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It is old news that all the tech we now live with is constantly gathering data about us. It is important, however, not to become complacent about this or to assume the situation cannot or is not getting worse. Pretty much every piece of digital technology that we interact with likely is gathering some personal information about you which is used to target advertising and to sell to third parties. Regulations in most countries are inadequate and fail to keep up with technological changes.

One of the latest venues to soak up information about you may be surprising – your car. Cars are increasingly computerized, and they typically collect driving behavior data – how fast your drive, how hard you break, and how tight you make turns. But also, some vehicles have cameras facing the driver which means they can detect your behavior visually. Sometimes this is sold as a safety feature, to tell if you are too sleepy or inebriated to drive. Sometimes this is part of a system to get your insurance company to reduce your rates if you think you are a safe driver. But often it is done without disclosure. Recent GM was found guilty of collecting and selling such data without the permission of the user, and was banned for doing so for five years. But many other car manufacturers also do this.

All they really have to do is bury some disclosure deep in the user agreement, which functionally nobody reads, and they are covered. You may have the ability to opt-out of such data selling. Of course, putting the burden on the end user to find and read any such disclosures and then go through the steps necessary to opt out of data selling is a huge problem. In fact insurance companies will buy data from car companies and then use that data to increase your insurance premiums, without you opting into any of it.

The basic fact is that collecting data from users, packaging that data and then selling it to third parties is a huge industry. It is estimated that globally this is a $240 billion industry. When that kind of money is on the line, companies are going to do everything they can to capitalize on it, while avoiding legal issues by either flying under the radar or hiding behind legal fig leaves (like the buried consumer disclosures). They will also use that money to lobby the government to let them continue to do so, or even to mandate certain things that will help this industry. For example, some car monitoring technology is sold as a safety feature, and it can legitimately be used for this purpose. Others are convenience features, like GPS. But once all the sensors and cameras are in place, they will soak up all the data they can – because that data is worth billions.

User data is collected from computers, pretty much every time you visit a website. It is collected from apps on your phone. And now it is collected from you car as well. If the “internet of things” becomes a reality, then every appliance could be collecting data on you.

All this data can now be paired with AI tools to sift through it, find patterns, and make inferences. They can not only infer your buying habits, but also your political affiliation. They can then use this to target political content to you. They will know which buttons to push and with push them expertly to affect your political beliefs and behaviors. Everyone, of course, likes to think we are resistant to such manipulation, but that is a conceit. In any case, in the aggregate people can very predictably be manipulated.

And of course, imagine the power of this data combined with AI in the hands of a totalitarian government. It is an authoritarian’s dream. But don’t think this kind of abuse is limited to blatantly authoritarian governments – authoritarianism is a continuum, and there are likely few governments free of any such tendencies. Fear of bad actors and the promise of safety is effectively used to get us to give away tiny portions of freedom, which accumulates over time.

The only solution is comprehensive regulation – a common theme I keep raising when it comes to modern technology. This is because technology is advancing quickly, and corporations, by default, have all the control. Free market forces are great for what they do, but in order to be effective the end consumer must have adequate information. This is increasingly difficult because as technology advances it is increasingly difficult for the average user to have enough expertise to navigate all the risks and perils. All the various technologies and applications are also overwhelming in the aggregate – you can spend your entire work day just managing your own security, fending off spam and other intrusive advertising, and trying to understand the technology you deal with regularly. All of this burden should not be on the consumer.

This is partly why we have elected representatives. There is some common-sense regulations that should be universal. People should not have the burden to opt out, it should be required that they actively opt in if they want any data collected or sold or to be sent any advertising. If you find you have been somehow opted in to anything like this, it should be trivially easy to opt out. It is OK to collect depersonalized aggregate data for research, but it is not OK to collect personalized data that can be tied to a specific person. The collection and use of any such data needs to be tightly regulated (like it is in medicine), with total transparency and heavy penalties for violators. It is not enough to have a disclosure buried in a user agreement.

In the US we are simultaneously in a situation of high political disfunction and rapid technological advance requiring thoughtful regulation. This is a bad combination. I know this is just another burden placed on the end user (all of us), but I don’t see another option. We need to educate ourselves on current technology and then advocate for common sense regulations. Write your representative – this actually does help. But long term we need to fix our broken political system so that our representative actually represent our interests.

The post Privacy In a Digital World first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

We think of our body clock ticking over on a 24-hour cycle, but evidence is growing that it has seasonal rhythms, which could affect our response to vaccines

Time might be even stranger than Einstein imagined. Physicists are now exploring the possibility that a single clock could exist in a quantum superposition, ticking both faster and slower at the same time — almost like Schrödinger’s cat being both alive and dead simultaneously. Using incredibly precise atomic clocks and cutting-edge quantum technologies, researchers believe they may soon be able to test this bizarre prediction in the lab for the first time.

The floating ice shelf of world’s widest glacier – Thwaites glacier in Antarctica – is detaching, with worrying implications for global sea-level rise

Inside some very special black holes, there may be a boundary called a Cauchy horizon. Columnist Leah Crane explores the place beyond which physics breaks and anything is possible

I'm on vacation this week and decided to repost a 2018 article that I had written for my other blog (but never published on SBM) that's oddly relevant to the SBM post last week about that awful NYT acupuncture article. Meet the introduction of the "interstitium" in acupuncture, complete with a major Deepak Chopra connection!

The post A blast from the past: The “interstitium,” the inspiration for that recent awful NYT acupuncture article first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have achieved what was once considered impossible by electrically powering insulating nanoparticles to create a completely new kind of LED. Using tiny organic “molecular antennas,” the team found a way to funnel energy into materials that normally cannot conduct electricity, producing ultra pure near infrared light with remarkable efficiency.

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have achieved what was once considered impossible by electrically powering insulating nanoparticles to create a completely new kind of LED. Using tiny organic “molecular antennas,” the team found a way to funnel energy into materials that normally cannot conduct electricity, producing ultra pure near infrared light with remarkable efficiency.

Researchers have developed a durable new catalyst that produces clean hydrogen without relying on expensive platinum metals. The breakthrough could make renewable hydrogen fuel cheaper, more efficient, and easier to scale for real-world energy use.

Electric vehicles are pushing scientists to tackle one of the biggest hidden energy drains inside electric motors: magnetic energy loss. Now, researchers in Japan have developed a powerful AI-driven physics model that can peer into the chaotic “maze-like” magnetic patterns inside motor materials and reveal how heat and microscopic magnetic structures trigger wasted energy.

Electric vehicles are pushing scientists to tackle one of the biggest hidden energy drains inside electric motors: magnetic energy loss. Now, researchers in Japan have developed a powerful AI-driven physics model that can peer into the chaotic “maze-like” magnetic patterns inside motor materials and reveal how heat and microscopic magnetic structures trigger wasted energy.

Scientists have achieved something that once sounded almost impossible: using ordinary sunlight to create quantum-linked photon pairs, a phenomenon normally dependent on precise laboratory lasers. By building a sun-tracking system that funnels sunlight through optical fiber into a special crystal, researchers generated strongly correlated photons capable of performing “ghost imaging,” where images are reconstructed indirectly through quantum correlations. Remarkably, the sunlight-powered setup produced image quality close to that of a traditional laser system, even recreating detailed images like a “ghost face.”

For more than 200 years, scientists have struggled to pin down the exact strength of gravity — and one physicist spent a decade chasing the answer while keeping his own results hidden from himself. Stephan Schlamminger and his team at NIST painstakingly recreated a landmark French experiment designed to measure “big G,” the universal gravitational constant that governs everything from falling apples to galaxies. When he finally opened a sealed envelope containing the secret number needed to decode the experiment, the results brought both relief and disappointment

For more than 200 years, scientists have struggled to pin down the exact strength of gravity — and one physicist spent a decade chasing the answer while keeping his own results hidden from himself. Stephan Schlamminger and his team at NIST painstakingly recreated a landmark French experiment designed to measure “big G,” the universal gravitational constant that governs everything from falling apples to galaxies. When he finally opened a sealed envelope containing the secret number needed to decode the experiment, the results brought both relief and disappointment

I did one of my favorite shopping expeditions today, stocking up on groceries in Chinatown. A giant supermarket opened there in the last couple of years, and it has everything one would want for Chinese food, including the hoisin sauce, sesame oil, soy sauce, and Botan Calrose short-grained rice that I favor.  But there are many, many aisles of things that aren’t even labeled in English, and tons of goodies like the first two shown below. I love wandering the aisles (usually I’m the only white guy there, and certainly the only Jew), so it takes me much longer to shop than I usually do.  They also have Chinese pastries, including various buns and cakes that are perfect for a weekend breakfast.  Also congee and crullers.

About the title above: no, this, it isn’t food for cats, but cat-shaped food for humans, plus a “veggie cat” nail salon downstairs.  The Chinese do love their cats, and it shows in the many products emblazoned with moggies.  The “good luck cat”  (maneki-neko in Japanese), raising its hand to wish you prosperity, is ubiquitous, and is on this first group of cat pastries:

I have a reclining maneki-neko in my office that is solar powered, so it waves its paw when the sun is out.  No good luck on overcast days!

I’d never seen this one before: cat-shaped butter-and-cheese cookies in a great package. Now I’m sorry I didn’t buy them:

And this was downstairs, but closed on Sunday. What on earth is a “veggie cat,” and what does it have to do with fingernails?

Bill Maher continues his defense of Israel on the country’s birthday by pointing out the pervasive Israel-dissing of the mainstream media, adding that there is one thing that the American Left and Right agree on: Israel is the “monster country of all time” (he includes the NYT in this category). He also calls out Democrats, professors, influencers and young people for hating on the Jewish state.  Some of the quotes Maher gives will curl the soles of your shoes.  As he says, “Jew hatred isn’t just acceptable, now; it’s cool. Celebrities love it and make it trendy; it’s the new Che Guevara tee shirt.”

The guests on view are Dan Jones, a historian and author of Castles: A Fortified History, and David French, New York Times columnist and co-host of the podcast Advisory Opinions. I wonder what French thought of Maher’s slap at the NYT at 1:44.

This is more serious and less funny than his usual bits, but it’s a good one.

British physicist and science popularizer Phil Halper emailed me about two new surveys he and others had conducted with 1675 physicists, asking their views about fundamental questions in the field.  This is not, of course, a guide to the truth, but simply a snapshot of where physicists stand on things like quantum gravity, black holes, and the Big Bang.  The links to the surveys are in the text below, sent by Phil. I’ll highlight a few of their stands on interesting (to me) issues. Phil’s words are indented:

My co-authors and I just released the largest survey of physicists ever done. In conjunction with the American Physical Society we got more than 1600 replies to our Big Mysteries Survey.

What’s relevant for debates between believers and non believers is that we only got a large consensus on one topic and that is the Big Bang should be understood only as a theory that says the universe evolved from a hot dense state that says nothing at all about a beginning of time . Interestingly, we got 68% in both this large survey of a broad cross section of physicists and for a smaller scale survey we did of leading physicists in Copenhagen with the Niels Bohr Institute. This seriously undermines William Lane Craig’s Kalam cosmological argument which is defended by claiming that physicists agree that the Big Bang has shown that the universe had a beginning, we now have strong empirical evidence that physicists think no such thing.

On the fine tuning argument the most popular answer  was that constants are brute facts that need no explanation. This was found in both of our survey and in the Phil papers survey of philosophers.

You can see the results here

And the Copenhagen Survey is here.

JAC: The Copenhagen Survey involved views of 151 physicists attending a conference on black holes in 2024.

And there is a video with Sean Caroll, Niayesh Afshordi, and Ghazal Geshnizjani discussing the results here. [JAC: I’ve put the video below.]

You might also enjoy the recent debate I did on science, cosmology and faith with Stephen Meyer here.

I haven’t yet watched the videos, but I did look at the big survey; you can access the pdf for free by clicking on the screenshot below:

First, a bit of methodology from the paper:

In the summer of 2024, a survey was conducted at the Black Hole Inside Out Conference in Copenhagen to assess physicists’ views on a range of ongoing controversies [1]. Eighty-five scientists responded. One year later, the authors collaborated with the American Physical Society’s Physics Magazine on a substantially larger follow-up survey, which polled 1,675 participants from the magazine’s readership and the members of the American Physical Society. The Physics Magazine survey therefore provides a broader view of attitudes within the physics community and allows comparisons with the more focused conference-based Copenhagen sample.

Taken together, the two surveys make it possible to compare views expressed in a specialist conference setting with those expressed by a much larger and more heterogeneous respondent pool. On some topics, the results are remarkably similar; on others, the differences are substantial. This paper presents the Big Mysteries Survey results, offers commentary on their interpretation, and highlights points of agreement and divergence relative to the Copenhagen survey

Here are a few bar charts from the paper. First, what the Big Bang implies (Sean Carroll explains this at the beginning of the video below).  A big majority of physicists think that the Big Bang says nothing about whether it marked the ‘beginning of time”:

Of course tyros like me have no idea why the Big Bang doesn’t imply the beginning of time, but so be it: all of this is above my pay grade but I’m happy to see where physicists stand on these issues now.

What about cosmic inflation? A bit more than half of physicists think that cosmic inflation (the expanding universe) explains “an unexpected uniformity” of the universe.

Dark matter: does it explain anomalies in the rate of rotation of galaxies? No consensus:

Also no consensus on whether dark energy explains the accelerating expansion of the Universe:

There’s no consensus on why the universe’s physical constants appear to be “fine-tuned” for the existence of worlds that can produce life. (This is a favorite theological argument for God.) The “brute facts” explanation brings a stop to searching for explanations, but only 26% of physicists hold it.  20%—and I think this includes Carroll—think it’s explained by a multiverse.

There are more graphs, but I’ll show just one more. What kind of picture of the Universe is provided by quantum mechanics? The Copenhagen explanatoin, which people like me can’t reconcile with physical reality, is the favored explanation. I believe it was Feynman who said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t. I’m still baffled by the issue of quantum entanglement, and don’t even understand the experiments buttressing it.

And here’s the video with Sean Caroll, Niayesh Afshordi, and Ghazal Geshnizjani.  Carroll, as usual, gives some very succinct and lucid explanations. The other physicists are good as well.

Have a look at the paper for more opinions, including about what black holes mean and what they do.

Hawking faced a question with no answer hiding behind it. The best boundary condition for the universe, he decided, was that there was no boundary at all. To make that statement into physics, he had to do something deeply strange to time.

Send in your wildlife photos! I am almost out. Thank you in advance.

Today we have miscellaneous photos from the Catskills taken by reader Jan Malik. Jan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge them by clicking on them.

Here is another batch of pictures from my hikes in the Central Catskills this April and May. They are not too artistic, given the fast pace that a weekend backpacking hike demands, but they give a sample of what common animals a casual hiker can see in these “mountains” (the Catskills are an eroded plateau and, despite being steep in places, they are too low to have an alpine zone).

White‑tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), right in the parking lot at a cloudy sunrise. It was slurping water from a muddy puddle despite a clear stream flowing nearby, so it must have been leftover salt that attracted this ungulate. Woodstock residents like their roads well salted. One has to drive carefully at dusk around Woodstock, as there are many deer browsing on lawns and gardens.

In the woodland, I found the first of many red efts of the Eastern newt (Notophthalmus viridescens). This is an intermediate land stage of development between the aquatic larva and adult forms. Red efts have lungs, but air exchange through the skin is also important, supplying 30–40% of their oxygen demand. They travel through the forest litter when it is humid enough—after rain or in the early morning:

This is probably a blue‑headed vireo (Vireo solitarius), collecting nesting materials. If my identification is correct, then it is not possible to tell a male from a female, as they are sexually monomorphic and share rearing duties almost equally. Interestingly, however, a female may desert the nest just before fledging to mate with another available male:

Possibly an Eastern comma (Polygonia comma), found at higher elevation:

Black‑and‑white warbler (Mniotilta varia). I think this is a male. If so, he may be led by a female into the territory of another male to provoke a fight and allow her to judge his fitness. These birds occupy a similar niche to nuthatches and brown creepers; they climb and circle tree trunks to find arthropods:

Eastern towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus), male. These colorful sparrows hang around the edges of forest clearings:

Eastern American toad (Anaxyrus americanus americanus), hiding in a ramps patch. I wonder whether they would prey on red efts or if the efts’ foul taste would be a deterrent:

While passing through oak woods rich with acorns, I heard many alarm chirps from Eastern chipmunks (Tamias striatus). Most made themselves scarce as I approached, but one remained on guard duty:

Not a good picture, but here is a dark‑eyed junco (Junco hyemalis). These are hardy birds, staying year‑round in the forest. In winter they form close‑knit flocks with a few dominant individuals and a strict pecking order:

Chipping sparrow (Spizella passerina) on the side of a quiet road. These migrate to more southern states in winter and in summer nest closer to human settlements:

Mourning cloak (Nymphalis antiopa). There were a couple of them in the area, continuously jousting in the air for control of the territory. I see them every spring in that exact spot, but this year they were too engaged in battling each other to stay still, so this is a picture taken a few years back:

Brown creeper (Certhia americana), shown here just a moment after eating a couple of mayflies. They are common enough, but I rarely see them due to their near‑perfect camouflage. Without directly comparing the bill length it is difficult to tell a female from a male:

The equations of general relativity give up at the singularity. Decades before Stephen Hawking dared to guess what came before, John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt built the strange mathematical machinery that would make the question askable in the first place.