Keeping Up with the Hertzbergs

How do you know your diamond isn't fake?
July 2019, BBC News

Being that it's not that hard to grow diamonds in a lab anymore, customers need new ways to tell whether their diamonds are real or not.

Identification codes can now be etched with lasers beneath the surface so it can't be tampered with, and small-scale diamond mines can use blockchain to prove they're not being tampered along the way to the customer.

Bottom line though, it's getting harder and harder to justify the diamond trade overall when you can just make them in a lab. Like the meatburgers made without meat - once you can no longer tell the difference, does it matter?

image source: The Z machine, the largest X-ray generator in the world, is located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. No idea what this has to do with diamonds, but it looks cool. Also, it rains diamonds on other planets.

Light Hype, Crystal Prediction, and Cerebral Diamonoids

Energy-free superfast computing invented by scientists using light pulses
May 2019, phys.org

Researchers demonstrate all-optical neural network for deep learning
Sep 2019, phys.org

Researchers teleport information within a diamond
June 2019, phys.org

Diamonds in your devices - Powering the next generation of energy storage
Dec 2019, phys.org

Boron-doped nanodiamond to be specific.

Crystal with a twist - scientists grow spiraling new material
Jun 2019, phys.org

"No one expected 2-D materials to grow in such a way. It's like a surprise gift," said Jie Yao, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley.

"While the shape of the crystals may resemble that of DNA, whose helical structure is critical to its job of carrying genetic information, their underlying structure is actually quite different. Unlike "organic" DNA, which is primarily built of familiar atoms like carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, these "inorganic" crystals are built of more far-flung elements of the periodic table, in this case, sulfur and germanium. And while organic molecules often take all sorts of zany shapes, due to unique properties of their primary component, carbon, inorganic molecules tend more toward the straight and narrow."

Cyborg organoids offer rare view into early stages of development
Aug 2019, phys.org

"If we can develop nanoelectronics that are so flexible, stretchable, and soft that they can grow together with developing tissue through their natural development process, the embedded sensors can measure the entire activity of this developmental process," said Jia Liu, Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at SEAS and senior author of the study. "

Brain waves detected in mini-brains grown in a dish
Sep 2019, phys.org

World first as artificial neurons developed to cure chronic diseases
Dec 2019, phys.org

Optimal solid state neurons, Nature Communications (2019).
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-13177-3 

***
We will all live inside diamonds.
Optical intelligentities in neuromorphic cerebral organoid diamonds, to be specific.

***

Scientists create a 'crystal within a crystal' for new electronic devices
Dec 2019, phys.org

Storing data in everyday objects
Dec 2019, phys.org

A method for marking products with a DNA "barcode" embedded in miniscule glass beads -- These nanobeads are used in industry as tracers for geological tests or as markers for high-quality food products, thus distinguishing them from counterfeits using a relatively short barcode consisting of a 100-bit code. This technology has now been commercialized by ETH spin-off Haelixa. 

They call the storage-form "DNA of Things" 

"All other known forms of storage have a fixed geometry: A hard drive has to look like a hard drive, a CD like a CD. You can't change the form without losing information," Erlich says. "DNA is currently the only data storage medium that can also exist as a liquid, which allows us to insert it into objects of any shape." 

A further application of the technology would be to conceal information in everyday objects, a technique experts refer to as steganography. 

Grass, Erlich and their colleagues used the technology to store a short film about this archive (1.4 megabytes) in glass beads, which they then poured into the lenses of ordinary glasses. "It would be no problem to take a pair of glasses like this through airport security and thus transport information from one place to another undetected," Erlich says. In theory, it should be possible to hide the glass beads in any plastic objects that do not reach too high a temperature during the manufacturing process.

Substance found in fossil fuels can transform into pure diamond
Mar 2020, phy.org

Palmar Sweating and Mass Hysteria

During a recent political crisis [this was written in 1967], when there was a temporary increase in the likelihood of nuclear war, all experiments into palmar sweating at a research institute had to be abandoned because the base level of the response had become so abnormal that the tests would have been meaningless.  (p188)
-The Naked Ape, Desmond Morris, 1967
(a book about the human animal by a zoologist)

O Canada

Sure, I can post this a year in advance. Around this time of year I grew up with Mischief Night. Mischievous things were done, mostly involving rotten eggs. Never thought about it as a regional phenomenon, but apparently it's limited to this little corner of the United States. Then again I never thought I'd be sh** out of luck to find a taylor ham, egg and cheese sandwich anywhere else.

Way more interesting is the Canadian version of Mischief Night, called Mat Night, and where you guessed it - they swap neighbors' doormats in the middle of the night. 

Mischief Night, apparently, is a Jersey thing. Here's how this mayhem started.
Oct 29, NJ.com

Manual Override Autocrash

We are already at their service.
We are already neglecting Asimov's Laws.
We don't see it yet because it's automatic updates and automatic screen rotation. When it's automatic plane-flying, or rather automatic plane-crashing, some might see it. Once it's automatically running your entire life, with no consideration to you the end user as an individual, with no consideration to a manual override, it will be too endemic, too pervasive, and too powerful for you to do anything.

The pilot's manual choices should always override software.
-random reddit comment by NotYouDude

Notes:
Wiki link

Flawed analysis, failed oversight: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system
Seattle Times. Mar 17, 2019.

Boeing 'misjudged 737 Max pilot reactions'
Sep 2019, BBC News

"...which was designed to make the aircraft easier to fly."

Post Script:
And you can't make this shit up -- the automated security system in your house automatically called the cops on the automated floor cleaner in the house. If only they talked to each other first...

Deputies surround burglar in Oregon home, find out suspect is Roomba trapped in bathroom
April 2019, Local News

Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics

The Bull's Eye

We're reading here about the Yellow Vests in France, on a random message board:

"The yellow vests feel like the American Occupy Wall Street movement back in the early 2010's. Started by people with genuine concerns only to be hijacked by anarchists and hippies who didn't entirely know what they want, with no actual leadership or chain of command, but wanted a reason to misguidingly express their personal political ideologies (drum circles and rioting depending on where they fall on the spectrum)."
-random message board contributor

Another contributor's response calls out the fact that one of the critical reasons for the Occupy Wall Street movement failing was due to the lack of public space in which to protest, something that today at almost ten years later is still not being fully appreciated, as seen by the continued emaciation of public space in New York City. (See the Starbuck's Bathroom Debacle of 2018 for further fodder on that)

I would rather draw attention to this -- the Yellow Vests have fallen by the same means as Occupy Wall Street -- hyper advanced NSA-type persistent surveillance plus members over-communicating on under-secure channels (social media etc) equals targeted takedown of leaders, and eventual loss of purpose. Hong Kong protesters, on the other hand, use layered operating systems on their phones for military-level security, to provide one example of adaptation.

Mental Vaccines Are Coming to Take Your Thoughts Away

Fear not fellow Americans, we'll be cured of the Fake News Blues in no time.

You see it everywhere --  we're turning fossil fuels into planet-killing death gas because climate change isn't real, turning kids into petri dishes for vintage diseases because the immune system isn't real, and even turning unscrupulous businessmen into national superheroes, because morals aren't real!

But finally, some psychologists from Cambridge have developed a mental inoculation that builds your resistance to bad data through small doses of exposure. The way it works is that they give you some real data (climate change; it's real), and then they give you some fake data (climate change; Chinese conspiracy!), and THEN they give you the reasons why the fake stuff is fake and the real stuff is real.

When you see it side by side, and when you see the rebuttal come from the same source as both the real and the fake, you build a little bit of resistance.

Notes:
Mental “vaccine” protects both parties from plague of fake news and lies
Jan 2017, Ars Technica

Inoculating the Public against Misinformation about Climate Change
Global Challenges, 2017. DOI: 10.1002/gch2.201600008

Here is for those who are trying to reconcile how climate change can be a national security threat and yet not a threat both at the same time:
A brief introduction to climate change and national security
Yale Climate Connections, 2019

See also