Sir Arthur C. Clarke

Earlier this week, Sir Arthur C. Clarke passed away at the age of 90. Several months ago, in December, for his 90th birthday, he recorded a sort of message to the world.

His words will do him far greater justice that I could, so here is the transcript of the speech, followed by the Youtube clip of it.

Hello! This is Arthur Clarke, speaking to you from my home in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

As I approach my 90th birthday, my friends are asking how it feels like, to have completed 90 orbits around the Sun.

Well, I actually don't feel a day older than 89!

Of course, some things remind me that I have indeed qualified as a senior citizen. As Bob Hope once said: "You know you're getting old, when the candles cost more than the cake!"

I’m now perfectly happy to step aside and watch how things evolve. But there's also a sad side to living so long: most of my contemporaries and old friends have already departed. However, they have left behind many fond memories, for me to recall.

I now spend a good part of my day dreaming of times past, present and future. As I try to survive on 15 hours’ sleep a day, I have plenty of time to enjoy vivid dreams. Being completely wheel-chaired doesn't stop my mind from roaming the universe – on the contrary!

In my time I’ve been very fortunate to see many of my dreams come true! Growing up in the 1920s and 1930s, I never expected to see so much happen in the span of a few decades. We 'space cadets' of the British Interplanetary Society spent all our spare time discussing space travel – but we didn’t imagine that it lay in our own near future…

I still can't quite believe that we've just marked the 50th anniversary of the Space Age! We’ve accomplished a great deal in that time, but the 'Golden Age of Space' is only just beginning. After half a century of government-sponsored efforts, we are now witnessing the emergence of commercial space flight.

Over the next 50 years, thousands of people will travel to Earth orbit – and then, to the Moon and beyond. Space travel – and space tourism – will one day become almost as commonplace as flying to exotic destinations on our own planet.

Things are also changing rapidly in many other areas of science and technology. To give just one example, the world's mobile phone coverage recently passed 50 per cent -- or 3.3 billion subscriptions. This was achieved in just a little over a quarter century since the first cellular network was set up. The mobile phone has revolutionized human communications, and is turning humanity into an endlessly chattering global family!

What does this mean for us as a species?

Communication technologies are necessary, but not sufficient, for us humans to get along with each other. This is why we still have many disputes and conflicts in the world. Technology tools help us to gather and disseminate information, but we also need qualities like tolerance and compassion to achieve greater understanding between peoples and nations.

I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I hope we've learnt something from the most barbaric century in history – the 20th. I would like to see us overcome our tribal divisions and begin to think and act as if we were one family. That would be real globalisation…

As I complete 90 orbits, I have no regrets and no more personal ambitions. But if I may be allowed just three wishes, they would be these.

Firstly, I would like to see some evidence of extra-terrestrial life. I have always believed that we are not alone in the universe. But we are still waiting for ETs to call us – or give us some kind of a sign. We have no way of guessing when this might happen – I hope sooner rather than later!

Secondly, I would like to see us kick our current addiction to oil, and adopt clean energy sources. For over a decade, I've been monitoring various new energy experiments, but they have yet to produce commercial scale results. Climate change has now added a new sense of urgency. Our civilisation depends on energy, but we can't allow oil and coal to slowly bake our planet…

The third wish is one closer to home. I’ve been living in Sri Lanka for 50 years – and half that time, I’ve been a sad witness to the bitter conflict that divides my adopted country.

I dearly wish to see lasting peace established in Sri Lanka as soon as possible. But I’m aware that peace cannot just be wished -- it requires a great deal of hard work, courage and persistence.

* * * * *

I’m sometimes asked how I would like to be remembered. I’ve had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer, space promoter and science populariser. Of all these, I want to be remembered most as a writer – one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well.

I find that another English writer -- who, coincidentally, also spent most of his life in the East -- has expressed it very well. So let me end with these words of Rudyard Kipling:
If I have given you delight
by aught that I have done.
Let me lie quiet in that night
which shall be yours anon;

And for the little, little span
the dead are borne in mind,
seek not to question other than,
the books I leave behind.

This is Arthur Clarke, saying Thank You and Goodbye from Colombo!

An Alternative View for Second Language Acquisition

As I've made clear many times, I'm interested in the neuroscience of learning to read a second language.

Here is one theory currently traveling the airwaves (from the TV show Scrubs):

Two Research Papers, and things i've been thinking about lately

Here is a short excerpt from an article I read that covered a paper that was published in the journal Nature:

Japan Scientists Develop Fearless Mice

By KAORI HITOMI
Associated Press Writer

TOKYO (AP) -- Cat and mouse may never be the same. Japanese scientists say they've used genetic engineering to create mice that show no fear of felines, a development that may shed new light on mammal behavior and the nature of fear itself.

Scientists at Tokyo University say they were able to successfully switch off a mouse's instinct to cower at the smell or presence of cats - showing that fear is genetically hardwired and not learned through experience, as commonly believed.

And here's an interesting video showing orca teamwork...the critical moment happens about 2:40 into the video, but the entire video is interesting. It appears as if the orcas are working in a team to push the ice floe (with helpless seal trapped aboard) into the water, and then they create a wave to wash their next meal into the water, where they will presumably chomp him (or her) to bits. More interesting is that (according to the researcher, who is filming) they seem to be teaching a younger orca about the hunting strategy...since its hard to tell from the video, I will take his word for it. (Thanks to Mo at Neurophilosophy for the reference to this).


The reference for the whale article:

Visser, I. N. et al. Mar. Mamm. Sci. doi: 10.1111/j.1748-7692.2007.00163.x (2007).

Some random, various thoughts that I have:

I'm a little troubled by the seemingly simple explanation that "fear is genetically hardwired and not learned through experience." Strictly speaking, I'd be willing to believe that the fear-of-cats response (in the mice) is brought about by the mouse genome, because of natural selection. Those mice with "the fear-of-cats gene" (remember that genes are not "for" something, but it makes it easier to speak as if they are) survived longer than those without the fear-of-cats gene, and they reproduced more successfully, and therefore the fear became "genetically hardwired." But then you have to think about gene expression, and you have to think about gene-environment interaction, and you have to think about the cats and their gene expression.

If mice were only found in the North American midwest, and cats were only native to Northeastern Africa, it is unlikely that mice would ever have developed a fear-of-cats gene, and it is equally unlikely that cats would have ever developed a mice-taste-good gene. In this way, it is only because of a sort of meta-experience that mice ever became afraid of cats, and similarly that cats favored the taste of mice. There was a very good reason that it was more adaptive for mice to fear cats, and similarly a good reason that cats came to enjoy mice. It was adaptive! I recommend the book The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins for anyone interested in thinking about these sorts of things. (also, how convenient that the cats that the genetically altered mice were exposed to were docile house-trained cats, who did not need to eat mice to survive...)

Now this brings me to the question of the seals and the whales. Is anybody going to tell me, given this news about the mice, that the seal has not learned from experience (in the immediate, or meta- sense) that he is about to become dinner for those whales? Has not the seal watched countless friends and relatives suffer the same fate as he is about to suffer? And what about the whales? Even if it has become genetically "hardwired" to have a seals-taste-good gene, the young need to be TRAINED in how to get the seal in the first place. Not like visual edge detection in humans, which does not need to be learned. It is a learned behavior, like reading. There is variability in reading because it is learned. Some people are good at reading, some are less skilled. Some orcas are good at hunting, some are less skilled. In time, the good hunters' genes will be passed on, and the lesser hunters genes' will die out. Will some scientist in the future say that orcas are genetically hard-wired to make waves to push the seals off of the ice floe, because of the way that the environment interacts with the genes, today?

Maybe I'm just confusing myself...and whoever happens to read my ramblings.

Japanese Game Shows

Japanese game shows are possibly the most ridiculous, ever.



Other than that, I'm mentally and physically and emotionally exhausted. Why is it that once you finally seem to be settled into some sort of rhythm in life, like ten thousand different things all happen at once to disrupt that delicately balanced homeostasis that you've worked so hard to achieve? At least I've got my research. I wonder if that's why people in academia and/or research tend to sequester themselves in the lab for hours on end...as a way to not have to deal with the outside world. When you're doing experimental research, you control, or attempt to control, everything except for one variable. And even then, you categorize the variable of interest, thereby controlling the way that you interpret it. You leave as little as possible to chance. I wonder if that says something about scientists and researchers. For people who would like to live a life in that sort of a model, it seems like a very predictable, and very boring, way to live.