That (Steve) Jobs used LSD and values the contribution it made to his thinking is far from unusual in the world of computer technology. Psychedelic drugs have influenced some of America’s foremost computer scientists. The history of this connection is well documented in a number of books, the best probably being What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, by New York Times technology reporter John Markoff.

Psychedelic drugs, Markoff argues, pushed the computer and Internet revolutions forward by showing folks that reality can be profoundly altered through unconventional, highly intuitive thinking. Douglas Engelbart is one example of a psychonaut who did just that: he helped invent the mouse. Apple’s Jobs has said that Microsoft’s Bill Gates, would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once.” In a 1994 interview with Playboy, however, Gates coyly didn’t deny having dosed as a young man.

Thinking differently–or learning to Think Different, as a Jobs slogan has it–is a hallmark of the acid experience. “When I’m on LSD and hearing something that’s pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and into anther brain state where I’ve stopped thinking and started knowing,” Kevin Herbert told Wired magazine at a symposium commemorating Hofmann’s one hundredth birthday. Herbert, an early employee of Cisco Systems who successfully banned drug testing of technologists at the company, reportedly “solved his toughest technical problems while tripping to drum solos by the Grateful Dead.”

“It must be changing something about the internal communication in my brain,” said Herbert. “Whatever my inner process is that lets me solve problems, it works differently, or maybe different parts of my brain are used.”

Burning Man, founded in 1986 by San Francisco techies, has always been an attempt to make a large number of people use different parts of their brains toward some nonspecific but ostensibly enlightening and communally beneficial end. The event was quickly moved to the desert of Nevada as it became too big for the city. Today, it’s more likely to be attended by a software engineer than a dropped-out hippie. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, are longtime Burners, and the influence of San Francisco and Seattle tech culture is everywhere in the camps and exhibits built for the eight-day festival. Its Web site suggests, in fluent acidese, that “[t]rying to explain what Burning Man is to someone who has never been to the event is a bit like trying to explain what a particular color looks like to someone who is blind.”

John Gilmore was the fifth employee at Sun Microsystems and registered the domain name Toad.com in 1987. A Burner and well-known psychonaut, he’s certainly one of the mind-blown rich. Today a civil-liberties activist, he’s perhaps best known for Gilmore’s Law, his observation that “[t]he Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” He told me that most of his colleagues in the sixties and seventies used psychedelic drugs. “What psychedelics taught me is that life is not rational. IBM was a very rational company,” he said, explaining why the corporate behemoth was overtaken by upstarts such as Apple. Mark Pesce, the coinventor of virtual reality’s coding language, VRML, and a dedicated Burner, agreed that there’s some relationship between chemical mind expansion and advances in computer technology: “To a man and a woman, the people behind [virtual reality] were acidheads,” he said.

And perhaps in other scientific areas, too. According to Gilmore, the maverick surfer/chemist Kary Mullis, a well-known LSD enthusiast, told him that acid helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction, a crucial breakthrough for biochemistry. The advance won him the Nobel Prize in 1993. And according to reporter Alun Reese, Francis Crick, who discovered DNA along with James Watson, told friends that he first saw the double-helix structure while tripping on LSD.

It’s no secret that Crick took acid; he also publicly advocated the legalization of marijuana. Reese, who reported the story for a British wire service after Crick’s death, said that when he spoke with Crick about what he’d heard from the scientist’s friends, he “listened with rapt, amused attention” and “gave no intimation of surprise. When I had finished, he said, ‘Print a word of it and I’ll sue.’”

link to original article here.

BY Cliff Kuang Wed Jul 1, 2009 at 2:16 PM

Sakhr Mobile develops an iPhone app for troops and diplomats that translates Arabic speech into English, and visa versa–and there’s video of it, in action.

Fast Company just got a tip about one of the first products of that effort, an iPhone and Blackberry app, created by Sakhr Software and Dial Directions, that does natural language translation. Check out the video of the app, translating sinister-sounding–but all-too-real–phrases like “The prime minister will form a new government”:

This is the first product from Sakhr, which has just announced its acquisition of Dial Directions. Sakhr works on devices that scan Arabic words and then offer machine translations, and its customers already include the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Department of Justice. Dial Directions, for its part, creates voice-entry applications.

Creating the app you see above was a matter of combining those technologies–first, the speech recognition part, which transcribes what’s being said, and then applying Sakhr’s know-how in translating the text that’s produced. Zoinks! The future, apparently, is now. And while the military applications are obvious, we can’t help but think the commercial applications are far more vast. How cool would it be to have something like this working for you while hiking in the wilds of India, or China, or any other Federation planet?

Of course, who knows how this device might fare in the field–machine language translators are faced with a daunting test, when posed with the sloppiness of real-life language. Just witness how bad Google’s translation still is. The field has made tremendous strides in recent years. Will the pace continue?

Pakistan officially objects to the strikes by pilotless US aircraft

Two separate US drone attacks have killed at least ten people in a Taliban-stronghold region of Pakistan.

In the first raid in South Waziristan, at least one missile struck a known stronghold of the Pakistan Taliban chief, Baitullah Mehsud, killing six.

Reports say a second attack, on the funeral of one of those who died in the first attack, killed four more people.

Initial reports had quoted officials in the region saying the attacks had killed 45 in the tribal region.

The region is a stronghold of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud.

Earlier on Tuesday, tribal leader Qari Zainuddin, who often criticised Mehsud, was shot dead by a gunman in north-western Pakistan.

Earlier this month, Zainuddin criticised Mehsud after an attack on a mosque, which killed 33 people.

The Pakistani army is preparing to launch an offensive against Taliban fighters under Mehsud’s command, who are blamed for a number of deadly attacks.

But Zainuddin’s killing is being seen as a setback for the government in its efforts to isolate Mehsud ahead of the security forces’ next phase of their anti-Taliban offensive in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, says the BBC’s Mike Wooldridge in Islamabad.

Mark Anslow, the Ecologist, part of the Guardian Environment Network

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 11 June 2009

Alvin Smith had his eureka moment not in the bath, but in the swimming pool. ‘I was swimming round the pool, making little waves, and it struck me how much power there was in the displacement of the water,’ he remembers. ‘You think of a 500-tonne boat: a wave comes along, lifts that whole boat, and then drops it down again. You must be able to harness some of that, I thought.’

His subsequent invention would have made Archimedes proud, and should be making the renewables industry very excited.

Dubbed ‘Searaser’, it consists of what looks like a navigation buoy, but is in fact a simple arrangement of ballast and floats connected by a piston. As a wave passes the device, the float is lifted, raising the piston and compressing water. The float sinks back down on the tail of the wave on to a second float, compressing water again on the downstroke.

What is particularly clever about Searaser, however, is its simplicity. Where most marine energy devices have sealed, lubricated innards and complex electronics, Searaser is lubricated entirely by seawater, has no electronic components and is even self-cleaning. Smith describes it as ‘Third-World mechanics’, but this belies the sophistication of the concept.

‘The beauty of it is that we’re only making a pump, and bringing water ashore,’ he explains. ‘All the other technology needed to generate the electricity already exists.’

Searaser is designed to pump water either straight through a sea-level turbine to generate electricity, or up to a clifftop reservoir, where the water could be stored until needed, then allowed to flow back down to the sea through turbines, generating electricity on demand.

Read more here.