Category: Future Science Gearbox

Sept. 16, 2103
BOSTON–In a paper published recently in the journal Science, MIT Professor Marguerite Fury reports establishing experimentally the existence of ‘anti-money’, a bizarre economic phenomena linked by Professor Fury to a host of hypothesized ‘quantum economic’ processes underlying all matter. “Experimental confirmation of at least one of my theoretical predictions tells me I’m on to something,” notes Professor Fury. “This result will feed my thinking for some time.”

Described by Professor Fury as nearly indistinguishable, co-consuming packets of ‘quantum monies’, anti-money is not the absence of money, but its opposite. Professor Fury explains: “At the scale of everyday economic phenomena, we tend to think of money and debt as complementary opposites, but their opposition is, in fact, quite weak. They actually work in balance to permit the construction of large-scale economic entities. Anti-money is, in contrast, opposed to conventional money at a more fundamental level; whenever money and anti-money come in contact, the two are annihilated, leaving only a consumer residue.”

Because anti-money is annihilated in the presence of its opposite, observation of anti-money required Professor Fury to construct a monetary vacuum. This vacuum, entirely devoid of money, lacked also all traces of debt, because of debt’s close association with ‘positive monetary phenomena’ like interest accrual and periodic payments. And, because of the possible influence of economic processes attached to the observer, Professor Fury herself had to occupy the center of the financial vacuum.

“It’s really quite difficult to rid yourself of all vestiges of economic activity,” notes Fury. “I had to not only discharge all of my own assets and liabilities, but also to disclaim any social benefits my new economic status might entitle me too. Try convincing a government bureaucrat that you don’t want any benefits. It’s not easy. And, on top of that, I had to quit my job. I was almost up for tenure.”

After a number of days spent “wandering in the woods, naked and alone,” Professor Fury returned to the lab and activated a ‘program trading accelerator’ generating within moments billions of ‘wash sales’, or transactions in which offsetting assets are both bought and sold. Though wash sales have little or no positive economic consequence, assets moving at high transaction-velocity generate infrequent ‘friction collisions’ and ‘asset-inversions’ thought to throw off infinitesimal packets of monies and anti-monies.

Though indistinguishable from conventional money, anti-money would, Professor Fury predicted, be observable because of the consumer residue that would remain after the money and anti-money generated by her program trading met and was annihilated.

February 1, 2039
BOSTON–A group of researchers at MIT’s Chomsky Institute announced yesterday independent confirmation of their discovery of a series of messages encoded in apparently dormant or unused sections of the human genome. “We’re able to report replication of our results by at least three independent teams,” explained the team’s project director Klara Tulip. “We hence feel quite confident about the results and felt that they were significant enough to warrant preliminary public release.”

Exploiting evolved, mathematical models derived from iterative analyses of network-available audio, video and text files in more than 200 languages, the team scanned files in the Human Genome Library for patterns consistent with the presence of a “semantic system.” “We were actually using the Genome Library as a control data-set to be sure that our model wasn’t producing false positives,” explains Tulip. “We’d developed a mathematical and algorithmic formulation of a meta-language descriptive of all known human linguistic systems and needed to test it against some non-random data that we assumed had no semantic content. We we’re stunned to find that the genome contains sequences consistent with an implied linguistic system.”

Within days of discovering the presence of “semantic sequences” the team had also isolated a “Rosetta Stone” enabling them to partially decipher and translate a number of passages. “The genome appears to contain a linguistic system of remarkable economy,” notes Tulip. “Like a coded message that includes detailed instructions for how it is to be decoded.”

Though declining to reveal the full results of their analysis, noting that some 97% of the human genome consists of biologically unused sequences with “a statistically significant chance of containing decipherable semantic content,” the team did release translations of a “number of passages of public interest,” including the warning “NOT TO BE REMOVED EXCEPT BY END USER.”

Among other messages, the team isolated at least 42 varied repetitions of the instruction to “[not] fold, spindle, or mutilate” and two apparently inconsistent warranties, one claiming “absence of defect in material or workmanship for 180 days from formulation” and one disavowing “all warranties of fitness for use except as otherwise required.” “Our initial analysis has uncovered a number of repetitions, counter-factuals, and internal-inconsistencies suggesting that these genomic messages are a product of the same evolutionary forces driving reproduction of the non-semantic portions of the genome,” observes Tulip.

Responding to news of the team’s discovery, critics, including a number of prominent linguists and bioinformaticians, characterize the research as a Rorschach Test revealing more about the researchers’ assumptions than about the meaning of human genes. “You have to look closely at their model, at what their meta-linguistic model assumes about the world,” notes Harvard Professor of Statistics Joseph Climb. “If you go into the world with a sufficiently abstract model of ‘language’ you’ll start finding Shakespeare inside rocks and twigs.”

Discounting such criticism as “mathematically unsophisticated,” project leader Tulip points to the astronomical odds against “a chance consistency that would permit our model to identify such a vast pool of semantically significant sequences. Our genome has something to say. The real question is why–what evolutionary purpose could these messages serve?”

Feb. 11, 2119
LINCOLN, NE–Organizers of last weekend’s Conference on Spontaneous Biodiversification indicate that the recently identified phenomenon has spread beyond the thinly-populated rural farmlands of the American Midwest and has begun to crop up in isolated cases in urban centers as far afield as Chicago and San Diego. “The real take-away from the Conference,” notes Dr. Wendy Chimer, the Conference’s keynote speaker, “is that spontaneous generations of the sort we’ve seen in this area for several years are not localized aberrations, but part of a larger biogenetic process that we are only now beginning to recognize.”

The phenomenon, known variously as “Organismic Teratoma,” “Noah’s Ark Disease,” and “Intronic Alter-Generation Syndrome” was first identified by a team of research oncologists working at The Nebraska Health Consortium to formulate courses of treatment for strange tumor-like growths that appeared to contain small animals. “We’d never seen anything like it,” explains one member of the team. “One of the patients literally grew a squirrel right in our isolation unit. I didn’t realize that such a small animal could cause such a big mess. Have you ever tried to catch a squirrel with just a mop and an emesis basin?”

Though researchers have yet to agree on a formal definition of the phenomenon, experts confirm observed gestation periods of varying lengths, from as short as 48 hours to as long as 3 months, and have noted the generation of a menagerie of both rare and common animals, including squirrels, toads, blue-bottle flies, and a species of brown garden snake. “Every day brings a startling new story,” admits Dr. Chimer. “Just yesterday a colleague recounted an examination of a patient during which a carbuncle erupted, emitting a small nuptial flight of Jackson Hole Bees.”[p]
Most experts point to a likely connection between the phenomenon and the presence in the human genome of what is commonly called “junk” or “vestigial” DNA. “One of the continuing mysteries of the human genome is the fact that most of it appears unused,” explains Dr. Chimer. “We use some 3-4% of it, but the rest appears to be either an evolutionary artifact or simply a structural glue of sorts. Now we’re beginning to realize that a number of non-human genomes may be stored there, dormant, waiting for some activating cue we have yet to identify.”

Preliminary findings from several clinical surveys appear to confirm the presence of “appropriate, intronic, non-human genomes” in patients expressing mice and amphibians. “Our assays have consistently found species-appropriate shadow-genomes in all subjects yielding tree-frogs,” explains Dr. Harald Hopping of The Johns Hopkins Gene and Cola Center. “While our conclusions aren’t yet generalizable, they are suggestive.”

Most popular among theories of the origin and causes of the syndrome is that identified by Dr. Chimer as “Spontaneous Biodiversification:” “Why is this syndrome concentrated here, in the Midwest? Well, the phenomenon has been observed most in biomes that have become largely monocultural through intense cultivation of a single human foodstuff. Biodiversity in the state of Nebraska is now extremely narrow: pretty much people and wheat. Everything else has been driven out. It may be that this syndrome is a previously unidentified natural mechanism for kick-starting diversity where it has been lost. These animals are erupting like symptoms of a genetic unconscious in distress.”

Among avenues of treatment, excision has offered temporary relief from some “generations,” but the syndrome is remarkably persistent. “Frankly, we are not recommending treatment at this time,” notes Dr. Hopping. “The syndrome involves some physical and emotional discomfort, but does not, at this point in our research, appear to have lasting physical side-effects. In the cases of patients known to be gestating endangered or extinct species, we strongly encourage them to let symptoms run their course.”

Jan. 2, 210
PASADENA–Responding to recent panic surrounding the sky’s dramatic change in color, a team of logicians and philosophers of language at the California Institute of Technology has released findings designed to calm the public and explain the transformation. “We have heard the press speculation that the change in the color of the sky is related to an unexplained and possibly toxic pollution event,” notes Caltech Professor of Nomenclature Dorinda Pocopollo. “Our aim with this press conference is to dispel those rumors. This is not an ecological catastrophe, as many have feared, but a logical one.”

Scientists and religious leaders alike have struggled to account for the January first transformation of the traditionally blue sky to a shade of green likened by many to key lime pie. In an effort to diffuse apocalyptic and alarmist fervor, a number of scientific institutions have offered preliminary analyses and have taken efforts to disseminate available concrete facts about the transformation.

The U.S.-based National Center for Atmospheric Research (“NCAR”) announced late yesterday that the change was not coordinated with any “apparent modification of atmospheric state or behavior” while atmospheric observatories and weather stations worldwide report no measurable change in the physical properties of observable light reflected from the sun through the earth’s atmosphere. “As far as we can tell the sky is still blue,” exclaims NCAR Executive Director Herman Grout. “Even if I didn’t trust my own eyes, though, I’d have to trust the 30 billion other eyes out there that also are telling me it’s green. At this point it seems safe to say the sky is, indeed, green. There are, however, no indications that it is falling.”

Noting that the largely overshadowed change in the color of emeralds occurred at the same time as that of the daytime sky, Professor Pocopollo’s Caltech team speculates that the changes are related to a traditional logic problem known as Goodman’s paradox. “Goodman’s paradox is a challenge to our intuitive understanding of induction,” explains Professor Pocopollo. “It postulates a language in which the properties ‘blue’ and ‘green’ are replaced with ‘grue’ and ‘bleen.’ Something is ‘grue’ if it is ‘green’ before a certain time and ‘blue’ after it, while something is ‘bleen’ if it is ‘blue’ before and ‘green’ after.”

Discussions of the paradox have traditionally used emeralds as a heuristic example, and typical analyses have hypothesized a definition of ‘grue’ objects as objects that are green before 2100 and blue afterward. “We aren’t offering a conclusion concerning what’s happened,” opines Professor Pocopollo, “But we would like to point out that the change in the color of the sky, and in that of emeralds, has been fairly accurately placed at 12:00:01am Greenwich Mean Time, and while Goodman’s paradox does not traditionally use the sky as an example of a potentially ‘bleen’ object, the sky is the paradigmatically blue object.”

Asked to speculate about the implications of her team’s findings, Professor Pocopollo indicated that, rather than a sign of an impending apocalypse or ecological disaster, the green sky may simply be “the first fact about the state of the world to confirm that our language is out of step with the case. Until now we’ve concluded, inductively, that the sky is blue; now we’ve learned that it is most likely bleen. That’s an inductive mistake that certainly isn’t going to kill us, however much it may shake the entrenched foundations of our confidence in the familiar inductions on which we rely in everyday life.

“If you ask me, and if the green sky is related to Goodman’s paradox, people shouldn’t worry about anything else than getting used to saying ‘bleen’ and ‘grue,'” confided Pocopollo. “The thing I worry about is what this might portend for Hume’s paradox. Hume pointed out that our belief that the sun will rise tomorrow is inductively derived from our habitual experience of the daily rising of the sun. If we’re as wrong about that as we were about the color of the sky we could be in for a rude surprise tomorrow morning.”