Marijuana, Aliens, and Alzheimer’s

From Contention to Ubiquity

Charlie Behrens –  short film –  Algorithmic Architecture

THE DIALOGUE PROPER

Start with Marijuana, and that’s Marijuana the idea, not marijuana the substance. It’s been illegal in the United States for a long time. It made its popular culture breakthrough in the 1960’s and was immediately followed by the Reefer Madness campaign, which caused just about every self-respecting parent to steer their kids away from it until about 1990. By this time, a generation passes, and with it the Reefer Madness. Note also that by this time the anti-marijuana campaign has been absorbed by the larger, all-purpose, Anti-Drug campaign where it is grouped together with more dangerous drugs such as cocaine and heroin. In these hospitable conditions, the Legalize It front comes on strong. Yet, it takes more than twenty years for marijuana to begin its descent from criminal-maker to decriminalized.

As we look around, in this year 2013, we see that although the Legalize It force seems to grow stronger, its entire context has shifted. Not only has the timespan of a generation wiped out the memory of Reefer Madness, but in other ways, practically unpredictable in the 1990’s, a resonating reconfiguration of the cultural matrix makes Legalize It almost obsolete.

The first of these coincidences relates to the Back-to-Nature movement (the one responsible for beards, backyard chickens and a resurgence in taxidermy). Part New Age, part WebMD and part Healthcare Reform, people are ready, willing, and able to use natural drugs to cure their ailments. It is readily apparent that the Legalize It dialog has changed drastically, yet somehow imperceptibly according to a general publicpoint-of-view. The dialog is no longer legal-illegal, but recreational-medicinal. The resolution, the conclusion of the Marijuana Dialog Proper is foregone, and in its place a less contentious polarization. Contentious enough, however, to maintain public interest, and related enough to still be identified as part of the Marijuana Dialog.

The outcome of the dialog will take one of two positions: 1. It will become legal for medical use, which isn’t exactly “legal” by definition of the dialog proper, or 2. It will become fully legal, although it will not be called such, because in order to denote legal status within the new context, it must be disambiguated, or referred to instead as ‘legal for recreational use’.

This is not, though it may seem, a semantics game, but an investigation of ideas, and one can’t think about ideas unless they have names, i.e. semantic identities. Over time, however, it seems that either ideas disown their identification, or they never existed in the first place. There are more subtle adjustments in the way an idea, or a debate play out over time. These could be called exogenous because they come from a space close-to but outside-of the dialog proper. They have an effect nonetheless on how we engage in the debate, and it is because of their exogenous quality that we often neglect their impact.

Google Earth Glitch Art, via Vice

Enter, separately, Prescription Drugs and Synthetic Drugs. Today, doctors are being investigated for writing painkiller prescriptions illegally – behaving as drug dealers essentially. All this in light of a statewide drug investigation in New Jersey, due to a marked increase in drug use – prescription drugs, that is, especially the ones analogous to heroin, since that makes it part of the larger drug culture as it is understood. Compared to this portent of pharmaceutical remedies and abuses (what could be considered part of the separate Big Pharma Dialog), marijuana seems benign.

Synthetic THC was sort-of legal for about one year, and not because law enforcement was unaware of it, but because the substance didn't fit under the law – it’s not THC, but the law says “THC”, not “THC-like”, not even one that is so -like that it has only one molecule out of place. Yet, this substance, which was legal by default was sending kids to the hospital, or at least into temporary psychosis, something real, regular THC is not likely to do. If our law can’t keep up with the synthetic drugs, and they are much more damaging than their natural illegal counterparts, why not just make it legal. At this point, another thread of the dialog proper has been frayed and twisted away.

Debates such as this are never fully resolved; they are instead absorbed into the larger cultural matrix, rendered asunder, and redistributed until they can barely be recognized. I do not mean to discount human agency, but to change the way in which we engage with the Dialog, and more importantly, with how we think about the Dialog. At least we must question whether or not we are wasting time and energy articulating dialogs which no longer exist with us.

Google Earth Glitch Art Gallery

Moving on, to higher ground: Aliens

The Aliens Dialog seems fairly simple – do they exist, or do they not. The very concept as we know it today comes from (believe it or not) turn-of-the-century science fiction, which by the 1930’s evolved into the little green men of Welles’ Wells’ War of the Worlds. Ever since, Aliens have been a convenient answer to many of the world’s unsolved mysteries, as well as a source of highly imaginative fantasy. Anyone with an active imagination speculates on the day when we have some in-your-face evidence on the existence of aliens. But, as it turns out, our imagination is apparently no match for the possible expressions of the Aliens Dialog that science has been throwing our way.

What is this; life has been found in a lake, timecapsuled under four miles of ice, experiencing pressures and temperatures that are more Europa-like than Earth. What say you now, Aliens? And this; molecules capable of creating life-building amino acids can themselves be created in a comet in outer-space-like conditions. Or this; exoplanets by the week. Or this; by reverse engineering the rate of acceleration of genetic complexification, the zero-point of origin comes out at 9 billion years, five more than Earth’s existence. And let’s not forget synthetic life. And finally, in developing biosignatures for use in space exploration, some things are forcing us to seriously rethink what life is: Apparently, all that is needed to be called “life” is a particular frequency distribution of essential amino acids. Unless, of course, you would rather import the topics of artificial intelligence and algorithmic automation into the debate, in which case you would be forced to consider their processes of competition, cooperation and evolution that seem to emulate what we might call life.

At this point, the Aliens Dialog has become so faceted and nuanced that by the time we can answer the yes-no question, it won’t even exist with us. All of the above examples are exogenous in that they have come not from within the Aliens Dialog, but from completely unsolicited, relatively unrelated dialogs of their own. The search for exoplanets isn’t looking for aliens, per se, but only Earth-like places in our galaxy. Biosignatures are not to help us discover aliens, but only to expand our definition of what life is, so that we can refine our technical recourse. None of these things help or hinder the resolution of the Aliens debate. What they certainly do, is to distort, to obfuscate the dialog until it settles into a cold, moot state in the memories of a generation that once cared about its outcome. There is no outcome.

 

Google Earth Glitch Art Gallery

Finally, closer to home: The Body Dialog

It’s really not a dialog as of yet, except for hardcore cyberpunk enthusiasts, blue sky research groups, and anyone working with neural interface systems. But it’s coming, inevitably, and here we will, despite its mind-bogglingly ostentatious preposterousness, attempt to predict its eventual disappearance into ubiquity.

The Body dialog, being that it isn’t fully formed yet, goes something like this: Your body determines who you are to the extent that it has a physical existence which can be located and analyzed objectively, that is to say, consensually. But you are more than just your body; this “more” is your mind. The Mind is non-physical, which makes it harder for people to agree on what it is, where it is, etc. Because we can’t objectively observe, via the hard sciences, the nature of the Mind, any theory of self which incorporates the mind becomes non-falsifiable. This disrupts the intuitive notion that self should be determined by the body at all. Hence, the Body Dialog: Can we continue to exist as individuals without a body to serve as locus for the self?

Advances in neural interfaces, in all manner of prostheses, in any cognitive studies, in machine learning, and in neuroscience in general; are amassing into this meme-set we call here the Body Dialog (conditioned by the more public discourse on virtual identity and digital existence).

To what extent is our self determined by our body, and to what extent can we remove our selves form our bodies while still remaining ourself? It sounds preposterous, as it tends to be at first. Then comes the contentious phase. We are slowly entering that now, in 2013, and will be in full swing within the decade’s end. By 2050, the Body Dialog will no longer exist, and yet some chimerical form of it will keep the illusion continuous for some time after.

We can see its bifurcation from the dialog proper, because it’s already among us: Alzheimer’s is sad, there is no doubt. It dismantles your brain, module by module, if you will, until it becomes questionable as to whether you are still you. The wave of psychological disorders which is slated for the coming generation of aging Americans announces the beginning of a shift in the entire context of the Body Dialog. As a generation interacts with the mental deterioration of their elderly, the concept of self, in relation to the body, becomes so fuzzy that the envelope we use to separate life from death becomes less rigid, and as the means to manipulate it become more accessible, so grows our willingness to use it.

-A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

-Max Plank, Scientific Autobiography, p151

Google Earth Glitch Art Gallery

RATIONALE

Ideas change over time, making it difficult to maintain meaningful dialog about popular issues. This disguised metamorphosis, an ontological distortion, seems to happen to the idea itself, but it is better understood as a massive reconfiguration of the entire idea-space.

-The paradigm shift does not change the world …it changes the scientist. (Thomas Kuhn, 1962, p121)

In some instances it becomes readily apparent that it is not the idea itself that remains constant. The idea only exists as a product of the network in which it is embedded. Its entire identification is an illusion, required by consciousness: for how could we debate and discuss, support and deny, prove and disprove an idea throughout time if we didn’t give it a sturdy, solid form?

-Just because it did not involve the introduction of additional objects or concepts, the transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian mechanics illustrates with particular clarity, the scientific revolution as a displacement of the conceptual network through which scientists view the world. (p102)

Newsworthy topics of our time can serve as an example. When we talk about a popular subject, such as marijuana use, we address it as a dialog. In the beginning, when the dialog is “hot”, it polarizes, or in a more imaginative way, it superimposes on two possible expressions. But as the dialog cools down, it bifurcates, seeking out slightly less contentious alternatives for expression.

-Problems are anticipated well in advance, so they come as less of a surprise, until they start to come from everywhere; then you have a crisis, and then paradigm shift, and it doesn’t happen until it has to. (~p75)

The Dialog, clear and guttural at first, becomes nothing but a thousand whispers. At this point, though the Dialog is still unresolved in the explicit sense, its superpositions have all collapsed unnoticeably into benign ubiquity; homeostasis.

Google Earth Glitch Art Gallery

But there is more to the story than thermal equilibrium analogies. Enter the illusion of memetic transmutation. In these so-called Dialogs, two opposing memetic configurations use the same meme-sets but articulate them differently, thus altering their meaning. Both sides of the Marijuana Dialog Proper, for example, use the same memotypes of the mental world, of self-control (or lack thereof), of exploration (and its dangers) but they impart different ~emotional values to each, in a collaboration that makes both sides distinct.

-Since new paradigms are born from old ones, they ordinarily incorporate much of the vocabulary and apparatus…. …Within the new paradigm, old terms, concepts, and experiments fall into new relationships one with the other.” (p149)

Over time, it is not the dialog that changes, per se, it is the opposing configurations that create its distinct expressions, for they become mixed and mangled so thoroughly with outside memes, side conversations and surprises, that even the means by which we might address them will have vanished.

-Although the strategies and techniques may remain the same, it is the world itself which has changed. (p111)

The opposing sides of the dialog are reconfigured to be accessible to the largest number of belief constructs available. Different configurations will be more easily accepted by different people, who all use different belief constructs to filter, organize and engage with the dialog.

It is in these kinds of value modifiers within the different configurations, or narrative cues as we might call them, where the interest lies. The two opposing views on marijuana use may be using the same meme-sets to an extent. But each view has a subset of modifiers whose job it is not to inform content, but to adjust emotional response.

In time, as the Dialog cools down, these seemingly unimportant value modifiers are exposed and become quasi expressions of the Dialog Proper, a distraction, an obfuscation. When enough value modifiers are exploited, the Dialog Proper ceases to exist with us.

-There is never any single argument that can or should persuade them all. Rather than a single group conversion, what occurs is an increasing shift in the distribution of professional allegiances. (p158)

Yet , we may continue to engage in the Dialog, not fully realizing its absorption into the cultural vortex; that which feeds on our contentious debates today, and tomorrow spits out predictive discoveries, benign policy stipulations, and pop-music lyrics.

Google Earth Glitch Art Gallery

AN AFTERWORD

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn wrote Structures of Scientific Revolution, wherein he surveyed the paradigm shifts that occur in the scientific discipline: A complex process, no doubt. Though Kuhn’s Structures deals specifically with Science, there are to be found in his work prescient thoughts as they relate to the coding, transmission and distortion of ideas by the general public. The same expressions, explanations, descriptions and observations presented by Kuhn in the arena of Science, remain useful still in the greater mess of the public psyche.

-Thomas S. Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 1962.

second edition 1970, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, volume 2, number2

Google Earth Glitch Art Gallery

POST SCRIPT

Our Blue Marble 3-2013

Google Earth Glitch Art Gallery

Semantics Lugubrious

Cultivorous exploitation of low-density, value modifying narrative agents in the “distortion” of meme-set reconfiguration [via the cultural vortex]

Art

Google Earth Glitch Art, via Vice

http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/glitches-in-ios-maps

Charlie Behrens –  short film –  Algorithmic Architecture

http://www.charliebehrens.com/Algorithmic-Architecture-Film

updates:
Deep sea 'mushroom' may be new branch of life - BBC News - Sep 2014

Bacon

AKA The Food Network

Aldrich's Organoleptic Properties Index

There is only one chemical used to make the flavor of bacon.

This is "bacon", surrounded by all the other flavors that use that same chemical-flavor.

To put it another way: the chemical that is used to make 'bacon flavor' is also used to make 'vanilla', 'jasmine', and 'clove', among others (including whiskey, which for some reason is not showing up).

Take a minute to play with this network graph - a compendium of flavors and fragrances and the relationships between them, using Aldrich's catalog of over 1000 chemicals.

(check out a youtube tutorial on how to use the network graphs if it seems too confusing)

Aldrich's Organoleptic Properties Index

Quantum Language

Until it Means Nothing
...a democratic term, to avoid damning labels...as soon as it begins to mean anything to anyone, they'll change it. "The idea seems to be: use an expression as long as it doesn't mean anything to anyone."
-Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes, 1959, p106


Our ambiguous world of words
May 31, 2013

Ambiguity in language poses the greatest challenge when it comes to training a computer to understand the written word.

Although words with multiple meanings give English a linguistic richness, they can also create ambiguity: drawing a gun could mean pulling out a firearm or illustrating a weapon.

We can navigate through this potential confusion because our brain takes into account the context surrounding words and sentences, but, for computers, so-called lexical ambiguity poses a major challenge.

"Computers are hopeless at disambiguation"

"It turns out that there are interesting links between quantum physics, quantum computing and linguistics," said Clark. "In the same way that quantum mechanics seeks to explain what happens when two quantum entities combine, Mehrnoosh and I wanted to understand what happens to the meaning of a phrase or sentence when two words or phrases combine."

The 'distributional' approach to language modeling focuses on the meanings of the words themselves, and the principle that meanings of words can be worked out by considering the contexts in which words appear in text. "We build up a geometric space, or a cloud, in which the meanings of words sit. Their position in the cloud is determined by the sorts of words you find in their context. So, if you were to do this for dog and cat, you would see many of the same words in the cloud – pet, vet, food – because dog and cat often occur in similar contexts."

Dr. Stephem Clark, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the European Research Council, Bob Coecke, Professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures at the University of Oxford, and Dr Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Queen Mary (University of London), who works on the applications of logic to computer science and linguistics.


Small differences in how a technology is defined can make a big difference in how the public feels about it
March 11, 2013

Even small tweaks in how scientists describe scientific breakthroughs can significantly change how the public perceives their work, a new study indicates. Researchers found that showing individuals different definitions of nanotechnology led to differences in how strongly the subjects supported this emerging area of science and in their motivation to learn more about it.

Participants in the University of Wisconsin-Madison study were given one of three definitions, each of which framed nanotechnology differently.

The researchers found that if the definition highlighted nanotechnology's useful applications, readers were more likely to support nanotechnology but weren't motivated to gather more information. If the definition focused on risks and benefits, readers were more interested in learning more but less likely to support nanotechnology.

"Changing the definition did not change the attitudes toward the technology for those who had a college degree in science," Brossard says. "It did, however, make a difference among those who have a college degree in a non-science-related field and those who do not have a college degree. And different definitions impacted these groups' motivation to learn more in different ways."
-Dominique Brossard, UW-Madison professor of life sciences communication.
This work appears in the Journal of Nanoparticle Research, provided by the University of Wisconsin-Madison.


Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University
May 10, 2013

As an 11-year-old, he had been fascinated by the flame on the end of a candle. When he asked his teacher what a flame was, she replied only: “Oxidation.” That answer meant nothing to him. In his editorial, Alda challenged scientists to do a better job of explaining a flame to an 11-year-old.

“Our aspiration is to become the first university in the nation to offer training in communications to all of our science and health graduate students”

“Alan’s insight is at the heart of our approach, which uses improvisation, story-telling and clear, vivid language to help scientists share the beauty and meaning of their work.”

On Social Contagion

aka The Clap

Clapping reveals applause is a 'social contagion'
Rebecca Morelle, BBC, 18 June 2013

The quality of a performance does not drive the amount of applause an audience gives, a study suggests.

Instead scientists have found that clapping is contagious, and the length of an ovation is influenced by how other members of the crowd behave.

They say it takes a few people to start clapping for applause to spread through a group, and then just one or two individuals to stop for it to die out.

"The pressure comes from the volume of clapping in the room rather than what your neighbour sitting next to you is doing," explained Dr Richard Mann, from the University of Uppsala.

"You have this social pressure to start (clapping), but once you've started there's an equally strong social pressure not to stop, until someone initiates that stopping."

The Swedish study is published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.



Emotional response to climate change influences whether we seek or avoid further information
phys.org May 15, 2013

Yang says, "Our key variables of interest were 'information seeking' and 'information avoidance.'

Those who had negative feelings toward climate change – feelings marked by states of fear, depression, anxiety, etc., – actively sought more information about climate change. They also saw climate change as having serious risks, and considered their current knowledge about it insufficient.

Those driven by a positive affect toward climate change – an emotional state marked by hopefulness, excitement, happiness, etc. – actively avoided exposure to additional information on the issue. They also said climate change presented little risk to nature and humans, and they viewed their knowledge about climate change as sufficient.

Our social environment has the potential to strongly influence whether we seek or avoid climate change information. This, the researchers say, may be because we are most often around people who agree with us about important issues, reinforce our perception of risk and support or discourage further action.

The study, "What, Me Worry? The Role of Affect in Information Seeking and Avoidance" was conducted by Z. Janet Yang, PhD, assistant professor of communication at UB, and Lee Ann Kahlor, PhD, associate professor of public relations and advertising at UT Austin. It was published in the April 2013 issue of the journal Science Communication.

Anthropogenic Metadata on Climate Science

aka The Low-Hanging Fruit of Neuro-Pop in the Age of Big Datty

Notice below, just a sample of the kinds of reports that use climate science as a substrate upon which to study human behavior and cognition..

Some may find it interesting to see how the science of climate change has ripened into a metadata-rich fruit hanging low on the tree of human-knowledge; that's knowledge -of- humans, not knowledge acquired by humans.

Granted we are entering the age of the New Humanities, and granted climate science is probably the most contentious scientific issue to be argued publicly since the advent of digital social media, but, 10 years ago, had you asked anyone what would be the most significant by-product of climate science, this would have never made it to the list.

Just goes to show that the world is full of surprises, and no matter how much you try, predicting the value of scientific endeavour is never part of the justification of doing it.

[note: I've recently been watching panels discussing the value of space exploration, and exploration in general]

Changing minds about climate change policy can be done—sometimes
phys.org Jun 24, 2013
Provided by The Ohio State University

Anthropologists argue field must play a vital role in climate change studies
phys.org Jun 20, 2013
Provided by University of California - Santa Cruz

Some Americans are cooling off on global warming
phys.org Jun 28, 2013
Provided by University of Michigan

Emotional response to climate change influences whether we seek or avoid further information
phys.org May 15, 2013
Provided by University at Buffalo

Americans care deeply about 'global warming' – but not 'climate change'
The Guardian, 27 May 2014

Justify My Heart

The Readymade Mashup

INSTRUCTIONS
- take Alicia Keys' "Listen to Your Heart" and Madonna's "Justify My Love"

-- (I have one open in a media player, the other in youtube, and toggle between them w a keyboard controller, as one shuts off, the other starts)

--- start Alicia Keys and have them both ready to toggle by 0:21 seconds, AK time (Alicia Keys)

---- at AK 0:28, switch to Madonna, and let it run for a bit
-------- at MD 0.27, switch
---- at AK 0.39
-------- at MD 0.37
---- at AK 0.48
-------- at MD 0.56
---- at AK 0.58
-------- at MD 1.15

- if done right, the Madonna 1:15 switch to Alicia Keys 0.58 comes out as "Justify My Heart"

Predict This

Adobe Social gets predictive tool for hyper-targeting
Nancy Owano, Apr 27, 2013 

Predictive analytics technology offers predictive data for customers, to optimize the marketer's efforts to increase customer responses and clicks. The data analyses can be used to guide future actions that can produce best results.

...new capability offers predictive analytics, historical data-driven recommendations, self-learning (the solution learns as it goes, with continual refinements to its recommendations) and social content optimization (best time to post).

"Traditionally, social posts are composed without a measurable, data-driven connection to how they will be received, and many marketers release big news or compelling content through social channels only to find that it falls flat in terms of engagement," according to an Adobe statement about its beta.

How it works: Customers open a widget showing an estimated range for the amount of Likes, comments, and shares a post will receive. They can identify other metrics, too, for tracking. Another key Adobe Social feature is timing. The tool will indicate if the post had best be delayed for posting later. Posts are not just targeted but (using Adobe's lingo) "hyper-targeted."

More information: www.adobe.com/solutions/social-marketing.html

POST SCRIPT
Scientists identify a mathematical 'crystal ball' that may predict calamities
Oct 28, 2013, phys.org

Neuroscientists have come up with a mathematical equation that may help predict calamities such as financial crashes in economic systems and epileptic seizures in the brain.

...measure of 'information flow' reaches a peak just before a system moves from a healthy state to an unhealthy state. Such 'phase transitions' are common in many real systems, and are often highly significant: epileptic seizures and financial market crashes are just two examples of transitions.

Lead researcher Dr Lionel Barnett says: "The key insight in the paper is that the dynamics of complex systems – like the brain and the economy – depend on how their elements causally influence each other; in other words, how information flows between them. And that this information flow needs to be measured for the system as a whole, and not just locally between its various parts."

Essentially this means finding a way to characterize, mathematically, the extent to which the parts of a complex system are simultaneously segregated (they all behave differently) and integrated (they all depend on each other).

Surprising results from study of non-epileptic seizures
Loyola University Health System, link

Study finds evidence that stock prices can be predicted within a short window of time
Feb 04, 2014
The study by researchers in the Tippie College of Business suggests that price movements can be predicted with a better than 50-50 accuracy for anywhere up to one minute after the stock leaves the confines of its bid-ask spread. Probabilities continue to be significant until about five minutes after it leaves the spread. By 30 minutes, the predictability window has closed. 

IBM researchers' algorithm explores tweets for home location cues
Mar 24, 2014

From July 2011 to Aug 2011, they collected tweets from the top 100 cities in US by population. They invoked the Twitter REST API to collect each user's 200 most recent tweets (less if that user had fewer than 200 total tweets). Some users discovered to have private profiles were eliminated. The final data set had 1.5 million tweets by 9551 users. 

In listing their contributions, the IBM researchers said, when tested using the 1.52-million tweet dataset from 9551 users from 100 US cities, that their algorithm outperforms the best existing algorithms for home location prediction from tweets. "Our best method achieves accuracies of 64% for cities, 66% for states, 78% for time zones and 71% for regions." 
More information: Home Location Identification of Twitter Users, arXiv:1403.2345 [cs.SI] 


[just to point at that is must be easier to predict timezone and region based on time-patterns (people sleep at the same time, for the most part, and this shifts based on time-zones; each region brings a particular vocabulary and vernacular, place names alone, in large enough quantities, can give a good sense of where a person is, regionally.]

Forecasting future may one day become as practical as predicting weather, thanks to Big Data advances
Jun 27 2014, phys.org

Early Model Based Event Recognition using Surrogates project, or EMBERS—Virginia Tech

In the past year, the team has used such an approach to correctly forecast many important events such as the riots after Paraguay's president was impeached, the Hantavirus outbreaks in Argentina, and the recent mass protests in Brazil and Venezuela. 

One thing this particular program does is read images of parking lots outside of health centers and hospitals to monitor upticks in "fill rate."  

Anil Vullikanti, a panelist and an associate professor of computer science, had many anecdotes regarding the role of human intervention in data forecasting.  

"You will always have people intentionally trying to clog the system with misinformation to throw you off course, but we are trained to separate the signal from the noise and minimize distractions." 

Interestingly enough, the spread of an idea is not so different from the spread of an illness. 

"Let's say you can predict the future and you intervene to prevent an uprising," Parikh says. "How can you be sure that an uprising was actually going to happen?"


[quantum theory?]

Just four bits of credit card data can identify most anyone
phys.org, Jan 2015