Meeting notice: The 00.10.03 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Suggested topic: NT and doping The Olympics raises the vexed question of the long-term effect of performance enhancing technologies on big ticket sports. Fanship depends on stories, usually having to do with the power of some species of virtue (discipline, will, heart, balls) to carry a recognizable member of the fan's tribe or group through adversity or challenge to triumph. preferably over members of other tribes. It seems to follow that audience participation could be killed either by inhibiting the success of virtue or repressing bondability with the players. If the outcome were perfectly knowable, with random outcomes being a special case of knowable, there would be no plot, no triumph. If ants could be to trained to play sports, there would be no identification (though admittedly the feat would be not without interest). If a random rich person regardless of physical condition could get a gold medal or a championship by buying a million bucks of PETs, both sides of the dynamic would be doused at once and almost all fans (outside perhaps of a few Ayn Randites) would withdraw. Thus from the pov of Big Sport, legalizing PETs is not an option. Doing so would not only sign the death warrent of the profession, it would leave governing bodies wide open to lawsuits when - as would certainly happen -- athletes damaged their bodies. Besides, sports has a long history of successfully keeping technological change within bounds that do not threaten the essential elements of the fan relationship. It is often argued that PETs are undectable and they will therefore inflict their mark with or without the sanction of Big Sport. At such moments someone interested in NT might point out that at some time in the not too distant future it will be possible to monitor the metabolism of any cell -- or of all of them -- for any desired length of time. In that sense, testing can get arbitrarily good. However, so can countermeasures; there is no way of knowing that signals being fed the sensors would necessarily mean anything. There is clearly a classic arms race here, with the governing bodies having most but not all of the capital and the athletes most but not all of the desire. It doesn't seem clear to me that either side can hope for a quick knockout, especially since PETs can only take an athlete just so far. Once the limiting constaint becomes the bursting strength of muscle tissue improvements have to stall out, regardless of where they come from. No one is going to sneak diamondoid bones, optical nerves, or polyer muscles past the inspectors at the gate. However, even if Big Sports manage to reassert theri control over technlogy they face an even worse problem, at least over the long- term: the gathering power of sports sciece. One can see the day approaching when it will be obvious who would post which times after exactly which how many hours of what sorts of training regime, and how to partition an expected outcome into genes, training, early childhood experiences, thermal noise, and so on. It is not instantly clear that the myth-making that is professional sports will be able to survive that level of reduction. Perhaps it can. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> This seems like an important story -- engineering scientists at the University of Wisconsin used genetic algorithms to design a diesel engine that was 15% more efficient while generating half the soot. These gains were achieved just by letting different parameters of the compression cycle compete against each other -- variations in geometry were not permitted. The technique seems like the nearest thing we have at the moment to an NT- relevant AI. We can hope for a better idea, since at present genetic algorithms are extremely resource intensive (in this case, the ratio of simulated to real time was about a hundred million to one), but if nothing else comes along, genetic algorithms might be there as a last resort. (http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/19/science/19DESI.html) <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Legend: "NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group. The Group meets on the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little else. If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg' to majordomo@world.std.com. Unsubs follow the same model. Discussion should be sent to nsg- d@world.std.com, which must be subscribed to separately. You must be subscribed to nsg-d to post to it and must post from the address from which you subscribed (An anti- spam thing). Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com.