Happiness by Design by Paul Dolan

Happiness by Design by Paul Dolan

Change what you do, not how you think.

Happiness is experiences of pleasure and purpose over time. Psychologists often categorize feelings according to a two-by-two model -”positive and negative as one category and ‘aroused and non-aroused’ as the other.  Positive and negative speak for themselves. You can think of aroused and non-aroused as feelings that are awakened or sleepy respectively. So joy is positive and aroused a; contentment is positive and non-aroused. Anxiety is negative and aroused and sadness is negative and non-aroused.

Emotions    Non-aroused        Aroused

Positive    Content, calm        joyful, excited

Negative    Sad, depressed      Anxious,angry

To be truly happy, then, you need to feel both pleasure and purpose.

When economists and others talk about delayed gratification, they are implicitly to sacrificing pleasure now for pleasure later. When happiness is defined as experience of both pleasure and purpose, the circumstances under which it is sacrificed for the pursuit of achievement are potentially much more limited. My research and my experiences tell me that life is less about trading off happiness now for happiness later (and vice versa) and more about trading off pleasure and purpose at different rates at different times.

To assess purpose, three adjectives were added - focused, engaged, competent/able -.

A few years ago, I led a comprehensive review with Tessa Peasgood and mat White, and our conclusions were that life satisfaction ratings are higher for those who:

a.      Are wealthier (ESP, when compared to people who are like them)

b.      Are young or old (being in your forties and fifties is a bad time for life satisfaction)

c.      Are healthier

d.      Have lots of social contacts

e.      Are married

f.      Are a little more educated (having a degree is good, but you probably shouldn’t get a PhD if you want to maximize your life satisfaction)

g.      Are religious

h.      Have a job

i.      Commute a short distance to work

For some factors associated with happiness, the effect is similar for evaluation and experiences: people who are tall, for example, report more positive life evaluations and better emotional experiences. Some of this effect is because taller people tend to be better educated and earn more money, which is often attributed to the fact that taller people may have received good nutrition and care during childhood,thus enabling them to reach their full cognitive and physical potential in adulthood.

Attention holds together our lives - as well as this book. It converts stimuli into happiness and it drives our behavior. We are often unaware  of the effects of attention on our happiness and our behavior, just as many people are unaware that background music affects their choice of wine. Yet this precious and scarce resource is responsible for all of what we do and how we feel. Attention explains why we adapt to weight gain and not too noisy and stammering. It also explains why we might not be as happy as we could be.

Deciding happiness:

One important and useful way to deal with the various mistakes you might make about your happiness is to pay attention to direct feedback about what brings you pleasure and / or purpose and what doesn't and then to use this information in your anticipation of future happiness

Don’t try too hard:

It is important to try too hard to be happy. I think this could go some way toward explaining why I hate taking part in ‘organized happiness’. All these events - pub trivia, weddings, birthdays - are supposed to be enjoyable, but the pressure to have fun can sometimes ruin the experience. So don’t think about it too hard.

Based on earlier attempts to develop a checklist by Rob Metcalfe, Ivo Vlave and me, Mindspace is deliberately  in the form of a checklist so that policy makers can work through the elements, ensuring that they properly account for situational factors that they might otherwise be blind to. Here are the nine elements.

Messenger - we are heavily influenced by who communicated the information

Incentives - Our response to incentives are shaped by mental short cuts

Norms - we are strongly influenced by what others do

Defaults - we ‘go with the flow’ of preset options

Salience - Our attention is drawn to what is novel and seems relevant to us

Priming - our acts are often influenced by conscious cues

Affect - our emotional associations can powerfully shape our actions

Commitment - we seek to be consistent with our public promises

Ego - we act in ways that make us feel better about ourselves.

By using priming, defaults, commitments and norms in your own life, you can become a whole lot happier without actually having to think very hard at all about becoming happier. You will be happier by design. You can then save your attentional energy for those occasions where you really do want to pay attention to a decision or to what you are doing.

Priming:

Would you be happier if your house were clean or your children tidied up after themselves? You might also think about how you use light to design your happiness landscape. Light is responsible for setting our circadian rhythm, the 24 hour sleep-wake cycle marked by changes in body temperature and levels of hormones like cortisol (related to stress) and melatonin (related to sleepiness). Blue light, the sort emitted by electronics and energy-efficient light bulbs has a particularly powerful effect on our circadian rhythms and enhances alertness by suppressing the release of melatonin, I know it might sound obvious, but by increasing your exposure to light in the morning and throughout the day, esp. blue light, you will optimize your alertness. By reducing your exposure at night, you prepare yourself for sleep. So charge your electronics outside of the bedroom and set up plenty of lights where you work.

One further environmental trigger you might consider is the natural environment. Nature (even through a window) grabs and retains your attention in positive ways because it’s constantly changing, even in subtle ways, which prevents adaptation.

Defaults

If your homepage is Facebook, it is inevitable that you will spend more time networking and less time working. Most of us ‘go with the flow’. In general, humans are pretty lazy and are usually content to do whatever is the preset option. Defaults are passive commitments and you rarely notice them. So it become happier you need to make small adjustments to your life so that going with the flow is consistent with being happier.

Setting a default to be with people whose company you enjoy is likely to increase the pleasure and purpose you experience, as well as improve some of the decisions you make. You may have withdrawn attention from your house but having an old friend around provides a fresh perspective on your dining room. Another way to default to being with others is to set up meetings on a particular work project or exercise program. Not only are you more likely to spend time on the activity if you have to actively ‘opt out’ of your commitments, you will also work harder once you are there it you have someone encouraging you.

Commitments

We like to be consistent with our public promises. We are more likely to enroll in a curbside recycling program if we have to make a written commitment to do so than if we learn about the program in another way such as on a flyer or by telephone. What ever form the commitment takes, start with small changes and don’t put yourself under too much pressure. Bite-size commitments are more effective than mouthfuls.

Economists are fond of saying that people respond to incentives and you will recall that is one of the nine elements of mindspace.

Experience expenditure

if we are happier by attending to our experiences, then it makes sense that we should spend our money on good experiences. Indeed, most of us will say that spending money on an experience, such a helicopter ride, makes us happier than spending it on a material possession= like flat-screen TV. In general, we adapt less quickly to happiness brought about by experiences, which means that their impact persists for longer. Not only does the impact of a new possession wane more quickly as an input into the production of happiness, but alternative choices can remain salient for long as we think about what other material goods we could have bought.

So to enjoy your conversations more, talk about what you have done or plan to do rather than what you own or plan to buy. People will also like you more if you do this: pairs of participants who discussed experiential purchases reported having more favorable impressions of their conversation partners than those perils who discussed material purchases.

Good vibrations

One of the most important is listening to music. This is a primal stimulus that has been a part of all cultures for thousands of years, bringing people together at weddings, funerals, music festivals, and flash mobs. As the philosopher Nietzsche pointed out, we listen to music with our entire bodies, moving muscles automatically in response to it by dancing, tapping our feet, or just bobbing along. It is a powerful way to open up the mind, and it most strongly affects the brain region associated with positive emotions and memory in a way that no other input to our happiness production process can.

Don’t underestimate the effects of humor, either. 20 minutes of watching a comedy reduce stress levels by about the same amount as 20 minutes on treadmill. One hour of watching a funny video is enough to increase infection-fighting antibodies in the bloodstream for 12 hours as well as activate ‘natural killer cells’, which selectively target infected and tumorous cells. Laughter also promotes muscle relaxation: You might consider having a quick laugh before an injection or a job interview.

Mindfulness training:

It is about developing a constant sense of awareness and an ability to remain in the present moment. Mindfulness under the larger umbrella of therapies that build upon traditional cognitive behavioral therapy. Mindfulness adds novel psychological methods, such as mediation to CBT techniques. It involves greater focus on one’s breathing and body as well as a deeper awareness and acceptance of thoughts and feelings.

One of the most effective aspects of mindfulness training is the conscious reorientation of attention.  Open monitoring involves attending to everything in your environment that you might not otherwise notice such as the wind or a ticking clock. Focused attention and open monitoring strategies have been shown to help people regulate their emotions and prevent the relapse into depression.

It should come as no great surprise to anyone that we are happier when we pay attention to good experiences and to people we like being with. Make a commitment to spend a little more time each day talking to people you like. And look to spend a little less time each day glued to your computer or phone. Distraction drains you and leave you feeling tired and less happy, so stay focused on one thing at a time- stop continually checking those darn emails and Facebook updates.

You are now armed with the three pillars of the production process of happiness. Producing happiness involves deciding, designing and doing, and the most effective ways to be happier involve joining up these various components.

‘Decide’ will help you answer whatever question it is you have about your happiness, ‘Design’ will make it easier to implement the answer, and ‘Do’ will ensure your attentional resources are running smoothly. These are flexible principle that can be applied to all of your experiences in life.

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Countdown to zero day by Kim Zetter

Countdown to zero day by Kim Zetter

Stuxnet and the launch of the world’s first digital weapon

In January 2010, inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency noticed that centrifuges at an Iranian uranium enrichment plant were failing at an unprecedented rate. The cause was a complete mystery—apparently as much to the technicians replacing the centrifuges as to the inspectors observing them.

A small time anti-virus firm in Belarus (VirusBlokAda) got a call from their resellers in Iran who reported a persistent problem with a customer’s machine in that country.  The infected computer was caught in a reboot loop, crashing and rebooting repeatedly while defying the efforts of technicians to control it.

The Belarus team identified a malware and that spreads via USB flash drives. Even though the team had seen similar infection, this was very peculiar. When it was infected a Windows 7 machine, the malicious driver module (malware) installed without any warning. Windows 7 has a security feature that was supposed to tell users if an unsigned driver or one signed with an untrusted certificate was trying to install itself on their machines.  That was because, VirusBlokAda team found out that the malicious driver was using a signed certificate of  a company called RealTek Semiconductors in Taiwan.

The VirusBlokAda team published their finding and almost immediately an antivirus firm in Slovakia names ESET spotted another malicious driver that appeared to be related to Stuxnet (named after the malicious driver name) and this new malicious driver was signed from a company called JMicron technologies, in Taiwan, a maker of electronic circuits.

The hacker who created the malware hacked these two companies digital signing keys (private keys) and certificates.When deeply examined, the attackers appeared to be searching for computers that had one of two Siemens proprietary software program called SIMATIC WinCC. This program are part of industrial control system (ICS) to work with Siemens programmable logic controllers (PLC).

Each time Stuxnet infected a system, it ‘phoned home’ to one of two internet domains masquerading as soccer fan sites - mypremerfutbol.com and todaysfutbol.com. The domain names, registered by someone who used fake names and fraudulent credit cards, pointed to servers to Denmark and Malaysia that served as command-and control stations for the attack.

But of all the information Stuxnet reported to its masters, the Siemens data was the most important because, as the researchers would soon learned, if Stuxnet found itself on a system that didn’t have the Siemens software installed, it simply shut itself down.

Symantec team who got involved in this malware tracking program, contacted the DNS service provider of these two domains and asked them to redirect all the traffic to Symantec servers. When they analyzed the traffic coming into their servers, out of the initial 38,000 machines they tracked, more than 22,000 were based in Iran.

Once in the malware is in place, whenever an engineer tried to send commands to PLC, Stuxnet made sure its own malicious command code got sent and executed instead. The second aprt of the attack was even ingenious. Before Stuxnet’s malicious commands went into action, the malware sat patiently on the PLC for about two weeks, sometimes longer, recording legitimate operations as the controller sent status reports back to monitoring stations. Then when Stuxnet’s malicious commands leapt into action, the malware replayed the recorded data back to operators to blind them to anything amiss on the machines. While Stuxnet sabotaged the PLC, it also disabled automated digital alarms to prevent safety systems from kicking in and halting whatever process the PLC was controlling if it sensed the equipment was entering a danger zone. Stuxnet modifying the data the safety system relied on, the system was blind to dangerous conditions and never had a chance to act.

While reverse engineering the malware, the Siemens engineers reached a startling conclusion. Stuxnet wasn’t just attacking two specific models of Siemens PLC, it was attacking a specific facility where the PLCs was used. The PLC has to be configured in a very precise way.  Right before Stuxnet unleashed its destructive payload on a 315 PLC, it searched the PLC for three magic values and it had reached its target when it found all three.

Three months into the discovery of Stuxnet, the rest of the world now knew about the mysterious code that had evidently targeted iran. yet speculation that it had specifically targeted the uranium enrichment program at ntanz remained just that speculation.

While this news was available outside, Iranian officials revealed for the first time that computers at Bushehr (nuclear plant in Iran) had indeed been hit by Stuxnet.

Symantec had resolved the mystery of the devices the digital weapon attacked, Albright had made the final connections between Stuxnet and the centrifuges at Natanz and although the US government still hadn’t made a formal admission of responsibility for the attack, the New York Times had confirmed what everyone suspected - that the United States and Israel were behind it.

Flame

The revelations began that April 2012, when a virus began running wild on computers at the Iranian Oil Ministry and the Iranian National Oil Company, wiping out the hard drive of every system it touched. The damage was systematic and complete, destroying gigabytes of data at a time. First, the malware eliminated documents and data files, then it went after system files, zapping core parts of the hard drive to cause them to crash and burn. The name given to the virus was Flame.

Stuxnet had tipped the scales at 500 kilobytes when compressed, but Flame was at least 20 megabytes with all of its components combined and consisted of more than 650,000 lines of code.

Flame appeared to be a multipurpose espionage tool created to meet every need, depending on the mission. A 6MB starter kit got loaded onto many infected machines first, which included a back door through which the attackers could install new spy modules from their command server at will.

The infrastructure is set up to support Flame was also massive and like nothing the researchers had seen before. They found at least eight domains operating as command servers in Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland and elsewhere through which the attackers controlled infected machines and collected siphons documents from them.

The Microsoft info-sec team was inspecting the Flame virus in detail, they realized they were looking at something much worse than a zero day - Flame was performing a sophisticated attack against part of a Microsoft Windows Update system to spread itself between machines on a local machine.

Like the Windows software, the update tool itself gets periodically updated by Microsoft. Each time the tool launches on a customer’s machine, it sends out a kind of beacon to Microsoft servers to see it a new version of itself is available. Microsoft distributes the updates through a series of so-called . CAB files signed with a Microsoft certificate to verify their legitimacy.

The attackers subverted this process by first infecting one machine on a victim’s network with Flame. Then when the update client on any other machine on the victim’s network sent out a beacon to Microsoft servers to check for updates to the Windows update tool, the infected machine intercepted the beacon and sent a malicious Flame file, masquerading as  a legitimate Microsoft .CAB file, to the new machine instead, thus infecting it with the spy tool. This wasn’t the most sophisticated part of the attack. To pull off the hijack, the attackers had signed their malicious .CAB file with a legitimate Microsoft certificate - except in this case the certificate indicated that the company it belonged was ‘MS’ not Microsoft Corporation as it should have said.

It turned out the attackers had pulled this off using something called an MD5 hash collision. Exploited the weakness in MD5 and thus faking it as these updates are original updates from Microsoft.

Operation Olympic Games were a covert and still unacknowledged campaign of sabotage by means of cyber disruption, directed at Iranian nuclear facilities by the United States and likely Israel. As reported, it is one of the first known uses of offensive cyber weapons.Started under the George W. Bush administration in 2006, Olympic Games was accelerated under President Obama, who heeded Bush’s advice to continue cyber attacks on Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz. Bush believed that the strategy was the only way to prevent an Israeli conventional strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.[Wikipedia]

How we got to now by Steven Johnson

How we got to now by Steven Johnson

Six innovations that made the modern world and the six innovations are "Glass," "Cold," "Sound," "Clean," "Time" and "Light.

Hummingbird effect - an innovation or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain together. Like a variation on the famous ‘butterfly effect’ from chaos theory, where the flap of a butterfly’s wing in California ends up triggering a hurricane in the mid-Atlantic.

Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press created a surge in demand for spectacles, as the new practice of reading made Europeans across the continent suddenly realize that they were farsighted; the market demand for spectacles encouraged a growing number of people to produce and experiment with lenses, which led to invention of the microscope, which shortly thereafter enabled us to perceive that our bodies were made up of microscopic cells.

Glass

Roughly 26 million years ago, something happened over the sands of the Libyan Desert. Grains of silica melted and fused under an intense heat that must have been at least a thousand degrees. When those superheated grains of sand cooled down below their melting point, a vast stretch of the Libyan Desert was coated with a layer of what we now call glass.

Scientist began to explore the idea that the Libyan glass rose from a comet colliding with the earth’s atmosphere and exploding over the desert sands. Scientists and space agencies have spent billions of dollars searching for particles of comets because they offer such profound insight into the formation of solar systems. The pebble from the Libyan Desert now gives them direct access to the geochemistry of comets. And all the while, glass was pointing the way.

Cold

Boston businessman named Frederic Tudor knew from personal experience that a large block of ice could last well into the depths of summer if it was kept out of the sun. And that knowledge would plant the seed of an idea in his mind, an idea that would ultimately made him an immensely wealthy man.

Ice powered refrigeration changed the map of America. Cooling rooms packed with natural ice that allowed them to pack pork year around, one of the principal innovations in the industry.

Places that had been intolerably hot and humid were suddenly tolerable to a much larger slice of the general public. By 1964, the historic flow of people from South to North that had characterized the post-Civil War era had been reversed. The Sun Belt expanded with new immigrants from colder states who could put up with the tropical humidity or blazing desert climates thanks to domestic air-conditioning.

Broad changes in demography invariably have political effects. The migration to the Sun Belt changed the political map of America. Once a Democratic stronghold, the South was besieged by a massive influx of retirees who were more conservative in their political outlook. In the first half of 20th century, only two presidents or vice presidents hailed from Sun Belt states. Starting in 1952, however, every single winning presidential ticket contained a Sun Belt candidate, until Barack Obama and Joe Biden broke the streak in 2008.

It is no accident that the world’s largest cities - London, Paris, New York, Tokyo - were almost exclusively in temperate climate until the second half of the twentieth century, All around the world, the fastest growing megacities are predominantly in tropical climates: Chennai, Bangkok, Manila, Jakarta, Karachi, Lagos, Dubai, Rio de Janeiro. Demographers predict that these hot cities will have more than a billion new residents by 2025.

Sound.

The essential revolution in vision largely unfolded between Renaissance and the Enlightenment: spectacles, microscopes, telescopes, seeing clearly, seeing very far and seeing very close. The technologies of the voice did not arrive in full force until the late nineteenth century. The first breakthrough in our obsession with the human voice arrived in the simple act of writing it down.

The dream of recording the human voice entered the adjacent possible only after two key developments: one from physics, the other from anatomy. Edouard-Leon Scott invented the first sound recording device in history, but he forgot to include playback.

Our ancestors first noticed the power of echo and reverberation to change the sonic properties of the human voice tens of thousands of years ago; for centuries we have used those properties to enhance the range and power of our vocal chords, from cathedrals to Wall of Sound. But it is hard to imagine anyone studying the physics of sound two hundred years ago predicting that those echoes would be used to track undersea weapons or determine the sex of an unborn child. What began with the most moving and intuitive sound to the human ear - the sound of our voice in song, laughter, sharing of news or gossip - has been transformed into the tools of both war and peace, death and life.

Clean

Building a city on perfectly flat land would seem like a good problem to have; San Francisco, Cape Town or Rio would pose more engineering problem for buildings and for transportation. But flat topographies don't drain and in the middle of the nineteenth century, gravity-based drainage was key to urban sewer systems.

19th century Chicago (flat terrain city) had both human and animal waste to deal with, the horses in the streets, the pigs and cattle awaiting slaughter in the stockyards. Epidemics of cholera and dysentery erupted regularly in the 1850s. Sixty people died a day during the outbreak of cholera in the summer of 1854. The authorities at the time didn’t fully understand the connection between waste and diseases.

Ellis Chesbrough got appointed as chief engineer to solve the sewage problem. Chesbrough launched one of the most ambitious engineering projects of the 19th century: building by building, Chicago was lifted by an army of men with jack-screws. As the jack-screws raised the building inch by inch, workmen would dig holes under the building foundation and install thick timbers to support them, while masons scramble to build a new footing under the structure. Sewer lines were inserted beneath buildings with main lines running down the center of streets which were then buried in land fall that had been dredged out of the Chicago river, raising the entire city almost ten feet on average.

The result was the first comprehensive sewer system in any American city. Within 3 decades, more than 20 cities around the country followed Chicago’s lead, planning and installing their own underground networks of sewer tunnels. Today, entire parallel worlds exist underground, powering and supporting the cities that rise above them.

new jersey doctor John Leal experimented with many techniques for killing bacteria and thus the cholera. In almost complete secrecy, without any permission from government authorities, Leal decided to add chlorine to the Jersey City reservoirs. Unlike others, Leal made no attempt to patent the chlorination technique that he had pioneered at the Boonton Reservoir. Town by town, country by country, colorization became a standard procedure.

Chlorination wasn’t just about saving lives; it was also about having fun. After the World War I, ten thousand chlorinated public baths and pools opened across America, learning how to swim became a rite of passage. These new aquatic public spaces were the leading edge in challenges to the old rules of public decency during the period between the wars. Before the rise of municipal pools, women bathers generally dressed as though they were bundled up for a sleigh ride. By the mid 1920, women began exposing their legs below their knee; one-piece suits with lower necklines emerged a few years later. In total, a woman’s thighs, hip line, shoulders, stomach, back and breast line all become publically exposed between 1920 and 1940. At the turn of the century, the average woman’s bathing suit requires ten yards of fabric; by the end of the 1930s, one yard was sufficient.

We celebrate the things they make possible - towering skyscrapers and even more powerful computers - but we don’t celebrate the sewers and the clean room themselves. Yet their achievements are everywhere around us.

Time

For almost the entire span of human history, time had been calculated by tracking the heavenly rhythms of solar bodies. Like the earth itself, our sense of time revolved around the sun.

In 1583, a 19 year old student at the University of Pisa attended prayers at the cathedral and while day dreaming in the pews, noticed one of the altar lamps swaying back and forth. No matter how large the arc, the lamp appeared to take the same amount of time to swing back and forth. As arc decreased in length, the speed of the lamp decreased as well. To confirm his observation, the student measured the lamp's swing against the only reliable clock he could find: his own pulse. The student was none other than Galileo Galilei.

Ships were in absolute need for split-second accuracy and sailors lacked any way to determine the longitude at sea. All across Europe, bounties were offered for anyone who could solve the problem of determining longitude at sea: Philip III of Spain offered a life’s pension in ducats, while the famous Longitude prize in England promised more than 1 million dollars in today’s currency.

Galileo’s memory of the altar lamp, his studies on motion and the moons of Jupiter, the rise of a global shipping industry and the new demand for clocks that would be accurate to the second, created the pendulum clock.

Pierre Curie had surmised that the decay rate of certain elements might be used as a ‘clock’ to determine the age of rocks. But the technique now popularly known as carbon dating, wasn’t perfected until the late 1940s. Most clocks focus on measuring the present: What time is it right now? But radiocarbon  clocks are all about the past. Different elements decay at wildly different rats which means that are like clock running at different time scales. Carbon 14 ticks every five thousand years, but potassium 40 clocks every 1.3 billion years. That makes radiocarbon dating an ideal clock for the deep time of human history, while potassium 40 measures geologic time, the history of the planet itself.

Why go to such extravagant lengths to build a clock that might tick only once in your life time? Because new modes of measuring force us to think about the world in a new light. Just as the microseconds of quartz and cesium opened up new ideas that transformed everyday life in countless ways, the slow time of the Long Now clock (clock that ticks once a year) helps us to think in a new ways about the future.

Light

Today’s night sky shines six thousand times brighter than it did just 150 years ago. Artificial light has transformed the way we work and sleep, helped create global networks of communication and may soon enable radical breakthrough in energy productions

The Babylonians and Romans developed oil based lamps, but the technology virtually disappeared during the Dark ages. For almost two thousand years, all the way to the dawn of the industrial age, the candle was the reigning solution for indoor lighting.  Significant economic rewards awaited anyone who managed to harpoon a sperm whale. The artificial light of the spermaceti candle triggered an explosion in the whaling industry, building out the beautiful seaside towns of Nantucket and Edgartown. Thousands of lives were lost at sea chasing these majestic creatures, including from the notorious sinking of the Essex, which ultimately inspired Herman Melville’s masterpiece, Moby-Dick.

National Ignition Facility (NIF) labs in Northern California, where scientists have built the world’s largest and highest-energy laser system. At NIF, they are taking light full circle, using lasers to create a new source of energy based on nuclear fusion, re-creating the process that occurs naturally in the dense core of the sun, our original source of natural light.

When all of NIF’s energy slams into its millimeter-sized targets, unprecedented conditions are generated in the target materials - temperature of more than a hundred million degrees, densities up to a hundred times the density of lead, and pressures more than a hundred billion times Earth’s atmospheric pressure. These conditions are similar to those inside starts, the cores of giant plants and nuclear weapons - allowing NIF to create, in essence a miniature star of earth, fusing hydrogen atoms together and releasing a staggering amount of energy. One way or another, we are still chasing new light.