This looks like the sort of technology that will be available in the 28th century:
PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.
Seriously, this is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. The abstract is here. If I were a venture capitalist I’d be shoveling money to these guys.
I liked this interview with Dennis Baron, the author of A Better Pencil.
Historically, when the new communication device comes out, the reaction tends to be divided. Some people think it’s the best thing since sliced bread; other people fear it as the end of civilization as we know it. And most people take a wait and see attitude. And if it does something that they’re interested in, they pick up on it, if it doesn’t, they don’t buy into it.
I start with Plato’s critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They’re not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down — the ultimate irony.
We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won’t have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there’s no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant — it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of “this is going to revolutionize everything” versus “this is going to destroy everything.”
So it’s always true that the new technology — whatever that new technology is — is going to destroy civilization, make kids into idiots, etc.. Fortunately, this never actually seems to be the case. (Not so far, anyway). If anything, scholars seem to be finding that the internet — by making people write much more — is making us into better writers.
P.S. By the way, it’s also not true that the current generation of kids knows less than past generations did. People have been saying that about young people since at least the 1800s, and it never seems to have been true.
Robert Wright gives us a little bit of sublime:
Incidentally, that is William Shatner talking about the opening to Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, a movie that most fans of Trek argue never actually happened. (Much like Rocky V and both Matrix sequels. They never happened. It was all a dream. Don’t you feel better now?)
Still, even in a movie that is best disappeared down the memory hole, the scene Shatner describes is a particularly egregious bit of suck. As you may recall, the movie opens with Capt. James Tiberius Kirk climbing El Capitan, only to fall off to certain doom. Spock, in an amazingly blunt bit of foreshadowing, uses anti-gravity boots to intercept the falling Kirk just before he hits the ground. Hooray!
Except, of course, for physics, the laws of which ye canna’ change. Kirk was probably falling at close to terminal velocity when Spock grabbed him by the ankle; assuming that his ankle wouldn’t have simply pulled off, Kirk’s brain most certainly wouldn’t have stopped moving at the same time his body did, leading to almost certain death from blunt force injuries.
Granted, Trek has never worried about physics when it got in the way of a good story, Montgomery Scott’s protests aside. But even so, this was a particularly egregious bit of stupidity, one that set the tone for the dumbest of all the Trek movies. The only good thing about the movie was that it gave us this exchange from “Futurama”:
Leonard Nimoy: Melllvar, you have to respect your actors. When I directed Star Trek IV, I got a magnificent performance out of Bill because I respected him so much.
William Shatner: And when I directed Star Trek V, I got a magnificent performance out of me because I respected me so much!
Truer words were never spoken.
Literally:
(Via Jezebel)
Minnesota is not just home to the world’s biggest twine ball made by a single person; it’s now home to the world’s biggest cupcake:
A 151-pound cupcake in Minneapolis has been certified as the world’s largest.
The 1-foot tall, 2-foot wide cupcake on display Saturday at the Minneapolis Mall of America had 15 pounds of fudge filling and 60 pounds of yellow icing.
Guinness World Records adjudicator Danny Girton Jr. called it a “fun and creative achievement.”
In your face, Wisconsin! “Weird Al” Yankovic won’t be writing anything about your state anytime soon!
Because there must be room in the world for fun, here’s a random timewastin’ web site: Apocryphacts. With the tag line of “Trivia so good you’ll wish it was true,” how can it go wrong? A sample:
The film Love Actually, though it claims to portray love in all its myriad manifestations, is actually missing several common situations, such as “Zeus seduces a mortal woman through trickery and transmogrification” and “man publicly declares love for delicious bagel sandwich in crowded deli.”
Or:
When historians reflect upon President Obama’s first State of the Union address, there will be mixed feelings about his decision to film in Digital 3-D. There will be consensus, however, that prepending a trailer for Monsters Vs. Aliens 2: B.O.B. Bounces Back was an excellent choice.
Or:
Just hours after Tusk-Haver etched the first deliberate painting into the walls of Cave-By-Long-Water, Bear-Smeller became the the first man to cut funding to the arts. After a successful appeal to Chief Biggest-Rock (with a stick), Tusk-Haver’s tusk was taken by force (a two-pronged stick) and converted into a spear. Bear-Smeller would go on to lead several unsuccessful raids against Bear-That-May-Exist, only to fall victim to the previously unknown Ground-Sloth-That-Definitely-Does-Exist-And-Has-Sharper-Claws-Than-Expected.
Or:
The spread of the Internet in the last decade has enabled the proliferation of Münchausen Syndrome by Proxy, allowing people to to induce illness in others from around the globe through the use of dedicated proxy servers.
Actually, that last one may be true.
…what exactly the Internet is for and what it has unleashed upon our society…
Okay, everybody, CALM DOWN. You can stop panicking now. I am delighted - no, relieved - to announce that we finally have a klezmer song about toxoplasmosis.
Via JVoices:
What is toxoplasmosis, you ask? Why, it’s the scary brain parasite that I PROBABLY TOTALLY HAVE. I’m forgetful. Also I get writer’s block a lot. Therefore: toxo.
It’s the only plausible explanation.
Also, if you’re in L.A., you should come to the Doikayt seder tomorrow. I will be there! We will exchange sholem aleychems and then do hipster dances.
(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)
Cross-posted from The Mustard Seed.
Who wants to check out the raps of a pissed-off, punk-rocking, straight-edge, vegan eating, 31337 typing, Pilipino activist blogger and scholar?
I do!
And so you do you God damn-it! The power of the simulacra of Xst compels you!
Where else can you get the postmodernist ramblings of a blogger (studying for his masters in sociology) on Donna Haraway’s cyborgisms and Marx’s alienation of labor and its use for interpreting the mega-blockbuser dark comedy Robocop (it was pretty hilarious, in a dark movie sense, the way officer Murphy got trashed by all that lead).
Just checking out his sidebar is an exercise in Internet cheekiness. His del.icio.us sidebar is titled mas.a.rap (”delicious” in Tagalog) and his monthly achieves reads “B0Mb SCh3matiCs.”
So if your down for an exercise in postmodernist intellectualism and boots on the ground Sartean Marxian activism then head on over to the 50 Megaton Paper Tiger.
A quadruple transit of Saturn as photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. From left to right, the moons are Enceladus, Dione, Titan, and Mimas.
(Via Bad Astronomy)
Today is my birthday (25) and to celebrate I present to you all…
Remember John Tierney? Sure you do! He was the glibertarian columnist for the New York Times who got bumped down to the science beat, where he could expound on why global warming isn’t real. Because that’s science!
Anyhoo, Tierney noted the news that we’re closing in on completing the Neandertal genome, which will give us more insight into our closest relatives, and help answer some longstanding questions, like why the Neandertals died out, and whether they interbred with modern humans before they did. But Tierney isn’t content merely to see this as an interesting bit of science; he wants to know something a little bit dumber:
Now that the Neanderthal genome has been reconstructed, my colleague Nicholas Wade reports, a leading genome researcher at Harvard says that a Neanderthal could be brought to life with present technology for about $30 million.
So why not do it? Why not give Harvard’s George Church the money he says could be used to resurrect a Neanderthal from DNA?
Um…because they’re human? And we don’t do cloning on humans?
If we discovered a small band of Neanderthals hidden somewhere, we’d do everything to keep them alive, just as we try to keep alive so many other endangered populations of humans and animals — including man-biting mosquitoes and man-eating polar bears. We’ve also spent lots of money reintroducing animals into ecosystems from which they had vanished. Shouldn’t be at least as solicitous to our fellow hominids?
Well, you see, John, there’s a difference between preserving a hypothetical existing band of H. s. neandertalensis and creating some in a lab. The former is basic decency, the latter is performing genetic experiments on humans.
Granted, it would be disorienting and lonely for the first few Neanderthals, but it would be pretty interesting for them as well as us. (What would a Neanderthal make of Disneyland, or of World of Warcraft?)
Wait, what?
Granted, it would be disorienting and lonely for the first few Neanderthals, but it would be pretty interesting for them as well as us. (What would a Neanderthal make of Disneyland, or of World of Warcraft?)
I’m sorry. Did he just say…
Granted, it would be disorienting and lonely for the first few Neanderthals, but it would be pretty interesting for them as well as us. (What would a Neanderthal make of Disneyland, or of World of Warcraft?)
Excuse me a minute.
John, you do understand that a cloned Neandertal wouldn’t be a person magically transported from 45,000 BCE, right? You do know that a cloned Neandertal would be raised, you know, now, right?
Neandertals were on the same order of intelligence as modern humans. They had larger brains than we do; while that doesn’t mean they were smarter, we do know that they were using stone tools, had control of fire, and buried their dead, sometimes with grave goods, something that suggests the same capacity for abstract thought that is the hallmark of H. sapiens sapiens. We don’t know why they died off; it’s possible they interbred with modern humans until they disappeared, it’s possible that as omnivores, we were better adapted than the apex hunters that were our cousins. It’s possible that our progenitors practiced genocide against the Neandertals — indeed, it’s possible that a little of all of these contributed to the demise of the species.
The Neandertals are so similar to modern humans that many scientists don’t classify them as a different species; the biggest differences are things we can’t recreate — their culture. Their worldview. What they thought of the world, and what they thought of us.
We can certainly create a Neandertal clone, of course, but he or she will be raised by humans. He or she will be suffused in our culture, based in our world. World of Warcraft and Disney World will be no stranger to them than it is to you or I — after all, they’ll grow up with it just like us. Assuming — as most scientists do — that Neandertals were close to our cognitive equals, a Neandertal clone would engage with our world somewhere on the continuum between the way a mentally challenged human does and the way a gifted human does.
Except, of course, for the fact that they’ll be raised as freaks, as sideshow attractions for us to poke and prod, to examine and gawk at. They’ll be around not for their own purpose, but for ours. And that, of course, is a barbaric and horrific thing. Would our society give a cloned Neandertal full rights, if he or she proved to be as capable as your average H. s. sapien, or would we view them always as something other? Would their children be free to chart their own destinies, or would they be the property of the lab that made them?
We generally prohibit genetic manipulation of humans for a reason — humans are intelligent, self-aware creatures, and it is inhuman to experiment on them. This can be taken too far, of course (a stem cell line is not self-aware or intelligent) or not far enough (it’s hard to argue that chimpanzees aren’t self-aware and intelligent), but as a general rule, it’s the right thing.
Neandertals were humans, as human as you or I. They may be our ancestors — and at the least, they are our closest cousins, the most similar species to ours ever to walk on this world. They lived and died out, as most species do; let us not bring back one of their number, alone and apart from ourselves, simply because we can.
A great little didy about the history of the internet in neat little animated form.
It also brings to mind the Hawaiian restaurant sketch from Monty Python’s “The Meaning Of Life.”
I like reading this story and hoping that somewhere, perhaps in a better world than ours, Rick Warren’s head has exploded.
A pair of gay penguins thrown out of their zoo colony for repeat- edly stealing eggs have been given some of their own to look after following a protest by animal rights groups.
Last month the birds were segregated after they were caught placing stones at the feet of parents before waddling away with their eggs.
But angry visitors to Polar Land in Harbin, northern China, complained it wasn’t fair to stop the couple from becoming surrogate fathers and urged zoo bosses to give them a chance.
In response, zookeepers gave the pair two eggs laid by an inexperienced first-time mother.
‘We decided to give them two eggs from another couple whose hatching ability had been poor and they’ve turned out to be the best parents in the whole zoo,’ said one of the keepers.
‘It’s very encouraging and if this works out well we will try to arrange for them to become real parents themselves with artificial insemination.’
Not the first time this has come up.
This is to all those bloggers and commenters our there who are all connected to each other in one way or another and to all those folks on this blog whom I was able to meet in person recently. Great vid. The last part of the video at 51:15 is especially touching.
It’s 33 multiple-choice questions, mostly about basic US civics, but straying a bit into economics. You can take the quiz yourself by going here.
They gave the quiz to a representative sample of Americans (or at least, of Americans with phone service). 7!% of Americans got a failing grade (that is, answered fewer than 60% of the questions correctly). The average score was 49%.
A few quick points:
1) Although the report emphasizes that college doesn’t make much difference, the opposite seems to be true. Going by the numbers, the single factor most clearly associated with higher scores was education (Average score of people with doctorates: 72%. Average for those without a high school degree: 35%.)
2) Amusingly, people who told the surveyor that they had been elected to public office at some point, did slightly worse on the test than those who had never been elected to public office.
3) These sort of quizzes are often used to argue that the young people are stupid, but they rarely give the same test to all age groups. This one did, and found that age made very little difference; baby boomers (the highest average scorers) did only a few points better, on average, than the youngest group.
4) Talking about politics a lot is associated with higher scores, as is using the internet, so I’m sure “Alas” readers will kick ass on the test. Watching lots of TV is associated with lower scores. So is talking on the phone a lot.
Weirdly, the report’s discussion refers to phones as “passive electronic media.” How is talking on the phone passive?
5) Race had a noticible association with test scores; whites and multiracial respondents scored about 50%, while Asians, Latin@s and Blacks scored about 40%. Men scored a little better than women. My guess is that this reflects a mixture of education & school quality effects, language barriers for some respondents, and stereotype threat.
6) Disappointingly, there’s no relationship between knowing this stuff and politics (conservatives and liberals both got about the same scores).1 If every American could pass this test, would anything change?
7) 32/33, in case you’re wondering.2
I guess I’m supposed to be frightened or appalled or something by the low scores on this test, but really it just makes me feel sort of alienated from my culture. It’s a reminder that knowing stuff like this is a hobby, and one I don’t happen to share with most Americans.
The seas were higher in the Cretaceous period. When last the dinosaurs walked the Earth, the Rocky Mountains were a sea dividing western North America from the east, and the inland sea flowed right into Hudson Bay, dividing the northernmost part of the continent from the rest. North America is hardly unique in having a different topography, of course — India was located off the southeast coast of Africa at the time, and Australia was just separating from Antarctica — but it is of the North American continent I speak today.
The higher seas of the Cretaceous covered the southeast of what would, 65 million years later, become the United States of America. Florida was a part of the continental shelf, as was Louisiana; most of Alabama and Mississippi were part of a bay, or perhaps a delta, that jutted into the coastline. We forget that by our planet’s lights, these lands were a part of the sea until recently; it is why the sea so often tries to be taking these lands back.
Along the ancient coastline, life thrived, as usually does. It especially thrived in the delta region, the Bay of Tennessee, if you will. Here life reproduced, ate, excreted, lived, and died. On the shallow ocean floor, organic debris settled, slowly building a rich layer of nutritious debris. Eventually, the debris would rise as the sea departed, becoming a thick, rich layer of soil that ran from Louisiana to South Carolina.
65 million years later, European settlers in America would discover this soil, which was perfect for growing cotton. They settled the land, and built plantations, importing slave labor from Africa to toil the fields, while the settlers reaped the profits. Though they did not know it, they built their plantations on the floor of the ancient seas.
It was a reasonably successful endeavor from the slaveholders’ perspective, surviving hundreds of years. It took a civil war to free the slaves from bondage, if only technically; during reconstruction, many of the slaves were given the proverbial 40 acres and a mule, and encouraged to remain on the land, farming, but this time for themselves — at least in theory.
Many of the slaves took that deal, and stayed along this rural belt in the south. While in the north, rural America was becoming a land of sundown towns, in the south, the racism was universal; there was not the same exodus of African Americans into the urban centers as was forced in the North. The population of these rural counties remained largely African American for well over a century; indeed, it remains so to this day. Today, it’s referred to as the “Black Belt,” a set of counties stretching from Louisiana to South Carolina, one that, as has been noted, voted for Barack Obama on Election Day.
It is easy to draw the line from slavery to that map, of course, but we often forget that the lines go further back than that. For all our conceit that we have become masters of our world, we still cling to places shaped long before the first primate had evolved. The farmers of the midwest benefit from the glaciers, which pushed fertile soil down from the north, and abandoned it on the plains. We power our computers with coal, laid down in fertile swamps hundreds of millions of years ago. We build cities along rivers and at seaports that were shaped long before we could write, sometimes long before mammals evolved. And we do so without thinking about it for a moment, for to consider how our lives are shaped by the great movement of continental plates, the advance and retreat of the seas and the glaciers — that is to realize that we are a species that has existed for but the tiniest second of Earth’s existence, one whose disappearance, while horrible to us, would matter not a bit to a world that has seen more species live and die than we can imagine. The Earth will go on changing itself, with or without us. And we are far more beholden to it than it is to us.
(Via Katherine Mangu-Ward)
Science fiction becoming fact, from the New York Times (and via Lawyers Guns and Money):
Scientists are talking for the first time about the old idea of resurrecting extinct species as if this staple of science fiction is a realistic possibility, saying that a living mammoth could perhaps be regenerated for as little as $10 million.
The same technology could be applied to any other extinct species from which one can obtain hair, horn, hooves, fur or feathers, and which went extinct within the last 60,000 years, the effective age limit for DNA. [...]
There is no present way to synthesize a genome-size chunk of mammoth DNA, let alone to develop it into a whole animal. But Dr. Schuster said a shortcut would be to modify the genome of an elephant’s cell at the 400,000 or more sites necessary to make it resemble a mammoth’s genome. The cell could be converted into an embryo and brought to term by an elephant, a project he estimated would cost some $10 million. “This is something that could work, though it will be tedious and expensive,” he said.
Not to mention the cost of building a woolly mammoth preserve, and really they’d have to do it a bunch of times so we’d have some breeding stock. So probably more like $100 million or more. But we’d have woolly mammoths! I say we ask the jackbooted thugs of the IRS to show up at the house of every libertarian and shake them down until we have enough money.
Of course, there are other possibilities besides mammoths….
The full genome of the Neanderthal, an ancient human species probably driven to extinction by the first modern humans that entered Europe some 45,000 years ago, is expected to be recovered shortly. If the mammoth can be resurrected, the same would be technically possible for Neanderthals.
But the process of genetically engineering a human genome into the Neanderthal version would probably raise many objections, as would several other aspects of such a project. “Catholic teaching opposes all human cloning, and all production of human beings in the laboratory, so I do not see how any of this could be ethically acceptable in humans,” said Richard Doerflinger, an official with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Dr. Church said there might be an alternative approach that would “alarm a minimal number of people.” The workaround would be to modify not a human genome but that of the chimpanzee, which is some 98 percent similar to that of people. The chimp’s genome would be progressively modified until close enough to that of Neanderthals, and the embryo brought to term in a chimpanzee.
“The big issue would be whether enough people felt that a chimp-Neanderthal hybrid would be acceptable, and that would be broadly discussed before anyone started to work on it,” Dr. Church said.
I believe a chimp-Neanderthal hybrid would not merely be acceptable, it would be an essential step towards making the world that much cooler! Flying cars and transporters, here we come! (Wait, if we have transporters, why do we want flying cars?) I want to have a plug-in slot installed in my skull so I can become addicted to pleasure when I’m not instantly downloading everything I need to know to be able to build my own robots with Asimov circuits so I can order them to jump out windows or I’ll kill myself.
Alternatively, maybe it’ll lead to humanity being enslaved by talking apes. Either way, I’m for it.
I’ve been a space geek since I was roughly four, and while we don’t have the moon bases, space habitats, and manned Mars missions I was promised back in 1978, we’ve finally started making some nice incremental improvements in space technology of late, primarily related to the impending retirement of the space shuttle fleet, which were far more expensive and far less useful than originally advertised, and tragically much less reliable. The Ares/Orion pairing should be, if nothing else, far safer than the shuttle fleet, and while Orion capsules are only expected to be reusable up to ten times, they should be less expensive to maintain than the shuttles, which are incredibly fragile.
The shuttles’ retirement does eliminate one key resupply element for the International Space Station. While people and supplies will continue to be supplied by Soyuz capsules after 2010, and until Orion debuts, water is used much more frequently by humans, and is expensive and heavy to launch. Previously, water came from the shuttles’ fuel cell electrical systems, which creates water as a byproduct of electricity generation. The water was saved up and delivered to the ISS. With crew for the ISS scheduled to increase to six, and only twenty shuttle missions left, there’s obviously a need to wring every drop of usefulness out of water on the station. And that’s where the current mission of Space Shuttle Endeavour comes in. Because Endeavour is carrying new sleeping compartments for the ISS, as well as a new water recycling system that will recycle up to 92 percent of water in the air and wastewater into potable drinking water.
If you do the math, you realize quickly that wastewater includes, well, waste water:
NASA plans to double the size of the space station crew from three members to six next year. The shuttle carries two new sleeping compartments and a water recycling system that will enable the crew to purify urine and other wastewater for drinking.
“We did blind taste tests of the water,” said NASA’s Bob Bagdigian, the system’s lead engineer. “Nobody had any strong objections. Other than a faint taste of iodine, it is just as refreshing as any other kind of water.”
“I’ve got some in my fridge,” he added. “It tastes fine to me.”
And it probably does. It doesn’t usually pay to think too deeply about the many processes that water goes through on its way through the cycle, but there’s about a 100 percent chance at least part of that glass of water you’re drinking was at some point part of some creature’s waste, if not a human’s. And, you know, so what? It’s gone through a long natural process of filtering through ground and into an aquifer and out into a river, or lake, or well, or what have you; it’s not part of waste any more.
Similarly, most of urine is simply water — remove the waste and what’s left is all water. And aside from the psychological hurdle of realizing that the water you’re drinking was inside someone recently, it’s just H2O.
What’s important about this, other than extending the life and efficiency of the ISS, is that its development is key to any sort of long-term manned missions. While I tend to be pessimistic about a human mission to Mars any time in my lifetime (for a variety of reasons, it’s very, very difficult), a human base on the Moon will probably be established in the next thirty years. Astronauts are going to be expected to live there for months, even years. And while there is ice on the Moon and Mars alike, the less time our astronauts have to spend gathering ice, the more they can spend doing productive things, like golfing. Doing this work now allows us to have one less thing to invent in 2023. And that’s a good thing for those, like me, who believe humankind’s future includes travel beyond this island Earth.
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