Smarter Do You Want to Be - Should You Be Allowed to Choose

We all know that using performance enhancements for sports are a no-no. It's not fair to the other competitors, and negates the entire purpose of human competition in sports. We know it goes on in many sports and no one says anything, you can tell by the humans that play the sport that they have been taking these enhancements. Right now, kids are taking psychiatric drugs to improve their school performance. This is problematic because many college professors grade on a curve.

It also is unfair for those students studying for the SAT, college entrance exams, and other academic tests. But it's happening. There was an interesting article in TPM - The Philosopher's Magazine in the third quarter of 2013. It was in the forum section titled "Human Enhancement - Rational Evolution, " by Julian Savulesu. There were several articles within this forum, one of the articles asks "Should students take smart drugs," by Darren Meacham. In this he ponders a question to the reader "why limit the question to only student?" In another article the author asks "If IQ is worth preserving, it is worth enhancing." Also, "the Treatment/Enhancement Distinction Is a Fiction."

Now then, I'd like to address that last point. Consider if you will that those who have mental issues and take psychiatric drugs to make them normal, are in essence enhancing their standing point. They are also offsetting the curve. If someone is deficient and brought up to normal through the enhancement process you might call that treatment, but in reality it is the same thing right? If someone of normal capability takes a treatment which becomes a noticeable enhancement and puts them up on the upper tier of the other students, then the average students will be upset, and so too will I guess the deficient student who took an enhancement as well.

However, if you let the bottom tier students get away with it, and the middle tier students get away with it so they can compete on a more level playing field, then you should also let the normally smarter students take it as well who become super geniuses. Well in that case everyone is taking it, therefore it negates the entire mean average of IQ. Do you see that point as well? Should everyone therefore be allowed to be as smart as they can be and take anything they want by choice, as long as it isn't hurting their brains, as long as we don't have socialized medicine, and the taxpayer has to pay for it?

Overall wouldn't our society be more well served with smarter college students graduating into the workplace therefore becoming more productive and solving problems that are in their places of work, the government, or a nonprofit sector they might encounter. Wouldn't you want smarter people as voters as well? Therefore wouldn't you just want everyone smarter? If so, why don't they just put it in the food? That is to say why don't they put good stuff in the food to make people smart, rather than things which dummy them down?

Maybe the powers that be don't want too many smart people because they will be so intelligent they will accumulate all the wealth. Of course isn't that why more intelligent people are wealthier than people low IQ? More questions than answers, I just wanted to throw that out there for you as an ethical conundrum in our modern technologically advanced age. Please consider all this and think on it.

Mirror With Google Glass Will Your Like What You See

Well, they say self-reflection is an important thing for the human psyche and in the future perhaps you will have no choice in the matter, especially if you are looking at yourself in a mirror and you are wearing your Google Glass spectacles. The more you put online, on your blog, Facebook page, then the more information there will be to look at. What if you stand between two mirrors, that endless mirror sensation - will you be able to see through time and space?

Google has often stated that it wants its search engine to know what you want before you do, and for the most part with their live-searching features offering up new suggestions as you type they are indeed doing that aren't they? Okay so, there was an interesting article in the New York Times on August 31, 2013 titled; "Googling Yourself Takes on a Whole New Meaning," by Clive Thompson which discusses "the latest in high-tech eyewear."

Now back to the subject; will you like what you see, what's being said, or your past, present and possible futures? Hard to say, but maybe that's why so many folks were a little taken aback by Vannevar Bush of Bell Labs back in the day when he suggested the concept of life-logging, or recording an entire life. Soon, we'll be beyond his concept of recording every movie you watched, every book you read, every place you traveled, and all the things that you said. In the future you'll have a record of every thought you had, thing you searched, video you watched, and all the pictures of your travels, and videos of your life.

That might sound scary but it could also be a blessing - EEF (Electronic Freedom Foundation) and Internet privacy aside. In that case, there might be a Google Glass app to tell you what you will most likely do next, based on what you've done in the past. Yes, some might find this problematic, but I guess the "pre-crime" division depicted in The Minority Report with Tom Cruise will be happy to have this data, even if you'd rather they didn't.

Interestingly enough, if humans ever reach the point of being able to live forever within a computer, I bet many of the components of such an innovation are in their pre-dawn age of technology now as Google Glass moves us one step closer. Please consider all this and think on it - the future awaits.

What You Think You Know About Online Learning and Why You're Wrong

Most people don't know the truth about online educational institutions. Read on to find out who you thought wrong.

False Impression: Online learning is easier.
Reality: Because student participation is required, students often find online learning to be challenging. No longer can they hide in the back of the classroom. Quizzes and reviews can ensure that the student truly understands the subject matter being taught. High-quality curriculum is produced for online students to use.

False Impression: Students don't receive as much attention because online classes are larger.
Reality: Students and teachers actually have more time to interact because digital learning lacks the interruptions of traditional school schedules. Students are freer to ask questions through web chat, so they understand material better. Instead of being embarrassed by not understanding in front of a large class, students learn and comprehend on an individual level.

False Impression: The NCAA won't accept online learning credits.
Reality: Most online learning institutions are accredited and have course work that meets NCAA standards. The NCAA even grants online students that are also high school athletes eligibility as long as courses are college prep in nature.

False Impression: The military won't accept online graduates.
Reality: Online graduates are given the same ability to enlist in the U.S. armed forces as are all students of traditional classrooms.

False Impression: Online schools don't have to meet the same standards as traditional schools.
Reality: Online institutions comply with the same federal and state laws that brick-and-mortar schools do. They often even require more state oversight including curriculum approval.

The idea that an education online is any less intensive or credible than education in a traditional brick-and-mortar school is clearly false. Although the courses aren't any easier, it is the way e-learning is set up that makes it easier. Students are successful with an learning environment that gives them flexibility, great access to teachers, and the ability to work at their own pace. School districts need to realize how many benefits their are to digital learning and make that option available to students.

Cyber learning helps all kinds of different students. From advanced learners to struggling students or all-star athletes to home school students learning online is a great solution. Traditional schools just can't provide the same one on one learning experience that e-learning can. To make sure your children are successful in school, you should consider all your learning options.

Simulation Alternative Cosmic Theory

The journey to the present situation had been long, and convoluted. It had involved scores of eccentric and liberal minded people. And it had also span across several centuries. Perhaps, in a sense, the underlying thought behind the present situation had started with the Italian polymath, Leonardo Da Vinci. Da Vinci had, in his lifetime, thought about, and drawn, several artifacts that pickled even the most average mind, and triggered metaphysical questions. Or perhaps, with its intimate association with fractals and the Fibonacci sequence, this thought had, more correctly, started with yet another Italian, Leonardo Fibonacci - an entire millennium ago.

Either way, the journey was birthed in mathematics - the purest of human disciplines.

The Fibonacci sequence has always been regarded with awe by mathematicians. Consecutive numbers in the sequence show a weird interrelationship... one best depicted as the ratio Phi - which is approximately 1.61803. When this interrelationship is depicted graphically, a spiraling shape emerges. What is amazing about this shape is the sheer number of instances in which nature has encoded phi into its core makeup. From the microscopic instance, such as the DNA's helical dimensions, to the average-sized, such as cowrie shells and floral presentation in most plants, all the way up to the shape of most galaxies, the Fibonacci - inspired spiral is ubiquitous.

Prior to the age of computing, the omnipresent nature of Phi in the universe used to be regarded as just but one of the many cosmic puzzles still to be unraveled. But as computing advanced, a few insightful analogies started emerging. Chief amongst them was the realization that a huge amount of complexity could be created from a simple iteration of fractals. Phenomena traditionally perceived as being chaotic, such as weather patterns, could be broken down to simple interactions of elementary principles. Given an exhaustive knowledge of all such elementary principles, and with enough computing power, all chaotic events in nature could be accounted for and, even more intriguingly, forecasted.

It was upon this cognitive foundation that the very seams of our universe started coming apart.

Slowly at first, but quickly gathering speed, a new paradigm started forming amongst the top scientists in the world. This paradigm had the scientists realizing that, with the ubiquitous nature of fractals in the observable universe, the amount of computing needed to encompass all cosmic information was finite. And hence, if the basic principles of the universe were to be tabled out, it was mathematically possible to simulate a replica of a small part of the universe, scale it up through numerous recursions, and essentially end up with another universe, similar to this one in complexity and depth of detail. And yet, even with all the vast scales involved in such an undertaking, the amount of computing needed would remain finite... and possibly even within human capacity.

Based upon this new perception, the scientists started researching on the upper limits of the universe - in a bid to establish, firmly, that this universe was, indeed, finite. Almost immediately, several upper limits started emerging. One of the most well-known such limit relates to speed - fixed at C, approximately 300,000 Km/s. The total electric energy of the observable universe, in electron volts, is estimated to be about 10 raised to the 27th magnitude. Time duration itself has a limit - but on the lower extreme - the Planck time limit... below which no meaningful event can occur. And of course, there is the fact that the universe does have a finite age - implying that at a certain time in the past, it didn't exist.

With the observations on the finitude of the universe, a rather inescapable thought came upon the scientists: that the universe was containable - it had external limits in time, space, mass, temperatures and so on, and anything capable of grasping all these limits could, theoretically, contain the entire universe. In short, the entire universe could be the creation of another, vastly bigger, but still finite, entity. The finitude of this creator entity would explain the fractals and self-similarity observable all over the universe: with such recursion, the amount of control capacity - or computing capacity - needed to have a simulation the size and scale of the universe would be relatively small. Given this, idea that the entire universe was but a simulation was not only plausible, it was rapidly gaining hard credibility.

And so it was, that I found myself invited to a physics facility in Ellesmere Island - Northern-most of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, to witness as scientists began to create a proof-of-concept simulation of the universe. With present computing power, the actual fraction of the universe that could, in totality, be simulated, was slightly more than a cubed millimeter in size. But still, within this admittedly small space, all the fundamental dynamics that make the larger universe what it is were replicable. Through digital magnification, I could observe, within this artificial area, particle dynamics that remained consistent and coherent up to the quark scale. This was an extremely high level of detailing, hence the huge amount of computing needed to maintain it. I learnt that, with Moore's law of computing, and given that fractals would soon be introduced into the simulation, an artificial universe the size of an average living room could be created within 60 years from now.