabriella, x Galileo Galilei, 75 gamma radiation emissions, 57 garden burgers, 34 gas, 56 gay-ball warming, 103 genes, 17 Genesis 4:1, 119 genetics, 16–19 Genus, 24 Getgo, ix Giana, xi Gina, xviii “gin and Drano,” 37 girlfriend cover letter, 134–35 Girls’ Guide to Fishing and Hunting, The (Bank), 119 global warming, 103–6 contributing to, 105 fashion staples for, 106 glycogen, conversion of, 174 Golda, xix Gone Girl (Flynn), 119 Goodall, Jane, 170, 173 Goodnight Moon (Brown), 111 Grace, x Gregoria, xviii gravity, 147 H H.P.T., xix Hailey, x hairspray, 105 Hamm, xi Hannah, x Harissa, xix Harper, x Heather, xiii Heidi, viii Hemings, Sally, 72 He’s Just Not That into You (Behrendt), 119 Holly, xvii homosexuality, 77 hoodies, 79 Hooke, Robert, 12 Hoover, J.


pages: 347 words: 97,721

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

A distant echo of that moment came in 2012, when Francisco Kitaura and his team at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam, Germany, developed a new algorithm based on artificial intelligence, called KIGEN, to map the “dark matter” of the cosmos. Dark matter makes up some 23 percent of the universe, compared to just 5 percent “normal matter” of visible stars, planets, dust, and gases—and both are flung across the 72 percent that consists purely of “dark energy.” Understanding just where and how the dark matter has been distributed since the Big Bang is essential to gaining deeper knowledge of the universe’s dynamics, but the computational task is immense. Summing up the contribution of the new algorithm, Kitaura says: “With the help of AI, we can now model the universe around us with unprecedented accuracy and study how the largest structures in the cosmos came into being.”1 That is a pretty smart machine—and it’s the kind of smart machine we can all love because, again, it is pure augmentation.

The best use of his human talent is in the “wet lab” preclinical studies where a compound is applied to live disease and it’s time to figure out just how it could be formulated to treat a patient, with sensitivity to toxicity and dose tolerance.2 Both of these are realms where smart machines are on the rise but don’t threaten jobs, because the goals are so immense that today’s labor supply doesn’t begin to match the requirements of the tasks in their unautomated states. There are not enough pharmacologists in Framingham, or indeed the world, to pore over the tens of trillions of data points that Berg’s AI system processes in its analysis of tissue samples. All the astronomers ever churned out by the world’s universities could not map the dark matter lurking among the 54,000 known galaxies of the universe. We’re guessing that there are no neo-Luddites out there trying to smash any of this machinery. The question is, then: Why don’t all applications of smart machines feel as helpful as these? What really is so different about these combinations of humans and machines?


pages: 400 words: 94,847

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielsen

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dark matter, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Higgs boson, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, means of production, medical residency, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, P vs NP, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, social intelligence, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, University of East Anglia, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler

In the 1970s the astronomer Vera Rubin discovered that stars toward the outer reaches of our Milky Way galaxy are rotating around the center of the galaxy much faster than we’d expect on the basis of our best theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity. But rather than give up on general relativity, most astronomers instead prefer to postulate the existence of invisible dark matter permeating the galaxy. If the distribution of dark matter is just right, then general relativity can correctly account for the speed of stars on the outer edges of the galaxy. By comparison to the popularity of dark matter, new theories of gravity have been pursued by relatively few astronomers. So far I’ve made little distinction between conventional explanations and complex models. This blithe conflation of the two has perhaps bothered some readers.

See also Firefox; Linux; MathWorks competition; open source software computer games: addictive quality of, 146, 147 for folding proteins (see Foldit) connectome, human, 106, 121 conversation, offline small-group, 39–43 conversational critical mass, 30, 31, 33, 42 Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology, 150 Cox, Alan, 57 Creative Commons, 219, 220 creative problem solving, 24, 30, 34, 35, 36, 38. See also problem solving Crick, Francis, 79–80, 104 Critical mass: for chain reaction, 29–31 conversational, 30, 31, 33, 42 dark matter, 127 data: citation of, 195 theft of, 104 databases, online: of all the world’s knowledge, 4–5 of American Chemical Society, 164 biological, 121 GenBank, 4, 6–7, 9, 108 of Open Dinosaur Project, 150–51 specified by grant agencies, 191 data-driven intelligence, 112–16 in biology, 116–19 complemented by citizen science, 151 for machine translation, 124–25.


pages: 208 words: 70,860

Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, complexity theory, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Olbers’ paradox, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

Others, such as those involving the cat and the demon, have, in the eyes of some, yet to be satisfactorily laid to rest. When choosing my greatest enigmas in physics, I have not homed in on the biggest unsolved problems—for example, what dark matter and dark energy, which between them make up 95 percent of the contents of our universe, are made of, or what, if anything, was there before the Big Bang. These are incredibly difficult and profound questions to which science has yet to find answers. Some, like the nature of dark matter, that mysterious stuff that makes up most of the mass of galaxies, may well be answered in the near future if particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva continue to make new and exciting discoveries; others, like an accurate description of a time before the Big Bang, may remain unanswered forever.

I set them out here merely to highlight how much more we still need to learn about the Universe and our place in it. I begin with ten problems that fall into the first category—those to which I anticipate science finding satisfactory answers within my lifetime: 1. Why is there more matter than antimatter in the Universe? 2. What is dark matter made of? 3. What is dark energy? 4. Will fully functional invisibility cloaks be possible? 5. How far can we push chemical self-assembly toward explaining life? 6. How does a long strand of organic material fold up into a protein? 7. Is there an absolute limit to human life spans? 8. How are memories stored and retrieved in the brain?


pages: 502 words: 107,657

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die by Eric Siegel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, backtesting, Black Swan, book scanning, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data is the new oil, data science, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Google Glasses, happiness index / gross national happiness, information security, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lifelogging, machine readable, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, personalized medicine, placebo effect, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shai Danziger, software as a service, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply chain finance, text mining, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Contest to automatically grade student-written essays: Kaggle, “Develop an Automated Scoring Algorithm for Student-Written Essays,” Competition, February 10, 2012. www.kaggle.com/c/asap-aes. Mark D. Shermis and Ben Hamner, “Contrasting State-of-the-Art Automated Scoring of Essays: Analysis,” Contrasting Essay Scoring, April 12, 2012. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/44416236/NCME%202012%20Paper3_29_12.pdf. Contest to predict the distribution of dark matter in the universe: Kaggle, “Mapping Dark Matter,” Competition, May 23, 2011. www.kaggle.com/c/mdm. Heritage Health Prize ($3,000,000): Kaggle, “Improve Healthcare, Win $3,000,000,” Competition, April 4, 2011. www.kaggle.com/host/casestudies/hpn. More Kaggle case studies: Anthony Goldbloom, “Machines Learn, but Can They Teach?”

.), and a graduate student (Germany); $100,000 in prize money sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation (established by a founder of Hewlett-Packard) went to these winners, who developed the best means to automatically grade student-written essays. Their resulting system grades essays as accurately as human graders, although none of these three winners had backgrounds in education or text analytics. And guess what kind of expert excelled at predicting the distribution of dark matter in the universe? Competing in a contest sponsored by NASA and the Royal Astronomical Society, Martin O’Leary, a British PhD student in glaciology, generated a method the White House announced has “outperformed the state-of-the-art algorithms most commonly used in astronomy.” For this contest, O’Leary provided the first major breakthrough (although he was not the eventual winner).

—Jeff Howe, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business The organizations I’ve worked with have mostly viewed the competition in business as a race that benefits from sharing, rather than a fight, where one’s gain can come only from another’s loss. The openness of crowdsourcing aligns with this philosophy. —Stein Kretsinger, Founding Executive of Advertising.com One small groundbreaking firm, Kaggle, has taken charge and leads the production of PA crowdsourcing. Kaggle has launched 53 PA competitions, including the essay-grading and dark matter ones mentioned above. Over 50,000 registered competitors are incentivized by prizes that usually come to around $10,000 to $20,000, but climb as high as $3 million. These diverse minds from more than 200 universities and 100 countries, about half academics, have submitted over 144,000 attempts for the win.2 An enterprise turns research and development completely on its head in order to leverage PA crowdsourcing.


pages: 465 words: 103,303

The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery by George Johnson

Apollo 11, Arthur D. Levinson, Atul Gawande, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Cepheid variable, Columbine, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, Magellanic Cloud, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, phenotype, profit motive, seminal paper, stem cell

Feinbaum, and Victor Ambros, “The C. elegans Heterochronic Gene lin-4 Encodes Small RNAs with Antisense Complementarity to lin-14,” Cell 75 (December 1993): 843–54. [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8252621] 50. the importance … has been overblown: Harm van Bakel et al., “Most ‘Dark Matter’ Transcripts Are Associated with Known Genes,” PLOS Biology 8, no. 5 (May 18, 2010): e1000371; [http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000371] and Richard Robinson, “Dark Matter Transcripts: Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing?” PLOS Biology 8 (May 18, 2010): e1000370. [http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000370] 51. a sweeping new theory: Leonardo Salmena, Pier Paolo Pandolfi, et al., “A ceRNA Hypothesis: The Rosetta Stone of a Hidden RNA Language?”

Only then can we truly understand the cellular circuits and how they can go wrong. Junk that is not junk. Genes—99 percent of them—that reside in our microbes rather than in our own cells. Background seemed to be trading places with foreground, and I was reminded of what happened in cosmology when most of the universe turned out to be made of dark matter and dark energy. Yet for all the new elaborations, the big bang theory itself was left standing. It wasn’t so clean and simple as before, but it provided the broad strokes of the picture, a framework in which everything, aberrations and all, made sense. The same appeared to be happening with the hallmarks.

Try as he might, Maxwell’s demon will ultimately be defeated. In the end, the Echthroi always win. Epilogue Joe’s Cancer A life-view by the living can only be provisional. Perspectives are altered by the fact of being drawn; description solidifies the past and creates a gravitational body that wasn’t there before. A background of dark matter—all that is not said— remains, buzzing. —JOHN UPDIKE, Self-Consciousness The next spring at the ranch, I’m told, the salsola was as bad as ever. I wasn’t there to see it. During that year our marriage ended, seventeen years after it had begun. For a long time our lives had been diverging. The cancer had brought us closer but now it was gone.


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The Infinity Puzzle by Frank Close

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, dark matter, El Camino Real, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Simon Singh, Ted Sorensen

How much of this is true, and how many of these bizarre names will one day become part of the lexicon of science, is for the future. However, there is one aspect of supersymmetry that could prove most profound: SUSY might be the source of the dark matter that appears to dominate the material universe. In cosmologists’ simulations of the large-scale universe, dark matter is the glue that binds the galaxies, preventing them from spiraling apart and probably having helped to form them in the first place. From the motion of galaxies we can infer that 90 percent of the universe consists of stuff that is dark—in the sense that it does not shine in any wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum.

This is analogous to the way 350 the infinity puzzle that the stars form, but whereas stars made of conventional particles feel strong and electromagnetic forces, which enable them to shine, the conglomerates of neutral “-inos” have no such ability. Inert lumps of dark matter populating space accompanied by occasional “conventional” particles, such as make us, could be the nature of the universe. If SUSY particles are discovered, and turn out to have these properties, it would prove a beautiful convergence between high-energy particle physics and cosmology. Having once believed that we were at the center of the universe, and then seen our location shifted into the outer reaches of one out of billions of galaxies, the stuff that makes us might turn out to be no more than flotsam in a sea of dark matter. big bang day When the Large Hadron Collider was approved in 1993, some wondered if it would ever become reality.

From the motion of galaxies we can infer that 90 percent of the universe consists of stuff that is dark—in the sense that it does not shine in any wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum. This implies that it is impervious to the electromagnetic force. Lightweight neutrinos have these properties, but the models of galactic dynamics work best if the dark matter consists of massive particles. However, no such particles are known in the standard model. In SUSY, such beasts are expected. Moreover, if the lightest superparticles are electrically neutral siblings of the photon or gluon—known as “photino” and “gluino”—they could be stable and form large-scale clusters through their mutual gravitational attraction.


pages: 238 words: 75,994

A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh

A. Roger Ekirch, big-box store, card file, dark matter, Evgeny Morozov, game design, index card, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Minecraft, off grid, Rubik’s Cube, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, statistical model, the built environment, urban planning

They knew how buildings actually worked, but also that buildings consist, for the most part, of sprawling back labyrinths of maintenance rooms and side corridors that residents—even the most dutiful of apartment owners—never visit or realize exist. For a burglar, these spaces on the outer margins of architectural consciousness are like the dark matter of the built environment. Laundry rooms, fire escapes, employee staircases, emergency exits, rooftop boiler rooms; the list goes on and on. An overlooked hinterland nonetheless central to any building’s ability to function, these sorts of facilities permeate hotels and apartment complexes. From a burglar’s point of view, these sorts of spaces are temptations: secondary passageways and points of entry over which few people feel they have responsibility.

The deep interiors of buildings such as hotels tended to be relatively unprotected, in his experience; this meant that once you got past the entrances and lobbies and had wandered farther into a building’s core, you could expect to find fewer people walking around, whether they were guards on patrol or residents taking out the garbage. Every building had its rhythms. These service corridors were the internal hinterlands—the architectural dark matter—so beloved by Bill Mason. The Internet has been a godsend to burglars, Dakswin pointed out. He had been going online to research different neighborhoods, zooming in to see specific buildings on Google Street View to scope out everything from window heights—and thus potential routes into someone’s home—to the presence of fences and shrubbery that could provide welcome cover.

In one of the film’s most iconic scenes, McClane evades capture by climbing through an air duct—this after falling down an HVAC shaft when the machine gun he has been using as an anchorage point fails—giving the building’s ventilation system a second life as an escape route and adding to the popular mythology of the ventilation system as an overlooked, parallel system of circulation within a building. As we saw with Bill Mason, these vents are part of the architectural dark matter—the invisible backstage—that makes up so much of the built environment. Indeed, McClane’s actions reveal a new type of architectural space altogether—a topological condition that we might call Nakatomi space, wherein buildings reveal near-infinite interiors, capable of being traversed through all manner of nonarchitectural means, with their own exhilarating form of boundless fluidity.


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Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places by Paul Collier

business cycle, carbon tax, dark matter, deskilling, failed state, information security, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, price stability, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, zero-sum game

The second was Votes and Violence 23 the converse question of why autocracies become more dangerous at higher levels of income. Finally, and most mysteriously, once these income-related effects of democracy and autocracy were allowed for, there remained a further pure effect of democracy that was making societies more at risk of violence. Like some unobservable dark matter it was lurking as a constant across societies. What was it? These were not easy questions. The key insight came by the simple psychological technique of imagining myself in the position of being a former dictator in one of the countries of the bottom billion who had caved in to pressure from donors to democratize.

Well, the awkward problem with preemptive purges is that they are not compatible with the rule of law: the technique depends upon punishing people even though they haven’t done anything. This sort of conduct collides with even fairly modest levels of democracy. The idea that the ability to mount a purge would be reduced as a result of democracy was a plausible explanation for the dark matter. If leaders could no longer mount preemptive purges they might 24 WARS, GUNS, AND VOTES be less able to keep the lid on political violence. This might be why, over and above those effects of democracy that depended upon the level of income, there was the pure effect that increased political violence.

Whatever the limitations of the present regime, it is clearly massively more democratic than that of Saddam Hussein. Yet Hussein presided over a relatively peaceful country. It was not an attractive peace, but it was a peace of sorts, and it most surely depended upon preemptive repression rather than citizen consent. So a weakening of technologies of repression is, I think, a likely explanation for the dark matter: the higher risk of political violence that comes from democracy. Why, then, should the net effect of democracy be increasingly favorable as income rises? I think the answer lies in those effects that I started with: accountability and legitimacy. The stark and straightforward reason that in the bottom billion the accountability and legitimacy effects of democracy do not reduce the risk of political violence is that in these societies, democracy does not deliver either accountability or legitimacy.


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Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture by Justin McGuirk

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, dark matter, Day of the Dead, digital divide, Donald Trump, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, facts on the ground, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, mass immigration, megaproject, microcredit, Milgram experiment, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, Silicon Valley, starchitect, technoutopianism, unorthodox policies, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, Washington Consensus

For Cruz, the only way forward is not to play by the existing rules, but to start redesigning those institutions. In San Ysidro, he has been seeking to change the zoning laws to allow a richer and more empowering community life. And changing legislation means engaging with what has been called the ‘dark matter’* – not just the physical fabric of the city, but its regulations. * A term coined by the architect Wouter Vanstiphout, later used in the title of Dan Hill’s 2012 book, Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary. This is the very definition of the activist architect, one who creates the conditions in which it is possible to make a meaningful difference. Cruz himself, who has a tendency to slip into academic jargon, calls it ‘expanded modes of practice’.

Thinking back to two of his heroes, Alison and Peter Smithson, Alfredo claims that they were sidelined because ‘they didn’t engage in the politics enough’. This is simplistic, but what I understand by it is that for the Smithsons and other modernist builders of social housing, the going was good when they could count on governments seeking them out, but not when it was the other way around. Being an activist architect means engaging in the dark matter of politics to make your case when the politicians have no particular plans in mind. By and large, the Venezuelan architecture community does not seek out these challenges, partly because of the social stigma attached to the barrios, but also because of a traditional high-culture education which taught them that architecture is the design of refined objects.


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Exoplanets by Donald Goldsmith

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, megastructure, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, time dilation

Most notably, the distances between the stars, and thus the distances between any planetary systems that may surround them, exceed what ­human intuition suggests by enormous f­actors. The strangeness of the universe begins with distances that surpass easy understanding. Astronomers have now concluded that two mysterious, invisible, and entirely disparate entities—­dark ­matter and dark energy—­ permeate and dominate the universe in mass and energy terms.1 Dark ­matter, revealed by its gravitational effects on “ordinary ­matter,” consists of particles that are entirely unknown to us at the pres­ent time. The “ordinary” form of m ­ atter resides primarily in vast clouds of hot gas that permeate ­giant clusters of galaxies; to a lesser extent, we find ordinary ­matter in the stars that form the vis­i­ble units of the universe.

See Atacama Large Millimeter Array Alpha Centauri, 10, 19–20, 43, 183, 208 Aluminum, 137, 153 Ammonia, 161–62 Anaxagoras, 124 Andromeda galaxy, 208 Angel, Roger, 195 Ariel (Atmospheric Remote-­sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-­survey), 186 Arrhenius, Svante, 124 Asteroids, 16, 21, 54, 63, 136–39, 218–23 Astronomical unit, 21 Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), 48, 142–44, 147, 196, 202 Atmospheres of exoplanets, 42, 60, 106–7, 172, 181, 185 composition of, 107, 172, 181, 185 heat trapping by, 42 observation of, 60, 106 Baikonur Cosmodrome, 51 Barnard’s star, 20 Batygin, Konstantin, 22–23, 139–40 Beaulieu, Jean-­Phillipe, 81 Beta Pictoris, 71 Binary star systems, 96–97, 146 Biosignatures, 158, 171–73, 192 Borucki, William, 51, 53 Boss, Alan, 31 Boyajian, Tabetha, 92, 95 247 Index Brown, Michael, 22, 139 Brown dwarfs, 41, 69, 82 Butler, Paul, 2, 32 California-­Kepler Survey (CKS), 129 Campbell, Bruce, 31 Carbon, 106, 153 Carbon dioxide, 106, 137, 162, 164, 172–73, 199 Carbon monoxide, 60, 72, 137 Carrington event, 123, 168–69 Cassini spacecraft, 164 CCD detectors, 108 Center for Astrophysics, 46, 109, 157 Center of mass, 15–19, 37, 43, 96–97 Cerro Pachón, 72–73 Charbonneau, David, 55 CHEOPS (CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite), 125–26 Chu, Stephen, 212 Copernican princi­ple, 32 Coronagraphic mask, 69, 72–73, 182, 190–93 Coronagraphy, 69–71, 205 CoRoT spacecraft, 53–54 Dark energy, 10–11 Dark ­matter, 10–11 Deep Space Industries, 222 Discovery Channel Telescope, 48 Domagal-­Goldman, Shawn, 174 Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, 31 Doppler, Johann, 30 Doppler effect, 30 Doppler tomography, 109 Draugr, 26 Dressing, Courtney, 123 Dust, 54, 68, 72, 90, 94, 97, 106, 115, 135, 137, 139, 143–47, 151, 159, 172, 204, 210–11 Dyson, Freeman, 94, 212, 224 Dyson sphere, 94 Eccentricity, 35–38 Eclipse, 75, 96, 173 Einstein, Albert, 8, 74–82, 205–6, 214–17 Einstein ring, 76, 205–6 Electromagnetic radiation.


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Hawai'I Becalmed: Economic Lessons of the 1990s by Christopher Grandy

Alan Greenspan, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, dark matter, endogenous growth, inventory management, Jones Act, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, minimum wage unemployment, open economy, purchasing power parity, Silicon Valley, Telecommunications Act of 1996

The bill proposed limitations on the total amount of the credit per year. A similar provision appeared in the administration bill HB 722. Anthony Lawrence Clapes has argued that Hawai‘i has not done nearly enough to attract high tech. See Anthony Lawrence Clapes, Blue Wave Millennium: A Future for Hawai‘i. (Honolulu: Dark Matter Press, 2000). Paul Romer and Robert Lucas are among the leading writers in this area. See Paul Romer, “The Origins of Endogenous Growth,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 8:1(1994): 3–22; and Robert E. Lucas, Jr., “On the Mechanics of Economic Development,” Journal of Monetary Economics 22(1988): 3–42.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. ———“Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania: Reply.” American Economic Review, 90(5)(December 2000): 1397–1420. Clapes, Anthony Lawrence. Blue Wave Millennium: A Future for Hawai‘i. Honolulu: Dark Matter Press, 2000. Crampon, L. J. Hawai‘i’s Visitor Industry, Its Growth and Development. University of Hawai‘i, School of Travel Industry Management, 1976. Eisner, Robert. How Real Is the Federal Deficit? New York: The Free Press, 1986. Grandy, Christopher. “...and Maybe Government Didn’t Grow Much, After All.”


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China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle by Dinny McMahon

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, crony capitalism, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, industrial robot, invisible hand, low interest rates, megacity, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, money market fund, mortgage debt, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban planning, working-age population, zero-sum game

United States in 2020: Yutao Sun and Cong Cao, “Will China Become World’s Largest Research Spender by 2020?,” Analysis, China Policy Institute, December 4, 2014, https://cpianalysis.org/2014/12/04/will-china-become-worlds-largest-research-spender-by-2020/. on dark matter: Gianfranco Bertone, Behind the Scenes of the Universe: From the Higgs to Dark Matter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), chap. 1. to research neutrinos: “Daya Bay Experiment Begins Taking Data,” Cern Courier, September 23, 2011, http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/47189. than ever before: Rebecca Morelle, “China’s Science Revolution,” BBC, May 23, 2016, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-0192822d-14f1-432b-bd25-92eab6466362.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, relative to the size of its economy, China already spends more than the European Union on R&D, and is on track to surpass total spending by the United States in 2020. Much of that money has been invested in visionary, one-of-a-kind research facilities, like the world’s largest laboratory for astroparticle physics, buried more than two kilometers underground in Sichuan, which is used for experiments on dark matter. And the sprawling underground complex being built in southeast China that will be used to research neutrinos. And the radio telescope in Guizhou Province that is the biggest of its kind in the world, with a half-kilometer diameter that allows scientists to look deeper into the night sky than ever before.


Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, biofilm, buy low sell high, carbon footprint, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, Easter island, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late capitalism, low earth orbit, Mason jar, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, NP-complete, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, TED Talk, the built environment, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, two and twenty

To compound matters, we understood very little. Graphs of microbial populations projected on a screen had large sections labeled “unknown.” I was reminded of the way that modern physicists portray the universe, more than ninety-five percent of which is described as “dark matter” and “dark energy.” Dark matter and energy are dark because we don’t know anything about them. This was biological dark matter, or dark life. Many scientific concepts—from time to chemical bonds to genes to species—lack stable definitions but remain helpful categories to think with. From one perspective, “individual” is no different: just another category to guide human thought and behavior.

For an estimate of the size of our microbiome see Bordenstein and Theis. (2015). For viruses within viruses see Stough et al. (2019). For a general introduction to the microbiome see Yong (2016) and a special issue of Nature on the human microbiome (May 2019): www.nature.com/​collections/​fiabfcjbfj [accessed October 29, 2019]. dark matter, or dark life: In a sense, all biologists are now ecologists—but disciplinary ecologists have a head start and their methods are starting to seep into new fields: A number of biologists are starting to call for the application of ecological methods to historically non-ecological fields of biology.


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Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them by Dan Bouk

Black Lives Matter, card file, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, desegregation, digital map, Donald Trump, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, government statistician, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, index card, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, public intellectual, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Noxubee County, Mississippi, E.D. 52–21, sheet 1A. 92.  “Noxubee County,” The Mississippi Encyclopedia, https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/noxubee-county/. 93.  To see how Black studies can and should be made central to our histories and theories of surveillance, see Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 94.  Price, “A Check on Underenumeration in the 1940 Census,” 47. 95.  Price, “A Check on Underenumeration in the 1940 Census,” 47. 96.  Appendix to Field Division, Bureau of the Census, “Rough Draft: Historical Report of 1940 (16th Decennial) Census Made from the Records That Were Available in 1948 with Emphasis on the Field Aspects” (1948), in Folder “16th Decennial Census 1940—Historical Report of 1940 Census,” Box 2, Entry P 26, RG 29, NARA, D.C. 97.  

Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Saburo Moriyama; Reki Moriyama,” File No. 100–15947, May 13, 1943, in Case File 146–13–2–16–288, Entry A1-COR 146–13, RG 60, NARA, College Park, MD. 75.  Konrad Linke, “Tanforan (Detention Facility),” Densho Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Tanforan_%28detention_facility%29/. 76.  Weglyn, Years of Infamy, 80, 226. 77.  On the long history of travel permits and racialized surveillance in the United States, see Browne, Dark Matters, chapter 2. 78.  Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied, 258. 79.  Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied, 3. 80.  “Japanese Residing in the Metropolitan Area of Washington, D.C., April 1, 1940,” in FDR Library, Morgenthau Diary, Book 655, August 10–12, 1943, Microfilm reel 190, frame 197.

On China and its distinct approach to socialist data, see Ghosh, Making It Count. One could also study data generated by monarchical governments and arrive at work like William Deringer, Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); or study data from slavery-centered systems through works like Browne, Dark Matters, Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery, and Jessica Marie Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads,” Social Text 36, no. 4 (2018): 57–79. Andrew Whitby offers a broad synthetic survey of census history in The Sum of the People: How the Census Has Shaped Nations, From the Ancient World to the Modern Age (New York: Basic Books, 2020). 29.  


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To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science by Steven Weinberg

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Astronomia nova, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fudge factor, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, retrograde motion, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Biologists who are interested in chromosomes or nerve cells study animals like fruit flies and squid, not noble eagles and lions. Elementary particle physicists are sometimes accused of a snobbish and expensive preoccupation with phenomena at the highest attainable energies, but it is only at high energies that we can create and study hypothetical particles of high mass, like the dark matter particles that astronomers tell us make up five-sixths of the matter of the universe. In any case, we give plenty of attention to phenomena at low energies, like the intriguing mass of neutrinos, about a millionth the mass of the electron. In commenting on the prejudices of the pre-Socratics, I don’t mean to say that a priori reasoning has no place in science.

There are also eight mathematically similar “gluon” fields responsible for the strong nuclear interactions, which hold quarks together inside protons and neutrons. In 2012 the last missing piece of the Standard Model was discovered: a heavy electrically neutral boson that had been predicted by the electroweak part of the Standard Model. The Standard Model is not the end of the story. It leaves out gravitation; it does not account for the “dark matter” that astronomers tell us makes up five-sixths of the mass of the universe; and it involves far too many unexplained numerical quantities, like the ratios of the masses of the various quarks and electron-like particles. But even so, the Standard Model provides a remarkably unified view of all types of matter and force (except for gravitation) that we encounter in our laboratories, in a set of equations that can fit on a single sheet of paper.

., 381 Cremonini, Cesare, 173, 180 Crombie, A. C., 137, 375 Ctesibius, 35, 41 cube, 10, 12, 17, 162, 163n, 275, 278–79 cubic equations, 109 Cutler, Sir John, 220 Cuvier, Georges, 265 Cyril of Alexandria, 50–51 d’Alembert, Jean, 248 Dalton, John, 11, 259 Damascus, 104, 117, 118 dark energy, 83, 165, 265 dark matter, 9, 264 Darwin, Charles, 24, 172, 200, 248, 265–66, 383 days of the week, 77n De analysi per aequationes number terminorum infinitas (Newton), 224 Dear, Peter, 125, 269, 373, 380 deduction, xv, 19–21, 132, 164, 189, 197, 201–3, 205, 247, 264–65, 289 deferents, 88–92, 93, 97, 110, 149, 150, 160, 180, 303–6, 324–24 Demetrius of Phaleron, 32 Democritus, 7, 11–14, 44, 46–47, 65, 110–11, 260 De Motu (On Motion) (Galileo), 173 density of Earth vs. water 240 Newton and, 232 De Revolutionibus (Copernicus), 153–58, 183–84 derivative, 223 Descartes, René, 37, 40, 141, 194, 201, 202–14, 218, 223, 229, 236, 246, 248, 342, 346–48 Descartes’ law, 37, 207 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World (Galileo), 185–87, 193, 199 Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences (Galileo), 190, 193–94 Dicks, D.


pages: 396 words: 96,049

Upgrade by Blake Crouch

bioinformatics, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, dark matter, deepfake, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hyperloop, independent contractor, job automation, low earth orbit, messenger bag, mirror neurons, off grid, pattern recognition, phenotype, ride hailing / ride sharing, supervolcano, time dilation

UPGRADE Blake Crouch is a bestselling novelist and screenwriter. His novels include the New York Times bestseller Dark Matter, and the international bestselling Wayward Pines trilogy, which was adapted into a television series for FOX. Crouch also co-created the TNT show Good Behavior, based on his Letty Dobesh novellas. He lives in Colorado. BY BLAKE CROUCH Wayward Pines Pines – Wayward – The Last Town Andrew Z. Thomas/Luther Kite Series Desert Places – Locked Doors – Break You Stirred – Serial Killers Uncut Standalone Novels Run – Abandon – Snow Bound – Famous Eerie – Draculas – Dark Matter Recursion – Upgrade Letty Dobesh Series The Pain of Others – Sunset Key Grab Other Stories And Novellas *69 – Remaking – On the Good, Red Road Shining Rock – The Meteorologist Unconditional – Perfect Little Town Hunting Season Story Collections Fully Loaded – Thicker Than Blood The Fear Trilogy First published in the US 2022 by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York First published in the UK 2022 by Macmillan This electronic edition first published in the UK 2022 by Macmillan an imprint of Pan Macmillan The Smithson, 6 Briset Street, London EC1M 5NR EU representative: Macmillan Publishers Ireland Ltd, 1st Floor, The Liffey Trust Centre, 117–126 Sheriff Street Upper, Dublin 1, D01 YC43 Associated companies throughout the world www.panmacmillan.com ISBN 978-1-5290-4538-3 Copyright © 2022 by Blake Crouch Jacket Images: DNA © Getty Images, figures © Arcangel Author photograph © Matthew Staver Design: Neil Lang, Pan Macmillan Art Department The right of Blake Crouch to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

For being the rocket engine on my books, thanks to everyone at PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE and BALLANTINE BOOKS, but especially GINA CENTRELLO, KARA WELSH, KIM HOVEY, JENNIFER HERSHEY, QUINNE ROGERS, KATHLEEN QUINLAN, CINDY BERMAN, and CAROLINE WEISHUHN. For your tireless work on my behalf, and for being the best publicist I’ve ever had, thank you, DYANA MESSINA. For my beautiful covers on Dark Matter, Recursion, and now Upgrade, thank you, CHRIS BRAND. For publishing me so well in the UK, a big hug to the incomparable WAYNE BROOKES, and everyone at PAN MACMILLAN. For reading the ungainly early drafts of Upgrade and sharing your feedback, which improved these pages immeasurably, thanks to my early readers—CHUCK EDWARDS, BARRY EISLER, JOE HART, CHAD HODGE, MATT IDEN, DAVID KOEPP, STEVE KONKOLY, ANN VOSS PETERSON, and MARCUS SAKEY.


pages: 193 words: 51,445

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

But these could continue for trillions of years—time enough, perhaps, for the long-term trend for living systems to gain complexity and ‘negative entropy’ to reach a culmination. All the atoms that were once in stars and gas could be transformed into structures as intricate as a living organism or a silicon chip—but on a cosmic scale. Against the darkening background, protons may decay, dark matter particles annihilate, occasional flashes when black holes evaporate—and then silence. In 1979, Freeman Dyson (already mentioned in section 2.1) published a now-classic article whose aim was ‘to establish numerical bounds within which the universe’s destiny must lie’.5 Even if all material were optimally converted into a computer or superintelligence, would there still be limits on how much information could be processed?

See also big bang Coursera, 98 creationism, 195, 196 Crick, Francis, 204–5 CRISPR/Cas9, 66–67, 73–74 Crutzen, Paul, 31 cryonics, 81–82 Cuba, environmental plan of, 45 Cuban missile crisis, 17–18, 20 Curiosity rover, 127–28, 143 cyberattack, threat of, 20–21, 94–95 cybertech, benefits and vulnerabilities of, 5, 6–7, 63, 109–10 cyborg technologies, 7, 151 dark matter, 179 Dartnell, Lewis, 217 Darwin, Charles, 121–22, 175, 194, 195, 196, 214. See also evolution Dasgupta, Partha, 34 death: assisted dying, 70–71; organ transplants and, 71 Deep Blue, 86 DeepMind, 86–87, 106 demographic transition, 30 Dengue virus, 74 designer babies, 68–69 Deutsch, David, 192 developing countries: clean energy for, 48–49, 51; effective redeployment of existing resources for, 224; genetically modified (GM) crops and, 66; impact of information technology on, 83–84; megacities of, 22, 29, 77, 109; need for good governance in, 28–29; need to bypass high-consumption stage, 27, 36; population trends in, 30–31.


pages: 326 words: 97,089

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ford Model T, full employment, Hans Moravec, hydraulic fracturing, index card, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, selection bias, Silicon Valley, space junk, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the scientific method, transcontinental railway

The majority of the observable universe looks to be empty space, offering at best one-in-a-million odds that, set down randomly within it, you would find yourself in a galaxy. Given that the universe is gradually expanding, these odds can only get worse as time marches on. Mysterious halos, filaments, and clouds of “dark matter,” seemingly immune to all forces in the universe save for gravity, are what hold galaxies and galactic clusters together. A galaxy’s interior is mostly void, filled with, on average, one proton per cubic centimeter. If a galaxy’s stars were the size of sand grains, the average distance between them would be on the order of a few miles.

Mountain extolled the possible virtues: besides imaging alien Earths, the light-gathering power of an 8-meter or 16-meter mirror would revolutionize the rest of space-based astronomy, allowing astrophysicists to witness the formation of supermassive black holes and probe the cosmic distribution of dark matter. More generally, he said, large, cheap mirrors could also prove useful for beaming solar power to receiving stations on Earth, or for monitoring our own planet’s changing atmosphere at the resolution of individual clouds to constrain weather forecasts and climate-change projections. Some months after my discussion with Mountain, the NRO presented NASA with a smaller but still significant gift: two unused space telescopes and related hardware sitting in a restricted clean room in upstate New York.

., 196, 198, 215, 221–23 Butler, Paul, 55, 58–70, 96, 114 Caldeira, Ken, 181 California, 105–7, 112–13 gold rush in, 105–6, 111, 112–13 Calvin, Melvin, 15, 19–20, 25 Cambrian Period, 138–39, 143–45, 182 Cameron, James, 258 Campbell, Joseph, 261 Canada, 244–48 Canadian Shield, 246 Capella, 239 carbon, 123, 131, 132, 134, 135, 140, 141, 175, 179, 182 carbonate-silicate cycle, 175–81, 184 carbon cycle, organic, 175 carbon dioxide (CO2), 124, 132, 134–37, 140, 141, 157, 159–62, 168, 170, 172, 173, 175–82, 184 Carboniferous Period, 131, 132 Carina Nebula, 238 Carnegie Institution, 251 Carpenter, Scott, 100 Carter, Jimmy, 240 Cash, Webster, 219–20 Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, 96 Challenger, 3, 188–89 Chandra X-Ray Observatory, 192, 209 Chaotian Eon, 139 Charbonneau, David, 228–30, 232 charged-coupled devices (CCDs), 51–53 China, 21–22 chlorofluorocarbons, 134, 142 chlorophyll, 141, 143 Christmas Tree Cluster, 238 Clinton, Bill, 196, 215 clouds, 161–62, 164, 206 coal, 125, 131, 134, 136, 137, 144, 160, 184 Columbia, 189, 196 comets, 2, 3, 19, 76–77, 140 Halley’s, 3 Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, 192, 209 computers, 43–44 Constellation program, 196, 198, 203, 204, 215, 221, 223 convergent evolution, 21 Cook, James, 85–86 Copernican Principle (principle of mediocrity), 83, 89, 91 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 81–83, 86, 87, 89, 91, 200 Cornell University, 39, 42 coronagraphic TPF, 217–22, 224, 231, 249 coronagraphs, 217 cosmology, 77–82 Copernican Principle (principle of mediocrity) in, 83, 89, 91 inflationary theory in, 89–92 modern, 86–87, 91 see also astronomy Cosmos, 240 Costanza, Robert, 74–75 Crab Nebula, 30 Crabtree, William, 84 Crutzen, Paul, 134–35 Cuban missile crisis, 23–24 cyanobacteria, 140–44, 175, 183 Daily Mail, 74 dark energy, 88, 90 dark matter, 206 Darwin, Charles, 200 Davidson, George, 113 deep time, 145–46 Democritus, 79, 80, 92, 238 Demory, Brice, 259 De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) (Lucretius), 80–81 De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Orbs) (Copernicus), 82 Devonian Period, 128, 130–32 Diamandis, Peter, 258 dinosaurs, 30, 136, 144 Discovery, 189 DNA, 40, 141, 143, 170 dolphins, 16, 20–21 Drake, Frank, 9–17, 27–45, 101, 167–68, 240 Arecibo transmission of, 39–41 orchids of, 37–38 Drake equation, 16–25, 28–29, 38–39, 41, 42, 183 longevity of technological civilizations (L term) in, 22–25, 38–39, 41, 42 Draper Laboratory, 256 Dyson, Freeman, 104 Dyson spheres, 104, 105 Earth, 109 asteroid strike on, 30 atmosphere of, 3, 132, 134–35, 139, 140, 144, 157–60, 168–69, 174–77, 206, 238 “Blue Marble” images of, 212, 239–41 carbonate-silicate cycle on, 175–81, 184 climate of, 123–24, 128, 132–37, 142, 144, 156–57, 160–62, 173–75, 184 in early cosmology, 77–82 energy consumption on, 103–4 extinctions on, 43, 135, 184 faint young Sun problem and, 173–75 formation of, 2, 7, 20, 139, 173 geologic time periods of, 128–45 glaciation on, 132–34, 142, 174, 176, 178, 179, 183 human population of, 43, 100, 134, 136 ice caps of, 128, 132–33, 135, 136, 184 Laughlin’s idea for moving orbit of, 76–77 Laughlin’s valuation of, 73–76 oxygen on, 139–44, 159, 171, 180–82, 200, 238 Snowball Earth events, 142, 174, 179 Sun’s distance from, 83, 86 tectonic plates of, 30, 105, 111, 128, 140, 144, 176, 229 union of organisms with geophysical systems on (Gaia hypothesis), 175, 176, 178, 183 water on, 3, 30, 158–61, 174, 177–80, 182 Earth, life on, 31, 154 diversification and explosion of, 138–39, 143, 144, 182 emergence of, 4, 7, 19–20, 238 end of, 7–8, 31–32, 75–77, 159, 180–83 essential facts of, 29–30 humanity’s ascent, 144–46 intelligent, 20–21, 182–83 jump from single-celled to multicellular, 28 redox reactions and, 168 Earth-like planets, 29, 32–34, 71–72, 99, 227–28 Earth-size or Earth-mass planets, 6, 53–54, 56, 200, 227, 251 ecology and economics, 74 economic growth, 102, 103 Eddington, Arthur, 35 Edison, Thomas, 106 Einstein, Albert, 35, 87 Elachi, Charles, 211–12, 214, 221 electricity, 103, 136 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 254 Endeavour, 190 endosymbiosis, 143 energy, 103–4, 136–38 from fossil fuels, 103, 124–27, 137, 154, 160, 184 Engelder, Terry, 126 Epicurus, 80 Epsilon Eridani, 10–11 Eshleman, Von, 35 ethanol, 137 eukaryotes, 143, 144 European Southern Observatory (ESO), 60, 64, 66 European Space Agency, 222 evolution, 183 convergent, 21 of universe, 88–89 exoplanetology, 13, 14, 34, 51, 193 exoplanets, 5, 27–28, 87, 222–23, 263 51 Pegasi b, 50, 53, 54, 58–59 Alpha Centauri Bb, 98–99 biosignatures and, 167–72, 261–62 Blue Marble images of, 212–15 distinguishing between various compositions of, 251 Earth-like, 29, 32–34, 71–72, 99, 227–28 Earth-size or Earth-mass, 6, 53–54, 56, 200, 227, 251 formation of, 109 GJ 667Cc, 65–69, 72 Gliese 581c, 163 Gliese 581d, 163 Gliese 581g (Zarmina’s World), 63–64, 68, 69, 72, 163 Gliese 876b, 60 habitability of, 154–83 HD 85512b, 163–64 Jupiter-like, 13, 28, 50, 56, 59, 60, 108, 109, 226, 228, 248–49 Laughlin’s valuation of, 71–77 migration theory and, 108 Neptune-like, 56, 108–9, 251 “Next 40 Years” conference on, 225–35, 263 observation of stars of, 33 snow line idea and, 110 super-Earths, 228–29, 251, 262 transits of, 53 TrES-4, 228 exoplanet searches, 5–7, 13–14, 32–33, 69–70 and false-alarm discoveries, 52–53 press releases on progress in, 163–65 SETI and, see SETI spectroscopy in, see spectroscopy, spectrometers see also telescopes Ferguson, Chris, 185–86 financial markets, 111–12 Fischer, Debra, 59, 61, 62, 69, 96 Ford, Eric, 249–50 Ford, Henry, 125 fossil fuels, 103, 124–27, 137, 154, 160, 184 fracking (hydraulic fracturing), 126–27 Gaia hypothesis, 175, 176, 178, 183 galactic planetary census, 54 galaxies, 87, 88, 99, 238 Andromeda, 31, 191, 238 Hubble Telescope and, 191 Local Group of, 88 Milky Way, see Milky Way Galileo, 241–42 Galileo Galilei, 81–83, 210 Galliher, Scot, 257 Garrels, Robert, 178 gas, natural, 125–27, 137, 184 Gemini telescopes, 199–200, 203 General Dynamics Astronautics time capsule, 100–103 geologic time periods, 128–45 geology, 110–11, 123 glaciers, 132–34, 142, 174, 176, 178, 179, 183 Glenn, John, 100 Goldin, Dan, 194, 211, 215, 242 governments, Urey on, 102 gravitational lenses, 35–37 Great Observatories, 192, 197, 209 Greece, ancient, 77, 92, 238 Green Bank conference, 15–25, 27–28, 101, 167–68, 240 greenhouse gases, 124, 134, 137, 157, 160, 174, 175 carbon dioxide, see carbon dioxide methane, 140, 142, 168–71, 174, 200 Grunsfeld, John, 197–99, 225–26, 235 Guedes, Javiera, 96 Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, 74–75 “Habitable Zones around Main Sequence Stars” (Kasting), 155–56, 159 Hadean Eon, 139–40, 156 Halley, Edmond, 84 Halley’s comet, 3 Hart, Michael, 174, 178 Hays, Paul, 176–79 heliocentrism, 79–82 Hiroshima, 23 Holmes, Dyer Brainerd, 100–101 Holocene Epoch, 133–35, 145 Horrocks, Jeremiah, 84 Howard, Andrew, 62 How to Find a Habitable Planet (Kasting), 167 Hu, Renyu, 259 Huang, Su-Shu, 15, 19 Hubble, Edwin, 86–87 Hubble Space Telescope, 189–93, 195, 197–99, 205–7, 209, 218–19, 226 human genome project, 234 hydraulic fracturing (fracking), 126–27 hydrogen, 159, 170–72 Icarus, 155 ice ages, 132, 133, 142–43 Industrial Revolution, 22, 134 inflationary theory, 89–92 Ingersoll, Andrew, 159 intelligence, 20–21, 23, 32, 182–83 interferometry, 213–14, 216, 231 International Space Station (ISS), 187, 189, 197, 202, 207–8, 210 interstellar travel, 44–45, 100–101 iron, 141 James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), 193–99, 202–4, 209, 215, 216, 218, 220, 225, 262 Jensen-Clem, Becky, 259 Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), 211–12, 216, 219, 221–25, 231 Johnson, Lyndon B., 101 Journal of Geophysical Research, 178 Jupiter, 76, 109, 191, 239 Galileo’s study of, 81 Kepler’s laws and, 83 moons of, 28, 110 Jupiter-like planets, 13, 28, 50, 56, 59, 60, 108, 109, 226, 228, 248–49 Kasdin, Jeremy, 219–20 Kasting, Jerry, 150–52 Kasting, Jim, 150–67, 169–84 children of, 153 Kasting, Sandy, 150 Kasting, Sharon, 153 Keck Observatory, 59, 60, 62, 66, 118 Kennedy, John F., 224 Kennedy Space Center, 185 Kepler, Johannes, 82, 83 planetary motion laws of, 82–84 Kepler field stars, 41 Kepler Space Telescope, 13–14, 53–54, 56, 62, 71–73, 98, 108–9, 166, 201, 225, 229–30, 263 Kirschvink, Joseph, 142 Knapp, Mary, 259 Korolev, Sergei, 186 Kuchner, Marc, 217–18 Kuiper Belt, 76 Large Magellanic Cloud, 238 Lasaga, Antonio, 178 Late Heavy Bombardment, 3, 140 Laughlin, Greg, 5–6, 48–50, 53–57, 69–70, 93–100, 107–12, 114–15, 117–20 Alpha Centauri planet search and, 94–98 idea to move Earth, 76–77 magnetic toy of, 93–94 SETI as viewed by, 99 valuation equation of, 71–77 laws of nature, 155–56 Lederberg, Joshua, 15, 16, 167–68 Le Gentil, Guillaume, 85, 117 Leinbach, Mike, 185–86 Lick, James, 112–14 Lick Observatory, 58, 61, 62, 70, 113–19 life, 32 on Earth, see Earth, life on intelligent, 23, 32 single-celled, 20 technological, see technological civilizations light: photons of, 72, 89, 115–16, 156, 191, 193–94, 201, 202, 213, 216, 237–38 polarization of, 115–16 waves of, 213–14, 216 Lilly, John, 15–16, 20–21 Local Group, 88 Lovelock, James, 168, 170, 174–76, 178, 181–83 Lucretius, 80–81 Lyot, Bernard, 217 Madwoman of Chaillot, The, 36 Manhattan Project, 23 Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research, 127, 149 Marcellus formation, 126–30, 137, 138, 141, 144, 160 Marconi, Guglielmo, 48 Marconi Conference Center, 48–50, 53–57 Marcy, Geoff, 57–63, 69, 70, 114, 194, 230–32, 235 Margulis, Lynn, 175 Mars, 19, 50, 87, 100, 107, 109, 155, 167, 179, 191, 192, 239 Kepler’s study of, 82, 83 missions to, 187, 188, 196, 207, 221 water on, 28, 179 Marshall, James, 105–6, 112 Martian Chronicles, The (Bradbury), 98–99 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 251–52, 259 ExoplanetSat project, 256–57 “Next 40 Years of Exoplanets” conference at, 225–35, 263 Mayor, Michel, 58 McPhee, John, 145 mEarth Project, 228–29 mediocrity, principle of (Copernican Principle), 83, 89, 91 Mercury, 82, 109, 239 meteorites, 20 methane, 140, 142, 168–71, 174, 200 methanogens, 140, 142, 169 microbes, 28 Miletus, 77 Milky Way, 16–17, 25, 31, 39, 41, 79, 86–87, 191, 237, 238 Sun’s orbit in, 95 Miller, George P., 101 Miller, Stanley, 19 Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science, 48, 74 mitochondria, 143 Moon, 3, 76, 100, 229, 242 in early cosmology, 78, 83 formation of, 30, 139 Moon, missions to, 188, 196, 221, 224 Apollo, 1, 50, 151, 187, 202, 212, 239 Morrison, Philip, 15, 18–19, 21, 23–24 Mosely, T.


pages: 488 words: 148,340

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dark matter, epigenetics, gravity well, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, mandelbrot fractal, microbiome, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, precautionary principle, printed gun, quantum entanglement, traveling salesman, Turing test

This is noticeable; there are sensors that register these occasional atomic hits, also the pass-throughs. It is also true that there is a continuous flood of dark matter and neutrinos always flying through the ship, as they do through everything in the universe, but these interact very weakly indeed; once a day or so, a flash of Cherenkov radiation sparks in the water tanks, marking a neutrino hitting a muon. Once in a blue muon. Same with the dark matter, which visible matter moves through as if through a ghost ether, a ghost universe; once or twice a weakly interactive massive particle has chipped away from a collision and registered on the detectors.

It seems a gamma ray shot through the ship and made an unlucky hit, collapsing the wave function in a quantum part of the computer that runs the ship. It’s such bad luck that Devi wonders darkly if it might have been sabotage. Badim doesn’t believe this, but he too is troubled. Particles shoot through the ship all the time. Thousands of neutrinos are passing through them right this second, and dark matter and God knows what, all passing right through them. Interstellar space is not at all empty. Mostly empty, but not. Of course they too are mostly empty, Devi points out, still grumpy. No matter how solid things seem, they are mostly empty. So things can pass through each other without any problems.

Problem of deceleration really quite severe, given our tremendous speed. Analogy describing the problem, from out of the classic literature on the subject: it is as if one is trying to stop a bullet with tissue paper. Quite an eye-opener of an analogy. Exotic physics, for example creating drag against dark matter, or putting dark energy to use, or quantum entangling the ship with slower versions of the ship, or with large gravity wells in parallel universes, etc.: these are all impractical at best. Wishes. Fantasies. Pie in the sky. Which is a mysterious metaphor. Food from nowhere? Land of Cockaigne? People used to be hungry often, as they were in the last years of wakefulness in the ship.


What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge by Marcus Du Sautoy

Albert Michelson, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, banking crisis, bet made by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, Black Swan, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, Georg Cantor, Hans Lippershey, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Necker cube, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, Turing test, wikimedia commons

A scientist is more interested in the things he or she can’t understand than in telling all the stories we already know how to narrate. Science is a living, breathing subject because of all those questions we can’t answer. For example, the stuff that makes up the physical universe we interact with seems to account for only 4.9% of the total matter content of our universe. So what is the other 95.1% of so-called dark matter and dark energy made up of? If our universe’s expansion is accelerating, where is all the energy coming from that is fuelling that acceleration? Is our universe infinite? Are there infinitely many other infinite universes parallel to our own? If there are, do they have different laws of physics?

For example, there might be something large beyond our cosmic horizon that is pulling on the galaxies we can see, causing an unusual drift in certain regions of the night sky. Although we might not be able to see such things, we can still experience their effect on the things we can see. What we can know is not limited to what we can see. It’s how we know about dark matter. The gravitational behaviour of the things we can see makes sense only if there is more stuff out there. It is how we discovered Neptune. Although we eventually saw Neptune with our eyes, it was mathematically predicted by the effect it was having on the planets around it. If there is something beyond our cosmic horizon that we can’t see, it can still pull the gravitational strings inside our bubble.

306–9 continuum hypothesis 400–1, 403, 404, 405, 410 Copernicus, Nicolaus 178, 193, 210, 238 corpus callosotomy 309–11 cosmic horizon, visible 214, 221, 223, 226–7, 229, 230, 243 cosmic microwave background 221, 224–5, 226, 227–8, 229, 293–4 cosmic ray interactions 103, 105, 125, 142–3, 258 cosmological argument 406 cosmological constant 215, 224, 230 cosmology: ancient Greek 81; dark energy and 223–4; homogeneity and 234–5, 305; religion and 234–40 see also under individual area of cosmology Couch Adams, John 196–7 Coulson, Charles 15 Crick, Francis 321, 347 Curtis, Heber 204 Cusanus, Nicolaus 191–2 Cygnus X–1 276–7 Dalai Lama 236, 354 Dalton, John 89 Darboux, Gaston 39 dark matter/dark energy 7, 222, 223–4, 227, 234, 365 Darwin, Charles 56, 230 Dawkins, Richard 13, 236, 237; The God Delusion 13, 15 de la Rue, Warren 10 death: consciousness and 8, 318, 354–5; dementia and 318; life after 8, 354–5; science and battle against 2 Delos, oracle of the island of 373–4 Delta baryon 108, 109, 110 dementia 318 Dennett, Daniel 358 Descartes, Rene 198, 304, 307, 330–1, 350, 359, 372, 406 Dhammapada, The 333 dice: ancient world and 21–2, 31, 32; atomic structure of 72–3, 77, 78–80, 81, 82–4, 88, 91–2, 94, 103, 111–13, 114, 121, 125, 127, 175, 187; Bell’s theorem and 171; black holes and 285, 289; calculus and 30–2, 33, 34, 88; Cantor set and 65–6; Cardano and 23–4; chaos theory and 41, 43, 44, 48, 54–5, 66–8, 157, 408, 419; consciousness and 304, 308–9, 321, 325, 338, 343; evolution and 56–7, 58–9; God and 22; infinity and 187, 188, 220, 242–3; microscope and 78–9, 80; Newton’s laws of motion and 32–3, 35–6, 67, 78, 88, 154; Pascal/Fermat and 24–8; predicting fall of, history of 21–8; quantum entanglement and 172–3; shape of universe and 188, 207, 208–9; symmetry and 111–17, 120, 121, 125; uncertainty principle and 160, 163–4, 167; uranium decay and 132–3, 158; what we cannot know and 407, 408, 414, 417, 419, 420 Diophantus 371; Arithmetica 374–5 Dirac, Paul 104, 174 DNA 1, 4, 56–7, 59, 61, 321 Doppler effect 214–15, 268 double-slit light experiment 134–6, 143, 144–7, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152–3, 154, 157, 161–2, 163, 165, 166, 169, 170, 171, 173 Douspis, Marian 226 down quark 117, 118, 119, 120, 121 dualism 330–1, 332 echolocation 57 Eddington, Arthur 271–2, 277 EEG 305, 314–16, 323, 340 Egypt, ancient 251, 332, 366, 368 Ehrsson, Henrik 329, 330, 331 eightfold way 113, 118, 119 Einstein, Albert 131, 275, 276, 277, 299; black holes and 277; Brownian motion and 92, 93–5, 123; cosmological constant and 215, 224; E=mc2 and 108, 167, 168; equivalence, principle of 267–9; expanding universe and 215–17; model of light 139, 141, 142, 143, 147; photoelectric effect and 141, 142, 143, 147; religion and 296–7; quantum entanglement and 172–3; quantum physics and 132, 170, 171, 172–3; space-time, reaction to concept of 262, 264; theory of general relativity 5, 6, 7–8, 115, 143, 168, 215, 219, 220, 248, 265, 267–72, 273, 275–6, 277, 278, 281–2, 285, 288, 293, 299; theory of special relativity 11, 105, 141, 143, 248, 252, 253–64, 296–7, 299, 359 élan vital 358, 408 electricity, Thomson’s experiments to understand 95–6, 140 electromagnetic force 107, 108, 274 electromagnetism 34, 104, 107, 108, 136, 138–43, 417 electron 48, 407; chaos theory and 70, 402; discovery of 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101; electromagnetic force and 107; hydrogen atom and 274; mass of 126, 127, 230; muon and 104, 105; particle model of light and 136–7, 140–3; periodic table and 103, 106, 116, 125; photoelectric effect and 140–1; quarks and 119–20, 125, 126, 127; string theory and 127; uncertainty principle and 133, 167–70; Young’s double-slit experiment and 143–56, 160, 161–3, 171, 173 electron microscopes 78–9 Elkies, Noam 375 emergent phenomena/emergence 331–2, 356 entropy of a system 285–7, 288, 290, 293 environment, man’s effect upon 2, 6, 53 epileptic seizures 309, 323–4, 326 epistemology 70, 170, 177–8, 179, 226, 411–12, 418 equivalence, principle of 267–9 Erdős, Paul 377–8 Eta particle 115 Euclid 271, 378–9, 380, 401; Elements 367–8, 390 Euler, Leonhard 34, 415 European space agency 187 event horizon 276, 277, 278, 282, 283, 285, 287, 288, 289, 290, 405 Everett, Hugh 155 evolution 2, 8, 56–66; Cambrian explosion of life 58; consciousness and 319–20, 346; Dalai Lama and 354; discovery of new knowledge and 2, 233; fractal tree of life and 60–2; God and 230, 411; mismanaged ecosystems and 55; origin of life and 56–66; pattern spotting and 20; probability/chaos theory and 54–5, 56–66; random mutation and 8, 56–62; solar system/universe 32–41, 43, 55, 133, 155, 177, 206, 220, 223, 234, 299, 377, 411 expanding universe 3, 5, 7, 214–29, 248, 291, 292, 293, 294, 335, 365; accelerating rate of expansion 3, 7, 221, 222–5, 291, 365, 408; Big Bang and 219–21; discovery of 214–18, 365; infinite universe and 225–9; multiverse and 227–35 extraterrestrials 8, 143, 239–40 Fermat, Pierre de 24, 25, 26–7, 28, 36; Fermat’s Last Theorem 4, 8, 36, 176–7, 374–5, 410, 420 Fermi, Enrico 106 Fermilab 122 Ferreira, Pedro 226 Feynman, Richard 3, 121, 131, 132, 155, 159, 174, 276, 305; diagrams 121; Lectures on Physics 158 Fitch, Frederic 413 Flanagan, Owen 349–50 fluid dynamics 34, 44–5 fMRI scanner 4, 305, 315–16, 323, 333–9, 350, 351, 354, 356–7, 416 Fourier, Joseph 34 fractals 60–2, 65, 66, 67, 68, 168, 364; fractal tree of life 60–2 fractions 49, 82–6, 101, 117, 191, 369, 370, 391, 394–5, 396 Franklin, Melissa 122–5, 240 Franklin, Professor W.


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The Scientist as Rebel by Freeman Dyson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, undersea cable

She found that the visible matter in galaxies is not heavy enough to explain the speed of their internal motions. She deduced from her observations that galaxies are pervaded by dark matter, invisible to our telescopes. Nobody knows what dark matter is. It is another deep mystery remaining to be explored. We know only that it is there, and that it weighs more than all the stuff that we can see. Besides discovering and exploring dark matter, Rubin raised four children and crusaded publicly for the advancement of women in science. I was recently chairman of a committee that organized a scientific conference with a list of distinguished scientists as members.


pages: 380 words: 104,841

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us by Diane Ackerman

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, airport security, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, dark matter, dematerialisation, digital divide, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Google Earth, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, Higgs boson, hindcast, Internet of things, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, Masdar, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, rewilding, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, skunkworks, Skype, space junk, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the High Line, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

We automatically don glasses and become an animal with keener eyesight. That may save the child from infection, but it also revises what a human being is. How will that continue changing in our lifetime? Already, we’re masters of the invisible. Just as we accept that the universe is mainly invisible dark matter and dark energy, we accept the reality of protozoans and viruses even though we can’t see them without a microscope, or perhaps as stationary oddities in the pages of a textbook—which few people are tempted to do. We believe in television and radio waves, gnomelike quarks, GPS, microwaves, the World Wide Web, gosling photons, a mantilla of nerve endings in the brain, the voiceless hissing of background fizz from the Big Bang, planets orbiting many stars in the night sky—some hospitable to life.

They’re also real workhorses, fluting the air until it’s breathable, promoting photosynthesis on the land and in the oceans, decomposing dead organisms and recycling their nutrients. In industry, we breed them to ferment dairy products and to process paper, drugs, fuel, vaccines, cloth, tea, natural gas, precious metals; they help mop up our oil spills. We yoke them like oxen and set them to work. But just as most of the mass in the universe (94 percent) is “dark matter,” this largest biomass on our planet escapes the naked eye, yet is the invisible Riviera of the visible world. How remarkable it is that we’re not only renaming our age, we’re on the threshold of redefining ourselves as a completely different kind of animal than we ever imagined. For years, we thought DNA told the whole story.

., 112–17 population of, 72 as seen from space, 16–17, 18, 19 sky parks in, 77–78 City Hall, Chicago, 83 city parks, 83 clams, 57 Clarke, Ann, 157–67 Clarke, Bryan, 156–67 Cleverbot, 227–28 cliff swallows, 115–16 close work, 192 Clostridium difficile, 301–2 clouds, 12 coal, 21, 106 Coan, James, 178 cocaine, 298 cochlear implants, 253 cockatoos, 202 cod, 59–60 Cold War, 146 Collins, Francis, 289 colon disease, 302 Colorado, 40 compassion, 176 computers, 13, 87, 175, 187, 194, 197, 203, 211, 220, 222, 224, 226, 230, 256, 261, 270 condors, 132 consciousness, 200, 216, 217, 219, 228–29 cooking, 190 Copenhagen, 78 copper, 21 coral bells, 80–81 cordite, 153 corn, 71, 153 corncrakes, 133, 137 Cornell University, 209–25 corpus callosum, 177 cosmos, 125 cottontails, 129 cougars, 117 Council House 2 building, 94 courtly love, 190 cows, 71 coyotes, 117, 118 crabs, 138 “cradle to cradle,” 87 cranes, 124 Creative Machines Lab, 218, 223–24 creativity, 196 Crick, Francis, 274 crickets, 173–74 Cronin, Lee, 237 crops, 71 Crutzen, Paul, 9, 313 cucumbers, 89 cuneiform, 235 Curitiba, Brazil, 107 cyborg anthropology, 262 cyborg dragonflies, 146–47 cyborgs, 146–47, 251, 260, 262–63 daffodils, 125 Dakar, Senegal, 314 dandelions, 132 Dantuluri, Phani, 261 dark energy, 172 dark matter, 172 Darwin, Charles, 156, 268, 276 Dayak people, 107 day lilies, 125 deception, 219 Decker Yeadon, 92 deer, 133 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 146–47, 209, 225, 236, 256, 258–59 dengue fever, 302 Denmark, 101 depression, 196 Desertec, 106 diabetes, 301 diamondbacks, 118–19 dianthus, 125 Dietikon, Switzerland, 82 digoxin, 302 dinosaurs, 31, 154 Djairam, Dhiradj, 104, 105 DNA, 160, 263, 274–75, 278–79, 281, 282, 287 of extinct species, 151–52, 153–54, 160–63, 166–67 dodos, 163 dog roses, 132 dogs, 140, 144, 145–46, 147, 148, 149 dolphins, 147, 202, 204, 216 domestic animals, 11, 71, 140 Dominoni, Davide, 114 dopamine, 298 Dourada, Fazenda, 123 droughts, 41, 46 Duckworth, Tammy, 259, 260 dung beetles, 164 Dust Bowl, 41 Dutch Hunger Winter, 283 ears, 245–46 Earth: as seen from air, 20–21 as seen from space, 16–18, 19, 305 Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering (Hamilton), 314 Eastgate Centre, 92, 93–94 echolocation, 147 École Polytechnique de Montréal, 181 eczema, 301 Edison, Thomas, 191, 306 Edmonton Airport, 83 education, 286 Edwards, Andres, 88 Eggerthella lenta, 302 Eggleson, Kathleen, 183–84 eggs, 160–61, 279 Eisenberger, Naomi, 177 electricity, 76, 78, 91, 97, 99, 100–103, 104, 184–87, 191, 213 electronic campfires, 193 elements, 34–35 elephants, 202, 217 underpass for, 124 in war, 144, 145–46 Ellis, Erle, 126 Eloxochitl, 112 emotions, 214, 222–23 empathy, 190, 219, 228 Energy Department, U.S., 64 England, 132 English ivy, 132 EnsnAired, 98 Environmental Protection Agency, U.S., 86–87 epigenetics, 279–86 Estonia, 77 eucalyptus, 132 Eureqa machine, 219–20, 221 European badgers, 124 Eve (robot), 221 Everglades, 129, 130, 133, 315 evolution, 208, 211, 219, 224, 251, 276–77, 279 microbes’ effects on, 292–93 extinction, 12 of birds, 139 of Miami blue butterfly, 131 orangutans and, 27–28 of Partula, 156–59 of plants, 315 and resurrection of species, 151–52, 153–54, 161–63, 208 of trilobites, 29, 30 extinctions, great, 60, 154, 305 eyeglasses, 171 factories, 71 false indigoes, 125 famine, 276, 277, 285, 286 Fantastic Voyage, 181 farming fish, 60 Faroe Islands, 78 farsightedness, 192 fecal transplants, 302 Ferrer, Miguel, 136 ferrets, 132 fertilizers, 36, 64 fiber optics, 97 field mice, 134 fighting, 190 finches, 156 Finger Lakes, 31, 131 fire ants, 132 fireflies, 181 fishermen, 56–60 fleecy electricity, 35 Flegr, Jaroslav, 297 floods, 41 Florida, 117, 131 Florida rosy wolfsnail, 157 flounder, 65 food, 7 Forbes, 235 Forbidden City, 235 Ford Motor Company, 87–88 forests, 54 fossil fuels, 10, 34, 51, 307 fossils, 9, 29–30, 31, 32, 33–34, 35, 36, 43, 57 Fountainhead, The (Rand), 59 foxes, 129, 133, 134 foxgloves, 125 France, 72, 124, 296, 298 Frankenstein (Shelley), 212–13 Franklin, Rosalind, 274 Fraser, Bill, 135 frogs, 80, 125, 131, 132 Frozen Ark, 155, 160, 163–64 frozen food, 317 fruit flies, 293–95 fungi, 289-90, 300 G8 Summit, 315 Gabriel, Peter, 201–3 Galileo Galilei, 220 Galveston, Tex., 50 Gambia, 131 gardening, hydroponic, 83 gardens, 38–39 urban, 74 vertical, 79–85 Gardens by the Bay, 78 gas, 106 Gaudi, Antoni, 236 geckos, 180 genetic mutations, 277 Genghis Khan, 272–73, 274 geoengineering, 53–54 geographic change, 11 Geological Society of London, 9 Geological Survey, U.S., 299 geothermal warmth, 95 Germany, 72, 78, 83, 101, 124, 132, 298 solar panels in, 106–7 Gershenfeld, Neil, 202–3 gestures, 26–27 giraffes, 276 global consciousness, 18 global warming, 11, 38–42, 154, 307–8 agriculture and, 56 in Bangladesh, 51–53 and development of seas, 64–65 evidence of, 108 extreme weather and, 36–43, 314 fishermen and, 56–57 gardens affected by, 38–39 habitats rearranged by, 133–40 human rights and, 48 glowworms, 144 glucocorticoids, 283 golden eagles, 132 Golden Lion Tamarin Conservation Program, 123 golden toads, 162 Golding, William, 162 Google, 192, 210 Google Glass, 260–61 gophers, 115 gorgonian, 38 grains, 71 Grand Canyon, 126 granite, 58–59 GraphExeter, 184–85, 317 grasshoppers, 173–74 Grassy Key, 131 great apes, 202 great auks, 151 Great Depression, 108 Greece, 124 Green Apple concept car, 103 Green Belt Corridor, 124 greenhouses, 90 Greenland, 42 green mussels, 131 Green over Grey, 83 growing season, 42 Guam, 139, 157 Guam rail, 139 Guatemala, 88 Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn), 218 Gurdon, John, 150, 160 Gut Erlasee Solar Park, 106–7 Guthrie, Barton, 261 habitat loss, 154 Haiyan, Typhoon, 46 Hamilton, Clive, 314 Hansen, James, 314 Hansmeyer, Michael, 236 Harvard University, 235 Hastings, Battle of, 190 heart, 150, 239, 248, 249, 250–51, 281 heat, 41 heaters, 87 heat recycling, 95–108 Helm, Barbara, 114 Henri, Pascal, 84 herbs, 89 Hernandez, Isaias, 264–65 herons, 193–94 Heuchera plants, 80–81 High Line, 77 Hitler, Adolf, 273 hockey, 40 Holocene, 9 Homer, 262 Honda, 236 Hong Sun Hye, 102 horse chestnut trees, 153 Horse Island, 58 horses, 137–38, 140, 145–46 hostas, 125 Hudson River, 54–55 hulls, 91 human genome, 13 Human Genome Project, 270, 274, 282, 285, 289, 300 Human Microbiome Project, 289 human rights, global warming and, 48 humans: as eusocial, 288 geographic expansion of, 10 geography changed by, 11 history of, 71 orangutan genes shared by, 3 population growth of, 10 technological changes to bodies of, 13 tools used by, 7, 9 humans, environmental effects of: climate change, see global warming and possibility of nuclear winter, 8–9 hummingbirds, 126 hunter-gatherers, 71 Huntington’s disease, 271 Hurricane Irene, 57 Hurricane Katrina, 46 hurricanes, 31, 41, 43, 55 Hurricane Sandy, see Sandy, Hurricane hybrid cars, 100 Hyde Park, 142 hydroelectronic power, 100, 107 hydroponic gardening, 83, 89, 90 Icarus, 224 icebergs, 195–96, 197 Iceland, 77 ice packs, 41–42 iCub, 218–19 iGlasses, 261 igloos, 86 iguanas, 131 Ike Dike, 50 Iliad (Homer), 262 India, 88, 107, 132, 175 Indian mongoose, 132 Indonesia, 132, 313 induced pluripotent stem cells (IPS), 150–51, 160–63 industrial farming, 60 Industrial Revolution, 34, 106, 185–86, 232, 235, 267 Inheritors, The (Golding), 162 insects, 166 insulin pumps, 253 intelligence of plants, 205–7 International Union for Conservation of Nature, 313 Internet, 199–200, 235 Inuit, 86 invasive species, 132, 154 Iran, 147 Iraq War, 258 Ireland, 132 Irene, Hurricane, 57 irises, 125 iron fertilization, 53 Island of Dr.


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The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

Our most important mechanical inventions are not machines that do what humans do better, but machines that can do things we can’t do at all. Our most important thinking machines will not be machines that can think what we think faster, better, but those that think what we can’t think. To really solve the current grand mysteries of quantum gravity, dark energy, and dark matter, we’ll probably need other intelligences beside human. And the extremely complex harder questions that will come after those hard questions may require even more distant and complex intelligences. Indeed, we may need to invent intermediate intelligences that can help us design yet more rarefied intelligences that we could not design alone.

Perceiving movies takes a lot more processing power, in part because there is the added dimension of time (do objects persist as the camera moves?). In a few years we’ll be able to routinely search video via AI. As we do, we’ll begin to explore the Gutenberg possibilities within moving images. “I consider the pixel data in images and video to be the dark matter of the Internet,” says Fei-Fei Li, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “We are now starting to illuminate it.” As moving images become easier to create, easier to store, easier to annotate, and easier to combine into complex narratives, they also become easier to be remanipulated by the audience.

Previous discoveries helped us to recently realize that 96 percent of all matter and energy in our universe is outside of our vision. The universe is not made of the atoms and heat we discovered last century; instead it is primarily composed of two unknown entities we label “dark”: dark energy and dark matter. “Dark” is a euphemism for ignorance. We really have no idea what the bulk of the universe is made of. We find a similar proportion of ignorance if we probe deeply into the cell, or the brain. We don’t know nothin’ relative to what could be known. Our inventions allow us to spy into our ignorance.


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The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Bonfire of the Vanities, Charles Babbage, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, dark matter, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, first-past-the-post, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, William of Occam, zero-sum game

But, more profoundly, I expect that Edison was misinterpreting his own experience. A trial that fails is still fun. A repetitive experiment is not repetitive if one is thinking about the ideas that it is testing and the reality that it is investigating. That galaxy project was intended to discover whether ‘dark matter’ (see the next chapter) really exists – and it succeeded. If Edison, or those graduate students, or any scientific researcher engaged upon the ‘perspiration’ phase of discovery, had really been doing it mindlessly, they would be missing most of the fun – which is also what largely powers that ‘one per cent inspiration’.

That is to say, the truth is that People are significant in the cosmic scheme of things; and The Earth’s biosphere is incapable of supporting human life. Consider Hawking’s remark again. It is true that we are on a (somewhat) typical planet of a typical star in a typical galaxy. But we are far from typical of the matter in the universe. For one thing, about 80 per cent of that matter is thought to be invisible ‘dark matter’, which can neither emit nor absorb light. We currently detect it only through its indirect gravitational effects on galaxies. Only the remaining 20 per cent is matter of the type that we parochially call ‘ordinary matter’. It is characterized by glowing continuously. We do not usually think of ourselves as glowing, but that is another parochial misconception, due to the limitations of our senses: we emit radiant heat, which is infrared light, and also light in the visible range, too faint for our eyes to detect.

We do not usually think of ourselves as glowing, but that is another parochial misconception, due to the limitations of our senses: we emit radiant heat, which is infrared light, and also light in the visible range, too faint for our eyes to detect. Concentrations of matter as dense as ourselves and our planet and star, though numerous, are not exactly typical either. They are isolated, uncommon phenomena. The universe is mostly vacuum (plus radiation and dark matter). Ordinary matter is familiar to us only because we are made of it, and because of our untypical location near large concentrations of it. Moreover, we are an uncommon form of ordinary matter. The commonest form is plasma (atoms dissociated into their electrically charged components), which typically emits bright, visible light because it is in stars, which are rather hot.


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Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

Every Thursday evening, The Big Bang Theory—a TV show about a group of eccentric astrophysicists—regularly topped the American charts. Tens of millions break out in laughter as Leslie dumps Leonard because he prefers string theory over loop quantum gravity. For three months, more than three million Americans picked Cosmos over The Bachelor each Sunday night, choosing dark matter and black holes over the drama of a rose ceremony.13 Movies about rocket science—from Apollo 13 to The Martian, from Interstellar to Hidden Figures—consistently top box-office charts and collect countless golden statues. Although we glamorize rocket scientists, there’s an enormous mismatch between what they have figured out and what the rest of the world does.

Connoisseurs of Uncertainty “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what—that is what our theory amounts to.”22 This is how the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington described the state of quantum theory in 1929. He may as well have been speaking about our understanding of the entire universe. Astronomers live and work in a dark mansion that’s only 5 percent lit. Roughly 95 percent of the universe is made up of ominous-sounding stuff called dark matter and dark energy.23 They don’t interact with light, so we can’t see or otherwise detect them. We know nothing about their nature. But we know that they’re there because they exert gravitational force on other objects.24 “Thoroughly conscious ignorance,” physicist James Maxwell said, “is the prelude to any real advance in knowledge.”25 Astronomers reach beyond the borders of knowledge and take a quantum leap into a vast ocean of unknowns.

Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), available at http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/Eddington.2008.pdf. 23. Brian Clegg, Gravitational Waves: How Einstein’s Spacetime Ripples Reveal the Secrets of the Universe (Icon Books, 2018), 150–152; Nola Taylor Redd, “What Is Dark Energy?,” Space.com, May 1, 2013, www.space.com/20929-dark-energy.html. 24. NASA, “Dark Energy, Dark Matter,” NASA Science, updated July 21, 2019, https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy. 25. James Clerk Maxwell, The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, vol. 3, 1874–1879 (New York: Cambridge University Press 2002), 485. 26. George Bernard Shaw, toast to Albert Einstein, October 28, 1930. 27.


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The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

Kennedy’s analysis usefully explores various new uses of “number” in daily life within businesses not normally thought of as in the social media sector, but it does so without some of the detail and, particularly, the wider theoretical links to labor relations, as understood by Marx, that we provide later in this chapter. 37. Browne, Dark Matters. We are not claiming datafied labor relations (or data relations) are slavery; such hyperbole would be offensive. We are making a comparison in terms of the degree and continuity of surveillance that is normal in various regimes of labor. 38. On the expansion of extraction, see Mezzadra and Neilson, “Frontiers of Extraction”; and compare Morozov, “Will Tech Giants Move” on “data extractivism.” 39.

Respectively, Schiller, Digital Capitalism; Castells, Network Society; Cohen, Truth and Power; Dean, Neoliberal Fantasies; Srnicek, Platform Capitalism; and Zuboff, “Big Other.” 132. Cohen, Truth and Power, Chapter 1. Occasionally, where we refer exclusively to capitalism’s informational dynamics, we will use the term informational capitalism for shorthand. 133. Browne, Dark Matters. 134. Foucault, Biopolitics; Brown, Undoing; Harvey, History of Neoliberalism; and Dardot and Laval, The New Way. 135. Note that, reflecting perhaps Foucault’s own divergence from Marx, commodification has a curious role in Brown’s book. It is generally absent as a term, and Brown notes Foucault’s dismissal of its importance (Brown, Undoing, 66), but it also reappears at certain points, at least as an accompaniment to her main arguments about neoliberalism as a model for valuing the world in economic terms (Brown, Undoing, 45).

“Plausible Cause: Explanatory Standards in the Age of Powerful Machines.” Vanderbilt Law Review 70, no. 4 (2017): 1249–1301. Bridges, Khiara. The Poverty of Privacy Rights. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos. New York: Zone Books, 2015. Browne, Simone. Dark Matters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Brunton, Finn, and Helen Nissenbaum. Obfuscation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016. Bucher, Taina. “The Algorithmic Imaginary: Exploring the Ordinary Affects of Facebook Algorithms.”


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Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Donald Davies, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, fake news, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper

Since the chance of catching two stars in our own Galaxy in perfect alignment is minuscule, astronomers would have to monitor millions of stars each night to catch a handful of events in progress. But that’s precisely what the Princeton University astronomer Bohdan Paczynski urged his colleagues to do, since the payback could mean valuable insights into what makes up the elusive “dark matter” that holds the Galaxy together. What’s more, in 1991, with then-student Shude Mao, he proposed gravitational microlensing as a means to search for extrasolar planets. His idea was that a planet around the foreground star would alter the magnifying properties of the lens dramatically and thereby betray its presence.

Oppenheimer (American Museum of Natural History) Current observations suggest that brown dwarfs are common, perhaps a third or a quarter as numerous as stars. Thus our Galaxy alone would contain tens of billions of them. Since they are faint and hard to detect, some astronomers had speculated initially that brown dwarfs could be an important constituent of the “dark matter” that dominates the Galactic mass budget. That doesn’t appear to be the case: even a hundred billion of these lightweights would not add up to much. Shrouded Origins As their ranks have grown, so has our interest in unraveling the origin of these peculiar objects. One obvious clue is that brown dwarfs are common as isolated, free-foating objects both in young star clusters and in the feld, but relatively rare as companions to stars.


pages: 271 words: 68,440

More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionised the Cosmos by Dava Sobel

Astronomia nova, Charles Babbage, Commentariolus, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Edmond Halley, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres

The Sun is only one star among two hundred billion in the Milky Way—and relegated to a remote region far from the galactic center. The Milky Way is just one galaxy in a Local Group of neighbors, surrounded by countless other galaxy groups stretched across the universe. All the shining stars of all the galaxies are as nothing compared to the great volume of unseen dark matter that holds them in gravitational embraces. Even dark matter is dwarfed by the still more elusive entity, dark energy, that accounts for three quarters of a cosmos in which the very notion of a center no longer makes any sense. A small corner of today’s known universe, depicted in this Hubble telescope Deep Field image, is many times more vast than the once-shocking distance Copernicus allowed between Saturn and the stars.


pages: 481 words: 121,669

The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can't See by Gary Price, Chris Sherman, Danny Sullivan

AltaVista, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, dark matter, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, full text search, HyperCard, hypertext link, information retrieval, Internet Archive, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, machine readable, machine translation, natural language processing, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, publish or perish, search engine result page, side project, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Ted Nelson, Vannevar Bush, web application

As we discussed in Chapter 2, search engines use programs called crawlers to find and retrieve Web pages stored on servers all over The Invisible Web 57 DEFINITION The Invisible Web Text pages, files, or other often high-quality authoritative information available via the World Wide Web that generalpurpose search engines cannot, due to technical limitations, or will not, due to deliberate choice, add to their indices of Web pages. Sometimes also referred to as the “Deep Web” or “dark matter.” the world. From a Web server’s standpoint, it doesn’t make any difference if a request for a page comes from a person using a Web browser or from an automated search engine crawler. In either case, the server returns the desired Web page to the computer that requested it. A key difference between a person using a browser and a search engine crawler is that the person is able to manually type a URL into the browser window and retrieve that Web page.

Text pages, files, or other often high-quality information available via the World Wide Web that general-purpose search engines cannot, due to technical limitations, or will not, due to deliberate choice, add to their indices of Web pages. Sometimes erroneously referred to as the “deep Web” or “dark matter.” keyword. A word or phrase entered in a query form that a search system attempts to match in text documents in its database. limit (limiting). Using search engine structure to reduce the returned set of possible hits by specifying certain criteria such as Web page date, country of origin, or by using field searching to restrict the search to specific parts of Web pages. metasearch engine.

., 317 customization databases, 60–61 invisible Web, 93 local weather, 102.103 MetaCrawler, 45 research toolkits, 111, 113 Cybercafe Search Engine database, 203 cyberterms, 204 412 The Invisible Web D dams, register of, 356 DARE: Directory in Social Sciences — Institutions, Specialists, Periodicals, 374 dark matter, definition, 57 Data Query: World Development Indicators, 373 Database of Award-Winning Children’s Literature, 321 databases. See also specific databases content storage, 78–79 crawlers and, 67–68 customization, 60–61 document delivery services, 154 dynamic content, 130–132 keywords searchable, 14 relational, 61, 75 search engines and, 59–61 specialized content focus, 93 Web interface access, 7 dates, timeliness and, 108–109 deep Web, 57, 82–83 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), U.S., 1, 3 Defense Research Reports (Canada), 363 Defensive Driving Training Locator (NSC), 384 Delphion Intellectual Property Network, 98, 276 Demographic Data (Government Information Sharing Project), 371 demographic information resources, 102, 216, 371–372 dentists, 294–295 Dentists Register and Rolls of Dental Auxiliaries (U.K.), 295 Denver Public Library, Western History Photos, 266–267 Department of Agriculture (USDA), 171 Economics and Statistics System, 171 Foreign Import/Export Data, 195 nutrient database for standard reference, 253–254 Plants Database, 348 Department Of Commerce (DOC), U.S., State Exports Database, 196 Department of Defense (DOD), U.S.


pages: 264 words: 76,643

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations by David Pilling

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, off grid, old-boy network, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, performance metric, pez dispenser, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, science of happiness, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

So the economy is shrinking, but everyone is getting a better deal. Lots of what tech is doing is destroying what wasn’t needed. The end result is you’re going to have less of an economy, but higher welfare.” From the economy’s perspective, he was suggesting that Spotify and similar companies are like dark matter. Instead of pumping GDP out, they suck it in and make it disappear. And yet they are providing a valuable service that people are willing to pay for. What this does to our economy, as conventionally measured, is a complicated subject about which there is considerable controversy. So it is worth unpicking into several strands.

Without going into detail, the World Bank basically works backward by calculating how much capital we must have to produce so much income. Having taken into account natural capital and physical capital, the missing amount must be institutional capital. It is a little like the assumptions scientists make about dark matter. If you remember the parable of the two islands, one where people trust each other (and trade) and one where they don’t (and don’t), then attributing a large portion of income to institutional capacity is not ridiculous. Still, the bank’s numbers seem implausibly high in comparison to natural capital.


pages: 381 words: 78,467

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize

., “A Natural Product Telomerase Activator as Part of a Health Maintenance Program,” Rejuvenation Research, September 7, 2010, www.liebertonline.com/doi/full/10.1089/rej.2010.1085. 78 Chris Woolston, “Pricey Telomerase Supplements, Touted as Longevity Boosters, Are Unproven,” Los Angeles Times, December 20, 2010, www.latimes.com/health/la-he-skeptic-telomeres-20101220,0,6925196,print.story. 79 See www.tasciences.com/ta-65/. 80 “Genome Announcement a Milestone, but Only a Beginning,” CNN, June 26, 2000, http://archives.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/06/26/human.genome.05/index.html. 81 Epigenetics is one of these new discoveries. See Brandon Keim, “Early Reports from the ‘Dark Matter’ of the Genome,” Wired News, December 22, 2010, www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/genomic-dark-matter/. 82 John Lauerman, “Complete Genomics Drives Down Cost of Genome Sequence to $5,000,” Bloomberg News, February 5, 2009, www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&refer=home&sid=aEUlnq6ltPpQ. 83 “Your Genome in Minutes: New Technology Could Slash Sequencing Time,” ScienceDaily, December 31, 2010, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101220121111.htm. 84 Francis Collins, “A Genome Story: 10th Anniversary Commentary,” Scientific American, June 25, 2010, www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?


The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum by Temple Grandin, Richard Panek

Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, David Brooks, deliberate practice, double helix, ghettoisation, Gregor Mendel, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, Khan Academy, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mouse model, neurotypical, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, twin studies

Same thing with junk DNA. If you messed around with it, the gene’s “computer program” would not work. I was hardly alone in harboring this deep suspicion. For years, scientists had been taking the idea of junk DNA less and less seriously. In fact, geneticists had started preferring the terms noncoding DNA and dark matter, both of which suggested that this kind of DNA was simply a mystery, not garbage. As I stood reading the article in the airport, I felt vindicated after so many years, which is always nice, but that’s not what jumped out at me. The article—amid many others that day and in the weeks to come that emphasized the non–junk DNA angle—was based on the results of a massive federal research effort called the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, or Encode.

But that Tinker Toy model represents a strand of DNA that’s stretched out. A strand of DNA completely unfurled would be about ten feet long. But it’s not unfurled. Instead, DNA is so tightly coiled that it fits inside the microscopic cell nucleus. By looking at DNA in its natural state, Encode researchers found, as the Times reported, “that small segments of dark-matter DNA are often quite close to genes they control.” Now that, I thought, is a mindblower. Until then, scientists had been thinking about DNA in its stretched-out form. But if you envision DNA as a tightly wound coil—and while I was standing in the airport, holding the Times in my hands, that’s exactly what my picture brain was doing—then a noncoding piece of DNA could be flipping switches on coding DNA that’s hundreds of thousands of base pairs away.


pages: 411 words: 140,110

Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery by Scott Kelly, Margaret Lazarus Dean

Apollo 11, clean water, dark matter, game design, inventory management, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, Skype, space junk, the scientific method, traumatic brain injury, twin studies, Virgin Galactic, Y2K

I would never question anyone else’s experience, but this vantage point has never created any particular spiritual insight for me. I am a scientifically minded person, curious to understand everything I can about the universe. We know there are trillions of stars, more than the number of grains of sand on planet Earth. Those stars make up less than 5 percent of the matter in the universe. The rest is dark matter and dark energy. The universe is so complex. Is it all an accident? I don’t know. I was raised Catholic, and as is the case in many families, my parents were more dedicated to their children’s religious development than they were to their own. Mark and I attended catechism classes until one day in the ninth grade, when my mother got tired of driving us.

Putting a telescope in orbit outside the atmosphere and past the reach of light pollution has changed the field of astronomy. By observing distant stars, scientists have been able to make discoveries about how fast the universe is expanding, how old it is, and what it is made of. Hubble has helped us to discover new planets in new solar systems and confirmed the existence of dark energy and dark matter. This one scientific instrument has revolutionized what we know about our universe, and the task of repairing it—which always brings the risk of damaging or even destroying its sensitive components—is an enormous responsibility. Once our training was in full swing, we spent a lot of time in simulators.

The Hubble Space Telescope and other instruments like the AMS have transformed our understanding of the universe in recent years. We had always assumed that the stars and other matter we could observe—200 billion galaxies each with 100 billion stars on average—made up all of the matter that existed. But we now know that less than 5 percent of the matter in the universe is actually observable. Finding dark energy and dark matter (the rest of what’s out there) is the next challenge for astrophysics, and the AMS is searching for them. Removing and stowing the insulation from the main bus unit is a relatively simple task for a spacewalk, but as with everything we do in zero g, it is harder than you would think—sort of like trying to pack your suitcase if it were nailed to the ceiling.


pages: 654 words: 204,260

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Brownian motion, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, clean water, Copley Medal, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, Thomas Malthus, Wilhelm Olbers

Zwicky's talent was for big ideas. Others—Baade mostly—were left to do the mathematical sweeping up. Zwicky also was the first to recognize that there wasn't nearly enough visible mass in the universe to hold galaxies together and that there must be some other gravitational influence—what we now call dark matter. One thing he failed to see was that if a neutron star shrank enough it would become so dense that even light couldn't escape its immense gravitational pull. You would have a black hole. Unfortunately, Zwicky was held in such disdain by most of his colleagues that his ideas attracted almost no notice.

When, five years later, the great Robert Oppenheimer turned his attention to neutron stars in a landmark paper, he made not a single reference to any of Zwicky's work even though Zwicky had been working for years on the same problem in an office just down the hall. Zwicky's deductions concerning dark matter wouldn't attract serious attention for nearly four decades. We can only assume that he did a lot of pushups in this period. Surprisingly little of the universe is visible to us when we incline our heads to the sky. Only about 6,000 stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth, and only about 2,000 can be seen from any one spot.

The fact is, there is a great deal, even at quite a fundamental level, that we don't know—not least what the universe is made of. When scientists calculate the amount of matter needed to hold things together, they always come up desperately short. It appears that at least 90 percent of the universe, and perhaps as much as 99 percent, is composed of Fritz Zwicky's “dark matter”—stuff that is by its nature invisible to us. It is slightly galling to think that we live in a universe that, for the most part, we can't even see, but there you are. At least the names for the two main possible culprits are entertaining: they are said to be either WIMPs (for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which is to say specks of invisible matter left over from the Big Bang) or MACHOs (for MAssive Compact Halo Objects—really just another name for black holes, brown dwarfs, and other very dim stars).


pages: 266 words: 78,986

Quarantine by Greg Egan

cosmic microwave background, dark matter, disinformation, fudge factor, intermodal, pattern recognition, placebo effect, Schrödinger's Cat, time dilation, warehouse robotics

And the whole point of The Bubble is that we never will know. I have other theories, though, if you don’t like that one. Maybe the Bubble Makers are made of cold dark matter—axions, or some other weakly interacting particle which we’ve never been able to detect with much efficiency. If that were the case, we might have done them relatively little harm—but they decided that our technology was getting uncomfortably close to the point where it could start to affect them. There were plenty of astronomers searching for cold dark matter in the twenties and the early thirties—and their equipment was becoming a little more sensitive, and a little more accurate, every year.


pages: 266 words: 80,273

Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One by Debora MacKenzie

Anthropocene, anti-globalists, butterfly effect, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Donald Trump, European colonialism, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, machine translation, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, planetary scale, reshoring, social distancing, supply-chain management, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

The actual pathogens behind these are often not even determined, as this is not needed for treatment. Instead, doctors use wide-spectrum antibiotics for bacteria, or with viruses—like Covid-19—they just try to keep the patient alive until the patient’s antiviral immune response kicks in. “Illuminating this biological dark matter,” the Hopkins team argued, “would focus pathogen discovery efforts on established damage-causing microbes.” Aggressively doing such diagnosis in a few sentinel locations, perhaps in zoonosis hotspots, might reveal the next big threat early as it starts jumping to people. To do more specific diagnosis of syndromes, hospital labs need new kinds of diagnostic technologies that can distinguish a wide range of pathogens.

Diagnostics manufacturers are now making automated “panels” of tests that can recognize the DNA or RNA of, say, a dozen respiratory or gut viruses, a huge improvement over old methods based on growing pathogens in culture to identify them, which is slow and insensitive. Making this kind of capability available more widely, including in countries that cannot afford it now but have hotspots of disease emergence, would illuminate a lot of pathogenic “dark matter” and give us a much stronger idea of exactly what pathogens we are contending with. For now, the most widely used diagnostic panels on the market are designed for routine hospital practice and mostly look for the usual suspects that cause most human infection. In sentinel sites looking for surprises, it would be good to have something that can spot the unexpected and unknown.


pages: 486 words: 148,485

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, car-free, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, cosmological constant, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Sedaris, desegregation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lake wobegon effect, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, mirror neurons, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, stem cell, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Tenerife airport disaster, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route

Or consider a still unresolved example: physicists currently think that 96 percent of all the matter and energy in the universe is invisible—so-called dark matter and dark energy. The virtue of this highly counterintuitive (not to say cockamamie) proposal is that it makes sense of scientific findings that would otherwise call into question the theory of gravity. This is a classic example of extremely strong prior beliefs (we really believe in gravity) trumping extremely strong counterevidence. It remains to be seen whether the dark-matter theory will ultimately seem as foolish as proposing that Orion loiters in the sky every fifty-two years or as prescient as predicting the existence of Neptune

Ellis’s story, 273–79, 280, 294–95 Cook, James, 353n Copernicus, Nicolaus, 127, 357n Coulter, Ann, 148n Courbet, Gustave, 328 credulity, 167–68 cross-dressing theory of comedy, 324n Cruikshank, George, 54 Cuban Missile Crisis, 153 ’Cuz It’s True Constraint, 104–9, 130, 163 Dadaism, 328, 329 dark energy, 126n dark matter, 126n Darwin, Charles, 131–32 data, and error-prevention, 305–6 Davidson, Osha Gray, 275–76, 284n, 383n death-wish response to error, 26–27 decision studies (error studies), 11–12 defensiveness (defenses), 213–18 “better safe than sorry,” 216, 216n blaming other people, 215–16 certainty and, 165–70 denial and, 229–30, 306, 307 near-miss, 214–15, 216 out-of-left-field, 214–15, 216 time-frame, 213–14, 216 definition of wrongness, 10–17 Defoe, Daniel, 258, 382n delusion, 38–39, 40, 351n dementia, 80n democracy, 311–16, 386n denial, 209–10, 228–34, 375–76n Innocence Project and, 233–39, 242–43 Dennett, Daniel, 369n depression, 336 Descartes, René, 6, 33, 113–15, 118–22, 318–19, 349n, 362–63n desegregation of schools, 274–77 desert mirages, 50 Design of Everyday Things (Norman), 211 despair, 258–59, 265 developmental psychology, 100–101, 197–98, 289–92, 307, 385n deviance, 34–35n Dickinson, Emily, 283 Diderot, Denis, 29, 38 direct elections, 312–14 disagreement deficit, 149–54 disillusionment, 53, 252n distal beliefs, 95–96, 359–60n distribution of errors theory, 34–35 Divine Right of Kings, 312 divorce, 248–49, 266–69 divorce rate, 268–69n DNA testing, 222–23, 226–27, 376n, 379n error rate, 223n Innocence Project, 227, 233–39, 242–43 dogma (dogmatic beliefs), 287.


pages: 608 words: 150,324

Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code by Matthew Cobb

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, factory automation, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, phenotype, post-materialism, Recombinant DNA, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology

As Cleland and Copley put it, ‘the fact that we have not discovered any alternative life forms cannot be taken as evidence that they do not exist’. That is logically correct, but it is hardly an enticing starting point for a research programme and would not be taken seriously by any funding agency. Physicists have realised that 95 per cent of the Universe is made of stuff we cannot directly detect – dark matter and dark energy – because calculations of the amount of matter in the Universe based on gravitational effects revealed a substantial discrepancy between observed and expected values. For the shadow biosphere to be more than day-dreaming, a similarly overwhelming signature of its existence would be necessary.

For the shadow biosphere to be more than day-dreaming, a similarly overwhelming signature of its existence would be necessary. Those intrigued by the remote possibility of weird life have come up with some potential indicators of its existence, such as the supposedly anomalous varnish that is found on desert rocks.29 However, something as impressive as the indirect evidence of the existence of dark matter and dark energy would be required for this hypothesis to be taken seriously. * The potential for synthetic biology is enormous. Scientists are already able to integrate unnatural amino acids into proteins, for example by manipulating enzymatic machinery associated with an ‘amber’ stop codon (UAG) that has been introduced into bacteria, yeast, the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans and even mammalian cells.30 A synthetic form of transfer RNA is used to allow the UAG codon to code for an unnatural amino acid, thereby producing a novel protein.

L. and Cavalcanti, A. R. O., ‘Consequences of stop codon reassignment on protein evolution in ciliates with alternative genetic codes’, Molecular Biology and Evolution, vol. 25, 2007, pp. 179–86. Rinke, C., Schwientek, P., Sczyrba, A. et al., ‘Insights into the phylogeny and coding potential of microbial dark matter’, Nature, vol. 499, 2013, pp. 431–7. Roberts, R. B. (ed.), Microsomal Particles and Protein Synthesis, London, Pergamon, 1958. Roberts, R. B., ‘Alternative codes and templates’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, vol. 48, 1962, pp. 897–900. Robertson, M. P. and Joyce, G. F., ‘The origins of the RNA world’, Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology, vol. 4, 2012, article a003608.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (New York: William Morrow, 2016). 9. Meredith Broussard, Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). 10. Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust (New York: Crown Books, 2001), and Clyde W. Ford, Think Black: A Memoir (New York: Amistad, 2019). 11. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke, 2015). See also Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology (New York: Polity, 2019). 12. Clyde W. Ford, Think Black: A Memoir (New York: Amistad, 2019). 13. Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (New York: NYU Press, 2018). 14. David Golumbia, “Do You Oppose Bad Technology, or Democracy?

Lisa Gitelman, 1–14 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); David Lyon, “Surveillance, Snowden, and Big Data: Capacities, Consequences, Critique,” Big Data & Society (July–December 2014): 1–14. 14. cf. Sarah Brayne, “Big Data Surveillance: The Case of Policing,” American Sociological Review 82, no. 5 (2017): 977–1008; Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Shoshana Amielle Magnet and Tara Rodgers, “Stripping for the State: Whole Body Imaging Technologies and the Surveillance of Othered Bodies,” Feminist Media Studies 12, no. 1 (2011): 101–118; Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: NYU Press, 2018). 15.

Kate Crawford, “Artificial Intelligence’s White Guy Problem,” New York Times (June 25, 2016). 38. Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey, eds., Thinking through the Skin (London: Routledge, 2001). 39. Steve Anderson, Technologies of Vision: The War between Data and Images (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). 40. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 41. Emily Horowitz, Protecting Our Kids? How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2015). 42. John Borneman, Cruel Attachments: The Ritual Rehab of Child Molesters in Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 43.


pages: 578 words: 168,350

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

This apparent general lack of interest by the biological community in aging and mortality beyond a relatively small number of devoted researchers stimulated me to begin pondering these questions. As it appeared that almost no one was thinking about them in quantitative or analytic terms, there might be a possibility for a physics approach to lead to some small progress. Consequently, during interludes between grappling with quarks, gluons, dark matter, and string theory, I began to think about death. As I embarked on this new direction, I received unexpected support for my ruminations about biology as a science and its relationship to mathematics from an unlikely source. I discovered that what I had presumed was subversive thinking had been expressed much more articulately and deeply almost one hundred years earlier by the eminent and somewhat eccentric biologist Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson in his classic book On Growth and Form, published in 1917.4 It’s a wonderful book that has remained quietly revered not just in biology but in mathematics, art, and architecture, influencing thinkers and artists from Alan Turing and Julian Huxley to Jackson Pollock.

Although it hardly grabs the same kind of attention, this accelerating socioeconomic expansion has had and will continue to have a significantly more profound effect on your life, your children’s lives, and their children’s lives than all of the wonders and paradoxes of the exponentially expanding cosmic universe and its archetypal mythologies of dark matter, dark energy, and the Big Bang. The most obvious manifestation of the exponential rate at which our social and economic lives have been expanding is provided by the huge population explosion that has occurred over the past two hundred years or so. After two million years of slow, steady growth the number of human beings living on the planet is estimated to have eventually reached the billion mark around 1805.

Names that you might not have heard of, such as Adolphe Quetelet, Thomas Young, and William Froude. I also included a few personal anecdotes to illustrate how I came to think about some of these problems, and, in particular, how I transitioned from being obsessed with elementary particles, strings, dark matter, and the evolution of the universe to trying to understand cells and whales, life and death, cities and global sustainability, and why companies die. A critical point in this transition was my meeting with the eminent ecologist and wonderful scientist Jim Brown. In chapter 3, I related the story of how this fortuitous encounter and my subsequent long-term engagement with the Santa Fe Institute came into being and how it led to an extraordinary collaborative relationship that changed my life, and I believe his, too.


pages: 559 words: 164,795

Berlin: Life and Death in the City at the Center of the World by Sinclair McKay

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, dark matter, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, German hyperinflation, haute couture, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mikhail Gorbachev, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, uranium enrichment

The Zeitzeugenbörse – a contemporary witness exchange – has been aiming to capture and record the voices of ordinary Berliners from right the way across the century: their lives and experiences through the traumas of the decades. The old sense that the German people had to suppress their own experiences of suffering had the unintended effect of creating a mass of historic dark matter: silence and obscurity when it came to certain epochal events. The wonderful academics and volunteers who run the Zeitzeugenbörse have been working in recent years to ensure that a generation of Berlin voices is never lost. It is these voices that can help guide us through a century both of terror and of stubborn fortitude.

By early 1933, Hitler’s ascension to the Chancellorship having been followed almost immediately by the burning of the Reichstag, enabling the Nazis to blame and whip up rage against the communists, hold a heavily freighted election and swiftly impose iron-gripped totalitarianism, Einstein understood that if anything he had underestimated the terrible forces at play; the dark matter exerting such strange effects across the nation. The night after the Reichstag fire, Einstein told his mistress: ‘I dare not enter Germany because of Hitler.’6 But this did not mean that he would keep his silence. Einstein sailed for Belgium, where he delivered this ringing statement: ‘As long as I have any choice in the matter, I shall live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance and equality of all citizens before the law prevail.

Then came the shock of the German invasion of Russia in 1941, and the evacuation of nuclear physics programmes from the larger cities out to the Urals and Kazakhstan. A young scientist who had joined the Soviet Air Force – Georgy Flyorov – noticed that Western scientific journals now had limited information about nuclear progress, and surmised that in the midst of that intelligence dark matter, top-secret work was underway. He wrote directly to Stalin: ‘It is essential not to lose any time in building the uranium bomb.’11 Flyorov was put into contact with senior physicists. At a time when the Nazi armies were brutalizing the country, there was an agonizing dilemma and it was to do with money.


pages: 360 words: 101,636

Engineering Infinity by Jonathan Strahan

augmented reality, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, gravity well, Kim Stanley Robinson, low earth orbit, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, post scarcity, quantum entanglement, Schrödinger's Cat, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski

Its mind was diamondoid processing nodes and smart dust swarms and cold quantum condensates in the system's outer dark. Its eyes were interferometers and WIMP detectors and ghost imagers. The first thing the server saw was the galaxy, a whirlpool of light in the sky with a lenticular centre, spiral arms frothed with stars, a halo of dark matter that held nebulae in its grip like fireflies around a lantern. The galaxy was alive with the Network, with the blinding Hawking incandescence of holeships, thundering along their cycles; the soft infrared glow of fully grown servers, barely spilling a drop of the heat of their stars; the faint gravity ripples of the darkships' passage in the void.

In an eyeblink it clumped into hadrons, almost faster than the server could follow - the baby had its own arrow of time, its own fast heartbeat, young and hungry. And then the last scattering, a birth cry, when light finally had enough room to travel through the baby so the server could see its face. The baby grew. Dark matter ruled its early life, filling it with long filaments of neutralinos and their relatives. Soon, the server knew, matter would accrete around them, condensing into stars and galaxies like raindrops in a spiderweb. There would be planets, and life. And life would need to be served. The anticipation was a warm heartbeat that made the server's shells ring with joy.


pages: 356 words: 102,224

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, germ theory of disease, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, linked data, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, power law, profit motive, remunicipalization, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, time dilation

We see, scattered across deep space, galaxies with "active nuclei," quasars, galaxies distorted by collisions, their spiral arms disrupted, star systems blasted with radiation or gobbled up by black holes—and we gather that on such timescales even interstellar space, even galaxies may not be safe. There is a halo of dark matter surrounding the Milky Way, extending perhaps halfway to the distance of the next spiral galaxy (M31 in the constellation Andromeda, which also contains hundreds of billions of stars). We do not know what this dark matter is, or how it is arranged— but some† of it may be in worlds untethered to individual stars. If so, our descendants of the * A value that nicely approximates modern estimates of the number of planets orbiting stars in the Milky Way Galaxy


pages: 370 words: 97,138

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

If the strong nuclear force was stronger or weaker, carbon couldn’t be created in stars. If the gravitational constant was stronger, stars would be very short-lived; if it was weaker, stars wouldn’t shine or make the heavy elements. The universe also has very low entropy or disorder, which may be responsible for time’s forward sense or “arrow.” In addition, the cosmic values of dark matter and dark energy neither prohibit structures from forming nor cause a collapse too soon for life to be able to form. The point is that while the universe would be physically sensible if any of these quantities took different values, it wouldn’t be a universe with life containing life as we know it.

The first fine-tuning argument was the fact that the age of a biological universe cannot be too short or too long, “Dirac’s Cosmology and Mach’s Principle” by R. H. Dicke 1961. Nature, vol. 192, pp. 440–41. Since then, the idea has been explored by a number of physicists, for example: Coincidences: Dark Matter, Mankind, and Anthropic Cosmology by J. Gribbin and M. Rees 1989. New York: Bantam. Also: The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? by P. Davies 2007. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. For a philosophical perspective, see A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology by A.


pages: 420 words: 100,811

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves by John Cheney-Lippold

algorithmic bias, bioinformatics, business logic, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer vision, critical race theory, dark matter, data science, digital capitalism, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, informal economy, iterative process, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, lifelogging, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, price discrimination, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software studies, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological singularity, technoutopianism, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Turing machine, uber lyft, web application, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

Keith Clark, “Negation as Failure,” in Logic and Databases, ed. Herve Gallaire and Jack Minker (New York: Plenum, 1978), 293. 39. Wanda Zamen, “HP Computers Are Racist,” YouTube.com, December 10, 2009. 40. For a fuller explanation of how digital epidermalization operates in this example, see Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 161–164. 41. Julianne Hing, “HP Face-Tracker Software Can’t See Black People,” Colorlines, December 21, 2009, www.colorlines.com. 42. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,” Grey Room 18 (2005): 26–51. 43.

Feminist scholar Shoshana Magnet has already outlined the racial, classed, and gendered dimensions of this machinic process. And surveillance theorist Simone Browne has argued that this biometric objectification constructs newly minted racial truths. See Shoshana Magnet, When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 61. Brad Weslake, “Explanatory Depth,” Philosophy of Science 77, no. 2 (2010): 273–294. 62. Kate Crawford, “The Hidden Biases of Big Data,” Harvard Business Review, April 1, 2013, http://hbr.org. 63. Geoffrey Bowker, “Data Flakes: An Afterward to ‘Raw Data’ Is an Oxymoron,” in Gitelman, “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, 170. 64.


pages: 352 words: 98,561

The City by Tony Norfield

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, G4S, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Irish property bubble, Leo Hollis, linked data, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-sum game

But their solution is to assume away the existence of different rates of return and instead to invent extra US foreign assets that do not appear in the statistics. I would be the last to argue that US statistics capture every cent of reality, but this is to ignore an evident fact that the yields are different. The extra US assets are given the name ‘dark matter’ and, as one might expect, including this results in the US having a net surplus on its investment position.24 This feat is achieved by ‘redefining the stock of assets in a way that more explicitly shows the value of the underlying services’. This transforms US imperialism’s economic and financial power, its ability to appropriate value from the world economy, into a payment the rest of the world makes to the US for the services rendered!

Other bond and longer-term loan interest rates are based upon the benchmark rate for government securities. 21A useful recent book on international finance is Brett Christophers, Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism, Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2013. 22Ricardo Hausmann, ‘Good Credit Ratios, Bad Credit Ratings: The Role of Debt Structure’, third draft of a paper prepared for the Conference on Rules-Based Fiscal Policy in Emerging Market economies, Oaxaca, Mexico, 14 to 16 February 2002. 23BEA, ‘US International Transactions, 1960–present’, 2014, Table 1.1, lines 6 and 14, at bea.gov. 24Ricardo Hausmann and Federico Sturzenegger, ‘Global Imbalances or Bad Accounting? The Missing Dark Matter in the Wealth of Nations’, Centre for International Development at Harvard University, Working Paper No. 124, January 2006, pp. 3–8, at hks.harvard.edu. 25Panitch and Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism. 26The ‘offshore’ Chinese renminbi currency has the ISO code CNH, and this might be used instead of the ‘onshore’ CNY.


pages: 114 words: 30,715

The Four Horsemen by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett

3D printing, Andrew Wiles, cognitive dissonance, cosmological constant, dark matter, Desert Island Discs, en.wikipedia.org, phenotype, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker

We don’t know, but we have some interesting hypotheses to think about. What did the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees look like? We don’t know, but we do know a bit about it. We know the continent on which it lived (Africa, as Darwin guessed), and molecular evidence tells us roughly when (between 6 million and 8 million years ago). What is dark matter? We don’t know, and a substantial fraction of the physics community would dearly like to. Ignorance, to a scientist, is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched. Ignorance, if you are a theologian, is something to be washed away by shamelessly making something up. If you are an authority figure like the Pope, you might do it by thinking privately to yourself and waiting for an answer to pop into your head – which you then proclaim as a ‘revelation’.


pages: 416 words: 106,582

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

But inference to the best explanation also gets us a great deal more than either deduction or enumerative induction does. It’s inference to the best explanation that gives science the power to expand our ontology, giving us reasons to believe in things we can’t directly observe, from subatomic particles—or maybe strings—to the dark matter and dark energy of cosmology. It’s inference to the best explanation that allows us to know something of what it’s like to be other people on the basis of their behavior. I see the hand drawing too near the fire and then quickly pull away, tears starting in the eyes while an impolite word is uttered, and I know something of what that person is feeling.

Hunting for Root Cause: The Human “Black Box” Eric Topol Professor of translational genomics, Scripps Research Institute; cardiologist, Scripps Clinic Root-cause analysis is an attractive concept for certain matters in industry, engineering, and quality control. A classic application is to determine why a plane crashed by finding the “black box”—the tamper-proof event-data recorder. Even though this box is usually bright orange, the term symbolizes the sense of dark matter, a container with critical information to help illuminate what happened. Getting the black-box audio recording is just one component of a root-cause analysis of why a plane goes down. Each of us is gradually being morphed into an event-data recorder by virtue of our digital identity and presence on the Web.


New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind by Noam Chomsky

Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Turing test

Shall we understand metaphysical naturalism to be the demand for unity of nature? If so, it could be taken as a guiding idea, but not as a dogma. “Ninety percent of the matter of the universe,” physicists tell us, “is what is now called dark matter – dark because we don’t see it; dark because we don’t know what it is,” indeed “we do not have the slightest idea of what 90 percent of the world is made of.” (Weisskopf 1989). Suppose dark matter turns out to be crucially different from the 10 per cent of the world about which there are some ideas. The possibility cannot be discounted in principle; stranger things have been accepted in modern science.


pages: 445 words: 105,255

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization by K. Eric Drexler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Bill Joy: nanobots, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, double helix, failed state, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Higgs boson, industrial robot, iterative process, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, performance metric, radical decentralization, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Thomas Malthus, V2 rocket, Vannevar Bush, Vision Fund, zero-sum game

They’re more different than most people think. PART 3 EXPLORING DEEP TECHNOLOGY CHAPTER 7 Science and the Timeless Landscape of Technology THE GREAT STORY OF THE WORLD Near the dawn of known time, before any hint of an Earth or a Sun, the pre-stellar universe was a realm of dark matter and incandescent gas that expanded, cooled, and faded to darkness as space itself stretched. There were ripples in that sea of matter, slight concentrations of mass that drew more mass together, collapsing to form the seeds of galaxies. The physics of gravitation—and of light, heat, and fluid dynamics—describes these collapses along with the lesser collapses within them that gave birth to a generation of stars that brought light into a time of universal darkness.

With the Higgs boson, physicists observed the final particle predicted by the Standard Model, a crowning yet frustrating achievement. Physicists had hoped that they would find something else, a terrestrial clue to physics beyond the Standard Model. There must be something beyond. Galactic dynamics shows the effects of mass in the form (it seems) of unobserved dark-matter particles, and the expansion of the cosmos itself is being driven ever faster by an unexplained dark-energy field. Beyond this, the equations themselves call out for amendment or replacement. Gravitation doesn’t fit with the rest (but only deep down, in as-yet unobservable ways), and even the compatible parts of the Standard Model have a patchwork quality, where at the bottom, physicists hope to find a more unified fabric.


pages: 364 words: 104,697

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghegan

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, dark matter, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disinformation, Easter island, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, McJob, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce

It’s just that our economic tools, at this early stage of the “science,” are too crude to calculate the trade-off. After all, economics as a science is about two hundred years old. When it’s as old as physics or astronomy, we’ll get much better measures of standard of living. Freedom or leisure is about as cosmically important as the dark matter, or dark energy, of the universe. It’s just that our minds have been darkened by economists like Milton Friedman. Yet Friedman himself had half an idea as to who is better off (Barbara v. Isabel), even when he was writing libertarian-type tracts like Free to Choose. Friedman’s very life was an indictment of the ideas in the book.

But that means on the Internet, where people flinch because it’s like a flashlight shining in your eyes, you find yourself involuntarily turning away from a thick, clunky German abstraction a nanosecond before you have had the time to absorb it. The way German makes a car wreck of three or four abstract nouns, you have to see the damn thing in print, and stare at the word longer than the digital world will let you. At any rate, I see more people reading cold, hard print—the kind that pulls the light into its dark matter without flashing any back—in Germany. And maybe it’s because people can stare at a sentence and think about it a little longer when it’s in print that it seems to me I can get into the kind of long and thoughtful political conversations over there that I never seem to have here. I should be clear: we can be thoughtful.


pages: 615 words: 189,720

Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson

clockwork universe, dark matter, Dava Sobel, fail fast, gravity well, Johannes Kepler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Plato's cave, power law, quantum entanglement

And something otherwise undetectable was exerting very marked gravitational effects, that if caused by a mass would outmass the visible matter of the universe ten to one. Then there appeared to be a kind of reverse gravity effect as well, an inexplicable accelerating expansion of space. People spoke of dark matter and dark energy, but these were names only—names that left the mysteries untouched. What they were was better explained by the existence of extra dimensions, first suggested by Kaluza and Klein, and then put to use by Bao.” Galileo said, “Explain them to me.” He felt himself become equations in the clouds inside him.

The best way to conceptualize some of the extra ones is to imagine them enfolded or implicate in the dimensions we sense.” A long, flat red sheet appeared before him; it rolled lengthwise into a long thin tube. “Seen in two dimensions this looks like a ribbon, but in three dimensions it’s obviously a tube. It’s like that all through the manifolds. Dark matter has to be very weakly interacting but at the same time registering gravitationally at ten times the mass of all visible matter. That is an odd combination, but Bao considered it as a dimension we only were seeing part of, a hyperdimension or manifold that enfolds our dimensions. That manifold happens to be contracting, you could say, which gives the effect in our sensible universe of the extra gravity we detect.

“I thought you said time was the fourth dimension,” Galileo said. “No. For one thing, what we call time turns out to be not a dimension but a manifold, a compound vector of three different dimensions. But put that aside for a second, and let’s finish with the spatial manifold. Dimension four we still call dark matter, as a gesture to our first awareness of it.” “Four,” Galileo repeated. “Yes, and dimension five in some ways counterbalances the action of four, as it is the perceived accelerating expansion of space-time. Aspects of this dimension are called dark energy.” “Do these dimensions pass through each other, then?”


pages: 824 words: 268,880

Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

anthropic principle, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, different worldview, epigenetics, gravity well, heat death of the universe, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, Kim Stanley Robinson, land tenure, new economy, phenotype, quantum entanglement, stem cell, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship

Random change was not the goal anyway. Acceptance was. Happiness— Ann’s true happiness, whatever that might be— now so far away, so hard to imagine. He ached to think of it. It was extraordinary how much physical pain could be generated by thought alone— the limbic system a whole universe in itself, suffused with pain, like the dark matter that suffused everything in the universe. “Have you talked to Michel?” Ursula asked. “No. Good idea.” He called Michel, explained what had happened, and what he had in mind to do. “My God, Sax,” Michel said, looking shocked. But in only a few moments he was promising to come. He would get Desmond to fly him to Da Vinci to pick up the treatment supplies, and then fly on up to the refuge.

And a magnetic monopole detector, orbiting the sun out of the plane of the ecliptic, had captured a trace of what looked to be a fractionally charged unconfined particle with a mass as big as a bacterium— a very rare glimpse of a “weakly interacting massive particle,” or WIMP. String theory had predicted WIMPs would be out there, while the revised standard did not call for them. That was thought provoking, because the shapes of galaxies showed that they had gravitational masses ten times as large as their visible light revealed; if the dark matter could be explained satisfactorily as weakly interacting massive particles, Sax thought, then the theory responsible would have to be called very interesting indeed. Interesting in a different way was the fact that one of the leading theorists in this new stage of development was working right there in Da Vinci, part of the impressive group Sax was sitting in on.

Everyone in these moments attended to her very closely, in effect mesmerized; she had been working at Da Vinci for a year now, and everyone there smart enough to recognize such a thing knew that they were watching one of the pantheon at work, discovering reality right there before their eyes. The other young turks would interrupt her to ask questions, of course— there were many good minds in that group— and if they were lucky, off they would all go together, mathematically modeling gravitons and gravitinos, dark matter and shadow matter— all personality and indeed all persons forgotten. Very productive exciting sessions; and clearly Bao was the driving force in them, the one they relied on, the one they had to reckon with. It was disconcerting, a bit. Sax had met women in math and physics departments before, but this was the only female mathematical genius he had ever even heard of, in all the long history of mathematical advancement, which, now that he thought of it, had been a weirdly male affair.


London Under by Peter Ackroyd

bank run, dark matter, The Spirit Level

That of Goodge Street stands on the corner of Chenies Street and Tottenham Court Road, while that of Stockwell has been converted into a war memorial. These portals could be knocked down, and the deep tunnels filled in, but what would be the purpose? Underground space has acquired the status of dark matter, unseen yet somehow maintaining the structure of the visible world. The portals are the gateways to immensity containing all that is hidden and all that is forgotten. A character in The War of the Worlds (1898) by H. G. Wells, in fear of the extraterrestrial invaders, states that You see, how I mean to live is underground.


pages: 524 words: 120,182

Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, discrete time, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine

Isaac Newton did not have a good definition of force, and in fact, was not happy about the concept since it seemed to require a kind of magical “action at a distance,” which was not allowed in mechanistic explanations of nature. While genetics is one of the largest and fastest growing fields of biology, geneticists still do not agree on precisely what the term gene refers to at the molecular level. Astronomers have discovered that about 95% of the universe is made up of “dark matter” and “dark energy” but have no clear idea what these two things actually consist of. Psychologists don’t have precise definitions for idea or concept, or know what these correspond to in the brain. These are just a few examples. Science often makes progress by inventing new terms to describe incompletely understood phenomena; these terms are gradually refined as the science matures and the phenomena become more completely understood.

We saw an example of this back in chapter 2—it was the invention of the electronic computer, and its capacity for modeling complex systems such as weather, that allowed for the demonstration of the existence of chaos. More recently, extremely powerful land and space-based telescopes have led to a flurry of discoveries in astronomy concerning so-called dark matter and dark energy, which seem to call into question much of what was previously accepted in cosmology. No new set of technologies has had a more profound impact on an established field than the so-called molecular revolution in genetics over the last four decades. Technologies for rapidly copying, sequencing, synthesizing, and engineering DNA, for imaging molecular-level structures that had never been seen before, and for viewing expression patterns of thousands of different genes simultaneously; these are only a few examples of the feats of biotechnology in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.


pages: 453 words: 117,893

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

R48– R58 Groenewegen, Peter, 1995, A Soaring Eagle: Alfred Marshall 1842–1924, Aldershot: Edward Elgar Hansen, Alvin H., 1939, ‘Economic Progress and Declining Population Growth’, American Economic Review, 29(1), pt I, pp. 1–15 Hausmann, Ricardo and Federico Sturzenegger, 2007, ‘The Missing Dark Matter in the Wealth of Nations and Its Implications for Global Imbalances’, Economic Policy, 22(51), pp. 470–518 Hayek, Friedrich A., 1979, A Conversation with Friedrich A. von Hayek: Science and Socialism, Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research ________, 1986, ‘The Moral Imperative of the Market’, in The Unfinished Agenda: Essays on the Political Economy of Government Policy in Honour of Arthur Seldon, London: Institute of Economic Affairs ________, 1994, Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue, ed.

Ricardo, Works and Correspondence, IV, p. 23. 14.  Ibid., p. 21. 15.  King, David Ricardo, p. 88. 16.  Ricardo, Works and Correspondence, IV, pp. 28, 32. 17.  Ibid., p. 35. 18.  Ibid., p. 33. 19.  Ibid., p. 41. 20.  Ricardo Hausmann and Federico Sturzenegger, 2007, ‘The Missing Dark Matter in the Wealth of Nations and Its Implications for Global Imbalances’, Economic Policy, 22(51), pp. 470–518. 21.  Mark Muro, Jonathan Rothwell, Scott Andes, Kenan Fikri and Siddharth Kulkarni, 2015, ‘America’s Advanced Industries’, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC; www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/AdvancedIndustry_FinalFeb2lores-1.pdf 22.  


pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

Todd, Oxford: Clarendon Press, bk IV, ch. 2, para 12. 13. Ricardo, Works and Correspondence, IV, p. 23. 14. Ibid., p. 21. 15. King, David Ricardo, p. 88. 16. Ricardo, Works and Correspondence, IV, pp. 28, 32. 17. Ibid., p. 35. 18. Ibid., p. 33. 19. Ibid., p. 41. 20. Ricardo Hausmann and Federico Sturzenegger, 2007, ‘The Missing Dark Matter in the Wealth of Nations and Its Implications for Global Imbalances’, Economic Policy, 22(51), pp. 470–518. 21. Mark Muro, Jonathan Rothwell, Scott Andes, Kenan Fikri and Siddharth Kulkarni, 2015, ‘America’s Advanced Industries’, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC; www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/AdvancedIndustry_FinalFeb2lores-1.pdf 22.

, National Institute Economic Review, 224, pp. R48–R58 Groenewegen, Peter, 1995, A Soaring Eagle: Alfred Marshall 1842–1924, Aldershot: Edward Elgar Hansen, Alvin H., 1939, ‘Economic Progress and Declining Population Growth’, American Economic Review, 29(1), pt I, pp. 1–15 Hausmann, Ricardo and Federico Sturzenegger, 2007, ‘The Missing Dark Matter in the Wealth of Nations and Its Implications for Global Imbalances’, Economic Policy, 22(51), pp. 470–518 Hayek, Friedrich A., 1979, A Conversation with Friedrich A. von Hayek: Science and Socialism, Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research ———, 1986, ‘The Moral Imperative of the Market’, in The Unfinished Agenda: Essays on the Political Economy of Government Policy in Honour of Arthur Seldon, London: Institute of Economic Affairs ———, 1994, Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue, ed.


pages: 476 words: 118,381

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Arthur Eddington, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, carbon-based life, centralized clearinghouse, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, space junk, space pen, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, trade route

When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe, with its galaxies hurtling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionately represented among them. When I pore over the data that establish the mysterious presence of dark matter and dark energy throughout the universe, sometimes I forget that every day—every twenty-four-hour rotation of Earth—people kill and get killed in the name of someone else’s conception of God, and that some people who do not kill in the name of God kill in the name of their nation’s needs or wants.

., 166, 175 Classification Act of 1949, 268–69 Clinton, Bill, 6 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (film), 37 Colbert, Stephen, 186–88 Cold War, 5–6, 59, 80, 87, 111, 192, 200, 219 Collier’s, 111 Columbia space shuttle, 12, 15, 60, 96, 130, 142, 156, 199–201, 210 Columbus, Christopher, 8, 87 Comet Halley, 88 Comet Hyakutake, 47 Comet Ikeya-Seki, 88 comets, 103, 116, 255 eccentric orbits of, 115 ecosystems and impact of, 51–52 impact rate of, xi long-period, 46–47 risk of impact by, 46–47 short-period, 46 water and, 48 Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, 52, 88, 102 Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2008, 289 Commerce, Department of, US, 305 Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984, 5 Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy, 13 Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry, 146, 316–19 appointments to, 316–17 establishment of, 316 personnel matters and, 318–19 termination of, 319 Communist Party, Soviet, 121 Congress, US, xiv, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 73, 79, 81, 82, 143, 191, 192, 228, 314 see also House of Representatives, US; Senate, US Constellation program, 186 Contact (film), 28 Convention on Registration of Objects Launched into Outer Space, 310–11 Cook, James, 160 Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRDAs), 303–8 Copernican principle, 34, 36 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 34, 97, 115, 118 Corey, Cyrus, 212 cosmic microwave background, 92, 94–95, 176 cosmic perspective, 258, 259–61 cosmochemistry, 30 Cosmos (TV show), 256 Cosmos 1 spacecraft, 166, 170 Cosmos 954 satellite, 168 Cronkite, Walter, 145–46 culture, 72–74, 147–48, 210–11 Curie, Marie, 96 Curtis, Heber D., 98–101 Cyrano de Bergerac, Savinien de, 217 Daniels, George H., 215–16 dark energy, 255 dark matter, 255 Darwin, Charles, 98 Deep Space 1 spacecraft, 164–65, 169–70 Deep Space Network, 246 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 125 Defense, Department of, US, 271, 274, 309, 312 De Forest, Lee, 218 Democrats, 4–5, 13, 224 Denmark, 7 De Revolutionibus (Copernicus), 115 Descent of Man (Darwin), 98 dinosaurs, 49, 103 Dirac, Paul A.


pages: 124 words: 40,697

The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, fudge factor, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Mercator projection, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Turing machine

Electromagnetic force • the second strongest of the four forces of nature. It acts between particles with electric charges. Electron • an elementary particle of matter that has a negative charge and is responsible for the chemical properties of elements. Fermion • a matter-type elementary particle. Galaxy • a large system of stars, interstellar matter, and dark matter that is held together by gravity. Gravity • the weakest of the four forces of nature. It is the means by which objects that have mass attract each other. Heisenberg uncertainty principle • a law of quantum theory stating that certain pairs of physical properties cannot be known simultaneously to arbitrary precision.


pages: 353 words: 355

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

This scientific method keeps driving the evolution of our understanding of the world. Today, in some ways, we have a scientific situation similar to the one a century ago. For example, we can't account for a big chunk of the mass that, according to current theories, should exist in the universe—we're talking 90 percent of the mass, which we call dark matter, partly because we can't find it. Something seems screwy here. Or according to our big bang theory of creation, the universe is expanding out from that initial explosion in one of two ways: Either it has been expanding at a steady rate after that first shove into the emptiness of space, or it is expanding but decelerating because of the gravitational pull of all the bodies in the universe.

See microprocessors Connections, See Networks Christian Democratic coalition, 94, Control vs. complexity, 263-265 113 Copernicus, 212 Chrysler, 60, 175 Corporations, 2, 42-45, 121 Citibank, 262 Climate change Corruption, 114-115, 126 COX2, 190 developing vs. developed worlds, 157-159 Crime, 285-286 floods, 150 Culture preservation, 234 forest fires, 150-151 Cuyahoga River, 156 global warming, 10, 152-154 Cyberspace libraries, 89 Hurricane Andrew, 149,150 Cystic fibrosis, 198 Hurricane Mitch, 150 overview, 148-154 Daimler-Benz, 60,171, 174 pollution in China, 158-159 D'Alema, Massimo, 94 regional weather problems, 151 Dark matter, 213 tornadoes, 151 Databases, 215-216 United Nation's Conference on Decentralization Climate Change, 157 personal computers and, 19, 26 Clinton, President Bill, 41, 52, 76, ragtag computer techies fostering, 92, 121 28-30 Cloning, 195-199 of telecommunications, 22,178 Club of Rome, 162 of utilities industry, 178-181 Coal, 158-159 Defense Advanced Research Projects Coca Cola, 112 Agency (DARPA), 50 Code of honor, 28-30 Delphi Energy & Engine Cold fusion, 219-220 Management Systems, 176 Cold War, 48, 49, 134-135, 22 Deming, W, Edwards, 119 Colorado, 267 Democracy Communism, 40, 116, 262 free markets and, 111-112, 115 Compassionate conservatism, 274 growth of middle class and, 235 Complexity theory, 263-265 media freedom in, 114 Computers rule of twos in, 112-114 economic decentralization and, in Singapore, 269 19, 26, 28-30 transparency rule, 114-115 impact of, 189-190 women in, 250 326 Democratic Party, 76-77 Democrats of the Left, 92 Deng, Xiaoping, 48, 116 Depression, 51-52 Deregulation of European businesses, 93 of U.S. businesses, 41 of utilities industry, 178,180-181 in Washington consensus, 96 Detroit Edison, 178 Digital technologies, 25-26 Diversity, 248, 273 DNA, 188-189, 197-198 Dolly, 195 Dow Jones Industrial Average, 47, 92 Downsizing, 42, 93 Drake, Frank, 220 Drake's equation, 220 Drexler, Eric, 203-204, 208 Dust Bowl, 149 Earth Day, 160 Earth Summit, 157 East vs.


pages: 677 words: 121,255

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

An encounter with the deity who created our universe and (presumably) the heavenly cloud where our connectome souls are uploaded after death would very probably top all of these encounters, given its implications for our future existence, not to mention the opportunity to answer science’s deepest questions from the ontological source itself: What is dark energy and dark matter? What was there before the Big Bang? Did you create our universe out of a singularity, and if so how did you do that … and why? We only have our thoughts and the tools of communicating those thoughts through speech and writing. Thus, free thought and free speech are the epistemological primitive, the ground of all other rights.

None of these arguments is relevant to the question because, I contend, whether there is a God or not, the universe per se cannot have a purpose in any anthropomorphic sense for which that term is usually employed. The universe is simply the collection of galaxies, stars, planets, comets, meteorites, and other solar system detritus, plus whatever dark matter and dark energy turn out to be. The universe is governed by laws of nature that themselves have no purpose other than dictating what matter and energy do. Stars, for example, convert hydrogen into helium, and they have no choice in the matter once they reach a certain size and temperature. Stars are not sitting around thinking “my purpose in life is to convert hydrogen into helium, so I better get on with it.”


pages: 592 words: 125,186

The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It by Matthew Williams

3D printing, 4chan, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic bias, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, gamification, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, Oklahoma City bombing, OpenAI, Overton Window, power law, selection bias, Snapchat, statistical model, The Turner Diaries, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, white flight

SQUIDs are so remarkably sensitive that they have been compared to hearing a pin drop at an AC-DC concert.2 They are used to detect gravitational waves, undulations in space-time emanating from cataclysmic events in the universe like a star going supernova or the collision of two black holes 1.8 billion light years away.¶ They have also been used in attempts to detect axions, the ghostlike particles with virtually no weight that were candidates for the dark matter that makes up 85 per cent of the universe. More locally, they have been used to study brain activity in sufferers of epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease. It may come as no surprise to learn that the theory underpinning SQUIDs, the Josephson junction, won its namesake the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973.

., 1 Byrd, James, Jr, 1 California, 1, 2n, 3 Caliskan, Aylin, 1 Cambridge Analytica, 1, 2 cancer, 1, 2 Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC), 1, 2, 3, 4 caregiving motivational system, 1 care homes, 1, 2 Casablanca, 1 cascade effect, 1, 2 categorisation, 1, 2, 3, 4 Catholics, 1 Caucasian Crew, 1 causality, 1, 2 celebrities, 1, 2, 3, 4 censorship, 1, 2 Centennial Olympic Park, Atlanta, 1 Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 1 change blindness, 1 charity, 1, 2, 3 Charlottesville rally, 1, 2, 3n, 4 chatbots, 1, 2, 3 Chauvin, Derek, 1 Chelmsford, 1 Chicago, 1 childhood: attachment issues, 1; child abuse, 1, 2, 3; child grooming, 1; child play, 1; failures of containment, 1, 2, 3, 4; group threat, 1, 2; intergroup contact, 1, 2; learned stereotypes, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2; predicting hate crime, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; trigger events, 1, 2; understanding the ‘average’ hate criminal, 1; understanding the ‘exceptional’ hate offender, 1, 2, 3 China, 1, 2, 3, 4 Chinese people, 1, 2, 3 ‘Chinese virus,’ 1, 2 Cho, John, 1 Christchurch mosque attack, 1 Christianity, 1, 2, 3 cinema, 1 citizen journalism, 1 civilising process, 1 civil rights, 1, 2, 3, 4 class, 1, 2 cleaning, 1 climate change, 1, 2 Clinton, Hillary, 1, 2 cognitive behavioural therapy, 1 cognitive dissonance, 1 Cohen, Florette, 1, 2 Cold War, 1 collective humiliation, 1 collective quests for significance, 1, 2 collective trauma, 1, 2 colonialism, 1n, 2 Combat 1, 2 comedies, 1, 2, 3 Communications Acts, 1, 2 compassion, 1, 2, 3 competition, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 confirmation bias, 1 conflict, 1, 2, 3, 4 conflict resolution, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Connectome, 1 Conroy, Jeffrey, 1 Conservative Party, 1, 2, 3 conspiracy theories, 1, 2, 3 contact with others, 1, 2 containment: failures of, 1; hate as container of unresolved trauma, 1; understanding the ‘exceptional’ hate offender, 1, 2, 3 content moderation, 1, 2, 3 context, 1, 2, 3 Convention of Cybercrime, 1 cooperation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Copeland, David, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 coping mechanisms, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Cordoba House (‘Ground Zero mosque’), 1 correction for multiple comparisons, 1, 2n ‘corrective rape’, 1, 2 cortisol, 1 Council of Conservative Citizens, 1n counter-hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4 courts, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 COVID-19 pandemic, 1, 2, 3 Cox, Jo, 1, 2, 3 Criado Perez, Caroline, 1 crime, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Crime and Disorder Act 1998, 1n crime recording, 1, 2, 3, 4 crime reporting, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), 1 criminal justice, 1, 2, 3 Criminal Justice Act, 1, 2n criminal prosecution, 1, 2 criminology, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 cross-categorisation, 1 cross-race or same-race effect, 1 Crusius, Patrick, 1, 2 CUBRIC (Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre), 1, 2, 3, 4 cultural ‘feeding’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 cultural worldviews, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 culture: definitions, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; tipping point, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1 culture machine, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 culture wars, 1 Curry and Chips, 1 cybercrime, 1 dACC, see dorsal anterior cingulate cortex Daily Mail, 1, 2 Dailymotion, 1 Daily Stormer, 1, 2n Daley, Tom, 1, 2 Darfur, 1 dark matter, 1 death: events that remind us of our mortality, 1; newspapers, 1; predicting hate crime, 1; religion and hate, 1, 2; subcultures of hate, 1, 2; trigger events, 1, 2 death penalty, 1, 2 death threats, 1 decategorisation, 1 De Dreu, Carsten, 1, 2, 3, 4 deep learning, 1, 2 defence mechanisms, 1 defensive haters, 1, 2 dehumanisation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 deindividuation, 1, 2 deindustrialisation, 1, 2, 3, 4 Democrats, 1, 2, 3 Denny, Reginald, 1 DeSalvo, Albert (the Boston Strangler), 1 desegregation, 1, 2, 3 Desmond, Matthew, 1 Dewsbury, 1, 2, 3 Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging (Diffusion MRI), 1, 2 diminished responsibility, 1, 2 Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), 1 disability: brain and hate, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; intergroup contact, 1; Japan care home, 1, 2; online hate speech, 1; profiling the hater, 1; suppressing prejudice, 1; victim perception, 1n Discord, 1, 2, 3, 4 discrimination: brain and hate, 1, 2; comedy programmes, 1; Google searches, 1; Japan laws, 1; preference for ingroup, 1; pyramid of hate, 1, 2, 3; questioning prejudgements, 1; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 disgust: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; group threat detection, 1, 2, 3; ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1, 2; Japan care home, 1; what it means to hate, 1, 2 disinformation, 1, 2, 3 displacement, 1, 2 diversity, 1, 2, 3 dlPFC, see dorsolateral prefrontal cortex domestic violence, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Doran, John, 1, 2, 3 dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), 1, 2, 3n, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), 1n, 2, 3 Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger, 1 drag queens, 1 drugs, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Duggan, Mark, 1 Duke, David, 1 Dumit, Joe, Picturing Personhood, 1 Durkheim, Emile, 1 Dykes, Andrea, 1 Earnest, John T., 1 Eastern Europeans, 1, 2, 3 Ebrahimi, Bijan, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 echo chambers, 1, 2n economy, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 EDL, see English Defence League education, 1, 2, 3, 4 Edwards, G., 1 8chan, 1, 2 elections, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 electroencephalography, 1n elites, 1 ELIZA (computer program), 1 The Ellen Show, 1 El Paso shooting, 1 Elrod, Terry, 1 Emancipation Park, Charlottesville, 1 Emanuel African Methodist Church, Charleston, 1 emotions: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4n, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; group threat, 1; subcultures of hate, 1; trigger events and mortality, 1; what it means to hate, 1, 2, 3, 4 empathy: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; feeling hate together, 1; group threat, 1, 2; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; subcultures of hate, 1; trauma and containment, 1 employment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 English Defence League (EDL), 1, 2n, 3 epilepsy, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Epstein, Robert, 1 equality, 1, 2 Essex, 1 ethnicity, 1, 2n, 3, 4 ethnic minorities, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ethnocentrism, 1 EU, see European Union European Commission, 1, 2 European Digital Services Act, 1 European Parliament, 1, 2 European Social Survey, 1 European Union (EU): Brexit referendum, 1, 2, 3, 4n, 5; Facebook misinformation, 1; group threat, 1, 2; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3; trigger events, 1 Eurovision, 1 evidence-based hate crime, 1 evolution, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 executive control area: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; disengaging the amygdala autopilot, 1, 2; extremism, 1; recognising false alarms, 1; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1 exogenous shocks, 1 expert opinion, 1 extreme right, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 extremism: Charlottesville and redpilling, 1, 2; feeling hate together, 1; online hate speech, 1; perceiving versus proving hate, 1; quest for significance, 1, 2, 3; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 Facebook: algorithms, 1, 2; Charlottesville rally, 1, 2; Christchurch mosque attack, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; filter bubbles, 1, 2; how much online hate speech, 1, 2; Myanmar genocide, 1; online hate and offline harm, 1, 2, 3; redpilling, 1; stopping online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4 facial expression, 1, 2, 3, 4 faith, 1, 2 fake accounts, 1, 2; see also bots fake news, 1, 2, 3, 4 false alarms, 1, 2, 3 Farage, Nigel, 1, 2 far left, 1n, 2, 3, 4 Farook, Syed Rizwan, 1 far right: algorithms, 1, 2, 3, 4; brain injury, 1; Charlottesville rally, 1, 2, 3n, 4; COVID-19 pandemic, 1, 2; Facebook, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; filter bubbles, 1, 2; gateway sites, 1; group threat, 1, 2; red-pilling, 1; rise of, 1; stopping online hate speech, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; terror attacks, 1, 2, 3; tipping point, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4n; trigger events, 1, 2; YouTube, 1 fathers, 1, 2, 3 FBI, see Federal Bureau of Investigation fear: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; feeling hate together, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; mortality, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3; steps to stop hate, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1, 2; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Federation of American Immigration Reform, 1 Ferguson, Missouri, 1 Festinger, Leon, 1 fiction, 1 Fields, Ted, 1 50 Cent Army, 1 ‘fight or flight’ response, 1, 2, 3 films, 1, 2 filter bubbles, 1, 2, 3, 4 Finland, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Finsbury Park mosque attack, 1, 2, 3 first responders, 1 Fiske, Susan, 1 Five Star Movement, 1 flashbacks, 1 Florida, 1, 2 Floyd, George, 1, 2, 3 Flynt, Larry, 1 fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 football, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 football hooligans, 1, 2 Forever Welcome, 1 4chan, 1, 2 Fox News, 1, 2 Franklin, Benjamin, 1 Franklin, Joseph Paul, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Fransen, Jayda, 1 freedom fighters, 1, 2 freedom of speech, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 frustration, 1, 2, 3, 4 functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 fundamentalism, 1, 2 fusiform face area, 1 fusion, see identity fusion Gab, 1 Gadd, David, 1, 2n, 3, 4 Gaddafi, Muammar, 1, 2 Gage, Phineas, 1, 2 galvanic skin responses, 1 Gamergate, 1 gateway sites, 1 gay people: author’s experience, 1, 2, 3; brain and hate, 1, 2; Copeland attacks, 1, 2; COVID-19 pandemic, 1; filter bubbles, 1; gay laws, 1; gay marriage, 1, 2, 3; group associations, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; hate counts, 1, 2, 3, 4; physical attacks, 1, 2; profiling the hater, 1; Russia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Section 1, 2, 3, 4; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; trigger events, 1, 2; why online hate speech hurts, 1; see also LGBTQ+ people gay rights, 1, 2, 3, 4 gender, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Generation Identity, 1 Generation Z, 1, 2 genetics, 1n, 2, 3 genocide, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Georgia (country), 1 Georgia, US, 1, 2, 3, 4 Germany, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Gilead, Michael, 1 ginger people, 1 girls, and online hate speech, 1 Gladwell, Malcolm, 1 Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, 1 glucocorticoids, 1, 2 God, 1, 2 God’s Will, 1, 2 Goebbels, Joseph, 1 Google, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Google+, 1 Google Translate, 1 goth identity, 1, 2, 3, 4 governments, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Grant, Oscar, 1 gravitational waves, 1 Great Recession (2007–9), 1 Great Replacement conspiracy theory, 1 Greece, 1, 2 Greenberg, Jeff, 1, 2, 3 Greene, Robert, 1 grey matter, 1 Grillot, Ian, 1, 2 Grodzins, Morton, 1 grooming, 1, 2, 3 ‘Ground Zero mosque’ (Cordoba House), 1 GroupMe, 1 groups: ancient brains in modern world, 1; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; childhood, 1; feeling hate together, 1; foundations of prejudice, 1; group threat and hate, 1; identity fusion, 1, 2, 3; intergroup hate, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; reasons for hate offending, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2; tipping point, 1, 2, 3, 4; warrior psychology, 1, 2, 3; what it means to hate, 1, 2 group threat, 1; beyond threat, 1; Bijan as the threatening racial other, 1; context and threat, 1; cultural machine, group threat and stereotypes, 1; evolution of group threat detection, 1; human biology and threat, 1; neutralising the perception of threat, 1; overview, 1; society, competition and threat, 1; threat in their own words, 1 guilt, 1, 2, 3, 4 guns, 1, 2 ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1, 2, 3, 4 Haines, Matt, 1 Haka, 1 Halle Berry neuron, 1, 2 harassment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 harm of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Harris, Brendan, 1 Harris, Lasana, 1 Harris, Lovell, 1, 2, 3, 4 hate: author’s brain and hate, 1; the brain and hate, 1; definitions, 1, 2; feeling hate together, 1; foundations of prejudice and hate, 1, 2, 3; group threat and hate, 1; ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1, 2; hate counts, 1; hate in word and deed, 1; profiling the hater, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; rise of the bots and trolls, 1; seven steps to stop hate, 1; subcultures of hate, 1; tipping point from prejudice to hate, 1; trauma, containment and hate, 1; trigger events and ebb and flow of hate, 1; what it means to hate, 1 hate counts, 1; criminalising hate, 1; how they count, 1; overview, 1; perceiving versus proving hate, 1; police and hate, 1; rising hate count, 1; ‘signal’ hate acts and criminalisation, 1; Sophie Lancaster, 1; warped world of hate, 1 hate crime: author’s experience, 1, 2, 3; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; definitions, 1; events and hate online, 1; events and hate on the streets, 1, 2; the ‘exceptional’ hate criminal, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3; foundations of prejudice and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; hate counts, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; laws, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5; number of crimes, 1, 2; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; predicting hate crime, 1; profiling the hater, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; understanding the ‘average’ hate criminal, 1; understanding the ‘exceptional’ hate offender, 1; what it means to hate, 1, 2, 3 hate groups, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 hate in word and deed, 1; algorithmic far right, 1; Charlottesville rally, 1, 2, 3n, 4; extreme filter bubbles, 1; game changer for the far right, 1; gateway sites, 1; overview, 1; ‘real life effort post’ and Christchurch, 1; red-pilling, 1 HateLab, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 hate speech: far-right hate, 1, 2, 3; filter bubbles and bias, 1; harm of, 1; how much online hate speech, 1; Japan laws, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; stopping online hate speech, 1; Tay chatbot, 1; trigger events, 1, 2, 3; why online hate speech hurts, 1 hate studies, 1, 2 ‘hazing’ practices, 1 health, 1, 2, 3, 4 Henderson, Russell, 1 Herbert, Ryan, 1 Hewstone, Miles, 1 Heyer, Heather, 1 Hinduism, 1, 2 hippocampus, 1, 2, 3, 4 history of offender, 1 Hitler, Adolf, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 HIV/AIDS, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 hollow mask illusion, 1, 2 Hollywood, 1, 2 Holocaust, 1, 2, 3, 4 Homicide Act, 1n homophobia: author’s experience, 1, 2, 3, 4; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3; evidence-based hate crime, 1; federal law, 1; jokes, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2; Russia, 1, 2; Shepard murder, 1; South Africa, 1; trauma and containment, 1; victim perception of motivation, 1n Homo sapiens, 1 homosexuality: author’s experience, 1; online hate speech, 1; policing, 1; questioning prejudgements, 1; Russia, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1, 2; see also gay people hooligans, 1, 2 Horace, 1 hormones, 1, 2, 3 hot emotions, 1 hot-sauce study, 1, 2 housing, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Huddersfield child grooming, 1 human rights, 1, 2, 3 humiliation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 humour, 1, 2 Hungary, 1 hunter-gatherers, 1n, 2 Hustler, 1 IAT, see Implicit Association Test identity: author’s experience of attack, 1; British identity, 1, 2; Charlottesville rally, 1, 2; children’s ingroups, 1; group threat, 1, 2; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; steps to stop hate, 1, 2 identity fusion: fusion and hateful murder, 1; fusion and hateful violence, 1; fusion and self-sacrifice in the name of hate, 1; generosity towards the group, 1; tipping point, 1, 2; warrior psychology, 1, 2, 3 ideology, 1, 2, 3, 4 illegal hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4 illocutionary speech, 1 imaging, see brain imaging immigration: Forever Welcome, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; hate counts, 1n, 2; HateLab Brexit study, 1; identity fusion, 1; intergroup contact, 1; negative stereotypes, 1; online hate speech, 1; Purinton, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3; trigger events, 1, 2n, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; YouTube algorithms, 1 immortality, 1, 2 Implicit Association Test (IAT), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 implicit prejudice: author’s brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; online hate speech, 1, 2 India, 1 Indonesia, 1 Infowars, 1, 2 Ingersoll, Karma, 1 ingroup: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; child play, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; HateLab Brexit study, 1; identity fusion, 1, 2; pyramid of hate, 1; reasons for hate offending, 1; trigger events, 1, 2, 3; what it means to hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Instagram, 1, 2, 3 Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 1 institutional racism, 1 instrumental crimes, 1 insula: brain and signs of prejudice, 1, 2, 3; facial expressions, 1, 2; fusiform face area, 1; hacking the brain to hate, 1; hate and feeling pain, 1; neuroscience of hate, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5; parts that edge us towards hate, 1; parts that process prejudice, 1; processing of ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1, 2 Integrated Threat Theory (ITT), 1, 2, 3 integration, 1, 2, 3, 4 intergroup contact, 1, 2, 3 Intergroup Contact Theory, 1, 2, 3 intergroup hate, 1, 2, 3, 4 internet: algorithms, 1, 2; chatbots, 1; counterhate speech, 1; COVID-19 pandemic, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; filter bubbles, 1, 2, 3; Google searches, 1; hate speech harm, 1; how much online hate speech, 1; online news, 1; reasons for hate offending, 1; rise of the bots and trolls, 1; stopping online hate speech, 1; tipping point, 1, 2, 3; training the machine to count hate, 1; why online hate speech hurts, 1 interracial relations, 1, 2, 3, 4 intolerance, 1, 2 Iranian bots, 1 Iraq, 1 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 1 ISIS, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Islam: group threat, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 Islamism: group threat, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; profiling the hater, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 Islamophobia, 1, 2, 3, 4 Israel, 1, 2, 3 Italy, 1, 2 ITT, see Integrated Threat Theory James, Lee, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Japan, 1, 2, 3 Jasko, Katarzyna, 1 Jefferson, Thomas, 1 Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin, 1 Jewish people: COVID-19 pandemic, 1, 2; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; filter bubbles, 1; Google searches, 1, 2; group threat, 1; Nazism, 1, 2; negative stereotypes, 1 2 online hate speech, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; questioning prejudgements, 1; ritual washing, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2; trauma and Franklin, 1, 2, 3 jihad, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 jokes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Jones, Alex, 1 Jones, Terry, 1 Josephson junction, 1 Judaism, 1; see also Jewish people Jude, Frank, Jr, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Kansas, 1 Kerry, John, 1 Kik, 1 King, Gary, 1 King, Martin Luther, Jr, 1, 2 King, Rodney, 1, 2, 3 King, Ryan, 1 Kirklees, 1, 2 KKK, see Ku Klux Klan Kuchibhotla, Srinivas, 1, 2, 3, 4 Kuchibhotla, Sunayana, 1, 2 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 1, 2, 3n, 4, 5, 6, 7 Labour Party, 1, 2, 3 Lancaster, Sophie, 1, 2 language, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department), 1 Lapshyn, Pavlo, 1 Lashkar-e-Taiba, 1 Las Vegas shooting, 1, 2 Latinx people, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 law: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3; criminalising hate, 1; hate counts, 1, 2, 3; Kansas shooting, 1; limited laws, 1; online hate speech, 1; pyramid of hate, 1 Law Commission, 1 Lawrence, Stephen, 1 learned fears, 1, 2, 3 Leave.EU campaign, 1, 2 Leave voters, 1, 2, 3n Lee, Robert E., 1, 2, 3 left orbitofrontal cortex, 1n, 2n Legewie, Joscha, 1, 2, 3, 4 lesbians, 1, 2 Levin, Jack, 1 LGBTQ+ people, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17; see also gay people LIB, see Linguistic Intergroup Bias test Liberman, Nira, 1 Liberty Park, Salt Lake City, 1, 2 Libya, 1, 2, 3, 4 Light, John, 1 Linguistic Intergroup Bias (LIB) test, 1 Liverpool, 1, 2 Livingstone, Ken, 1, 2 Loja, Angel, 1 London: author’s experience of attack, 1; Copeland nail bombing, 1, 2; Duggan shooting, 1; far-right hate, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3; online hate speech, 1, 2; Rigby attack, 1; terror attacks, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 London Bridge attack, 1, 2, 3 London School of Economics, 1 ‘lone wolf’ terrorists, 1, 2, 3, 4 long-term memory, 1, 2, 3, 4 Loomer, Laura, 1 Los Angeles, 1 loss: group threat, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; tipping point, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 love, 1, 2 Love Thy Neighbour, 1 Lucero, Marcelo, 1, 2 Luqman, Shehzad, 1 ‘Macbeth effect’, 1 machine learning, 1 Madasani, Alok, 1, 2, 3 Madrid attack, 1, 2 Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI): Diffusion MRI, 1, 2; functional MRI, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 magnetoencephalography (MEG), 1, 2, 3 Maldon, 1 Malik, Tashfeen, 1 Maltby, Robert, 1, 2 Manchester, 1, 2 Manchester Arena attack, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 marginalisation, 1, 2 Martin, David, 1 Martin, Trayvon, 1, 2 MartinLutherKing.org, 1, 2 martyrdom, 1, 2, 3, 4n masculinity, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 The Matrix, 1 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Prevention Act, 1n, 2n Matz, Sandra, 1 Mauritius, 1 McCain, John, 1 McDade, Tony, 1 McDevitt, Jack, Levin McKinney, Aaron, 1 McMichael, Gregory, 1 McMichael, Travis, 1 media: far-right hate, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; stereotypes in, 1, 2; subcultures of hate, 1; trigger events, 1 Meechan, Mark, 1 MEG (magnetoencephalography), 1, 2, 3 memory, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 men, and online hate speech, 1 men’s rights, 1 mental illness, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 mentalising, 1, 2, 3 meta-analysis, 1 Metropolitan Police, 1 Mexican people, 1, 2, 3, 4 micro-aggressions, 1, 2n, 3, 4, 5, 6 micro-events, 1 Microsemi, 1n Microsoft, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 micro-targeting, 1, 2 Middle East, 1, 2 migration, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; see also immigration Milgram, Stanley, 1 military, 1 millennials, 1 Milligan, Spike, 1 Milwaukee, 1, 2, 3 minimal groups, 1 Minneapolis, 1, 2, 3 minority groups: far-right hate, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; police reporting, 1; questioning prejudgements, 1; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1, 2 misinformation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 mission haters, 1, 2, 3 mobile phones, 1, 2, 3 moderation of content, 1, 2, 3 Moore, Nik, 1 Moore, Thomas, 1 Moores, Manizhah, 1 Moore’s Ford lynching, 1 Moradi, Dr Zargol, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Moral Choice Dilemma tasks, 1, 2, 3 moral cleansing, 1, 2, 3 moral dimension, 1, 2, 3, 4 moral outrage, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Moroccan people, 1, 2 mortality, 1, 2, 3 mortality salience, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Moscow, 1 mosques, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Moss Side Blood, 1 mothers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 motivation, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Mphiti, Thato, 1 MRI, see Magnetic Resonance Imaging Muamba, Fabrice, 1 multiculturalism, 1, 2, 3, 4 murder: brain injury, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3; hate counts, 1; identity fusion and hateful murder, 1; police and hate, 1, 2; profiling the hater, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Murdered for Being Different, 1 music, 1, 2, 3 Muslims: COVID-19 pandemic, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; Google searches, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; negative stereotypes, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2; profiling the hater, 1, 2; Salah effect, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; and Trump, 1, 2, 3, 4n, 5, 6n Mvubu, Themba, 1 Myanmar, 1, 2 Myatt, David, 1 Nandi, Dr Alita, 1 National Action, 1 National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, 1 national crime victimisation surveys, 1, 2 National Front, 1, 2, 3 nationalism, 1, 2 National Socialist Movement, 1, 2, 3, 4 natural experiments, 1, 2 Nature: Neuroscience, 1 nature vs nurture debate, 1 Nazism, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 NCVS (National Crime Victimisation Survey), 1, 2 negative stereotypes: brain and hate, 1, 2; feeling hate together, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; tipping point, 1 Nehlen, Paul, 1 neo-Nazis, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Netherlands, 1, 2 Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz (NetzDG) law, 1 neuroimaging, see brain imaging neurons, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 neuroscience, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Newark, 1, 2 news, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 newspapers, 1, 2, 3, 4 New York City, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 New York Police Department (NYPD), 1 New York Times, 1, 2 New Zealand, 1 n-grams, 1 Nimmo, John, 1 9/11 attacks, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 911 emergency calls, 1 Nogwaza, Noxolo, 1 non-independence error, 1, 2n Al Noor Mosque, Christchurch, 1 Northern Ireland, 1 NWA, 1 NYPD (New York Police Department), 1 Obama, Barack, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Occupy Paedophilia, 1 ODIHR, see Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights Ofcom, 1 offence, 1, 2, 3, 4 Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), 1, 2 Office for Security and Counter Terrorism, 1 office workers, 1 offline harm, 1, 2 Oklahoma City, 1 O’Mahoney, Bernard, 1 online hate speech: author’s experience, 1; COVID-19 pandemic, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; hate speech harm, 1; how much online hate speech, 1; individual’s role, 1; law’s role, 1; social media companies’ role, 1; steps to stop hate, 1; tipping point, 1, 2; training the machine to count hate, 1; trigger events, 1 Ono, Kazuya, 1 optical illusions, 1 Organization for Human Brain Mapping conference, 1 Orlando attack, 1 Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1 Osborne, Darren, 1 ‘other’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Ottoman Empire, 1 outgroup: author’s brain and hate, 1, 2, 3; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; child interaction and play, 1, 2; evolution of group threat detection, 1; feeling hate together, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1; HateLab Brexit study, 1; human biology and threat, 1; identity fusion, 1; prejudice formation, 1; profiling the hater, 1; push/pull factor, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; society, competition and threat, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2; tipping point, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 outliers, 1 Overton window, 1, 2, 3, 4 oxytocin, 1, 2, 3, 4 Paddock, Stephen, 1 Paddy’s Pub, Bali, 1 paedophilia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 page rank, 1 pain, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Pakistani people, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Palestine, 1 pandemics, 1, 2, 3, 4 Papua New Guinea, 1, 2, 3 paranoid schizophrenia, 1, 2 parents: caregiving, 1; subcultures of hate, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 Paris attack, 1 Parsons Green attack, 1, 2 past experience: the ‘average’ hate criminal, 1; the ‘exceptional’ hate criminal, 1; trauma and containment, 1 perception-based hate crime, 1, 2 perception of threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 perpetrators, 1, 2 personal contact, 1, 2 personality, 1, 2, 3 personality disorder, 1, 2 personal safety, 1, 2 personal significance, 1 perspective taking, 1, 2 PFC, see prefrontal cortex Philadelphia Police Department, 1 Philippines, 1 physical attacks, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 play, 1 Poland, 1, 2, 3 polarisation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 police: brain and hate, 1, 2; Duggan shooting, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3; and hate, 1; NYPD racial bias, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; perceiving versus proving hate, 1; police brutality, 1, 2, 3, 4; predicting hate crime, 1; recording crime, 1, 2, 3, 4; reporting crime, 1, 2, 3; rising hate count, 1, 2, 3; ‘signal’ hate acts and criminalisation, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; use of force, 1 Polish migrants, 1 politics: early adulthood, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2; filter bubbles and bias, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3; online hate speech, 1, 2; seven steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Trump election, 1, 2 populism, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 pornography, 1 Portugal, 1, 2 positive stereotypes, 1, 2 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 poverty, 1, 2, 3 Poway synagogue shooting, 1 power, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 power law, 1 predicting the next hate crime, 1 prefrontal cortex (PFC): brain and signs of prejudice, 1; brain injury, 1; disengaging the amygdala autopilot, 1; feeling pain, 1; ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1; prejudice network, 1; psychological brainwashing, 1; recognising false alarms, 1; salience network, 1; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1, 2 prehistoric brain, 1, 2 prehistory, 1, 2 prejudgements, 1 prejudice: algorithms, 1; author’s brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; brain and signs of prejudice, 1; cultural machine, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2; filter bubbles and bias, 1; foundations of, 1; Google, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; human biology and threat, 1; neuroscience of hate, 1, 2; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3; parts that process prejudice, 1; prejudice network, 1, 2, 3, 4; prepared versus learned amygdala responses, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; releasers, 1, 2; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; tipping point from prejudice to hate, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; Trump, 1, 2; unconscious bias, 1; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1; what it means to hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 prepared fears, 1, 2 Prisoner’s Dilemma, 1 profiling the hater, 1 Proposition 1, 2 ProPublica, 1n, 2 prosecution, 1, 2, 3 Protestants, 1 protons, 1 psychoanalysis, 1 psychological development, 1, 2, 3, 4 psychological profiles, 1 psychological training, 1 psychology, 1, 2, 3, 4 psychosocial criminology, 1, 2 psy-ops (psychological operations), 1 PTSD, see post-traumatic stress disorder Public Order Act, 1 pull factor, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Pullin, Rhys, 1n Purinton, Adam, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 push/pull factor, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 pyramid of hate, 1, 2 Q …, 1 al-Qaeda, 1, 2 quality of life, 1 queer people, 1, 2 quest for significance, 1, 2, 3 Quran burning, 1 race: author’s brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; brain and signs of prejudice, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3; Google searches, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; hate counts, 1, 2, 3; online hate speech, 1; predicting hate crime, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; race relations, 1, 2, 3; race riots, 1, 2; race war, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4n, 5, 6; trigger events, 1, 2; unconscious bias, 1; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1 racism: author’s experience, 1; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; far-right hate, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; Kansas shooting, 1; NYPD racial bias, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; steps to stop hate, 1n, 2, 3; Tay chatbot, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; Trump election, 1; victim perception of motivation, 1n; white flight, 1 radicalisation: far-right hate, 1, 2, 3; group threat, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; trigger events, 1 rallies, 1, 2, 3; see also Charlottesville rally Ramadan, 1, 2 rape, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 rap music, 1 realistic threats, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Rebel Media, 1 rebels, 1 recategorisation, 1 recession, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 recommendation algorithms, 1, 2 recording crime, 1, 2, 3, 4 red alert, 1 Reddit, 1, 2, 3, 4 red-pilling, 1, 2, 3, 4 refugees, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 rejection, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 releasers of prejudice, 1, 2 religion: group threat, 1, 2, 3; homosexuality, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3; predicting hate crime, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; religion versus hate, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2; subcultures of hate, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1n, 2; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; victim perception of motivation, 1n reporting crimes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 repression, 1 Republicans, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 research studies, 1 responsibility, 1, 2, 3 restorative justice, 1 retaliatory haters, 1, 2, 3 Reuters, 1 Rieder, Bernhard, 1 Rigby, Lee, 1 rights: civil rights, 1, 2, 3, 4; gay rights, 1, 2, 3, 4; human rights, 1, 2, 3; men’s rights, 1; tipping point, 1; women’s rights, 1, 2 right wing, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; see also far right Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale, 1 riots, 1, 2, 3, 4 risk, 1, 2, 3 rites of passage, 1, 2 rituals, 1, 2, 3 Robb, Thomas, 1 Robbers Cave Experiment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Robinson, Tommy (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), 1, 2, 3, 4 Rohingya Muslims, 1, 2 Roof, Dylann, 1, 2 Roussos, Saffi, 1 Rudolph, Eric, 1 Rushin, S,, 1n Russia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Russian Internet Research Agency, 1 RWA (Right-Wing Authoritarianism) scale, 1 Rwanda, 1 sacred value protection, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Saddam Hussein, 1 safety, 1, 2 Sagamihara care home, Japan, 1, 2 Salah, Mohamed, 1, 2, 3 salience network, 1, 2 salmon, brain imaging of, 1 Salt Lake City, 1 same-sex marriage, 1, 2 same-sex relations, 1, 2, 3 San Bernardino attack, 1n, 2, 3 Scanlon, Patsy, 1 scans, see brain imaging Scavino, Dan, 1n schizophrenia, 1, 2, 3, 4 school shootings, 1, 2 science, 1, 2, 3 scripture, 1, 2 SDO, see Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) scale Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME), 1 search queries, 1, 2, 3, 4 Second World War, 1, 2, 3 Section 1, Local Government Act, 1, 2, 3 seed thoughts, 1 segregation, 1, 2, 3 seizures, 1, 2, 3 selection bias problem, 1n self-defence, 1, 2 self-esteem, 1, 2, 3, 4 self-sacrifice, 1, 2, 3 Senior, Eve, 1 serial killers, 1, 2, 3 7/7 attack, London, 1 seven steps to stop hate, 1; becoming hate incident first responders, 1; bursting our filter bubbles, 1; contact with others, 1; not allowing divisive events to get the better of us, 1; overview, 1; putting ourselves in the shoes of ‘others’, 1; questioning prejudgements, 1; recognising false alarms, 1 sexism, 1, 2 sexual orientation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 sexual violence, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 sex workers, 1, 2, 3, 4 Shakespeare, William, Macbeth, 1 shame, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 shared trauma, 1, 2, 3 sharia, 1, 2 Shepard, Matthew, 1, 2 Sherif, Muzafer, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 shitposting, 1, 2, 3n shootings, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 ‘signal’ hate acts, 1 significance, 1, 2, 3 Simelane, Eudy, 1 skin colour, 1, 2, 3n, 4, 5, 6, 7 Skitka, Linda, 1, 2 slavery, 1 Slipknot, 1 slurs, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Snapchat, 1 social class, 1, 2 social desirability bias, 1, 2 Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) scale, 1 social engineering, 1 socialisation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 socialism, 1, 2 social media: chatbots, 1; COVID-19 pandemic, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; filter bubbles and bias, 1; HateLab Brexit study, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; online news, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; subcultures of hate, 1; trigger events, 1, 2; see also Facebook; Twitter; YouTube Social Perception and Evaluation Lab, 1 Soho, 1 soldiers, 1n, 2, 3 Sorley, Isabella, 1 South Africa, 1 South Carolina, 1 Southern Poverty Law Center, 1n, 2 South Ossetians, 1 Soviet Union, 1, 2 Spain, 1, 2, 3 Spencer, Richard B., 1 Spengler, Andrew, 1, 2, 3, 4 SQUIDs, see superconducting quantum interference devices Stacey, Liam, 1, 2 Stanford University, 1 Star Trek, 1, 2, 3 statistics, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 statues, 1 Stephan, Cookie, 1, 2 Stephan, Walter, 1, 2 Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth, Everybody Lies, 1 Stereotype Content Model, 1 stereotypes: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; cultural machine, group threat and stereotypes, 1; definitions, 1; feeling hate together, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4; homosexuality, 1; NYPD racial bias, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; study of prejudice, 1; tipping point, 1; trigger events, 1 Stoke-on-Trent, 1, 2 Stormfront website, 1, 2, 3 storytelling, 1 stress, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 striatum, 1, 2, 3n, 4 subcultures, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 subcultures of hate, 1; collective quests for significance and extreme hate, 1; extremist ideology and compassion, 1; fusion and generosity towards the group, 1; fusion and hateful murder, 1; fusion and hateful violence, 1; fusion and self-sacrifice in the name of hate, 1; quest for significance and extreme hatred, 1; religion/belief, 1; warrior psychology, 1 subhuman, 1, 2 Sue, D.


The Science of Language by Noam Chomsky

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, backpropagation, British Empire, Brownian motion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, Drosophila, epigenetics, finite state, Great Leap Forward, Howard Zinn, language acquisition, phenotype, public intellectual, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, trolley problem

[C] Further, [in] talking about the capacity to do science [in our very recently practiced form, you have to keep in mind that] it's not just very recent, it's very limited. Physicists, for example, don't go commit suicide over the fact that they can't find maybe 90 percent of what they think the universe is composed of [dark matter and dark energy]. In . . . [a recent] issue of Science, they report the failure of the most sophisticated technology yet developed, which they hoped would find [some of] the particles they think constitute dark matter. That's, say, 90 percent of the universe that they failed to find; so we're still in the dark about 90 percent of the matter in the universe. Well, that's regarded as a scientific problem in physics, not as the end of the field.


pages: 515 words: 142,354

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Alex Hyde-White

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, pensions crisis, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, working-age population

We get less output for any level of inputs, taking account, for instance, of the smaller capital stock.23 We can estimate the predicted effect of the smaller capital and other observable inputs on productivity. The difference between this and the actually observed decline in productivity is the result of missing “dark matter.” Something hard to observe is missing. Even if we can’t precisely parse out the components of this dark matter, it’s real and needs to be taken into account. There are many components of this missing capital. In their twenties, individuals accumulate skills that increase their productivity over a lifetime. But those skills are gained largely through on-the-job training.


pages: 491 words: 141,690

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

It might sound like something out of a Netflix series or a science fiction novel, but there is a real push towards reducing the population of this amazing planet by a bunch of psychopathic men that have the capacity to actually make it happen when they want to. The long-term plan for depopulation is shrouded in mystery and dressed up to look like a man-made disaster caused by the people, but like most of the attempts by the New World Order to control the world, it is lies upon lies forced upon the people by the corrupted corporate media. The Dark Matter of Power Being in control offers the types of rewards that true psychopaths seek: real power, almost endless amounts of money, fame, and everything that comes with it, a feeling of importance, the ability to make life and death decisions, and the influence to cover them up. It is this ability to cover up and intentionally keep the “People They Serve” blind and in the dark, that gives them the ability to change laws and influence morals, safe in the knowledge that people are generally uncomfortable with revealing the rot – as long as they can pretend it is not there.

In politics, the supreme powers are also being influenced by something that the people cannot see, but know is there. It remains in the darkness, but the control that it has over the politician is easily determined by his uncharacteristic actions that expose the hidden hand of influence. In the never-ending vastness of political dark matter, one only really begins to understand what they are up against when they make the decision to illuminate the places intentionally kept in the dark. To put it another way: Spreading mold covers more ground when the pantry door is shut, the light is turned off, and no one is watching. Sunlight is the best solution to illuminate the problem – and also to disinfect it.


pages: 189 words: 49,386

Letters From an Astrophysicist by Neil Degrasse Tyson

dark matter, do what you love, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, microaggression, Pluto: dwarf planet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unbiased observer

Tyson and any other kind brainiacs, My Aspergers son Jack* is scary smart and could very well be the next Einstein, which is his nickname. I’m trying to reach out to other super smart scientists who may be able to help Jack grow his gift. Jack’s vocabulary and obsessions consist of things like concept cars, nuclear fusion, biotech, particle accelerators, dark matter, anti-matter, worm holes, black holes, nanobots, creating cures for disease, and lots of hydrogen! I have no means of nourishing Jack’s brain. His spirit has been almost extinguished by his public school environment. I want so badly for Jack to have connections with other people. That can’t happen when the people surrounding him can’t relate or understand, or believe what he is talking about.


pages: 184 words: 53,625

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

Prize-backed challenges are an acknowledgment that governments work better when they tap the intelligence of the wider population. The power of these challenges does not merely arise from the sheer number of people involved but also from the intellectual diversity of the population. NASA cosponsored a challenge to elicit algorithms that would help computers map the dark matter in the universe. They created a “live leaderboard” of entries, so that participants could learn from their competitors and refine their submissions over time. Leading algorithms were submitted by a Ph.D. student researching satellite photos of glaciers, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School, and a signature verification expert from Qatar University.


pages: 185 words: 55,639

The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything by John Gribbin

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, complexity theory, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking

A shadow planet could pass right through the Earth and never affect us, except through its gravitational pull. It sounds like science fiction, but one reason that the idea has been taken seriously is that there is astronomical and cosmological evidence that a lot of the Universe exists in the form of dark matter, detectable gravitationally but not seen. It is, though, at least as likely that in the shadow universe later symmetry breakings occurred differently from in our own world, so that there are no shadow stars, and so on, after all. All this is tangential to the story being told here (but see In Search of the Big Bang).


pages: 180 words: 55,805

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, deliberate practice, digital twin, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, Milgram experiment, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, OpenAI, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, software as a service, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, zero-sum game

Those teams spent more than $100 million, developed breakthroughs, and launched a new space race which we are seeing the benefits of today. Since that time, other crowdsourced competitions have been used to develop breakthroughs in everything from healthcare, to creating better algorithms to find dark matter, to cleaning our oceans. One of the key attributes of crowdsourcing is that it is open to participation; it allows ideas and contribution to come from anywhere and anyone. Those solutions are often far better than anything that could have been imagined by experts in a field. The internal debate to write this book was derived from the most important lesson in my life, which also came from my greatest tragedy—the sudden loss of my brother.


pages: 732 words: 151,889

Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World by Paul Stamets

clean water, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, Exxon Valdez, invention of gunpowder, Louis Pasteur, phenotype, precautionary principle

FIGURE 5 A slime mold, Physarum polycephalum, chooses the shortest route between 2 food sources in a maze, disregarding dead ends. In a controversial article, Toshuyiki Nakagaki proposes that this represents a form of cellular intelligence. FIGURE 6 Computer model of the early universe. These primeval filaments in space resemble the mycelial archetype. FIGURE 7 Computer model of dark matter in universe. In a conjunct of string theory, more than 96 percent of the mass of the universe is theorized to be composed of these molecular threads. Note the galaxies interspersed throughout the myceliumlike matrix. The idea that a cellular organism can demonstrate intelligence might seem radical if not for work by researchers like Toshuyiki Nakagaki (2000).

FIGURE 10 Hurricane Isabella approaches North America in October 2003. FIGURE 11 Spiral galaxies conform to the same archetypal pattern as hurricanes and mycelium. The Mycelial Archetype Nature tends to build upon its successes. The mycelial archetype can be seen throughout the universe: in the patterns of hurricanes, dark matter, and the Internet. The similarity in form to mycelium may not be merely a coincidence. Biological systems are influenced by the laws of physics, and it may be that mycelium exploits the natural momentum of matter, just like salmon take advantage of the tides. The architecture of mycelium resembles patterns predicted in string theory, and astrophysicists theorize that the most energy-conserving forms in the universe will be organized as threads of matterenergy.


pages: 207 words: 52,716

Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons by Peter Barnes

Albert Einstein, car-free, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, dark matter, digital divide, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, hypertext link, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, jitney, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, new economy, patent troll, precautionary principle, profit maximization, Ronald Coase, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

But there’s another trove of wealth that’s not so well-known: our common wealth. Each of us is the joint recipient of a vast inheritance. This shared inheritance includes air and water, habitats and ecosystems, languages and cultures, science and technologies, social and political systems, and quite a bit more. Common wealth is like the dark matter of the economic universe—it’s everywhere, but we don’t see it. One reason we don’t see it is that much of it is, literally, invisible. Who can spot the air, an Reinventing the Commons | 67 aquifer, or the social trust that underlies financial markets? The more relevant reason is our own blindness: the only economic matter we notice is the kind that glistens with dollar signs.


pages: 198 words: 59,351

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning by Justin E. H. Smith

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Adrian Hon, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic management, artificial general intelligence, Big Tech, Charles Babbage, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, global pandemic, GPT-3, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kuiper Belt, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meme stock, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, passive income, Potemkin village, printed gun, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, strong AI, technological determinism, theory of mind, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, you are the product

Working in a vein largely uninformed by historical examples prior to the most recent era of technology, Schneider speculates, citing Caleb Scharf as inspiration, that a machine superintelligence invented by an alien species could by now have “blend[ed] in with natural features of the universe, perhaps it is in dark matter itself.”9 Of course, few ideas have a more ancient pedigree than the belief that the celestial bodies are intelligent, and indeed vastly superior to us: Schneider is refurbishing this old trope that we could just as easily have come across in Aristotle, while ornamenting it with the latest findings in physical cosmology.


pages: 181 words: 62,775

Half Empty by David Rakoff

airport security, Buckminster Fuller, dark matter, double helix, gentrification, global pandemic, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, phenotype, RFID, subprime mortgage crisis, twin studies, urban planning, urban renewal, wage slave, Wall-E, Y2K

(A hint: it rhymes with schmucking sneaker factory.) That can be a cold and lonely reality with which to contend, and one to which every one of us, even the most vinegar-soaked pessimist, is naturally resistant. We all spend our lives rejecting this truth and, consciously or not, entreating the universe—with its vast stretches of deep space, dark matter, and uncharted, immeasurable distances—to somehow align itself in sheer admiration of our fervor and gumption, to rain down precisely that which it is we wish for. And the universe will say nothing. Even the most charmed life is a veritable travelogue of disappointment. There will always be an inevitable gulf between hope and reality.


How to Be Black by Baratunde Thurston

affirmative action, carbon footprint, Columbine, dark matter, desegregation, drone strike, gentrification, high-speed rail, housing crisis, phenotype, plutocrats, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, supply-chain management, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

That name was just a bit too soft for a black kid from the city. Speaking of soft, my initial interest in the school was based entirely on the crush I had on a girl from my church, never a good reason to make a six-year commitment. Strike Two: building design. The school had no hallways. I don’t mean that the inside of the building consisted of dark matter or “The Nothing” from The Neverending Story. I mean the classrooms all had doors to the outside, and kids walked outdoors to get from one class to the next. I later learned that this is a common design in warm places like Southern California and Hawaii, but Green Acres was in Bethesda, Maryland, whose climate offers three full months a year with average low temperatures at or below freezing.


pages: 233 words: 62,563

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Cepheid variable, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, machine readable, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking

They did, however, allow for several other fates, which depend on the amount of mass in the cosmos. In the case of a light universe, the balloon of space-time could expand forever, getting bigger and bigger. The stars and galaxies would wink out, one by one. The universe grows cold and dies a heat death. However, if there is enough mass—galaxies, galaxy clusters, and unseen dark matter—the initial push given by the big bang wouldn’t be enough to allow the balloon to inflate forever. The galaxies would tug on one another, eventually pulling the fabric of space-time together; the balloon would begin to deflate. The deflation would get faster and faster, the universe would get hotter and hotter, and it would eventually end in a backward big bang: the big crunch.


pages: 219 words: 63,495

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

the condensed idea Beware terrorists with nuclear materials timeline 1995 Terrorists attempt to detonate dirty bomb in Moscow 2010 Stuxnet virus attacks nuclear facilities in Iran 2018 Man arrested after attempting to sell radioactive materials on eBay 2022 Al-Qaeda attempts to detonate dirty devices on three subway systems 2030 Tactical nuclear weapons used in Georgia 2060 25 percent of nations found to have secret nuclear programs 2080 Nuclear development abandoned in favor of dark-matter weapons 44 Volcanoes & quakes In 1815, a volcano known as Tambora erupted on an island called Sumbawa in Indonesia. The eruption was the most powerful ever recorded. It has been linked, by some people, to what became known as “The Year Without Summer,” where unusually low temperatures and ash clouds led to crop failures, severe food shortages and riots.


pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

Chapter 8: Cheap Is Good 1 Ed Lowther, “A Short History of the Pound,” BBC News, February 14, 2014. 2 Caroline Freund, “Current Account Adjustment in Industrialized Countries,” International Finance Discussion Papers (U.S. Federal Reserve, 2000). 3 Rudi Dornbusch, interview by Frontline, PBS, 1995. 4 Paul Davidson, “IMF Chief Says Global Growth Still Too Weak,” USA Today, April 2, 2014 5 Oliver Harvey and Robin Winkler, “Dark Matter: Hidden Capital Flows That Drive G10 Exchange Rates,” Deutsche Bank Markets Research Report, March 6, 2015. 6 “EM Macro Daily: China Capital Outflow Risk—The Curious Case of the Missing $300 Billions,” Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research, January 13, 2015. 7 Muhamad Chatib Basri and Hal Hill, “Ideas, Interests, and Oil Prices: The Political Economy of Trade Reform During Soeharto’s Indonesia,” World Economy 27, no. 5 (2004): 633–55.

: Capital Flows, Banks, and the Beatles.” Bank of England, 2014. Freund, Caroline. “Current Account Adjustment in Industrialized Countries.” International Finance Discussion Papers, 2000. “Global Macro Jottings: Financial Deglobalization.” VTB Capital, November 20, 2014. Harvey, Oliver, and Robin Winkler. “Dark Matter: The Hidden Capital Flows That Drive G10 Exchange Rates.” Deutsche Bank Markets Research, March 6, 2015). Hyman, Ed. “Bond Yields Up But S&P Advances.” Evercore ISI, February 18, 2015. “Is That a Kleptocrat in Your Balance of Payments?” Financial Times Alphaville, March 10, 2015. Kaminsky, Graciela, Saul Lizondo, and Carmen Reinhart.


On Nature and Language by Noam Chomsky

Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, complexity theory, dark matter, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, language acquisition, launch on warning, Murray Gell-Mann, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Turing test

And so, it often makes good sense to disregard phenomena and search for principles that really seem to give some deep insight into why some of them are that way, recognizing that there are others that you can’t pay attention to. Physicists, for example, even today can’t explain in detail how water flows out of the faucet, or the structure of helium, or other things that seem too complicated. Physics is in a situation in which something like 90 percent of the matter in the Universe is what is called dark matter – it’s called dark because they don’t know what it is, they can’t find it, but it has to be there or the physical laws don’t work. So people happily go on with the assumption that we’re somehow missing 90 percent of the matter in the Universe. That’s by now considered normal, but in Galileo’s 99 On nature and language time it was considered outrageous.


pages: 244 words: 68,223

Isaac Newton by James Gleick

Albert Einstein, Astronomia nova, complexity theory, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Richard Feynman, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

he wrote in one of many new drafts that did not see light.16 An active, interventionist God must organize the universe and the solar system: otherwise substance would be evenly diffused through infinite space or gathered together in one great mass. Surely God’s hand could be seen in the division between dark matter, like the planets, and shining matter, like the sun. All this “I do not think explicable by mere natural causes but am forced to ascribe it to the counsel & contrivance of a voluntary Agent.”17 He returned to his alchemical experiments, too. Whether or not Newton was like other men, by the summer of 1693 he was eating and sleeping poorly.


pages: 209 words: 68,587

Stephen Hawking by Leonard Mlodinow

Albert Michelson, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, do what you love, Ernest Rutherford, Eyjafjallajökull, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Nelson Mandela, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

But Stephen asked me to come home with him. There was still an hour or two before dinner, he said. He wanted to keep working. *1 Assuming that the discrepancy is not due to experimental error or a shortcoming of the approximation method employed to derive the prediction. *2 Dark energy and dark matter represent two unexplained anomalies in today’s physics. Will these eventually be explained within our current framework of theories, or by amending them, or will they require a completely new approach? No one knows. 3 Stephen lived in a house on shady Wordsworth Grove, a quiet street just a short walk outside the old city and close to his office.


pages: 213 words: 68,363

Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction by Judith Grisel

cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, double helix, epigenetics, Haight Ashbury, impulse control, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, phenotype, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), seminal paper, systems thinking, trade route, traumatic brain injury

Still, it is important to remember that in comparison to astronomy or physics the field of neuroscience is a neonate. About a hundred years ago, the field of astrophysics knew much more than it does today. How can this be? At the time, scientists were quite certain they knew the size and structure of the universe. Of course, this was before they had the foggiest notion about quantum mechanics, string theory, dark matter, or other paradigm shifts stemming from empirical research. In fact, astrophysics today barely resembles the field as it was in the early twentieth century. Space physicists these days are much more aware of what they don’t understand than they were then. We could characterize the change as a reduction in certainty and a rise in humility.


pages: 245 words: 71,886

Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story by Jeremy Farrar, Anjana Ahuja

"World Economic Forum" Davos, bioinformatics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, dual-use technology, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, machine translation, nudge unit, open economy, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, side project, social distancing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, zoonotic diseases

The antibody data showed nothing of the sort; only 6 per cent of the UK population had been infected by September 2020, nine months into the epidemic. At that point, the Declaration believers explained away the discrepancy between their theory and the antibody data by suggesting people were protected by ‘immunological dark matter’. It was an evidence-free assertion, as was the insistence by the Great Barringon supporters that there would be no second wave. Dominic Cummings claims he had wanted to run an aggressive press campaign against those behind the Great Barrington Declaration and to others opposed to blanket Covid-19 restrictions, such as Carl Heneghan (an Oxford University professor and GP), the oncologist Karol Sikora and Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens.


pages: 684 words: 188,584

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Craig Nelson

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, El Camino Real, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, Project Plowshare, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, TED Talk, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, éminence grise

Four other US nuclear reactors are named for Enrico, as is element number 100, fermium. NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has revealed a previously unknown fifty-thousand-light-year remnant of a black hole eruption at the very center of the Milky Way. Cosmologist Dan Hooper: “We’ve considered every astronomical source, and nothing we know of, except dark matter, can account for the observations. No other explanation comes anywhere close.” In its obituary, the New York Times said, “More than any other man of his time, Enrico Fermi could properly be named ‘the father of the atomic bomb.’ It was his epoch-making experiments at the University of Rome in 1934 that led directly to the discovery of uranium fission, the basic principle underlying the atomic bomb as well as the atomic power plant.

“The Röntgen Rays in America. McClure’s, April 1896. Monbiot, George. “Evidence Meltdown.” Guardian, April 5, 2011. Moran, Michael. “The Reckoning: The Future of American Power.” Slate, November 7–23, 2011. Morris, Errol, director. The Fog of War. Sony Pictures Classics, 2003. Mosher, Dave. “Signs of Destroyed Dark Matter Found in Milky Way’s Core.” Wired, October 26, 2010. Mueller, John. Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Myhrvold, Nathan. “After Fukushima: Now, More Than Ever.” New York Times, December 2, 2011. Nash, Philip. The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Jupiters, 1957–1963.


pages: 662 words: 180,546

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

Of course, sometimes the natural sciences themselves encountered something commensurable to a crisis in their own fields of endeavor—think of dark matter and dark energy, or the breakdown of causality in the 1920s—but they didn’t respond by evasive maneuvers and suppressing its consideration, as did the economists. In retrospect, appeals to science will be seen to have proven a bit of a red herring in coming to terms with the current crisis. Physical complexity theory or neuromysticism or dark matter won’t save us now. In the heat of battle, economists purported to be defending “science’”when, in fact, they were only defending themselves and their minions.


pages: 583 words: 182,990

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cakes and ale, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cryptocurrency, dark matter, decarbonisation, degrowth, distributed ledger, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, fiat currency, Food sovereignty, full employment, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, High speed trading, high-speed rail, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, land reform, liberation theology, liquidity trap, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, megastructure, Modern Monetary Theory, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rewilding, RFID, Robert Solow, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, synthetic biology, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, wage slave, Washington Consensus

We don’t know about dark matter, which should be called invisible matter, we don’t know them or what’s going on there. Presumably its individual constituent elements are something like me, but maybe not; no one knows. All that stuff flies around as if in a parallel universe slightly overlapping ours, maybe just waves, in any case gravity works on it for sure, because its very existence has been revealed to us by its gravitation effects. If we are similar to those dark-matterinos, it is in the way that light and dark are similar. Two parts of a whole, perhaps. I am visible, I embody light itself; dark matter is not actually dark, it is invisible, and we don’t know how or what it is.


pages: 230 words: 76,655

Choose Yourself! by James Altucher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, cashless society, cognitive bias, dark matter, digital rights, do what you love, Elon Musk, estate planning, John Bogle, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, mirror neurons, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, PageRank, passive income, pattern recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, superconnector, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, Y2K, Zipcar

When you’re an Idea Machine, everything you look at breaks down into a collection of ideas, just as physical objects would ultimately breakdown into collections of particles if your eyes were subatomic microscopes. Your eyes and brains become sub-idea microscopes that see the ideas that become the building blocks for everything in society. See them, build them, change them, seed them, birth them, love them, and live them. Ideas are the dark matter of the universe. We know it’s there, but only those “in the know” can see them. * * * What Do I Do Once I Become an Idea Machine? This is what I don’t know the answer to because you are the master of your life. Now you’re ready to take your unique place in the world. Now you have superpowers.


pages: 276 words: 74,074

The City Always Wins: A Novel by Omar Robert Hamilton

Berlin Wall, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, dark matter

Is he in the cells with you or on his own somewhere? Let us know about any specific books you’d like or if you have any new ideas—or new material—for podcasts. We will try to get Chaos back in action properly again now. See you soon man K * * * There is a black hole in the center of our lives. A silence, an unsaid lurking, a word, a place, dark matter slowly pulling all else into its nothingness. A thousand deaths live on television. And none of them us. And who are we, if not the ones fighting, not the ones dying? Should we have been ready to die for our enemies? Did we do this? * * * Black open-backed jeeps with men in SWAT gear drive around the streets.


pages: 256 words: 15,765

The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy by Dr. Jim Taylor

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, Donald Trump, estate planning, full employment, glass ceiling, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, passive income, performance metric, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ronald Reagan, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

., someone who has had too much to drink searching for his lost keys under a lamppost, where the light is good, rather than where the person is most likely to have lost the keys). Astronomers, for example, tend to study bright shiny objects such as stars and supernovas because they are easy to see, as opposed to the dark matter or dark energy that many believe actually constitutes over 95 percent of the universe. Living large is, by definition, an easier phenomenon to uncover than steal wealth. Media reports shape thinking in part through the 60 The New Elite vividness effect: the tendency of graphic or dramatic depictions of an event to lead people to overestimate how common that event is.


pages: 272 words: 76,089

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium by Carl Sagan

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, classic study, clean water, cosmic abundance, dark matter, demographic transition, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, germ theory of disease, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, planetary scale, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, zero-sum game

And so it is with the Universe: If it contains a great deal of matter, the gravity exercised by all this matter will slow down and stop the expansion. An expanding Universe"will be converted into a collapsing Universe. And if there is not enough matter, the expansion will continue forever. The present inventory of matter in the Universe is insufficient to slow the expansion, but there are reasons to think that there may be a great deal of dark matter that does not betray its existence by giving off light for the convenience of astronomers. If the expanding Universe turns out to be only temporary, ultimately to be replaced by a contracting Universe, this would certainly raise the possibility that the Universe goes through an infinite number of expansions and contractions and is infinitely old.


pages: 281 words: 78,317

But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, British Empire, citizen journalism, cosmological constant, dark matter, data science, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, George Santayana, Gerolamo Cardano, ghettoisation, Golden age of television, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, Large Hadron Collider, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, obamacare, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Y2K

Even on points of conflict, they generally force themselves into alignment: When I told Tyson that Greene was open to the possibility that our understanding of gravity might drastically change, Tyson implied that I may have phrased the question incorrectly. “He’s pointing forward to a time when our understanding of gravity includes our understanding of dark matter,” said Tyson. “That there will be some other understanding of gravity, but it will still enclose Newton’s laws of gravity and Einstein’s general relativity. So he may have presumed your question meant, ‘Is there anything left to be discovered about gravity?’ And that question is not clear to someone who researches gravity.”


pages: 252 words: 79,452

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge

They’ll tell you they’re trapped in the wrong body. But me, I’m trapped in the wrong body because I’m trapped in a body. All bodies are the wrong body.” We were, I felt, nearing the central paradox of transhumanism, the event horizon where Enlightenment rationalism, pushed to its most radical extremes, disappeared into the dark matter of faith. As unfair a double bind as it may have been, the more Tim denied any connection between his own thinking and the mysteries of religion, the more religious he sounded. But perhaps it wasn’t so much that transhumanism was a quasi-religious movement, as that it addressed itself toward the fundamental human contradictions and frustrations that had traditionally been the preserve of faith.


pages: 325 words: 73,035

Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life by Richard Florida

Abraham Maslow, active measures, assortative mating, back-to-the-city movement, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, Celebration, Florida, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, edge city, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, extreme commuting, financial engineering, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, invention of the telegraph, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-work, power law, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, World Values Survey, young professional

The answer, according to Ethan Watters, is a new surrogate family, the urban tribe.10 Watters defines it as an “intricate community of young people who live and work together in various combinations, form regular rituals, and provide the same kind of support as an extended family.” “If our tribes were maximizing our weak ties within a city,” Watters writes, “might we be creating the social science equivalent of dark matter—a force that was invisible but was nonetheless critical to holding everything together?” Furthermore, Watters argues, the urban tribe is especially good at meeting members’ needs for self-expression and self-actualization in ways that actual parents and siblings sometimes suppress. But these tribes are not just substitutes; on the contrary, they constitute what amounts to our real families, in ways the networks we were born into may never be.


Animals by Emma Jane Unsworth

call centre, dark matter, fear of failure, Google Earth, Higgs boson, Large Hadron Collider, rolodex, unpaid internship

Quite a blinder from the great beyond, I think you’ll agree. A fine example of blistering cosmic humour – and one I didn’t truly appreciate until I first started sending out submissions and received several rejections referring to the discrepancy between my own writing and that of my streamy namesake. Want to know what the mysterious ‘dark matter’ they’re searching for actually is? It’s Irony – billions of tons of the stuff, lurking, ready to go. The Universe is not indifferent; the Universe is amused. To get out of my bedroom I had to slide a clothes rail out of the way of the door. It was tricky getting back in again. In addition to the clothes rail and a small desk I had a single bed, which was why I often ended up in bed with Tyler.


pages: 238 words: 73,824

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

The barriers against entry to entrepreneurship in physical goods are dropping like a stone. “Markets of ten thousand” defines the successful niche strategy for products and services delivered online. That number is large enough to build a business on, but small enough to remain focused and avoid huge competition. It is the missing space in the mass-production industry, the dark matter in the marketplace—the Long Tail of stuff. It is also the opportunity for smaller, nimbler companies that have emerged from the very markets they serve, enabled by the new tools of democratized manufacturing to route around the old retail and production barriers. Even better, some of those companies that start with niche markets may graduate to huge ones.


pages: 227 words: 76,850

Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life by Sarah Edmondson

Albert Einstein, dark matter, financial independence, Keith Raniere, Mason jar, Skype, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, young professional

He had a boyish way of nervously biting his lip just before offering answers as he expounded on topics ranging from creativity to productivity to ethics to science. The thing was, I couldn’t follow what the hell he was saying in either of the forums that happened during this first V-Week. I might glean a couple nuggets of wisdom, but mostly I was lost. When Mark asked him a question about quantum physics and dark matter, Keith’s answer somehow shifted into how science has no free will. A question about the development of thought was met with an answer about something entirely unrelated. The senior levels asserted that Keith’s genius was a template to help anyone with their goals, regardless of the content, whether an individual had enrolled to get better at hockey, horse jumping, making more money, or whatever.


pages: 250 words: 75,151

The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution Is Making the World a Better Place by Felix Marquardt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, digital nomad, Donald Trump, George Floyd, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joi Ito, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sustainable-tourism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Yogi Berra, young professional

When I look back at where I come from as an alcoholic and addict – at the pain caused, the damage and the wreckage of my past – and I look at the miracle of my life in recovery, I see this ever-present potential for connection as one of the greatest privileges and indeed one of the most beautiful things in my life. Not everyone is an addict. But everyone is something. And you only need one thing to form a community with others. Whether you are into video games or football, Japanese aquarelles or Chilean wine, Vipassana meditation or opera, hip-hop or tango, Scrabble or chess, dark matter or dinosaurs (or both), there is something about you that can spark a network. The point is, you don’t need an existing network to get started. All you need in this day and age is a passion – or a problem, in my case – or even just an interest in something, anything, to initiate contact with people who down the line might provide a base for you to get started – wherever it is you hope to go.


pages: 244 words: 73,966

Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture by Bernardo Kastrup

active measures, cellular automata, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, conceptual framework, dark matter, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum entanglement, retail therapy, scientific worldview, sugar pill, systems thinking, the scientific method

Bernardo isn’t fortunate by the standards of mass media, which breathlessly announces the discovery of the Higgs boson but remains silent about metaphysics. But he’s very fortunate to discover many cutting-edge topics that push the envelope of both science and philosophy. To be frank, unless a philosopher can satisfy the demands of science, meeting it halfway about the brain, the nature of time, the existence of multiple universes, dark matter and energy, etc., the whole enterprise will just be zombie philosophy. It will move around as if alive but actually be dead. Fortunately, this is a fruitful time for ‘peeking beyond,’ because the accepted worldview of science, locked in its materialistic assumptions, has failed to show where time and space came from, what consciousness is, how deterministic laws of nature can be reconciled with free will, whether the brain can think or only parallels the mind’s invisible processes, and a host of related questions.


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Yaldabaoth plunged his clumsy hands into the pile of poop, and formed a world out of this sweating, semi-alive playdough. Then he made some people. Then he decided he was God. In some texts he is called Jehovah. It’s a Trump-style story from the beginning of time. As part of a pair, Sophia isn’t alone with her mess. Her counterpart, Christos, comes to pull her out of the bog of dark matter she has created. When they discover that this steaming, sweaty, material world is still infused with a glimmer of divine light, Christos agrees to impart the necessary knowledge (gnosis) whereby humankind can be informed, Matrix-like, of their true origins and true home. Humans, therefore, are not sinful.


My Shit Life So Far by Frankie Boyle

airport security, banking crisis, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, credit crunch, dark matter, David Attenborough, Jon Ronson, Live Aid, out of africa, pez dispenser, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, traveling salesman, urban planning

I seriously think that teenagers are now the only people who can handle the police drinking culture. I’ve always had a real problem with secondary education. It seems to exist to teach conformity and obedience over anything else. For me, it’s all in the bell. The bell goes and you move along to the next class. It doesn’t matter what you’re learning about, it could be Hamlet or dark matter. That bell goes and you trot along because nothing is more important than the system. My course qualified me to teach English and was full of the sort of boring, conformist bastards that made Hitler’s rise to power so easy. I thought this was terrible at first, then once I’d been in some staffrooms I realised that these tedious flesh puppets were going to fit in perfectly.


pages: 287 words: 80,050

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less by Emrys Westacott

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate raider, critique of consumerism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, degrowth, Diane Coyle, discovery of DNA, Downton Abbey, dumpster diving, financial independence, full employment, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, loss aversion, McMansion, means of production, move fast and break things, negative equity, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sunk-cost fallacy, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, Virgin Galactic, Zipcar

As Jürgen Habermas argues, building on Paul Grice’s analysis of conversational conventions, regardless of how we actually behave and our actual motivations, our discussions usually proceed on the shared assumption that we are all committed to establishing the truth about the topic under discussion.27 But a different paradigm of truth now dominates: the paradigm of truth established by science. For the most part this is not something that ordinary people can pursue by themselves through reflection, conversation, or even backyard observation and experiment. Does dark matter exist? Does eating blueberries decrease one’s chances of developing cancer? Is global warming producing more hurricanes? Does early involvement with music and dance make one smarter or morally better? Are generous people happier than misers? People may discuss such questions around the table. But in most cases when we talk about such things, we are ultimately prepared to defer to the authority of the experts whose views and findings are continually reported in the media.


pages: 277 words: 87,082

Beyond Weird by Philip Ball

Albert Einstein, Bayesian statistics, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, dark pattern, dematerialisation, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes

Quantum mechanics has nothing to say about them, and there would be no need to apologize for that if some scientists didn’t keep talking grandiosely about Theories of Everything that are silent about the things which matter most to most of us. fn2 Fundamental particles with spin 3/2, 5/2 and so on are possible in principle, but have never been observed. Some theories predict spin-3/2 particles as candidates for the mysterious ‘dark matter’ thought to make up about four-fifths of the mass of the universe, or as components of a (still elusive) quantum theory of gravity. Not everything is knowable at once fn1 Heisenberg of course used German words: in his original 1927 paper he refers to both Ungenauigkeit (inexactness) and Unbestimmtheit (undeterminedness or vagueness).


pages: 283 words: 81,376

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

We come across an extraterrestrial monolith on the moon. It awakens and informs us that observers are found throughout the universe. Some are biological, based on carbon and other elements. Some are artificial intelligences created by biological beings. But most observers are not made of atoms at all. What we call “dark energy” and “dark matter” are forms of cosmic intelligence. Still other observers inhabit planes of reality we know nothing about. How would this change our views? One take is that it underscores how our world is supremely fine-tuned for life. Yet the alien envoy has informed us that none of the things we thought were essential for observers actually are.


Toast by Stross, Charles

anthropic principle, Buckminster Fuller, cosmological principle, dark matter, disinformation, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, flag carrier, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, hydroponic farming, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Khyber Pass, launch on warning, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, NP-complete, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, performance metric, phenotype, plutocrats, punch-card reader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, slashdot, speech recognition, strong AI, traveling salesman, Turing test, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, Y2K

You're still locked into a pre-singularity economic model that thinks in terms of scarcity. Resource allocation isn't a problem any more -- it's going to be over within a decade. The cosmos is flat in all directions, and we can borrow as much bandwidth as we need from the first universal bank of entropy! They even found the dark matter -- MACHOs, big brown dwarves in the galactic halo, leaking radiation in the long infrared -- suspiciously high entropy leakage. The latest figures say something like 70% of the mass of the M31 galaxy was sapient, two point nine million years ago when the infrared we're seeing now set out. The intelligence gap between us and the aliens is a probably about a trillion times bigger than the gap between us and a nematode worm.


pages: 432 words: 85,707

QI: The Third Book of General Ignorance (Qi: Book of General Ignorance) by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Boris Johnson, British Empire, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, double helix, epigenetics, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

STEPHEN Which animal has the most genes? ALAN Jeremy Clarkson. What is junk DNA good for? Quite a lot, actually. Only 2 per cent of our DNA is actively involved in overseeing the production of the proteins which make new cells. The remaining 98 per cent was once thought to be useless, random, genetic soup – the dark matter of the human genome, dubbed ‘junk DNA’ by Japanese-American geneticist Susumu Ohno in 1972. Nowadays it’s called ‘non-coding’ DNA: it doesn’t tell the body how to make proteins, but it does decide how much gets made and which bits should be turned on and off. For example, non-coding DNA tells the cells in the liver they should produce liver enzymes, and hair cells that they should make the protein keratin, from which hair is made.


pages: 285 words: 86,174

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, carried interest, circulation of elites, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kenneth Arrow, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

In an extensive investigation into what they called “Top Secret America,” the Washington Post’s Dana Priest and William Arkin found a secret national security state so large and sprawling that almost no one could actually account for what its individual component parts did. It is the alternating waves of secrecy and disclosure that characterize our present epistemic crisis in realms far beyond just national security. We may have more financial data at our fingertips than ever before, but during the last several decades, the hidden universe of financial dark matter has dramatically expanded. The private equity industry, which takes companies private, outside the view of the SEC and public filings, more than tripled in size between 2001 and 2007. Between 2004 and 2007, the market for over-the-counter derivatives grew 74 percent. These derivatives, usually highly specialized, are traded one-to-one, away from the prying eyes of an organized exchange.


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Competing for the Future. Harvard Business Review Press. Hamel, G., & Breen, B. (2007). The Future of Management. Harvard Business Review Press. Hamel, G. (2012). What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation. Jossey-Bass. Hill, D. (2012). Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary. Strelka Press. Hinssen, P. (2004). The New Normal: Great Opportunities in a Time of Great Risk. Portfolio Hardcover. Hoffman, R., & Casnocha, B. (2012). The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career. Crown Business.


pages: 304 words: 82,395

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Swan, book scanning, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, hype cycle, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, obamacare, optical character recognition, PageRank, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, post-materialism, random walk, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

This has sparked a new academic discipline called “Culturomics”: computational lexicology that tries to understand human behavior and cultural trends through the quantitative analysis of texts. In one study, researchers at Harvard poured through millions of books (which equated to more than 500 billion words) to reveal that fewer than half the number of English words that appear in books are included in dictionaries. Rather, they wrote, the cornucopia of words “consists of lexical ‘dark matter’ undocumented in standard references.” Moreover, by algorithmically analyzing references to the artist Marc Chagall, whose works were banned in Nazi Germany because he was Jewish, the researchers showed that the suppression or censorship of an idea or person leaves “quantifiable fingerprints.” Words are like fossils encased within pages instead of sedimentary rock.


pages: 291 words: 81,703

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Amazon Mechanical Turk, behavioural economics, Black Swan, brain emulation, Brownian motion, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deliberate practice, driverless car, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, full employment, future of work, game design, Higgs boson, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, Loebner Prize, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, P = NP, P vs NP, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, reshoring, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

String theory is known to contain configurations that describe all the observed fundamental forces and matter but with a zero cosmological constant and some new fields. Other configurations have different values of the cosmological constant, and are metastable but long-lived. This leads many to believe that there is at least one metastable solution that is quantitatively identical with the standard model, with a small cosmological constant, containing dark matter and a plausible mechanism for cosmic inflation. It is not yet known whether string theory has such a solution, nor how much freedom the theory allows to choose the details. That was the easy part. Now: String theories also include objects other than strings, called branes. The word brane, derived from “membrane,” refers to a variety of interrelated objects, such as D-branes, black p-branes, and Neveu–Schwarz 5-branes.


pages: 371 words: 93,570

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

“I heard women talking about things that I wouldn’t normally hear women talking about,” says Howard Mittelmark, “talking about men in ways that they wouldn’t usually share with me.” At its peak, Echo had around forty-six thousand users. More than half were lurkers. Even today, most people are lurkers: on social media platforms everywhere a vast silent majority listens, reads, and keeps to itself. It’s the social dark matter of the Internet, the force holding us all together. Those who did post actively on Echo—about a tenth of Stacy’s subscribers—were the diehards. They were the hosts, the contrarians, the pot stirrers, the core group. Although Echo still exists, tumultuously but successfully moved over to a Linux server not long ago, only a fraction of that core group remains.


pages: 346 words: 89,180

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

Although these investments represented the modern age in all its industrial glory (in 2015 in the UK, for example, businesses invested £78bn in new buildings; £60bn in IT, plant, and machinery; and £17bn in vehicles2), the basic principle that investment was about physical goods would have made sense to William the Conqueror’s reeves. The Dark Matter of Investment But, of course, the economy does not run on tangible investment alone. Stansted Airport, for example, owned not just tarmac and terminals and trucks, but also things that were harder to see or touch: complex software; valuable agreements with airlines and retailers; internal know-how.


pages: 310 words: 89,653

The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission by Jim Bell

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Virgin Galactic

Perhaps it was some kind of new physics that could only be discovered by a long, lonely trip through deep, nearly empty space? No one knew, and the discrepancy became known as the Pioneer Anomaly. Over more than twenty years, astronomers, physicists, and spacecraft engineers tossed around hypotheses about the gravity of small bodies like KBOs, or dark matter, or some other cosmological effect, causing the Pioneers’ deceleration. Or maybe drag from particles in the heliosphere, or small helium gas leaks on the spacecraft that acted like mini thrusters, or some other spacecraft-related effect that hadn’t been properly accounted for. Eventually after much head scratching, physicists and spacecraft engineers finally solved the Pioneer Anomaly.


pages: 255 words: 88,987

An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield

Apollo 13, dark matter, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Neil Armstrong, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Skype, éminence grise

(It turns out that some modules are better shielded than others, though it’s not yet clear how big a problem this is or what the long-term health implications are for astronauts and cosmonauts.) Some of my favorite experiments were the ones attempting to answer really big questions like, What’s the universe made of? The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, mounted on the Station’s exterior, is collecting dark matter and high-energy particles to try to provide an answer. Another experiment is looking at the behavior of nanoparticles and how they coalesce without the weight of gravity. Most of the 130 experiments on board are ones that simply cannot be done on Earth: we’re there to make sure that scientists on the ground get the information they need.


pages: 327 words: 88,121

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

It offers more freedom to individuals than people experienced in the past because now they have more room to maneuver and more capacity to act on their own.31 The great hope is that connections made across better-integrated disciplines—doctors and scientists kibitzing through mobile devices, across social networks, in real time—will spark even more creativity than that generated in townshipped society. To hear the deans of exciting new industries—venture capitalists surveying the landscape in Silicon Valley, researchers enveloped in projects designed to discover the true nature of dark matter, journalists on missions to uncover elements of the political process shrouded in mystery—it’s hard not to be confident. At the same time, however, a balanced look at the potential dynamism born in outer-ring relationships will cause many to hedge their bets. Some of the same studies documenting the extent to which racial and ethnic separations have eroded have simultaneously found other corrosive sorts of divisions that have emerged in their stead.


pages: 291 words: 92,688

Who Is Rich? by Matthew Klam

carried interest, dark matter, Dr. Strangelove, liberation theology, Mason jar, mass incarceration, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, TED Talk

To embroil Robin, to mythologize her, to upset her, break her open. I’d convinced myself that everyone wants to be immortalized in a work of art. I told that story because it confused me. Because it felt good to scratch the itch of that confusion. Because the work of telling it became a consolation. Because when I worked on it, I took hold of dark matter. I felt an ecstatic thrill seeing my work on the page. I wanted to leave my mark. I thought I could transform it into something else. Because if I didn’t somehow address these ideas, I was literally thinking myself out of existence. Which, I guess, was what I’d done, which was why I didn’t want to be alive anymore, and why I went to my suitcase to find a belt and hang myself.


pages: 294 words: 96,661

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

Strawson writes, “We don’t know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff,” and he believes that as we understand physics better, consciousness will give up its secrets and be seen just as a physical process. In this view, the seemingly inexplicable nature of what we call consciousness is no great surprise. The physical universe is full of strange, seemingly inexplicable things, such as quantum physics, relativity, and dark matter. Consider the phenomenon of entanglement, in which two particles are so linked with each other that even if they are separated by the width of the universe, if you perform an action on one of them, its pair reacts instantly, faster than light itself. Even Einstein categorized this phenomenon as “spooky.”


High-Frequency Trading by David Easley, Marcos López de Prado, Maureen O'Hara

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, computer vision, continuous double auction, dark matter, discrete time, finite state, fixed income, Flash crash, High speed trading, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Large Hadron Collider, latency arbitrage, margin call, market design, market fragmentation, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, martingale, National best bid and offer, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, price discovery process, price discrimination, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, Tobin tax, transaction costs, two-sided market, yield curve

Kearns, Y. Nevmyvaka and J. Wortman, 2010, “Censored Exploration and the Dark Pool Problem”, Communications of the ACM 53(5), pp. 99–107. Guéant, O., C. A. Lehalle and J. F. Tapia, 2012, “Optimal Portfolio Liquidation with Limit Orders”, Technical Report, arXiv:1106.3279 [q-fin.TR]. JP Morgan, 2012, “Dark Matters Part 1: Optimal Liquidity Seeker”, Report, JP Morgan Electronic Client Solutions, May. Kharroubi, I., and H. Pham, 2010, “Optimal Portfolio Liquidation with Execution Cost and Risk”, SIAM Journal on Financial Mathematics 1(1), pp. 897–931. Kulesza, A., M. Kearns and Y. Nevmyvaka, 2010, “Empirical Limitations on High Frequency Trading Profitability”, Journal of Trading 5(4), pp. 50–62.


pages: 442 words: 94,734

The Art of Statistics: Learning From Data by David Spiegelhalter

Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Anthropocene, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, Brexit referendum, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer vision, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Edmond Halley, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, government statistician, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, Higgs boson, Kenneth Rogoff, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, placebo effect, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, self-driving car, seminal paper, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, sugar pill, systematic bias, TED Talk, The Design of Experiments, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Two Sigma

As soon as the practical performance of algorithms started to be measured and compared, people inevitably got competitive, and now there are data science contests hosted by platforms such as Kaggle.com. A commercial or academic organization provides a data set for competitors to download: challenges have included detecting whales from sound recordings, accounting for dark matter in astronomical data, and predicting hospital admissions. In each case competitors are provided with a training set of data on which to build their algorithm, and a test set that will decide their performance. A particularly popular competition, with thousands of competing teams, is to produce an algorithm for the following challenge.


pages: 312 words: 91,538

The Fear Index by Robert Harris

algorithmic trading, backtesting, banking crisis, dark matter, family office, fear index, Fellow of the Royal Society, fixed income, Flash crash, God and Mammon, high net worth, implied volatility, Jim Simons, Large Hadron Collider, mutually assured destruction, National best bid and offer, Neil Kinnock, Renaissance Technologies, speech recognition, two and twenty

Apparently sixteen hundred super-conducting magnets, each weighing nearly thirty tonnes, were housed in a twenty-seven-kilometre circular tunnel beneath his feet, shooting beams of particles around it so quickly that they completed the circuit eleven thousand times per second. The collisions of the beams at an energy of seven trillion electronvolts per proton were supposed to reveal the origins of the universe, discover extra dimensions and explain the nature of dark matter. None of it that Leclerc could discern seemed to have anything whatever to do with the financial markets. QUARRY’S INVITEES BEGAN to arrive just after ten, the first pair – a fifty-six-year-old Genevese, Etienne Mussard, and his younger sister Clarisse – turning up on a bus. ‘They’ll be early,’ Quarry had warned Hoffmann.


Bastard Tongues: A Trailblazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages by Derek Bickerton

colonial rule, dark matter, European colonialism, experimental subject, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, language acquisition, longitudinal study, rent control, Suez crisis 1956

I'll consult, if asked, but anyone else is welcome to organize it and run it and take the credit for it. All I care about are the results. Other sciences at least have the luxury of temporary certainty. Newton's explained the universe, oops, no, Einstein's ex­ plained the universe, er, well, now there's all this dark matter and dark energy we have to account for. In linguistics we don't even get that far, we just argue back and forth. Some linguists, like Steve Pinker (whose book The Language Instinct is, after this one, the most fun book on language you're likely to read), have what they are pleased to call "labs," but the kinds of experiment they can do in them, even in the f~ncier ones where you can get pictures of the inside of your brain, yield results that are always interpretable in at least two contradictory ways.


pages: 336 words: 93,672

The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists by Gary Marcus, Jeremy Freeman

23andMe, Albert Einstein, backpropagation, bioinformatics, bitcoin, brain emulation, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, Drosophila, epigenetics, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, Google Glasses, ITER tokamak, iterative process, language acquisition, linked data, mouse model, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, twin studies, web application

A very large proportion of the single-gene disorders that affect the human population (cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, Huntington’s disease, and many others) are known to be caused by specific mutations disturbing protein-coding genes. Beyond the exome, the remainder of the genome includes many stretches of DNA (once thought of as junk) that may have complicated roles in regulating how the exome works. While progress is being made, geneticists still struggle to make sense of this dark matter of the genome, in particular to understand the biological significance of variations that affect it. So, targeting the protein-coding genes, by sequencing a whole exome rather than dealing with an entire genome, seems a smart way of simplifying things when searching for causal variants in newly ascertained families with a disorder or trait of interest.


pages: 349 words: 27,507

E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Berlin Wall, British Empire, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Mercator projection, Nelson Mandela, pre–internet, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Thorstein Veblen, time dilation

The Universe (Chapters 14–16) Payne The richest source here is Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections, ed. Katherine Haramundanis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1996). See also George Greenstein’s reflective essay “The Ladies of Observatory Hill,” in his Portraits of Discovery (New York: Wiley, 1998). An interesting comparison from a later generation is Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters by Vera Rubin (Woodbury, N.Y.: American Institute of Physics, 1997), while George Gamow’s dated though highly readable The Birth and Death of the Sun: Stellar Evolution and Subatomic Energy (London: Macmillan, 1941) gives a useful impression of solar physics in Payne’s time. Hoyle and Earth Fred Hoyle is the best writer of any high-level scientist I’m aware of: his autobiography, Home Is Where the Wind Blows: Chapters from a Cosmologist’s Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), is a pleasure to read.


pages: 374 words: 94,508

Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage by Douglas B. Laney

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, behavioural economics, blockchain, book value, business climate, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon credits, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, hype cycle, informal economy, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, it's over 9,000, linked data, Lyft, Nash equilibrium, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, profit motive, recommendation engine, RFID, Salesforce, semantic web, single source of truth, smart meter, Snapchat, software as a service, source of truth, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, text mining, uber lyft, Y2K, yield curve

But when it comes to truly analyzing it using language and syntactically aware algorithms, graduating to advanced analytic technologies which specialize in this is required. And beyond written text, sources of enterprise intelligence and performance increasingly are in even more complex formats, such as audio and video. As discussed in chapter 2, much of this unstructured information lies dormant in the form of what’s called “dark data.” Much like the dark matter of the universe, we know dark data is there because it has a gravitational effect on our business and operations as it remains unused and unmeasured. As I have long advised clients, there are only three ways to generate economic benefits from unstructured information (or content) before you structure it: you can read it, search it, and sell it.


pages: 293 words: 88,490

The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction by Richard Bookstaber

asset allocation, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, data science, disintermediation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, epigenetics, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, geopolitical risk, Henri Poincaré, impact investing, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market clearing, market microstructure, money market fund, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, sovereign wealth fund, the map is not the territory, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, yield curve

We can also think of radical uncertainty as a type of complexity. From the standpoint of computational irreducibility, we might look at radical uncertainty as occupying a position that is beyond the edge of the complexity spectrum, at least beyond the “visible” complexity spectrum that we can observe and analyze. Radical uncertainty is the dark matter of complexity. We cannot see it, we cannot even detect it, we cannot measure it in terms of informational irreducibility, but we know it is there because every now and then it hits us between the eyes. To see how we can put radical uncertainty into a complexity context, let’s revisit Conway’s Game of Life.


pages: 321 words: 90,247

Lights Out in Wonderland by Dbc Pierre

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, dark matter, haute cuisine, market design, Prenzlauer Berg, stem cell

A fire engine roars past with its lights flashing. I turn my back and stare at Burger King as if I might buy it. But whoosh—I find beauty there. The neon has dimmed on a corner of the sign, causing a delicate graduation of reds, from hot capsicum to dry blood. The dimmer part is at the bottom, making dark matter seem to pool there, but that old blood sparkles with highlights thrown by other lamps nearby. There’s no orchid or lily as rare as this fragment of sign, I reflect. Certainly none spelling “King.” Arriving at the railway station, I find it droning with an alternating current of apathy and rage, buffeted as much between trains as when they rocket past without stopping.


pages: 386 words: 92,778

"Live From Cape Canaveral": Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today by Jay Barbree

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, dark matter, Gene Kranz, gravity well, invisible hand, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, white flight

Were there other planets outside our solar system? Hubble answered yes as it showed astronomers hundreds in our galactic neighborhood. How old is the universe? Hubble says 13.9 billion years. Is the speed of light really the ultimate velocity? Or will we find unanticipated matter and energy that travel faster? What exactly is dark matter? Does it really make up most of the universe? And what happens to the trillions of tons of matter that vanish into the maw of black holes? What are the white gushers in space pouring vast amounts of subatomic particles into our universe—with no identifiable source or known reason? And is the universe expanding?


pages: 404 words: 92,713

The Art of Statistics: How to Learn From Data by David Spiegelhalter

Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, Brexit referendum, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer vision, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Edmond Halley, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, government statistician, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, Higgs boson, Kenneth Rogoff, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, placebo effect, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, self-driving car, seminal paper, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, sugar pill, systematic bias, TED Talk, The Design of Experiments, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Two Sigma

As soon as the practical performance of algorithms started to be measured and compared, people inevitably got competitive, and now there are data science contests hosted by platforms such as Kaggle.com. A commercial or academic organization provides a data set for competitors to download: challenges have included detecting whales from sound recordings, accounting for dark matter in astronomical data, and predicting hospital admissions. In each case competitors are provided with a training set of data on which to build their algorithm, and a test set that will decide their performance. A particularly popular competition, with thousands of competing teams, is to produce an algorithm for the following challenge.


pages: 292 words: 94,660

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back by Jacob Ward

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, drone strike, endowment effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, hindsight bias, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, non-fungible token, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, smart cities, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Levy, survivorship bias, TikTok, Turing test

We shouldn’t plow ahead and deploy profitable technology on one another that we know has a widespread effect when we don’t yet know what it is. We are capable as a society of making choices and rules based on something softer, messier, more important than the data, something we can all sense but can’t quite see, something that touches on the human emotions we all share, the immeasurable but unmistakable dark matter of our minds. IF WE ARE going to maintain our capacity to make these human choices, we have to incorporate the unquantifiable but unmistakable effects of The Loop into some sort of regulatory framework. It’s the only way to enjoy the benefits of AI without losing human agency in the process. We must update our legal framework to account for the gray areas between data and emotion—the heuristics and biases that AI will increasingly exploit—and come to understand that just because the effects we’re feeling don’t show up in a typical financial audit, they are still there, and still hugely impactful.


pages: 414 words: 105,153

Ringworld by Larry Niven

dark matter, gravity well, Mercator projection, supervolcano, time dilation

“By now you know,” said Chiron, “that we have been moving north along the galactic axis for the past two hundred and four of your Earth years. In kzin years—“ “Two hundred and seventeen.” “Yes. During that time we have naturally observed the space ahead of us for signs of danger and the unexpected. We had known that the star EC-1752 was ringed with an uncharacteristically dense and narrow band of dark matter. It was assumed that the ring was dust or rock. Yet it was surprisingly regular. “Some ninety days ago our fleet of worlds reached a position such that the ring occluded the star itself. We saw that the ring was sharply bounded. Further investigation revealed that the ring is not gas nor dust, nor even asteroidal rock, but a solid band of considerable tensile strength.


pages: 367 words: 99,711

Sundiver by David Brin

Arthur Eddington, clean water, dark matter, zero-sum game

Naturally we won’t be opening the wavelength that laser’s tuned to! The lines we choose are quiet and optically thick, so whatever you see that’s green or blue comes from a beastie. It should come as a pleasant change.” “Anything would be welcome but this damned red.” The ship passed through the dark matter and suddenly they were almost among the creatures. Jacob gulped and closed his eyes momentarily. When he looked again, he found that he couldn’t swallow. On top of three days of unbelievable sights, what he saw left him helpless before a powerful tremor of emotion. If a group of fish “is called a “school” for its discipline, and several lions comprise a “pride,” named for their attitude, Jacob decided that the cluster of solar-beings could only be called a “flare.”


pages: 417 words: 103,458

The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions by David Robson

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, classic study, cognitive bias, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, deep learning, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, fake news, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, post-truth, price anchoring, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Whatever the reason, the results suggest that smarter people are not investing their money in the more rational manner that economists might anticipate; it is another sign that intelligence does not necessarily lead to better decision making. As one vivid example, consider the story of Paul Frampton. A brilliant physicist at the University of North Carolina, his work ranged from a new theory of dark matter (the mysterious, invisible mass holding our universe together) to the prediction of a subatomic particle called the ‘axigluon’, a theory that is inspiring experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. In 2011, however, he began online dating, and soon struck up a friendship with a former bikini model named Denise Milani.


pages: 379 words: 99,340

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Ayatollah Khomeini, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Burning Man, business cycle, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, David Graeber, death of newspapers, disinformation, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, job-hopping, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skype, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, too big to fail, traveling salesman, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional

Chapter 5 Phase Change 2011 My story – I repeat – concerns the tectonic collision between a public which will not rule and institutions of authority progressively less able to do so. My misgiving is that democracy will be ground to pieces under the stress. An immense psychological distance separates the two sides, even as they come together in conflict. This gulf is filled with dark matter: distrust. The elites who control the institutions have never really trusted the public, which they considered animalistic and prone to bouts of destructiveness. In effect, they sought to neuter the public by herding it into a mass and attaching it to established hierarchies. A glimpse at any American airport today will confirm that this horror of the top for the bottom has, if anything, grown more intense.


pages: 332 words: 101,772

Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines His Former Life on Drugs by Marc Lewis Phd

dark matter, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, Golden Gate Park, impulse control, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, Rat Park, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea

We’d been blithely building our scenario about school in Puerto Rico, getting lost in its intricacies and ignoring its sheer unlikelihood. Until the bubble finally burst over Christmas vacation. You could say that Schwartz and I had created our own brand of dissociation. But it wasn’t the DM-style knock-you-over-the-head departure from reality. We’d gotten lost in the possibilities of how the world might be, not in the dark matter that emerges when you leave the world behind. The audacity of our plan may have been bolstered by the maturation of cannabinoid receptors, fuelled by the flow of cannabinoids made in our own cells. And if cannabinoids help teenagers design their own reality, then maybe my new preoccupation with pot wasn’t so much an aberration as a second, somewhat desperate effort to keep my options open.


pages: 317 words: 97,824

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, availability heuristic, Bluma Zeigarnik, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, fear of failure, feminist movement, functional fixedness, Lao Tzu, pre–internet, Richard Feynman, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Walter Mischel

But that view shifts with time, and thus, evidence that might at one point seem meaningless can come to hold a great deal of meaning. Think of how many ideas seemed outlandish when first put forward, seemed so impossible that they couldn’t be true: the earth being round; the earth going around the sun; the universe being made up almost entirely of something that we can’t see, dark matter and energy. And don’t forget that magical things did keep happening all around as Conan Doyle came of age: the invention of the X-ray (or the Röntgen ray, as it was called), the discovery of the germ, the microbe, radiation—all things that went from invisible and thus nonexistent to visible and apparent.


The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael Strevens

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, Peace of Westphalia, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, William of Occam

Driving this machine was a regimented process that subjected theories to a pitiless interrogation by observable evidence, raising up some and tearing down others, occasionally changing course or traveling in reverse but making in the long term unmistakable progress. Where Thales once surveyed the horizon and saw water, our radio telescopes look into deep space and see dark matter. It is to mark this sudden change in the tempo and form of discovery that historians call what happened the “Scientific Revolution,” and philosophers and sociologists distinguish what came after the Revolution as a new way of thinking about the world. In so doing, they set “modern science” apart from what preceded it—that is, ancient and medieval science, or what is sometimes called, to emphasize the striking discontinuity, “philosophy of nature” or “natural philosophy.”


Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, colonial rule, dark matter, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global pandemic, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, placebo effect, social distancing, trade route, urban renewal

Health insurance was almost unheard of, and in general healthcare was paid for privately or provided by charities. Antibiotics had yet to be invented, and there was still relatively little people could do once sick. Even in Paris and Berlin, therefore, disease filled the interstices of human lives. It lurked behind the column inches devoted to the war. It was the dark matter of the universe, so intimate and familiar as not to be spoken about. It engendered panic, followed by resignation. Religion was the main source of comfort, and parents were used to surviving at least some of their children. People regarded death very differently. It was a regular visitor; they were less afraid.


pages: 350 words: 98,077

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, ImageNet competition, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, ought to be enough for anybody, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, the long tail, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers

Examples include methods for clustering examples based on their similarity or learning a new category via analogy to known categories. As I’ll describe in a later chapter, perceiving abstract similarity and analogies is something at which humans excel, but to date there are no very successful AI methods for this kind of unsupervised learning. Yann LeCun himself acknowledges that “unsupervised learning is the dark matter of AI.” In other words, for general AI, almost all learning will have to be unsupervised, but no one has yet come up with the kinds of algorithms needed to perform successful unsupervised learning. Humans make mistakes all the time, even (or especially) in driving; any one of us might have hit that public bus, had we been the one veering around sandbags.


pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

Astronomers had always assumed that if they looked out beyond the Milky Way, galaxies would be spread more or less evenly across the universe. But John’s map suggested that the galaxies were instead confined to great sheets arcing around enormous voids millions of light-years across. The discovery made the front page of the New York Times and helped lay the foundation for the current dark matter–based view of the universe.30 John became one of the most highly cited astronomers of the twentieth century. In 1991, when we had our first date, I was entirely ignorant of all this. He was just some guy that I’d been introduced to. Since we were both academics, I asked him how many papers he had published.


pages: 285 words: 98,832

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, gentleman farmer, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, out of africa, precautionary principle, QAnon, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, tech bro, telemarketer, the new new thing, working poor, young professional

The chip, in other words, could be used not just to diagnose an existing virus but to discover a new one, as it had with SARS. And its power to diagnose grew with the addition of new viruses to the chip. What if the virus had zero genetic connection to any virus on earth? What if it came from Mars? Another common question. And harder to answer satisfactorily. There actually was a phrase: the dark matter of genomic sequencing. It referred to genetic material without any connection to known genetic material. But SARS wasn’t that. And neither were any of the other likely biological threats to humans. Why had the virus vanished? Why had it infected eight thousand people and killed eight hundred of them and then just stopped?


pages: 301 words: 96,359

Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in Histroy by Ben Mezrich

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, dark matter, Neil Armstrong, Silicon Valley

From the very beginning, Thad used the inmates’ eclectic interests to guide them into a more basic study of space and the unknown. Because they couldn’t exactly go outside at night to look through telescopes, he focused on the many theories behind the science of astronomy, and did his best to get the inmates excited about the mysteries of the universe—things like black holes, supernovas, and dark matter. He had only one requirement from his students. If they enjoyed his class, when they eventually got out of prison, they were each to send Thad one physics book—so he could continue studying the subject he had found the most challenging of his three college majors. Since, as a prisoner, he could only keep up to five books in his cell at one time, he had other inmates hold them for him, rotating through as many books as he could read, as quickly as he could get them.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

For his eschatology, the “world” is a tragic casualty of its appearance in digital images of itself.48 It cannot survive this manner of testimony. It is shrunken, eaten, defamed by its reduction to a plateau of digitalized time. Whereas difference and analogy are naturally functions of distance, in the instantaneousness of global information the landscape of distances has collapsed, and so for Virilio digital space is dark matter, one that instead of expanding and elongating real distances instead flattens the space of analogy into the simultaneity of network time. There are other, and better, judgments of these accelerations, displacements, elongations, migrations, vectors, lines, and links. Can they be drawn without replicating the terms of reduction that any truly living image would need to escape?

See also money bitcoin, 9, 127, 171, 209, 336–337, 393n54 digital platform, 336–337 double spend problem, 418n45 Facebook, 127 future of, 127, 336 currency-matter link, computerization of, 199 “Cybernetic Praxis in Government” (Beer), 1 cybernetics autopoietic, 59 consumer, 274 corporate, 128 economic planning systems, 58–61, 328–329 of interface design, 157 meaning of, 275–276 rise of, 327 of scenario planning, 359 second-order, 334 Soviet, 58–61, 138, 328–329, 332 theory concurrent with, 54 cyberwarfare, 27 Daalder, Rene, 320 Dal Co, Francesco, 304 Dar al-Islam, 9, 322 dark matter, 91 Darknet, 215 dark pools, 451n63 Dark Side of the Rainbow effect, 359 data jurisdiction over, 113–114, 120, 122–123, 285–286 ownership of, 203, 285, 345–346 proliferation of, 117, 204 substantialization of, 168 data centers energy footprint, 92–94, 113, 140–141, 303–304 water-based, 113–114, 140 data collection Apps for, 236 mobile phones for, 342 sensor nets, 97, 180, 192, 295 smart dust for, 201 Users used for, 340 Data.Gov, 9 data hauls, 363–364 data haven, 400n42 data space versus state space, 123 data visualization, 267, 302, 334 Daultrey, Sally, 97 da Vinci robotic surgery system, 279 Davis, Mike, 304–305 de-addressing of things, 199 death of the User, 260, 271–274, 361, 370, 436n42 Debord, Guy, 414n10 debt, 303, 335–336 decision-making algorithms, 134, 332, 341–342 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” (Barlow), 441n7 dedifferentiated space, 33 deep address, 64, 197–200, 206, 209, 210–216, 334–335, 338–339, 370.


She Has Her Mother's Laugh by Carl Zimmer

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, CRISPR, dark matter, data science, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flynn Effect, friendly fire, Gary Taubes, germ theory of disease, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, lolcat, longitudinal study, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, statistical model, stem cell, twin studies, W. E. B. Du Bois

To my ear, at least, she has her mother’s laugh. As I write this, Charlotte is now fifteen. She has a thirteen-year-old sister named Veronica. Watching them grow up, I have pondered heredity even more. I wondered about the source of their different shades of skin color, the tint of their irises, Charlotte’s obsession with the dark matter of the universe, or Veronica’s gift for singing. (“She didn’t get that from me.” “Well, she certainly didn’t get it from me.”) Those thoughts led me to wonder about heredity itself. It is a word that we all know. Nobody needs an introduction to it, the way we might to meiosis or allele. We all feel like we’re on a first-name basis with heredity.

Veronica has always been off the charts, making people assume she’s a couple of years older than she really is. As a child, Charlotte would hold back when we introduced her to new people, sizing them up. Veronica, standing next to her, would launch herself into the air and shout her name. At age twelve, Charlotte became obsessed with galaxies and dark matter. Veronica didn’t care much what the universe is made of. She’d rather sing, or read Jane Austen. The experiences our daughters have had probably account for some of their differences. But so does meiosis. Grace and I gave each of our children different combinations of the DNA we inherited from our own parents.


pages: 319 words: 105,949

Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker

Airbus A320, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, computer age, dark matter, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Joan Didion, John Harrison: Longitude, Louis Blériot, Maui Hawaii, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, the built environment, transcontinental railway, Year of Magical Thinking

Or that a typical picnic blanket—6 feet by 9 feet, say—has around 50 tons of air resting upon it. To me, the truth that air is as substantive as concrete remains as counterintuitive as any of science’s most inscrutable revelations about particles that exist in two places at once, or the unseen dark matter we are told comprises most of the universe. Little in daily life suggests that the air weighs down upon me as matter-of-factly as water rests on the bottom of an aquarium; that each day I awake and stand up and walk through insensible thickness. The writer David Foster Wallace once related a tale of an old fish who asks a pair of young fish how the water is that day.


pages: 397 words: 109,631

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking by Richard E. Nisbett

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, endowment effect, experimental subject, feminist movement, fixed income, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Henri Poincaré, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Shai Danziger, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, William of Occam, Yitang Zhang, Zipcar

Society tolerates government and business practices that make our lives worse because they were developed without following effective evaluation procedures and remain untested long after they were introduced—sometimes for decades and at costs in the billions of dollars. A Sampling of the Things to Come The first section of the book deals with thinking about the world and ourselves—how we do it, how we flub it, how to fix it, and how we can make far better use than we do of the dark matter of the mind, namely the unconscious. The second section is about choices—how classical economists think choices are made and how they think they ought to be made, and why modern behavioral economics provides both descriptions of actual choice behavior and prescriptions for it that are better and more useful in some ways than those of classical economics.


pages: 274 words: 93,758

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller, Stanley B Resor Professor Of Economics Robert J Shiller

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compensation consultant, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Brooks, desegregation, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equity premium, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, greed is good, income per capita, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, loss aversion, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Milgram experiment, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, publication bias, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave

In Illinois, for example, the Democrats avoided whole areas downstate; just as in New York, they avoided upstate. But now the very significant minorities of voters in such places could be approached, because they were individually targeted. For Obama 2012 these voters in Democrat minority areas were no longer dark matter. The world of advertising and marketing is still about getting the right message and creating the right story. It is still about the story of the Man in the Hathaway Shirt; and that Palmolive will make you beautiful. But the Obama campaign illustrates that it helps greatly to know where to target your message, and, when you do, to know which message will resonate favorably.


A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, dark matter, delayed gratification, demographic transition, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Eyjafjallajökull, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, out of africa, phenotype, sceptred isle, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

Lots of the rest of it does something, including the switches – the ons and offs for genes to dance their choreography as we develop in the womb, enact our lives and interact with the rest of the universe. Some of it does stuff that we haven’t discovered yet. Is it junk? No. Is it useful? We don’t know. Most of the genome – upwards of 85 per cent – does not appear to be under any selective pressure at all. Many writers have described the non-coding realm of our DNA as the ‘dark matter of the genome’, alluding to the stuff we know exists in space, that makes up the majority of mass in the universe, but that we cannot yet account for. We don’t know what it is, but we infer that it is there because of our model of how the universe is built. I intensely dislike this phrase. Metaphors in science should clarify or enlighten, not obfuscate because they sound profound.


pages: 399 words: 107,932

Don't Call It a Cult: The Shocking Story of Keith Raniere and the Women of NXIVM by Sarah Berman

Albert Einstein, COVID-19, dark matter, Donald Trump, East Village, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Milgram experiment, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, systems thinking, TED Talk, white picket fence, work culture

They’d committed to attending only a five-day seminar but ended up staying for three weeks in Salzman’s house, where they talked at length with Salzman’s daughter, Lauren, and other members of the inner circle. Vicente was especially interested in meeting the Vanguard, Keith Raniere, but it wasn’t until the tenth day of NXIVM classes that he was deemed ready for the experience. “I remember we spoke about dark matter, quantum mechanics,” Vicente said of his first conversations with Raniere. “He was talking to me about a certain kind of mathematics. I said I had never heard about it before. He said, ‘Well, actually I invented this mathematics,’ and I said, ‘Oh, that’s amazing.’ Not being a mathematician, what do I know?”


pages: 412 words: 104,864

Silence on the Wire: A Field Guide to Passive Reconnaissance and Indirect Attacks by Michal Zalewski

active measures, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AltaVista, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, dark matter, data acquisition, Donald Knuth, fault tolerance, information security, MITM: man-in-the-middle, NP-complete, OSI model, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vannevar Bush

I’ve discussed a number of fancy problems that affect the security and privacy of information from its input at the keyboard to its ultimate destination hundreds or thousands of miles away. But it is too early for either of us to throw a party; something is missing from the picture—something far bigger than what we have discussed so far. The dark matter. The problem with our story so far is simple: communications do not occur in a void. Although the process of exchanging data is usually limited to two systems and a dozen or so intermediate ones, the grand context of all events simply cannot be ignored; the properties of the surrounding environment can shape the reality of a chitchat between endpoints in profound ways.


pages: 384 words: 105,110

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life by Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein

autism spectrum disorder, biofilm, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of DNA, double helix, epigenetics, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, Gregor Mendel, helicopter parent, hygiene hypothesis, lockdown, meta-analysis, microbiome, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, phenotype, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind

.,” but in the sense of where we are with respect to photoperiod, the length of time in a twenty-four-hour period during which there is light—because that was, until very recently, the only important parameter. In London, 4:00 p.m. is called daytime in both December and June, even though in June the sun is still high in the sky at 4:00 p.m., whereas in December the sun has already set. Until recently, darkness mattered far more than one’s position in a twenty-four-hour day. So we humans have done the expedient thing. We’ve used ingenuity to extend our productive period, by inventing artificial light. The benefits of this are obvious, but the hazards aren’t. Before electric lights were invented, humans never experienced light after sunset of the intensity or duration that we are now commonly exposed to in our indoor spaces.


pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

Ruta, “The Global Trade Slowdown: Cyclical or Structural?,” International Monetary Fund, No. 15–16, 2015. 121. See the powerful critique in S. J. Evenett and J. Fritz, Will Awe Trump Rules? The 21st Global Trade Alert Report (London: CEPR, 2017). 122. B. W. Setser, “Dark Matter. Soon to Be Revealed?,” Follow the Money (blog), February 2, 2017, https://www.cfr.org/blog/dark-matter-soon-be-revealed. 123. National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington, December 2017), 37, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf. 124. D. A. Graham, “The Wrong Side of ‘the Right Side of History,’” Atlantic, December 21, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/obama-right-side-of-history/420462/. 125.


pages: 405 words: 117,219

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

But it took ten more millennia until Newton, and then Einstein, developed the scientific theory of gravity that explains why the celestial bodies move the way they do. Moreover, gravity theory (or the ‘General Theory of Relativity’ as it is formally called) explains much more than the planetary motions. It explains the whole cosmos. And it has predicted the existence of black holes, dark matter and dark energy. Similarly, a scientific theory of consciousness must not only explain why the brain achieves consciousness the way it does, but provide predictions of other phenomena relating to consciousness, for example dreams, hallucinations, consciousness in animals, schizophrenia, locked-in-syndrome, and others.


pages: 422 words: 113,525

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

Such a “genomics of Gaia” would be the ultimate implementation of systems biology. • The transformative technique that makes all of this new science suddenly possible is the shotgun sequencing of the aggregate genomes of large samples of microbes, hence metagenomics. Microbes were long the “dark matter” of biology because, except for a few, they couldn’t be cultured in the lab. Now, with what is called functional metagenomics, you don’t have to bother with the organisms; you screen millions of DNA fragments from countless microbes, looking for new proteins that the fragments generate, and that tells you what the genes are used for.


pages: 457 words: 112,439

Zero History by William Gibson

augmented reality, business intelligence, dark matter, edge city, hive mind, invisible hand, messenger bag, new economy, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, RFID, too big to fail

He wore a headset, cabled to his no-name black laptop, on the embroidered velour beside him, their conversation being conducted, she assumed, through one or another of the darknets they frequented. These were, she gathered, private internets, unlicensed and unpoliced, and Garreth had once remarked that, as with dark matter and the universe, the darknets were probably the bulk of the thing, were there any way to accurately measure them. She didn’t listen. Stayed in the warm, steamy bathroom, drying her hair. When she came out, he was staring up at the round bottom of the birdcage. “Are you still talking?” “No.”


pages: 424 words: 114,905

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, bioinformatics, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital twin, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, fault tolerance, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Santayana, Google Glasses, ImageNet competition, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, move 37, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, post-truth, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, techlash, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population

IMAGES ImageNet exemplified an adage about AI: datasets—not algorithms—might be the key limiting factor of human-level artificial intelligence.39 When Fei-Fei Li, a computer scientist now at Stanford and half time at Google, started ImageNet in 2007, she bucked the idea that algorithms ideally needed nurturing from Big Data and instead pursued the in-depth annotation of images. She recognized it wasn’t about Big Data; it was about carefully, extensively labeled Big Data. A few years ago, she said, “I consider the pixel data in images and video to be the dark matter of the Internet.”40 Many different convolutional DNNs were used to classify the images with annual ImageNet Challenge contests to recognize the best (such as AlexNet, GoogleNet, VGG Net, and ResNet). Figure 4.6 shows the progress in reducing the error rate over several years, with ImageNet wrapping up in 2017, with significantly better than human performance in image recognition.


pages: 386 words: 116,233

The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime by Mj Demarco

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, bounce rate, business logic, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, commoditize, dark matter, delayed gratification, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, drop ship, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, multilevel marketing, passive income, passive investing, payday loans, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, Ronald Reagan, subscription business, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, white picket fence, World Values Survey, zero day

I have no love lost for the poor sap who lost his retirement savings because he listened to some CNBC pundit peddling some hot stock tip or investment advice. What is wrong with people? How do you not take responsibility for your financial plan? And then there's your uncle. You know the guy-the well-educated elder in your life who knows everything, including the molecular structure of dark matter in the Horsehead Nebula. His army of factoids is always ready for deployment: stock tips, the latest and greatest investments, money trends. Yet, lest you forget, he lives paycheck to paycheck. I call these people “Broke Know-It-Alls”-people who dispense financial, moneymaking advice, and yet are dirt poor.


pages: 395 words: 110,994

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford

air freight, anti-work, antiwork, Apollo 13, business intelligence, business process, centre right, cloud computing, continuous integration, dark matter, database schema, DevOps, fail fast, friendly fire, Gene Kranz, index card, information security, inventory management, Kanban, Lean Startup, shareholder value, systems thinking, Toyota Production System

I look at the portion of the change board with no cards on it. It really is like some giant hand swept all those change cards aside that we had so meticulously scheduled and arranged on the board. And we know what swept it aside: It was Phoenix blowing up. But Phoenix isn’t the fourth category of work. Maybe what I’m looking for is like dark matter. You can only see it by what it displaces or how it interacts with other matter that we can see. Patty called it firefighting. That’s work, too, I suppose. It certainly kept everyone up at all hours of the night. And it displaced all the planned changes. I turn back to Patty and say slowly, “Let me guess.


pages: 399 words: 118,576

Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old by Andrew Steele

Alfred Russel Wallace, assortative mating, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clockwatching, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Easter island, epigenetics, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, life extension, lone genius, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, parabiotic, Peter Thiel, phenotype, precautionary principle, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, stem cell, TED Talk, zero-sum game

To form a tumour, a cancer cell needs to divide over and over again, which means it needs to stop its telomeres from getting critically short. As a result, almost 90 per cent of cancers reactivate telomerase in order to sidestep cellular senescence. (The other 10 per cent use a mechanism known as ALT, which stands for ‘alternative lengthening of telomeres’ – an acronym which, like ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ in astrophysics, exists primarily to cover for the fact that we have very little idea what it is or how it works.) Active telomerase isn’t enough in itself to turn a cell cancerous, but we’d rather not pre-tick any boxes on cancer’s checklist if we can avoid it. This worry was borne out by the first experiments using telomerase in organisms more complex than Tetrahymena.


Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 42.Rinaldo Walcott and Idil Abdillahi, BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2019), 22. 43.Robyn Maynard, “Black Life and Death across the US–Canada Border: Border Violence, Black Fugitive Belonging, and a Turtle Island View of Black Liberation,” Critical Ethnic Studies 5, nos. 1–2 (April 2019): 124–51; Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press: 2015). 44.Maynard, “Black Life and Death across the US–Canada Border,” 127. 45.Roberto Lavato, “Juan Crow in Georgia,” The Nation, May 26, 2008, www.thenation.com/article/juan-crow-georgia/. 46.Philip Kretsedemas, The Immigration Crucible: Transforming Race, Nation, and the Limits of the Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 47.K-Sue Park, “Self-Deportation Nation,” Harvard Law Review 132, no. 1878 (May 2019): 1879–941. 48.Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W.


pages: 444 words: 118,393

The Nature of Software Development: Keep It Simple, Make It Valuable, Build It Piece by Piece by Ron Jeffries

Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, bitcoin, business cycle, business intelligence, business logic, business process, c2.com, call centre, cloud computing, continuous integration, Conway's law, creative destruction, dark matter, data science, database schema, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, duck typing, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, fault tolerance, Firefox, Hacker News, industrial robot, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Kubernetes, load shedding, loose coupling, machine readable, Mars Rover, microservices, Minecraft, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, OSI model, peer-to-peer lending, platform as a service, power law, ransomware, revision control, Ruby on Rails, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software is eating the world, source of truth, SQL injection, systems thinking, text mining, time value of money, transaction costs, Turing machine, two-pizza team, web application, zero day

Your support team doesn’t want its “search by name” results cluttered up with every prospect your sales team ever pursued. Even the question, “Who is allowed to create a customer instance?” will vary. This challenge was the bane of enterprise-wide shared object libraries, and it’s now the bane of enterprise-wide shared services. As if those problems weren’t enough, there’s also the “dark matter” issue. A system of record must pick a model for its entities. Anything that doesn’t fit the model can’t be represented there. Either it’ll go into a different (possibly covert) database or it just won’t be represented anywhere. Instead of creating a single system of record for any given concept, we should think in terms of federated zones of authority.


pages: 358 words: 118,810

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia by Adrian Shirk

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, buy and hold, carbon footprint, company town, COVID-19, dark matter, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Haight Ashbury, index card, intentional community, Joan Didion, late capitalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, medical malpractice, neurotypical, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, transatlantic slave trade, traumatic brain injury, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

What does heaven have to do with it if, a trillion years from now, the universe annihilates itself and becomes nothing but antimatter, formless and unformable? In the spiritual idea of heaven, as well as the zenith of a hoped-for secular heaven on earth, it seems like there would also be no markers, nothing for time to inscribe itself on because the idea is that, if successful, the heaven is a stasis. Utopianism tries to create a world also of dark matter in a way, a form of life or a way of life that will be so perfect as to not need changing over the course of its existence, for the rest of time, where the passage of time will become moot. Whether the spiritual world-builders of the Oneida or the Shakers or the hippie communes of the 1960s and ’70s, labor toward these alternative models of living was carried out, however outrageously, in the sincere belief that once perfected, they wouldn’t need changing later.


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

If SWFs were a country, they would probably rank lower than Zimbabwe in Transparency International’s ranking. The Linaburg Maduell Transparency Index (LMTI) measures their transparency and, to cut a long story short, if there are problems understanding the ownership motives of investment funds, they are child’s play compared with the SWFs. SWFs are more like dark matter – known but not observable. Differences exist, of course, but SWFs are generally secretive and only one of the ten largest SWFs in the world – Norway – gets the highest transparency grade. Seven of them rate so poorly that it is impossible to know what they really own. In 2015, these “secret seven” together managed over $3.46 trillion in assets.26 One can understand why many SWFs are shy about the outside world.


pages: 473 words: 124,861

Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, dark matter, illegal immigration, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, mass immigration, meta-analysis, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, rewilding

For decades, research into soil biology – ‘one of the most neglected components of the global system’, according to environmentalist Tony Juniper – has been woefully underfunded, sidelined by other, less complex fields of natural science, sexy projects like space technology, and the agro-industry’s funding of research into artificial systems. Only now are scientific techniques coming into play that allow the observation of soil microbes – microbial ‘dark matter’ – in their natural environment rather than within the limiting scope of the laboratory. 99 per cent of microbes will not grow in laboratory conditions. In 2015 the journal Nature reported the first discovery for thirty years of a new antibiotic in the soil – teixobactin – capable of killing Mycobacterium tuberculosis , Clostridium difficile and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus .


pages: 475 words: 127,389

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas A. Christakis

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atul Gawande, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job satisfaction, lockdown, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, meta-analysis, New Journalism, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school choice, security theater, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, trade route, Upton Sinclair, zoonotic diseases

The old saying about the indifference that can arise in the face of mass mortality comes to mind: “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic” (a variant of which is usually attributed to Stalin). Author Laura Spinney, in her account of the 1918 flu pandemic, described the many millions of deaths that occurred from influenza (amplified by the massive casualties and dislocations of World War I) as the “dark matter of the universe, so intimate and familiar as not to be spoken about.”7 A hundred years later, Americans have less experience with untimely death, and they are also less resigned to it. Many people live for decades without seeing death up close. While most Americans died at home a century ago, witnessed by all their loved ones, this is less common now.8 But even so, there seemed to me to be an unsettling acquiescence to the COVID-19 deaths of 2020.


pages: 436 words: 127,642

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, CRISPR, dark matter, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Monty Hall problem, Murray Gell-Mann, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paradox of Choice, Paul Erdős, Peter Singer: altruism, Plato's cave, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum entanglement, random walk, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, Skype, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, wage slave

With too little stuff, the gravity would merely slow the expansion, which would go on forever. So, to determine how the universe would ultimately expire, cosmologists thought that all they had to do was to weigh it. And preliminary estimates—taking account of the visible galaxies, the so-called dark matter, and even the possible mass of the little neutrinos that swarm through it all—suggested that the universe had only enough weight to slow the expansion, not to turn it around. Now, as cosmic fates go, the big chill might not seem a whole lot better than the big crunch. In the first, the temperature goes to absolute zero; in the second, it goes to infinity.


pages: 508 words: 137,199

Stamping Butterflies by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

affirmative action, Brownian motion, Burning Man, carbon-based life, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, dark matter, PalmPilot, phenotype

And then in 1904 a minor clerk at the Swiss Patent Office in Berne wrote a brief pamphlet, a side effect of which was that time and space became, like mass and energy, so inextricably linked they turned into variants of the same thing. Petra Mayer was not a believer in unalloyed Einstein, any more than she believed in the angelic host, time running in only one direction or the universe as an ever-expanding balloon of mostly dark matter. "You've got more than just the one photograph, right?" Petra Mayer said. She was having trouble keeping the impatience out of her voice. Old age and cancer were not treating her kindly. "Yes," said the President, reopening a file. "They're one of the things we've just been discussing. We got copies this morning."


pages: 494 words: 142,285

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

AltaVista, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, business process, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, dark matter, decentralized internet, Dennis Ritchie, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Erik Brynjolfsson, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, history of Unix, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, invention of hypertext, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, Larry Wall, Leonard Kleinrock, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, smart grid, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systematic bias, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

At the time the RIAA filed suit, the number of Napster users was under two hundred thousand; after the suit hit the press, the number of users grew to fifty-seven million. In chapter 11, we will consider in some depth the legal questions that Napster raised. Focus for the moment just on the innovation. For what Fanning had done was to find a way to use the dark matter of the Internet—the personal computers connecting the Net. Rather than depending upon content located on a server somewhere—in this strict hierarchical client/server model of computing—Fanning turned to the many individual computers that are linked to the Net. They could be the place where content resides.


pages: 493 words: 139,845

Women Leaders at Work: Untold Tales of Women Achieving Their Ambitions by Elizabeth Ghaffari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Bear Stearns, business cycle, business process, cloud computing, Columbine, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, dark matter, deal flow, do what you love, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, follow your passion, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, high net worth, John Elkington, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Oklahoma City bombing, performance metric, pink-collar, profit maximization, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

SSAL has about a dozen engineers that come and go on projects as needed. Ghaffari: Does SSAL conduct business mostly in Europe? Ford: The work of SSAL includes any non-US location: Latin America, Asia, pretty much the world over. Our first big contract was a NASA/DOE project, working for the people who were providing the sensors used to discover the origins of dark matter in the universe. They were all located in Pisa, Italy, where Galileo studied. They know a thing or two about astrophysics. It required us to have people on site in Italy to help get that project out the door. In the early days, we did the international work from within our domestic commercial group.


pages: 588 words: 131,025

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize

One company, Foundation Medicine, has initiated a commercial product of limited sequencing of about three hundred genes of the tumor to query the presence of likely driver mutations.37 Initial results in over two thousand patients have looked promising for finding culprit cancer genes, but clinical trials will be necessary to show that this information leads to improved outcomes compared with the standard, non-GIS approach. Further, given that only a limited number of genes (three hundred of nineteen thousand, or 1.6 percent) are assessed, and the rest of the 98.5 percent of the genome is left as dark matter, we can readily predict this partial GIS approach will likely miss important data. We already know, for example, that there are many noncoding (nongene) elements of the genome that can induce cancer; part of this information could be tapped by performing RNA sequencing. And there is no assessment of the patient’s germline DNA.


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

However, as many scholars have demonstrated, slavery, whether in the ancient world or in for example the US plantation system, furnishes many further examples of surveillance as a weapon of social control, dehumanisation and othering. For further reading on racialised surveillance, see for example Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke University Press, 2015). 37 ‘Pinkerton National Detective Agency’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 25 September 2017, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pinkerton-National-Detective-Agency. 38 Ifeoma Ajunwa, Kate Crawford and Jason Schultz, ‘Limitless Worker Surveillance’, California Law Review 105, no. 3 (2017), 735–6. 39 Julie A.


pages: 530 words: 145,220

The Search for Life on Mars by Elizabeth Howell

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, British Empire, dark matter, double helix, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, Google Earth, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Skype

There she looked at what she has called “three squiggly lines” in the spectrum of a star suspected of having a large water-rich planet orbiting it. Fraeman also met an extraordinary pioneer whose name now lives on Mars. Vera Rubin was a pioneering astronomer who first proposed the existence of dark matter and worked in the same building. Rubin died in 2016 at the age of eighty-eight, but not before a ridge of hematite (“I was the campaign lead,” Fraeman says with a smile) in Gale Crater was named for her due to singular contributions to science. In the meantime, Abigail Fraeman is carrying on Rubin’s legacy, blazing the trail for other explorers to follow on the frontiers of knowledge.


First Time Ever: A Memoir by Peggy Seeger

belling the cat, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, Easter island, index card, Kickstarter, Nelson Mandela, place-making, pre–internet, Skype, the market place

I knocked on the dividing wall and invited the girls to open their curtain. I stood there and said, Look at this and think again how imperfect your bodies are. No, I didn’t really do that, Irene. I stared at my reflection and apologised to my courageous body for using the word ruined. * Like the universe, 85 per cent of our brains seems to be dark matter. Other fauna are smart. Their males may battle, sometimes to the death, but they don’t kill or torture each other on a massive scale. They don’t invent things the logical outcome of which could spell their doom. Dumb animals. Survival is Nature’s reward for those who are good at securing territory for food, shelter and the right conditions for reproduction.


Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C by Bruce Schneier

active measures, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, dark matter, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Dutch auction, end-to-end encryption, Exxon Valdez, fault tolerance, finite state, heat death of the universe, information security, invisible hand, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, NP-complete, OSI model, P = NP, packet switching, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, seminal paper, software patent, telemarketer, traveling salesman, Turing machine, web of trust, Zimmermann PGP

Many of the astrophysics numbers are explained in Freeman TABLE 1.1 Large Numbers Physical Analogue Number Odds of being killed by lightning (per day) Odds of winning the top prize in a U.S. state lottery Odds of winning the top prize in a U.S. state lottery and being killed by lightning in the same day Odds of drowning (in the U.S. per year) Odds of being killed in an automobile accident(in the U.S. in 1993) Odds of being killed in an automobile accident(in the U.S. per lifetime) Time until the next ice age Time until the sun goes nova Age of the planet Age of the Universe Number of atoms in the planet Number of atoms in the sun Number of atoms in the galaxy Number of atoms in the Universe (dark matter excluded) Volume of the Universe 1 in 9 billion (233) 1 in 4,000,000 (222) 1 in 255 1 in 59,000 (216) 1 in 6100 (213) 1 in 88 (27) 14,000 (214) years 109 (230) years 109 (230) years 1010 (234) years 1051 (2170) 1057 (2190) 1067 (2223) 1077 (2265) 1084 (2280) cm3 If the Universe is Closed: Total lifetime of the Universe If the Universe is Open: Time until low-mass stars cool off Time until planets detach from stars Time until stars detach from galaxies Time until orbits decay by gravitational radiation Time until black holes decay by the Hawking process Time until all matter is liquid at zero temperature Time until all matter decays to iron Time until all matter collapses to black holes 1011 (237) years 1018 (261) seconds 1014 (247) years 1015 (250) years 1019 (264) years 1020 (267) years 1064 (2213) years 1065 (2216) years 101026 years 101076 years Dyson’s paper, “Time Without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe,” in Reviews of Modern Physics, v. 52, n. 3, July 1979, pp. 447–460.

Design a chip that can test a billion keys per second and throw a billion of them at the problem, and it will still take 1013 years—that’s longer than the age of the universe. An array of 1024 such chips can find the key in a day, but there aren’t enough silicon atoms in the universe to build such a machine. Now we’re getting somewhere—although I’d keep my eye on the dark matter debate. Perhaps brute force isn’t the best way to attack IDEA. The algorithm is still too new for any definitive cryptanalytic results. The designers have done their best to make the algorithm immune to differential cryptanalysis; they defined the concept of a Markov cipher and showed that resistance to differential cryptanalysis can be modeled and quantified [931, 925].


pages: 473 words: 154,182

Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them by Donovan Hohn

An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, clean water, collective bargaining, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Exxon Valdez, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hindcast, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, intermodal, Isaac Newton, means of production, microbiome, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, post-Panamax, profit motive, Skype, standardized shipping container, statistical model, the long tail, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman

And yet below us, if the data were to be believed, there raged a watery storm. We human beings are such visual creatures that for a semi-scientifically literate layperson like me, believing in invisible if observable phenomena—mesoscale eddies; rising CO2 levels measured in parts per billion; rising sea levels measured in millimeters; electrons, dark matter, quarks; the waves through which cell phones and satellites communicate—requires a leap of faith, or at least a leap of trust. Out there on the fantail of the Knorr, on the last day of our voyage, in seas far less stormy than they’d been the day before, trying in vain to perceive some trace or sign of the watery storm below, I couldn’t help but feel a bit envious of the naturalists of centuries past, those scientific voyeurs who, with microscopes and telescopes, made discoveries everywhere they looked, perceiving ecosystems in drops of water, cosmologies in the dying rays of intergalactic light.


pages: 547 words: 148,732

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Mother of all demos, off-the-grid, overview effect, placebo effect, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, satellite internet, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Whole Earth Catalog

A painting of Albert Hofmann hangs over the fireplace. Overhead, beneath the peak, is a massive round stained glass depicting “The Universality of the Mycelial Archetype”—an intricate tracery of blue lines on a night sky, the lines representing at once mycelium, roots, neurons, the Internet, and dark matter. Displayed on the walls heading upstairs from the living room are framed artworks, photographs, and keepsakes, including a diploma signifying the successful completion of one of the Merry Pranksters’ Acid Tests, signed by Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady. There are several photographs of Dusty posing in old-growth forests with impressive specimens of fungi and a colorfully grotesque print by Alex Grey, the dean of American psychedelic artists.


pages: 590 words: 152,595

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Air France Flight 447, air gap, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, brain emulation, Brian Krebs, cognitive bias, computer vision, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, DevOps, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, fail fast, fault tolerance, Flash crash, Freestyle chess, friendly fire, Herman Kahn, IFF: identification friend or foe, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sensor fusion, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, Tesla Model S, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche, Y2K, zero day

Patti Domm, “False Rumor of Explosion at White House Causes Stocks to Briefly Plunge; AP Confirms Its Twitter Feed Was Hacked,” April 23, 2013, http://www.cnbc.com/id/100646197. 185 deep neural networks to understand text: Xiang Zhang and Yann LeCun, “Text Understanding from Scratch,” April 4, 2016, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.01710v5.pdf. 185 Associated Press Twitter account was hacked: Domm, “False Rumor of Explosion at White House Causes Stocks to Briefly Plunge; AP Confirms Its Twitter Feed Was Hacked.” 186 design deep neural networks that aren’t vulnerable: “Deep neural networks are easily fooled.” 186 “counterintuitive, weird” vulnerability: Jeff Clune, interview, September 28, 2016. 186 “[T]he sheer magnitude, millions or billions”: JASON, “Perspectives on Research in Artificial Intelligence and Artificial General Intelligence Relevant to DoD,” 28–29. 186 “the very nature of [deep neural networks]”: Ibid, 28. 186 “As deep learning gets even more powerful”: Jeff Clune, interview, September 28, 2016. 186 “super complicated and big and weird”: Ibid. 187 “sobering message . . . tragic extremely quickly”: Ibid. 187 “[I]t is not clear that the existing AI paradigm”: JASON, “Perspectives on Research in Artificial Intelligence and Artificial General Intelligence Relevant to DoD,” Ibid, 27. 188 “nonintuitive characteristics”: Szegedy et al., “Intriguing Properties of Neural Networks.” 188 we don’t really understand how it happens: For a readable explanation of this broader problem, see David Berreby, “Artificial Intelligence Is Already Weirdly Inhuman,” Nautilus, August 6, 2015, http://nautil.us/issue/27/dark-matter/artificial-intelligence-is-already-weirdly-inhuman. 12 Failing Deadly: The Risk of Autonomous Weapons 189 “I think that we’re being overly optimistic”: John Borrie, interview, April 12, 2016. 189 “If you’re going to turn these things loose”: John Hawley, interview, December 5, 2016. 189 “[E]ven with our improved knowledge”: Perrow, Normal Accidents, 354. 191 “robo-cannon rampage”: Noah Shachtman, “Inside the Robo-Cannon Rampage (Updated),” WIRED, October 19, 2007, https://www.wired.com/2007/10/inside-the-robo/. 191 bad luck, not deliberate targeting: “ ‘Robotic Rampage’ Unlikely Reason for Deaths,” New Scientist, accessed June 12, 2017, https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12812-robotic-rampage-unlikely-reason-for-deaths/. 191 35 mm rounds into a neighboring gun position: “Robot Cannon Kills 9, Wounds 14,” WIRED, accessed June 12, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2007/10/robot-cannon-ki/. 191 “The machine doesn’t know it’s making a mistake”: John Hawley, interview, December 5, 2016. 193 “incidents of mass lethality”: John Borrie, interview, April 12, 2016. 193 “If you put someone else”: John Hawley, interview, December 5, 2016. 194 “I don’t have a lot of good answers for that”: Peter Galluch, interview, July 15, 2016. 13 Bot vs.


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Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, California gold rush, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Copley Medal, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dmitri Mendeleev, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, Ted Nordhaus, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Vanguard fund, working poor, young professional

Energy in the American Economy, 1850–1975: An Economic Study of Its History and Prospects. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1960. Schurr, Sam H., Calvin C. Burwell, Warren S. Devine, and Sidney Sonenblum. Electricity in the American Economy: Agent of Technological Progress. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. Scott, Charlotte. “Dark Matter: Shakespeare’s Foul Dens and Forests.” Shakespeare Survey 1952 (2011) (online). Scott-Warren, Jason. “When Theaters Were Bear-Gardens: Or, What’s at Stake in the Comedy of Humors.” Shakespeare Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2003): 63–82. Scrivner, Lee. Becoming Insomniac: How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity.


pages: 489 words: 148,885

Accelerando by Stross, Charles

book value, business cycle, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, disinformation, dumpster diving, Extropian, financial engineering, finite state, flag carrier, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, glass ceiling, gravity well, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Kuiper Belt, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, performance metric, phenotype, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, quantum entanglement, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, satellite internet, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, slashdot, South China Sea, stem cell, technological singularity, telepresence, The Chicago School, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, web of trust, Y2K, zero-sum game

"We need to send duplicate ghosts out to each possible router end point, wait for an echo, then iterate and repeat. Recursive depth-first traversal. The goal – that's harder." He points at the ceiling, which dissolves into a chaotic 3-D spiderweb that Rita recognizes, after some hours of subjective head-down archive time, as a map of the dark matter distribution throughout a radius of a billion light-years, galaxies glued like fluff to the nodes where strands of drying silk meet. "We've known for most of a century that there's something flaky going on out there, out past the Böotes void – there are a couple of galactic superclusters, around which there's something flaky about the cosmic background anisotropy.


pages: 475 words: 155,554

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge by Faisal Islam

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, British Empire, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, energy security, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, ghettoisation, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Chicago School, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two tier labour market, unorthodox policies, uranium enrichment, urban planning, value at risk, WikiLeaks, working-age population, zero-sum game

The system worked well in an era of flexible credit ratings and even more flexible regulators. But it lacked the insurance against bank runs present in the conventional banking system. There was no backstop for liquidity in the event of a run on the shadow banks. London was its capital – and in 2008, we got the run. Like the dark matter that makes up much of the mass of the universe, the shadow banking system is detectable only by deduction, rather than by direct observation. The US Treasury International Capital (TIC) reporting system offered some light into the financial shade. It was set up in 1934 to track international investment and capital flows, and requires most US financial entities to track foreign purchases of bonds and shares.


Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

From the perspective of many of the best minds in science at the time, those regions were little more than the ghosts of genomes past, mostly remnants of dead hitchhiking viruses that had integrated into the genome hundreds of thousands of years ago. The stuff that makes us who we are, it was thought, had largely been identified, and we had what we needed to propel forward our understanding of what makes us human. Yet by some estimates, that genetic dark matter accounts for as much as 69 percent of the total genome,1 and even within the regions generally regarded as “coding,” some scientists believe, up to 10 percent has yet to be decoded, including regions that impact aging.2 In the relatively short time that has come and gone since 2003, we have come to find out that within the famous double helix, there were sequences that were not just unmapped but essential to our lives.


Animal Spirits by Jackson Lears

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, escalation ladder, feminist movement, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, George Santayana, heat death of the universe, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, short selling, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, the market place, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

As she wrote, the recognition that “we are made up of its”—the countless bacteria that populate our bodies—ought to be a key to “the newish self that needs to emerge” in an “onto-tale” where “everything is, in a sense, alive.” Since Vibrant Matter was published, scientists have been creating a broader foundation for Bennett’s speculation. Robert Macfarlane converses with some of them in his remarkable book Underland. One is a physicist studying the collisions of dark matter. During a lull in their conversation, “he pauses. I wait,” Macfarlane writes. “Trillions of neutrinos pass through our bodies and on through the earth’s bedrock, its mantle, its liquid innards, its solid core.” Then the physicist says, “as if the phrase has just entered his head without warning, scoring a trace as it passes through—‘Everything causes a scintillation.’”


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The Best of Best New SF by Gardner R. Dozois

back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, Columbine, congestion charging, dark matter, Doomsday Book, double helix, Extropian, flag carrier, Future Shock, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, pneumatic tube, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, three-masted sailing ship, Turing machine, Turing test, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, zero-sum game

“Rall?” She didn’t even hesitate in her answer this time. “Of course not, Henry Bone. How could you ever think such a thing? I was waiting to catch up with you. Now tell me about the future.” And so I drew away from her for a while, and told her – part of it at least. About how there is not enough dark matter to pull the cosmos back together again, not enough mass to undulate in an eternal cycle. Instead, there is an end, and all the stars are either dead or dying, and all that there is is nothing but dim night. I told her about the twilight armies gathered there, culled from all times, all places. Creatures, presences, machines, weapons fighting galaxy-to-galaxy, system-to-system, fighting until the critical point is reached when entropy flows no more, but pools, pools in endless stagnant pools of nothing.

You’re still locked into a pre-singularity economic model that thinks in terms of scarcity. Resource allocation isn’t a problem anymore – it’s going to be over within a decade. The cosmos is flat in all directions, and we can borrow as much bandwidth as we need from the first universal bank of entropy! They even found the dark matter – MACHOs, big brown dwarves in the galactic halo, leaking radiation in the long infrared – suspiciously high entropy leakage. The latest figures say something like 70 percent of the mass of the M31 galaxy was sapient, two point nine million years ago when the infrared we’re seeing now set out. The intelligence gap between us and the aliens is probably about a trillion times bigger than the gap between us and a nematode worm.


Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, dark matter, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Ford Model T, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, IFF: identification friend or foe, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, SETI@home, social graph, speech recognition, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture

I am grateful for the poets who suspect the twilight zone.”59 The secrecy Morse so objected to is now permanently entrenched. The U.S. government now produces more classified information than unclassified information—and, since even the amount of classified information is classified, we may never know how much dark matter there is. Von Neumann’s monument, however, has turned out not to be as coldly legible as it first appeared. There will always be truth beyond the reach of proof. Alan Turing received the Order of the British Empire in 1946, yet, under the Official Secrets Act, he could never talk openly about his wartime work.


pages: 574 words: 164,509

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, brain emulation, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, epigenetics, fear of failure, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hallucination problem, Hans Moravec, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine translation, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, nuclear winter, operational security, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, prediction markets, price stability, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, search costs, social graph, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trolley problem, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The true number is probably much larger. We might get additional orders of magnitude, for example, if we make extensive use of reversible computation, if we perform the computations at colder temperatures (by waiting until the universe has cooled further), or if we make use of additional sources of energy (such as dark matter).24 It might not be immediately obvious to some readers why the ability to perform 1085 computational operations is a big deal. So it is useful to put it in context. We may, for example, compare this number with our earlier estimate (Box 3, in Chapter 2) that it may take about 1031–1044 ops to simulate all neuronal operations that have occurred in the history of life on Earth.


pages: 571 words: 162,958

Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology by James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel

back-to-the-land, Columbine, dark matter, Extropian, Firefox, flag carrier, Future Shock, gravity well, haute couture, Internet Archive, Kim Stanley Robinson, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, phenotype, post-industrial society, price stability, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, technological singularity, telepresence, the scientific method, Turing test, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Y2K, zero day

You’re still locked into a pre-singularity economic model that thinks in terms of scarcity. Resource allocation isn’t a problem any more—it’s going to be over within a decade. The cosmos is flat in all directions, and we can borrow as much bandwidth as we need from the first universal bank of entropy! They even found the dark matter — MACHOS, big brown dwarves in the galactic halo, leaking radiation in the long infrared—suspiciously high entropy leakage. The latest figures say something like 70 percent of the mass of the M31 galaxy was sapient, two point nine million years ago when the infrared we’re seeing now set out. The intelligence gap between us and the aliens is probably about a trillion times bigger than the gap between us and a nematode worm.


pages: 506 words: 167,034

Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut by Mike Mullane

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, feminist movement, financial independence, Gene Kranz, invisible hand, Magellanic Cloud, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pepto Bismol, placebo effect, Potemkin village, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, space junk, space pen, Stephen Hawking, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent, your tax dollars at work

Jerry’s story implied Abbey had selected a new class over Kraft’s objections. Did even Dr. Kraft answer to Abbey on the subject of astronauts? Nobody knew. Kraft, Abbey, and Young never said a word about their responsibilities. Everything about the most important aspect of our career—flight assignments—was as unknown to us as the dark matter of space was to astrophysicists. Who made assignments? Who approved them? Who had veto power over them? Would there be a rotation system? Would our preferences for a mission be considered? Would military astronauts fly only military missions? Abbey said nothing. Nor did he ever provide the slightest performance feedback—positive or negative.


pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Vietnam triggers unease in America for the same reasons the Empire remains an uneasy subject for Britons: The moral failures of each stretched well beyond the Pentagon and Whitehall. Guerrillas in the Mist It’s been over forty years since the last American troops left Vietnam, and while the war continues to make itself felt as part of the dark matter of the American political universe, details have gotten fuzzy. For Americans who did live through the war, including all the Boomers, time erodes many details. Others facts have mutated or vanished entirely (e.g., the confusion surrounding the sincerity of B. Sanders’ application for conscientious objector status), lost to assiduous mythologizing like whitewashed draft histories (B.


pages: 1,178 words: 388,227

Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson

Danny Hillis, dark matter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Free Software Foundation, gentleman farmer, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, retrograde motion, short selling, short squeeze, Snow Crash, the scientific method, trade route, urban planning

A triangular commerce in highly significant glances and eyebrow-raisings flourished there in the Dogg, for the next hour, among them. But they could not all break free at once: Churchill and others wanted more details from Daniel about this Mr. Newton and his telescope. The Duke of Gunfleet got Pepys cornered, and interrogated him about dark matters concerning the Navy’s finances. Blood-spattered, dejected Royal Society members stumbled in from Gresham’s College, with the news that Drs. King and Belle had gotten lost in the wilderness of canine anatomy, the dog had died, and they really needed Hooke—where was he? Then they cornered Bishop Wilkins and talked Royal Society politics—would Comstock stand for election to President again?

“M’Lord Upnor’s town-house lies this way,” shouted Bob Shaftoe, pointing insistently in the direction of Piccadilly. “Work with me, Sergeant,” Daniel said, “as if I were a guide taking you on a hunt for strange game of which you know nothing.” They began to push their way across the vast cosmos of the square, which was crowded with dark matter: huge mobs pressing in round bonfires, singing Lilliburlero, and diverse knaves who’d come up out of Hogs-den to prey upon ’em, and patchwork mutts fighting over anything that escaped the attention of the knaves. Daniel lost sight of the green flames for a while and was about to give up when he saw red flames shooting up in the same place—not the usual orange-red but an unnatural scarlet.


pages: 1,048 words: 187,324

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, Ella Morton

anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, centre right, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Day of the Dead, double helix, East Village, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, horn antenna, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, intentional community, Jacques de Vaucanson, Kowloon Walled City, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, urban sprawl, Vesna Vulović, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, working poor

See Robert Redford’s cowboy boots, Elvis’s blue patent-leather loafers, and an ankle boot that once cradled the foot of John Lennon. 327 Bloor Street West, Toronto. 43.667278 79.400139 Around 13,000 shoes from all over history live in a shoebox-shaped building. Snolab LIVELY A mile and a half underground, beneath the Creighton nickel mine, a team of astrophysicists is trying to solve the mysteries of the universe. They work at SNOLAB, a laboratory devoted to searching for neutrinos—neutral subatomic particles—and dark matter. The laboratory needs to be so far underground in order to shield the sensitive detection systems from interference caused by cosmic radiation. The site is best known for its Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), an experiment that ran from 1999 to 2006, which used a 40-foot-wide (12 m) vessel filled with heavy water (water containing a large amount of the hydrogen isotope deuterium) to detect neutrinos produced by fusion reactions in the sun.


pages: 611 words: 186,716

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

British Empire, clean water, dark matter, defense in depth, digital map, edge city, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, Mason jar, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, the scientific method, Turing machine, wage slave

She looked toward the door, thinking that someone had come in and turned the lights on, but she was alone in the room, and the light was flickering against the wall. She turned her head the other way. The center span of the Causeway had become a ball of white light hurling its marbled shroud of cold dark matter into the night. The sphere expanded until it seemed to occupy most of the interval between New Chusan and the Pudong shoreline, though by this time the color had deepened from white into reddish-orange, and the explosion had punched a sizable crater into the water, which developed into a circular wave of steam and spray that ran effortlessly across the ocean's surface like the arc of light cast by a pocket torch.


pages: 775 words: 208,604

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, confounding variable, corporate governance, cosmological principle, CRISPR, crony capitalism, dark matter, declining real wages, democratizing finance, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, means of production, mega-rich, Network effects, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, very high income, working-age population, zero-sum game

Consideration of material such as the burials from Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period takes us to—and perhaps beyond—the limits of how far we can push the study of inequality. Most leveling that was driven by political fragmentation took place in the premodern past, a potentially widespread phenomenon that will for the most part forever remain obscured from the modern observer. It forms a kind of “dark matter” in the history of inequality, almost certainly present but hard to pin down. ”THE COUNTRY IS SO BROKEN”: CONTEMPORARY STATE FAILURE IN SOMALIA However severe the limitations of much of the historical evidence, it lends support to the thesis that the violent unraveling of predatory states of the premodern era curtailed inequality by depriving established elites of wealth and power.


pages: 823 words: 206,070

The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, book value, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, continuous integration, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, dark matter, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, guest worker program, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, oil shock, precariat, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, vertical integration, very high income, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Acharya, Guaranteed To Fail: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Debacle of Mortgage Finance, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, pp. 20–2. 24 Alan Greenspan, “Consumer Finance,” remarks by Chairman Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve Fourth Annual Community Affairs Research Conference, Washington, DC, April 8, 2005. 25 Moreover, because US FDI was so large, and the returns on it so much higher than on securities, total receipts to the US on assets abroad were higher than what was paid out on foreign assets in the US. For this argument, and the quotation used here, see Ricardo Housmann and Federico Sturzenegger, “US and Global Imbalances: Can Dark Matter Prevent a Big Bang?” Working Paper, Kennedy School of Government, November 13, 2005. See also Herman Schwartz, Subprime Nation: American Power, American Capital and the Housing Bubble, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. 26 The data is readily available from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the Federal Reserve Board Flow of Funds Accounts, Data Download Program. 27 This argument was most strongly advanced by Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy, New York: Verso, 2002, but was much more widely held.


pages: 669 words: 195,743

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, coronavirus, dark matter, digital map, double helix, experimental subject, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, South China Sea, the long tail, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

Both the round bodies of B. burgdorferi and the small form of C. burnetii merely illustrate that, even in the age of antibiotics, bacteria can be sneaky and tough. These microbes remind us that you don’t have to be a virus to cause severe, intractable, mystifying outbreaks of zoonotic disease in the twenty-first century. Although it helps. VI GOING VIRAL 54 Viruses were an invisible mystery, like dark matter and Planet X, until well into the twentieth century. They were momentously consequential but undetectable, like the neutron. Anton van Leeuwenhoek’s microbial discoveries hadn’t encompassed them, nor had the bacteriological breakthroughs of Pasteur and Koch, two hundred years later. Pasteur worked on rabies as a disease, true, and even developed a vaccine, but he never laid eyes on the rabies virus itself nor quite understood what it was.


Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, gentrification, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, Howard Zinn, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Samuelson, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, wage slave, women in the workforce

Also, we probably don’t know all the laws—I mean, it’s very unlikely that we really do know the laws, even at the core of science. A physicist will tell you much more about this than I can, but take, say, the matter in the universe: more than 90 percent of the matter in the universe is what’s called “dark matter”—and it’s called “dark” because nobody knows what it is. It’s just sort of postulated that it exists, because if you don’t postulate it, everything blows up—so you have to assume that it’s there. And that’s over 90 percent of the matter in the universe: you don’t even know what it is. In fact, a new branch of physics has developed around superconductivity [“superconductivity” refers to the complete disappearance of electrical resistance in various solids at ultra-low temperatures], and while I don’t have the knowledge to evaluate the claims, what some of the physicists working on it say is that they can now virtually prove (I mean, not quite prove, but come quite close to proving) that in this domain of highly condensed matter, there are principles which are literally not deducible from the known laws of nature: so you can’t reduce the principles of superconductivity to the known laws of nature.


Lonely Planet London City Guide by Tom Masters, Steve Fallon, Vesna Maric

Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, Crossrail, dark matter, death from overwork, discovery of the americas, double helix, East Village, Edward Jenner, financial independence, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, gentrification, ghettoisation, haute cuisine, Isaac Newton, James Bridle, John Snow's cholera map, Mahatma Gandhi, market design, Nelson Mandela, place-making, Russell Brand, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, young professional

The latter describes it in detail in his Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). 6 Whitechapel Bell Foundry In business for nigh on 450 years, this bell foundry can lay claim to producing some of the most recognisable bells in history, including Big Ben and the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. Return to beginning of chapter NORTH LONDON Drinking; Eating; Shopping; Sleeping North London is a nebulous term for an area made up of many smaller neighbourhoods, most of which are ancient villages that have slowly been drawn into London’s dark matter over the centuries as the metropolis has expanded. Starting north of Euston Rd, this region of the capital includes King’s Cross and Camden Town – two names both likely to elicit a response from Londoners. King’s Cross has historically been one of the capital’s nastiest urban blights, but a redevelopment of the tube station, the opening of the beautiful St Pancras International train terminal and the slow but thorough urban renewal going on elsewhere is making King’s Cross more and more desirable, although it’s fair to say it’ll be a while before we’re all meeting there for drinks.


pages: 824 words: 218,333

The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autism spectrum disorder, Benoit Mandelbrot, butterfly effect, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, seminal paper, stem cell, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

Some noncoding genes were of known function: the ribosome, the giant intracellular machine that makes proteins, contains specialized RNA molecules that assist in the manufacture of proteins. Other noncoding genes were eventually found to encode small RNAs—called micro-RNAs—which regulate genes with incredible specificity. But many of these genes were mysterious and ill defined. They were not dark matter, but shadow matter, of the genome—visible to geneticists, yet unknown in function or significance. What is a gene, then? When Mendel discovered the “gene” in 1865, he knew it only as an abstract phenomenon: a discrete determinant, transmitted intact across generations, that specified a single visible property or phenotype, such as flower color or seed texture in peas.


pages: 678 words: 216,204

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business logic, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, dark matter, desegregation, digital divide, East Village, Eben Moglen, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, George Gilder, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, machine readable, Mahbub ul Haq, market bubble, market clearing, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, random walk, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, software patent, spectrum auction, subscription business, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, work culture , Yochai Benkler

As SETI@home and Slashdot suggest, it is not necessarily limited to stable communities of individuals who interact often and know each other, or who expect to continue to interact personally. Social production of goods and services, both public and private, is ubiquitous, though unnoticed. It sometimes substitutes for, and sometimes complements, market and state production everywhere. It is, to be fanciful, the dark matter of our economic production universe. 228 Consider the way in which the following sentences are intuitively familiar, yet as a practical matter, describe the provisioning of goods or services that have well-defined NAICS categories (the categories used by the Economic Census to categorize economic sectors) whose provisioning through the markets is accounted for in the Economic Census, but that are commonly provisioned in a form consistent with the definition of sharing--on a radically distributed model, without price or command. 229 NAICS 624410624410 [Babysitting services, child day care] "John, could you pick up Bobby today when you take Lauren to soccer?


Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale by David N. Blank-Edelman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, bounce rate, business continuity plan, business logic, business process, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, commoditize, continuous integration, Conway's law, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, database schema, Debian, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, DevOps, digital rights, domain-specific language, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, exponential backoff, fail fast, fallacies of distributed computing, fault tolerance, fear of failure, friendly fire, game design, Grace Hopper, imposter syndrome, information retrieval, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, invisible hand, iterative process, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kubernetes, loose coupling, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Maslow's hierarchy, microaggression, microservices, minimum viable product, MVC pattern, performance metric, platform as a service, pull request, RAND corporation, remote working, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, search engine result page, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, single page application, Snapchat, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, systems thinking, the long tail, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, traumatic brain injury, value engineering, vertical integration, web application, WebSocket, zero day

We then used all of the missed repair items to measure what we called “virtual repair debt.” Visualizing virtual repair debt became a powerful tool to drive improvements. As seen in Figure 4-5, the gray line representing repair debt makes it look like the team is keeping up with the repair debt, but when you add the dotted red line that represents missed repairs, the dark-matter repair items that form virtual debt become glaringly obvious. Virtual debt is particularly important because it represents the corpus of repair items that were never logged and will end up hurting the service down the road. When there is virtual debt, the specific TTD and TTM misses will repeat over and over until they are logged and fixed.


pages: 745 words: 207,187

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Carrington event, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, Eddington experiment, Edward Snowden, energy security, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global value chain, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Laura Poitras, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, operation paperclip, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, prediction markets, profit motive, Project Plowshare, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, skunkworks, South China Sea, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, the long tail, time dilation, trade route, War on Poverty, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

Various permutations of astrophysicists from Canada, Chile, France, Israel, Italy, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States have been studying the quantum effects of the intense magnetic field surrounding a neutron star; a vast intergalactic void that is helping to propel our galaxy through space by repelling it; an as-yet-unexplained cool region in the cosmic microwave background (imprint from the Big Bang) that may offer the first evidence of the multiverse. They’ve found a large, dim, relatively nearby spheroidal galaxy, similar in total mass to the Milky Way, that was only recently discovered because 99.99 percent of it consists of dark matter. They’ve witnessed an interstellar asteroid, the solar system’s first visitor from elsewhere in the Milky Way, which plunged past the Sun and onward toward Mars at 300,000 kilometers per hour in the fall of 2017. Besides making discoveries, astrophysicists have speculated that aliens might use lasers to broadcast obviously purposeful signals of their existence that would be picked up by skywatchers carefully monitoring known and suspected exoplanets.


pages: 653 words: 218,559

Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975 by Hannah Arendt

American ideology, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, dark matter, desegregation, means of production, military-industrial complex, post-truth, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Rosa Parks, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

And since only that is which appears and is seen, Plato’s highest idea of the good in its all-embracing and overshadowing reality is phanotaton—that is, it shines forth most, has the most shining appearance (Republica, 518 C). The private realm, even if the necessities of life were successfully “ruled” and taken care of, remained a realm of shadowy, inarticulate, and dark matters; private life was deprived of reality because it could not show itself and could not be seen by others. The conviction that only what appears and is seen by others acquires full reality and authentic meaning for man is at the basis of all Greek political life. The principal aim of the tyrant is to condemn men to their private household, which is to deprive them of the possibility of their humanity.


pages: 1,014 words: 237,531

Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, disruptive innovation, Easter island, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Multics, Network effects, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, secular stagnation, South China Sea, spinning jenny, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

., 583n157 Yuan empire, 229, 281, 403, 507 Zhao, Dingxin, 393–94, 412, 583n144 Zheng Chenggong, 445 Zheng He (Chinese eunuch), 433, 439, 445, 468 Zhenzong emperor, 241 Zhou regime: demise of, 221, 222, 570n52; in heyday of empire, 281; language and writing in, 308; religious beliefs in, 319; steppe effect in, 282, 285, 286; unity as concept in, 323 Zoroastrians, 207, 317 Zwingli, Ulrich, 474 THE PRINCETON ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE WESTERN WORLD Joel Mokyr, Series Editor Going the Distance: Eurasian Trade and the Rise of the Business Corporation 1400–1700 by Ron Harris Dark Matter Credit: The Development of Peer-to-Peer Lending and Banking in France by Philip T. Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis by Sheilagh Ogilvie Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean: Private Order and Public Institutions by Taco Terpstra The Winding Road to the Welfare State: Economic Insecurity and Social Welfare Policy in Britain by George R.


pages: 897 words: 242,580

The Temporal Void by Peter F. Hamilton

corporate governance, dark matter, forensic accounting, linked data, megacity, place-making, trade route

Its spectrum chased through a delicate pink to pure white, then accelerated into blue-white as its radiation efflux poured out vast quantities of gamma waves. The event horizon consumed the last of the planet’s core. Only the light remained, growing ever brighter as its heart shrank faster and faster. ‘Out of twinkling stardust all came, into dark matter all will fall. Death mocks us as we laugh defiance at entropy, yet ignorance birthed mortals sail forth upon time’s cruel sea.’ The Lindau began to accelerate at an easy two gees, keeping far ahead of the rock fragments and darkening seas of magma that spewed out from the dazzling implosion nucleus.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

We can explain much about the history of the universe, the forces that make it tick, the stuff we’re made of, the origin of living things, and the machinery of life, including our mental life. Though our ignorance is vast (and always will be), our knowledge is astonishing, and growing daily. The physicist Sean Carroll argues in The Big Picture that the laws of physics underlying everyday life (that is, excluding extreme values of energy and gravitation like black holes, dark matter, and the Big Bang) are completely known. It’s hard to disagree that this is “one of the greatest triumphs of human intellectual history.”2 In the living world, more than a million and a half species have been scientifically described, and with a realistic surge of effort the remaining seven million could be named within this century.3 Our understanding of the world, moreover, consists not in mere listings of particles and forces and species but in deep, elegant principles, such as that gravity is the curvature of space-time, and that life depends on a molecule that carries information, directs metabolism, and replicates itself.


The Art of SEO by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Jessie Stricchiola, Rand Fishkin

AltaVista, barriers to entry, bounce rate, Build a better mousetrap, business intelligence, cloud computing, content marketing, dark matter, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, folksonomy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, linked data, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, optical character recognition, PageRank, performance metric, Quicken Loans, risk tolerance, search engine result page, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, social bookmarking, social web, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Steven Levy, text mining, the long tail, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, web application, wikimedia commons

Here are some factors to think about when considering SEO for ideological influence: When to employ SEO for ideological influence Use it when you need to change minds or influence decisions/thinking around a subject—for example, a group of theoretical physicists attempting to get more of their peers to consider the possibility of alternative universes as a dark matter source. Keyword targeting It’s tough to say for certain, but if you’re engaging in these types of campaigns, you probably know the primary keywords you’re chasing and can use keyword research query expansion to find others. Page and content creation/optimization This is classic SEO, but with a twist.


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

And to recur to the eighth, environmental pessimism, great amounts are now being spent to avoid ecocatastrophe, with some gratifying successes, if more to do. Yet nearly half a century after making some of the worst scientific predictions of his generation—outdoing in this respect even the proud physicists missing dark matter and the proud economists missing the Great Recession—people still heed what Ehrlich says, inviting him, for example, to NPR’s Science Friday and hanging on his words. It is a remarkable performance, worth bottling and selling. Ehrlich has been selling over and over since the 1960s the same erroneous prediction, which all of the eight pessimisms voice: the sky is falling, the sky is falling.


pages: 879 words: 309,222

Nobody's Perfect: Writings From the New Yorker by Anthony Lane

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Apollo 13, classic study, colonial rule, dark matter, Frank Gehry, General Magic , Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Index librorum prohibitorum, junk bonds, Mahatma Gandhi, Maui Hawaii, moral hazard, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Great Good Place, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, urban planning

Faced with such effrontery, one might more usefully assume that Homer is in fact winking, and no Pynchon novel would be complete without its fair share of anachronistic digs; the shipboard scenes include an honorary mention of a sailor named Pat O’Brian, “the best Yarn-Spinner in all the Fleets,” and the current president might allow himself a small smile at the advice on Indian hemp which is offered to Cherrycoke as he prepares to set sail: “If you must use the latter, do not inhale. Keep your memory working, young man!” Whether Thomas Pynchon himself would heed this counsel is hard to decide. His memory seems, as ever, not only to have gorged itself on facts and figures but to have kept the whole lot down; some of the astronomical passages are dense with dark matter. On the other hand, this book could easily have been conceived in the fumes of inhalation: it has a dreamed quality, an eagerness to be haunted. Mason and Dixon sail first to the Cape of Good Hope; they record a Transit of Venus, which proves to have a suitably warping effect on the libidos of those observing it, and then proceed to St.


Northern California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, gentrification, gigafactory, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, Port of Oakland, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the built environment, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Thai HouseTHAI$ ( GOOGLE MAP ; www.newthaihouse.com; 248 S Main St; mains $5-14; h11am-3pm & 4-8:30pm Mon-Fri, 11am-8:30pm Sat, from noon Sun; pav)S A remarkably solid Thai restaurant with excellent curries and soups. 6Drinking & Nightlife Cedar Crest BrewingBREWERY ( GOOGLE MAP ; 615 Main St; h11am-8pm Mon-Thu, to 10pm Fri & Sat, noon-5pm Sun) Situated inside a local specialty food spot called Enjoy The Store, this young craft brewery (Red Bluff's first!) pours floral IPAs and a delicious Dark Matter Porter. The surrounding store is a great spot to stock up on fancy snacks, such as local cheese, olives and nuts. E's Locker RoomBAR ( GOOGLE MAP ; %530-527-4600; 1075 Lakeside Dr; h4-9:30pm Tue-Thu, to 10pm Fri & Sat, 3-9pm Sun) Framed photos of local legends and sports heroes clutter the walls of this friendly, casual Red Bluff watering hole.


pages: 1,171 words: 309,640

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini

back-to-the-land, clean water, Colonization of Mars, cryptocurrency, dark matter, friendly fire, gravity well, heat death of the universe, hive mind, independent contractor, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, megastructure, random walk, risk tolerance, time dilation, Vernor Vinge

As confirmed by Oelert (2122), the majority of our local superluminal matter exists in a vast halo surrounding the Milky Way. This halo provides positive pressure on the Milky Way, which helps keep the galaxy from flying apart. The gravitational effects of superluminal mass on our own subluminal realm were long a mystery. Early attempts to explain them resulted in the now-obsolete theories of “dark matter” and “dark energy.” These days, we know that the concentrations of superluminal mass between the galaxies are responsible for the ongoing expansion of the universe, and that they also affect the shape and movement of the galaxies themselves. Whether or not tachyonic matter coalesces into the superluminal equivalent of stars and planets remains an open question.


pages: 1,020 words: 339,564

The confusion by Neal Stephenson

correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filipino sailors, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, land bank, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, Snow Crash, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, urban planning, web of trust

And when Jack moved it to another rock, it pointed in a different direction that was not north. “If you are trying to spook me, it has worked. Let’s get the hell out of here,” Jack said. Their inspection of the Carnaya’s equipment had left Danny and Jimmy baffled and suspicious respectively. “’Twas nought more’n some dark matter, as dull and gross as anything I’ve ever seeyen,” Danny reported. “Certain gemstones look thus, before they have been cut and polished,” Jack said. “It was all sand and grit, nothing bigger’n a pin-head,” Jimmy said. “But Jayzus! Those sacks were heavy.” Enoch was as close to being excited as Jack had ever seen him.


California by Sara Benson

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Columbine, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, planetary scale, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the new new thing, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

GRIFFITH OBSERVATORY & PLANETARIUM After four years and $93 million, this landmark 1935 observatory (Map; 213-473-0800; www.griffithobservatory.org; 2800 Observatory Rd; admission free, planetarium shows adult/child/student & senior $7/3/5; noon-10pm Tue-Fri, 10am-10pm Sat & Sun; ) reopened in 2006 and now boasts the world’s most advanced star projector in its planetarium – phone or check the website for show times. In the lower level is the Big Picture, a 150ft floor-to-ceiling digital image of a sliver of the universe bursting with galaxies, stars and lurking dark matter. For more tangible thrills, weigh yourself on nine planetary scales (weight-watchers should go for Mercury), generate your own earthquake or head to the rooftop to peek through the refracting and solar telescopes housed in the smaller domes. From here, sweeping views of the Hollywood Hills and the gleaming city below are just as spectacular, especially at sunset.


pages: 1,993 words: 478,072

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans by David Abulafia

Admiral Zheng, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial rule, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land reform, lone genius, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, megacity, new economy, out of africa, p-value, Peace of Westphalia, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

Arising out of their theories about a southern continent, and anchored in Marco Polo’s certainties, they were as convinced that a large landmass must exist somewhere south of the Spice Islands as Columbus had been that no landmass could exist between Europe and the Far East; and maybe it was a massive island rather than the world-encircling continent that mapmakers generally preferred to show. A sort of mental discovery actually preceded physical discovery, odd as it may sound. After all, much the same might be said about modern cosmology – dark matter and dark energy, it is claimed, must be there, partly to solve the mathematical equations, despite the fact that nothing has, if the pun can be excused, come to light. The universe has to be in perfect balance, just as the assumption in 1600 was that the earth could only be in balance if the southern continent weighed down the Antarctic pole.