Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.

It may be only a step on a long road toward the long-predicted global virtual library. But the collaboration of Google and research institutions that also include Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library is a major stride in an ambitious Internet effort by various parties. The goal is to expand the Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic, body of material and create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world's books, scholarly papers and special collections.

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
- Sir Winston Churchill

The email started with a list of recipients that was longer, and arguably more impressive, than the holy lineage at the start of the New Testament: dozens of people from Harvard and HarperCollins and The Wall Street Journal. This was a highbrow crowd. Then it got down to business. I was invited by a lawyer named Pearlas Sanborn to participate in a Microsoft/AOL/Intel email beta test designed to help Internet Explorer maintain its dominance in the marketplace. But first they needed more testers. "When you forward this email to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (if you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two-week time period. For every person that you forward this email to, Microsoft will pay you $245, for every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243, and for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $241."

The U.S. is struggling with an information war as well as a shooting war in Iraq. Many civilians think troops are behind insurgent violence.

Hussein Ramadan sells synthetic flowers in Baghdad. He doesn't trust the United States.

"These car bombs are mostly done by Americans," he said. "When they are searching you at a checkpoint, one is putting an explosive device in the car. Then they will chase the car, and as soon as he goes into a populated area, it will blow up. This is what has happened, not in all cases but some."

Iraq is awhirl in rumors.

Amid fires in the night and mortar rounds pounding city and village, this nation, where so much is uncertain, feeds on the half-truths and conspiracies that U.S. forces are struggling to contain in what has become an information war. The gossip on the street and the grisly images flickering across Arab television are doing as much to undermine American authority as well-armed insurgents staging ambushes on desert highways.

Reality is pliable and truth is altered to serve agendas in a society where stories, myths and superstitions have shaped public discourse for centuries.

Can there be freedom and free will in a deterministic world? Yes, declares the controversial philosopher Daniel C. Dennett. "Human freedom," he writes in his important new book Freedom Evolves (Viking), "is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species, us."

One might think that Dennett’s ringing endorsement of the reality of human freedom would make him popular with other intellectuals. It doesn’t. On the right, the conservative Weekly Standard denounces him as "a vigorous evangelist for evolutionary psychology." The neoconservative journal The Public Interest has called him "an evolutionary fundamentalist." That view was shared by the late left-wing evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould, who disparaged Dennett as a "Darwinian fundamentalist." Gould’s scientific collaborator Niles Eldredge concurs, dismissing him as an "ultra-Darwinian." The liberal American Prospect accuses him of "cybernetic totalism."

But Dennett has his admirers too. The New York Times Book Review selected his Consciousness Explained as one of the 10 best books of 1991. The Wall Street Journal raved about 1995’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, and declared that Dennett "does one of the things philosophers are supposed to be good at: clearing up conceptual muddles in the sciences." Zoologist Matt Ridley, author of The Origins of Virtue, hails him as the "ebullient, pugnacious and ever pithy sage of Boston."

Born in 1942, Daniel Dennett studied philosophy at Harvard University and Oxford University. His philosophical views can be traced most clearly to the influence of his Oxford teacher, philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Ryle famously attacked Cartesian mind-body dualism, dismissing it as the doctrine of "the ghost in the machine." Dennett is now the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.

Dennett has spent his intellectual career trying to extend the Enlightenment project of putting philosophy and morality on a scientific and naturalistic basis. In a sense, Dennett is updating David Hume in the light of Darwin’s theory of evolution. In doing so, he provides us with fascinating new ways to think about the meaning
of choice, the value of morality, and how the evolution of the human brain and its capabilities has made us more free.

Indeed, Dennett argues that human freedom is dramatically expanding. Language and culture, especially when abetted by modern science and technology, enable us to increase the range of our choices. As our understanding of our genes and brains increases, he believes we will increase our freedom rather than limit it. We will be able to prevent and cure more diseases, improve our social institutions, and even enhance human capabilities. He says that we defend freedom, especially political freedom, because among other things it enables people to make better and better choices over time. As important, Dennett maintains that to whatever extent we were ever at the mercy of our genes and biological evolution, we no longer are. Instead our genes are now at the mercy of our brains.
Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey interviewed Dennett in February.

Such prognostications are currently more speculation than science. Indeed, during a panel on legal and ethical issues, Roco jumped to his feet to distance the NBIC mission from any connection to the "transhumanist" philosophy that supports overcoming biological limitations through technology. While some of the vision for NBIC may bleed over into a fringe interested in "posthuman" civilization, talk of cyborgs and mutants is presumably not good for winning support and funding for sober science.

In fact, Roco emphasized that upgrading human beings and culture over the next two decades through interdisciplinary science must be done in a way "that respects human dignity." How that idea gets parsed as the debate moves ahead remains an open question.

More than two-thirds of American adults were users of the Internet in 2003, according to a poll published by market research company Harris Interactive.

The figure of 69 percent of those polled represents around 146 million people.

Internet use among adults is growing constantly, Harris Interactive said, noting that the figure had risen from 67 percent in 2002, 64 percent in 2001, and 56 percent in 1999.

Far more marvelous is the truth than any artist of the past imagined. Why do poets of the present not speak of it?
-Richard Feynman

Ronald Bailey, in his very reasonable piece about the "growing peril" of a nanotechnology moratorium," asserts that anti-nano activists "cannot be lightly dismissed."
I agree to a point, having made similar assertions myself, but after speaking and listening to a number of business and government leaders, I can't help but think that activists like Pat Mooney of the ETC Group might be the best thing that's happened to the nanotech industry.

When it comes to the environmental debate, the handful of people who call for a moratorium on nano research conveniently play the role of the straw enemy of nanoprogress, since their pseudoscience can easily be attacked. That is what I was thinking as I listened to Phil Bond, the U.S. Commerce Department's undersecretary for technology, give an eloquent speech recently in Chicago. He told the audience of businesspeople that a nanotech research moratorium would, itself, be "unethical" because it would delay development of technologies that could improve the quality of human life and the environment.

There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.
- Alfred Korzybski

"We have to remember that the annals of this warfare between "civilization" and "barbarism" have been written almost exclusively by the scribes of the "civilized" camp."
-Arnold Toynbee

"When the philosophers of the eighteenth century made religion out to be an enormous error conceived by priests, at least they were able to explain its persistence by the interest the sacerdotal caste had in deceiving the masses. But if the peoples themselves have been the artisans of these systems of erroneous ideas, at the same time that they were their dupes, how has this extraordinary hoax been able to perpetuate itself throughout the course of history?"
—Emile Durkheim

"An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it."
—Don Marquis

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an
idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it
to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the
possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of
it."
- Thomas Jefferson

Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, by releasing audio- and videotapes of themselves, have given new life to their movements of rebellion — or at least the illusion of new life — which, in the age of mass media, may amount to the same thing.