Copying and file sharing recognized as a religion in Sweden

Can the gospel of file sharing really be recognized as a religion? In Sweden it can.

In the midst of a worldwide debate about Internet piracy, Swedish authorities have granted official religious status to the Church of Kopimism, which claims it considers CTRL+C and CTRL+V (shortcuts for copy and paste) to be sacred symbols, and that information is holy and copying is a sacrament.

The church was founded by philosophy student Isak Gerson, who is also the self-appointed spiritual leader of the movement. [...]

The blog Torrent Freak reports that membership in the church has grown from 1,000 to 3,000 in the last six months, and the founders expect more people to join now that its religious status is making a splash on the Internet.

“Being recognized by the state of Sweden is a large step for Kopimi,” said Gerson. “Hopefully this is one step towards the day when we can live out our faith without fear of persecution.”

I suspect that “persecution” means government agencies who want to shut down file-sharing sites like Pirate Bay.

(via Robert Cargill’s XKV8R)

“I have no idea. But yes.”

*wince* I’ve done that.

Researchers at Harvard University have successfully created a functioning, respirating human ‘lung’ on a chip in a lab. Made using human and blood vessel cells and a microchip, the translucent lung is far simpler in terms of observation than traditional, actual human lungs (for obvious reasons), in a small convenient package about the size of a pencil eraser. The researchers have demonstrated its effectiveness and are now moving toward showing its ability to replicate gas exchange between lung cells and the bloodstream. Down the road a bit more, the team hopes to produce other organs on chips, and hook them all up to the already operational heart on a chip.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was reading through the old Slacktivist archives and laughing at his deconstruction of Left Behind. LeHaye and Jenkins did a miserable job of, among other things, predicting what their “not to distant future” would look like. They made no real attempt to predict technological change, and their work looked dated as soon as it was published.

But are we any better?

What technological changes are you predicting for the near future? What modern trends will turn out to be important?

By downloading a free program, you and your laptop could help researchers pinpoint earthquakes and even sound an early warning to surrounding areas.

Newer models of laptops manufactured by companies like Apple and Lenovo contain accelerometers — motion sensors meant to detect whether the computer has been dropped. If the computer falls, the hard drive will automatically switch off to protect the user’s data.

“As soon as I knew there were these low-cost sensors inside these accelerometers, I thought it would be perfect to use them to network together and actually record earthquakes,” says geoscientist Elizabeth Cochran of the University of California, Riverside.

So a few years ago, Cochran got in touch with Jesse Lawrence, a colleague at Stanford. They whipped up a program called the Quake-Catcher Network. It’s a free download that runs silently in the background, collecting data from the computer’s accelerometer and waiting to detect an earthquake.

Just in time for boobquake, no less. However, it’s actually a serious project:

Right now, only about a thousand people across the world have the software installed on their computers. The goal is to grow that number to 10,000 in California alone. They’re beefing up the numbers by making external USB-connected accelerometers available to people who don’t have them built in to their computers — and installing those in schools as part of an educational program.

With more monitoring stations, Lawrence says he’ll be able to gather a finer idea of how exactly earthquakes unfold. And there are other benefits.

“If you can detect an event fast enough, then you can potentially provide advance alert to surrounding areas, and those areas could react in several seconds and get to safety,” he says.

So right now your computer could be searching for extraterrestrial life, studying protein folding and acting as an earthquake sensor.

You, however, are sitting on your butt eating Cheetos and reading blogs.

Why can’t you be more like your computer?

In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. [...] As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. [..]

We have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.

They continue:

We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. [...]

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

I applaud Google for sharing this information publicly and deciding not to censor their results, even though they will likely lose money over this. And I say that as a shareholder!

Those of you who also follow my posts at FriendlyAtheist know I’m a huge fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think he’s an excellent science communicator and role model. He’s so enthusiastic about science and he makes others interested through his exuberance.

Back story (taken from the youtube info):

TIME recently went to interview Neil deGrasse Tyson and we noticed a huge crate had been delivered to his office. He was then kind enough to open it on-camera. The back story of this gift is that Neil was adamant that ABC News include the Saturn V Rocket on its list of The 7 Wonders of America. The folks at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama were so grateful, they sent Neil a replica.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Holding his new model of the Saturn V] This and only this is the only piece of hardware to ever take humans to another world.   The space shuttle… is cool, but it goes into Earth orbit – you’re still attached to the earth.  This thing gets you off of Earth into space… to another world.

…

I submit to you that this is the crowning achievement of human ingenuity and the fulfillment of dreams in the history of what it is to be human.

Wonderful.

According to Kwabena Boahen, a computer scientist at Stanford University, a robot with a processor as smart as the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate. That’s the amount of energy produced by a small hydroelectric plant. But a small group of computer scientists may have hit on a new neural supercomputer that could someday emulate the human brain’s low energy requirements of just 20 watts–barely enough to run a dim light bulb….

[The new idea] trades the extreme precision of digital transistors for the brain’s chaos of many neurons firing, with misfires 30 percent to 90 percent of the time. Yet the brain works with this messy system by relying on crowds of neurons to shout over the noise of misfires and competing signals.

That willingness to give up precision for chaos could lead to a new era of creative computing that simulates the unpredictable patterns of brain activity. It could also represent a far more energy-efficient era — the Neurogrid fits in a briefcase and runs on what amounts to a few D batteries, or less than a watt. Rather than transistors, it uses capacitors that get the same voltage of neurons.

Let me be the first to welcome our new neurogrid overlords.

(For a fuller writeup on this, see this discovery article.)