Gestalt Pong

I watched something pretty amazing on TV last night – gestalt Pong. The footage was of a demonstration, or experiment, run by a computer graphics specialist, Loren Carpenter. Five thousand people file into a conference room; on each chair they find a little paddle, red on one side, green on the other. At the back of the room a camera linked to computers scans the crowd and monitors the position of each paddle, and whether the person holding it has it displaying its red or green face. At first this information is simply translated into a red or green pixel on a screen in front of the participants, by flipping one’s paddle back and forth each person can locate ‘their’ pixel on-screen. Then, with nothing more than a request for the number 5, everyone flips their paddle based on their position and, with a little experimentation, the number resolves itself. With a little practice the participants can bring up any shape or figure requested extremely quickly, all with no planning or organisation.

Things get freaky when a game of Pong is put on the screen. The crowd is dived into left and right; displaying the red side of your paddle ‘votes’ to move the Pong bat upwards, displaying green is a ‘vote’ to move the virtual bat down. But if all the participants on one side show red the bat moves up extremely quickly to the top of the screen - a mixture of green and red is required to move the bat with more finesse. None of this is explained. Loren has simply put up a game of Pong and said “folks on the left of the auditorium control the left bat; folks on the right control the right bat. Go!” Thirty seconds later the crowd is playing an increasingly quick and skillful game of Pong.

Flocking patterns can be simulated with simple rules, but what is the rule that governs the Pong players? A small percentage of the group unknowingly reversing the directions (believing that, by displaying the red side of their paddle they are moving the Pong bat down, when in fact they are voting to move it up) providing the balance to move the bat more fluidly? This seems less likely than the more unlikely explanation – that two ‘mob intelligences’ are somehow playing the game. Awesome.

Related (and unverified) folklore….

-         a swarm of bees is as intelligent as a dog

-         the part of the brain that causes you to yawn when you see someone else yawn is the same part that is involved in the flocking of birds

Enrich Your Own Uranium

There were breathless reports this week that Australian scientists (yes, we still fund a couple, and these are physicists, not those bloody climate change ones) are developing a new method of refining uranium. The method, if perfected, will make a difficult process much easier. The US and Australian governments have entered negotiations whereby the technology will be licensed to General Electric, which would then build a billion dollar enrichment plant in North Carolina to supply 60 of the US’s nuclear power plants.

Ignoring the fact that all this possibly puts us in breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (hey, we sleep soundly while supplying 15% of the world’s uranium already, why not enrich it too); ignoring the fact that the US has taken reckless actions (e.g. the invasion of Iraq, the STUXNET worm) to prevent countries whose governments it does not approve of from enriching uranium; what pissed me off was the hushed tones of secrecy surrounding the technology.

Western Democracy is obsessed with secrecy. The decisions and processes of government and business are hidden under a sheet of confidentiality. Citizens may, at times, lift a corner of this sheet through freedom of information requests, but in general one must know where and what to look for. This is not how our society should be run. The usual bleatings about security were shown to be nonsense when Wikileaks dumped about a billion diplomatic cables into the public domain. A few people had their noses put out of joint; a few people’s opinions about other people, or countries, were revealed. The world did not collapse. The terrorists did not win.

Yet, here was the media reporting on the new method of uranium enrichment with fawning obedience to the cult of secrecy. The method (and the company’s name) is SILEX, or Separation of Isotopes by Laser EXcitation. It is both classified and proprietary. End of story. No scientists were interviewed about the possible mechanism for such enrichment. There was no speculation. It was as if the merest description of the process would crack it wide open for any half-arsed scientist from Jakarta to Islamabad. Hell, you could probably do it yourself with shit you bought down at Bunnings.

So, in the interests of a full and frank discussion on the technology and the part we are playing in its development, this is how it probably works. Uranium ore is refined and gasified, becoming uranium hexafluoride. This is mixed with a carrier gas and exposed to pulsed laser radiation from a series of CO₂ lasers at the wavelength of 16µm. This laser energy selectively excites the uranium isotopes used in nuclear reactors – ²³⁵U – allowing the stream of gas containing them to be funneled off, condensed and processed back into reactor feedstock. Voila.

Let’s just check out the window…. No fireballs and/or mushroom clouds? No, the people, from whatever country, who are developing this technology know all of the above already. Failing to include such details in your reporting simply serves to keep the issue opaque, while playing to the tune of cold war Spy vs. Spy nonsense that surrounds the nuclear industry.