Daily Archives: April 2, 2010

Origin of the Species, From an Alien View

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If you’re going to ask Zecharia Sitchin, be ready for a “Planet of the Apes” scenario: spaceships and hieroglyphics, genetic mutations and mutinous space aliens in gold mines.

It sounds like science fiction, but Mr. Sitchin is sure this is how it all went down hundreds of thousands of years ago in Mesopotamia. Humans were genetically engineered by extraterrestrials, he said, pointing to ancient texts to prove it.

In Mr. Sitchin’s Upper West Side kitchen, evolution and creationism collide. He is an apparently sane, sharp, University of London-educated 89-year-old who has spent his life arguing that people evolved with a little genetic intervention from ancient astronauts who came to Earth and needed laborers to mine gold to bring back to Nibiru, a planet we have yet to recognize.

Outlandish, yes, but also somehow intriguing from this cute, distinguished old man whom you may have seen shuffling slowly down Broadway with his cane, and thought, “Is Art Carney still alive?”

So you bring your laptop to his kitchen table, as if to take dictation, and ask what to write about him. He pads slowly to the stove and puts on the kettle.

“Well, you could start by calling me the most controversial 89-year-old man in New York,” Mr. Sitchin says. “Or you could just say I write books. I understand you’ve got to have an opening sentence, but describing my theories in a sentence, or even something like a newspaper article, is impossible. It will make me look silly.”

Mr. Sitchin has been called silly before — by scientists, historians and archaeologists who dismiss his theories as pseudoscience and fault their underpinnings: his translations of ancient texts and his understanding of physics. And yet, he has a devoted following of readers.

His 13 books, with names like “Genesis Revisited” and “The Earth Chronicles,” have sold millions of copies and been translated into 25 languages. “And Albanian is coming,” he notes, spooning the Taster’s Choice into two mugs.

Mr. Sitchin himself represents a remarkable feat of urban evolution that often goes unnoticed. He lives alone, in the sprawling prewar apartment he has inhabited for 54 years, maintaining his independence by relying on the infrastructure many Manhattanites take for granted.

He works away on his latest book, answers fan mail, and at midday, reaches for his cane, floppy hat and overcoat, and rides the elevator down from the second floor to the lobby. The doorman hails him a cab for the $4 ride to a nearby diner, Cafe Eighty Two on Broadway, for the lunch special, the chicken gyro, where there are other elderly people doing the same.

The Upper West Side is Mr. Sitchin’s Mesopotamia, Broadway a fertile valley. He has Lincoln Center, Zabar’s, Fairway, dry cleaners that deliver and a galaxy of take-out restaurants. For research, the New York Public Library is down on 42nd Street, and the archives of the Jewish Theological Seminary up on Broadway at 122nd Street.

“In Florida, if you don’t have a car, you might as well lay down and die,” he said. “I’ve been all over the Western world and I know of no other place where an older person like myself can survive on his own. I raise my hand, and my chauffeured car — a yellow cab — takes me anywhere. I can call any restaurant or store and get what I need delivered in minutes.”

He slides over a cup of coffee in a mug with a 30th anniversary logo for “The Twelfth Planet,” his seminal first book, now in its 45th printing. It stated his basic theory, based largely on his reading of texts preserved on clay tablets from the pre-Babylonian era in ancient Mesopotamia, the so-called cradle of the civilization of Sumer.

Born in Russia and raised in Israel, Mr. Sitchin studied economics in London and worked as a journalist and editor in Israel before moving to New York in 1952. Here, he was an executive at a shipping company and, with his wife of 66 years (she died in 2007), raised two daughters. He spent his free time studying, leading archaeological tours to ancient sites and spreading his unusual gospel.

Starting in childhood, he has studied ancient Hebrew, Akkadian and Sumerian, the language of the ancient Mesopotamians, who brought you geometry, astronomy, the chariot and the lunar calendar. And in the etchings of Sumerian pre-cuneiform script — the oldest example of writing — are stories of creation and the cosmos that most consider myth and allegory, but that Mr. Sitchin takes literally.

In his kitchen, Mr. Sitchin pulled two Danish out of a Zabar’s bag and began to explain. It starts with the planet Nibiru, whose long, elliptical orbit brings it near Earth once every 3,600 years or so. The planet’s inhabitants were technologically advanced humanlike beings, Mr. Sitchin said, standing about nine feet tall. Some 450,000 years ago, they detected reserves of gold in southeast Africa and made a colonial expedition to Earth, splashing down in what is now the Persian Gulf.

Mr. Sitchin said these Nibiru-ites recruited laborers from Earth’s erect primates to build eight great cities. Enki, who became the Sumerians’ god of science, bestowed some of the Nibiru-ites’ advanced genetic makeup upon these bipeds so they could work as miners.

This is how Mr. Sitchin explains what scientists attribute to evolution. He says the aliens’ cities were washed away in a great flood 30,000 years ago, after which they began passing on their knowledge to humans. He showed a photograph of a woodcarving from 7,000 B.C. of a large man handing over a plow to a smaller man: Ah, the passing on of agricultural knowledge. Anyway, he said, the Nibiru-ites finally jetted home in their spacecraft, around 550 B.C.

“This is in the texts; I’m not making it up,” Mr. Sitchin said, finishing his coffee. “They wanted to create primitive workers from the homo erectus and give him the genes to allow him to think and use tools.”

He showed photographs of ancient Sumerian carvings and etchings showing what he said were alien gods dressed in space helmets and suits. He pointed to something he called Nibiru in diagrams of the solar system.

Quite a theory — has he sold it to Hollywood?

“Oh no, not yet,” he said solemnly. “I’m waiting for Spielberg.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/nyregion/10alone.html

Synapse on a Chip

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Nanoscale Memristor Photo: pubs.acs.org/ The memristor — the so-called “missing link of electronics” memory technology that can change its resistance in varying levels — has been around on paper for nearly 40 years. However it wasn’t until 2010 that a group at the University of Michigan led by Dr. Wei Lu demonstrated that it can be used to build brain-like computers in a paper just published in Nano Letters. New Scientist reports that “memristors can behave uncannily like the junctions between neurons in the brain.” Scientific American describes a US military-funded project that is trying to use the memristor “to make neural computing a reality.” DARPA’s Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics Program (SyNAPSE) is funded to create “electronic neuromorphic machine technology that is scalable to biological levels.”

The discovery of the memristor derives from the search for a rigorous mathematical foundation for electronics by a young electronics engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, Leon O. Chua. Chua’s analysis suggested there was a fourth foundational circuit element missing from the standard trio of resistor, capacitor and inductor. He called it “memristor.” In 1971, he published a seminal paper on this missing basic circuit element.

In 1976, Chua and Sung-Mo Kang published another paper describing a large class of devices and systems they called “memristive devices and systems.” The proof of the existence of such devices proved elusive until 2008, when R. Stanley Williams and his research team at HP actually developed a two-terminal titanium dioxide nanoscale device that exhibited memristor characteristics. A memristance device requires its atoms to change location when voltage is applied, and that happens much more easily at the nanoscale (1 x 10-9 meters). Here is HP Senior Fellow R. Stanley Williams at the whiteboard describing the memristor:

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HP sees an immediate application of memristors for a new kind of computer memory that could be used in place of the dynamic random access memory (DRAM) commonly found in today’s desktop and laptop computers. When you turn your computer off, whatever you are working on in conventional DRAM is lost unless you save it. With memristor-based computers, your document or spreadsheet (or other data) would be stored without having to save it, with little power drained from the computer’s battery. HP is obviously interested in marketing memristors for computers, cell phones, video games — anything that requires a lot of memory without a lot of battery drain. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) promotes U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness and is also very interested in memristor technology. Here’s a video of Dr. Nadine Gergel-Hackett, who researches memristor technology there, describing the how memristors can be used to develop flexible chips that “do the twist”:

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As flexible chips that retain their memory when turned off, clearly memristors could soon have a big impact on the electronics marketplace. But what makes them so well suited to build “brain-like computers?” An HP Labs article makes the case that memristor technology “could one day lead to computer systems that can remember and associate patterns in a way similar to how people do,” Improved facial recognition technology and possibly “provide more complex biometric recognition systems [that] could enable appliances that learn from experience and computers that can make decisions.” Memristors will soon have a big impact on the electronics marketplace. But what makes them so well suited to build “brain-like computers”? The remarkable characteristics of the memristor that make it interesting to HP, DARPA, and NIST as a neural computing substrate come from an unlikely source in the biological world: the slime mold Physarum polycephalum. The slime mold appears as a fungus-like gel during certain phases of its lifecycle, hence the name. Like ectoplasm from the movie Ghostbusters, this glutinous single-celled organism — without a single neuron to its name — can sense and react to its environment and even solve simple puzzles. It can also anticipate events. When Leon Chua first discovered this missing foundational circuit element, he suspected that memristors might have something to do with how biological organisms learn. Experiments with slime molds in 2008 by Tetsu Saisuga at Hokkaido University in Sapporo sparked additional research at the University of California, San Diego by Max Di Ventra. Di Ventra was familiar with Chua’s work and built a memristive circuit that was able to learn and predict future signals. This ability turns out to be similar to the electrical activity involved in the ebb and flow of potassium and sodium ions across cellular membranes: synapses altering their response according to the frequency and strength of signals. New Scientist reports that Di Ventra’s work confirmed Chua’s suspicions that “synapses were memristors.” “The ion channel was the missing circuit element I was looking for,” says Chua, “and it already existed in nature.” Jumping forward to 2010, the work of Dr. Wei Lu’s University of Michigan team now confirms that memristor circuits indeed behave like synapses. Lu’s team used a mixture of silicon and silver to join two metal electrodes, mimicking how synapses allow neurons to learn new firing patterns — not unlike a slime mold’s ability to anticipate events. The timing of electrical signals in two neurons anticipates how later messages can jump across the synapse between them. When a pair fires, the given synapse becomes more likely to pass later messages between the two. “Cells that fire together, wire together,” says Lu.

Just like a synapse, the memristor changes its resistance in varying levels. Dr. Lu found that memristors can simulate synapses because electrical synaptic connections between two neurons can seemingly strengthen or weaken depending on when the neurons fire. “The memristor mimics synaptic action,” Lu concludes. Dr. Nadine Gergel-Hackett at NIST acknowledges the Michigan team’s successful creation of a brain synapse analog. “This work is a large step towards the realization of biology-inspired computing,” she says. The human brain contains about 10 billion nerve cells, or neurons. On average, each neuron is connected to other neurons through about 10,000 synapses. While Lu’s research is promising, it will likely be a while until researchers can demonstrate circuits with even tens of thousands of memristor “synapses.” Nevertheless, DARPA’s SyNAPSE project appears committed to scaling memristor technology to biological levels.

Source: http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/ai/synapse-chip