Category Archives: Immortality

Published April 3, 2017, 10:30 PM

By AFP

Los Angeles Russell Westbrook edged closer to NBA immortality with his 40th triple-double of the season on Sunday as LeBron James dug deep to help Cleveland clinch a double-overtime thriller against Indiana.

Oklahoma Citys Russell Westbrook posted 40 points, 13 rebounds and 10 assists for his 40th triple-double in a losing effort against the Charlotte Hornets, 113-101, Sunday in Oklahoma City. (AP)

Westbrook scored 40 points, grabbed 13 rebounds and provided 10 assists as the Oklahoma City Thunder fell to a 113-101 home loss against the Charlotte Hornets.

The Thunder guard is now one triple-double away from tying Hall of Famer Oscar Robertsons single-season record of 41, set in 1961-62 for the Cincinnati Royals.

With six games left in the regular season, Westbrook can match the record when the Thunder host the Milwaukee Bucks on Tuesday.

Westbrook however was more focused on the Thunders defeat than the latest chapter in his remarkable season.

Asked for his thoughts about the possibility of tying Robertsons long-standing mark on Tuesday, Westbrook replied: We gotta win. Thats my thoughts.

We were just making bad mistakes, bad decisions, Westbrook said after a game that saw the Thunder hand over 24 turnovers. Starting with myself, we have to take better care of the ball.

Oklahoma City now lies in sixth place in the Western Conference standings at 43-33.

WARRIORS WIN

In the Western Conference, Stephen Curry scored 42 points as the leading Golden State Warriors moved to within three wins of clinching the best record in the league.

The Dubs thrashed the Washington Wizards 139-115 to improve to 63-14.

Curry broke the 40-point barrier for the fourth time this season while Draymond Green added a triple-double to guide the Warriors to their 11th consecutive victory.

The Warriors are now only three more wins to be certain of clinching the best record in the league heading into the postseason.

Golden State now stands at 63-14, leading the San Antonio Spurs (59-17) by three-and-a-half games with five remaining.

The Wizards, meanwhile, fell to 46-31, one behind Toronto as they battle for third place in the Eastern Conference.

In Cleveland, the Cavaliers looked to 2016 NBA Finals MVP James once again to secure a pulsating 135-130 win over the Pacers in double-overtime.

James finished with 41 points, 16 rebounds and 11 assists for his 11th triple-double of the season and the 53rd of his career in a crucial win for the Cavaliers.

Tags: Cavaliers, Charlotte Hornets, Indiana, Manila Bulletin, mb.com.ph, NBA: Westbrook nears NBA immortality, Russell Westbrook

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NBA: Westbrook nears NBA immortality - Manila Bulletin

For years they had been inseparable, off the ice and on the ice, where they made magic as sweet as any set of NHL matched-pair wingers have in a very, very long time, and in the minds eye of the hockey universe.

But after a while, Patrik Elias yearned for independence from his friend Petr Sykora; yearned to be known as an independent entity and for his own identity. He had, after all, earned that.

And so it was early in the 2002-03 season that I approached Elias, whom I had known since he first joined the Devils as a 19-year-old back in 1995. Sykora had been traded the previous offseason. I started a question, Petr

Elias interrupted me.

Im Patrik, he said.

He most certainly was.

He most certainly is.

He is Patrik Elias, the greatest forward ever to play for the Devils and one of the great two-way forwards of his generation who probably sacrificed some 75-100 goals and 150-200 points off his lifetime 408-617-1,025 total in order to accommodate the unyielding defense-first philosophy of the only organization for which he ever worked.

Except, as Elias told me when we chatted upon the announcement of his retirement, it probably wasnt much of a sacrifice at all to become an indispensable part of two of the three Stanley Cups the franchise won while reigning over the Eastern Conference for more than a decade.

There are no regrets for me, said New Jerseys forever No. 26, who next year will have his sweater raised to the rafters to accompany those of franchise bedrocks Martin Brodeur, Scott Stevens, Scott Niedermayer and Ken Daneyko. Maybe I could have had different numbers somewhere else, but I was happy winning championships. I was happy making the playoffs every year and I was happy knowing we had a chance to win every year.

You either adjusted in New Jersey or you didnt stay. We were all proud of being part of those teams. I wasnt just a one-way player. If they wanted to move me from wing to center, I did it. I played the PP and the PK. I could check. Im very happy being known for that.

When I look back, the thing I am most proud of is that I spent my entire career with one team, Elias said, before referring to the man who ran the show. You know, I wasnt the only one to make that decision. Lou [Lamoriello] kept me for all those years, too.

Elias almost left, almost signed with the Rangers when he became a free agent the summer of 2006. In fact, he had essentially agreed to a six-year, $42 million contract. But when New York general manager Glen Sather would not give the winger a no-move clause, Elias circled back to the Devils and signed a seven-year, $42 million deal.

It was slightly more than the $625,000 he earned during the 1999-2000 Cup season when he recorded 72 points (35-37) and put the puck on Jason Arnotts stick with one of the slickest passes you have ever seen for the Game 6 double-overtime Cup winner in Dallas. That $625,000, by the way, that was surpassed that season by 486 players. And that $625,000 was Elias salary on the first year of a three-year deal he received following a holdout through which he missed the seasons first nine games.

It wasnt always roses with Lou, Elias said. But we made it work and the relationship got better as it went on.

The 2000-01 season in which the winger recorded 40 goals and 56 assists for 96 points was the most productive of his career. The Devils gave away the Cup final and a repeat in that seven-game loss to the Avalanche after becoming cavalier about their talent and supremacy, but that was through no fault of Elias, who had 23 points (9-14) in 25 playoff games after posting 20 (seven goals, 13 assists) in 23 matches the previous tournament.

Those were the days of the A Line, the shooting comet of the unit featuring Elias, Arnott and Sykora that was as lethal, skilled and entertaining a combination that has played in the league over the last quarter century. While the rest of the league was playing checkers, the A Line was playing chess.

It seemed as if the three pieces would be interlocked forever. They lasted just over two years. Arnott, unhappy and becoming a disruptive influence, was traded first, at the 02 deadline. Then Sykora.

Obviously those were the best two years, but more than that, playing on that line with Petr and Arnie was the most fun of my career, Elias said. Every time we went onto the ice, every game, every practice, we had so much fun together.

But Lou made those decisions. I dont really know why. I wish we had been together longer.

Elias thrived without Arnott and Sykora. He became the quintessential checking wing for Pat Burns 2003 Cup champions, became the left wing on another one of the Devils signature units, the EGG line centered by Scott Gomez that had Brian Gionta on the right. He later moved to center when times became leaner in New Jersey.

But he never wore another NHL logo. Never played for another team, this exceptional player who most certainly is Hall of Fame worthy and who, felled by a knee injury that kept him off the ice all season, will skate in warmups one final time before the home finale against the Islanders next Saturday night.

One more skate for Elias, who established his own identity as a franchise icon and who will leave New Jersey with everybody not only knowing his name, but chanting it, as well.

Hes Patrik.

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How two trades pushed Patrik Elias into Devils immortality - New York Post

While going through my Facebook memories, a friendship reminder abruptly wrenched my heart. It said, You became friend with one person Anum Rustum 5 years ago, today March 11, 2012 Sunday. The memory breaks my patience as it was the same time when I literally was busy in the process of restoring my shattered broken heart and emotions in the stable form after returning back from a funeral of my childhood friend to whom I shared golden era of childhood with a lot of mischiefs and screw ups.

I just cant believe this happened to one of us. I just wanted to stop the world and just wanted to scream out loud. Its very gloomy and difficult to put my tears into words as its been 8 days of hard trying every time my pen stops at the point, my heart bleeds and my tears make every word vague to follow up while writing in the account of this innocent soul who left us this early. When people covered his face and raised him towards his final destination, it felt like somebody took something from my heart, those recitations still echoes in my ears. I was stunned and just thinking over and over again that We belong to Allah and to Him we shall return.

Some say that young people are not supposed to die. It feels like it is against all the rules of nature. It is not fair it should not happen. Unfortunately, it does happen and when it does it can be agonising. This sudden incident is a wakeup call for us that we are hanging with the tree of morality constantly trying to rescue ourselves. It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom to move on in ones inward journey into new realms than to stand for outer freedom, just a slip takes into world of immortality. I cant cope up with my agony whenever I think that how melancholic it is when your name has been called in hall for receiving gold medal in MBBS but you are not present even in this world to receive it. Who knows that your preparation for serving your patients will takes you to the same hospital unconscious. It stings when I think that how painful it is when you are just one step ahead from your success to get your hard work rewarded.

New dreams, hopes and journey towards life ends before it even starts. Anum, how fine was it when the day started with grace and how much it is graceful now, that you are remembered every morning with every opening eye. You remain in our prayers for eternity as time may heal anguish of the wound but the space you left and the loss of your existence can never be repaired. May Allah SWT grant you highest place in Jannat and bless you with His endless bounties.

MAHRUKH IBRAHIM,

Abbottabad, March 12.

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Just a slip from mortal to immortality - The Nation

Peter Higgs picks up the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 medal

Phil McCarthy/Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851

By Richard Webb

Youre in London to receive the 1851 Royal Commission medal for outstanding influence on science. Arent you bored of medals and prizes by now? I think I shall have to clear some handkerchiefs and things out of another drawer to find room. There are quite a lot.

How does it feel to have achieved immortality? I describe it as notoriety rather than immortality. It continues to be an embarrassment how easily I get recognised on the streets of Edinburgh going to do my shopping. Theres always somebody who wants to take a selfie or something. Its nice but theres too much of it.

Many people thought the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERNs Large Hadron Collider would be just the start, yet five years on nothing more has been discovered. Yes, thats rather worrying. The hope has been that we would discover things to connect particle physics much more with cosmology, dark matter and that kind of thing. It doesnt seem to be happening yet.

Youre thinking of theories that go beyond the standard model that the Higgs is a component of, like supersymmetry? Yes, supersymmetry in particular. Quite apart from its potential to explain dark matter, from a pure theorists point of view its hard to see how to make the connection between particle physics and gravity in any other way.

Isnt finding the Higgs and nothing else the very worst of outcomes? It would still have been worse if theyd found nothing. The standard model is so successful in other ways that a non-discovery would have been really rather shattering.

Do you still feel a hint of embarrassment referring to the particle as the Higgs? It could be worse: when its called the god particle that really upsets people. That seems to me an unfortunate mixing of theoretical physics with bad theology. Ive ceased to be embarrassed about the particle being named after me because Ive spent many years playing down the tendency to attach my name to everything in the theory. But its upsetting for people who worked on the theory even before me to have my name on what they did.

How can fundamental physics get out of its current impasse? There are plenty of indications of the need to go beyond the standard model, but not necessarily through the sort of thing they do at CERN. The discoveries in neutrino physics about neutrino oscillations dont fit well at all. And people are beginning to learn more about ancient galaxies and so on, which throws some light on the question of whether dark matter exists or whether youve got to modify gravity. I think we have to watch the astrophysical evidence coming in.

A lot of people would ask why we should bother trying to discover new physics. What would you say to that? The person who answered that was Robert Wilson, the builder of the machine at Fermilab when he testified before US Congress in 1969. He simply said, this is one of the things that makes this country worth defending. I think theres a general tendency now for people to devalue pure science and concentrate on the spin-offs. Its a mistake. Its giving in to the idea that pure science doesnt really matter unless you can get something tangible out of it.

What was your motivation for becoming a theoretical physicist? The seed was probably planted when I was at school in Bristol during the second world war. One of its former students, whose name appeared on the honours board, was Paul Dirac. He was about as pure a theoretical physicist as you could get, maybe overly pure. It was curiosity about him that began to draw me in aided by my incompetence as an experimentalist in my student days at Kings College London.

What would your advice be to someone who has your sort of esoteric interests? Go undercover. I wasnt productive in an obvious way; I didnt churn out papers. I think these days the University of Edinburgh would have sacked me long ago, theres just too much competition. So now I would say, do it in your spare time, and get yourself a solid publication record in the sort of thing that gets you recognition more readily.

Have we lost sight as a society of the value of knowledge for knowledges sake? Theres certainly a danger that people in government circles are losing sight of it. With various economic crises and problems hitting us, particularly things that may be self-inflicted, its hard to argue the case.

Do you mean things like Brexit? If the UK does get out of the European Union, as we seem to be doing, theres going to be a very great upheaval because more and more of the funding for scientific research in this country has come from Europe. The people who want to get us out are going to have to reverse that process in some way and they wont find it easy to do. I dont think I would be very happy in the US either with the Trump regime, with attitudes that will affect science. But the trend towards being anti-rationalist affects more than just science itself, and it is worrying.

So how do we make the case for expertise and knowledge for knowledges sake? Perhaps from watching the mess that some of the non-experts make of things.

Peter Higgs is emeritus professor of physics at the University of Edinburgh, UK. In 1964, along with Robert Brout and Franois Englert at the Free University of Brussels, he proposed a new particle that would explain how other fundamental particles gain mass. The discovery of the Higgs boson, announced in July 2012, led to the award of the 2013 Nobel prize in physics to Higgs and Englert.

Read more: Instant Expert: The Higgs Boson; The Higgs boson makes the universe stable just. Coincidence?

More on these topics:

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Peter Higgs on knowledge, immortality and the future of physics - New Scientist

Head in the cloud: could our neutral networks soon be running via a computer program? Photograph: Alamy

Heres what happens. You are lying on an operating table, fully conscious, but rendered otherwise insensible, otherwise incapable of movement. A humanoid machine appears at your side, bowing to its task with ceremonial formality. With a brisk sequence of motions, the machine removes a large panel of bone from the rear of your cranium, before carefully laying its fingers, fine and delicate as a spiders legs, on the viscid surface of your brain. You may be experiencing some misgivings about the procedure at this point. Put them aside, if you can.

Youre in pretty deep with this thing; theres no backing out now. With their high-resolution microscopic receptors, the machine fingers scan the chemical structure of your brain, transferring the data to a powerful computer on the other side of the operating table. They are sinking further into your cerebral matter now, these fingers, scanning deeper and deeper layers of neurons, building a three-dimensional map of their endlessly complex interrelations, all the while creating code to model this activity in the computers hardware. As the work proceeds, another mechanical appendage less delicate, less careful removes the scanned material to a biological waste container for later disposal. This is material you will no longer be needing.

At some point, you become aware that you are no longer present in your body. You observe with sadness, or horror, or detached curiosity the diminishing spasms of that body on the operating table, the last useless convulsions of a discontinued meat.

The animal life is over now. The machine life has begun.

This, more or less, is the scenario outlined by Hans Moravec, a professor of cognitive robotics at Carnegie Mellon, in his 1988 book Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. It is Moravecs conviction that the future of the human species will involve a mass-scale desertion of our biological bodies, effected by procedures of this kind. Its a belief shared by many transhumanists, a movement whose aim is to improve our bodies and minds to the point where we become something other and better than the animals we are. Ray Kurzweil, for one, is a prominent advocate of the idea of mind-uploading. An emulation of the human brain running on an electronic system, he writes in The Singularity Is Near, would run much faster than our biological brains. Although human brains benefit from massive parallelism (on the order of 100 trillion interneuronal connections, all potentially operating simultaneously), the rest time of the connections is extremely slow compared to contemporary electronics. The technologies required for such an emulation sufficiently powerful and capacious computers and sufficiently advanced brainscanning techniques will be available, he announces, by the early 2030s.

And this, obviously, is no small claim. We are talking about not just radically extended life spans, but also radically expanded cognitive abilities. We are talking about endless copies and iterations of the self. Having undergone a procedure like this, you would exist to the extent you could meaningfully be said to exist at all as an entity of unbounded possibilities.

I was introduced to Randal Koene at a Bay Area transhumanist conference. He wasnt speaking at the conference, but had come along out of personal interest. A cheerfully reserved man in his early 40s, he spoke in the punctilious staccato of a non-native English speaker who had long mastered the language. As we parted, he handed me his business card and much later that evening Iremoved it from my wallet and had a proper look at it. The card was illustrated with a picture of a laptop, on whose screen was displayed a stylised image of a brain. Underneath was printed what seemed to me an attractively mysterious message: Carboncopies: Realistic Routes to Substrate Independent Minds. Randal A Koene, founder.

I took out my laptop and went to the website of Carboncopies, which I learned was a nonprofit organisation with a goal of advancing the reverse engineering of neural tissue and complete brains, Whole Brain Emulation and development of neuroprostheses that reproduce functions of mind, creating what we call Substrate Independent Minds. This latter term, I read, was the objective to be able to sustain person-specific functions of mind and experience in many different operational substrates besides the biological brain. And this, I further learned, was a process analogous to that by which platform independent code can be compiled and run on many different computing platforms.

It seemed that I had met, without realising it, a person who was actively working toward the kind of brain-uploading scenario that Kurzweil had outlined in The Singularity Is Near. And this was a person I needed to get to know.

Koene was an affable and precisely eloquent man and his conversation was unusually engaging for someone so forbiddingly intelligent and who worked in so rarefied a field as computational neuroscience; so, in his company, I often found myself momentarily forgetting about the nearly unthinkable implications of the work he was doing, the profound metaphysical weirdness of the things he was explaining to me. Hed be talking about some tangential topic his happily cordial relationship with his ex-wife, say, or the cultural differences between European and American scientific communities and Id remember with a slow, uncanny suffusion of unease that his work, were it to yield the kind of results he is aiming for, would amount to the most significant event since the evolution of Homo sapiens. The odds seemed pretty long from where I was standing, but then again, I reminded myself, the history of science was in many ways an almanac of highly unlikely victories.

One evening in early spring, Koene drove down to San Francisco from the North Bay, where he lived and worked in a rented ranch house surrounded by rabbits, to meet me for dinner in a small Argentinian restaurant on Columbus Avenue. The faint trace of an accent turned out to be Dutch. Koene was born in Groningen and had spent most of his early childhood in Haarlem. His father was a particle physicist and there were frequent moves, including a two-year stint in Winnipeg, as he followed his work from one experimental nuclear facility to the next.

Now a boyish 43, he had lived in California only for the past five years, but had come to think of it as home, or the closest thing to home hed encountered in the course of a nomadic life. And much of this had to do with the culture of techno-progressivism that had spread outward from its concentrated origins in Silicon Valley and come to encompass the entire Bay Area, with its historically high turnover of radical ideas. It had been a while now, he said, since hed described his work to someone, only for them to react as though he were making a misjudged joke or simply to walk off mid-conversation.

In his early teens, Koene began to conceive of the major problem with the human brain in computational terms: it was not, like a computer, readable and rewritable. You couldnt get in there and enhance it, make it run more efficiently, like you could with lines of code. You couldnt just speed up a neuron like you could with a computer processor.

Around this time, he read Arthur C Clarkes The City and the Stars, a novel set a billion years from now, in which the enclosed city of Diaspar is ruled by a superintelligent Central Computer, which creates bodies for the citys posthuman citizens and stores their minds in its memory banks at the end of their lives, for purposes of reincarnation. Koene saw nothing in this idea of reducing human beings to data that seemed to him implausible and felt nothing in himself that prevented him from working to bring it about. His parents encouraged him in this peculiar interest and the scientific prospect of preserving human minds in hardware became a regular topic of dinnertime conversation.

Computational neuroscience, which drew its practitioners not from biology but from the fields of mathematics and physics, seemed to offer the most promising approach to the problem of mapping and uploading the mind. It wasnt until he began using the internet in the mid-1990s, though, that he discovered a loose community of people with an interest in the same area.

As a PhD student in computational neuroscience at Montreals McGill University, Koene was initially cautious about revealing the underlying motivation for his studies, for fear of being taken for a fantasist or an eccentric.

I didnt hide it, as such, he said, but it wasnt like I was walking into labs, telling people I wanted to upload human minds to computers either. Id work with people on some related area, like the encoding of memory, with a view to figuring out how that might fit into an overall road map for whole brain emulation.

Having worked for a while at Halcyon Molecular, a Silicon Valley gene-sequencing and nanotechnology startup funded by Peter Thiel, he decided to stay in the Bay Area and start his own nonprofit company aimed at advancing the cause to which hed long been dedicated: carboncopies

Koenes decision was rooted in the very reason he began pursuing that work in the first place: an anxious awareness of the small and diminishing store of days that remained to him. If hed gone the university route, hed have had to devote most of his time, at least until securing tenure, to projects that were at best tangentially relevant to his central enterprise. The path he had chosen was a difficult one for a scientist and he lived and worked from one small infusion of private funding to the next.

But Silicon Valleys culture of radical techno-optimism had been its own sustaining force for him, and a source of financial backing for a project that took its place within the wildly aspirational ethic of that cultural context. There were people there or thereabouts, wealthy and influential, for whom a future in which human minds might be uploaded to computers was one to be actively sought, a problem to be solved, disruptively innovated, by the application of money.

One such person was Dmitry Itskov, a 36-year-old Russian tech multimillionaire and founder of the 2045 Initiative, an organisationwhose stated aim was to create technologies enabling the transfer of an individuals personality to a more advanced nonbiological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. One of Itskovs projects was the creation of avatars artificial humanoid bodies that would be controlled through brain-computer interface, technologies that would be complementary with uploaded minds. He had funded Koenes work with Carboncopies and in 2013 they organised a conference in New York called Global Futures 2045, aimed, according to its promotional blurb, at the discussion of a new evolutionary strategy for humanity.

When we spoke, Koene was working with another tech entrepreneur named Bryan Johnson, who had sold his automated payment company to PayPal a couple of years back for $800m and who now controlled a venture capital concern called the OS Fund, which, I learned from its website, invests in entrepreneurs working towards quantum leap discoveries that promise to rewrite the operating systems of life. This language struck me as strange and unsettling in a way that revealed something crucial about the attitude toward human experience that was spreading outward from its Bay Area centre a cluster of software metaphors that had metastasised into a way of thinking about what it meant to be a human being.

And it was the sameessential metaphor that lay at the heart of Koenes project: the mind as a piece of software, an application running on the platform of flesh. When he used the term emulation, he was using it explicitly to evoke the sense in which a PCs operating system could be emulated on a Mac, as what he called platform independent code.

The relevant science for whole brain emulation is, as youd expect, hideously complicated, and its interpretation deeply ambiguous, but if I can risk a gross oversimplification here, I will say that it is possible to conceive of the idea as something like this: first, you scan the pertinent information in a persons brain the neurons, the endlessly ramifying connections between them, the information-processing activity of which consciousness is seen as a byproduct through whatever technology, or combination of technologies, becomes feasible first (nanobots, electron microscopy, etc). That scan then becomes a blueprint for the reconstruction of the subject brains neural networks, which is then converted into a computational model. Finally, you emulate all of this on a third-party non-flesh-based substrate: some kind of supercomputer or a humanoid machine designed to reproduce and extend the experience of embodiment something, perhaps, like Natasha Vita-Mores Primo Posthuman.

The whole point of substrate independence, as Koene pointed out to me whenever I asked him what it would be like to exist outside of a human body, and I asked him many times, in various ways was that it would be like no one thing, because there would be no one substrate, no one medium of being. This was the concept transhumanists referred to as morphological freedom the liberty to take any bodily form technology permits.

You can be anything you like, as an article about uploading in Extropy magazine put it in the mid-90s. You can be big or small; you can be lighter than air and fly; you can teleport and walk through walls. You can be a lion or an antelope, a frog or a fly, a tree, a pool, the coat of paint on a ceiling.

What really interested me about this idea was not how strange and far-fetched it seemed (though it ticked those boxes resolutely enough), but rather how fundamentally identifiable it was, how universal. When talking to Koene, I was mostly trying to get to grips with the feasibility of the project and with what it was he envisioned as a desirable outcome. But then we would part company I would hang up the call, or I would take my leave and start walking toward the nearest station and I would find myself feeling strangely affected by the whole project, strangely moved.

Because there was something, in the end, paradoxically and definitively human in this desire for liberation from human form. I found myself thinking often of WB Yeatss Sailing to Byzantium, in which the ageing poet writes of his burning to be free of the weakening body, the sickening heart to abandon the dying animal for the manmade and immortal form of a mechanical bird. Once out of nature, he writes, I shall never take/ My bodily form from any natural thing/ But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make.

One evening, we were sitting outside a combination bar/laundromat/standup comedy venue in Folsom Street a place with the fortuitous name of BrainWash when I confessed that the idea of having my mind uploaded to some technological substrate was deeply unappealing to me, horrifying even. The effects of technology on my life, even now, were something about which I was profoundly ambivalent; for all I had gained in convenience and connectedness, I was increasingly aware of the extent to which my movements in the world were mediated and circumscribed by corporations whose only real interest was in reducing the lives of human beings to data, as a means to further reducing us to profit.

The content we consumed, the people with whom we had romantic encounters, the news we read about the outside world: all these movements were coming increasingly under the influence of unseen algorithms, the creations of these corporations, whose complicity with government, moreover, had come to seem like the great submerged narrative of our time. Given the world we were living in, where the fragile liberal ideal of the autonomous self was already receding like a half-remembered dream into the doubtful haze of history, wouldnt a radical fusion of ourselves with technology amount, in the end, to a final capitulation of the very idea of personhood?

Koene nodded again and took a sip of his beer.

Hearing you say that, he said, makes it clear that theres a major hurdle there for people. Im more comfortable than you are with the idea, but thats because Ive been exposed to it for so long that Ive just got used to it.

In the weeks and months after I returned from San Francisco, I thought obsessively about the idea of whole brain emulation. One morning, I was at home in Dublin, suffering from both a head cold and a hangover. I lay there, idly considering hauling myself out of bed to join my wife and my son, who were in his bedroom next door enjoying a raucous game of Buckaroo. I realised that these conditions (head cold, hangover) had imposed upon me a regime of mild bodily estrangement. As often happens when Im feeling under the weather, I had a sense of myself as an irreducibly biological thing, an assemblage of flesh and blood and gristle. I felt myself to be an organism with blocked nasal passages, a bacteria-ravaged throat, a sorrowful ache deep within its skull, its cephalon. I was aware of my substrate, in short, because my substrate felt like shit.

And I was gripped by a sudden curiosity as to what, precisely, that substrate consisted of, as to what I myself happened, technically speaking, to be. I reached across for the phone on my nightstand and entered into Google the words What is the human... The first three autocomplete suggestions offered What is The Human Centipede about, and then: What is the human body made of, and then: What is the human condition.

It was the second question I wanted answered at this particular time, as perhaps a back door into the third. It turned out that I was 65% oxygen, which is to say that I was mostly air, mostly nothing. After that, I was composed of diminishing quantities of carbon and hydrogen, of calcium and sulphur and chlorine, and so on down the elemental table. I was also mildly surprised to learn that, like the iPhone I was extracting this information from, I also contained trace elements of copper and iron and silicon.

What a piece of work is a man, I thought, what a quintessence of dust.

Some minutes later, my wife entered the bedroom on her hands and knees, our son on her back, gripping the collar of her shirt tight in his little fists. She was making clip-clop noises as she crawled forward, he was laughing giddily and shouting: Dont buck! Dont buck!

With a loud neighing sound, she arched her back and sent him tumbling gently into a row of shoes by the wall and he screamed in delighted outrage, before climbing up again. None of this, I felt, could be rendered in code. None of this, I felt, could be run on any other substrate. Their beauty was bodily, in the most profound sense, in the saddest and most wonderful sense.

I never loved my wife and our little boy more, I realised, than when I thought of them as mammals. I dragged myself, my animal body, out of bed to join them.

To Be a Machine by Mark OConnell is published by Granta (12.99). To order a copy for 11.04 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99

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'Your animal life is over. Machine life has begun.' The road to immortality - The Guardian

First off, Rudy Gobert can say whatever the hell he wants to the press, to his teammates, and to the universe itself. With what hes doing out there on the court he has the right to be as loud as he wants. And damnit, this Utah Jazz team does need a firey vocal leader out there suiting up every night. But beyond the Jazz - a franchise with its own Pantheon of Greatness in John Stockton, Pistol Pete Maravich, Adrian Dantley, Karl Malone, and Mark Eaton - we see an angry star emerging in Gobert. A star whose accomplishments in this 2016-2017 season appear to truly epic.

I wrote about it earlier this month in a better researched, longer, piece that no one seems to have read.

But what is real is that Gobert is approaching 1000 points, 1000 rebounds, and 200 blocks on the season. No one in franchise history has done that. Not Karl. Not Mark. The only Jazzman who even came close was Rich Kelley (who played for both the Jazz in New Orleans and Utah and deserves more recognition in franchise history). Kelley had 1253 points, 1026 rebounds, and 166 blocks back in 1978-79. And I guess thats the story for a lot of players out there. Getting to 200 blocks truly means you were a menace.

So where is Rudy at this season? The Gobzilla is at 987 points, 980 rebounds, and 188 blocks. Hes 13 points, 20 rebounds, and 12 blocks away with nine games left on the season. (If he plays all nine games hell need to average 1.44 ppg, 2.22 rpg, and 1.33 bpg to get there.)

Why is 1000 / 1000 / 200 such a big deal? Well, its one of the most exclusive clubs EVER for bigmen in the era where blocks were recorded. (They werent back when Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain played.) As a result, there have only ever been 11 instances where someone made it there (according to the data from Basketball-Reference.com that you can check here).

If Rudy Gobert does it this year, and climbs that 1000 / 1000 / 200 mountain of the Gods, he will have done it one time, needing just four seasons to scale that peak. The 11 players who did it before him (for a grand total of 22 times for all time in the history of all centers in the NBA ever) had long careers, and were legends. And even these legends only managed to do it (usually) once or twice ever in their careers. The only guys who have done it more than twice are first-namers like Kareem, Shaq, and Hakeem.

I dont know what Rudys career is going to end up being like. And I dont know if hes going to play in each of these remaining nine games. But if he does suit up and plays normal minutes its very likely that hes going to reach this elite level that only 11 other players have EVER reached before.

And with how hes playing right now, who knows what he can achieve?

Over the last 10 games the Utah Jazz are 6-4. Thats not great - losing three in a row to questionable Eastern conference talent, and dropping one to the Clippers sucks. But what doesnt suck has been Rudys efforts on both ends of the court.

Over the last 10 games Gobert has averaged 18.70 ppg, 14.10 rpg, 3.20 bpg, 2.30 apg, 0.70 spg, and is shooting a very tidy 73.08% from the floor and 60.34% from the stripe. He has a positive +/- (duh), and is way ahead in steals and blocks against fouls, and in assists over turn overs.

With his average efforts over the last little while he could surpass 1000 points and rebounds in one game from now. (Seriously, a 13 point, 20 rebound effort isnt out of the picture.) Hes blocking enough right now to get it done as well, but the 12 blocks in 9 games thing could be jobbed by the refs a little. I hope they know not to get in his way.

Rudy Gobert is playing better than every center in the NBA right now. He should be the Defensive Player of the Year this year. He should be an All-NBA player. And he should reach immortality in the NBA History books this year with a 1000 / 1000 / 200 year.

#TakeFNNote

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Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert chasing 1000 / 1000 / 200, immortality in NBA History books - SLC Dunk

It'sall down to a photo taken nearly 150 years ago

BIZARRE conspiracy theories are the lifeblood of cinema fans on the internet but one fang-tastic favourite really takes the biscuit.

Its that Nicolas Cage is an immortal vampire.

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The bonkers theory first surfaced when a seller on eBay put up a black and white picture from 1870 which was the spitting image of the National Treasure star.

The seller was asking for 800,000 for the picture, which is thought to be man living in Tennessee around the time of the American Civil War.

The inflated price tag was justified by dealer Jack Mord, who claimed it was proof of Nic Cages immortality.

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The listing read: Original c.1870 carte de visite [a type of small photograph] showing a man who looks exactly like Nick Cage.

Personally, I believe its him and that he is some sort of walking undead / vampire who quickens / reinvents himself once every 75 years or so.

150 years from now, he might be a politician, the leader of a cult, or a talk show host.

Jack said he found the Civil War-era portraits in an album but he said: All of the other people in the album, living and dead, were identified by name this man was not.

The picture was eventually taken off the site, unsold.

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The theory, which has been circulating since 2011, even led to the 53-year-old actor denying he was a bloodsucking vampire on the David Letterman show.

The Vampires Kiss star pointed out a few flaws in the thinking.

He said: Theres a photograph of me and you cant take pictures of vampires.

He added: Now look, I dont drink blood and the last time I looked in the mirror I had a reflection.

Other recent film theories have claimed that Ferris Bueller isan imaginary friend and that Willy Wonka is a crazed serial killer in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

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Crazy conspiracy theorists think that Nicolas Cage is an immortal vampire and here's why - The Sun

The man regarded by many as the greatest Socceroos star of them all should etch his name in Australia's football history with an extraordinary tally that would be almost impossible to surpass.

At the moment Cahill, who at 37 has become the face of the A-League after forging a successful career abroad, is on a record 48 goals from 94 matches in the green and gold.

Only goalkeeper Mark Schwarzer, 109, defender Lucas Neill, 96, and Brett Emerton, 95, have played more matches for Australia.

And with two 2018 FIFA World Cup qualifiers coming up against Iraq and the United Arab Emirates in the next few days, the FIFA Confederations Cup in Russia in June and remaining qualifying matches in the second half of the year, it is fair to expect Cahill to reach the historic double milestone in 2017.

His record goalscoring tally is 19 better than that of second-placed Damian Mori and has already earned him legendary status in Australia and overseas. Cahill's position as Australia's greatest would be set in concrete if, as expected, he overtakes Emerton's, Neill's and Schwarzer's appearances tally.

Which is why his decision to end his career in Australia should be seen as a godsend by all the true lovers of our game.

Unfortunately, his arrival has not been welcomed with the widespread approval it deserves.

Perspective is not a prevalent or prominent feature surrounding Australia's football narrative.

In much the same way as some pundits amazingly greeted the announcement that Fox will back the A-League to the tune of $346 million over six years with a 'but it's less than what they were expecting' verdict that almost defied belief, some sceptics see Cahill's return home as nothing more than a brazen bid for a final big pay day in his career.

The feeling among some is that Cahill's ageing legs cannot withstand the rigours of playing for 90 minutes in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the modern game that is becoming faster, stronger and more demanding than it has ever been.

So a stint in the slower-paced A-League, it seems, would give him the opportunity to play more games, score a few more goals and keep alive his dream of playing in a fourth World Cup.

And in the process add a few more zeroes to his bank account, to be sure.

Fair enough, I reckon. It's a classic win-win scenario.

Cahill, like each and every one of us, has every right to work wherever he wants to and he deserves all the accolades and rewards he can reap as he prepares to hang up his bountiful boots in the not-too-distant future.

The man who could so easily have been lost to Australian football because of his Samoan heritage and family links with Ireland has helped make the Socceroos one of Asia's most competitive football teams.

At one stage at the height of his career he seemed to be carrying the Socceroos team on his broad shoulders.

Ever since he made his full international debut for Australia in a friendly match against South Africa in London in 2004, Cahill became one of the mainstays of the side, scoring decisive goals that changed the course of our football history and many others that saved the Socceroos from the jaws of defeat.

So we should appreciate the fact that after so many years of catching barely a glimpse of him when on home international duty, we now can watch him play nearly every week and watch him on television or read about him in the papers almost every day.

I really do not care about the commercial side of Cahill's coup. How or where he makes the most of his name and fame is none of my business and, I dare say, nobody else's.

What I do know is that as a football fan I am genuinely thrilled to be able to switch on the television or go to a game to watch Cahill play.

Cahill, let's face it, is not the most technically endowed footballer we have ever produced although I reckon many world stars would love to be able to head the ball the way he does, especially when he comes in with those late runs from the blind side.

The headed goal he scored for Melbourne City against Newcastle Jets at the weekend proved that he has lost none of his aerial prowess.

The World Cup in Brazil showed that he has a decent left foot too.

He also is past his peak and at a stage of his career when his body takes more time to recover from knocks - which might explain why he does not play for City every week - but he keeps delivering for club and country.

The A-League season is its final stages and Cahill might have scored a contender for goal of the season with that long-distance screamer in his first derby against Melbourne Victory. He also gave his new club their first piece of silverware with a trademark header in the FFA Cup final against Sydney FC.

Needless to say, Football Federation Australia are getting their pound of flesh from their investment in Cahill under the contentious guest player rule.

FFA chipped in with $500,000 to help City snare Cahill on a two-year player contract believed to be worth $7m.

He has become the smiling face of the A-League and his services are in constant demand from promoters, media and fans. He even has his own management team.

He has given dozens of interviews and signed hundreds of autographs in his short time here.

If Cahill continues to deliver for City, the A-League and the Socceroos, our game will be the winner in the long run.

Cahill, let's not forget, is a special Australian player and should be remembered accordingly.

Top 10 Socceroos appearances 109: Mark Schwarzer 96: Lucas Neill 95: Brett Emerton 94: Tim Cahill 87: Alex Tobin 84: Mark Bresciano 84: Paul Wade 80: Luke Wilkshire 76: Tony Vidmar 68: Scott Chipperfield 68: Mile Jedinak

Top 10 Socceroos scorers 48: Tim Cahill 29: Damian Mori 28: Archie Thompson 27: John Aloisi 25: Attila Abonyi 25: John Kosmina 20: Brett Emerton 20: David Zdrilic 19: Graham Arnold 18: Ray Baartz (Stats provided by Andrew Howe)

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Cahill poised to achieve Socceroos immortality - SBS - The World Game (blog)

Googles Director of Engineer Ray Kurzweil believes that we are little more than a decade away from taking major steps towards immortality.

The tech specialist, who has long supported the notion of immortality, says that medical advancements and improved technology in the coming 12 years will see humans being given the option to live forever.

Mr Kurzweil said: "I believe we will reach a point around 2029 when medical technologies will add one additional year every year to your life expectancy.

"By that I dont mean life expectancy based on your birthdate, but rather your remaining life expectancy.

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By 2045, the 69-year old says, humans will be able to live forever.

He continued: "The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will reach a level thats a billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today."

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The Google chief says that one of the steps that will allow us to live forever will be the invention of nanotechnology that can be placed in our bodies.

Once inside, the minuscule bots will be a significant improvement on our immune system and will be almost 100 per cent effective at fighting disease.

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Originally known as BackRub, Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in a friend's garage while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. It has since grown to become the world's biggest search engine.

Another step will be connecting our brains to the internet or a cloud network, which will be as big of a step in evolution as when our ancestors developed the frontal cortex 2 million years ago, according to Mr Kurzweil.

He said: "Well create more profound forms of communication than were familiar with today, more profound music and funnier jokes.

"Well be funnier. Well be sexier. Well be more adept at expressing loving sentiments."

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We will have cracked secret of ETERNAL LIFE by 2029 says GOOGLE chief - Express.co.uk

Recent advances in science and technology have some pondering whether human immortality is within reach. It is possible that the first human to live forever has already been born? Scientists are working on genetic editing, artificial intelligence and robotics that will be implemented into human bodies in the near future. Some refer to the unison of the human body and high-tech devices as "transhumanism". A handful of skeptics fear this merger of body and high-tech devices as it cedes control of oneself to those in charge of the technology. Regardless of transhumanism's merit, the question is whether aging is a social construct or an inescapable biological truth.

The Race Against the Biological Clock

There is a clear push developing within the scientific community to gain a comprehensive understanding of the aging process on a cellular level. When cells divide, cellular DNA breaks apart, causing increased susceptibility to disease. Some thought telomeres were essential to slowing the aging process yet they have turned out to be more complex than first thought. Telomeres that are excessively long can cause health problems like cancer. Telomeres wear down during the aging process. Scientists initially believed they could lengthen telomere strands for heightened DNA protection that would extend lifespan. However, research has shown that several cellular processes work in unison to determine telomere lengths.

Scientists in labs across the globe are examining molecular mechanisms that shorten and expand telomere length to determine if the perfect telomere length can be achieved. Genetic editing technology is advancing quite rapidly. As an example, the process for modifying DNA, known as "CRISPR/Cas9", has empowered scientists to make specific genetic alterations in mammalian cells. This process will likely prove quite important in efforts to combat diseases and prolong lifespans. Replace the Human Body

Some tech aficionados are looking to completely replace the human body in the quest for virtual immortality. After all, virtual reality will soon replace the real world for many individuals who are socially isolated, depressed, immobile or simply dislike the hand they were dealt in the current version of reality. Some researchers are looking for ways to upload consciousness to computers and/or robotic bodies that can withstand harsh physical conditions.

Though it is a tough sell, uploading one's mind to a computer/robot body could one day be en vogue. Consider Elon Musk's push to develop a neural lace that boosts brain functionality. Musk's neural lace will likely grow within the brain, linking human consciousness to computers for enhanced capabilities. It is possible that such computers will eventually be able to store human minds so people can live forever.

Is Digital Immortality Appealing?

One has to wonder what digital immortality would be like. If it is similar to an enjoyable computer game, people would flock to the opportunity to live forever in a virtual paradise. However, living a digital existence isn't exactly living as it is currently known. It is a completely separate form of existence, similar to how philosophers philosophize about brains in vats. Cue The Matrix comparisons.

It is certainly possible that the human body and the human experience for that matter, are components of an overarching computer simulation. Perhaps this is the rabbit hole and creating a digital existence is actually another rabbit hole embedded within a larger one. It is important to not lose sight of the possibility that human existence could have been designed as temporary for a reason. Regardless of whether our reality is a simulation or not, the question may soon become how one would like to experience consciousness rather than whether it will come to an end.

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Can Immortality be Achieved Through Science? - Anti Aging News