Microsoft is just cramming this first day of its Build conference with news. New Windows 8.1! Royalty-free Windows for phone makers! The return of the start menu!

And now? Not one, not two, but three new Windows Phone-powered Nokia Lumia phones.

With these new phones — the Lumia 630, 635, and 930 — Microsoft is trying to cover its bases at both ends of the market. Read More

What are Tesla owners actually doing with their in-car web browsers? That’s the question that ad measurement and targeting company Quantcast tried to answer with some just-released data.

Apparently, the Tesla Model S (of which there are now more than 25,000 on the road) includes a 17-inch touchscreen with a web browser, and yes, it works when you’re driving. Read More

I met Emile Petrone, the raffish owner of gadget marketplace Tindie, a few weeks ago and he told me that I would like his site. It turns out I really do. Part maker community and part amazing e-shop, Tindie is where good handcrafted gadgets go to become businesses. It’s basically a cool place to find electronics projects for you and yours including sections for kids, musicians, and even fans of… Read More

Ron Conway, the widely influential angel investor, is asking tech CEOs across San Francisco to support Ellis Act reform, which will help slow no-fault evictions of long-time residents as rents across the city skyrocket. The non-profit Conway started, Sf.citi, sent a letter out to its hundreds of member companies earlier today. You can also sign a petition here. The Ellis Act is a provision in… Read More

Financial services-focused software developer OpenFin has raised $4 million in a new round of funding to help financial services firms update their technology infrastructure and junk the Bloomberg terminal. Read More

At its Build developers conference today, Microsoft announced the launch of the first release candidate of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2. While this may sound like a minor update, it’s actually a big step forward for Visual Studio and Microsoft itself calls it one of the most significant updates it has done for Visual Studio yet. Since its release fewer than five months ago, Microsoft also today… Read More

As TechCrunch previously reported, Microsoft today detailed Windows 8.1 Update 1, announcing that starting April 8th, the new code will begin to roll out to the operating system’s users around the world. It will be a gradual deployment via Windows Update, so don’t set an alarm. I met with Microsoft yesterday to discuss the update, which the company likes to refer to as “laser focused” on users… Read More

Mozart in the Jungle. Image courtesy Amazon

Amazon announced today that six more shows from its Amazon Originals program will be made into full series, following viewer input on the pilot episodes the company released last month. The big surprise? That the right shows made the cut.

The six shows to get a full season are Chris Carter’s The After, Bosch (based on the Michael Connelly novels), Roman Coppola’s comedy Mozart in the Jungle, the wonderful Transparent, and two kids’ series: Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street and Wishenpoof! Also officially announced today, although known for some time: Alpha House, the political comedy from Doonesbury creator Gary Trudeau, is getting a second season on Amazon.

With the arguable exceptions of the overly-polite Wishenpoof! and uneven The After—and in that latter case, Carter’s involvement doubtlessly carried some amount of cache, not to mention likely X-Files-led fan engagement—this is the rare case of a network (well, quasi-network) making the right choices for once. In particular, Transparent and Mozart are shows that feel as if they could thrive online in a way in which they couldn’t manage even on cable television, which is something Amazon needs in order for its Originals programming to succeed.

Whether or not this makes up for not picking up Zombieland and Onion News Empire from the first round of pilots remains to be seen, but it’s a good sign for the future of Amazon’s attempts to be the next Netflix, which was of course the next HBO, which itself used to be the next TV. Evolution is a strange thing.

Photo: WIRED

When you install an app on your phone, it often spreads its tentacles into other various parts of the device. Sometimes, it taps into the hardware that identifies your location. Others, it grabs data from your address book.

If you use an Android phone, the OS will tell you — explicitly — what the app is trying to access, and it will ask your permission to do so. But you can’t provide permission for one data grab and then reject another. It’s an all-or-nothing proposition. If you want the Twitter app but don’t want it accessing your text messages, you’re out of luck.

That’s a problem for those of us who really want to protect our privacy, but still want to be participate in things like social media. And even if you trust everything the app developer is doing today, you never know if a new update may contain malware planted by someone else. That’s why Marcel Bokhorst created XPrivacy, an open source tool that lets you closely control the permissions for each of your Android apps.

In short, the tool can override a particular permission setting by feeding it junk data. For example, it can feed your Linkedin app fake location information, or your Twitter app an empty address book. And you can do this on an app-by-app basis. So, even if you prevent LinkedIn from accessing you location, you can still offer access to your mapping app.

Other Android tools let you do much the same thing, such as PDroid and OpenPDroid, but they’re no longer supported by the developers who made them. The popular Android alternative CyanogenMOD includes a tool called Android Privacy Guard, and the latest version of the official Android OS offers app-by-app privacy settings. But Bokhorst says these tools don’t provide the same fine-grained controls as XPrivacy, which can manage 250 different settings. Plus, the official Android privacy settings are hidden from the average user, probably because they’re not ready for prime time.

Bokhorst started building XPrivacy last year while he was developing his own custom version of CyanogenMOD that included OpenPDroid. But after getting frustrated because no one was updating OpenPDroid, he decided to create his own privacy tool using an open source Android developer framework called XPosed. The result was XPrivacy.

The project took off quickly. Bokhorst says he has spent over 2,000 hours working on the project so far, and the open source community has contributed not only several ideas for the project, but translations into 37 different languages.​ According to the open-source-project-tracking site Ohloh, over seven years of effort have already gone into the project. “I guess I am an efficient worker,” Bokhorst jokes.

The downside of the tool is that you can’t use it without arranging “root” access to your phone. This generally means using some third-party software to hack into your phone so that you have control over the core software, and it can void your warranty — or, worse, screw-up the phone’s internal software so badly that’s effectively rendered useless. Unfortunately, Bokhorst says, it’s not possible to build a version of XPrivacy that doesn’t require rooting. The application must integrate deeply with the Android OS. For the less adventorous, Android’s own hidden settings are probably the best way to go.

According to Bokhorst, Google removed XPrivacy from the Android Play Store soon after it was made available. But the store still includes a tool that will at least walk you through the installation of the app. Not being in the Play store makes it harder for Bokhorst to sell the tool, but that doesn’t bother him. He’s not building the tool for money. “The goal of the XPrivacy project is to offer a free, decent Android privacy solution for as many as possible people,” he says.

That said, he does offer a premium version of XPrivacy that adds tools such as a database of custom privacy restrictions created by the XPrivacy community, and a way of importing and exporting settings across devices. And he does accept donations. “I see donations as concrete positive feedback, but they are in no way a compensation for all the time I have spent on this project,” he says. “XPrivacy is more an ideology and a technical challenge.”

Norris Geyser Basin in Yellowstone National Park. Image: Erik Klemetti

Over the weekend, the Yellowstone National Park felt its strongest earthquake since 1980 — a M4.7 event located just north of the Norris Geyser Basin at a depth of ~7 km. As you can guess, with such an earthquake, the Yellowstone-fearing throngs got a little nervous. However, this earthquake is nothing out of the ordinary for Yellowstone, even if it is larger than your average seismic event in or near the caldera. Over the past few hundred years, the caldera has felt numerous large earthquakes, including a M7.3 earthquake in 1959 … and none of them have lead to an eruption at Yellowstone (even a small one). In fact, if you really want to be worried about hazards from Yellowstones, earthquakes might be the bigger danger.

Now, why might that be? Well, some of it has to do with whether Yellowstone has much eruptible magma beneath the surface. Most suggestions, both looking at Yellowstone through a seismic or petrologic lens, suggests that no, the caldera doesn’t have a huge volume of magma that is in a state that can easily erupt. In fact, some research suggests that Yellowstone is bordering on moribund — that is, it might be a “dying” caldera. Now, I’m not really ready to carve the caldera’s tombstone, but most research about large earthquakes triggering volcanic eruptions suggest that you likely need a volcano that is ready to erupt (i.e., lots of eruptible, gas-charged magma sitting below the surface) and is just looking for a trigger. That really doesn’t describe Yellowstone.

Sunday’s earthquake did not have the right focal mechanism to be directly related to magma moving below the surface either. You would expect if an earthquake was being caused by magma working its way upwards and making room for itself in the crust that any earthquake that were to occur would be one caused by extension. However, the recent M4.7 earthquake had a focal mechanism that suggests it was mainly reverse (compressional) with a smidge of strike-slip (side-by-side) motion — not what you would expect for magma moving upwards leading to an eruption.

The area that the earthquake occurred is a region of uplift in the caldera and exactly why this uplift is occurring is still being researched. This uplift is occurring in one of the most hydrothermally-active areas in/around the caldera, so maybe some of the uplift could be related to changes in the hydrothermal system rather than anything magmatic. There is some research that suggests that the uplift is related to a small sill of magma being emplaced at depth under the region — and this sort of event should be expected to be common at a caldera. Petrologically speaking, we see that the exposed innards of volcanoes — plutons and batholiths — are constructed incrementally by lots of small intrusions of magma. This means that we might expect small intrusions to be common at Yellowstone. More importantly, most of these intrusions likely don’t produce any eruption (possibly because they don’t add enough heat to the system to generate sufficient eruptible magma), so uplift and earthquakes related to intrusions of magma at depth as the roots of the magmatic system grows should be expect at any active caldera. This is the “breathing” that people like to discuss at Yellowstone: cycles of inflation and deflation over years to decades.

This doesn’t mean that USGS geologists aren’t checking out what effects the earthquake might have had on the region — maybe there was some surface motion or maybe the hydrothermal system at Norris Geyser Basin has changed. However, there are no indications that any eruption is on the way at Yellowstone after this weekend’s earthquake.

Trinity College at Cambridge University, where Isaac Newton studied. Image: Wikimedia Commons

What the heck do these three things have to do with each other? Well, originally I had three different blog ideas. They are very related so I figured it would be better to include them in one post.

Let’s begin with robots.

Robots Will Have Your Job

Bill Gates said it. Not me. In this interview, Gates claims that in 20 years there are many jobs that will be replaced by robots. I don’t think this is a crazy idea.

Just think about it. Right now if you need someone to drive you to the airport, you could get a taxi. That taxi is driven by a human and that is the human’s job. But wait! There is the Google self-driving car. Sure, they aren’t super popular, but they already exist. So why not have this Google car drive you to the airport? Wouldn’t that be better for everyone? Well, I guess it wouldn’t be better for the human that was replaced by a robot.

I was working on a small project with my older son. We were talking about this idea of robots taking over the world. The conversation went something like this:

Me: This just shows that it’s a good idea to do something you love for a career. It’s extra good if that thing can’t be replaced by robots. So, what career would you like that couldn’t be replaced by robots?

Him: My career will be that of a robot killer.

That’s a great idea. Although really, if humans can kill robots wouldn’t it be easy for robots to kill robots?

What kinds of jobs can’t be replaced by robots? I think (at least for now), robots can’t be humans. They can do some tasks that humans do but they aren’t humans. This means that the best robot-proof jobs would be the job of being a human. What is the job of a human? Let’s see….here are some things that humans do (and make us human):

• Art
• Music
• Literature
• Filmography and photography
• Science
• Math
• Philosophy
• Gaming
• Sports

But which of these match up to actual real human paying jobs? Clearly some of them do (some sports and filmography). Others could be considered to be a job – you can get paid to be a scientists, right? So maybe these don’t all match up with a career – but as we know robots right now, they don’t really do these things. These are the realm of humans. No droids allowed.

Newton’s Education and Useful Science

What about the most recent episode of Cosmos? (You can watch episode 3 here online) I thought this episode of Cosmos was the best so far. It seems they are sticking with the theme of “how do we know this stuff”? Looking at the historical development of ideas in science shows that we don’t just read about things in textbooks. The ideas had to come from somewhere first.

They spend some time talking about Newton, Hooke and Halley. It’s a very interesting story about the relationship these three men have. For me, the best part was when they showed Newton studying at Cambridge. It’s very clear that he is not there for job training (because if he was, then he could be replaced by a robot).

I especially love the scene with Newton in his room studying all sorts of stuff – including alchemy and looking for secret codes in the Bible. Why did he study these things? They weren’t part of a course (and I don’t think they had grades back then – those were invented later). Then why? The answer is obvious: because. Why do we do the things we do? I think for the best activities, we do them just because.

Now when I think of National Science Foundation grant proposals, you know what the first thing that comes to my mind? You have to write a proposal in such a way to make clear that your research will be useful. This is wrong. Do you think that Newton worked on the universal law of gravity because it was useful? Well sure, it’s useful now – but what about back then? I guess you could say Newton did it for revenge, but maybe he just did it because he wanted to. Why do artists paint a particular scene? Sometimes they are commissioned for some particular work but often they just paint what they want.

Robots will have a hard time replacing humans because they don’t have their own desires (at least not until their firmware is upgraded).

The Biggest Educational Mistake

You might think the worst mistake is to start a land war in Asia, but you would be wrong. Well, in higher eduction, there is a bigger mistake (but really, universities shouldn’t get involved in war). The mistake that countless politicians and administrators make is to think that a university is a place to create and train workers.

If a university’s role is to produce workers, why not just make it a robot factory? Isn’t that the logical next step? I mean if robots are going to take over jobs and the university creates workers – then just skip a step.

No. A university is not about workforce development. Ok, it is probably true that if more people graduate with an undergraduate degree they can increase the number of employed people in an area. But it’s like what Richard Feynman said about sex: “sure it’s useful, but that’s not why we do it”.

If a university isn’t about workforce development, what is it about? A college degree isn’t about jobs but rather it’s about learning and training to be more human. Think about it. If a college degree is about job training, why do math majors take art? Or why do history majors take math? Oh, I’ve heard this before. In order to be a great historian, you need to know algebra. I, for one, like this argument. However, go get some great historians and give them some algebra questions (make it word problems). How well would they do? I bet not so great. No, most adults don’t actually NEED algebra. Most adults should still study algebra because it’s good for you.

Ok, now for some links. Here is a post from Inside Higher Ed that looks at President Obama’s view of the art history major. His quote was:

“But I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.”

Let me first point out that if someone followed me around all the time and recorded what I said, I would surely say dumber things than this. But this was pretty dumb. It seems that he is implying that there shouldn’t be any art majors because they don’t make very much money? This would be like saying that we shouldn’t plant flowers because you can’t eat them. There is more to life than money.

Anyway, all those art majors are going to get the last laugh. “Manufacturing skills”? Don’t you really mean “robot programing”? I, for one, welcome our art major overlords.

One more link. This is essentially the same thing but without a Presidential quote.

These U.S. Colleges and Majors are the Biggest Wast of Money – The Atlantic.

Yes. For the most part, an undergraduate degree costs WAY more than it should. If you really want to make more money, it would probably better to skip college and just find some career that you can start making money right away. You might not have as good of a job after 5 years compared to a college grad, but you surely won’t have the debt.

My main point: if you are going to college just to get good grades and then get a job, you are probably wasting your money. This goes along with the advice I give to early college students. Don’t just pick the easiest path to a degree. All you’ll end up with is a degree and good grades. Instead, study lots of things. Focus on the things you find the most interesting (that might be art history). If you are doing what you love and are passionate about, you are way ahead of many people. Even if you don’t end up being a professional art historian, you will still have enriched your lives and made yourself more human.

Photo: Peripatoides novazealandiae by Frupus, via Flickr. Distributed under a CC-BY-NC-2.0 license.

Velvet worms, otherwise known as Onychophora, are reclusive little animals that have changed very little in the last 500 million years.

Scientists have described some 180 modern species. They can be found in moist, dark places all around the tropics and Australia and New Zealand. Smaller species are less than an inch long, while the largest reach lengths of about 8 inches.

They come in a dazzling array of colors and exhibit some pretty weird and complex behaviors. I’m sure you’ll be just as charmed by them as I am.

1. Velvet worms have hydrostatic skeletons. Velvet worms don’t have hard exoskeletons like arthropods. Instead, their fluid-filled body cavities are covered in a thin skin and kept rigid by their pressurized internal liquids. They move by the alteration of fluid pressure in the limbs as they extend and contract along the body.

2. They have velvety, water-proof skin. Their entire bodies are covered with papillae, tiny protrusions with bristles sensitive to touch and smell. The papillae are made up of overlapping scales, which gives the velvet worm its velvety appearance. It also makes their skin water-repellant.

Photo: Euperipatoides rowelli by Andra Keszei, via Flickr. Distributed under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.

3. They have lots of little stubby feet. Their feet are described as conical, baggy appendages. Depending on the species, a velvet worm can have between 13 and 43 pairs of feet. The feet are hollow, fluid-filled, and have no joints.

4. Each little stubby foot has a claw. Each foot is outfitted with a hooked claw made of chitin (lending the group its scientific name, Onychophora (‘Claw-Bearers’)). Velvet worms use their claws when walking on uneven terrain; on smoother surfaces, they retract their claws and walk on the foot cushions at the base of the claws.

5. Velvet worms are vulnerable to dehydration. Like insects, velvet worms breathe through holes along their bodies called tracheae. Unlike insects, velvet worms cannot close these holes to prevent water loss, so they easily dry out. For this reason, velvet worms spend most of their time hidden in moist areas in the soil, under rocks, and in rotting logs. They’re most active at night and during rainy weather.

6. They use slime as a weapon. Velvet worms are ambush predators, hunting other small invertebrates by night. To subdue their prey, they squirt a sticky, quick-hardening slime from a pair of glands on their heads. After the prey is ensnared, the velvet worm bites into it, injecting digestive saliva that helps liquefy the insides for easier snacking. The slime is energetically costly to make, so velvet worms will often eat any excess slime they have produced to shore up their reserves. Check out a sliming in action here.

7. At least one species is highly social with a strict dominance hierarchy. Euperipatoides rowelli live in groups of up to 15 individuals, ruled over by a dominant female. The group hunts together, and after a kill the dominant female always feeds first, followed by the other females, then the males, and finally the young. The social hierarchy is established and maintained through aggression: higher-ranking individuals will chase, bite, kick, and crawl over subordinates.

Photo: Euperipatoides leuckartii by Michael Whitehead, via Flickr. Distributed under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.

8. Velvet worms are survivors. They belong to a clade that has been around for over 500 million years. Fossilized marine versions of velvet worms from the Cambrian period have been found in the Burgess Shale in Canada (505 million years old) and the Chengjiang formation in China (520 million years old). Velvet worms are now considered to be close relatives of arthropods and tardigrades. They’re of interest to paleontologists because they might help provide an idea of what the ancestors of arthropods were like.

9. They have a number of bizarre reproductive strategies. All the velvet worms reproduce sexually, except for Epiperipatus imthurni (they reproduce by parthenogenesis and no males have ever been observed).

The other velvet worm species have evolved several creative ways to deliver the male’s sperm to the female’s egg. Some species deposit their spermatophores directly into the female’s genital opening, though the means by which they do this varies. In some species the male uses special structures on his head; other species have spikes, spines,or pits to either hold their sperm or transfer it to the female.

The males in the genus Peripatopsis just deposit their spermatophore on seemingly random spots on the female’s body. This stimulates a localized breakdown of her skin so the sperm can pass into her body and migrate to her ovaries, where fertilization takes place.

10. Most velvet worms give birth to live young. Female velvet worms can store sperm for many months before using them to fertilize their eggs. Their gestation period can last up to 15 months in some species. Most give birth to live young, although a few species lay eggs. Young velvet worms are born fully developed and looking like miniature versions of the adults.

References and Other Resources:

Campbell, L. I., Rota-Stabelli, O., Edgecombe, G. D., Marchioro, T., Longhorn, S. J., Telford, M., J., … Pisani, D. (2011). MicroRNAs and phylogenomics resolve the relationship of Tardigrada and suggest that velvet worms are the sister group of Arthropoda. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. 108: 15920-15924. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1105499108.

“Introduction to the Onychophora,” UC Berkeley. Accessed 3/27/2014.

Monge-Najera, J. (1995). Phylogeny, Biogeography and Reproductive Trends in the Onychophora. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 114 (1): 21–60. doi:10.1111/j.1096-3642.1995.tb00111.x.

Oliveira I. de S., Read V. M. S. J. and Mayer G. (2012). A world checklist of Onychophora (velvet worms), with notes on nomenclature and status of names. ZooKeys 211 (211): 1–70. doi:10.3897/zookeys.211.3463.

Poinar, G. (1996). Fossil Velvet Worms in Baltic and Dominican Amber: Onychophoran Evolution and Biogeography. Science 273 (5280): 1370–1371. doi:10.1126/science.273.5280.1370.

Reinhard, J. and Rowell, D. M. (2005). Social behaviour in an Australian velvet worm, Euperipatoides rowelli (Onychophora: Peripatopsidae). Journal of Zoology, 267, pp 1-7. doi:10.1017/S0952836905007090.

Van Roy, P., Orr, P. J., Botting, J. P., Muir, L. A., Vinther, J., Lefebvre, B., Hariri, K. E. and Briggs, D. E. G. (2010). Ordovician faunas of Burgess Shale type. Nature 465 (7295): 215. doi:10.1038/nature09038.

“Velvet Worm,” Australian Museum. Accessed 3/27/2014.

Video: “I had this skill with mathematical tools, and I played these tools as well as I could just because it was beautiful,” said Freeman Dyson in a wide-ranging interview.

Freeman Dyson — the world-renowned mathematical physicist who helped found quantum electrodynamics with the bongo-playing, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman and others, devised numerous mathematical techniques, led the team that designed a low-power nuclear reactor that produces medical isotopes for research hospitals, dreamed of exploring the solar system in spaceships propelled by nuclear bombs, wrote technical and popular science books, penned dozens of reviews for The New York Review of Books, and turned 90 in December — is pondering a new math problem.

Original story reprinted with permission from Simons Science News, an editorially independent division of SimonsFoundation.org whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

“There’s a class of problem that Freeman just lights up on,” said the physicist and computational biologist William Press, a longtime colleague and friend. “It has to be unsolved and well-posed and have something in it that admits to his particular kind of genius.” That genius, he said, represents a kind of “ingenuity and a spark” that most physicists lack: “The ability to see further in the mathematical world of concepts and instantly grasp a path to the distant horizon that’s the solution.”

Press said he’s posed a number of problems to Dyson that didn’t “measure up.” Months and years went by, with no response. But when Press asked a question about the “iterated prisoner’s dilemma,” a variation of the classic game theory scenario pitting cooperation against betrayal, Dyson replied the next day. “It probably only took him a minute to grasp the solution,” Press said, “and half an hour to write it out.”

Together, they published a much-cited 2012 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The next year, Press traveled to Princeton, N.J., for a two-day celebration of Dyson at the Institute for Advanced Study, Dyson’s intellectual home for the past six decades. In honor of Dyson’s 90th birthday, there was seemingly boundless cake, a forest of long, white candles, 350 guests — including his 16 grandchildren — and lectures recognizing his eclectic achievements in math, physics, astronomy and public affairs.H. T. Yau of Harvard University commenced the math section, launching into Dyson’s work on the universality of random matrices. George Andrews of Pennsylvania State University and Kathrin Bringmann of the University of Cologne followed with the implications of Dyson’s early contributions to number theory, which he began contemplating in high school. William Happer, a physicist at Princeton University and a fellow skeptic of the perils of anthropogenic climate change, closed day one with a talk provocatively titled “Why Has Global Warming Paused?”

Dyson’s unfinished science fiction story, “Sir Phillip Roberts’s Erolunar Collision,” written in the early 1930s when he was 8 or 9. Image courtesy of the Dyson Family Collection

Dyson admits to being controversial when it comes to climate science. But during an hour-long interview with Quanta Magazine in December, he said: “Generally speaking, I’m much more of a conformist.” Still, he has written fondly of science as an act of rebellion. In his 2006 anthology of essays and reviews, “The Scientist as Rebel,” Dyson writes, “I was lucky to be introduced to science at school as a subversive activity of the younger boys.” With characteristic concern for social issues, he goes on to advise parents: “We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.”

On the second day of the 2013 celebration in Princeton, after numerous speakers had recounted past collaborations with Dyson, alternately feting and roasting his brilliance, Press took a different tack. Referring to their collaboration on the prisoner’s dilemma, Press — a professor at the University of Texas, Austin — said he “thought it would be a little extreme to reminisce with Freeman about a paper that was just published.” Instead, he described his own recent result on safer “adaptive” clinical trials, adding that although he had solid computational data, the mathematical analysis proved too formidable. “I wish I had worked on it with Freeman — and maybe still will get the chance to do so,” he said slyly.

Press’ comment proved prescient. After the celebration, Dyson began mulling over the problem — unbeknownst to Press, who didn’t find out until Quanta contacted him in March about the new “collaboration.” “I’m glad to know it’s on his stack of things to do!” he said. “I’m looking forward to seeing what he comes up with.”

Quanta Magazine interviewed Dyson at the institute, just days after his 90th birthday. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows.

QUANTA MAGAZINE: Technically, you retired from the Institute for Advanced Study 20 years ago. What are you working on now?

FREEMAN DYSON: I used to be a scientist and did a lot of calculations. It was a competitive world, and when I got older, I decided I wouldn’t compete with the bright, young people anymore, so I write books instead. And now I’ve become a book reviewer for The New York Review of Books. About once a month, I write a review, and then I get a lot of response and correspondence, people who are finding things I said which aren’t true.

What did you do prior to writing book reviews?

I was trained as a mathematician, and I remain a mathematician. That’s really my skill, just doing calculations and applying mathematics to all kinds of problems, and that led me into physics first and also other fields, such as engineering and even a bit of biology, sometimes a little bit of chemistry. Mathematics applies to all kinds of things. That’s one of the joys of being a mathematician.

Why math?

I think the decisive moment was reading the book “Men of Mathematics” by Eric Temple Bell. Bell was a professor at Caltech, and he wrote this book, which is actually just a wonderful collection of biographies of mathematicians. Historians condemn it as romanticized. But what was wonderful about this book is that he showed the mathematicians as being mostly crooks and people of very mixed kinds of qualities, not at all saints, and many of them quite unscrupulous and not very clever, and still they managed to do great mathematics. So it told a kid that “if they can do it, why can’t you?”

What are some of the big questions that have guided your career?

I’m not a person for big questions. I look for puzzles. I look for interesting problems that I can solve. I don’t care whether they’re important or not, and so I’m definitely not obsessed with solving some big mystery. That’s not my style.

What kinds of puzzles first intrigued you?

I started out as a pure mathematician and found problems that just arise out of the very nature of numbers, which are amazingly subtle and difficult and beautiful. That was when I was about 17 or so, just at the end of high school. I was interested in numbers before I was interested in the real world.

“I translated Feynman’s ideas into mathematics so it became more accessible to the world, and, as a result, I became famous.”

What is it about numbers that made you want to figure them out?

It’s just like asking, “Why does a violinist like to play the violin?” I had this skill with mathematical tools, and I played these tools as well as I could just because it was beautiful, rather in the same way a musician plays the violin, not expecting to change the world but just because he loves the instrument.

You’re known for your work in quantum electrodynamics — which describes interactions between light, matter and charged particles — and in solving the renormalization problem — which helped rid the mathematics of unwanted infinities. How did that work come about?

When I arrived in Cornell in 1947, there just had been done a beautiful experiment at Columbia on the hydrogen atom. The hydrogen atom is the simplest atom, and you ought to be able to understand it if you understand atoms at all. So, these experiments were done by Willis Lamb and his student Robert Retherford at Columbia, observing for the first time the very fine behavior of hydrogen using microwaves to examine the hydrogen atoms, and Lamb got very precise results. The problem was the quantum theory wasn’t good enough to explain his results. Dick Feynman, who was an absolute genius, had understood more or less how to explain it but couldn’t translate his ideas into ordinary mathematics. I came along and had the mathematical skill, making it possible to calculate precisely what the hydrogen atom was doing, and the amazing thing was that my calculations all agreed with the experiment, so it turns out the theory was right.

I didn’t invent anything new — I translated Feynman’s ideas into mathematics so it became more accessible to the world, and, as a result, I became famous, but it all happened within about six months.

Did it lead to other questions that you wanted to explore?

I got job offers from everywhere in America and also in England, but the problem was that I didn’t actually want to settle down yet and become an overburdened professor with lots of students. So I escaped to England and had two happy years at Birmingham without any responsibilities and continued working on other problems.

I was very much interested in space travel, and so the next exciting thing I did was to work with a company in California called General Atomics for a couple of years building a spaceship. In those days, people were willing to take all kinds of risks, and all kinds of crazy schemes got supported. So there was this bunch of crazy, young people — the leader was Freddie de Hoffmann, who had been at Los Alamos [National Laboratory] and knew all about nuclear bombs — and we decided we would go around the solar system with a spaceship driven by nuclear bombs. We would launch the ship into space — “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb,” about four bombs per second — going up all the way to Mars and then afterwards to Jupiter and Saturn, and we intended to go ourselves.

Freeman and Imme Dyson traveled to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in March 2009 for Charles Simonyi’s second trip to the International Space Station. Photo: George Dyson

What happened to Project Orion?

I spent two wonderful years in San Diego having grand dreams of spaceships. We not only did calculations, we also flew little models about a meter in diameter with chemical explosives, which actually went “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb” a few times a few hundred feet up. It was amazing we never got hurt. I think we didn’t even have to buy the explosives. We had some Navy friend who stole it from the Navy. Anyhow, we certainly borrowed the test stand from the Navy where we did these little flight tests. That lasted for two years. By that time, it was clear that the competition was actually going to win, the competition being Wernher von Braun and the Apollo program, which was going to go with ordinary rockets to the moon.

The Orion spaceship sounds like something a child might dream up. How disappointed were you that this “grand dream” wasn’t realized?

Of course we were very disappointed when it turned out that the Orion never flew, but it was clear that it would make a horrible mess of the landscape. These bombs were producing radioactive fallout as they went up through the atmosphere, and although at that time we were exploding bombs in the atmosphere for military purposes, which were much bigger than the ones we proposed to use, still we would have made a contribution to the general contamination, and that was the reason why the project failed, and I think it was a good reason.

You’ve developed a reputation as a maverick scientist with contrarian views. Where do you think that comes from?

I think the notion that I always like to oppose the consensus in science is totally wrong. The fact is there’s only one subject that I’ve been controversial, which is climate. I spend maybe 1 percent of my time on climate, and that’s the only field in which I’m opposed to the majority. Generally speaking, I’m much more of a conformist, but it happens I have strong views about climate because I think the majority is badly wrong, and you have to make sure if the majority is saying something that they’re not talking nonsense.

With a majority of scientists on the other side of this issue, what would it take to convince you to switch sides?

What I’m convinced of is that we don’t understand climate, and so that’s sort of a neutral position. I’m not saying the majority is necessarily wrong. I’m saying that they don’t understand what they’re seeing. It will take a lot of very hard work before that question is settled, so I shall remain neutral until something very different happens.

You became a professor at Cornell without ever having received a Ph.D. You seem almost proud of that fact.

Oh, yes. I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all.

In the summer of 1955, below Yosemite Falls in Tuolumne Meadows, California. Photo: Verena Huber-Dyson

I was lucky because I got educated in World War II and everything was screwed up so that I could get through without a Ph.D. and finish up as a professor. Now that’s quite impossible. So, I’m very proud that I don’t have a Ph.D. and I raised six children and none of them has a Ph.D., so that’s my contribution.

Looking back at your career, how has your approach to science changed over the decades?

I’ve now been active for something like 70 years, and still I use the same mathematics. I think the main thing that’s changed as a result of computers is the magnitude of databases. We now have these huge amounts of data and very little understanding. So what we have now — I forget who it was who said this — are small islands of understanding in a sea of information. The problem is to enlarge the islands of understanding.

What scientific advance do you see on the horizon that will have a big impact on society?

People are often asking me what’s going to happen next in science that’s important, and of course, the whole point is that if it’s important, it’s something we didn’t expect. All the really important things come as a big surprise. There are many examples of this, of course, dark energy being the latest example. Anything I mention will be something that, obviously, is not a surprise.

Are you currently working on a math problem?

The question of what I do with my time is a delicate one. I’m not really doing science competitively, but I like to have a problem to work on. I’m very lucky to have a friend, Bill Press, who is an expert on clinical trials, which actually turns out to be an interesting mathematical problem.

He published a paper explaining how to do clinical trials in a really effective way with a minimum loss of life. He’s a computer expert, so everything he does is worked out just with numbers, and so I have taken on as my next task to translate what he did into equations, the same way I did with Feynman. I’m not sure whether it will work, but that’s what I’m thinking about at the moment.

What does it mean for someone with so many intellectual pursuits to be retired?

When I retired as a professor of the institute, I kept all the privileges. The only thing that changed is the paychecks stopped coming. I still have an office and all the secretarial help I need, plus a place at the lunch table. One more advantage is not having to go to faculty meetings.

Sovereign governments everywhere are petrified. An ingenious new invention that allows people to make payments across borders without leaving a trace in the official monetary system is spreading like wildfire. Its workings are so clever that few understand them. It’s backed by some of the leading entrepreneurs of the day. The embattled establishment is warning that the state’s right to regulate finance is being undermined.

That may sound a lot like bitcoin in 2014. But, in fact, it’s the story of a much earlier episode of monetary innovation: the birth of modern banking in sixteenth century Europe.

For just like Bitcoin’s mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, the bankers of Renaissance Europe invented their own form of money. And their experience, it turns out, can teach us a thing or two about bitcoin. Above all, this can show that bitcoin’s boldest promise lies not as a currency, but as a reboot of the way money works which has its origins 500 years in the past.

The King’s Money

In the early middle ages, Europe’s feudal society began to re-monetise. Obligations that had previously been rendered in kind – the tenth of one’s produce paid to the landlord, for example, or the two week’s of one’s labour owed to the king – began to be valued and paid in money instead. Whose money? The king’s, of course. Sovereigns guarded their exclusive right to issue money jealously and forbade from their subjects the minting of metal coinage, the standard payments technology of the day.

Their subjects were not happy with this situation. They enjoyed the explosion of commerce that money brought. But sovereigns had a nasty habit of abusing their monetary monopoly to fund their wars and debauchery. The medieval merchant was constantly at risk of a sudden debasement of the currency designed to transfer his hard-earned wealth to his predatory monarch.

Many were the complaints lodged against this politically unjust and economically inefficient situation — but few were the concessions from the sovereigns. That is, until Europe’s merchants re-discovered a clever technology that enabled them to escape the sovereigns’ greedy clutches: the ancient art of banking. Why bother with our rulers’ myriad, unreliable, national moneys, these clever entrepreneurs asked, when we can have just one and manage it in our own interests?

And so they did. The merchants began to account their debts to one another in their own, private, international monetary unit — the écu du marc. They had no need of coinage to represent their new money — that was yesterday’s game. Instead, they deployed bills of exchange — written records of credit balances. Such was the trust they had in one another that no collateral was required to back this stateless paper currency — just a quarterly conclave at the great fair of Lyons, where outstanding balances could conveniently be cleared. It was an extraordinary achievement — nothing less than the creation of a private money to settle payments on a continent-wide scale. It was not unusual, wrote a contemporary observer, to see “a million pounds paid in a morning, without a single sou changing hands.”

But there was the rub. The disappearing sou was a coin of the French king. The impact of the merchant-bankers’ splendid innovation was not just economic, but political. Just as the new private money increased his subjects’ control over their financial affairs, so it diminished the king’s command of his tax base — and so threatened his political authority. The result was a long-running guerrilla war between sovereigns and their subjects over the central questions of the monetary standard: what rule should govern how much money should be created, and who should get to decide?

It was a battle neither side could really win. The merchant-bankers had the killer payments technology — but their private money could not circulate beyond their tight-knit circles. Sovereigns, meanwhile, could make their money circulate all right — but their profligacy ensured that this happened only under duress. It was centuries before a truce was declared with the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694. The bankers would contribute their payments technology and their commercial nous, and in return, the king would allow them to issue his sovereign money, the pound sterling.

Henceforth, money would be a hybrid beast — issued by private banks, but under license from the sovereign — and its creation would be managed according to neither fiscal nor commercial interests alone, but as a compromise hammered out between the two. It was nothing short of a Great Monetary Settlement: a politico-monetary quid pro quo that has remained the basis for all capitalist financial systems ever since.

The Lessons We Can Learn

So what lessons does this Old World precedent hold for money’s latest manifestation? The first is that bitcoin’s real promise does not lie in bitcoins themselves.

Consider, to begin with, the issue the monetary standard. Any money is essentially a system of transferable credit. An extraordinary variety of tokens have been used over the years to represent and operationalize such systems, from gold coins to written entries in account books, but the essence of money — an underlying system of credit accounts and clearing — is always the same.

There are four central questions that any such system must answer. The first two are closely related: how much money should be created, and who should decide? The answers to these two questions set the monetary standard. They determine — insofar as it is under anyone’s control at all — how much a pound, a dollar, or a bitcoin is worth. Then, with the matter of the standard settled, two further practical questions arise. The first is how new money is actually created in order to achieve the chosen standard. The second is how payments are made — how credit balances are transferred between counter-parties to settle of debts incurred in the course of exchange.

Bitcoin’s answer to the first of these questions is a simple one. There is a fixed limit on the number of bitcoins that can ever be issued, written into the bitcoin code. So its answer to the second question is simple too. Nobody decides how many bitcoins will be issue. Since the limit is fixed, there is no discretion involved.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s answers to the third and fourth questions are closely connected. The mechanism for issuing bitcoins is that credit balances are “mined” — that is, bitcoins are credited to a user’s account in return for contributing processing power to the task of verifying payments recorded in a digital ledger. That ledger — the blockchain — is in turn bitcoin’s answer to the fourth question, of how payments are made. Bitcoin credit balances are recorded a unique ledger in which the entire history of bitcoin transactions is recorded.

This ledger is not held in one place, however, but distributed across the entire network of computers belonging to bitcoin users. And changes to the ledger resulting from transfers of credit balances form one user to another require computationally costly verification by other users before they are authenticated as complete. The blockchain, therefore, is a special kind of ledger — a distributed, public ledger.

The Limited Appeal of Bitcoin

For the sovereigns of the early middle ages, the answers to the two questions of how much money should be created, and who should decide were: as much as I need to fight my wars, and it’s my right to decide how much that is. For the merchant-bankers who escaped their grasp, they were: as much as we need to settle trade, and only we can judge that. Both objectives were legitimate enough, but often, they were not aligned. So it was only when a compromise was agreed — a standard that married the two — that a single, hybrid money was able to win widespread acceptance.

The problem with bitcoin’s standard — with its fixed limit on issuance and its abrogation of human discretion — is that it looks fated to have limited appeal. A digital version of the gold standard sounds good in theory to a generation fed up with governments printing money to fund yawning deficits. But history shows that the popularity of “hard money” comes and goes.

In the Europe of the early middle ages, it was the merchants who liked their money hard — so their invoices would hold their value — and sovereigns who wanted it to bend to their needs. Fast forward to the nineteenth-century United States, and the same battle was fought between America’s bankers its farmers. Today, it is the baby-boomers across the developed world whom price stability suits, and their children and grandchildren who stand to benefit from a bit more inflation.

In all three cases, the underlying dynamic is the same. An economy’s creditors — those who hold financial claims on other people, when everything’s netted out — lose when the standard monetary unit buys less stuff. Its debtors, by the same token, gain. The trouble is that — as all these cases also show — the distribution of creditors and debtors throughout society changes radically over time. As a result, the fairness and efficiency of a hard money standard waxes and wanes as well. Capitalist economies never stand still, so neither does the appropriate monetary standard.

That is not a statement of opinion. It is a statement of historical fact. Operating on a standard that suits only one part of the population confines money to limited circulation: even the greatest private money in history — the écu du marc — discovered that. To lock a monetary system to a fixed standard, and then throw away the key, is to condemn it to a marginal existence. To achieve widespread use, money must operate on a standard that suits a wide range of interests. So bitcoin’s intrinsic limit may make it very popular — but amongst a limited constituency of users.

What Exactly Is Money For?

Then there is bitcoin’s answer to the third central monetary question: how new money is actually created.

Sovereign money was (and mostly still is) created against public debt. The sovereign incurred debt by employing officials or buying provisions, and thereby got its liabilities into circulation. The merchant-bankers’ money, on the other hand, was created against commercial debt. They issued bills to finance trade, and those bills then circulated as money. Bitcoins, by contrast, are created on a very different principle. They are issued as a reward for verifying the transaction log.

In a world in which people have lost faith in government’s judgment on public expenditure and in bankers’ acumen as arbiters of sound business, there is obviously something unattractive about relying on these qualities to determine how new money is created. In contrast, a system where the process of money creation is open to all and tightly linked to the technical job of sustaining the payments system itself sounds much more sensible. Look a little harder at these three alternatives, however, and there is an awkward question lurking in the background: what exactly is money for?

We may not like the processes whereby sovereign money or bank money were created — but they did have clear rationales. Sovereign money was a tool to achieve the sovereign’s aims — public action of one sort or another. Likewise, the bankers’ money was a tool to expand trade and thereby consumption. So it made perfect sense that the issuance of new money should be tied to the financing of public or private spending.

Seen in this light, the logic of bitcoin mining is strangely circular. The issuance of new money is tied to the job of maintaining the integrity of the payments system. It is as if money exists not to serve any ulterior purpose at all, but simply as an end in itself. In that case, bitcoin may indeed be the perfect metaphor for our relentlessly transactional culture. But it is less clear that it can serve as the currency of a modern, market economy, in which the creation of money through the extension of bank loans is intentionally linked to the expansion of business investment.

Coinage: The Original Internet of Things

Bitcoin, however, is more than just its answers to the first three key questions of money.

At its core is its novel payments technology — the distributed public ledger — which could just as easily be used to process payments denominated in US dollars, or British pounds, or Japanese yen as in bitcoins. So how does bitcoin’s answer to the fourth question any money must answer measure up against the historical alternatives?

The oldest of those is cash: coins and notes that represent credit balances and transfer them from person to person when passed from hand to hand. It is in fact a very ingenious technology when one thinks about it. Settlement is instantaneous. There is the risk of counterfeiting, of course — but no need to refer to any centralized records. And the ledger recording society’s network of credit and debt at any point in time is genuinely virtual: it consists simply in the physical distribution of the information-bearing tokens. Coinage, you see, was the original internet of things.

The bank-based payments system pioneered by Europe’s medieval merchants, which accounts for the vast majority of payments today, works differently. It deploys real ledgers — paper-based in the middle ages, digital today — to keep track of clients’ money. When payments are made, credit and debit balances are cleared against one another — within a single ledger if both counter-parties bank there, or across two or more, If not. Unlike cash, settlement is not quite instantaneous. No longer is clearing done only quarterly, and in person, as in the days of the medieval fairs. But it usually take at least a few seconds, even if it is purely electronic. Settlement risk, meanwhile, derives from the possibility of failures in banks’ IT systems — a possibility that exasperated clients will confirm is all too real.

Bitcoin’s payments technology is a kind of mixture of these predecessors. Like the existing, bank-based payments system, every transaction is recorded. But rather than a hierarchy of centralized account books, bitcoin has only one, which is updated (more or less) in real time. It is as if the medieval fair of Champagne or Lyons happens every day — indeed, every ten minutes. But bitcoin’s payments system is also like cash: because bitcoin’s ledger is distributed and public, shared across its users and requiring endorsement not from any authority but from users’ peers in order to authenticate payment. The fairs, as it were, are held spontaneously, rather than at the behest of the bankers’ cabaal.

Why Bitcoin May Be Different

If history is a guide, it is here that bitcoin’s real potential lies: in its hybrid payments technology. As Europe’s medieval merchant-bankers proved, a brilliant new means of recording and verifying money transfers can indeed be a revolutionary event — not just in economic, but in political terms.

The existing, bank-based payments system is expensive and antediluvian — but also profitable and therefore jealously guarded by its powerful owners. Other technologies co-exist — such as cash payment face-to-face, or the developing world staple of hawala for international transfers — but they cannot seriously compete with banks. If Bitcoin’s technology is as cheap, as scalable, and as secure as its advocates claim, it may be different.

That last point, of course, is crucial. One reason that cash, that most archaic of payments technologies, still exists, is because it really is anonymous. Anonymity in transactions can be abused, of course. But it remains a basic civil liberty. Payments systems that use ledgers rarely offer the same assurance. Efficiency and economy are nice to have: but not at the cost of our right to privacy.

It was thirty-five years ago — long before bitcoin, the internet, or even the Macintosh — that the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard warned that “the computerization of society…could become the ‘dream’ instrument for controlling and regulating the market system, extended to include knowledge itself and governed exclusively by the performativity principle.” An unreasonably dystopian vision, perhaps, given the enormous increases in prosperity and individual freedom that the web has brought. But it is only now that computerization is transforming money — the most basic institution of all in our market societies. So it is a dystopia we must make all the more certain does not become reality.

PullClean puts sanitization in hospital workers’ “line of motion.” Image: Agency of Design

One in 25 patients in U.S. hospitals acquires an infection during their stay in the hospital, according to a comprehensive study released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Clean hands can help mitigate the problem, but getting hospital workers to use sanitizer regularly has proven tough. One design studio’s clever solution? A door handle that encourages people to clean their hands every time they use it.

The handle, PullClean, was developed by the British studio Agency of Design for Altitude Medical. It’s a simple column that can be fitted on any pull door, with a blue paddle on bottom that dispenses a dab of hand sanitizer when pushed. The aim, the designers explain, is to “make it so simple that sanitizing becomes habitual every time you open the door.”

Hospitals are already littered with sanitizer bottles and wall-mounted dispensers. But the problem isn’t that hospital workers avoid using them; it’s simply that they forget to.

The big insight with PullClean was to combine that sanitizing act with something hospital workers already do every day. “Altitude Medical came to us with the idea of putting hand sanitizers ‘in the line of motion’ of staff,” says Rich Gilbert, a co-founder of Agency of Design. “They knew their position on corridor walls meant that they weren’t used enough and that a simple reposition could have a radical impact.”

The handle, invented by Altitude Medical co-founders Alex Oshmyanksy and Jacob McKnight, was carefully tuned to encourage use. Agency of Design toyed with ideas of how to force the behavior, and looked at some high-tech solutions involving personalized reminders using things like RIFD tags, but ultimately elected to go with a frictionless, “opt-in” design. “We wanted to make the interaction as simple as possible, trying to make it almost subconscious,” Gilbert says. “You’re already holding it, so you might as well use the other hand to dispense sanitizer.”

They also tested a variety of designs for the dispenser itself, deciding that the blue paddle offered the most obvious affordance. The paddle is tapered slightly outwards from the handle, helping it stand out, and it also bends slightly forward, inviting passersby to flatten it. “This is taking some of the visual language of a fire exit paddle, to try and make it say ‘push me,’” Gilbert says. A clinical trial of a slightly different prototype handle in a U.S. hospital saw the rate of sanitation rise from 24 percent to 77 percent after the prototype handle was installed.

A web application lets hospital administrators track the handle’s use. Agency of Design

The smart hardware is only part of the solution. The refillable handles also come with built-in sensors that link to a web application, letting administrators see how often the dispensers are being activated in relation to how frequently the doors are opened. Hospitals will be able to track sanitation rates over time and compare their use at different locations throughout the facility.

While it’s impossible to say how many fatalities hospital-acquired infections are directly responsible for, CDC Director Tom Frieden offered a striking statistic earlier this week: “Today and every day, more than 200 Americans with healthcare-associated infections will die during their hospital stay.” Clean hands won’t solve the problem completely, but building sanitation into the day-to-day work flow of hospital employees certainly can’t hurt.

PullClean will ship later this year for $200.