Posts Tagged ‘science’
[LINK] “Controlled by Guns”
Quiet Babylon’s Tim Maly writes about the consequences of the Liberator, the first gun made by 3-D printer. In the near future, it won’t be necessary to go to a store to buy a gun. All that you’ll have to do is download a file (a directory, at most) to your nearest 3-D printer. What will happen?
The hack that Defense Distributed have committed is a social one. Like many before, they have found and exploited the notoriously unpatched hole in the press’ defences—a vulnerability to sensational headlines. The science fiction promise of 3D printers (remember, Makerbot had the temerity to call their latest line of machines Replicators, after Captain Pickard’s miraculous tea provider) blurs with the Matter Battle reality. So the press will spend a few days collectively wringing their hands and debunking the wringing of hands around crude plastic guns when all around us very good guns can be bought or made using older more proven tools.
As materials scientist Deb Chachra once said, if they ever make a thing capable of making a truly great 3D printed gun, the least interesting thing about it will be that it can print guns. The truly interesting thing will be all the other machines and devices that can come out of it.
In the interim, Defense Distributed’s hack is interesting as a provocation. They’ve taken the world’s categories and grabbed and twisted the kaleidoscope. Suddenly, Maker movement adherents finds themselves uncomfortably on the side of gun owners, which is a place I suspect few of them wanted to be or realized they were in the first place. Sales people and advocates for 3D printers promising that these new machines will let us make anything are learning that weapons are things. Now they find themselves standing shoulder to shoulder with gun enthusiasts arguing that a tool is just a tool and you can’t ban a thing just because of a few bad apples.
The resulting parallels and analogies are instructive. Consider that one of the arguments I used to show that the Liberator wasn’t that big a deal was the ubiquity of mass-produced weapons. This is the exact same argument used by those who seek to downplay the coming impact of 3D printing in general. “Who cares that you can make a cup when there are millions of cups coming from China?”
If you think that 3D printing is going to be a big deal—if you think that there is reason for any enthusiasm about rapid prototyping, desktop manufacturing and the galaxy of tools and devices that lower the barriers of entry to small scale production runs—when someone points out that the global supply chain does it better, you smile and say, “Wait and see”.
So does Defense Distributed. They announced they’d made a plastic receiver and we said it wasn’t a big deal, since it broke after 6 shots. Then they made a reinforced version that lasted for 660. The current fully plastic gun isn’t a great weapon but it’s the first. Any objections to it being a big deal because of how crude or clumsy it is, is kind of like looking at the Wright Brothers’ Flyer and saying it doesn matter because no one is going to want to fly 120 feet. Wait and see.
[CAT] “Living-Room Leopards”
Ariel Levy‘s latest article in The New Yorker is in the current issue of that magazine. Free only to New Yorker online subscribers or owners of the actual physical copy of the magazine, it’s a fascinating look at the world of cat breeders who are trying to breed pet cats that have as exotic a look as possible, the “living-room leopards” of the title. Levy takes on this culture, which seems to have something of the obsessive to it, concerned with producing a particular look regardless of the cost to the breeders or indeed to the often-inbred animals themselves.
(Myself, I wouldn’t want a wild cat, in look or in appearance. I’m glad that Shakespeare’s less than ten pounds. He’s still adorable.)
When Anthony Hutcherson was a little boy, what he wanted most was something wild. But he was growing up in a very tame place: Helen, Maryland, a small farming community named after the postmaster’s daughter. “I wanted a kinkajou and a monkey and a skunk, a pet leopard,” he recalled—something unlike the cows and sheep out in the meadow. One day, when he was ten years old, waiting with his mother to check out at the grocery store, he saw something that thrilled him. It was a picture in Cat Fancy of a pretty woman in California, holding an exotic golden cat that she’d bred by crossing a domestic shorthair with an Asian leopard cat—a foul-tempered little beast with a gorgeous spotted coat. She called the result the Bengal, and touted it as “a living room leopard.”
His family didn’t understand his passion, he told me one recent afternoon. Hutcherson, who is African-American, offered a cultural explanation: “Generally, black people don’t like cats.” So he wrote to the woman in California, Jean Mill, and, to his delight, she wrote back. They have been friends and collaborators ever since. Hutcherson, now thirty-eight, is the chairman of the International Cat Association’s Bengal Breed Committee and a past president of the International Bengal Cat Society. He and Mill, like many of their colleagues, share a dream: to breed a cat that “looks like it just walked out of the jungle.”
We were sitting in Hutcherson’s living room, in Aquasco, Maryland, across from a glass cage where his kinkajou, a ferret-like nocturnal creature, was sleeping under a blanket. Hutcherson works as an event producer, and also runs a cattery, called JungleTrax, out of his house. When I visited, he had half a dozen sleek Bengal kittens, coppery creatures with well-defined dark spots—“rosettes,” in cat-fancier parlance. As we talked, he flung a cat toy in the air, and they leaped after it with astounding speed. Several times, they scratched us as they went by, so Hutcherson decided to trim their nails, holding the scruff of their neck in his mouth while he clipped. “When I’m gardening or mowing the grass, they all come outside with me,” he said. “And they really do look like little leopards. It’s really rewarding and humbling when you forget the bead of time, and you are watching a cat chase a bug up a tree—two thousand years ago, somebody probably watched a cat that looked like a leopard chase a bug. It is beautiful and transcendent.”
[BLOG] Some Monday links
- Beyond the Beyond’s Bruce Sterling is skeptical that plans to archive vast quantities of archived data accumulated over decades, even centuries, are going to be viable.
- The Burgh Diaspora notes that for southern Europeans, Latin America is once again emerging as a destination–this time, the migration is of professionals seeking opportunities they can’t find at home.
- The Dragon’s Tales’ Will Baird links to a proposal by biologists that life initially evolved in highly saline environments.
- Democracy is still fragile in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, Eastern Approaches notes.
- Odd placenames in Minnesota are analyzed at Far Outliers.
- A Fistful of Euros’ Alex Harrowell notes the translation problems surrounding the Nazi term volkisch, liking one recent translator’s suggestion that “racist” works best.
- Razib Khan at GNXP introduces readers to the historical background behind the recent ethnic conflict in Burma.
- Itching for Eestimaa’s Guistino takes a look at same-sex marriage in Estonia.
- Savage Minds reviews Nicholas Shaxson’s book Treasure Islands, which took a look at offshore banking centres like Cyprus.
- Torontoist’s Kevin Plummer describes the background behind Elvis’ 1957 performances in Toronto.
- The negative effects of mass migration to Russia from Central Asia on sending countries, especially the republics of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, are introduced at Window on Eurasia.
[LINK] “Hints of Human Language Heard in Lip-Smacking Monkey Talk”
Wired’s Brandom Keim reported on the scientific import of the sounds made by the gelada, a primate of the Ethiopian highlands. They may be precursors to human language.
Sounds made by a little-known monkey living in Ethiopia’s mountain grasslands may hint at the origins of human speech. Unlike most other primates, which communicate in strings of short, relatively flat-toned syllables, geladas possess uncannily human-like vocal tempos and undulations.
“When we first started working with geladas in 2006, we noticed sounds like people were talking around you,” said evolutionary biologist Thore Bergman of the University of Michigan. “Most primates only make a few sounds, but geladas produce a complex stream with a rhythm similar to language.”
[. . .]
Bergman [. . .] shows that geladas sometimes use lip-smacking to shape their calls, giving them a human language-like quality. Geladas were already known to possess an extremely rich vocal repertoire; lip-smacking adds to that richness.
[. . .]
Whatever the order, vocal complexity is likely intertwined with social complexity. Baboons are closely related to geladas, but use fewer vocalizations and don’t smack their lips. Perhaps not coincidentally, baboons live in relatively small, short-lived groups.
Gelada groups stay together for many years, with females having especially long-lived relationships. Often groups come together in bands of several hundred individuals. “It’s a very complex social system. They have some of the largest groups of any primate,” Bergman said. “These very large group structures may be linked to vocal complexity. There’s some evidence across primate that bigger groups make more sounds.”
[LINK] “Life on Earth… but not as we know it”
Writing in The Observer, Robin McKie introduces his audience at length to the idea of shadow biospheres, of ecosystems co-existing with the DNA-based ecosystems and life forms we’re familiar with on our own Earth but unrecognized on account of profound differences. The idea was raised most recently in the popular media in 2010 with the purported discovery of arsenic-based life in California’s Lake Mono–I’ve written about the fallout of what was at best a premature accident here on my blog (see 1, 2, 3). The idea remains fascinating for reasons other than their applicability to the search for extraterrestrial life, and potentially plausible.
Across the world’s great deserts, a mysterious sheen has been found on boulders and rock faces. These layers of manganese, arsenic and silica are known as desert varnish and they are found in the Atacama desert in Chile, the Mojave desert in California, and in many other arid places. They can make the desert glitter with surprising colour and, by scraping off pieces of varnish, native people have created intriguing symbols and images on rock walls and surfaces.
How desert varnish forms has yet to be resolved, despite intense research by geologists. Most theories suggest it is produced by chemical reactions that act over thousands of years or by ecological processes yet to be determined.
Professor Carol Cleland, of Colorado University, has a very different suggestion. She believes desert varnish could be the manifestation of an alternative, invisible biological world. Cleland, a philosopher based at the university’s astrobiology centre, calls this ethereal dimension the shadow biosphere. “The idea is straightforward,” she says. “On Earth we may be co-inhabiting with microbial lifeforms that have a completely different biochemistry from the one shared by life as we currently know it.”
It is a striking idea: We share our planet with another domain of life that exists “like the realm of fairies and elves just beyond the hedgerow”, as David Toomey puts it in his newly published Weird Life: The Search for Life that is Very, Very Different from Our Own. But an alternative biosphere to our own would be more than a mere scientific curiosity: it is of crucial importance, for its existence would greatly boost expectations of finding life elsewhere in the cosmos. As Paul Davies, of Arizona State University, has put it: “If life started more than once on Earth, we could be virtually certain that the universe is teeming with it.”
However, by the same token, if it turns out we have failed to realise that we have been sharing a planet with these shadowy lifeforms for eons, despite all the scientific advances of the 19th and 20th centuries, then we may need to think again about the way we hunt for life on other worlds. Robot spacecraft – such as the Mars rover Curiosity – are certainly sophisticated. But what chance do they have of detecting alien entities if the massed laboratories of modern science have not yet spotted them on our own planet? This point is stressed by the US biologist Craig Venter. As he has remarked: “We’re looking for life on Mars and we don’t even know what’s on Earth!”
[LINK] Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster on the genesis of Arthur C. Clarke, writer
Writing at Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster had a trio of thoughtful posts examining the development of Arthur C. Clarke (1, 2, 3). The first post, “The Vision of Arthur C. Clarke”, points to an interesting-looking new biography about the writer.
Neil McAleer’s new book on Clarke is called Visionary: The Odyssey of Sir Arthur C. Clarke (Clarke Project, 2012). It’s the place to go for the background on this period, and on any period, in Clarke’s life. I call the book ‘new,’ but it’s actually a major revision and update of McAleer’s 1993 biography that adds extensive coverage of Clarke’s last fifteen years, covering a lot of material that was new to me, including insights into Clarke’s synergistic relationship with Stanley Kubrick, his reaction to the tsunami of 2004, and the almost playful way he fielded questions about his private life until a newspaper scandal based on nothing more than innuendo delayed the ceremony conferring his knighthood for two years. Throughout, McAleer’s research is exhaustive, drawing on memoirs, interviews and letters from Clarke’s many friends.
The second, “Arthur C. Clarke: On Cities and Stars”, draws from McAleer’s biography to look at the influences and experiences of the young writer, leading up to his The City and the Stars.
By the time Clarke moved from Somerset to London in 1936 he was already suffused with science fiction and in particular enraptured with Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, not to mention the second-hand copies of American science fiction magazines that were then available in England. He spoke of the ‘ravenous addiction’ these magazines inspired and the effect that Stapledon’s novel, with a time scale spanning five billion years, had upon his imagination. He was twelve years old when he first read Last and First Men, awed by its cosmic reach and its placement of the evolution of humanity against the broader backdrop of the cosmos.
Think for a moment of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Has any film ever covered a wider swath of time, from the beginnings of tool making to the apotheosis of the species in an extraterrestrial encounter? This was Clarke’s stage, but the other great discovery of his youth, David Lasser’s The Conquest of Space (1931) gave him the technology he would spend a life examining. Lasser was the founder of the American Interplanetary Society (which became the American Rocket Society and, eventually, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics). He was also, for a time, the editor of Hugo Gernsback’s Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories. If Stapledon brought Clarke the cosmos, Lasser gave the boy a focus on the attainable, the idea of space as a reachable frontier.
[. . .]
I came across The City and the Stars just a few years after it was published and was mesmerized by its setting in much the way Clarke was taken with Stapledon’s Last and First Men. Here was Diaspar, the city of the far future, the only city on planet Earth, whose inhabitants moved through a high-tech monument to stasis. Nothing changes in Diaspar even as the world around it loses its oceans and becomes desert. Clarke would have much to say about the kind of inward thinking that his characters have to overcome, but the unmistakable fact about Diaspar is that the city at the end of time is also achingly, eerily beautiful.
The third and final (so far?), “Clarke: The Rocket Man Emerges”, considers the beginning of his viable writing career and his genius as a science writer and predictors.
As his stint in the Royal Air Force drew to a close in 1945, Clarke developed the notion of geostationary satellites providing global communications. During the war he had worked on microwaves and radar, while his passion for rocketry provided the means of deployment. McAleer points to George O. Smith as a possible influence, the latter having published a series of stories in Astounding during the war years that became known as the Venus Equilateral series. Clarke even wrote an introduction to a 1976 reprint of these stories saying that they might well have influenced him subconsciously in his work.
The article “Extra-Terrestrial Relays,” whatever its sources, would appear in Wireless World in October of 1945. Worldwide coverage by radio and television would be implemented by a series of spacecraft with an orbital period of 24 hours at a distance of 42,000 kilometers from Earth center. Clarke went on to describe the equatorial orbits that would place space stations into ‘fixed’ spots in the sky (as seen by people on Earth). The predictions were bold, valid and, yes, visionary, but remained unheralded at the time except by the US Navy. Many believe the article was influential in the development of early space satellites.
Clarke’s $40 from Wireless World offered him plenty of opportunity later in life to joke about the real monetary value of the communications satellite concept, and McAleer notes that he never showed any regrets about what might have been. In any case, being a visionary was already becoming a habit for the writer, one that seemed to outweigh financial considerations. While still in the RAF and working as an instructor at a radio school in Wiltshire, Clarke often broke into soliloquies on rocket science, describing at one late night session how multistage rockets would get us to the Moon. When asked how big the rocket would be, he described it as the height of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which turns out to be within a few feet of the height of the Saturn V.
Read all three; they’re good.
[LINK] “One of Us”
John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay in Lapham’s Quarterly engaging with evolving conceptions of animal intelligence, and animal consciousness, over time really must be read.
These thoughts begin, for most of us, typically, in childhood, when we are making eye contact with a pet or wild animal. I go back to our first family dog, a preternaturally intelligent-seeming Labrador mix, the kind of dog who herds playing children away from the street at birthday parties, an animal who could sense if you were down and would nuzzle against you for hours, as if actually sharing your pain. I can still hear people, guests and relatives, talking about how smart she was. “Smarter than some people I know!” But when you looked into her eyes—mahogany discs set back in the grizzled black of her face—what was there? I remember the question forming in my mind: can she think? The way my own brain felt to me, the sensation of existing inside a consciousness, was it like that in there?
For most of the history of our species, we seem to have assumed it was. Trying to recapture the thought life of prehistoric peoples is a game wise heads tend to leave alone, but if there’s a consistent motif in the artwork made between four thousand and forty thousand years ago, it’s animal-human hybrids, drawings and carvings and statuettes showing part man or woman and part something else—lion or bird or bear. Animals knew things, possessed their forms of wisdom. They were beings in a world of countless beings. Taking their lives was a meaningful act, to be prayed for beforehand and atoned for afterward, suggesting that beasts were allowed some kind of right. We used our power over them constantly and violently, but stopped short of telling ourselves that creatures of alien biology could not be sentient or that they were incapable of true suffering and pleasure. Needing their bodies, we killed them in spite of those things.
Only with the Greeks does there enter the notion of a formal divide between our species, our animal, and every other on earth. Today in Greece you can walk by a field and hear two farmers talking about an alogo, a horse. An a-logos. No logos, no language. That’s where one of their words for horse comes from. The animal has no speech; it has no reason. It has no reason because it has no speech. Plato and Aristotle were clear on that. Admire animals aesthetically, perhaps, or sentimentally; otherwise they’re here to be used. Mute equaled brute. As time went by, the word for speech became the very word for rationality, the logos, an identification taken up by the early Christians, with fateful results. For them the matter was even simpler. The animals lack souls. They are all animal, whereas we are part divine.
And yet, if you put aside church dogma, and lean in to look at the Bible itself, or at the Christian tradition, the picture is more complicated. In the Book of Isaiah, God says that the day will come when the beasts of the field will “honor” Him. If there’s a characteristic of personal identity more defining than the capacity to honor, it’s hard to come up with. We remember St. Francis, going aside to preach to the little birds, his “sisters.” Needless to say he represented a radical extreme, conclusions of which regarding the right way of being in the world would not seem reasonable to most of the people who have his statue in their gardens. In one of his salutations, that of virtues, he goes as far as to say that human beings desiring true holiness should make themselves “subject” to the animals, “and not to men alone, but also to all beasts.” If God grants that wild animals eat you, lie down, let them do “whatsoever they will,” it’s what He wanted.
Deeper than that, though, in the New Testament, in the Gospel According to Luke, there’s that exquisite verse, one of the most beautiful in the Bible, the one that says if God cares deeply about sparrows, don’t you think He cares about you? One is so accustomed to dwelling on the second, human, half of the equation, the comforting part, but when you put your hand over that and consider only the first, it’s a little startling: God cares deeply about the sparrows. Not just that, He cares about them individually. “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?” Jesus says. “Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight.”
[LINK] “Scientists home in on mysterious dark matter”
Robert Evans’ Reuters article reports on the exciting news that the first traces of dark matter may have been found.
Members of an international team had picked up what might be the first physical trace left by dark matter while studying cosmic rays recorded on the International Space Station, said the head of the Europe- and U.S.-based research project Samuel Ting.
He told a packed seminar at the CERN research center, near Geneva, the team had found a surge of positron particles that might have come from dark matter.
In the coming months, he said, the CERN-built AMS particle detector on the space station “will be able to tell us conclusively whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter or if they have some other origin”.
Dark matter, once the stuff of science fiction, “is one of the most important mysteries of physics today,” Ting, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and 1976 Nobel physics prize winner, has written.
Sometimes called the sculptor of the universe’s millions of galaxies because of the way its gravity shapes their formation, its existence has long been recognized because of the way it pushes visible stars and planets around.
But efforts in laboratories on earth and in deep underground caverns to find concrete evidence that it is there, and to establish what it is, have so far proven fruitless.
Ting said it was also possible the surges came from pulsars – rotating neutron stars that emit a pulsing radiation.
But CERN physicist Pauline Gagnon told Reuters after hearing Ting that the precision of the AMS could make it possible “to get a first hold on dark matter really soon”.
“That would be terrific, like discovering a completely new continent. It would really open the door to a whole new world,” said Gagnon, a Canadian physicist on ATLAS, one of the two CERN teams that believe they found evidence of the elusive Higgs particle in the centre’s Large Hadron Collider.
