Science and technology with Bill Bain

The Herald:

“IT’S true, the Earth is flat. You mean to tell me China is under us? It’s not,” enthused US basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal recently. "Listen, I drive coast to coast, and this s*** is flat to me.”

It’ll be sad news to LA’s $1,000-an-hour therapists, but Shaq was only having a laugh. A few days later, he confirmed his sanity by expressing surprise at how quick people were to accept his japery.

And it is funny – the thought we’re all going about the daily monotony of pulling on socks and eating chips while hurtling through space on
a frisbee. That said, the accepted reality that we’re on a wee round rock spinning around a nuclear furnace in the middle of infinity doesn’t provide much comfort either.

So it’s perhaps not so surprising in this post-truth era – where facts enjoy the same currency as fibs, and “fake news” is wielded as a weapon to disorientate and confuse on a mass scale – that the Flat Earth Society is enjoying a renaissance.

As we go to press, a fella calling himself “Mad Mike Hughes” will blast off on a homemade steam-powered rocket in the Mojave desert. His goal? To prove astronauts, scientists, Nasa and about six billion people wrong; that the Earth is indeed a flat disk surrounded by ice mountains that keep the seas from spilling out. Oh, yes.

To do this, Hughes will board a rocket he built from scrap metal and launch himself 1,800 feet into the air to take damning photos proving a dark global conspiracy. He also plans to live-stream all this. If he succeeds, I’ll live-stream myself swallowing my own head through a straw.

The original Flat Earth Society fizzled out after the Sputnik satellite’s orbit definitively proved the Earth was round. But a new breed of Flat-Earthers are now harnessing the mob reach of social media, with hip-hop superstar B.o.B tweeting: “Don’t believe what I say, research what I say. I’m going up against the greatest liars in history ... you’ve been deceived.”

Flat-Earthers such as B.o.B believe our disc is accelerating upwards due to “dark energy”, claiming it all chimes with Einstein’s theories. Yes, that sound is Albert’s coffin spinning through the Earth’s core and resurfacing in Ramsay Street.

A well-attended Flat Earth conference has just wrapped up in North Carolina, featuring talks such as “Nasa and Other Space Lies,” “Flat Earth with the Scientific Method,” and “Waking Up to Mainstream Science Lies”. Organiser Robbie Davidson is a Christian creationist, but we suspected that, with his talks “Flat Earth & The Bible” and “Exposing Scientism”.

The whole weekend was cheaper than a Michael McIntyre ticket, and – I assume – a hell of a lot funnier.

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DOLLY PARTON AND THE ORIGIN OF LIFE ON EARTH

GENERATIONS have marvelled at Dolly Parton's majestic bouffant over the centuries, and with good reason - it's buoyancy and supernova shine owe everything to the magical ingredient H2O2, otherwise known as hydrogen peroxide. Or plain old bleach.

You may frown at such hyperbolic cheerleading for a commonplace compound - especially since it also made Billy Idol a superstar - but biologists from the Australian National University are claiming H2O2 not only allows folk to have more fun, but also kicked the whole party off around four billion years ago.

Hydrogen peroxide, abundant in baby Earth’s boiling oceans, apparently hoards a number of special qualities that could have allowed it
to become the great granny of all things, from trilobites to Trump.

It is the simplest “chiral” molecule in existence – meaning its structure is a bit chaotic and has no symmetry. Why does this matter? Well, it is thought this curious feature allowed it to settle within rocks near boiling ocean vents, eventually forming the information-rich substance RNA.

Over millions of years, this RNA evolved ways of storing genetic information – tricks eventually borrowed by its more handsome and talented cousin DNA, which could also replicate, mutate and pass on this information. The rest, literally, is history.

This scenario may also explain another of science’s biggest mysteries – why did life only originate once on Earth? Advances in genetics have proven conclusively that all things that have ever existed, from fungus to Frank N Furter, originate from just one common ancestor.

So why did that single spark of RNA only rise once?

Well, it seems that hydrogen peroxide may have been the molecular equivalent of the male black widow spider – sacrificing itself to feed the recipient of its seed. The first multicellular organisms, owing their existence to hydrogen peroxide, actually began to produce enzymes that fed on it, and thus ending any chance for a second creation event. It’s possible we ate our own mother. Wha’s like us, eh?

Life has been created since, however. But only artificially, slavishly following nature’s own processes. One of these occasions was in 1996, when Scottish scientists famously cloned a sheep – and perhaps it’s no coincidence they named her Dolly.

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JUST ONE MORE THING...ABOUT AI

ONE of the great joys of Columbo was knowing exactly who the murderer was all the way through. Each episode would be a masterclass in conceit, with the detective playing up the crumpled, confused archetype to lower the perpetrator’s guard, all the while handing them enough rope to hang themselves.

But Columbo was cosy. The crimes were always self-contained cases of jealously, revenge or greed. He never ran up against a motiveless serial killer. Especially not one who taunted him with mysterious letters written in impenetrable code – like “Zodiac”, whose still-unsolved murders cast a dark shadow over California during Columbo’s 70s heyday.

We can perhaps understand why the show never went there. Too close to the bone and Columbo would have been out of his depth without an obvious motive. To catch such a killer, one would have to think like such a killer – and ultimately shed the empathy that makes us human.

But what if we could create a Columbo “brain” without those pesky feelings that weigh so heavily upon our decision-making processes? Well, someone has.

CARMEL is an AI supercomputer created by programmer Keven Knight at the University of California’s Information Science Institute. He is also an expert in cryptography and code breaking who believes his creation can solve Zodiac’s most famous unsolved code – or “cypher” – which was mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1969. It’s widely believed this particular cryptogram contains the killer’s name.

But that’s not all. This supercomputer detective also moonlights as a poet, spilling out reams of rather disturbing rhyme at will. Since CARMEL is designed to interpret English words within complicated or encoded languages like the Zodiac letters, its programming can also work “in reverse” by churning chilling couplets like: “A little happy daughter Jennifer! The children die without a fear of dying, Never ever gonna live forever, On the wings of love and soul undying.”

Perhaps like CARMEL was inspired by the lyrics of late killer-guru Charlie Manson. Or maybe she has already discovered the killer’s identity, and has hidden his name deep within her own dark cyphers. Certainly, all this AI understands is language and encryption.

These poems may only ever be “unlocked” by another, more powerful, supercomputer. Which may itself wrap the Zodiac’s identity within an even bigger maze of language and symbolism. Agh!

There’s perhaps still something to be said about old school methodology of musing over case files with a single malt and cigar. It never failed Columbo.