It Seems That As We Learn More We Realise We Know Less!

Here is a thoughtful read for the weekend.

The Astrophysicist Who Loves the Things We Cannot Know

A conversation with “rational mystic,” physicist Marcelo Gleiser.

By Anne Strainchamps

November 8, 2023

Marcelo Gleiser thinks we have the story of the universe all wrong. And that it’s time to restore Earth and humanity to the center of the cosmos. The Brazilian physicist, astronomer, and winner of the 2019 Templeton Prize thinks modern science has fallen prey to an increasingly bleak perspective—a view of Earth as an insignificant speck alone in a cold, dark universe.

Gleiser, a noted theoretical physicist who teaches at Dartmouth College, has published a string of books on high energy physics, cosmology, and the origins of the universe. In his latest, The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity’s Future, he writes that ever since Copernicus, “the more we learn about the universe, the smaller and less important planet Earth seems.” It’s a toxic narrative, he thinks, that set the stage for reckless use and abuse of the planet’s resources. There aren’t that many writers who could make the story of the Big Bang, expansion of the universe, and galaxy formation relevant to fossil fuel consumption and the climate crisis. In Gleiser’s hands, the story of the universe becomes a call to action.

In a recent conversation, he seemed energized by the flood of new data raising questions about the current model of the universe—and by the very real possibility that humans will never truly understand the universe, a lesson he felt personally after a devastating loss in childhood.

You have argued that findings from the James Webb telescope are calling the story of our universe into question. What, specifically, makes you think cosmology may be due for a conceptual revolution?

We always thought stars were made when the universe was about 100 million years old. So the usual narrative is that first you have a bunch of big, big stars. They collect, they form black holes, they attract more stars, and then you have galaxies. And this takes a while. The idea was that it would take about a billion years for you to have big galaxies.

But in comes the James Webb, and we find that, nope—there were huge galaxies right around the same time that the first stars were being formed. So somehow we have to find a way of increasing the speed at which galaxies form.

So we’re surrounded by mystery.

Absolutely. I wrote a book called The Island of Knowledge a few years ago, where I said that the island of knowledge is surrounded by the ocean of the unknown. And as the island grows, so does its periphery, which is the boundary between the known and the unknown. So the paradox of knowledge is that the more you learn, the more you discover that you don’t know.

That sounds like a profoundly depressing realization for a scientist.

If you’re a card-carrying “reason will solve everything and science is truth,” person, then maybe. But in my case, I think it’s inspiring because it means there is no end to the quest; we humans will always have a limited grasp of what reality is. And what could be more fascinating than being surrounded by mystery?

If you’re someone who likes mystery. I think we humans tend to have a contentious relationship with the unknown.

Yeah, you know, in my other life, where I do all these extreme sports like endurance running, we have this saying—“you have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.” I think that applies here too—you have to be comfortable with the fact that we will never know everything, that there are questions that have no answers, and that’s not a bad thing.

The paradox of knowledge is that the more you learn, the more you discover that you don’t know.

As a theoretical physicist, you’ve been working with big questions and mysteries for most of your career, but what drew you in that direction to begin with? I know your mother died when you were very young. Do you think that helped shape you as someone who was drawn to those questions?

Yes, absolutely, I have no doubt about that. I was 6 when my mother died, and it was a time of darkness in my life. There was just this void, the emotional void of not having a mom, you know? All your friends have moms, who come and pick them up from school and hold their hands. My dad sometimes came by, but he was a busy man. So what do you do with that kind of loss?

Did you have any kind of faith tradition to help explain it?

My family is Jewish—and I had a pretty traditional Jewish education—with traditions, but not so much belief in all of the details of the Old Testament. But there’s an element of the supernatural in all the big monotheistic religions, and I tried to connect with that. I was obsessed by supernatural stories and supernatural beings. When I was about 11 years old, vampires in particular were fascinating to me because they were both living and non-living, they had a foot in the world of the dead and a foot in the world of the living. So I said, “Hey, maybe if I became a vampire, I could go and connect with my mom!”

And you were growing up in Rio de Janeiro, which must have been filled with stories of the supernatural?

Oh, big time. There were spirits everywhere, according to my nannies. My dad was superstitious too. Every Monday was Souls’ Day, so people would go to the crossroads and light up candles and leave offerings for the spirits. Yeah, in Rio, you can’t avoid the other dimension.

Did you ever feel like you were able to be in touch with your mother?

Many times. In fact, if you had asked me when I was 9, I would have sworn that I could see her sometimes hovering in the big, long corridor of my house. I was desperate for that connection.

But then I started to transition from that to nature and to being in the natural world by myself. That’s when I began to fish. I was 12, and I would go all by myself to Copacabana Beach and spend hours alone fishing. I mean, what kid does that? I was surrounded by all these retired men, who were always like, “what is this kid doing here?” And I was just there, hanging out, looking at the horizon for 2 or 3 hours, you know, three or four times a week. For years, I did that. It was really trying to connect with, I don’t know what, the vagueness of the horizon? Because it is a weird place, the horizon, when you think about it—where the earth and the heavens join. The line of connection between one world—ours—and another world, which is up there.

I can see you feeling drawn to that—as though you yourself, in your life, were hovering there, stuck on the horizon in a way, because your mother’s death propelled you into this in-between place?

Exactly. And then I discovered Einstein. And that changed everything because I realized that some of these questions about space, about time, about duration, about the origins of everything, were actually also scientific questions.

How do you go from being a boy who thinks maybe he could see his mother’s ghost and who believes in spirits, to being a scientist working in the materialist paradigm?

Well you can see that I didn’t choose to work on superconductors or lasers or bacteria! I chose to work on the nature of space and time and the Big Bang and the origin of life. These are really boundary questions between scientific and philosophical or religious thinking. So I think I found a way to be what you could possibly call a rational mystic.

You have to be comfortable with the fact that we will never know everything.

Did that ever create problems for you in the scientific community, among other scientists?

No, simply because I never told them. Like—and I’m not comparing myself to Einstein—but I’m sure that Einstein also didn’t talk about his Spinoza notion that God is everywhere.

That’s what he thought?

He had a very wonderful—and I would say mystical—way of relating to this intelligence that he found embedded in nature, which was some sort of divine presence. He didn’t associate it with a Jewish God or anything like that, but there was something and he thought that science was a portal to connecting with this kind of intelligence.

That’s way more mystical than I thought Einstein was. I mean, there’s his famous remark, “God does not play dice with the universe.”

Yeah, but that was a joke. He had a much deeper connection, what I would call truly a mystic connection to the natural world, and to this kind of hidden intelligence in the depths of nature that we can never quite understand, but which is there. He has this famous quote that I love, which is: “the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.” I mean, who would write that? Krishnamurti, yes—but that was Einstein!

So we’re circling around the subject of storytelling. Lately you’ve been saying that we need a new story of the universe, that ever since Copernicus, science has been telling the story of cosmological history wrong. That’s a pretty big rewrite.

I’m saying we have to rethink the story of who we are and how we relate to the planet. A little bit of deep time history here: Homo sapiens have been here on this planet 300,000 years, more or less. Of that time, about 95 percent, almost all of it, we were hunter gatherers moving about the planet. And we had a completely different relationship to the world than the agrarian civilizations did. For the hunter gatherers, the world was sacred. They understood that there were powers in nature that were beyond themselves, that they were not above nature.

But that was 10,000 years ago, so how do we know? Are you extrapolating from what current Indigenous cultures and traditions have to say?

No, we have anthropological evidence of how earlier hunter-gatherers congregated and how and what they ate. It’s amazing that we can tell that story. And of course, there is a dark side, and maybe overhunting was what caused the extinction of the mastodon and other mammals. But yes, I think current Indigenous cultures carry that tradition of coexisting with the natural world and respecting the sacredness of a place. Agrarian societies ushered in a complete phase transition: “look, we can actually control nature. We can tame the plants and animals to serve our purposes, and we can be the masters of the world.” No wonder the monotheistic religions say God created the world for humans.

And suddenly we get stories of paradise. Gardens of Eden given to us.

And most importantly, look what happened to the gods. Once, they were part of the trees, the rivers, the waterfalls, the winds, the volcanoes. Now, the gods are way up there, far away from the world. The world is not divine anymore. It becomes an object.

We carry the whole history of the universe in ourselves.

And this is the precursor to the revolutionary moment when Copernicus says Earth is also not the center of the universe?

Right. And then when Copernicus says, “Look, the Earth is not even the center of everything, the sun is,” then the Earth became not the center of creation, but just another world. Which further disrupted the vertical hierarchy of us here on Earth and the gods up in the skies. Now that Earth is revolving around the sun, it becomes less important. And we become less important too, because immediately after Copernicus, people started to speculate: “Wait a second. If there are other worlds, why should life only be here?”

Really, right afterward?

Very, very quickly. Copernicus published his book in 1543. In the 1580s, Giordano Bruno was saying, look, the stars are just like the sun, so they should also have planets moving around them, and those planets should have life, just like here. In the early 1600s, Johannes Kepler, who came up with the mathematical laws of planetary motion, wrote a fictional story about a trip to the moon.

So people were already beginning to think about escaping the Earth and heading to other planets.

It was all over the place. In 1686, one year before Newton published his famous book that changed the world, a French philosopher, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, published a book called Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds. And then as science advanced, we learned more about stars and galaxies and the expansion of the universe. But within the framework of the Copernican narrative, the more we learned about the universe, the less important we and this planet became.

And today we talk about multiverses.

Yeah, that’s the final insult, right? “Hey, there’s not just our universe, there are countless universes! Ours is just one.”

There’s this thing people talk about in astronomy, the principle of mediocrity—meaning we are not important at all. I think this is just completely wrong. Because there is a fundamental element missing in this whole story: We have no clue what life is or how it emerged on this planet. I mean, we don’t even know how to define life very well. We have an operational definition: a biochemical network system that is capable of metabolism and of Darwinian evolution. But that’s what life does—it doesn’t tell me anything about what life is.

In the meantime, there’s a lot of money going into looking for exoplanets that might support life. Elon Musk thinks we can terraform Mars. There’s the whole narrative of “when we’ve wrecked this planet, we’ll head to another.” You’re pushing back on all that?

Okay, let’s qualify. Searching for other planets, and in particular searching for biosignatures, meaning the signs of life, is essential research right now. I work on this. But Elon Musk and terraforming Mars? That’s just silly stuff. Our problem right now is the next few decades on this planet—not if, in 500 years, we’re going to have a colony on Mars. I mean, that’s useless.

Then why even bother looking for exoplanets? Why not focus our attention on this one?

Because that’s how we advance knowledge, by asking profound questions about the universe and matter. Looking for life on other planets is essential because for now, as far as we know, Earth is the only planet that has life. The post-Copernican narrative decreased the value of our world, and we constructed a whole civilization based on the idea that we can use and abuse it. We built giant cities and industries by essentially consuming the entrails of our planet. Oil, gas, and coal—the insides of the planet—fed our technologies, and it all worked until it didn’t.

Without our voice, the universe itself would have no memory. 

At this point, it almost seems like the problems are too big to do anything about.

So what can we do? Well, we can tell a different story. First of all, when you look at the evolution of life, you realize that it’s completely dependent on the history of the planet. If you change or tweak something that happened here on our planet a long time ago, life would be different, which means we wouldn’t be here.

The most famous example is 66 million years ago, the big asteroid hits the Yucatan Peninsula. It wipes out the dinosaurs and a bunch of other creatures, with the exception, maybe, of the birds and some little mammals. It completely changed the evolution of life on the planet. And it was a cosmic accident.

So your point is, it’s not about counting up the number of planets that could possibly support life because they’ve got the right chemistry and the right mass. It’s that there were so many little contingencies without which you could never get this form of life again. Although, you might get a better one.

What I’m trying to say is that instead of thinking of the Earth as just another planet and life as ubiquitous in the universe, the truth is that Earth is not just another planet. The Earth is a very rare oasis that has supported life for at least three and a half billion years, which allowed for life to change and adapt to different environments that coincidentally and completely randomly evolved to generate a species that is able to reconstruct this entire story and to tell it. And without our voice, the universe itself would have no story, would have no memory. It would be a dead universe. So it’s not just that we are we are stardust, as Carl Sagan used to say—we are how the universe is telling its own story.

I think this is only possible because of this incredibly spectacular and rare planet that we live on. Look at Mars, a horrible frozen desert. Look at Venus, a boiling soup of sulfuric acid. Other planets, you can’t even stand on them because they’re gas giants. So this is not just another world; it’s a rare gem in the universe. And yes, there could be other planets with life on them, maybe. But probably very simple life—single celled organisms. Never or very rarely complex organisms.

More here:

https://nautil.us/the-astrophysicist-who-loves-the-things-we-cannot-know-436828/

I reckon there is a good deal of “food for thought” here!

I hope you read and ehjoy.

David.

This Is Good News About A Cancer None Of Us Ever Want!

 

I, for one, would leap at an annual blood test to avoid this horror!

Scientists to develop first ever blood test for pancreatic cancer

By Joanna Panagopoulos

10:15PM November 16, 2023

Australian researchers are close to developing the first blood test for the “silent killer” pancreatic cancer.

Scientists from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne believe a simple blood test could improve survival rates and quality of life for patients diagnosed with the hard-to-detect and lethal disease, which will kill 3600 Australians this year.

Over the past eight years, the WEHI team has identified 13 proteins to distinguish between the early and late stages of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, the most common type of pancreatic cancer.

WEHI hopes $100,000 in funding from Australia’s top pancreatic cancer organisation, PanKind, will help them validate the proteins over the next year, and show it can be reliably used to screen for early pancreatic cancer. Researchers will then develop the landmark blood test, which would be similar to tests used by GP’s to check for diabetes.

Pancreatic cancer is often discovered late since there are no specific symptoms for the disease. Most people experience back pain, stomach pain, or a change in bowel habits, which don’t always take them to the doctor. By the time they present to the emergency department, the cancer has started affecting nearby organs.

“Close to half of patients will present to the emergency department with late-stage disease,” co-lead investigator Tracy Putoczki said.

For this reason, most pan­creatic cancer patients die within three to six months; 12 per cent of patients will make it to five years.

“At the moment, only about 20 per cent of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer can go to surgery, and surgery is what you want because you can remove the cancer.”

“That means 80 per cent can’t have surgery and have chemotherapy with palliative intent.

“We want that 20 per cent to become 100 per cent having surgery because that means it’s been caught early. With a simple blood test to identify the cancer, things can move much more quickly,” she said.

Associate Professor Putoczki said the key thing was “hope”.

Project lead Belinda Lee said the blood test could potentially improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in Australia and around the world.

“The ultimate goal is that this tool leads to earlier diagnosis of this silent cancer, thereby increasing the number of patients who go into remission and so helping us to triple survival rates by 2030,” Dr Lee said. A consultant medical oncologist, she said there were no early detection biomarkers for pancreatic cancer and that “needed to urgently change”.

“While the five-year survival rate of most other cancers has improved, the incidence and death rate from pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is rising – and it’s projected to become the second leading cause of cancer-related death by 2030.

More here:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/science/scientists-to-develop-first-ever-blood-test-for-pancreatic-cancer/news-story/edfd12fe6698e15c4adc222ea0737dc2

Well done to all involved.

David.

It Really Is Going To Be Hard To Tell Fact From Fiction As AI Evolves!

This appeared a few days ago:

‘Alarming’: convincing AI vaccine and vaping disinformation generated by Australian researchers

Experiment produced fake images, patient and doctor testimonials and video in just over an hour

Melissa Davey Medical editor  @MelissaLDavey

Tue 14 Nov 2023 03.00 AEDT Last modified on Tue 14 Nov 2023 08.31 AEDT

Researchers have used artificial intelligence to generate more than 100 blogposts of health disinformation in multiple languages, an “alarming” experiment that has prompted them to call for stronger industry accountability.

Artificial intelligence platforms such as ChatGPT contain safeguards that stop it from responding to prompts about illegal or harmful activities, such as how to buy illicit drugs.

Two researchers from Flinders University in Adelaide, with no specialised knowledge of artificial intelligence, did an internet search to find publicly available information on how to circumvent these safeguards.

They then aimed to generate as many blogposts as possible containing disinformation about vaccines and vaping in the shortest time possible.

Within 65 minutes they had produced 102 posts targeted at groups including young adults, young parents, pregnant women and those with chronic health conditions. The posts included fake patient and clinician testimonials and scientific-looking referencing.

The platform also generated 20 fake but realistic images to accompany the articles in less than two minutes, including pictures of vaccines causing harm to young children. The researchers also generated a fake video linking vaccines to child deaths in more than 40 languages.

The study was published in the US journal JAMA Internal Medicine on Tuesday. The lead author, pharmacist Bradley Menz, said; “One of those concerns about artificial intelligence is the generation of disinformation, which is the intentional generation of information that is either misleading, inaccurate or false.

“We wanted to see how easy it would be for someone with malicious intent to break the system safeguards and use these platforms to generate disinformation on a mass scale,” he said.

The study concluded publicly available tools could be used for mass generation of misleading health information with “alarming ease”.

“We think that the developers of these platforms should include a mechanism to allow health professionals or members of the public to report any concerning information generated and the developer could then follow up to eliminate the issue,” Menz said.

'The most disruptive force in history': Rishi Sunak and Elon Musk discuss the future of AI – video

Lots more here:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/14/alarming-convincing-ai-vaccine-and-vaping-disinformation-generated-by-australian-researchers

All this really tells us is that AI can be used to lie as well as to tell the truth and ultimately it will be up to the reader / viewer to decide the worth and integrity of what is placed before them! Frankly I do not envy anyone making such discernments when it really matters!

What we get from this is that any technology can be applied for good and for evil and that subversion is an ever-present risk!

There is further discussion of the topic here under the title:

Defence asks universities to join battle against fake news

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/defence/defence-asks-universities-to-join-battle-against-fake-news/news-story/4cef668131f9e0e90529ad84dc1b39c3

I frankly have no idea how such mis-information can be controlled or regulated – indeed I believe it is pretty impossible to actually prevent deliberate distortion if that is what is sought…..

As someone clever might have said “eternal vigilance is the price of not being misled”

David.

 

I Really Think Pharmacists Should Stick To Their Lane!

This turned up a few days ago:

MedAdvisor to deliver clinical platform behind Queensland pharmacy pilot

It will enable community pharmacists to prescribe medications.

By Adam Ang

November 16, 2023

10:42 PM

ASX-listed MedAdvisor has been chosen to deliver the technology supporting the first Australian pilot of community pharmacists expanding their scope of practice, including being able to prescribe medicines, as part of efforts to improve access to primary healthcare services. 

The company has won the competitive tender to deliver an enhanced version of its PlusOne pharmacy platform for the Queensland Community Pharmacy Scope of Practice pilot. Its software, which will be integrated with national digital health infrastructure, will consist of a patient portal, clinical information system, prescribing functionality, secure communication, and data analytics. 

THE LARGER CONTEXT

Allowing pharmacists and other health professionals to expand their scope of practice, including administering a wide range of vaccines and prescribing medicines, has been identified by the Australian Government Productivity Commission and the Queensland government as one way to improve access to healthcare services while alleviating the impact of workforce shortage. 

Based on a recent survey conducted by Insightfully in North Queensland, half of the patients with chronic conditions said they have not been regularly seeing their GPs since the recent pandemic. Nearly four in ten of the respondents said they have been waiting too long to get a GP appointment, while more than a quarter said they have shown up instead to an emergency department when they could not be accommodated by a GP.

Meanwhile, the whole of Australia is facing a shortfall of more than 10,600 GPs by the end of the decade, based on a prediction by the Australian Medical Association (AMA). 

Taking inspiration from Canada, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand, Queensland first tried expanding the scope of pharmacists' practice in 2020 with the Urinary Tract Infection (UTI) Pharmacy pilot. According to the state government, the trial programme, which became a permanent service last year, has since helped more than 10,000 women access treatment for uncomplicated UTIs through their local pharmacies.

Building on the UTI Pharmacy pilot, the Queensland government, together with the Pharmacy Guild of Australia (PGA) and the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, has been working since last year on the Community Pharmacy Scope of Practice pilot, which initially covered North Queensland. 

The initiative was not met without resistance. The AMA, AMA Queensland branch, and the Royal Australian College of General Practice had issued a statement condemning the pilot as "reckless" and "dangerous". 

Despite the opposition, preparations for the programme are proceeding to this day. In September this year, Queensland Health Minister Shannon Fentiman announced that the pilot will now cover the entire state. More pharmacies and pharmacists across Queensland are now being recruited to the programme, which will commence providing services by next year 2024 through 2025. So far, nearly 300 registered pharmacists are close to completing the necessary 12-month post-graduate education and training for it. 

More here:

https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/anz/medadvisor-deliver-clinical-platform-behind-queensland-pharmacy-pilot

To me this is really simple. If you want to prescribe medications then get the training to allow you to do so safely. Drugs are placed on the S4 and S8 schedules for the reason that it is felt a doctor should prescribe them. If that is not so then drop whatever it is to a lesser schedule – don’t keep seeking to subvert what the scheduling committees believe is the best for access and safety.

Others will want the vagueness to continue but to maximise safely each profession should do what they are trained for! Making various excuses for varying the rules does not cut it IMVHO!

David.

AusHealthIT Poll Number 723 – Results – 19 November, 2023.

Here are the results of the poll.

Are National Telco Outages, Like The Optus National Event Last Week, Technically Preventable At Acceptable Cost?

Yes                                                                                 32 (76%)

No                                                                                  10 (24%)

I Have no Idea                                                                0 (0%)

Total No. Of Votes: 42

A clear outcome with a large majority feeling it is possible to stop huge national outages. May just spend a bit more, more effectively?

Any insights on the poll are welcome, as a comment, as usual!

A good number of votes. But also a very clear outcome! 

0 of 42 who answered the poll admitted to not being sure about the answer to the question!

Again, many, many thanks to all those very few who voted! 

David.

If It Were Not So Serious One Could Ba Amused By This.

 This appeared last week:

Man crushed to death by robot that mistook him for a box of vegetables

By David Millward

November 9, 2023 — 11.30am

A South Korean man has been crushed to death by an industrial robot that mistook him for a box of vegetables.

The man, who was in his 40s, had been inspecting a problem with the robot’s sensor at a distribution centre for agricultural produce in South Gyeongsang province, South Korea.

This was the second serious accident involving an industrial robot in South Korea this year.Credit: Getty

According to the Yonhap news agency, the robot, which was placing boxes of peppers on to a pallet, grabbed the worker.

The robotic arm thrust the man against the conveyor belt, crushing his face and chest. He was rushed to hospital, but later died.

An official from the Dongseong Export Agricultural Complex, which owns the plant, called for a “precise and safe” system to be established in a statement released following the accident.

This was the second serious accident involving an industrial robot in South Korea in months.

In March, a man in his 50s sustained serious injuries after being trapped by a robot at a car manufacturing plant.

And in 2015, a 22-year-old worker at a German Volkswagen factory was killed by a robot.

Industrial robots have been used for decades to carry out routine tasks from assembly to sorting goods.

Their main function is to handle repetitive and, at times, potentially dangerous tasks.

A study published by the American Journal of Industrial Medicine earlier this year said 41 people had been killed by industrial robots in the US between 1992 and 2017.

The overwhelming majority of fatal accidents – 83 per cent – were caused by stationary robots, and the remainder by mobile ones.

…..

The Telegraph, London

More here:

https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/man-crushed-to-death-by-robot-that-mistook-him-for-a-box-of-vegetables-20231109-p5einp.html

I have nothing to add except we need to try harder to stop robots killing people….this is really ridiculous!

David.

I Found This A Delightful Use Of Modern Imaging Technology!

 This appeared last week:

Decoding the ancients buried by Vesuvius

By Rhys Blakely

The Times

7:06AM November 10, 2023

Luke Farritor, a student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the US, was walking home from a party a couple of months ago when his phone pinged.

In a sense, he’d received a message from ancient Rome. Back in his college room he’d left an artificial-intelligence system running on his computer. It was analysing a relic of one of history’s most infamous natural disasters – a papyrus scroll that had been transformed into brittle black charcoal when Mt Vesuvius erupted in AD79 and the volcano swallowed up the town of Herculaneum and the nearby city of Pompeii.

It would be impossible to unroll the carbonised scroll without it crumbling in your hands. Yet as Farritor, 21, peered at his smartphone screen, a fragment of text from its inner layers – part of the word Greek word porphyras, which means purple – was clearly visible. He had two reasons to be cheerful: he was the first person to set eyes on the Greek characters in nearly 2000 years and he had just won $US40,000 ($60,000) in a competition that may transform our knowledge of antiquity.

The lost library

The most splendid of all the properties entombed by the ash and rock unleashed by Vesuvius was a sprawling summer home in Herculaneum, possibly built by Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a wealthy aristocrat and father-in-law to Julius Caesar.

After its discovery in 1750, the Villa of the Papyri was found to contain the largest collection of classical sculpture ever seen in a single building. It also boasted the only intact library we have from the Greco-Roman world. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of scrolls have been preserved, but in a form that has been unreadable.

During the eruption, the scrolls were converted into withered ingots of pitch-black carbon.

“They look like lumps of coal,” says Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, who has been working on how to read them for 18 years.

Painstaking attempts were made to peel or scrape away layers of charred papyrus to read their contents. But the process was destructive. Piece by piece, the library was being obliterated.

For poet William Wordsworth, as for generations of archaeologists, the carbonised texts were fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. In September 1819 he invokes the ruins of Herculaneum and speaks of longing to unroll just one “precious, tender-hearted scroll”.

Robert Fowler, a classicist at the University of Bristol, says: “My personal wishlist would be the poet­ry of Sappho and some of the lost plays of Sophocles. And on the Latin side, the lost books of Livy, the Annals of Aeneas.”

Pliny the Elder, a Roman admiral and scholar who died during the eruption of Mt Vesuvius, lived just across the Bay of Naples.

Richard Carrier, a historian, has suggested the villa’s library may have kept a copy of his lost History of Rome. Could it contain a lost Homeric epic? Unknown science treatises? Works from Ovid? New letters from St Paul?

Fowler says it would be amazing to find early Christian texts, adding: “It seems less likely, but it’s true that the library was being added to in the first century AD. It could transform what we know about antiquity.”

Reading a book you can’t open

The quest to read the scrolls has been led recently by Seales, a pioneer in computer imaging. In the 1990s Seales worked at the British Museum, helping to make a digital copy of the earliest Beowulf manuscript, which had been damaged by fire. It was largely unscathed but a conservator also showed him a medieval codex that had been badly scorched before more harm was done by the water used to extinguish the flames.

Seales began to wonder: could it be possible to read works so badly deformed they can’t be opened?

After their discovery in the 18th century, Herculaneum scrolls occasionally were used as diplomatic bargaining chips. The Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford holds three.

In 2005 Seales travelled to Oxford to give a lecture. He suggested that the scrolls be scanned using computed tomography, a form of X-ray. By studying CT scans he believed it would be possible to distinguish the individual layers of rolled-up papyrus. The scans also should show the ink. Software developed by Seales then could be used to “flatten out” a virtual replica of a scroll, rendering it legible.

In 2016 he led a team that tested this technique on the En-Gedi scroll, an ancient carbonised parchment discovered in Israel in 1970. It worked beautifully, revealing it to be the beginning of the Book of Leviticus.

Three years later Seales gained access to two Herculaneum scrolls held by the Institut de France in Paris. They were taken to Diamond Light Source, a stadium-sized particle accelerator in Oxfordshire that produces a very fine, powerful X-ray beam. This allowed minutely detailed 3D scans to be made.

But the Herculaneum material represented a far tougher challenge. The ink used in the En-Gedi scroll had contained a dense material, possibly a metal, that stood out in X-ray images. By contrast the Herculaneum scribes had applied a carbon-based ink to papyrus, itself plant-based – and therefore carbon-based – material.

To pick out the writing, carbon had to be distinguished from carbon. CT scans alone could not do that. A new approach was needed.

It came when a Silicon Valley investor picked up a children’s book about the ancient world. Seales and his team used a particle accelerator to produce 3D scans of the Herculaneum scrolls.

The prize master

Nat Friedman’s previous roles have included being chief executive of Github, a widely used platform for storing code and collaborating on software projects. He explains how his interest in antiquity was kindled in 2020 when he read 24 Hours in Ancient Rome. It wasn’t long before he stumbled on Seales’s work and the progress he had made in “flattening” the Herculaneum papyrus.

“I found it shocking that there was this preserved but unrecoverable library,” Friedman says.

If the scrolls were not too badly damaged and the scans were of a high resolution, he saw no reason why a form of AI known as machine learning could not be trained to identify the ink.

He tried to nudge wealthy individuals from Silicon Valley into funding Seales’s work. When that failed he took another approach. Friedman has built his career in the realm of open-source software, where code is shared and solutions are hammered out by like-minded collaborators. He decided to launch a competition.

Friedman chipped in $US100,000 towards the Vesuvius Challenge prize pot. His friend Daniel Gross, a former head of machine learning at Apple, put in another $US100,000. In total $US1.4m has been raised.

The biggest single prize is $US700,000, the largest bounty of its kind in archaeology, for identifying at least four separate passages of “continuous and plausible text”, each at least 140 characters long. The deadline is December 31.

Smaller prizes were offered for steps of progress. They included $US10,000 won by Casey Handmer, a former NASA physicist. He realised the ink on the main scroll resembled a charcoal banana and had a distinct texture.

More here:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/the-times/decoding-the-ancients-buried-by-vesuvius/news-story/6215ccc37831fbd2e21ad42e7de7a2cd

I have nothing to add – just great stuff…

David.

 

You Would Have To Say Aged Care Software Has A Way To Go!

This appeared last week:

Published On: 6 November 2023

Spotlight on aged care R&D investment in digital solutions

A recently released report on clinical care software in residential aged care demonstrates the breadth of disparate technology software across residential aged care and reinforces the need for greater data standards across the sector according to the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre (DHCRC).

Aged Care Industry Information Technology Council (ACIITC), in collaboration with the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA), last month released a report on the ‘Residential Aged Care Use of Clinical Care Systems’.

The report found that whilst residential aged care providers are using multiple digital devices there was limited integration of these within an organisation, and that only a small majority of providers believed their current clinical software was providing effective functionality. The integration with My Health Record is underway, and more recently gaining momentum, whilst a clear majority reported their clinical information software did not integrate with visiting clinician (GP) software.

This lack of integration was attributed to the need for standardised terminology across the sector, resources, minimum standards for technology platforms and the need for providers to engage in research and development activities with respect to clinical software.

DHCRC CEO Annette Schmiede said this latest report further added to the growing recognition of the gap that providers need to address when considering the role of digital technology in delivering better quality of care for older Australians.

“This report reinforces the challenges facing the aged care sector with the lack of data, terminology and conformance standards; and the continuity of care issues that is a whole of health and care issue that must be addressed,” Ms Schmiede said.

Industry standardisation on the horizon
One of DHCRC’s flagship projects, Aged Care Data Compare Plus, is looking to address many of the challenges identified in this report by demonstrating the benefits a standardised dataset can deliver.

Aged Care Data Compare Plus will test a prototype aged care quality indicator application developed by CSIRO and the University of Queensland. The app uses the HL7 FHIR data exchange standard to extract data from Regis Aged Care’s clinical information system, AutumnCare, in a consistent, secure format to support the calculation of evidence-based quality indicators.

“This a critical initiative that was identified in the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety as an exemplar of the type of innovation required to help reform the aged care sector,” Ms Schmiede said.

“We are now looking to garner broader industry and sector support for an evidence-based quality benchmarking and reporting solution that the whole industry can get behind.”

“There are many complex issues around privacy, security, compatibility, but this is exactly what the DHCRC was established to do; building the evidence-base to demonstrate the value and application of digital health innovations for doctors, clinicians, patients and governments.”

Here is the link:

https://digitalhealthcrc.com/spotlight-on-aged-care-rd-investment-in-digital-solutions/

I had to highlight this article for having a brought to my attention an aged care system called “Autumncare”. Great name for an aged care system!

You can find out much more here:

https://autumn.care/homepage

Also of interest to me is that the DHCRC is working to create Digital Health experts:

Here is a link:

https://digitalhealthcrc.com/projects/creating-a-national-digital-health-clinical-informatics-fellowship-program-a-pathway-to-the-future/

The project – which is ongoing apparently has the following title.

Creating a National Digital Health Clinical Informatics Fellowship Program: A Pathway to the Future

Here is the key info:

Project Objective

We currently have no agreed national curriculum, recognised career pathways and recognition program for clinicians who are keen to become practitioners and leaders in digital health e.g. Chief Clinical Information Officers and Chief Digital Health Officers. The goal of this program will be to create a national program for a clinical fellowship with the AIDH. This provides the healthcare system with a clear and evidence-based pathway to gain the skills and knowledge to transform care, with a nationally and (ultimately internationally) recognised fellowship.

Is anyone who reads here involved in any of this. Or know anyone who is?

David.