August’s Surprises Arrived Early

It’s as if they read my mind. In 2021 I noted that surprises often come during August. Two weeks later, President Biden’s Afghan exit turned into an unexpected fiasco. I figured, hey, let’s try again. I spent the past few weeks researching for a column about more August surprises. Imagine my surprise when July—even its last week or so—spit out a stream of surprises, all seemingly related. I ripped up the August column.

Let’s start with unidentified anomalous phenomena, the trendy new expression for UFOs. Former U.S. intelligence agent David Grusch testified to Congress on July 26 that the U.S. has retrieved not only UFOs but also “nonhuman” biologics of supposed pilots. Any pictures? If so, wanna bet they’re blurry and grainy?

I’m in the camp that thinks the government rolls out UFOs every time it needs a distraction. In 2003 the Central Intelligence Agency declassified documents showing that it had made up stories about flying saucers shortly after it was outed for its role in a 1954 Guatemala coup. Are the UFO stories being used to distract us from the Donald Trump indictment or the Hunter Biden tax evasion?

Maybe UFOs are real. If so, aliens must possess some really cool technology, like superconductors enabling quantum-drive engines. Lo and behold, July 22 saw the announcement out of South Korea of LK-99, a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor, surprising everyone. A video claims to show the Meissner effect, levitation via emitted magnetic waves as material becomes superconducting.

The creators even describe how to make the lead-based superconductor. The first step requires the synthesis of copper phosphide from copper powder and red phosphorus. Oops, the Drug Enforcement Administration labels red phosphorus a List I chemical used by illegal meth labs to convert pseudoephedrine into methamphetamine. It’s also in strike-anywhere matches. I suspect every scientist trying to replicate the room-temperature superconductor is now binge-watching “Breaking Bad” for tips.

Replicating the results will take time—a few weeks, or forever as many skeptics think. Still, room-temperature superconductors would usher in an era of magnetic levitated trains, handheld magnetic-resonance imaging, cheap quantum computing and even nuclear fusion.

In some surprise room-temperature thinking, on July 24 Elon Musk clicked “delete” on 17 years of valuable brand building by inexplicably changing the name of Twitter to X. Why? Well, with all the UFO fever, some ex-Twitterers—see what I did there?—think it’s an homage to the TV show “The X-Files.” Makes more sense than anything else.

On the other hand, this makes absolutely no sense: In a world of increasingly short attention spans, millions voluntarily filed into dark rooms to watch back-to-back flickering celluloids about dolls and nuclear physicists—the Barbenheimer timer ran nearly five hours. Weird. Meanwhile, the stock market, surprising most, spent July heading into the stratosphere. Or was it an Oppenheimer-like mushroom cloud?

Even crazier: On July 20, Google and researchers at Osaka University released details of Brain2Music. As it sounds, it reconstructs music from brain activity—yes, reading your mind. While a person listens to music, fMRI, functional magnetic-resonance imaging, captures brain waves. That data is run through artificial intelligence to break down the sounds into smaller elements of text, which are then fed into a text-to-music transformer called MusicLM that plays the reconstructed music. Amazing.

They tested the results with 540 music samples from 10 different genres, including the 1986 Beastie Boys head-banger “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party).” The reconstructed output is a bit grainy, but this is a first step toward literally reading minds. All that’s needed is portable MRI and—wait, room-temperature superconductors will enable that.

Coincidentally, or maybe not, on July 20 a patent application filed by Apple was published for a “Biosignal Sensing Device Using Dynamic Selection of Electrodes.” It looks like AirPods, except the earpiece has 40 or 50 embedded electrode sensors that could be used for, get this, “accurate measurements of brain activity.” Hmmm. Could this read our minds when we discuss UFOs? It wouldn’t surprise me.

All these surprises took place while I was reading George Gilder’s

By the looks of July, we certainly aren’t in one of those. July was a reminder not to be closed-minded. My only real surprise was that these surprises weren’t in August.

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