About AthenaLab: The main activities of AthenaLab are applied scientific research, technology development, and scientific education. AthenaLab is named after Athena, the Greek Goddess of wisdom, victory, and technical crafts.
What a Universe! “Many times I’ve wondered how much there is to know.” — Led Zeppelin (Conrad.Schneiker@Gmail.com)
	My Books The Provably Ultimate and Universal Foundation of Science and Philosophy (Newest, 2008) The Provably Ultimate Foundation of Science (Newer, 2007) The Supreme Scientific Method NanoTechnology with Feynman Machines My NanoTech Inventions NanoTech History Physics and Math Geometric Calculus Collective Electrodynamics Apeiron Metacognition (Brain Boost) Technology Some Exceptional Geniuses Genius Code and Project Renaissance Mega Genius The Complete Guide to Genius Photoreading Whole Mind System Simple and Powerful Mental Change Tools The Father of the Neutron Bomb (Sam Cohen) Perl 6 — The Next Great Super-Language! Life Extension Foundation Amalgam Illness and Mercury Toxicity
About the cover artwork: Bryan McIntyre is MATEC’s graphic designer (Maricopa Advanced Technology Education Center, http://www.matec.org). On their behalf, he did the 2nd series of proposed logos for the Arizona Nanotechnology Cluster (http://www.aznano.org). (I was one of the founding board members of the cluster.) Fortunately the other board members chose another one of Bryan’s logos, so I was able to obtain rights to this one. This logo was based on a suggestion of mine, and after the intermediate round of feedback and tweaking on all the logos, this one turned out very much better than what I’d originally imagined. Plus it still looks great when enlarged (although I’ve reduced the resolution of the web images to produce smaller files for faster loading), even though it was never intended to be scaled up much beyond postage stamp size. So I wanted to put in a word for those who made it possible: “Thanks!”.

Super-NanoTech Inventions

My latest nanotech patents are US Patents 6,700,127, 6,815,688, 6,943,356, and 7,279,686. (The assignee is Biomed Solutions LLC.) These patents involve low-voltage, micro-encapsulated, atomic-point nano-scale electron beam emitters, nano-scale electron beam lenses, neutron beam micro-focusing, and more.

Some nano-scale metal films are substantially more electron-transparent at very low voltages than higher voltages. Tunneling-assisted field emission from mono-atomic sites can also yield very narrow electron beams. Combining these features might provide the means of meeting Feynman’s 1959 challenge to greatly improve electron microscopes. By eliminating magnetic focusing coils and high voltages, SEMs might be reduced to microchip scales. (Low voltages and nano-scale resolution would be extremely valuable for biotech imaging.)

In the ultimate limiting case of this configuration, the electrodes would each be 1 or 2 monolayers of (say) graphene, the emitting electrode would be tipped with a tungsten tetrahedron, and some or all of the protective layers eliminated. Unlike most electrostatic lenses, the lens below can produce either negative or positive focusing (depending on electrode biases), so many aberration-reducing tricks employed for compound optical lenses could be transferred to the realm of compound electrostatic lenses.

There is a further extremely intriguing potential refinement that unfortunately would require comparably  extremely advanced nano-fabrication capabilities. Between 2 stacked disc-shaped (say) graphene monolayers clamped at the edges, in the center one could sandwich a single atom (or a single atom surrounded by a hexagonal ring of other atoms). The key idea is to exploit both the atomic-scale “electrostatic” fields and “quantum-modulated” electron transport to combine the extraction and focusing electrodes into a single high-performance system. There are obviously many other possible alternate configurations on a similar scale. Mechanically driving the emission tip in sub-nano-scale circles (among other patterns) while applying angle-correlated (in axis-normal plane) voltage modulation might provide a means of compensating for lack of rotational symmetry of such atomic-scale electron beam lenses.

NanoTech History

Schneiker, Conrad (1988). NanoTechnology With Feynman Machines: Artificial Life and Scanning Tunneling Engineering. In: Langton, Christopher, editor (1988). Artificial Life I. Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Addison-Wesley. [This chapter was allowed 3 times the standard chapter length limit for the published papers from the First Los Alamos Conference on Artificial Life. It contains a wealth of interesting and often-overlooked historical material on nanotech. It also has Also see the original space nanotech prognosis of Patrick Gunkel from his massive futurism study, The Future of Space (1975), which unfortunately was not included in my chapter.]

NanoScam :-)

Self-explanatory.

Nanocosm (William Atkinson)

[(offsite link to excerpt)] This is an interesting, informative, and sometimes rambunctious reporting on interviews with many key nanotech players, interwoven with overviews of the nature and significance of their respective technological developments. (There are some iconoclastic doses of Feynman-like irreverence towards certain self-proclaimed nanotech gurus mixed in for good measure. It's sometimes overdone, but given Feynman’s private comments, he would more than halfway agree, and would almost certainly be smiling with delight if he were still alive.) The author’s audience is venture capitalists and the technically interested public. The author generally favors approaching nanotech from a generalized biological perspective, and sees profound implications in biology’s nanotech beyond merely serving as an existence proof. (See the end of the NanoScam link above for additional comments on this book.)

	Here’s some simple and amusing nanotech “art” that I cooked up with Mathematica, Nanotube Modeler, and the Gimp. The 2 suns are carbon Bucky Balls (C240 fullerenes), and the 2 saguaros are carbon nanotube segments. Why 2 suns and 2 saguaros? I’m from beautiful “Two-sun”, AZ, which is (1) the Astronomy Capital of the World and (2) the Optics Valley of the World (which includes the world-class College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona)—2 brilliant “suns” of science and technology. Plus we have 2 Saguaro National Parks (East and West).
For more information about Tucson’s business and technology environment, please see Southern Arizona’s High-Tech Connection: (http://www.sazhightechconnect.com/)

My Books

The Provably Ultimate Foundation of Science

This book is the start of an extensive revision and updating of an earlier book (see next section below). Here are the newest versions of this book in (PDF) and (HTML).

Here’s the full title and subtitle, including the cover page synopsis, plus the abstract:

The Provably Ultimate Foundation of Science
is the Universal Logic of the
Universally-Supreme Logical-Value System

This is the Ultimately-Fundamental Logical Super-Pattern
of our Necessarily Inherently Objectively-Intelligible Universe,
Which is the Progressively-Wisest Super-Qualitative Worldview
of All Genuinely-Advanced Systematic Science and Philosophy

• The ultimate scientific logic of the universe is implicit in all scientific progress. Because this logical system is both universal and reflexively self-applicable, we can decisively discern its most fundamental necessarily-invariant characteristics, despite our enormous ignorance about the universe. Universal logic is as ontologically fundamental as space, time, and energy.
• The most fundamental scientific facts of reality are the universal objective value-facts, which serve as the ultimate instrumental truth values of objective realism. This logical-value system is the ultimate foundation and greatest fundamentalist common denominator of all science. This is the magnificent master-key of genuinely scientific philosophy.
• The scientifically ultimate universal logic is an intensional logic (versus the extensional logic of set theory and common symbolic logic). This logic allows consistent full semantic closure, without the limitations of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems (which Gödel also anticipated), and without arbitrary restrictive kludges to avoid conventional self-reverential paradoxes.
• Universal value logic corresponds to a family of mutually-applicable axiomatic logical value-facts. This is ultimate objectively-authoritative “scientific fundamentalism”, with intriguing corollaries that the universe is necessarily inherently-intelligible and open to evolution.
• The ultimate ontology of universal value-logic is the 1 category ontology of moderate realism with combinatorial particularism that treats polyadic relations as first-class realities (versus the false dichotomy-prone 2 category ontology of subject-predicate or attribute-containment predication). This has important implications for the biological and physical sciences, and for overcoming false mentalist-materialist dichotomies and reductions.
• Universal value logic is the ultimate scientific method that is logically senior to the other more-specialized scientific methods. It is our most powerful tool for dealing with inevitable fallibility and ignorance. The subjective value axiom of praxeology turns out to be one of the genuinely universal axioms, and provides a super-powerful scientific basis for deducing far-reaching theorems in the human sciences of economics, cognitive consciousness, and ethics.
• The universal logical value system is provably the universally-supreme objective moral priority of the scientific ethics of realistically-responsible cognition. For the supreme defining criterion of God as being the universe’s eternally-supreme ethical-value reference, universal value logic yields the ultimate scientific proof of God’s necessary objective existence—as the 100%-natural objectively-primal experiential-relational value-orientation-bias of the universe.

Abstract

It’s a common claim (notably made without proof) that people making claims (especially scientific claims) should be assigned “the burden of proof”. Yet (scandalously and notoriously) the major prevailing scientific methods are less-than-rigorous conventions that have not been established by proof, and it’s no wonder that their application and interpretation leads to an unseemly amount of floundering and controversy at the complex frontiers of science.

Surprisingly and counterintuitively, proving the basic nature and existence of the ultimate foundation of science (which also implicitly constitutes the grandmaster scientific method) is fairly straightforward. The very much greater difficulty and complexity arises in (1) progressively discerning and refining the many important interconnecting details of that foundation, and in (2) pursuing their very wide-ranging and far-reaching implications.

Much of our scientific and philosophical knowledge is necessarily approximate, provisional, and fallible—yet even this moderate claim exhibits another fundamental sort of knowably eternal, invariant, and permanent absolute truth of the objective knowledge of scientific philosophy. The most fundamental system of eternally true facts is implicit in realistically-inclined thinking, but discerning that system has been a highly contentious and insidiously vexing problem for scientific philosophy. The reoccurring academic and religious “science wars” highlight this previous foundational weakness of science and its cumbersome patchwork of partly divergent worldviews.

The logical pattern constituting our universe’s intelligibility and discoverability is very much more primal, profound, and pervasive than is commonly believed. Building on centuries of prior exploratory efforts, scattered advances in 20th century scientific philosophy finally attained an explicit “critical mass” of this powerful self-cross-checking scientific system and its grandmaster praxeological method. The identification and corollary elaboration of the extended family of the absolutely necessary, axiomatic, reflexive-invariants of the ultimate universal, logical-ontological order of all being reflexively maps the integral constitutive context of all objective knowledge.

The most objectively and universally fundamental lawful facts of logic, existence, value, and cognitive consciousness are provably integral aspects of this same universally primary and pervasive super-pattern. (This is initially counterintuitive due to many widespread false dichotomies and false over-generalizations.) This universally-supreme logical-value system is the necessary common core of the ultimate scientific foundations of logic, ethics, and economics—and it constitutes the ultimate mutual boundary conditions of the other physical, social, and psychological sciences. This system is also the ultimate basis of all other scientific methods.

Finally, this system is also the ultimate natural scientific basis of universal human liberty rights, and it characterizes the (one and only possibly true and natural) ethical God of science.

The Supreme Scientific Method of Universal Value Logic

There are many (arguably pragmatically-justified) versions of purported scientific methods. Although these methods are undeniably powerful (and are often tremendously successful), they are still ultimately hypothetical and provisional in character. So where is the primary scientific method that serves as the rock-solid, provably-objective, and non-hypothetical ultimate master foundation of all these other secondary scientific methods? This book answers that question, based on the enormous power of reflexive intensional logic. Among other important facts, universal intensional logic is (1) not subject to Gödel’s incompleteness theorems (as Gödel himself had notably hoped and anticipated), it (2) provides the demonstrably ultimate (and logically rigorous) scientific foundation for economics, and it (3) demonstrably constitutes the inherently-unified and necessarily-supreme moral-logical value system of the universal (instrumental objective) ethics of all responsibly-realistic thinking. I provide an initially non-technical introductory overview (plus a glossary) to help you get started learning about this intriguing and important system.

The development of this system’s components occurred largely on the scientific sidelines, and attained “critical mass” during the last decades of the 20th century. It’s still largely unrecognized, although it amounts to a Copernican-heliocentric revolution in inseparably uniting foundational scientific logic and universal instrumental objective values—in other words, it amounts to nothing less than the second scientific revolution. The 21st century will eventually witness the emergence of a rigorous fundamental science of wisdom, among many other powerfully beneficial socio-cultural, socio-economic, and socio-cognitive spin-offs. This in turn will considerably accelerate the presently rather sluggish (relative to world resources) rate of development of science and technology.

Here’s the full title and subtitle:

The Supreme Scientific Method
of Universal Value Logic:

The Logical-Value Super-Telescope
of the Second Scientific Revolution

[Here’s the latest versions: (PDF) or (HTML) (As of late December, 2005, these files were approaching 0.9 MB and 0.5 MB respectively, and are likely to keep growing slowly with each approximately-weekly revision. The PDF file now has hyperlinks in the tables of contents, plus chapter and section headings appear in the PDF bookmarks—both are very handy for navigating around the book. You’ll probably have a much easier time reading and navigating the PDF file if you download it first and then read it locally—I think this is well worth the extra bit of effort, and it’s now much nicer than the HTML file. No standard blue underlining is displayed in the PDF file’s hyperlinked tables of contents, due to still-unfixed Adobe Acrobat bugs that produce a hideous mess when attempting to do so. But the hyperlinks are really there, and are very handy for browsing.]

Physics, Math, and Life

Geometric Calculus, A Unified Mathematical Language for Physics

[The rest of this subsection is copied from the Geometric Calculus R & D Home Page.]

Agenda. This web site is dedicated to perfecting a universal mathematical language for science, extending its applications and promoting it throughout the scientific community. It advocates a universal scientific language grounded in an integrated Geometric and Inferential Calculus.

Geometric Calculus is a mathematical language for expressing and elaborating geometric concepts. Spacetime algebra is an application of this language to model physical space and time. It is the core of a universal language for physics, providing invariant formulations of basic equations and a powerful computational engine for deducing their consequences.

Inferential Calculus integrates deductive and statistical inference into a coherent system for matching scientific models to empirical data. It provides a unified framework for data analysis, image/signaling processing and hypothesis testing from incomplete data. Thus, it supports the semantic bridge between theoretical constructs and empirical realities.

Modeling. Scientists make sense of the real world by constructing models to represent the structure of things and processes within it. Geometric Calculus provides a rich language for the construction and analysis of mathematical models. Inferential Calculus provides a framework for their empirical validation.

This site is devoted primarily to the development of Geometric Calculus with many applications to modeling in physics, mostly the work of David Hestenes. A companion web site on Geometric Algebra is at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. Inferential Calculus and Modeling are treated in greater depth at other sites.

Collective Electrodynamics — by Carver Mead

Back in the early-mid 1980s, I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to repeatedly see Richard Feynman and Carver Mead over the course of several months—both were very down-to-earth but awesome minds. Carver Mead is one of the great technical and entrepreneurial pioneers of VLSI design technology and silicon “neural networks”, among other things. I think Carver’s latest book is a huge (albeit partial) step towards an improved (more realistic) quantum electrodynamics.

Here is one of the Amazon.com reviews “Collective Electrodynamics”, written by Munir F. Bhatti (Los Angeles, CA), with minor {formatting changes, spelling corrections}:

“Despite his preface upbraiding physicists for their work of the past 50–75 years, the main text makes reasonable claims based upon well-founded experimental and theoretical results. The book endorses earlier work of Einstein, Feynman, Riemann, Lorentz, Maxwell, Planck, and others while making computational and conceptual adjustments to accommodate modern experimental results.

Also in the text, Bohr and other die-hard quantum statisticians are continually under attack for their poo-pooing of possible phenomena, algorithms, and concepts behind the observed quantum behavior. Bohr and his clan, apparently, claimed that the statistics made up the whole baseball team of quantum physics—and that we should not, and could not, look further.

In refuting this micro-labotomic approach of Bohr, Dr. Mead makes reference to systems—macroscopic in size—that exhibit quantum behaviors. While he mentions lasers, masers, semiconductors, superconductors, and other systems in the text, the primary results of the book hinge upon experimental results from the field of superconductors. He points out that physics can be split into several areas:

·         Classical Mechanics explains un-coherent, uncharged systems such as cannon balls, planets, vehicles, etc.

·         Classical Electrodynamics explains un-coherent, charged systems such as conductors, currents, and their fields.

·         Thermodynamics explains how macroscopic statistics, such as temperature and entropy, guide the time evolution of systems.

·         Modern Quantum Mechanics tries to explain coherent, charged systems.

Here 'coherent' refers to quantum coherency, where many particles/atoms march to the same drum such as the photons in a laser, or the electrons in a superconductor, or any isolated one or two particles. Another description of coherency is that the states are quantum entangled; their time-evolution depends upon each other.

The thrust of Carver's book: QM applies to all matter—not just small systems or isolated particles—is well made. He brings up experimental data from superconductors to illustrate that the phenomenon of coherent quantum entanglement can, and does, occur at macroscopic scales; and that such behavior is very quantum. Thus he proves, quite convincingly, that quantum mechanics applies to all coherent systems.

He then closes by making some very important points.

(1)   He shows that quantum behavior of such systems can be expressed in quantum language (wave function), relativistic language (four-vectors), or electrodynamics (vector potential, scalar potential) in an equivalent fashion. This is important, as it proves that a superconductor is macroscopic, exhibits quantum behavior, and that these quantitative results agree with those found from the other approaches.

(2)   He makes the point that the quantum and relativistic equations show that electromagnetic phenomena consist of two parts: one traveling forward in time; the other backward in time. Feynman and others have said this for a long time, and he shows how thermodynamics (or un-coherent behavior) forces what we see as only time-evolution in one direction in un-coherent systems.

(3)   He illustrates, modeling single atoms as tiny superconducting resonators, that two atoms that are coherently linked will start exchanging energy. This causes an exponential, positive-feedback loop that ends with each atom in a quantum eigenstate. Thus quantum collapse is neither discontinuous, nor instantaneous; and in fact makes a lot of sense.

(4)   He explains, using four-vectors, that all points on a light-cone are near each other in four space. This point—together with (2)—shows that there's no causality contradiction between relativity and quantum mechanics. For example, he explains that two entangled particles, such as photons light years apart, can affect each other immediately if one falls into an eigenstate, since the four-dimensional distance between them (R1 dot R2) is zero. Although separated in three space, they're neighbors in four space. Through these demonstrations and proofs, he successfully suggests that there is a way to further develop the 'behavior of charged, coherent systems' such that quantum mechanics and relativity will agree—but the conceptual changes he suggests are necessary and must be further developed. Also, he admits that a better, more appropriate mathematical and computational methods will be needed, since the complexity of coherent systems runs as n^2.

Pleasantly, then, the book makes elegant, defensible, mathematical and conceptual steps to resolve some nagging points of understanding. Also, the narrative gives the best introduction to electrodynamics and quantum mechanics that I've ever seen. Since the theoretical criticisms and experimental data are quite valid, his proposed resolutions are eye-opening and valuable. The methods he suggests greatly simply thinking about complicated quantum/classical problems. New approaches for future theoretical research are also suggested. Despite the dark tone in the preface, the book is positive, enlightening, and well anchored to accepted, modern experimental results and theoretical work.

It's a short book, about 125 pages, and well worth the read. Familiarity with classical and quantum physics, and special relativity, is required to get the most out of it. As you can tell, I enjoyed it tremendously.”

Apeiron — The Saner Fringes of “Alternative Science”

Important note: I am a big fan and admirer of the great pioneers of quantum theory and general relativity, and I certainly recognize the oftentimes semi-awesome engineering utility of the conventional theories, and I’m an avid subscriber to the leading mainstream science journals, such as Science and Nature. While the overwhelming percentage of outside-the-mainstream “dissident science” is wrong-headed, recall that the earliest works of quantum and relativity theory were not initially warmly received by the mainstream, and arose in the same era as the oft-repeated cynical remarks (including from Max Plank) to the effect that science progresses through the death of the old guard. Also recall that {Schrodinger, de Broglie, Einstein, Bohm, Bell, and others} restlessly searched for {improvements, alternatives}. The {discovery, recognition} of genuinely {viable, realistic, comprehensive} alternatives may require the sort of new data that won’t be available until the advent of {100+ meter telescopes, 1,000,000 km scale space interferometers, continental scale superconducting networks, and so on}. After that, I suspect that the enchanting brilliant technical wizardry of general relativity will turn out to be somewhat too-general and somewhat too-relativistic, and will be radically revised. Meanwhile, I expect that some of the key ideas for such a revision are already lurking outside the present scientific mainstream.

So with the above caveat, I recommend that you check out the online journal (plus archives thereof) and various books featured at: APEIRON, Studies in Infinite Nature. Relative to my “ultra-realist” scientific framework, I find perhaps 10% of the articles plausible (although the majority are still generally technically excellent and insightful), and roughly 25% of the books at least semi-plausible, which I regard as a very rare and remarkable concentration of such material.

(Despite its unfortunately extremely-provocative and somewhat-misleading title, the print journal “Galilean Electrodynamics” is also an interesting and moderately high-quality scientific resource.)

Metacognition (Brain Boost) Technology

As you may have inferred from the title of my books, I regard metacognition as an extremely important subject. (When it comes to artificial intelligence, I think as much effort should be devoted to developing super-human intelligence in people as is presently devoted to developing artificial intelligence in computing systems.) I’ve always been interested in learning about the mental words of high-achieving scientific geniuses (from the time that I first learned there were such people). Likewise, I’ve also long been very keenly interested in information about people with exceptionally high intelligence of a more general nature (as very approximately indicated by very high IQ scores, which are admittedly imperfect measures of certain cognitive capacities) — especially since there is strong suggestive evidence that learnable superior metacognitive practices play important roles here (Perkins, 1995; Root-Bernstein and Root-Bernstein, 1999; Sidis, 2005; Wegner and Poe, 1996; Zwicky, 1969, Feldman, 1986; Hollingworth, 1975; Stern, 1971).

I also think that the metacognitive {strategies, tactics, and achievements} of extraordinary geniuses (among their other cognitive attributes) is an extremely important source of clues about the ultimate logically-conceptual characteristics of reality, which would be extremely scientifically-valuable to know more {fully and explicitly}.

It’s extraordinarily ironic that the field of “artificial intelligence” neglected to aggressively explore all plausible means of increasing the upper limits of human cognitive ability. You would think that forecasters of eventually-extraordinary “intelligence bootstrapping” of artificially-intelligent systems would maximally-leverage their own work by “intelligence bootstrapping” the presently most cognitively-powerful systems on our planet.

Some Exceptional Geniuses

Although I had the very great fortune to know (among other very remarkable people) the incomparable Richard Feynman for a couple of years, there’s already an abundance of readily-available good information about him, so I’ll not add anything further at this time. Although Feynman’s high school IQ was only 126, this is clearly a testing artifact of his extremely-lopsided technical preoccupations. (This of course also highlights one of the many well-known issues with the very-approximate nature of IQ measures, which nevertheless still have interesting non-trivial correlations with other less-ambiguous capabilities and attainments.) Feynman’s actual IQ was obviously at least in the high 160s realm, and quite likely in the high 180s. His GED scores reportedly reflected his highly skewed interests, although he was obviously enormously capable of excelling in other intellectual reams, despite his unfortunate disdain for them. It would be interesting to find out comparable information for other extraordinary quantum physicists (such as Julian Schwinger, John Bardeen, Murray Gell-Mann, and Steven Weinberg) and extraordinary quantum chemists (such as Linus Pauling, in his earlier years).

Incidentally, I think that Carver Mead (whom I knew concurrently with Feynman) is much closer to approaching Feynman’s intellectual league than most people suspect. I suspect this misjudgment is because Mead is very much more low-key, the fields he worked in were not amenable to QED-type breakthroughs (and, for example, required a wider range of less highly-leveraged intellectual tools), and he devoted much more of his time to a long series of entrepreneurial activities. If the quality and reliability of 1960s era thin film deposition technology had been better, Mead might have got a Nobel Prize for some of his early research work involving solid state device physics.

Anyway, this rest of this section generally excludes discussion of many remarkable “upper-tier” Nobel Prize winning scientific genius, since they mostly tend to be (almost of practical necessity) fairly extreme specialists (despite some unrelated hobbies), whereas I’m especially interested in exceptional polymath geniuses.

·         William J. Sidis — “Abraham Sperling, director of New York City's Aptitude Testing Institute, said after Sidis’ death that according to his calculations, Sidis “easily had an IQ between 250 and 300” and that there was no evidence that his intellect had declined in adulthood.” (Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis) While the modern system of deviation-percentile IQ measures would yield a considerably lower estimate for Sidis’ IQ (perhaps in the 190–200 range), that is still in the spectacular outer limits of present-day human ability.

Largely bogus and often malicious newspaper and magazine reports falsely portrayed Sidis as a failed and burned out prodigy. Robert M. Pirsig’s intriguing 1991 book “Lila: An Inquiry into Morals” was my first introduction to the real scope and significance of what Sidis achieved, in the pre-web dark ages.

While misinformation about Sidis still abounds in print and on the web, the Sidis Archives (http://www.sidis.net/) provide a wonderful web resource on the life and works of Sidis.

·         Marilyn vos Savant — The most accurate estimate of vos Savant’s adult intelligence appears to be 186. (Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant).

Her books on “Brain Building in Just 12 Weeks” (with Leonore Fleischer) and “The Power of Logical Thinking” are certainly worth studying.

While not an apparently spectacular achievement, vos Savant’s enduring public presence as an always diplomatic and engaging example of exceptional intellectual sanity is extremely commendable, especially in a culture plagued by both rampant anti-intellectualism and rampant bogus-intellectualism. If one of the side-effects of vos Savant’s activities is to shift the intellectual bell curve upwards for a few percent of the population, that would still be an extremely valuable achievement, under present conditions. She is also an executive at Jarvik Heart. Her personal web site is here: (http://www.marilynvossavant.com).

·         To be continued….

Genius Code and Project Renaissance

(The links here are NOT business affiliate links. I don’t get any kickbacks for these suggestions.)

While the “Genius Code” is a good course and has some interesting new material, you can find much of the content in Win Wenger’s previously published books (Wegner and Poe, 1996) and also at his “Project Renaissance” website. His general orientation is towards increasing creative intelligence. Since you can easily and readily check out a large cross-section of his work on the web for yourself, I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about whether Genius Code is likely to be a worthwhile investment for you. In any case, I definitely recommend checking out Win Wegner’s website. “Image streaming” seems to be the most useful process for general mental development.

Win Wegner’s “Project Renaissance”:

(http://www.winwenger.com/)

Here’s the main “Genius Code” product link:

(http://www.learningstrategies.com/Genius/Home.html)

Mega Genius

(The links here are NOT business affiliate links. I don’t get any kickbacks for these suggestions.)

Jim Diamond (aka “Mega Genius”) has the highest documented overall level of intellectual performance ever measured on “The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale — Revised”. Although this test isn’t considered an accurate gauge for IQs more than about 3 standard deviations above the mean, acing it (and thereby exceeding its upper range of accuracy) is still an exceptional achievement. I’d like to know about the next 9 people in the top-10 category of this test as well, but Jim is still an extremely interesting and worthy data point to study.

Even despite several substantial reservations, I highly recommend Jim’s 3-set lecture series:

(http://www.mega-genius.com/)

Yes, some of the claims and hype at his web site are outrageously over-the-top, and these are (to a fortunately lesser degree) reflected in his products, but there are nevertheless considerable offsetting virtues contained in them.

I have some caveats concerning some of the content:

·         I strongly disagree about the likely prospects, proximities, and natures of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. Very roughly speaking, I’m approximately in the Fermi-Tipler, Dyson, and Kurzweil technology camps of ETI-skeptics, in addition to the “Rare Earth”, “Scorched proto-Earths” (i.e. by gamma ray bursts), and other anti-Drake astrophysical camps of ETI-skeptics. Also see my books for a host of additional advanced logical-ethical considerations — including much stronger analogs of the classical theological problem of evil, plus logically-ethically universally-superior scientific policies to the bogus “Star Trek” style non-interference doctrine (more aptly called the “bad Samaritan” doctrine). These considerations generally preclude any realistic possibility of truly advanced ETIs in our galactic neighborhood.

·         I don’t regard any cases for body-independent personal spiritual existence before birth or after death as even remotely credible, despite the naturally and inherently immense intuitive appeal of such ideas.

·         I think that the quoted figures from Catherine Cox’s IQ estimates of eminent geniuses of the past are misleadingly low. Her initial estimates were based on a process that did not account for incomplete data and the known well-above-average IQ of the select subject group. Such sorts of issues were handled in subsequent steps. So I think that her revised estimates (which may be somewhat too high in some cases) and the later Flynn effect corrections (which may be somewhat too low in some cases) together provide more plausible IQ ranges of the great scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers that I am familiar with. And even so, Cox noted (on p.85, Vol. 2, Genetic Studies of Genius; italics in the original), “The result of the correction indicates that the true IQ’s of the subjects of this study average above 160. It further indicates that many of the true IQ’s are above 180, while but few of them are below 140.” (The {causes, extent, nature, and apparently varying tapering off} of the Flynn effect is intriguing and very contentious.)

However, these items (among a few others I’ve not mentioned here) should not prevent you from studying the great many other thought-provoking items of great interest and value. (In any case, even the mistakes of the extraordinarily intelligent can additionally be especially instructive cases for doing cognitive root cause analysis. And likewise, an analogous self-oriented analysis can be instructive for things that you happen to recognize as true after the fact, but which you hadn’t previously articulated.)

Related Weschler IQ test links of interest:

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Adult_Intelligence_Scale)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wechsler)

The Complete Guide to Genius

(The links here are NOT business affiliate links. I don’t get any kickbacks for these suggestions.)

This is another product that I strongly recommend, despite its outlandish IQ-boosting claims:

(http://www.geniusintelligence.com/)

This contains some very good material that will at the very least improve your thinking ability, even though:

·         There is no solid evidence presented to substantiate the most outlandish IQ-boosting claims.

·         The few claims of scientific substantiation implicitly greatly exaggerates very preliminary sorts of studies that were very limited in scope.

·         To be continued….

The Photoreading Whole Mind System

(The links here are NOT business affiliate links. I don’t get any kickbacks for these suggestions.)

This is an extremely interesting system, even after discounting the huge hype factor. Although I haven’t mastered full-fledged photoreading (at least for the fairly technical stuff I predominantly read), it has proven very helpful for zeroing in on the most important key items and discussions in the endless stream of books that I peruse. You can inexpensively check out the (4th edition) book on photoreading, Scheele (2007).

Here’s the corresponding product web site:

(http://www.photoreading.com/).

However, you should also check out this rather more skeptical and independent evaluation as well:

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreading)

Simple and Powerful Mental Change Tools

(The links here are NOT business affiliate links. I don’t get any kickbacks for these suggestions.)

These items may seem too simple and easy to be genuinely powerful and effective—but since there are a “semi-infinite number” of simple things, it’s not surprising that some very simple and powerful processes have been long overlooked. From the perspective of “The Supreme Scientific Method”, these are among the best (and least expensive) tools for everyday sorts of use.

·         3D Mind™. (http://www.essential-skills.com/). When it comes to making general mental (psychological) changes, this process is an ingenious and quick shortcut relative to endless competing methods. For example, 3D Mind is vastly better than endlessly over-hyped NLP BS (which, not surprisingly, is much better suited to the realms of selling, swindling, propaganda, and dirty tricks). The video presentation is definitely on the informal side, and you should read over the supplementary documents that you will be given access online to. This is a great system — don’t be misled by the informality of its developers or the simplicity of the process. It’s a surprisingly fast, effective, and versatile process — if you diligently follow the instructions.

·         The Sedona Method, aka Release Technique. (http://www.sedona.com/index.aspx) and (http://www.releasetechnique.com/). This is great for reducing “emotional noise” and thereby increasing your effective “emotional intelligence”. This is a powerful yet simple-minded technique. With respect to the purportedly more advanced levels, their proponents lean somewhat towards the “new age”-flavored “metaphysical” belief systems of the otherwise seemingly sane and fairly brilliant originator (Lester Levenson), but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. A couple of introductory books and CDs should be sufficient to get most of the most important ideas and practices. Remember the 80-20 rule: the first 20% is going to get you 80% of the results if you really do it, so you don’t need to obsessively do this for everything and become a Sedona/Release seminar junkie. Moderating perturbations makes a lot of emotional common sense for living more happily and sanely, but seeking complete imperturbability is crazy. Just because good sunglasses are great in many situations doesn’t mean that blindness is better still.

·         Vernon Howard and Guy Finley. (http://www.anewlife.org/) and (http://www.guyfinley.com/). Too oversimplify a bit, Vernon Howard’s works (and that of his leading former student, Guy Finley) are variations on the theme of the great (spiritual, psychological) value of cultivating simple (non-interfering, “that’s interesting”) awareness of how you (and others) habitually react to personal likes and dislikes throughout the day. This is ancient wisdom that seems to be rediscovered by a few people every generation, but which is otherwise largely ignored. Like many good ideas, this carries some “metaphysical” baggage at the purportedly more advanced levels, but once again, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. A couple of introductory books and CDs should be sufficient to get most of the most important ideas and practices. And again, remember the 80-20 rule mentioned in the preceding paragraph.

Sam Cohen, Father of the Neutron Bomb

“ ‘[Expletive Deleted] You, Mr. President’: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb”

This third edition (2006) supersedes the previously printed (2000) version (and the earlier 2005 second edition). It incorporates a new overview and postscript chapter by Charles Platt called “The Profits of Fear”. It also has a much more provocative new title. (I want to be on record as having urged Sam to consider a more moderate change of title.) This is the controversial and myth-shattering book on national security that was turned down by every conventional publisher and agent that I contacted (despite Sam's previously successfully published books). [(PDF) (about 1.1 MB).] The second (now third) edition explicitly gives you permission to put it on your web site, or to print and sell full and unaltered copies of it, among other options. See the copyright page for details. Among other changes Sam requested or otherwise approved of, the second (now third) edition has all the original expletives fully restored. I've also fixed a bunch of typos and misspellings and updated the bibliography.

You might also be interested in Sam Cohen’s 1998 article, “Needed: A Real ABM Defense”.

Some publishing history: I converted the raw manuscript file (produced by Sam’s daughter) into standard book format, did the subsequent technical editing work, created the index, and made arrangements for print-on-demand publishing. (Please don't hold my amateur efforts against Sam.) The printed version of this book has now been available for many years, but soon after a (non-exclusive) publishing agreement was made, the greedy publisher quickly and drastically raised prices way above what many people were willing to pay. At the same time, to drive sales through their own web site, they reportedly lowered standard discounts to other outlets, so Amazon.com dropped Shame. Moreover, Amazon.com only showed the earlier planned World Scientific version of Shame (which the publisher inexplicably cancelled, while I was in the midst of making initially-requested editorial changes), which of course was marked as unavailable. At long last, years later, Amazon.com now carries Shame again. To their credit, BarnesAndNoble.com has carried it for the duration. In any case, with Sam's permission, I've put the new third edition of Shame online.

After Shame was published, Sam Cohen’s daughter got another interesting book of Sam's similarly published. It's called “Automat: Jess Marcum, Gambling Genius of The Century”. Jess was one of Sam’s many brilliant and peculiar co-workers at RAND.

Perl 6 — The Next “World’s Greatest Programming Super-Language”

http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?perl_6 — The Official Perl 6 Wiki

(Has links to the latest news and docs, including a great FAQ.)

Preface: I want to call your attention to an exceptionally fascinating software development, while indulging in some entertaining and far-out end-of-the-year speculation concerning Perl6. (I’m also hoping that this note will help increase the likelihood of this speculation coming true.) It will be interesting to check back a decade from now. (This was last updated on Sunday, 12-18-2005. Apart from fixing typos, I’m planning to leave this version “as is”, and not “debug” it further. I’ll collect any updates and subsequently-discovered errors in the Related and Other Links section.) FYI, I am the founder of the comp.lang.ruby Usenet newsgroup. (Even though our paths have diverged, I still think Ruby is a wonderful language, I still admire Matz and the exceptionally newbie-friendly, helpful, well-mannered, and innovative Ruby community, and I still wish them all continuing great success. Indeed, I expect this development to substantially help Ruby and other productively-innovative languages, over the long run.)

Even if you don’t know about Perl, don’t like Perl, or don’t use Perl, this is still important “good news”.

(Here’s why in a nutshell: The Perl6 virtual machine (aka “Parrot”) is building in the infrastructure needed to practically support a wide range of other languages, including Ruby, Python, Tcl, and of course Perl5, to name a few. This means that all languages that target Parrot can have access to Perl’s gigantic and well-organized module archives (and vice versa)—to the great mutual benefit of their users, and their users’ clients).

I regard Perl6 as a (very much more) “humanized” and “mega industrial strength” repackaging of the greatest and most powerful features of Lisp (the predominant 20th century programming language for artificial intelligence research and development), and which further incorporates great ideas from Ruby, Python, and other practical and innovative programming languages. Perl6 is a comprehensive redesign of Perl5—many serious defects have been fixed, and some fixes involve extremely powerful generalizations. For example, unlike Perl5’s clever but kludged-on “roll your own” object system, Perl6 elegantly incorporates multiple state-of-the-art object paradigms, some powerful functional programming mechanisms, optional strict type declarations, enhanced “good old fashioned” procedural programming support, and it gives you the capability to morph it practically beyond belief (to meet unanticipated future needs). For another example, Perl5’s flagship “regular expression engine” has become Perl6’s “rules engine”, which allows sophisticated on-the-fly rule-based grammar specification for generalized pattern parsing, recognition, and transformation—and it’s not limited to processing strings. Perl6 will be able to access Perl5’s huge collection of CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) modules, and will able to compile Perl5 programs.

Given that Perl5 is often likened to a “Swiss Army chainsaw”—Perl6 is comparable to a “Swiss Army T2 Terminator with a full set of surgeon’s tools, a fast laptop gene sequencer and synthesizer, a fully automated laptop machine shop, and a multi-kilowatt plasma torch” (but at your command, of course). Perl6 is far from perfect, and it seems to be getting almost as big as (but not as clunky as) C++. But Perl6 is still a fantastic system overall—a new class of (operating system-like) super-language as it were—that in effect integrally incorporates and systematizes many tremendously-improved versions of the software construction tools from the “GNU-part” of “GNU/Linux” (and their BSD and UNIX counterparts). Perl6 also seems to be (moderately) successfully realizing the design goal of letting you get by with only learning small subsets of the language as needed, so you can still “do simple things simply” and easily. (It’s the old “getting the camel’s nose in the tent” trick. :-) Overall, the Perl6 design team seems to have made enough generally-important and good-to-great pragmatic tradeoffs to reach a historically new level of software “critical mass”.

Despite getting off to an agonizingly slow and very rocky start, I think that it is still just barely possible for Perl6 to eventually become as predominant for programming language users (although most commonly as a secondary language) as English is for human language users (partly as a widespread second language). What about Chinese? Good question. For purposes of this analogical comparison, far more Chinese speakers are learning English as a second language than vice versa, and some dialects of Chinese are distinct languages for many practical purposes. Incidentally, Perl6 will be able to support Chinese language Perl6 programming by virtue of its Unicode support and compile-time customization capabilities. Perl6 is insanely flexible—but that includes the flexibility to enforce desired conventions as well.

If I was appointed to distribute a few million dollars in grants for generally improving the world (with a focus on boosting the rate of scientific and technological progress), by way of diversification I’d definitely spend one of those millions on jumpstarting Perl6. (Hint! Hint! :-)

If I’m even half-way correct about Perl6’s prospects, then this has some incredibly important scientific, technological, and economic implications. There will be many “semi-awesome” software systems and projects involving large scale collaborative and distributed systems, both open source and commercial. Perl6 and C6PAN should also emerge as the most common language for very advanced automation systems, sophisticated robotics, and artificial intelligence programming systems. These prospects seems far-fetched and highly-speculative even to me, and there’s a lot that could still go wrong (again!) before the first production version of Perl6 appears. However, I haven’t seen anything nearly as interesting in the computer programming language realm since I learned to program extremely elementary Lisp using punched cards. (I’m excluding some great but relatively more hardware/economics related advances such as terminals, PCs, and the awesome web.) So I’m taking a huge chance and sticking my neck way, way out on this one—in the (possibly vain) hope that, many years from now, I’ll be able to say “I told you so” (first, and publicly). Meanwhile, please see the Perl6 section in Related and Other Links for some handy links to help you get started checking out current developments.

Life Extension Foundation

This is the best and most down-to-earth such organization that I know of:

(Life Extension Foundation)

Misc.

This home page © 2008 Conrad Schneiker. You may reuse anything here, so long as you give appropriate credit, including a link back to (www.AthenaLab.com).

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