Things I Know I Know

Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides is looking for people who can come up with better slogans for NASA than the one NASA came up with (which, once you see that their slogan is: NASA explores for answers that power our future, you will realize can't be that difficult).

So, I think their new slogan should be:

Super!Space!Monkeys! Because wouldn't that be reason enough?

And if they were Giant!Super!Space!Monkeys! I bet the funding would just come pouring in.

In other news, I finished revising 'Cowgirls in Space' and sent it to Chance so she can tell me why it still sucks. Maybe I will write a sequel called 'Cowgirls in Space with Super!Space!Monkeys!'

Posted by debco at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues by Sandra Harding:

...Yet a far more insidious and damaging project can get ignored when our focus is restricted to racial biases and prejudices. It turns out that the work of many biologists and biomedical scientists has made important contributions to advancing their cultures' racist projects even when the scientists themselves have not intended such consequences of their work, and sometimes even when they have explicitly intended to recruit science for antiracist projects. Nor is it only these biological and biomedical sciences that have participated in white supremacist projects....

...The problems of interest to a culture's sciences at a given moment in history, the hypotheses proposed to explain such problems, the methods chosen to test those hypotheses, decisions about what should count as evidence for or against such hypotheses, or the goals to be achieved in resolving the problem--how could these aspects of sciences not contribute to maintaining the existing social structure and agendas of the white supremacist society that decides which scientific projects to support? A white supremacist society need not be one in which all or any white individuals intend or prefer their supremacy [emphasis mine]. It can also reasonably designate societies where most whites report that they oppose white supremacy, yet the values and social structures of the society de facto maintain racial inequality. In such cases, scientists can end up advancing white supremacist agendas though they have no intention of doing so....

...Today, much antiracism work has focused on helping individuals to improve themselves, to become antiracist individuals. They learn to identify their own beliefs and behaviors and to help others to do so also. Such work is valuable, but it will have little effect on changing racist social structures and widely shared assumptions unless it is actively put in the service of an antiracist political movement. The self-improvement of individuals is never an adequate substitute for collective political action against the white supremacist interests, policies and practices of dominant social institutions.....

Unconscious bias--we all have it. It is as inevitable a part of who we are as our education, our families and the places we grew up. To say, 'so and so is a good person, I'm sure she means well' says nothing about whether this process or that organization or this practice perptuates bias. We mean well or we're tired or it's a lot of trouble or we don't want to hurt anyone's feelings or it's easier or we just want to be comfortable and none of those are actually 'wrong' or 'bad' things. But many of those unconscious, don't-even-think-we-do-it, things are why there are fewer women in the 'hard' sciences and fewer women writing science fiction and fewer women in high level corporate positions and....

Also, part of being privileged is taking it for granted.

Posted by debco at 07:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Because we're all just a little bit geeky:

Each [sic] rich, satisfying meals of eleven-dimensional noodles, and watch the pounds melt away! You'll lose weight so fast, your friends will think that gravity is leaking off your brane and affecting them more than you! You'll be your own walking hierarchy problem!

You can lose as much as one Planck mass per Planck time (individual loss rates may vary; past results do not guarantee future performance) using our simple three-step plan. The tenured research job and New York Times best-selling pop science book of your dreams are within your reach!

Posted by debco at 10:57 AM | Permalink

Seed article on urban coyotes:

Way, who has been studying coyotes in urbanized parts of Massachusetts since 1998, calls most resident urban coyotes "low-key animals." To succeed in cities, coyotes must learn to be invisible, avoiding peopled areas where they are likely to be spotted. Urban coyotes are more active at night than their rural counterparts; Way's studies have shown that coyotes cover 15 to 25 km (10 to 15 mi) a night as they range through a roughly 26-square-kilometer (10-square-mile) territory.

Most coyotes live in family groups: five or six adults and their pups. Since coyotes only dig dens during April, when they are raising young, they cover a territory. The packs have favorite places to bed down, but they will switch resting spots several times in a day, and vary those locations from day to day. In Chicago, researchers found coyotes favoring hideouts behind post offices and shopping malls, in backyards, under decks, in culverts or easements between highways, in golf courses and cemeteries, and even in the ornamental shrubs of a parking lot.

The article also says that coyotes in cities do a good job of controlling deer, rat, mice, and even Canadian geese populations.

Posted by debco at 02:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

From Nature, an article about color blindness:

The most common form of colour blindness makes it difficult for those with the condition to distinguish between red and green. But scientists have found that it also helps these people to discern subtle shades of khaki that look identical to those with normal vision

Posted by debco at 06:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new weblog on The Psychology of Stress, Depression, and Addiction.

...via Mind Hacks

Posted by debco at 06:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new study says that being able to ignore irrelevant things is more important to getting things done than how large a capacity you have for remembering things:

"Until now, it's been assumed that people with high capacity visual working memory had greater storage but actually, it's about the bouncer – a neural mechanism that controls what information gets into awareness," Vogel said.

The findings turn upside down the popular concept that a person's memory capacity, which is strongly related to intelligence, is solely dependent upon the amount of information you can cram into your head at one time. These results have broad implications and may lead to developing more effective ways to optimize memory as well as improved diagnosis and treatment of cognitive deficits associated with attention deficit disorder and schizophrenia.

Posted by debco at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Discover tells us why our brains got big:

Why did hominin brains triple in size over the past 6 million years?
William Calvin, a neurobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, argues that it all has to do with throwing a rock. To hit the target, the brain had to coordinate such variables as muscle movements, visual images, and the weight of the stone. Only an increase in brain size could make throwing—especially over long distances—accurate, he says. That neural circuitry was able to handle other complex matters: keeping track of social relationships, planning for the future, and developing language.

But just so you don't get cocky, you should know that they're not as big as they used to be...

via BoingBoing

Posted by debco at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Boingboing reports on a new report that there may be a link between artificial light and breast cancer:

Their theory that artificial light can cause breast cancer is simple. Prolonged periods of exposure to artificial light disrupt the body's circadian rhythms - the inner biological clocks honed over thousands of years of evolution to regulate behaviors such as sleep and wakefulness. The disruption affects levels of hormones such as melatonin and the workings of cellular machinery, which can trigger the onset of cancer, Stevens theorizes.

Two interesting things beyond the obvious:

We knew more about the cause of breast cancer 20 years ago than we do today," Stevens said.

I suppose this means that we thought we knew more 20 years ago than we do today because I don't remember going through any medical dark age in the last twenty years where we suddenly just forgot a whole bunch of stuff. It reminds me of my father's classic argument with the phone company back in the eighties when he said, "Forty years ago we had better phone service than this!" And the phone company said, "Forty years ago, no one cared."

Also, and completely unrelated to the previous point (as so many of my points are) is this:

...blind women are less likely to have breast cancer than women with sight.

I suppose I'm overlooking something obvious, but the reason I find this curious is that if artificial lights do cause breast cancer and the reason they cause breast cancer is because they mess with our circadian rhythm, then why doesn't that reason also apply to blind women? I mean, I get that blind women can't see artificial lights, but they can't see the sun either. Blind women in the developed world live their lives on the schedule of the developed world, don't they? If it's all about the circadian rhythm, why aren't they messed up too?

Posted by debco at 04:24 PM | Permalink

The Fastest Stuff in the Universe:

Among the speed demons of the universe are Jupiter-sized blobs of hot gas embedded in streams of material ejected from hyperactive galaxies known as blazars. Last week at a meeting here of the American Astronomical Society, scientists announced they had measured blobs in blazar jets screaming through space at 99.9 percent of light-speed.

"This tells us that the physical processes at the cores of these galaxies … are extremely energetic and are capable of propelling matter very close to the absolute cosmic speed limit," said Glenn Piner of Whittier College in Whittier, California.

Posted by debco at 06:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

From an interview in New Scientist:

Interviewer: Did you find scientific language difficult to penetrate?

Bill Bryson (author of A Short History of Nearly Everything): I rather expected it to be worse than I found it. I was quite delighted with how accessible most of the writing in Nature is. The part that I sometimes found hard was sitting with a scientist as they explained their work to me. I had one scientist who was extremely patient at explaining particle physics to me, and I simply couldn't grasp it at all. It seemed like the sort of thing that someone on LSD would be telling you. It is such a completely different world from the one I know.

Posted by debco at 05:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So, I'm interested in advancements in robotics, especially those with nifty practical uses, like the Roboking robotic vacuum cleaner and the Banryu guard robot

But today, I was looking at pictures of these things and thinking about them zipping around my house vacuuming and guarding and I thought, John Henry and Charming Billie would just kill those things dead.

Posted by debco at 04:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A researcher in Seattle says that how couples interact and whether they stay together or divorce can be predicted mathematically:

In The Mathematics of Marriage: Dynamic Nonlinear Models (MIT Press), which he wrote in collaboration with four mathematicians, Mr. Gottman uses the tools of calculus to describe the interactions of couples like Angie and Dave. The models presented in the book, he says, offer insights into the heaven and hell of couplehood that he would never have found by sifting through his data with standard linear statistical tools. He has already begun to apply those insights in his therapeutic work -- including with Angie and Dave themselves, whose conversations are transcribed in the book.

...

Both "validating" couples and "conflict avoiding" couples tend to have marriages that are stable and long lasting. Couples are in trouble, though, when they have mismatched influence functions. Consider the "hostile detached" couple, where the slopes for the husband's and the wife's influences look very different. When the husband behaves positively, he has almost no impact (slope of 0.02) on his detached wife.

Posted by debco at 04:14 PM | Permalink

Natalie Jerimejenko has information here and here detailing her feral robots project:

OUT THERE, in happy family homes, in the offices of corporate executives, in toy stores through out the globe, is an army of robotic dogs. These semi-autonomous robotic creatures, though currently programmed to perform inane or entertaining tasks: begging for plastic bones; barking to the tune of national anthems; walking in circles; are actually fully motile and AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.

If the dogs were, for example, modified with an off-the-shelf gas sensor, they could be released on building sites to prowl, take readings, and send back data.

I just hope they're smart enough not to get between a real dog and a piece of meat...

...via BoingBoing

Posted by debco at 04:25 PM | Permalink

Can be found here.

Posted by debco at 03:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

or inequality, since no two snowflakes are alike (or, at least, lots and lots of them are different).

But enough about me...

snowcrystals.net has fascinating pictures of snowflakes . There's also information on how snowflakes form and other neat stuff.

Posted by debco at 03:17 PM | Permalink

The SETI@home project has found about 150 signals that might be evidence of intelligence in the universe:

After more than a million years of computation by more than 4 million computers worldwide, the SETI@home screensaver that crunches data in search of intelligent signals from space has produced a list of candidate radio sources that deserve a second look.

Posted by debco at 03:17 PM | Permalink

Gizmodo has the lowdown on the following:

• the USB toothbrush
• the USB hotpot
• the USB fan
• the USB heating pad
• the USB Hot plate

Everything you ever needed, right there at your fingertips!

Posted by debco at 02:10 PM | Permalink

...is the tagline for the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting newsroom. Depending on how you interpret it, it could be kind of disturbing. Let's pretend it means being in the science professions.

The 2003 AAAS annual meeting took place this week and brought together scientists from all over to talk about a huge range of reasearch and, if nothing else to remind us what a vast lot of 'stuff' modern science embraces. Among the interesting items:

Misunderstanding the prehistoric southwest: what happened at Chaco?
Two University of Colorado at Boulder researchers have developed intriguing theories on the mysterious demise of the Chaco Canyon Pueblo people and the larger Chaco region that governed an area in the Southwest about the size of Ohio before it collapsed about 1125.

Case for massive black hole strengthened
UCLA astronomer Andrea Ghez reported at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Denver that the case for the monstrous black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy has been strengthened substantially, and that all of the proposed alternatives can be excluded.

Pain and the brain: Sex, hormones & genetics affect brain's pain control system
Gender, sex hormones, and genes appear to play a big part in how individuals' bodies and emotions react to pain, according to new data. The findings, from brain scans of the brain's natural painkiller system in action, include surprising data showing that women's ability to handle pain increases with their estrogen levels. The studies may help determine why some people, especially women, are more frequently prone to disorders – like temporomandibular joint pain and fibromyalgia.

Predicting the climate of the 21st century
Warming land and ocean surfaces, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and other recent evidence strongly suggest that Earth's climate is already changing rapidly because of the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, according to Warren Washington, senior scientist and head of the Climate Change Research Group at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Computer models of Earth's climate support these observations, he says, and indicate more severe changes yet to come.

Scientist looks at less to find out more about quantum materials
At very low temperatures, classical physics fails to explain phenomena at tiny scales. This is when quantum mechanics kicks in. Scientists are now chilling materials to study the behavior of electrons in the smallest discrete building blocks of matter. Then they are looking at those materials in reduced dimensions, which confine the flow of electrons, to study novel quantum states. ''Usually you get new physics when you impose confinement,'' says Stanford Professor Aharon Kapitulnik.

Posted by debco at 11:58 AM | Permalink

Here's a web page that talks about how to communicate with aliens.

In case it comes up.

The concrete challenge however is that when extraterrestrials are contacted (SETI), or land (UFOs), somebody is presumably going to be considered as appropriately briefed to communicate with them. The media, and science fiction, have explored many possible scenarios. The two most typical are:

• aliens are met by (or handed over to) some branch of military intelligence for secret "negotiations"
• aliens are met by John and Jane Doe who have only media scenarios, common sense, and their prejudices to guide them

And how have such people been prepared for this encounter? Is there a manual (on the Web) to assist in this process, or at least to indicate the possible traps? Does this emergency website offer links to sources of guidance? Does it offer interactive facilities -- like some health sites -- to enable those faced with such a challenge to clarify their options in the light of any information that emerges at different stages of the early interaction with the aliens?

Before true communication can occur, we would have to negotiate our differences, not only figuring out what the differences are, but what they imply and how we compensate for them. Some of the areas we might differ:

• Language
• Behavioral context
• Behavioral attributes
• Different agendas, knowledge, temporal or spacial contexts
• Different species
• Different modes of communication, trust and confidence
• Different values
• Different sense of values, aesthetics, team work, privacy, personal hygiene, maturity

So, who should we put on the committee to communicate with aliens? According to this paper:

• Martial arts (aikido, etc) -- vigilance, preparedness, respect for opponent (Black belt)
• Performer, aesthete -- responsiveness, reframing, expression
• Communicator, facilitator, empath, humorist -- (Peter Ustinov)
• "Operator", trader, con-man -- opportunism, vigilance (it takes one to know one)
• Biologist, species empath -- understanding
• Jesuit -- avocatus diaboli
• Taoist / Mullah Nasrrudin -- crazy wisdom response to the moment
• Anthropologist, linguist, protocol
• Theoretician, physics, mathematics (Richard Feynman)
• Game player
• Philosopher
• Lawyer

I think the most interesting question is, how do you tell if aliens are intelligent? All the measures we have (no matter how we argue them) are culturally and societally based. We don't have a clear way to tell whether dogs or dolphins or lions are intelligent, though we presume that they are not (in the human sense). We will not have a way to tell that aliens are intelligent, though we will presume that they are. I've often wondered what difference this makes in how we approach things--assuming that it's an intelligent being with whom we can't communicate versus assuming that it's an unintelligent being with whom we can't communicate....

Posted by debco at 11:36 AM | Permalink

Technology Review has an article on 10 Emerging Technologies that will Change the World. Included are:

Posted by debco at 02:23 PM | Permalink

A Japanese scientist is working on a way to make objects appear virtually transparent.

I want one.

Posted by debco at 03:00 PM | Permalink

Steve MacLaughlin has excellent summaries of Columbia shuttle news here and here.

...via BoingBoing

Posted by debco at 06:18 PM | Permalink

As everyone probably is aware by now, the space shuttle, Columbia, has broken up on re-entry over Texas. There are no survivors.

It's the breaking news at CNN. Some initial speculation on cause can be found here. And there are updates, discussion, and expressions of grief all over the blog-o-sphere.

There's not much for me to say, really, that isn't being said elsewhere.

But, well, damn...

Posted by debco at 12:17 PM | Permalink

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, reports from Davos on the yuck factor:

When it comes to thinking about how to regulate the science, the best test may be the "yuck factor." This is, as you might imagine, a pretty squishy concept, something along the lines of using gut reaction as a proxy for a long and unproductive philosophical debate. Perhaps if people are grossed out by, say, vat-grown artificial organs, they may not be ready to use them wisely. Indeed, their gag reflex may be telling us something about the essence of human nature and what might threaten it.

I would say the opposite can hold as well--if people find something too mundane, we're not always going to think through all the consequences of its use. 'Oh, there won't ever be a problem with that' can be famous last words.

Another problem says Nobel Laureate David Baltimore is that 'Yuck is culturally determined.'

Dr. Baltimore bravely soldiered on, noting that yuck changes with age and generations; teenagers aren't freaked out by the things their parents are. Indeed, yuck is as much learned as innate: An audience member cheerily volunteered that a 1-year-old will drink apple juice—"which is urine-colored"—out of a bedpan without complaint. Good point: Perhaps this is not the stuff laws should be made of.

All that money and all those brains--it's good to know they're concentrating on the estoteric and the strange....

via BoingBoing

Posted by debco at 09:06 AM | Permalink