Steve Matrazzo - Columns on science and technology

Steve Matrazzo

Columns on

science and technology

2 The Dundalk Eagle, Dundalk, MD August 8, 2013

And so we come to the meat of the question ....“That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.”

William ShakespeareRomeo and Juliet

We tend to fo-cus our at-tention on the issues

of the moment. Embas-sies closed over security worries. The latest em-ployment statistics. Civil war in Syria and unrest in Egypt. Immigration re-form, the debt ceiling, the NSA, who’s running for office .... And we should. All of those things are, in their own ways, important mat-ters. But we tend to ad-dress them in immediate and isolated terms, often ignoring the underlying — and more far-reaching — issues of long-term effects, unintended consequences and the implications of precedent. And in one recent case, seemingly missing the deepest questions entirely.

t t t Not lost, but certainly glossed over, in the never-ending parade of phenom-ena through the public spotlight was the serving of a few unusual hamburg-ers. They weren’t just any hamburgers, of course; they differed from all that had come before in one im-portant aspect; they were meat, but had never been part of an animal. Created by scientist Mark Post and funded by Google magnate Sergey Brin, the beef served in London on Monday was grown in a laboratory at

Maastricht University in the Netherlands from cattle stem cells that had been scientifically coaxed to form muscle tissue — that is to say, meat. The adventurous din-ers who got to take part in Monday’s taste test of Post’s “cultured beef” (think “cultured pearls” for context) gave it mixed reviews. Post partook, of course, and was joined by Ameri-can journalist Josh Schon-wald, author of The Taste of Tomorrow, and Aus-trian nutritional scientist Hanni Rützler. Reports of their reac-tions included repeated use of words like “almost” and “close.” The consensus seemed to be that the burg-ers had the right smell and texture, and that the fla-vor was off, perhaps mostly due to a lack of the satisfy-ing fat that is an essential part of the beef experience. In sum, what short-comings the burgers had seemed likely to be fixable as the culturing process becomes more refined. A good deal of the report-ing on the event seemed to

focus on the “wow vs. ick” factor — the “gee whiz” amazement at the pros-pect of edible meat being grown in a lab instead of within an animal’s hide, and the “creepy” idea of eating “Franken-meat.” There was, of course, plenty of reporting that looked a bit deeper, noting that culturing of meats, if extended to other food species and refined to the point of being both eco-nomically feasible and ac-ceptable to diners, could have far-reaching impacts on everything from pro-moting public health and fighting hunger to reduc-ing water use and lowering greenhouse gas emissions. At least some supporters of animal-rights hope the technology will end the captivity and slaughter of animals for food. Others, not surprisingly, are simply aghast at the prospect of moving human-ity farther along the road of “artificial” foods than it already is, in some cases regarding Post’s cultured beef as the harbinger of a dystopia worthy of Aldous Huxley, sure that there is

something nefarious in it. I’ve yet to see — though I may have missed — any mention of what is re-ferred to in philosophy as “essence” — the attributes that make a thing what it fundamentally is, which it must have in order to be what it is, and without which it isn’t. In Romeo and Juliet, the previously-cited quote follows on the heels of the less-known passage, “What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a man.” Extending Juliet’s no-tion more broadly, we are ultimately prompted to ask what any thing truly is, in the most fundamen-tal sense. We hear or read a word, and it conjures an immedi-ate, almost reflexive un-derstanding, a mental im-age of the thing denoted by that word. But how often do we give any sort of deep thought to the absolute meaning of the words we reflexively understand? What is “beef,” exactly? What precise properties definitively make some-thing beef, and what prop-erties — or lack thereof — render it not beef? While Post’s cultured

Talk of the Town by Steve Matrazzo

beef may fall short for the moment, it seems inevi-table that he, or someone following in his path, will produce something in-distinguishable from the meat of a slaughtered steer, identical even at the microscopic level, in physi-cal structure, chemical composition, smell, texture and flavor, satisfying all of the sensory expectations we associate with beef, and interacting with our own bodies in the way to which we are accustomed. But it will never have mooed, walked on hooves or chewed the cud. Will it be beef? News of the London taste test reminded me of a long-ago discussion prompted by advances in the laboratory manufac-ture of diamonds. As with Post’s beef, the lab-made stones in ques-tion were not quite the equal of naturally-occur-ring gems, but it was clear that future iterations of them would be. Diamond concerns like DeBeers, not surprisingly, were eager to discredit the very idea that something manufactured by man rather than by nature could, or should, be called a “diamond.” They even campaigned for legal definitions that would allow only natu-rally-occurring carbon crystals to be called “dia-monds.” But the question was raised: if something is a carbon crystal, with the

chemical composition, crystalline structure, opti-cal properties and general appearance characteristic of a diamond — if, upon presentation of a stone with no knowledge of its provenance, even the most expert and well-equipped examiner could not deter-mine its origin — is it or is it not a diamond? Meat of all species and gemstones of all variet-ies — and a host of other material things previously known only in their natu-ral occurrences — are like-ly to be within our grasp to create, probably sooner rather than later. We are advancing tech-nologically not only beyond what previous generations could have imagined, but often faster than even we realize. This is not a bad thing. It is to be embraced and, if we are wise, pondered. Human civilization is in the midst of a tide of change that may be funda-mental to our own identi-ty, and there is in that tide a deeper question than simply whether or not we want to eat the beef, of what effects its wide-spread use might have. There’s the question of “essence,” and in the long run, it won’t just be about deciding what “beef” fun-damentally is, but — as the world in which we live changes, and we change with it — what we are. So sit down, grab a burger, and give it some thought ....

nOpinions expressed are those of the writer and do not represent the opinion of The Dundalk Eagle or Kim-bel Publication Inc. You can contact Eagle editor Steve Matrazzo via e-mail at [email protected].

Mark Post and his cultured-beef hamburger. photo courtesy Maastricht University

We are ultimately prompted to ask what any thing truly is, in themost fundamental sense.

2 The Dundalk Eagle, Dundalk, MD July 12, 2012

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There’s a cost if we won’t pay the price to stay ahead

Okay, so the world is abuzz over the apparent proof of the existence

of the Higgs boson, popu-larly known as the “God particle,” which, according to the applicable theory, would explain why mat-ter exists and why, after the moment of creation, the universe didn’t simply disperse into a vast mist of near-nothingness instead of forming galaxies, stars, planets ... and us. The term traces to the 1993 book The God Par-ticle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What is the Ques-tion? by Nobel Prize-win-ning physicist Leon Leder-man, who explains the nickname by calling the particle “so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final under-standing of the structure of matter, yet so elusive.” In the years since, the name has rankled both sci-entific and religious crit-ics, for obvious reasons. It has also deflected credit away from the brilliant physicist who theorized the particle’s existence, Peter Higgs. Higgs returned to the spotlight, however, when scientists at CERN, [the French acronym for Euro-pean Organization for Nu-

clear Research, located in Switzerland], recently an-nounced that experiments conducted at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) yielded a particle with properties “consis-tent” with those expected for the Higgs boson. [Contrary to popular be-lief, scientists are notori-ously cautious about claim-ing absolute certainty.] There’s something else to be upset about, how-ever. The thing was found in Switzerland. The words “American Exceptionalism” have gained a lot of traction in the public forum in recent years as the term of art for the notion that the U.S. is something unique in hu-man history, a nation with a special destiny to stand at the head of all nations. We are, the theory goes, meant to lead the world in all things — wealth, military might, influence, culture ... and science. After all, we gave the world everything from the light bulb to nuclear power. We gave humanity the vac-cine against polio and the Hubble Space Telescope. So why was the Higgs boson discovered by a bunch of Europeans? Because they were will-ing to pay for it.

The LHC is a 17-mile high-energy particle race-track that uses highly powerful and sophisticated electromagnetic genera-tors to accelerate particles to 99.999 percent of the speed of light. It did not come cheap. In fact, the LHC cost over $10 billion to build. U.S. researchers pro-posed such a project in the 1980s; Congress wasn’t in-terested in the expense. If anything, our leaders have been prone to seeing public spending on science as a lurking boondoggle. There may well be cases in which they’re right, but all too often, science policy is being made by people who have no grasp of science and technology. There was former Sen. Ted Stevens’ attempt to

describe the Internet as “a series of tubes,” even as he led the Senate committee that was responsible for regulating the Web. Then there was the “bird brain” study. Back in the 1980s, researchers sought federal funding for a study of how songbirds relearn their seasonal calls. Why would we want to spend tax money on that? The answer is that birds were among the first ver-tebrate species in which neurogenesis — the growth of new brain tissue — was observed in adulthood. A deeper understanding of neurogenesis in complex species could have implica-tions for the treatment of everything from brain in-jury to Alzheimer’s disease. But all the policymakers hear is “bird brains.” It should come as no surprise, then, that federal science spending as a per-centage of Gross Domestic Product has fallen by more than half since the 1970s. The usual response from spending hawks is that such research should be funded by the private sec-tor, but the truth is that the profit motive will only support research that has a clear potential for profit. The most important ad-


We are, the theory goes,meant to lead the world in all things — wealth, military might, influence, culture ... and science.

vances, however, are rarely made by scientists looking for marketable products; they’re made by scientists seeking to answer funda-mental questions. Michael Faraday was simply trying to under-stand the strange work-ings of electricity and mag-netism, neither of which, in his time, was much more than a strange curi-osity with little apparent practical importance. But his induction prin-ciple is at the heart of the alternator in your car, the turbine that creates elec-tricity at Conowingo, the MRI scanner at Bayview and much more. Gregor Mendel wasn’t trying to invent anything; he wanted to know why some peas are green and others are yellow. But all of the genetic sci-ence we have today, which has already yielded lifesav-ing (and profitable) medi-cal advances and promise to yield even more, was born of his basic, and un-profitable, research. Albert Einstein wasn’t trying to invent anything;

he just wanted to know how the universe worked. And those who followed — Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, etc. — just wanted to know what was going on inside the atom. Today, the principles of mass-energy conversion and quantum mechanics are at the root of nuclear power, which provides about 20 percent of the electricity in the U.S., and the micro-electronics that give us so many great gad-gets to use that electricity — including the computer on which I’m typing. What will the discovery of the Higgs boson lead to? Maybe nothing, in practi-cal terms. But who knows? The U.S. will spend over $1 trillion this year to re-main the world’s leading military power. Will we pay the fraction of that to stay at the top of the sci-ence and technology heap, or will we pay the price for devaluing science? In a nation where peo-ple are still trying to slip creationism into science classes, it’s hard to say what the answer will be.


2 The Dundalk Eagle, Dundalk, MD June 12, 2014

Our new computer overlords? Not so fast ....

Chances are most people wouldn’t recognize the name Jules

Bergman. Even those who had heard of him in the past have likely forgotten about him. Bergman was a journal-ist by trade, and he made his place in the annals of the profession through his long service at ABC News, where he worked from 1953 until shortly before his death in 1987. What made him special was that he had a career-long “beat.” Most jour-nalists, especially those working for large national outlets, tend to move pe-riodically from one area of specialization to anoth-er — court reporting, the crime beat, business, poli-tics ... and, for those with the nerve, war reporting — building a portfolio and a reputation in the hope of “moving up the ladder.” The upside of such a system is that it creates a pool of reporters with exposure to a broad range of topics, making them ca-pable of responding to an ever-changing news land-scape. The downside is that very few reporters for general-audience outlets achieve a high level of ex-

pertise in any particular area. Bergman, for all of the more than three decades he spent at ABC, did one thing — science reporting — and he did it extraor-dinarily well. He played a central role in ABC’s coverage of the space pro-gram, medical issues, en-ergy — including the acci-dent at the Three Mile Is-land nuclear power plant in 1979 — and virtually any other story that had a significant scientific or technological component. His long background in science gave him the abil-ity to do something more than merely take the claims made by his sub-jects and pass them along them without context. Instead, he demon-strated the ability to cut through the techno-speak, sort the wheat from the chaff and tell viewers what the great advances unfolding before their eyes really meant. It’s not that sound sci-ence reporting no longer exists; it’s that most “news consumers” don’t get ex-posed to it. “Specialty out-lets” ranging from Scien-tific American magazine to the Smithsonian Chan-nel on cable to online out-lets like Wired and io9 do

outstanding — and acces-sible — reporting on vari-ous aspects of science and technology. However, most people don’t patronize such out-lets, and at the news out-lets to which the vast bulk of people gravitate, real scientific knowledge is a bit harder to come by. This would have been a good week for televi-sion viewers to have Jules Bergman at their disposal.

t t t A major shortcoming of most general-audience sci-ence once again surfaced this week with the head-lines declaring that “a computer has passed the ‘Turing test.’” [Short version: In 1950, British mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing proposed an experiment in which a human judge engages in communications with a human and with a ma-chine designed to generate communications indistin-guishable from those of a human. If the judge can-not reliably tell which is which, the machine is said to have “passed” the test. This is regarded as a criti-cal threshold in the ability of machines to “think.”] First of all, most reports

got a major detail wrong; it wasn’t a computer — some even more errone-ously called it a “super-computer” — that alleg-edly passed the test; it was a program. The far more important failing of most general-audience coverage of the story is that those report-ing on it were too credu-lous by far, lacking the scientific and technologi-cal background to under-stand the concept of the Turing test or to evaluate the validity of the specific experiment on which they were reporting Instead, they swallowed the claims they were spoon-fed, went straight to the attention-grabbing headlines and the inevi-table references to Skynet and HAL 9000 — not to mention the more recent movie Her, or Apple’s Siri — and never looked any deeper. Fortunately, the more expert reporters who live on the science beat did what they do best, and the real story is out there for those who seek it. Some have pointed out that the specific program that scored the alleged success was specifically emulating a teenaged boy speaking what was sup-


posedly not his native tongue — leaving a built-in margin of error for re-sponses that would nor-mally be considered “off.” Others noted that the threshold of success — “fooling” 30 percent of a hand-picked group of judg-es in a single session — was set ridiculously low. More importantly, most of the best reporting point-ed out just what even a well-designed Turing test does — and does not — measure. The “conversational” test does not actually measure intelligence, sen-tience, self-awareness or self-actualization — and it certainly doesn’t measure that most ineffable quality of “consciousness.” While the creation of technology that would re-peatedly and reliably pass a strictly-administered Turing test would be an important advance, it comes nowhere near quali-fying as true artificial in-telligence. (As Sheldon Cooper might say, at best, it’s a modest leap forward from the basic technology that

gave us Country Bear Jamboree.)

t t t As I wrote almost a year ago, in the wake of anoth-er widely misunderstood science story:

We are advancing tech-nologically not only be-yond what previous gen-erations could have imag-ined, but often faster than we even realize. This is not a bad thing. It is to be embraced and, if we are wise, pondered. Human civilization is in the midst of a tide of change that may be fundamental to our own identity .... The age in which we live, and the questions be-fore us, put us in a posi-tion of great responsibility not only to our fellow hu-mans today but to genera-tions yet to come. We are setting the precedents for the age of technology. It would be nice if we had better information at our disposal. Yeah, I really do miss Jules Bergman ....


2 The Dundalk Eagle September 25, 2014

n Opinions expressed are those of the writer and do not represent the opinion of The Dundalk Eagle or Kimbel Publication Inc. You can contact Eagle editor Steve Matrazzo via e-mail at [email protected].

It was a genuinely beautiful moment. After 14 years of futility and two more of teasing, the Orioles had just beaten the Toronto Blue Jays to

clinch their first division title since 1997, and Adam Jones was sealing his place as the successor of Brooks Robinson and Cal Ripken Jr. in the hearts of Baltimore baseball fans.

Having completed the traditional on-field jumping, shouting and embraces of teammates and the time-honored club-house champagne revelry, Jones emerged from the dugout and took an impromptu lap of the field, spraying some of the die-hards with beer shaken from the bottle he carried, treating a few to the pie-in-the-face usually reserved for each game’s hero player, and not only giving hand-shakes and high-fives, but allowing some to outright grab the newly-crowned “Mr. Oriole” in a bear hug.

The fans, unsurprisingly, ate it up.Those who actually took part, that is.A disturbing number of those in the

stands chose to experience that sure-to-be-iconic moment not with their eyes, ears and bodies but through their “devic-es” — that is, their smart phones and tablets.

It’s hardly a new phenomenon; in recent years, popular music performers includ-ing Wilco, Bjork, the Black Crowes the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Kate Bush have gotten headlines for asking concertgoers to put away their devices, on the premise that their use is both an imposition on others in attendance (think of someone holding up a device — with its glowing screen — while you’re trying to actually enjoy the concert) and an impediment to the users’ own experience of the event.

As The Wall Street Journal reported in 2010 about a Natalie Merchant concert:

“In the second half of the concert, Ms. Merchant paused to call out a man near the front who’d been brandishing his phone throughout. ‘I’m right here,’ she said with icy sarcasm. ‘This is live. This is where the show is.’”

I’m no Luddite; as I’ve noted often, my first hands-on experiences with a computer came in the mid-1970s, when the computer was the size of a small room, we programmed it in FORTRAN on Hollerith cards, and the output came via a dot-matrix printer about as big as a washing machine. I first encountered the Internet in the early 1980s, when it was still called CSNET and it could only be

accessed from a small knot of universi-ties and research institutions — plus the military.

Embracing technology, however, does not mean technology should replace gen-uine experiences.

Sure, the folks who recorded Adam Jones’ lap at Camden Yards have a perma-nent record of the moment (albeit poorly shot, in all likelihood), but can they claim to have actually experienced it firsthand?

Adam Jones was right there. It was live. That was where the show was.

It’s a shame those folks missed it.

t t t From a column appearing in this space a little over two years ago: When I interviewed former governor Bob Ehrlich about his book Turn This Car Around, he said his career in Maryland politics was over, but that he wanted to “have a national voice.” Could he make his own run for the White House? He’s a solid conservative, but not so dogmatic as to scare swing vot-

ers (He did win in Maryland, after all.) He connects well with blue-collar voters who have made the difference for the GOP for the last generation or so .... I can see it now: “O’Malley-Ehrlich III: This Time, For All The Marbles.” Tell me that wouldn’t be worth the pay-per-view fees. O’Malley, of course, has been obvious in his preparations for a 2016 presidential run for some time now. (My morning e-mail included a press release from his awkwardly-named O’Say Can You See PAC about a Senate race — in Iowa.) Ehrlich, on the other hand, had been relatively quiet about his own ambitions (though he did author another book) un-til he made a trip to New Hampshire — home of the leadoff primary — earlier this month and generated enough interest to warrant coverage by the Washington Post and the online Daily Beast. “O’Malley-Ehrlich III: This Time, For All The Marbles” — remember, you read it here first.

A brief reminder to pay attention to the momentTalk of the Town by Steve Matrazzo

2 The Dundalk Eagle November 20, 2014

Net neutrality prevents service providers from being gatekeepers


nOpinions expressed are those of the writer and do not represent the opinion of The Dundalk Eagle or Kimbel Publication Inc. You can contact Eagle editor Steve Matrazzo via e-mail at [email protected].

In the “even a stopped clock is right twice a day” department, Sen. Ted Cruz last week had this to say about

net neutrality: “The Internet should not operate at the speed of government.” He’s absolutely right, of course, just not in the way he meant. Cruz, a Texas Republican identified with the all-government-action-is-in-herently-bad skepticism of the Tea Party mindset, called recent calls for the Fed-eral Communications Commission to take steps to ensure equal treatment of all Internet traffic “Obamacare for the Internet,” whatever that means. His intent was clearly to conjure the image of an Internet mired in the quicksand of bureaucratic regulation and stifled beneath the hobnailed jack-boot, etc., and connect the idea with the image of President Obama, who last week urged the FCC (an independent agency not under White House control) to adopt tougher neutrality rules. Cruz’s statements against the net neu-trality push drew him into a spitball fight with another senator, Minnesota Democrat Al Franken, who responded in a CNN interview that “[Cruz] has it completely wrong, and he just doesn’t understand what this issue is.” So what is the issue? And, for that matter, what exactly is net neutrality? Essentially, it is the principle that Internet service providers [ISPs] should treat all Internet traffic equally, not giving price or speed preference to particular websites, content, platforms,

applications, hardware, browsers, oper-ating systems, etc. For the record, it is what has existed during the entire history of the Internet. ISPs — like Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner, for instance — insist that they have no intention of engaging in the activities that net neutrality rules would prohibit, but there is at least one documented instance of an ISP — Com-cast, specifically — intentionally slow-ing certain classes of traffic. Furthermore, it’s worth noting that the current FCC debate stems from the fact that earlier this year, the agency was poised to consider rules allowing preferential treatment — a so-called “fast lane” for content providers willing to pay for it. It’s a reasonable bet that the proposal didn’t simply arise out of thin air. Verizon, after all, had already chal-lenged open-Internet rules in court. Free commerce, one might say. But freedom for whom? Too much of latter-day pseudo-libertarian thought (as op-posed to true libertarianism) is focused on removing the fetters from com-merce, with little attention given to the freedom-inhibiting effects commercial power can have on individual freedom. In this case, it is your freedom at stake — your right to readily access the cornucopæia of information and com-munication that is the Internet. To be sure, the rule change now being considered would protect users — that is, you — from directly discriminatory treatment. But as long as an ISP like

Comcast or Verizon does not slow the service that you buy, it can give faster service to a company that pays to get its content into the “fast lane.” Picture this: you subscribe to a streaming video service, like Netflix. The big conglomerate that owns your ISP also owns a competing streaming service, and it would love for you to dump your current streaming service and switch to theirs. So, it slows trans-mission of the competing service until you get tired of it and switch, putting more money in the pockets of your ISP’s parent company. The same company, it turns out, also owns a news service — these are big media conglomerates we’re talking about, after all — and uses similar tactics to get you to stop visiting Fox News/MSNBC/CNN online, so you’ll start using their service, where the ad-vertising revenue comes to them. Speaking of Fox News and MSNBC ... maybe the company that owns your ISP has very strong political or social opinions — since the Hobby Lobby decision, they can, apparently — and would like to promote those opinions through its corporate practices. Without net neutrality guarantees, it could. An ISP owned by, say, George Soros could make it inconvenient for users to access the Fox News site and easy to get onto MSNBC.com, while another owned by... oh, Sheldon Adel-

son, perhaps? ... could do the exact op-posite Such practices could have effects ev-erywhere from news to entertainment to retail. (Imagine: buy your shoes from Zap-pos, or good luck logging on to any other shoe website.) In any case, the danger is not just that free expression will be stifled, but that established companies with enough cash to pay for preferential treatment will get it, while start-ups will struggle to make themselves visible online. Potentially, non-neutrality could have even broader consequences — preferences given to certain brands of computers, or certain web browsers or operating systems, which could stifle innovation not only in content, but in technology, keeping upstarts in both sectors on the margins while assuring the established order an uninterrupted flow of revenue. All of which might be avoided — maybe — with some firm rules pro-hibiting what amounts to monopolistic behavior. Ted Cruz is absolutely right; the In-ternet should not operate at the speed of government. That is, it shouldn’t operate as gov-ernment does, giving big moneyed in-terests exactly what they want, exactly when they want it, while leaving the little guy on the outside looking in.

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Steve Matrazzo - Columns on science and technology