Martin C. Winer

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (Canadian Link): http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-colbert-report/full-episodes/#clip174780

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (USA Link):  http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/228190/may-19-2009/walter-kirn

Notes and Excerpts:

“Marine’s [Marine, Minnesota] elementary school was on a hill.  It was the largest man-made structure in town, one of the newest, and by far the ugliest.  Shape: rectangular.  Material: beige brick.  Constructed with tax money, it looked like tax money, a fiscal line item come to joyless life.  Even the playground equipment seemed bureaucratic: a stainless-steel slide and a set of iron monkey bars on which one could picture army recruits glumly sweating their way through basic training.  From the moment I entered the building’s long tiled hallway, its colorless walls inadequately brightened with red-and-yellow construction-paper maple leaves, I wanted out.  But out, I know, meant through. ” p.25

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“Certain questions which grown-ups deem unanswerable begin as answers which children find unquestionable.  For example: what is Death?  To me at eight years old, death was the signal for a person’s loved ones to cry and look stricken for a while and then begin dividing up his stuff.  What is Beauty?  The thing that made me like things when nobody was pushing me to like them. ” p.30

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On losing a debate…
“I’d harmed myself the night before the match by staying up till dawn trying to walk off and bathe away the phosphorescent curlicues of dread lossed in my brain by a drugged cupcake I’d eaten with a teammate in her motel room.  I hadn’t fully recovered when I found myself battling a girl with close-set eyes and the excessively brushed straight hair of a virginal prodigy.  Here was a force I’d never faced before: the supercharged purity of postponed puberty augmented by early viola training.” p.62

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In an early computer class, no one seemed able to use the computer yet it was promised to revolutionize the future:

“That’s when we stopped touching the device and chose to regard it as an icon or a totem.  Our classes turned into speculative chats about the wonders the object might perform if instead of addressing it in COBOL or FORTRAN, we could interact with it in English.  To heighten the atmosphere of possibility, we kept the thing plugged in.  This warmed its obscurely coiled and bundled insides, releasing unappetizing chemical vapors. ” p.66

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Upon watching a younger talented computer whiz work the computer…

“The exhibition unveiled no technical mysteries, but it did help me understand the term “conservative” as I’d once heard it used by a friend’s father while he was watching the TV news.  A conservative was a person who stopped adjusting once adjustment brought him no vital benefits.  The commandment to us from kindergarten on had been to grow, to expand ourselves, to stretch, but there was another option too, I saw.  Once could let others cope with the novelty and concentrate on the familiar.”  p.68

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On a graduation night romp with two exchange students:

Skirts came up, pants slipped off, and legs made V’s that turned into X’s and shifted on complex axes that allowed for wonders of sidelong friction that brought forth fetching squeaks and grunty purrs and primordially bridged all language gaps.  Some new bond was being stirred in that car, some fresh form of international understanding that the Rotary Club, or whichever organizations sponsored the exchange program, might not have planned on but shouldn’t have been displeased by, so intimately did it shrink our globe. p. 73

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Kirn feeling he was a fraud while mourning the passing of John Lennon:

“”All the lonely people,” he began [singing].

The choice was a magical piece of luck for me.  Afterwards, spent, having sung with my whole rib cage and fully emoted on every memorized word, I felt the urge to cry for real — from gratitude.  Thanks to my gloomy second-grade music teacher, I’d managed to respond convincingly, in the company of a well-credentialed witness, to a historic cultural tragedy that would be revisited for decades.  My genuine tears flowed along with my false tears, as they did the distinction between them blurred.  I wasn’t ashamed of this.  My fraudulence, I was coming to understand, was in a way the truest thing about me.  It represented ambition, longing, need.  It sprung from the deepest chambers of my soul.” p.77

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Drug use was rampant, even for the lighting guy during the performance of one of Kirn’s plays:

“The lighting guy, who’d eaten a hash brownie which he’d sworn would wear off before the show, toggled at random between clashing colors, turning the stage into a cruise-ship disco…” p.91

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Discussing a conversation Kirn had about  ‘the divided brain’.  Kirn may be a victim of this divided brain, leading to the impostor syndrome which he suffers from greatly:

“The best conversation of my life ensued — one I could never have had in Minnesota and one that helped me forget my recent troubles by occupying me with cosmic issues of just the sort a place like Princeton should raise but so far hadn’t, at least when I’d been listening.  Julian taught psychology, he said, despite having no diploma in the subject, only a book he’d written as an amateur.  It had ground out of his reading of ancient literature and concerned, he said, “the history of consciousness.”  I asked him to explain but keep it simple.  He told me that he’d try.  The modern human brain, he said, was actually two brains functioning as one brain, but there had been a time, long, long, ago, when man’s double brain had operated differently.  It’s parts, its halves, had been separate then, divided.  In fact, they’d been virtual strangers to each other.  When a thought arose in one of them, the other one, acting as a receiver, processed the thought as a voice, an actual voice.  This voice seemed to come from another being, really.  But who was this being?  Who were these secret speakers?  Man had answered these questions in many ways.  He’d conceived of gods and spirits, angels and demons, trolls and fairies.  Muses.

“Back when, before the Breakdown,” said Julian, “before the gods and voices fell silent, writers truly believed in inspiration.  They experienced inspiration.  It was real to them. Tell me: did you ever feel, during the composition of your script, that someone else, not you, was in control?”

“Honestly?”

“Of course.”

“Honestly, I feel that way a lot.  Down deep, in a quiet way, I feel it constantly.  And sometimes it shakes me up a little.  Should it?”

Julian shook his head, but not as vigorously as I would have liked.

“What was the ‘Breakdown’?” I asked him.  I had to know.  I had to know everything he did, suddenly.  Julian was a genius, I’d decided, even if everything he’d said was crazy.  And it probably was.  Because I understood it.” pps 93-94

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_Syndrome

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Kirn is brought before the Honor Committee accused of cheating on his Spanish mid-term:

“Guilty or innocent? Yes or no,” Rob said.

I ate a pretzel and let Rob’s anger hang there.  I thought he should have to feel it in the air.  I thought it might force him to face his ugliness.  Then I said, “I heard this from a senior.  In France, there’s a critic, I forget his name, who teaches that antonyms, words that mean the opposite, don’t really mean the opposite at all.  They aren’t the only alternatives, that is.  There are other words between them.  And all around them.”

“Fascinating except this isn’t France.”

“You tell me to choose, but the words I’m meant to choose from — ‘innocent and ‘guilty’ — aren’t my only choices.  I chose another one.  ‘Uncovictable’. p.109

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Kirn discusses the ‘critical assumptions’ he’d made in reading.  Unfortunately, Kirn had done very little reading at all.

“With virtually no stored literary material about which to harbor critical assumptions, I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself. I’d honed these skills on the speech team back in high school, and l didn’t regard them as sins against the Honor Code. Indeed, they embodied an honor code: my own “Be honored” it stated. “Or be damned.” To me, imitation and education were different words for the same thing, anyway.  What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?” pg119

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On the unreadability of some of the supposed ‘Greats’:

“This suffocating sensation often came over me ‘whenever I opened Deconstruction and Criticism, a. collection of essays by leading theory people that l spotted everywhere that year and knew to be one of the richest sources around for words that could turn a modest midterm essay into an A-plus tour de force.  Here is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution by the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the volume’s most prestigious name. “He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.” On the same page I encountered windpipe-blocking ”heteronomous’ and ”invagination.” When I turned the page I came across- tucked in a footnote –”unreadability.”
That word I understood of course.” p.120

See: http://books.google.ca/books?id=igP67FXXQCEC

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction

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Kirn discusses the literary catchphrases for ‘hard’: ‘ semiotically unstable’ (referring to TS Elliot’s The Waste Land), hermeneutical, gestural, recursive, incommensurable. pps 120-122

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Kirn discusses his use of literary catchphrases to mask his ignorance of literature.

“The need to finesse my ignorance through such trickery — honorable trickery to my mind, but not to other minds, perhaps — left me feeling hollow and vaguely haunted.  Seeking security in numbers, I sought out the company of other frauds.  We recognized one another instantly.  … We spoke of “playfullness” and “textuality” and concluded before we’d read even a hundredth of it that Western canon was “illegitimate,” a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert.  In our rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors, … we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.”  p.121

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Kirn discusses how he used his confusion to his advantage:

“I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion.  The literary works they prized — the ones best suited to their project of refining and hallowing confusion — were, quite naturally, knotty and oblique.  The poems of Wallace Stevens, for example.  My classmates and I found them maddeningly elusive, like collections of backward answers to hidden riddles, but luckily we could say “recursive” by then.  We could say “incommensurable”.  p.122

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On feeling a fraud for learning to regurgitate professors opinions rather than truly appreciating the classics:

I grew to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they too, were fakes. In classrooms discussions and even when grading essays, they seemed to favor us over the hard workers, whose patient, sedentary study habits, and sense that confusion was something to be avoided rather than celebrated, appeared unsuited to the new attitude of antic post-modernisn – that I had mastered almost without effort.  To thinkers of this school, great literature was an incoherent con, and I — a born con man who knew little about great literature had every reason to agree with them In the land of nonreadability the nonreader was king it seemed.   Long  live the king.  p.122

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On page 122, Kirn holds a play of planters on a stage.  He watches in amazement as the audience waits for something to happen, which never does.  The play is titled: Planters and Waiters.  Double-entendre on “waiters”.

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On drug use at Ivy League schools:

“There is no drug scene like an Ivy League drug scene.  Kids can’t just get high; they have to seek epiphanies.  They have to ground their mischief in manifestos.  The most popular one around the veggie house held that drugs, especially psychedelic drugs — especially plant based psychedelic drugs — helped to break down the rigid inner partitions that restricted one’s full humanity.” p.124

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Kirn expresses a unique view on the relationship between literature and war:

“Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place.  That was its role in the world, I’d started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn’t matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything.  Without literature, humans would all be one.  Warfare was simply literature in arms.  The pen was the reason man invented the sword.”  p.145

This may not be as outlandish a suggestion as it may first seem.  If literature is based on pretence instead of substance, as it was in the case of Kirn’s education, then pretence needs to be defended by violence of all forms, military and otherwise.  Further if the great written works upon which the great religions of the world are based turn out to be not the writ word of God, they are then by exclusion, works of literature.  The swords that have been raised in the name of these literary works are well documented.

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More evidence of the theme of detachment.  Kirn seems detached from his inspiration.

“Tessa’s poems focused on harrowing emotions grief, self-loathing, panic while mine were concerned with grander matters Such as the creeping loss of ”personhood” in an era of technological change. How I’d hit on this theme I wasn’t sure, but the more time I spent on it the more convinced l grew that I’d borrowed it.   I invented an alter ego, ”Bittman,” and in my poems I stretched him on the rack of   mechanization and macroeconomics In class, Tessa praised my poems as “Kafkaesque” but I could tell she didn’t like them.” p.140

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More on the impostor/fraud theme:

“Out of shame for this hypothetical failure and hoping to break through to intimacy, I confessed that my poems were all a sham and that Bittman was a hybrid version of Elliot’s Prufrock and Berryman’s Henry, two famously beleaguered characters from the North anthologies.” p.144

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Kirn had ongoing conversations with “V.” – an exchange student who “represented the best of the best of [his] entire country”.

“I felt in his company, as in no one else’s, that my bullshitting was a defensible activity, a circular approach to enlightenment.  And I felt flattered when he listened to me.  Here was a young man who represented the best of the best of an entire country — of an entire people, as I saw it — and I was holding his attention.” p.168

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The pains Kirn went to in order to write collegiate essays after he’d lost his fulfillment in so doing.

“For a few weeks I was still able to write, but it was a punishing, grind, self-conscious labor. l began most of my sentences with ”the.” Then I went looking for a noun. “The book” was often the result. Next, I seemed to remember, should come a verb. “Is” is a verb. It because my favorite verb. I liked it for its open-endedness — the way it allowed for a wide range of next moves. ”The book is always . . .”  “The book is thought to . . .”  “The book is green and . . .” Impermissible. Yes, a book might be a certain color, but starting an essay with the fact wasn’t what college was all about. What was it all about? It was about making statements that weren’t obvious for people who made such statements professionally. “The book is a gestural construct possessed of telos.”

There I could rest.  I’d done it.  An hour’s work.” p.178

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Kirn develops a regime for deprogramming him self from his college ‘undereducation’ and pulling himself out of a resulting depression.

“My alarm clock woke me every morning at five, and for the next three hours I’d lie in bed, with my reference books propped open on my stomach, and repeat aloud, in alphabetical order, every word on every single page, along with its definitions and major synonyms. The ritual was humbling but soothing, and for she first time in my academic career I found myself making measurable strides, however minuscule. “Militate.” “Militia.” “Milk.”  I spent as much energy on the easy words as I did on the hard ones — my way of showing contrition for squandering my high-percentile promise. And in truth, they were all hard words for me by then.” p.183

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Reflections on having been awarded a post at Oxford.

“I’d soon be off to Oxford as a result.  “result” was not exactly the right word, though, because it suggested that logic governs destiny.  But now I knew otherwise.  Imagination does.  And though part of me had always suspected as much and certain teachers had coached me in the notion (“Image that you can be anything you want”), what I hadn’t understood at all was that our imaginations don’t act alone.  One’s own imagination is powerless until it starts dancing with another’s.

Imagine having been imagined.  Imagine.” p.205

Kirn’s summation of the book:

“… I discovered the truth — of words like “truth” mean anything.  Ad even if they don’t perhaps.

Pause in your knowing to be known.  Quit pushing — let yourself be pulled.  Stop searching, frantic child, and be found.

Some call this Grace.

I called it Marguerite.”  (Margerite Keasbey established the Keasbey Prize which Kirn received (enabling him to go on to Oxford)  after being denied a Rhode’s Scholarship). p 205

See: http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2008/02/08/19971/

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Towards the end of the book, it is revealed that Kirn’s Uncle Admiral — a childhood mentor — was Robert W. Knox RADM USC & GS (Ret.).  Here is a brief biography:

http://www.history.noaa.gov/cgsbios/biok4.html

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Kirn’s second, broader conclusion:  Reflecting on a friend Karl who was self-taught and well read and wanted to meet up with after Kirn graduated Princeton.

“We had a great deal in common, Karl said.

But we didn’t, in fact, or much less than he assumed, and I didn’t know how to tell him this. To begin with, I couldn’t quote the transcendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn’t quote anyone, reliably. I’d honed other skills: for flattering those in power without appearing to, for rating artistic reputations according to academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the backgrounds of my listeners, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some “classic” or masterpiece,”       for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if it looked like it was changing.

Flexibility, irony, self-consciousness, contrarianism. They’d gotten me through Princeton, they hadn’t quite kept me out of Oxford, and these, I was about to tell my friend, were the ways to get ahead now–not by memorizing old Ralph Waldo. I’d found out a lot since I’d aced the SATs, about the system, about myself and about the new class that the system had created, which I was now part of, for better or for worse. The class that runs things.” p.210

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (Canadian Link): http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-colbert-report/full-episodes/#clip174780

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (USA Link):  http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/228190/may-19-2009/walter-kirn

Review of:
“Lost in the Meritocracy:  The Undereducation of an Overachiever”
By: Walter Kirn (Doubleday)
Reviewed By: Martin C. Winer
June 28, 2009

When I picked up “Lost in the Meritocracy:  The Undereducation of an Overachiever” by Walter Kirn (Doubleday), I expected a semi-dry expose on the problems facing the American Education system with an emphasis on the Ivy League schools.  The only semi-dry thing in the book was the champagne Kirn poured over two fawning exchange students during a graduation night orgy on his way to Princeton.  Told with prose and wit more common to novels, Kirn details his experiences as he rises out of the rural Minnesota winning one of 20 transfer student spots at Ivy League Princeton.

By Kirn’s account it is a wonder that there is any ivy left due to the propensity of the students to smoke any mildly herbaceous looking thing.

“There is no drug scene like an Ivy League drug scene.  Kids can’t just get high; they have to seek epiphanies.  They have to ground their mischief in manifestos.  The most popular one around … held that drugs, … especially plant based psychedelic drugs helped to break down the rigid inner partitions that restricted one’s full humanity.” (p. 124)

Recreational drug use was pervasive at Princeton as were many other illicit activities, with education taking a back seat.  I was so engaged with the stories that I was half way through when I reexamined the title and asked “what is a meritocracy anyways?”

Meritocracy was introduced as a more equitable replacement for aristocracy. Insofar as education, Harvard’s James Conant championed the cause of educational reform towards meritocracy as a realization of Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a “natural aristocracy among men, founded on virtue and talents.” (Jefferson used the term ‘natural aristocracy’ instead of ‘meritocracy’ because it wasn’t coined a term until the 1958 book “Rise of the Meritocracy” by Michael Young.  Incidentally it was intended pejoratively.) As with many high minded theories, the implementation often renders an imperfect reflection of the ideal.

Conant set the controversial School Aptitude Test (SAT) as gatekeeper for the bastions of higher learning guarding all the rewards of power that lay beyond.  When Walter Kirn took the SAT, he discovered he “had a natural talent for multiple-choice tests [which] landed [him] without the vaguest survival instructions [at Princeton]”. (p. 6)  Throughout the course of the book which details his experiences at Princeton Kirn suggests that his education consisted of learning how to succeed in the education system;  this is a far cry from becoming educated.

The distinction is eloquently revealed when Kirn is asked to discuss the ‘critical assumptions’ he’s made in reading the Norton anthologies;  unfortunately, Kirn had done little reading at all:

“With virtually no stored literary material about which to harbor critical assumptions, I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself. I’d honed these skills on the speech team back in high school, and l didn’t regard them as sins against the [Princeton Student] Honor Code. Indeed, they embodied an honor code: my own “Be honored” it stated. “Or be damned.” To me, imitation and education were different words for the same thing, anyway.  What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?” (p.119)

Throughout the course of the book Kirn refers to himself as a fraud – sometimes proudly but more often with remorse.  But is Kirn a fraud or instead a sufferer of “Fraud Syndrome”?  Fraud Syndrome (also Impostor Syndrome) is not an official psychiatric diagnosis, but it is a topic well known and documented by psychiatrists and psychologists.  It is an intellectual condition where the intellect feels disconnected from any accomplishments or abilities.  If the intellect were a tree, then the tree would lack any knowledge of its roots and thus mistakenly think that its ability to grow upright was the result of undeserved serendipity.

Kirn’s notion that he somehow managed to beguile and finesse the system into accepting him to its highest ranks is significantly, and ironically, weakened by the quality of the writing he uses in making said point.  What follows is an example of Kirn’s average writing:

“Certain questions which grown-ups deem unanswerable begin as answers which children find unquestionable.  For example: what is Death?  To me at eight years old, death was the signal for a person’s loved ones to cry and look stricken for a while and then begin dividing up his stuff.” (p. 30)

Witty and clever turns of phrases such as these are found on every other page.  While this made for a delightful read, it served to undermine one of his main tenets.  It seems far more likely that Kirn didn’t finesse the system, but that the system managed recognized his talent despite his own inability to do so – marshalling him exactly where he ought to be: in the commensurate Princeton English Program.

If Fraud Syndrome ever does make it one day to be an official diagnosis, then Kirn should appear on the Public Service Announcement poster.  The text is rife with examples of Kirn’s detachment from his talent and feelings of being a fraud:

“My genuine tears [over the news of John Lennon’s death] flowed along with my false tears, as they did the distinction between them blurred.  I wasn’t ashamed of this.  My fraudulence, I was coming to understand, was in a way the truest thing about me.” (p. 77)

“The need to finesse my ignorance through such trickery [(using catchphrases)] — honorable trickery to my mind, but not to other minds, perhaps — left me feeling hollow and vaguely haunted.  Seeking security in numbers, I sought out the company of other frauds.” (p. 121)

“I grew to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they too, were fakes.” (p. 122)

“[My poems] were concerned with grander matters such as the creeping loss of “personhood” in an era of technological change. How I’d hit on this theme I wasn’t sure, but the more time I spent on it the more convinced l grew that I’d borrowed it.” (p.140)

“I confessed that my poems were all a sham and that [my] Bittman [character] was a hybrid version of Eliot’s Prufrock and Berryman’s Henry two famously beleaguered characters from the North anthologies.” (p.144)

“I felt in [my friend’s] company, as in no one else’s, that my bullshitting was a defensible activity, a circular approach to enlightenment.” (p. 168)

One of Kirn’s Princeton encounters offers a possible cause for Fraud Syndrome.  Kirn has a conversation with Julian — undoubtedly Dr. Julian Jaynes best known for his book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” – in a bar following the production of one of Kirn’s plays.  Julian explained that the human mind was actually two distinct entities, that in ancient times were:

“… virtual strangers to each other.  When a thought arose in one of them, the other one, acting as a receiver, processed the thought as a voice, an actual voice.  …  But who was this being?  …  Man had answered these questions in many ways.  He’d conceived of gods and spirits, angels and demons, trolls and fairies.  Muses.” (pps. 93-94)

When Julian asked Kirn: “did you ever feel, during the composition of your script, that someone else, not you, was in control?” Kirn replied: “Honestly, I feel that way a lot.  Down deep, in a quiet way, I feel it constantly.  And sometimes it shakes me up a little.” (p. 94)  Perhaps this is why Kirn was unable to identify with his obvious talent; it felt external to him.  While Kirn makes this point incidentally in his book, it is nonetheless a very important one.  While Kirn fails to connect with his talent due to this separation of the mind, many more do something far worse:  Many fail to express their talents at all – failing to listen to that other ‘voice’.

While Kirn fails to impress upon me that his placement at Princeton was either coincidental or accidental, he does make some well taken points about the education he received once there.  It seems that when reading in the English program, pretension superseded comprehension.

“We … concluded, before we’d read even a hundredth of it, that Western canon was “illegitimate,” a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert.  In our rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors, … we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.” (p.121)

“To thinkers of this school, great literature was an incoherent con, and I — a born con man who knew little about great literature had every reason to agree with them. In the land of nonreadability the nonreader was king it seemed.   Long live the king.”  (p.122)

Kirn found that many of the supposed ‘greats’ they were asked to read were completely incomprehensible by students and professors alike:

“Here is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution by the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the volume’s most prestigious name. “He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.” On the same page I encountered windpipe-blocking “heteronomous’ and “invagination.” When I turned the page I came across – tucked in a footnote –“unreadability.”

That word I understood of course.” (p.120)

For Kirn, university was a process in learning to jockey jargon words and phrases effectively.  Phrases like ‘semiotically unstable’ (referring to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”) and words such as ‘hermeneutical’, ‘gestural’, ‘recursive’, ‘incommensurable’ were all synonyms for ‘hard’.  Kirn was extremely confused by the works he read but he realized that confusion was not something to be escaped by understanding, but instead something which could be exploited by mirroring it back at its source.

“I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion.  The literary works they prized — the ones best suited to their project of refining and hallowing confusion — were, quite naturally, knotty and oblique.  The poems of Wallace Stevens, for example.  My classmates and I found them maddeningly elusive, like collections of backward answers to hidden riddles, but luckily we could say “recursive” by then.  We could say “incommensurable”.”  (p.122)

Kirn was adrift in a sea of confusion but it seemed that he was managing to navigate it by drinking the sea water and rolling with the currents.  It wasn’t long before Kirn’s thirst for meaning caught up with him, just as he had become completely intellectually dehydrated, basking in the scorching sun of the top percentile.  Kirn suffered a collapse, unable to continue the charade:

“For a few weeks I was still able to write, but it was a punishing, grind, self-conscious labor. I began most of my sentences with “the.”  Then I went looking for a noun. “The book” was often the result. Next, I seemed to remember, should come a verb. “Is” is a verb. It because my favorite verb. I liked it for its open-endedness — the way it allowed for a wide range of next moves. “The book is always . . .”  “The book is thought to . . .”  “The book is green and . . .” Impermissible. Yes, a book might be a certain color, but starting an essay with the fact wasn’t what college was all about. What was it all about? It was about making statements that weren’t obvious for people who made such statements professionally. “The book is a gestural construct possessed of telos.”

There I could rest.  I’d done it.  An hour’s work.” (p.178)

Eventually Kirn recovered after undertaking a course of self guided education which he found more fulfilling.  He continued his academic career at Oxford as a recipient of the “Keasbey Prize”.  Kirn draws two broader conclusions from his experience.

The first is a ‘roll with the punches and everything will turn out alright’ sort of message.  “… I discovered the truth — if words like “truth” mean anything.  And even if they don’t perhaps.  Pause in your knowing to be known.  Quit pushing — let yourself be pulled.  Stop searching, frantic child, and be found.”  (p. 205)  This advice may bear meaning for someone like Kirn with an innate and wonderful talent.  Its relevance to the rest of us who must work at it is somewhat questionable.

The second conclusion comes out more strongly in the interviews surrounding the book, but it is mentioned briefly.    In an interview (The Colbert Report: May 19, 2009.) Kirn claims that the current meritocracy does not reward depth, but instead rewards the “ability to define ‘incipient’. “Basically people who are very good at cross word puzzles end up running the country.”  “They are able to shine in every cocktail party they attend, but when it comes to running the economy, fighting the war on terror, … not very good.”  Kirn is referring to Donald Rumsfeld and to certain Lehman Brothers board members, who are Princeton Alumni.  Given Kirn’s experiences, it is easy to imagine jargon slinging economists brandishing terms like “Collaterized Debt Obligations” and “Credit Default Swaps” using them as talking points, rather than understanding their deeper implications.  Terms like these undoubtedly are mentioned in numerous A+ Ivy League Economics theses, confounding both the authors and the readers while leading to economic ruin.

This second summation is made in the book when Kirn discusses a run in, after graduating Princeton yet before going to Oxford, with an old friend who was self taught and well read.

“We had a great deal in common, Karl said.

But we didn’t, in fact, or much less than he assumed, and I didn’t know how to tell him this. To begin with, I couldn’t quote the transcendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn’t quote anyone, reliably. I’d honed other skills: for flattering those in power without appearing to, for rating artistic reputations according to academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the backgrounds of my listeners, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some “classic” or masterpiece,”       for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if it looked like it was changing.

Flexibility, irony, self-consciousness, contrarianism. They’d gotten me through Princeton, they hadn’t quite kept me out of Oxford, and these, I was about to tell my friend, were the ways to get ahead now–not by memorizing old Ralph Waldo. I’d found out a lot since I’d aced the SATs, about the system, about myself and about the new class that the system had created, which I was now part of, for better or for worse. The class that runs things.” (p. 210)

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080410153643.htm

This recent study shows reveals that humans do like the birds and bees when they make like the birds and bees.  That is to say, there is tremendous evidence in the animal kingdom of the exchange of sex for resources and vice versa.  Humans, it would seem, not immune to this sort of behaviour despite any influences of class or caste. 

In my study of biology, I attended a class at 8am in the dead of winter broadly titled “Animals”.  The class lacked anything wild despite its title and it was an exercise just to keep my eyes open.  Don’t get me wrong, our Prof was a nice enough guy, it’s just I don’t function at that hour.

One day though our professor Kenneth Davey took a tangent into the mating rituals of the fly family Empidae.  He showed a progression in the evolution of nuptial gifts — the process of exchanging resources for sex — across several members of the family in the following progression.

1) The male mates with the female and is eaten by the female.

2) The male brings a food gift to the female hoping that while she’s eating the gift he can do the deed and escape in a hurry.  They mate, she eats the food he brought her followed by him for dessert. 

3) The male brings a food gift wrapped in a grass wrapping.  While she busily unwraps the grass wrapping, he’s able to ‘wham bam and thank you maam’ before she manages to open the package.  He escapes and she at least is able to enjoy her food.

4) The male brings a package to the female.  As she unwraps it he, as before, completes the deed and escapes.  She finally unwraps the package only to discover that it’s empty.

I have too many comments to offer about this tale, so instead I’ll offer none.  I’d imagine your assessment of this story will be highly dependent on your perspective. 

Update: There will be a History Channel special on this: “Quest for the Lost Ark” on March 2, 2008 at 8pm.

I was reading a recent article in Time magazine and had to double check that I was reading an article in the “Health & Science” section instead of a book review of the most recent Dan Brown novel. The article can be found here:

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1715337,00.html

Since this generation suffers from a mass case of ADD, let me use bullets to demonstrate how Tudor Parfitt, a professor at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, reveals the Ark to be a multipurpose carry-all for religious relics which doubles conveniently in times of war for a cannon. Yes, you read correctly.

• A Southern African tribe called the Lemba claimed to be a lost tribe of Israel. (They practice circumcision and call meetings using a rams’ horn.) No one believed them until it was discovered that the Lemba priestly cast had the same frequency of a specific marker to the Jewish priestly cast (cohens).
• The Lemba also claim to be custodians of the Ark of the Covenant. Based on the now verified first claim, Parfitt began to investigate this second claim.
• The Lemba call Ark the ngoma lungundu.
  • “The ngoma,according to the Lemba, was near-divine, used to store ritual objects, and borne on poles inserted into rings. It was too holy to touch the ground or to be touched by non-priests, and it emitted a ‘Fire of God’ that killed enemies and, occasionally, Lemba. A Lemba elder told Parfitt, ‘[It] came from the temple in Jerusalem. We carried it down here through Africa.’”
• His search led him to the ancient city of Senna where Parfitt believes the Lemba and their ancestors may have converged where he uncovered several clues as to where the Ark may be today.
• His search ended at the Harare Museum of Human Science in Zimbabwe where he found a drum like object, with remnants of the carrying rings and crossed reeds indicative of biblical origins.
• Neither Parfitt nor the Lemba contend that this object is the original Ark of the Covenant. The object was carbon dated to 1350 ad, which is some time after Moses. However, the Lemba folklore holds that the original ngoma destroyed itself and was rebuilt upon its own ruins by the temple priests.
• Parfitt contends that the Ark was in fact a drum which was a repository of relics and a cannon!

Don’t believe it? It’s hard to believe I admit, however, it is interesting to note that the Ark of the Covenant is brought into many Israelite battles at the head of the attacking force. Now do you put your relics at the head of an attacking force, or do you put your greatest weapon?

Truly the Lord hath delivered into our hands all the land; for even all the inhabitants of the country do faint because of us.” [Josh.2:24]

Still can’t believe it? I admit, I’m having similar trouble. Worshipping a weapon? I keep conjuring up images of “Beneath the Planet of the Apes”:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

With the recent passing of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn I was reminded of a lecture by psychology professor Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto.  This lecture expounded the virtue of taking personal responsibility in dealing with our fears.  Peterson used a children’s book “There No Such Things As A Dragon” and the moral lessons therein to reveal how we all can be crippled by a metaphoric fear dragons and released only by facing them.

Peterson first deals with the common fears we all deal with such as fear of dying and losing those we love.  Then Peterson comes to dealing with fears and adversity imposed upon us by social forces such as tyranny and bureaucracy.  This is where he begins to discuss Solzhenitsyn. 

Solzhenitsyn is a survivor of the former Soviet Gulag where according to Solzhenitsyn’s account, approximately 60 million people died between the years of 1919 and 1959.  Solzhenitsyn started out life on the Russian front.  He was captured by the Germans where he was thrown in a special POW camp because Stalin in his neuroticism refused to sign the Geneva convention.  Conditions were so bad in these camps that other POW’s — who were not much better off themselves – threw packages of food over the fences in pity of the Soviet inmates.

With the end of the war, Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia expecting a hero’s welcome.  Much to his surprise, he and his comrades were thrown into the Gulag out of fears that they may have been contaminated by their exposure to Western culture.  Conditions in the gulag were intolerable.  Many of Solzhenitsyn’s fellow inmates ate a type of clay just to have their stomachs feel fuller.  Solzhenitsyn then asked a remarkable question under the circumstances:

“What did I do to get here?”  This is a remarkeable question because many of us would immediately look to the external conditions that brought about Solzhenitsyn’s plight.  There was the war, the Soviet Empire and any other host of external conditions that could be used to explain his current situation.  Solzhenitsyn instead chose to revisit, over the following 10 years, all the things he had done wrong in his life.  In Peterson’s words “he revisited anything that gave his conscience a pang”.

Out of this introspection, he wrote the Gulag Archipelago – a 3 volume 1900 page book – which he committed to memory as there was no pen and paper available to him in the gulag.  This work circulated for years in the underground before it was eventually published in 1975.  The Gulag Archipelago went on to be the greatest literary attack on the Soviet Empire.  Solzhenitsyn, under completely unreasonable circumstances, chooses to take personal responsibility for his plight.  As a result of this soul searching, he wrote a literary attack which in many real ways bested the former Soviet Empire.  Some may immediately be tempted to say: “well the world doesn’t work like that!”  Peterson retorts: “Do we really know the world works?”  Peterson equates injustice large and small to dragons that we must all face on a personal and societal level. 

In a related work, Peterson quotes Solzhenitsyn saying: “one man who stopped lying could bring down a tyranny”.  Peterson further commented: ”I don’t think he meant that as a metaphor–or hyperbole.”

Peterson’s lecture can be found at:
http://www.tvo.org/podcasts/bi/audio/BIJordanPeterson031806.mp3
(The section about Solzhenitsyn begins at time index 44:00)

In 1979 Jimmy Carter delivered a televised speech bemoaning the increasing US dependence on foreign oil.  In it he outlines his Energy Policy for the coming decades.

“[Foreign Oil is] a cause of the increased inflation and unemployment that we now face. This intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic independence and the very security of our nation. The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our nation.”

– Jimmy Carter  (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_crisis.html)

Today the US relies on 60% foreign oil (http://www.fueleconomy.gov/FEG/oildep.shtml) in strong defiance of president Carter’s prescient warning.

As far as the US dependence on foreign oil, nothing has changed since the Carter’s clarion call aside from the problem getting far worse.  However, president Carter didn’t live in a world threatened by Global Warming (at least it wasn’t commonly known).   President Carter also didn’t live in a world with two superpopulations, India and China weighing in at a billion people each who are poised to ramp up their consumption.

Clearly oil will no longer do as a source of energy.  Luckily science has provided an alternative: The Hydrogen – Aluminum Cycle.  To be clear, I’m not speaking of hydrogen power alone.  Hydrogen power alone is a red herring of alternative energies.  The catch is that hydrogen is hugely expensive to make and today largely comes from the demethylization of hydrocarbons; ie oil.  No, the Hydrogen – Aluminum cycle is something different entirely.

When we think of hydrogen, some horrible images from the past might emerge.

Here we see the Hindenburg which was filled with hydrogen bursting into flames.  Many see the risks of hydrogen in cars and decry ‘oh the humanity!’.  Well there are no such worries with the hydrogen – aluminum power cycle because the hydrogen is produced in micro amounts and only as needed.  Hydrogen need not be stored in a cryogenic canister with motorists barrelling down the highways with a bomb on board.  This in situ or just in time production solves the danger of using hydrogen in a car.

Next, we must solve the problem of where to find our hydrogen.  Clearly deriving it from oil simply won’t do.  The other current method for obtaining hydrogen is through a process called hydrolysis which splits water into hydrogen and oxygen.  Regrettably, this process is too inefficient to be used on a wide scale.

Enter into the picture aluminum.  Aluminum has a high affinity for oxygen.  Whenever you hold a piece of aluminum it has a skin of oxidation.  This skin, once formed, prevents any further oxidation which is why you never have to worry about rust in components built of aluminum.  Aluminum likewise reacts with water;  A jealous lover of oxygen, it bonds strongly with it, ousting the hydrogen.  While a jealous lover aluminum may be, it is quickly satiated and forms a skin failing to react any further.

Jerry Woodall, a professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Purdue, discovered in the 60′s that when aluminum, gallium and water were mixed, the aluminum oxidized fully, liberating massive amounts of hydrogen.  It would seem that the gallium acts as a mediator in the reaction and prevents the formation of the oxidation skin on aluminum.  The end results of this reaction are hydrogen gas, aluminum oxide (aka alumina) and gallium.  The gallium is not consumed, and thus can be recycled.  The alumina can be electrically converted back into aluminum and thus recycled.  Burning hydrogen produces only water.

The idea of using hydrogen to power a vehicle is certainly not a new one.  While Woodall was experimenting with gallium in the 60′s, GM was trying to prototype a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle: The Electrovan.  It is recognized as the first hydrogen fuel cell prototype.  The prototype was scrapped due to the high cost of the rare (precious) metals used in its fuel cells and the complexity of storing hydrogen.

The aluminum-gallium-hydrogen cycle may allow us to succeed where the Electrovan failed.  So now, let’s put the pieces together: How does this get you to work in the morning?  Your new, non-polluting car has two fuel tanks, one containing water, the other containing aluminum and gallium flakes.  As hydrogen is needed the water and the flakes are mixed.  The hydrogen is harvested and runs the engine.  Also the heat produces by the chemical reaction may be harvested for energy by a Stirling Engine which is a type of engine which can run off of temperature differentials.

When it comes time to fuel your vehicle, the new filling station attaches three hoses to your car.  One removes the slurry of used alumina to be recycled.  The other two replenish your supply of water and aluminum-gallium flakes.  When it comes time to pay for your aluminum flakes, will it be competitive with gasoline?

“Since standard industrial technology could be used to recycle our nearly pure alumina back to aluminum at 20 cents per pound, this technology would be competitive with gasoline,” Woodall said. “Using aluminum, it would cost $70 at wholesale prices to take a 350-mile trip with a mid-size car equipped with a standard internal combustion engine. That compares with $66 for gasoline at $3.30 per gallon. If we used a 50 percent efficient fuel cell, taking the same trip using aluminum would cost $28.”

–  (http://www.purdue.edu/UNS/x/2007b/070827WoodallNanotech.html)

Next, some may wonder where the aluminum will come from.

Enough aluminum exists in the United States to produce 100 trillion kilowatt hours of energy. That’s enough energy to meet all the U.S. electric needs for 35 years.  If impure gallium can be made for less than $10 a pound and used in an onboard system, there are enough known gallium reserves to run 1 billion cars.”

–  (http://www.purdue.edu/UNS/x/2007b/070827WoodallNanotech.html)

Recall that alumina (aluminum oxide, the waste product) can be recycled electrically back into aluminum.  So it’s not like oil where, once burnt, we can’t reclaim it.  We can electrically reclaim the waste alumina back into aluminum.

Ecologically this is a dream come true.  When thinking ecologically it’s important to think in terms of cycles.  Everythings output must be something’s input cycling back to the original source.  Here we have aluminum going to aluminum oxide (alumina) going back to aluminum.  The alumina to aluminum step can be powered by non polluting nuclear or renewable sources such as solar or wind etc.  The water turns to hydrogen which combines back with oxygen to produce water.  Gallium is never consumed and is recycled continuously.

So there you have it: president Carter’s dream some thirty years later, but not too late.  With the skyrocketing prices of oil the need for this change has never been more clear.  The only missing ingredient in this equation is the political motivation to fund and accelerate the conversion process.  This may prove to be the trickiest part of the equation to balance.

Further reading:

Please don’t take my word on this matter, feel free to do your own research:

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=aluminum+gallium&spell=1

http://youtube.com/results?search_query=aluminum+gallium&search_type=

There is also a similar approach using boron

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=boron+hydrogen+car&meta=

Update: One of my readers kindly provided a link with some very detailed technical information:  http://www.overunity.com/index.php/topic,4047.240.html

In my original post:
http://www.martincwiner.com/perpetual-motion-claim-if-its-a-hoax-its-a-good-one/
I examine a device proposed by Thane Heins. He calls the device “Perepiteia” which deceptively echos of ‘perpetual’ when in fact it’s from the Greek meaning “a sudden reversal of fortune”. A kind poster on the original article pointed out that Heins appears to be applying power to the motor. Thus, this is NOT a claim of perpetual motion, nor can it be, given an external power source.

Just the same, the puzzle remains: Why does the device accelerate when the induction coil is shorted out? My personal question is: Does the device continually accelerate or only accelerate to a given point? If it continually accelerates we must examine the possibility that this configuration somehow has created free energy (highly unlikely with respect to current dogma). If it accelerates only to a given point, then the device is likely a new, more efficient, implementation of an induction motor (possible even in consideration of current dogma). The MIT professor who reviewed the set up refused to call it free energy or perpetual motion, but was willing to consider the set up a possibly more efficient induction motor.

I’ve dug a little deeper and dug out the actual patent application:
http://www.freeenergynews.com/Directory/Electromagnetic/Perpetual_Differences/CA2437745A1_Perepiteia_patent.pdf
The patent application makes mention of superconducting coils and wires, yet in his videos where he demonstrates the apparatus, I see no evidence of them.

Digging a little deeper, I came across this post:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Talk:Directory:Perepiteia_Generator_by_Potential_Difference_Inc#No_Useful_Output which suggests that Heins’ design is more like a brake and the shorting out of the coil which produces the acceleration is really just a release of this brake. The relevant topic in dynamics is ‘Hysteresis’ and Heins’s setup, appears to use this phenomenon as some sort of a electromagnetic brake. Shorting out the brake would of course lead to acceleration. The above poster also points out that in the 7th video, Heins has a large fan cooling the motor which suggests that this very well may be a brake since braking would cause the current to be released as heat.

I always root for the underdog, and the story of a college dropout who developed free energy would have made me smile. However, in this case, it looks like we’ll have to wait to tell such a tale on a different occasion. Just the same, I wish Thane Heins the best of success and hope he continues his research and that significant findings result.

What was presented to consumers as a clean, green alternative to fossil fuels turns out to be a wretched red herring.  Ethanol is a kludge attempt to address the Global Warming crisis.  The idea of using Ethanol as a substitute for fossil fuels is so stupid that it’s necessary to break down the stupidity into a list:

1) Food Diversion : Ethanol is produced from several sources, most notably corn. 

The UN says it takes 232kg of corn to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol. That is enough to feed a child for a year. Last week, the UN predicted “massacres” unless the bio fuel policy is halted.

Certain critics will point out that ethanol is produced by feed corn, not human corn.  Those critics would do best to consider that the amount of arable land on the planet is finite.  Thus the more feed corn we grow, the less food corn can be grown.

2) Ethanol isn’t economical.  That is, it costs MORE than crude oil.  For comparison:

Goldman Sachs says the cost of ethanol from corn is $81 a barrel (oil equivalent), with wheat at $145 and soybeans $232. It is built on subsidy.

3) Farm land isn’t green land.  The more we come to rely on ethanol, or bio fuels in general the more farmland we’ll need.  For example Brazil has the largest reserve of potentially arable land.  The problem is that land coexists with the rainforest.

The catch is obvious. “The idea that you cut down rainforest to actually grow bio fuels seems profoundly stupid,” said Professor John Beddington, Britain’s chief scientific adviser.

4) As a corollary to 1) Ethanol is a weak attempt to assuage the West’s abuse of the planet, at the cost of the world’s poor. 

The global food bill has risen 57pc in the last year. Soaring freight rates make it worse. The cost of food “on the table” has jumped by 74pc in poor countries that rely on imports, according to the FAO.

The world food situation is very serious: we have seen riots in Egypt, Cameroon, Haiti and Burkina Faso,” said Mr Diouf. “There is a risk that this unrest will spread in countries where 50pc to 60pc of income goes to food,” he said. 

Original source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/04/14/ccview114.xml

“Brent T. White, a University of Arizona law school professor, says that it’s in the homeowners’ best financial interest to stiff their lenders and that it’s not immoral to do so.”

– http://www.latimes.com/classified/realestate/news/la-fi-harney29-2009nov29,0,3801270.story

This story, suggests that mortgage holders politely flip the bird to their debtors when they come to collect on underwater mortgages.  The argument provided is that when times were good, the banks were negligent and irresponsible in handing out loans.  As such, now that times are bad, it’s fine to simply walk away, and you should do so with a clear conscience.  I agree with the message but not with the reasoning.

The real reason is that you may think the bank has offered real money to the previous seller of your home; not so.  The bank instead paid the former seller of your house with money it conjured into existence from another mortgage.  The fractional reserve banking system allows the bank to ‘leverage’ 90% of its deposits, reserving only 10% for those who make periodic withdrawals.  So the money that the bank put up for the house is actually someone else’s deposits which theoretically could be called in on a moment’s notice?

Confused?  Good, you should be.  Suppose your neighbour lent you 5 DVD’s on condition that he might ask for then to be returned at any time.  You then turn around and rent out those 5 DVD’s for a dollar each for 1 week.  If your neighbour doesn’t ask for his DVD’s back during that week, you just made 5 bucks.  But suppose your neighbour comes back 2 days later to reclaim his DVD’s – what then?  Legally, in either case, the DVD’s weren’t yours to rent; the agreement between you and the people you rented the DVD’s to is null and void.  The only difference in the two scenarios was whether you got caught or not in the fraudulent activity.

Believe it or not, the banking system, worldwide, is currently this fraudulent.  The loans a bank issued are from the unwitting depositors funds’.  Only due to the Federal Reserve Act (and similar acts worldwide) is this fraud considered ‘legal’.  Even so, the bank never puts up its own assets for a loan.  As such a successful, yet rarely mentioned case, makes the argument that having failed to put up legal ‘consideration’ (hard assets) for a mortgage, the mortgage is null and void.

Here an article about this decision including links to the actual decision on file.
http://www.martincwiner.com/a-fast-way-out-of-the-mortgage-crisis/

There has been a spate of activity in the nanotech realm lately. Over the past few months I’ve tracked several new developments. Here they are in no particular order: spine, ram, solar cell, ca

1) Solar Power: The problem with solar technology is the high cost of the solar cells. The current level of technology in solar is in silicon wafer solar cells. They have low relative effeciency and a high relative cost. This makes them unfeasible as a replacement. Many companies, amont them Nanosolar of California, have developed a technology using nanoparticles which can absorb light more efficiently, but more importantly, more economically. Nanosolar is targetting a rate of $1/watt which would make solar power a viable alternative over nuclear or fossil fuels.

More amazing is the fact that the solar films can be mass produced and printed on to any building or surface. More details can be found here: http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10989479
http://www.nanosolar.com/

2) Cancer Treatments:This story warms my heart on so many levels. John Kanzius was himself diagnosed with Leukemia. He underwent several bouts of painful chemotherapy. Not a physician but instead a retired radio and television engineer, he had a brainwave one night while sleeping. He came up with the idea of using radio waves to selectively target cancer cells while leaving the remaining healthy cells unscathed. Chemotherapy is based on the differential survivability of cancerous cells versus healthy cells. That is to say the chemicals used are toxic to both healthy and cancer cells, and the hope is that the cancer cells die out faster than the healthy ones: not a promising prospect.

Kanzius’ idea is remarkably different. He plans to send nanoparticles of gold into the tumor. He plans to use a targeting molecule attached to the gold nanoparticle to saturate the tumor with particles. Then he directs a highly concentrated radio beam towards the tumor. The gold heats up under influence of this beam and essentially the tumor is cooked.

3) RAM-Memory: Hard discs have had a good run. They’ve given us a terabyte of storage at nominal cost and with reasonable access time. The technology of the future however will but much smaller, with no operating parts to wear out. The technology is called ‘Racetrack’ and is being developed in the Almaden Research Center in San Jose California. At the heart of the technology electron spin is used to code information. This information races along a nanowire at blazing speeds with very low power consumption. Future incarnations of this technology promise replace hard discs an allow for near instantaneous start up and uncompromising reliability.

4) Spinal Repair: We all recall fondly the heroic efforts of Christopher Reeve to bring about an awareness of spinal injury and the tragic effects it can have on the sufferers and their families. The problem with spinal injury, indeed most nerve injury, is that the injured site (referred to as a transection) forms a scar at either end of the cut bundle. Nerves do have the ability to regrow however, they lack the ability to bridge this scar. John Kessler, M.D., Davee Professor of Stem Cell Biology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine has come up with a gel of self assembling nanostructures which is injected at the injury site. Once inside, they go to work assembling a scaffolding which allows neural stem cells to bridge the gap. Mice with spinal injuries were injected with the compound and showed significant improvement including the ability to walk again.