science is a religion

The vast majority of people are religious. Science is a religion. Religions can be better or worse. Religions differ by focus. The ultimate way to judge a religion is by outcomes. Science is a good religion. So is Christianity, in a different way. So is Judaism, in an entirely different way. So was Islam in a way very similar to Christianity (something became broken in Islam after the defeat in Spain and I am not sure what). So was the Egyptian cult of Amon-Ra, etc. On the other hand, the Semitic cults of Ba`al and Ishtar as well as the Greek and Roman religions were not so good. Pagan cults of place spirits and such were quite lousy.

While religions can be good or bad, religious fanatics are almost always harmful. The traits of religious fanatics are (i) fixation on their religion and (ii) claims that all other religions are false. Richard Dawkins, for example, is a religious fanatic of atheism. (Atheism is distinct from science [science has nothing to say on supernatural beings, but atheism does], also a religion, and a rather useless one, about the level of the cult of Ishtar.)

To answer your original question: the tendentious history of science that you refer to is what the New Testament is to the history of Christianity. It’s not that it’s wrong, but it’s not where you’d look for an unbiased examination.

Practice science by all means, but not religious fanaticism of science. I’m afraid it may be the latter that informs the sentiment of this post.

What may have been different about the Greeks is an unusual extent of religious tolerance they had. Their basic view was diametrically opposed to religious fundamentalism—instead of treating other religions as false by default, they treated them as true. To reconcile, they mapped every religion to their own with much flexibility. (Most affected religions were enlightened by this attitude of tolerance. But, for example, the exclusionary Judaism, inherently fundamentalist [look at the first commandment again] was less ready to embrace the Greek mapping.)

(Because I also don’t believe in unbiased analysis, for the context: Personally, I consider myself an agnostic. This includes my attitude towards science. Or perhaps I’m a math cultist. I’m also culturally Jewish.)

Finding the fear and love of God inside the brain

Why do some embrace religion and others reject it outright? For a long time, scientists have been trying to answer this question by probing the neural roots of religion. Until fairly recently, many thought the answer lay in a "God-spot"—a small region of the brain that has been linked to the mystical experiences associated with faith.

Thanks in large part to the growing sophistication of brain-scanning techniques, which let neuroscientists peer into the brain’s inner workings, that concept has largely been rendered moot; there is now widespread agreement that religious behaviors are modulated by well-defined neural pathways. Indeed, several studies have indicated that the feelings of joy, doubt, and self-reflection that are evoked by intense religious experiences can be correlated with specific patterns of brain activation. Earlier this year, a group of researchers led by the National Institute on Aging’s Dimitrios Kapogiannis identified several of the cognitive mechanisms and brain circuits that seem to be engaged during the processing of religious belief.

Their findings showed that, far from being an inscrutable phenomenon, religion could in fact be experimentally addressed and that its emergence may have been driven by changes in the neural capacity for language, logical reasoning, and other evolutionarily significant processes. In a follow-up study, the same group investigated whether the expression of religious beliefs could be tied to variability in the brain's architecture. Their results, which reveal that differences in regional cortical volumes correlate with key aspects of religiosity, were reported in PLoS ONE.

In their first study, Kapogiannis and his colleagues developed a three-dimensional psychological framework that incorporated their subjects' differing perceptions of God in order to explore the neuroanatomical underpinnings of religion. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they were able to associate these religious beliefs with activity in areas of the brain associated with memory retrieval, imagery, emotion, and abstract semantics. For instance, a subject who claimed to feel God’s love experienced higher levels of activity within the right middle frontal gyrus, a region associated with positive emotions.

For their new study, the authors had the same group of subjects complete a survey about their religious behaviors, their upbringing, and about particular aspects of their worldview. Whereas the intent of their first study was to illuminate the neural and cognitive activity associated with religious experiences, their objective here was to determine whether slight variations in gray matter volume correlated with different facets of their religiosity.

From the survey results they collected, they identified four components of religiosity: experiencing an intimate relationship with God and engagement in religious behavior; having a religious upbringing; doubting God’s existence; and experiencing fear of God’s anger. They then paired these findings with the results of structural MRI tests to see what relationships existed between brain volume and these components.

Confirming some of their earlier conclusions, the authors found that both religious belief and religious practice seem to be associated with networks in the brain involved with social cognitive processing. The robustness of the networks varied on an individual basis, reflecting each subject’s distinct religiosity, and seemed to fluctuate over time in response to changing stimuli. None of the networks they identified were found to be unique to religion.

The MRI results revealed that a stronger sense of intimacy with God correlated with an increase in the cortical volume of the right middle temporal gyrus (MTG). The MTG plays a key role in establishing and maintaining intimate relationships, such as the one between a mother and her child, so the authors reason that its evolution gave rise to the sense of intimacy with God that some devout individuals share.

At the other end, subjects with low MTG volumes displayed little interest in God or religion. (Schizophrenic patients, who often struggle to differentiate self from God and display aberrant religious behaviors, had the lowest volumes.)

They also found a pronounced negative correlation between the cortical volume of the left precuneus, an area involved in empathy and emotional response, and fear of God's anger. Those who felt a stronger connection with God, and thus were better able to relate God to their selves, had larger precuneus volumes and tended to be the most devout practitioners. Individuals with smaller volumes who did not form strong emotional bonds with God typically prayed out of a sense of fear, rather than out of a sense conviction or love.

Because the study only considered adults, the obvious next step would be to analyze younger age groups. Being correlational rather than causal, these findings don't really address the question of whether certain individuals were more predisposed to particular patterns of religiosity because of their brain development. The fact that no region of the brain corresponded with religiosity of upbringing rules out the contention that religious nurture alone contributes to neuroanatomical variability.

The sum total of their results suggests that religious belief may have arisen as a natural extension of evolutionary advances in social cognition and behavior. Over time, the changes in brain volume that enabled humans to show empathy towards others may have also made it possible for some to develop intimate personal relationships with a supernatural entity, thus laying the foundation for the emergence of religion.

WIRED Science

WIRED Science

For Mars Rover, Really Remote Roadside Assistance

Past Warranty, It Survived Solar Flares and a Three-Story Bounce, but the Off-Road Buggy Is Belly-Deep in a Ditch

On Mars, NASA's robot rover Spirit is spinning its wheels on the soft shoulder of planetary exploration, up to its axles in silt millions of miles away from tense engineers who are struggling to extricate it by remote control.

At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., mission planners are testing ways to drive it free of the Martian sand trap in a last-ditch effort to save a $300 million robot that, after puttering across alien terrain for five years, may have rolled its last few feet.

To recreate the treacherous Martian ground, they built a tilted plywood sandbox and packed it with 5,400 pounds of diatomaceous earth and fire clay mixed to mimic soil with the properties of "slippery cake flour," says Sharon Laubach, head of the Mars rover project's integrated sequencing team. A full-scale duplicate of the 384-pound vehicle is parked on an artificial hillside, hub-deep in the powder.

Working through their first round of 11 rescue experiments, JPL rover engineers wearing protective masks and white "Free Spirit" lab coats gingerly gunned the test rover's engine, then periodically measured its progress with a yardstick. With each trial maneuver, though, the robot dug itself a little deeper.

This month, the world celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon mission and humanity's first footsteps on a world beyond our own. In the decades since, space flight has in so many ways become routine. Hundreds of satellites orbit our home planet, owned or shared by 115 countries.

Not since 1972, however, have people returned to the moon or ventured much beyond low Earth orbit. Generations of unmanned probes, though, have toured Mercury, Venus, the outer planets and beyond. For the robot pioneers of planetary exploration, every journey is a narrative of near misses and narrow escapes, of human ingenuity rising to a challenge.

"We know we have to diagnose these problems from millions of miles way," says Dr. Laubach. "It would be nice to be able to stand around Spirit and actually see the situation. It would be even nicer if we could push her out."

The Spirit rover has long been working on borrowed time. Designed for a 90-day mission, it has been sending back data 20 times longer than planned. At its best, Spirit has traveled further in a day than the 1997 Mars Sojourner rover covered in its entire three-month mission.

"We are way out of warranty," says project deputy principal investigator Ray Arvidson at Washington University in St. Louis. "Nobody expected us to be still doing this in July 2009."

Yet any one of Spirit's almost 2,000 days on Mars could easily have been its last.

Spirit's travails began the moment it was launched from Earth in 2003. During its 311-million-mile interplanetary voyage, it survived bombardment by charged particles from some of the highest energy solar flares on record. Wrapped in a cocoon of protective air bags, it hit Mars hard enough to bounce higher than a three-story building. It bounced up and down 27 times before skittering to a halt on a rust-colored plain strewn with volcanic rocks and pocked with impact craters.

A defective air bag briefly blocked its way onto the planet's surface. Once it rolled on to Martian soil, mission planners promptly lost control of the vehicle for two days. In the years since, Spirit's rover drivers at JPL have contended with faltering power levels, communications blackouts and periodic computer problems that have worsened in recent months.

To complicate matters, the Spirit by necessity has been driving backwards since 2006, when its right front wheel stopped working. JPL's rover drivers discovered they could still steer the vehicle more or less in the right direction, but only by driving it in reverse, dragging its locked wheel like an anchor. The scientists quickly came to value the broken wheel as a digging tool that churned up subsurface soil for analysis.

"Wherever you drive, you dig a big trench," says Dr. Arvidson. "The positive side is that it turns out to be a beautiful physical properties experiment."

All told, the JPL rover engineers have at least 60 maneuvers to consider, conceived during a recent brainstorming session involving hundreds of researchers around the country. It might be weeks before they can tell which approaches have the best chance of freeing the stranded rover in Mars' lighter gravity, where the vehicle weighs much less than it does on Earth. "It is our expectation that it will take a long time to get out," says JPL project manager John Callas. "This is the most serious event for the rover in its five-plus years on the surface of Mars."

With swept-back wings of solar panels, a gold-plated instrument box and clusters of cameras, the six-wheel Spirit rover resembles a mechanical moth with a gilded thorax. Spirit, one of two NASA rovers now on Mars, is the ultimate off-road vehicle. The nearest highway is more than 250 million miles away.

Rolling across this exotic terrain earlier this year, the Spirit rover broke through the thin crust of a volcanic rise called Home Plate. It has been mired there since May. "Unfortunately, when we tried to climb up that little slope, the rover couldn't make it," Dr. Laubach says. "The rover was digging into this material and the belly of the rover was getting closer to the surface," where it might easily have grounded itself permanently on rocks.

So far, the Spirit rover and its twin rover Opportunity together have transmitted 250,000 images and 36 gigabytes of technical data, equal to 2.5 million pages or so of text. They have uncovered mineral evidence that Mars once was warmer and wetter than today -- and buttressed the possibility that it might have supported the development of life.

"Both rovers, by digging in the dirt, provided absolute ironclad evidence of warm wet conditions on Mars several billion years ago," Dr. Arvidson says.

While engineers try to get Spirit moving again, project scientists are using its sensors to study the strange ground around it. "It turns out that the soil is scientifically very interesting," says Dr. Laubach.

At the same time, the wind has swept Spirit's solar panels free of dust, restoring the vehicle to full power for the first time in many months. "We've tripled the amount of energy," says Dr. Callas.

China and Russia plan to send satellites to Mars next year. NASA's next Mars rover mission is scheduled for launch in 2011. The U.S. space shuttle fleet, however, has reached retirement age. The International Space Station already is slated for de-orbit and demolition in 2016, NASA's space station program manager, Michael T. Suffredini, said this week.

For decades, NASA planners and space-exploration proponents dreamed of lunar settlements and manned missions to Mars, as a necessary prelude to even more ambitious human exploration of planets around other stars. In the weeks ahead, the U.S. human space flight plans committee, appointed by President Barack Obama, will be assessing NASA's human space exploration efforts. Are the fiscal, physical and psychological challenges of long duration space flight more than we can master?

Our machines boldly go, leaving tire tracks where footsteps may one day follow.

In Search for Intelligence, a Silicon Brain Twitches

By Replicating a Rat's Gray Matter, Scientists Discover Simulated Cells That Self-Organize but Lack Certain Smarts

 

For the last four years, Henry Markram has been building a biologically accurate artificial brain. Powered by a supercomputer, his software model closely mimics the activity of a vital section of a rat's gray matter.

Dubbed Blue Brain, the simulation shows some strange behavior. The artificial "cells" respond to stimuli and suddenly pulse and flash in spooky unison, a pattern that isn't programmed but emerges spontaneously.

"It's the neuronal equivalent of a Mexican wave," says Dr. Markram, referring to what happens when successive clusters of stadium spectators briefly stand and raise their arms, creating a ripple effect. Such synchronized behavior is common in flesh-and-blood brains, where it's believed to be a basic step necessary for decision making. But when it arises in an artificial system, it's more surprising.

 

Blue Brain is based at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. The project hopes to tackle one of the most perplexing mysteries of neuroscience: How does human intelligence emerge? The Blue Brain scientists hope their computer model can shed light on the puzzle, and possibly even replicate intelligence in some way.

"We're building the brain from the bottom up, but in silicon," says Dr. Markram, the leader of Blue Brain, which is powered by a supercomputer provided by International Business Machines Corp. "We want to understand how the brain learns, how it perceives things, how intelligence emerges."

Blue Brain is controversial, and its success is far from assured. Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology, a scientist who studies consciousness, says the Swiss project provides vital data about how part of the brain works. But he says that Dr. Markram's approach is still missing algorithms, the biological programming that yields higher-level functions.

"You need to have a theory about how a particular circuit in the brain" can trigger complex, higher-order properties, Dr. Koch argues. "You can't assemble ever larger data fields and shake it and say, 'Ah, that's how consciousness emerges.'"

Despite the challenges, the push to understand, replicate and even re-enact higher behaviors in the brain has become one of the hottest areas of neuroscience. With the help of a $4.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, IBM is working on a separate project with five U.S. universities to build a tiny, low-power microchip that simulates the behavior of one million neurons and ten billion synapses. The goal, says IBM, is to develop brainy computers that can better predict the behavior of complex systems, such as weather or the financial markets.

The Chinese government has provided about $1.5 million to a team at Xiamen University to create artificial-brain robots with microcircuits that evolve, learn and adapt to real-world situations. Similarly, Jeff Krichmar and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, Calif., have built an artificial-brain robot that learns to sharpen its visual perception when moving around in a lab environment, another form of emergent behavior, a form of spontaneous self-organization. And researchers at Sensopac, a project backed by a grant of €6.7 million ($9.3 million) from the European Union, have built part of an artificial mouse brain.

 

The scientists behind Blue Brain hope to have a virtual human brain functioning in ten years -- a lengthy time period that underscores the scientific challenge. The human brain has 100 billion neurons that send electrical signals to each other via a network of at least 100 trillion connections, or synapses. How could this dizzying complexity ever be recreated in a virtual model?

Dr. Markram has adopted a systematic, if painstaking approach. He decided to work out the blueprint of its wiring and then use that map to rebuild the brain in an artificial form. He focused on a rat's neocortical column, or NCC, an elementary building block of the brain's neocortex, which is responsible for higher functions and thought. In a rat's case, that includes planning to obtain food.

A rat's NCC, comprised of about 10,000 neurons and their 10 million connections, functions much like a computer microprocessor. All mammals have NCCs, and the ones in humans aren't all that different from the ones in rats. However, humans have far more NCCs, which means far greater brain power. Dr. Markram figured that if a rat simulation did a good job of correctly mimicking activity in a real rat's brain, he could use the same model as a road map for simulating the human brain.

Dr. Markram began by collecting detailed information about the rat's NCC, down to the level of genes, proteins, molecules and the electrical signals that connect one neuron to another. These complex relationships were then turned into millions of equations, written in software. He then recorded real-world data -- the strength and path of each electrical signal -- directly from rat brains to test the accuracy of the software.

At the Lausanne lab one recent afternoon, a pink sliver of rat brain sat in a beaker containing a colorless liquid. The neurons in the brain slice were still alive and actively communicating with each other. Nearby, a modified microscope recorded some of this inner activity in another brain slice. "We're intercepting the electro-chemical messages" in the cells, then testing the software against it for accuracy, said Dr. Markram.

The rat's NCC has 10,000 neurons, and it takes the power of one desktop computer to mimic the behavior of a single neuron. To model the entire NCC, Dr. Markram relies on an IBM computer that can perform 22.8 trillion operations a second. This enables the simulation to be rendered as a three-dimensional object. Thus, when Blue Brain is running, its deepest inner workings are seen in astonishing detail, in the form of a 3-D simulation that unfolds on a computer screen.

In a darkened room, Blue Brain displays a virtual NCC as a column-like structure, its blue color signifying a state of rest. When zapped by a simulated electrical current, the neurons start to signal to each other and their wiring progressively sparks to life different colors. Tests indicate the same areas light up in the model as do in a real rat's brain, suggesting that Blue Brain is accurate, says Dr. Markram.

More complex things start to happen. First there's a burst of red, then white, then red again, as the NCC's wiring fills up with a cascade of myriad signals. There are so many connections, the NCC looks like an incredibly dense tangle of undergrowth.

Then, two successive waves of yellow color suddenly race through Blue Brain. It's a sign that the neurons have synchronized their behavior on their own. "The cells start to take on a life of their own," says Dr. Markram. "That's what your brain is [and when such patterns become sophisticated] it becomes your personality."

If Blue Brain ever gets sophisticated enough to closely mimic the human brain, will it exhibit consciousness? Says Dr. Markram: "If it does emerge, we'll be able to tell you how it emerged. If it doesn't, we'll know that it's the result of more than just 100 billion neurons interacting."

Write to Gautam Naik at gautam.naik@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications: 
There are 10 million neuronal connections in the neocortical column of a rat brain. A previous version of this article incorrectly said there were 10 billion such connections.

 

Collaborating for Profits in Nanotechnology

Ivo Atanasov of the Electron Imaging Center for Nanomachines at the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. The institute allows start-ups to use its machines.

THE economic news in California has been pretty bleak lately. Its businesses, small and large, are becalmed by the recession. The state has taken to issuing i.o.u.’s in the wake of political wrangling over how to resolve a $26 billion budget deficit. Most ominous, the state’s once-great public universities and its community colleges and local schools face budget cuts that amount to critical surgery.

 

Gates gets his science lesson

I think he forgot the lessons of his schools,

HIRE A SCIENCE TEACHER,

Microsoft goes to Microscience.

Here is a inverview of the Bill gates, who left his job of full time in

microsoft, He found many ways to keep himself busy.This was an interview to CNET.com.

In between trying to eradicate polio, tame malaria, and fix the broken U.S. education system, Gates has managed to fulfill a dream of taking some classic physics lectures and making them available free over the Web. The lectures, done in 1964 by noted scientist (and Manhattan Project collaborator) Richard Feynman, take notions such as gravity and explains how they work and the broad implications they have in understanding the ways of the universe.Gates first saw the series of lectures 20 years ago on vacation and dreamed of being able to make them broadly available. After spending years tracking down the rights--and spending some of his personal fortune--Gates has done just that. Tapping his colleagues in Redmond to create interactive software to accompany the videos, Gates is making the collectionavailable free from the Microsoft Research Web site.

Gates said that he hoped his action would serve as a model for taking great educational content and making it broadly available for free.

"When a lecture is presented as well as this, it draws more people in to understanding science." Gates told CNET News. "And over time I hope there's more like this."

In a wide-ranging interview, Gates also reflected on the changes at Microsoft, spill the beans on the expansive vision for Product Natal (I explained about Natal in my posterous, just click the red color'd letters of Product Nadal)  and shared his thoughts on Google's just-introduced Chrome OS. Here's an edited transcript of that interview.

You first saw these videos on a vacation 20 years ago. Do you want to talk a little bit about how that happened, and what your reaction was to seeing those lectures?
Gates: Yes. I was in a period where, in order to learn new science, thought it would be a fun thing to see what films there were, and we went to some university catalogs, including University of California system had a catalog of films, and got a lot of health, biology, physics type films--those are those metal cans with big reels--and then we had a projector in a room that we made dark. So even (during) the day, you could thread these films. And there were a lot of interesting ones, but these Feynman lectures that he gave at Cornell...those were just unbelievably good.

After that, I got them put onto videotape, and I got rights to make a small number of videotapes. It was VHS tape at the time, and send it around to some friends who might be interested. But I always had in the back of my mind that it was kind of a crime that there wasn't broad availability of those things, particularly for young people thinking about science.

And so I sort of had this project in mind, and (have been) making some progress in understanding who had the rights, and eventually doing deals for the rights, and then getting these things scanned, and then getting Microsoft Research agreed to host the stuff and create some innovative software around it, which Curtis (Wong) has run. It's taken a long time, but with lots of PCs and the Internet, and my willingness to spend some money, now these things are just going to be out there.

What do you hope people get out of these videos? Who is your ideal audience for them? 
Gates: Well, I didn't get to see these until I was about 30, and so I would love it if lots of young people saw them, and got a sense of the fun, and how science works, and what's complicated, and what's not. I hope some people who teach science are inspired by the way that Feynman managed to make it interesting without giving up the depth of how it works.

With super-high-quality material like this up there for free, I hope people see the potential, and that they'd benefit from this one in particular, and then it starts to push forward the idea if someone is great lecturer, then their work should be out there and available.

I've heard you talk about the way community college really should change, and really what we should be doing for some of these subjects that are somewhat universal is taking really the best explanations, the best lectures out there, and making those broadly available, and then focusing sort of the local learning around discussion and different sorts of things. 
Gates: That's right. Education, particularly if you've got motivated students, the idea of specializing in the brilliant lecture and text being done in a very high-quality way, and shared by everyone, and then the sort of lab and discussion piece that's a different thing that you pick people who are very good at that.

 

But, you've also got this huge set of people who like to teach themselves and like to learn things, and yet find science kind of daunting. And when a lecture is presented as well as this, it draws more people in to understanding science. And over time I hope there's more like this, including some about science stuff that's changed since the time these were done.

How big an impact do you think these types of things can have in terms of the overall problem of getting people interested in math and science? Is this type of thing enough, or do we really need to fundamentally do more, younger? 
Gates: Well, certainly in fifth grade through senior year, most students aren't yet motivated to want to learn a lot in general, and particularly about science and math. The big impact is anything that can help teachers do a better job, where teachers can either see other teachers doing it super-well, or they might incorporate some online things into the classroom experience. As you get older, and you've got people who are motivated more clearly, then it shifts where these online lectures can be a huge part of learning.

That's where Feynman with his clarity of explanation and simplicity of explanation, and love of the subject, and humor around it is such an exemplar.

You mentioned that you didn't get to see these until you were in your 30s. If you had seen them earlier in your career, maybe before you decided to start Microsoft, do you think you might have headed in a different direction? 
Gates: I'm not sure. I've always liked physics, but I also want the equivalent lectures to be out there for biology, and computer science, and chemistry. Everybody has a level where you can bring in their interest. I mean, people care about animals, and disease, and food, but many of the sciences are so abstract, and the amount of things you have to learn before you start connecting to those practical issues can be very daunting. And yet with a teacher like Feynman they're out there in different fields, it's just that we haven't had a way to magnify their excellence, and make it broadly available.

One of the points that's made in the lectures is this idea that from the discovery of gravity there's basically been since then 400 years of just an avalanche of discoveries, and he sort of puts forth this notion of continuous progress. And I'm curious, do you see that having continued, or have we seen limits to sort of some of the full understanding that the basic sciences can give us? Are there things that are beyond sort of what basic science can teach us? 
Gates: We're learning more about basic science today by a huge amount than ever before. You just take understanding materials, why they break, why they're strong, how you engineer them to have various properties, and a lot of that was black magic. And it's only now that we're able to say, okay, when we want to make batteries that charge really fast, okay, how do you make something with a lot of surface area that doesn't degrade.

Anyway, in material science, or basic medical things, or basic things about physics that are going to be important for cheap energy as just one example, this is the most interesting time. That's why it's partly an irony that you're not getting the best and the brightest particularly native born to go into science and math. And so you've got to look back and say, what is it we're doing about making it daunting, or abstract that holds that back so much.

There's an American physicist, Fritjof Capra, (who) wrote a lot of books in the '70s on ecology, and the limits of Cartesian thinking. Basically his thing was that by focusing on sort of the Cartesian reductionist approach to things that prioritizes sort of looking at the small parts--that type of thinking has contributed to not getting as deep an understanding of things like ecology, and really complex systems. Is that what's caused us to get into some of the problems we have, or do you think it's more just these are tough choices and require conserving, and things that are kind of hard for us as humans to do? 
Gates: Well, the tough situation that we're in is that we have electricity, we have medicines, we have vaccines, those were all due to scientific understanding. And as we get new materials, new batteries, solar, nuclear energy that don't cause environmental things, it will be because of these scientific understandings. So, I think the incredible improvement in living standards, and life expectancy, and literacy, and all those things really do come back to the advanced scientific understanding. And when people look at history, that's the one thing that they always undervalue is how scientific progress has allowed us to do those big things.

 

We do have a problem if we don't draw a large part of society into at least some understanding of science and the tools of science. And so, having great lectures online, I have several goals--improve education, get more people into the sciences in a deep way, but also get a broader set of people into sciences in even a modest way.

When we talked a year ago, I asked kind of what you anticipated your life would be like once you stopped being at Microsoft full time. Now a year later what are some of your observations on how your time is different, and maybe what are some things that you hadn't expected about where you are today? 
Gates: Well, the foundation work is very rewarding, and there's a lot of interesting complexity that comes with it. I'm pretty much doing what I expected to be doing, which is very different than what I was doing before my job changed. I do have about 20 percent involvement with Microsoft, where topics like their future of Office, of search, or various things that Steve (Ballmer) asked me to look into and help out with come along. So that's developed pretty much like I would expect.

It will be interesting as I get a year or two more out, and I know the activities and the people (at Microsoft) a little bit less, you know, how Steve and I make sure I stay fresh and connected and things like that. So, maybe the first year was always going to be the easiest. And it's at the level that we planned it for, which is giving me a massive amount of additional time to meet with scientists and go to the developing world and meet with various government partners.

For the last three months, up until two weeks ago, I was entirely in Europe, and actually based out of there. Our family had moved over there. So, I was up at Cambridge and Oxford. For that period I was particularly focused on the science and partners, both governments and companies, and things that happen to be based in Europe. That's done, but the kind of things I was doing there are exactly what my schedule looks like over the next six months, where I'm in India, I'm in Africa, going to meet with companies, doing things, meeting with scientists. So, you know, I'm thrilled by the foundation work, and fortunately I have Jeff Raikes running the foundation as CEO, and so my role at the foundation is a lot like it was in the period where Steve had already taken over as CEO, where I got to be more on the research side, the breakthroughs, the new ideas.

And you've been doing some stuff with Intellectual Ventures. I know every time you show up on a patent application that, folks get interested in what you're looking at, whether it's stopping hurricanes, or beer kegs, or what-have-you. 
Gates: That's right. We're going to make the cows that don't fart. You name it, we've got it under control.

That's been really exciting to take this idea of gathering top scientists from a broad set of areas and think about problems that can be solved. And in the case of the foundation, you know, Nathan (Myhrvold) has used that ability to convene great scientists to look at things like how do you deliver vaccines without having to use as many refrigerators, or how do you pasteurize milk in a better way, some very interesting things. And then I also sit down with that group when they're looking at their rich world applications, including things around energy, and one of those has actually led to creating a company called TerraPower, which is focused on a new, very radically improved nuclear power plant design, which is a hard thing to get done, but extremely valuable if it comes through.

I'm curious of your thoughts of how Microsoft is doing as a company since you left. I'd also be remiss if I didn't ask you what you thought of Google's efforts to get in the OS arena.
Gates: Well, just to do the second part very succinctly, there's many, many forms of Linux operating systems out there, and packaged in different ways, and booted in different ways. So I don't know anything in particular about what Google is doing. But, in some ways I'm surprised people are acting like there's something new. I mean, you've got Android running on Netbooks; it's got a browser in it. In any case, you should make them be concrete about what they're doing. It is kind of a typical thing. When Google is doing anything it gets this--the more vague they are, the more interesting it is.

I guess there is the notion, though, and I know Microsoft Research had been looking at it, too, of whether the browser, because it's become so central to so much of our work, needs to take on more operating system-like characteristics. 
Gates: It just shows the word browser has become a truly meaningless word. Anyway, what's a browser, what's not a browser? If you're playing a movie, is that a browser or not a browser? If you're doing annotations is that a browser or not a browser? If you're editing text, is that a browser or not a browser? In large part it's more an abuse of terminology than a real change.

 

Gates: I'm always the one who thinks, gosh, why isn't Microsoft doing even more, because that's been my mindset, let's move fast, do new things very quickly. But, you have to say, whether it's Windows 7 that is a really excellent piece of work. I'd go so far as to say both compared to other operating systems, and compared to other generations of Windows, it's an extremely nice piece of work.

What they're doing in new versions of Office--I guess they showed a little bit of how the Web piece fits into it recently, but there's a lot about the new version that will get talked about in the next nine months or so. The work on search, where people see Bing as a nice piece of work, really see us in the game, hiring really top people, and willing to try to do things some different ways.

The part of Microsoft I stay up to date the most on is probably the research group. I was over at the Cambridge lab a few weeks ago, over at the India lab as part of a trip I take this month, and that's really the sort of crown jewel in terms of always feeding neat new things into Microsoft. I'd say a cool example of that, that you'll see is kind of stunning, in a little over a year, is this (depth-sensing) camera thing... Not just for games, but for media consumption as a whole... If they connect it up to Windows PCs for interacting in terms of meetings, and collaboration, and communication, you put the camera in now it's a cool thing, and it's just an example where Microsoft research did the original stuff to show, with the depth information, something great could be done. Then both the Xbox guys and the Windows guys latched onto that and now even since they latched onto it the idea of how it can be used in the office is getting much more concrete, and is pretty exciting.

So Microsoft is a very innovative company, but obviously in a hyper-competitive field, which is what makes it such a great field.

I'm not sure I understood that last point. You're talking about cameras, you were talking about like the depth sensing cameras that are in Natal? 
Gates: Yes, exactly, Natal. The software libraries and applications we're doing around Natal.

And we'll basically see that in more than gaming? We'll see it in other scenarios, too? 
Gates: Well, I think the value is as great for if you're in the home, as you want to manage your movies, music, home system type stuff, it's very cool there. And I think there's incredible value as we use that in the office connected to a Windows PC. So Microsoft research and the product groups have a lot going on there, because you can use the cost reduction that will take place over the years to say, "Why shouldn't that be in most office environments?"