Love it: Impossible Motions 2
Heavy snow. And my Good Lady Wife and I both have the latest cold/flu thing going around. I need diversions. So take what you can get.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Apollo program, Arthur C. Clarke, Astronomy, Humor, movies, Neil Armstrong, NPR, Science, Science Fiction, Space, Writing stuff
What topic could possibly warrant being the subject of post #1,000?
None.
I have no big announcements to share, no news, not even a scrap of intelligent musing on something obscure. Things are pretty much just what passes for routine here currently: getting conservation work done, waiting to hear from the publishers/agents, going through the day-to-day of life.
So, I’ll just break the tension (well, *I’ve* been feeling tension over it) and share this amusing item:
Neil Armstrong Talks About The First Moon Walk
Well, this doesn’t happen every day.
In yesterday’s post, I talked about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s walk across the lunar surface back in 1969 and wondered, how come they walked such a modest distance? Less than a hundred yards from their lander?
Today Neil Armstrong wrote in to say, here are the reasons:
He also posts the entirety of Armstrong’s email. It’s not often that you get to read history from one of the men who actually made it – it’s worth a look.
So, on to 1,001: A Blog Odyssey.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Brave New World, Buzz Aldrin, Carl Zimmer, Comics, Government, io9, movies, NASA, Neil Armstrong, Phil Plait, PZ Myers, Science, Science Fiction, SETI, Space
Today’s xkcd sums things up pretty well, I think: the actual discovery was cool, but the hype made it feel anticlimatic.
Above and beyond what this says about our press being driven by ASTOUNDING!! news and the failure to get even basic science stories right (with some very obvious and excellent exceptions), consider just what was behind the hype: excitement at the prospect of non-terrestrial life of any sort being discovered.
The initial speculation that NASA had proof of life on Titan swept like electronic fire around the world. It wasn’t just science fiction geeks. Or actual biologists. Or space buffs. It was pretty much the whole world, though some had more fun with it than others.
Why did this capture the imaginations of so many people? Easy: we’re hungry for this news, and have been for decades. It’s not just the countless science fiction books and movies which have fed this hunger (mine included) – it is also the very real science behind the search for extra-terrestrial life (or intelligence). Proof of the existence of life beyond our planet would likely be considered one of the most important discoveries in the history of mankind, and the announcement of such a discovery would be a turning point bigger than even the first time that humans walked on the Moon.
It is easy in a time of recession, when money is tight for most people and the government is trying to figure out ways to cut expenditures, to under-value NASA or basic science research. And I am not arguing for this or that ‘big science’ program, per se. But all you have to do is look at what happened this week, to note the wonder and excitement which was launched by the merest possibility of the discovery of life elsewhere, to realize that this kind of knowledge is something that people around the world are waiting for with eager, almost palpable, anticipation. I think it is one of the very best things about humans that this is the case, and it should be encouraged and used.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Bad Astronomy, Brave New World, Carl Zimmer, NASA, Phil Plait, Science, Science Fiction
Well, it’s not life on Titan. But it is very damned cool nonetheless:
NASA’s real news: bacterium on Earth that lives off arsenic!
NASA scientists announced today an incredible find: a form of microbe that apparently evolved the ability to use otherwise toxic arsenic in their biochemistry!
To understand just how important this is, let’s turn to an analogy from one of my favorite science writers: Carl Zimmer.
The search for alien life has long been plagued by a philosophical question: what is life? Why is this so vexing? Well, let’s say that you’re hunting for change under your couch so that your four-year-old son can buy an ice cream cone from a truck that’s pulled up outside your house. Your son offers to help.
“What is change?” he asks.
“It’s…” You trail off, realizing that you’re about to get into a full-blown discussion of economics with a sugar-crazed four-year-old. So, instead, you open up your hand and show him a penny, a nickel, a dime. “It’s things like this.”
“Oh–okay!” your son says. He digs away happily. The two of you find lots of interesting things–paper clips, doll shoes, some sort of cracker–which you set aside in a little pile. But you’ve only found seventeen cents in change when the ice cream truck pulls away. Tears ensue.
As you’re tossing the pile of debris into the trash, you notice that there’s a dollar bill in the mix.
“Did you find this?” you ask.
“Yes,” your son sobs.
“Well, why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s not change. Change is metal. That’s paper.”
OK, I have just broken the usual standards of “fair use” and I hope Carl will forgive me. I’ll compensate by saying that you should go read the whole rest of the post, because it explains far better than I ever could what the full ramifications of this actually are. Seriously – go. I’ll write more tomorrow. Come back then.
Jim Downey
This would be so very cool:
Did NASA Discover Life on One of Saturn’s Moons?
NASA is holding a press conference on Thursday “to discuss an astrobiology finding.” Are they going to announce that they’ve found evidence of extraterrestrial life?Blogger Jason Kottke took a look at NASA’s press release, which touts “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life” (astrobiology, besides being a cool word, is “the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe”), and decided to investigate further by looking at the participants’ resumes. So who are the participants?
- A geobiologist who’s written about “geology and life on Mars”;
- an oceanographer who’s done extensive work on arsenic-based photosynthesis;
- a biologist examining Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, and its similarities to early Earth;
- and an ecologist investigating the “chemistry of environments where life evolves.”
Keep your fingers crossed.
Jim Downey
Hat tip to Jacob for the link! Thanks!
Filed under: BoingBoing, Civil Rights, Constitution, Politics, Privacy, Science, tech, Terrorism
…to yesterday’s post, in which I focused primarily on the civil liberties aspect of the latest TSA security procedures.
I am not competent to evaluate the technical or engineering safety of the equipment being used for full-body scanning. But this guy is:
I am a biochemist working in the field of biophysics. Specifically, the lab I work in (as well as many others) has spent the better part of the last decade working on the molecular mechanism of how mutations in the breast cancer susceptibility gene, BRCA2, result in cancer. The result of that work is that we now better understand that people who have a deficient BRCA2 gene are hypersensitive to DNA damage, which can be caused by a number of factors including: UV exposure, oxidative stress, improper chromosomal replication and segregation, and radiation exposure.
That’s the into to a post of his about the safety of one type of the new scanners. You should read the whole thing – it is well written for an intelligent lay person, though some of the technical stuff might be beyond your ken. It isn’t hyperbolic, but it is *very* sobering. Here’s the key paragraph which leapt out at me:
Furthermore, when making this comparison, the TSA and FDA are calculating that the dose is absorbed throughout the body. According the simulations performed by NIST, the relative absorption of the radiation is ~20-35-fold higher in the skin, breast, testes and thymus than the brain, or 7-12-fold higher than bone marrow. So a total body dose is misleading, because there is differential absorption in some tissues. Of particular concern is radiation exposure to the testes, which could result in infertility or birth defects, and breasts for women who might carry a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation. Even more alarming is that because the radiation energy is the same for all adults, children or infants, the relative absorbed dose is twice as high for small children and infants because they have a smaller body mass (both total and tissue specific) to distribute the dose. Alarmingly, the radiation dose to an infant’s testes and skeleton is 60-fold higher than the absorbed dose to an adult brain!
This isn’t the only serious assessment of this technology which has been critical – in fact, he is largely writing in reaction to the government’s effort to discredit a letter of concern about the technology from a group of scientists and doctors at the University of California at San Francisco. I think the procedures should be changed based purely on civil liberties concerns, as I have written previously. But when you add in the technical concerns, I think the need to stop the use of these procedures becomes even more apparent.
Jim Downey
Via BB – which prompted me to take the time and go read the whole post, though I had seen references to it elsewhere previously.
Filed under: Augmented Reality, Predictions, Psychic abilities, Science, Science Fiction, Society
As I’ve noted recently, I’m pretty much a hard-nosed skeptic. But as I said in that post:
But I am much less willing to invest my energy into any enterprise which doesn’t seem to be well grounded in proven reality.
“Proven reality.” Well, what constitutes proof?
* * * * * * *
The term psi denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms. Two variants of psi are precognition (conscious cognitive awareness) and premonition (affective apprehension) of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process. Precognition and premonition are themselves special cases of a more general phenomenon: the anomalous retroactive influence of some future event on an individual’s current responses, whether those responses are conscious or nonconscious, cognitive or affective. This article reports 9 experiments, involving more than 1,000 participants, that test for retroactive influence by “timereversing” well-established psychological effects so that the individual’s responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur. Data are presented for 4 time-reversed effects: precognitive approach to erotic stimuli and precognitive
avoidance of negative stimuli; retroactive priming; retroactive habituation; and retroactive facilitation of recall. All but one of the experiments yielded statistically significant results; and, across all 9 experiments, Stouffer’s z = 6.66, p = 1.34 × 10-11 with a mean effect size (d) of 0.22. The individual-difference variable of stimulus seeking, a component of extraversion, was significantly correlated with psi performance in 5 of the experiments, with participants who scored above the midpoint on a scale of stimulus seeking achieving a mean effect size of 0.43. Skepticism about psi, issues of replication, and theories of psi are also discussed.
* * * * * * *
Communion of Dreams is about a re-evaluation of reality. As I note on the homepage for the book, a dust jacket blurb could read in part:
When an independent prospector on Titan discovers an alien artifact, assumptions based on the lack of evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence are called into question. Knowing that news of such a discovery could prompt chaos on Earth, a small team is sent to investigate and hopefully manage the situation. What they find is that there’s more to human history, and human abilities, than any of them ever imagined. And that they will need all those insights, and all those abilities, to face the greatest threat yet to human survival.
* * * * * * *
That .pdf above comes from the site of DARYL J. BEM, Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. His work is starting to get some real notice. Why? Well, here’s a nice summation:
Dr. Bem, a social psychologist at Cornell University, conducted a series of studies that will soon be published in one of the most prestigious psychology journals (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). Across nine experiments, Bem examined the idea that our brain has the ability to not only reflect on past experiences, but also anticipate future experiences. This ability for the brain to “see into the future” is often referred to as psi phenomena.
Although prior research has been conducted on the psi phenomena – we have all seen those movie images of people staring at Zener cards with a star or wavy lines on them – such studies often fail to meet the threshold of “scientific investigation.” However, Bem’s studies are unique in that they represent standard scientific methods and rely on well-established principles in psychology. Essentially, he took effects that are considered valid and reliable in psychology – studying improves memory, priming facilitates response times – and simply reversed their chronological order.
And a very good description of one of the specific experiments:
Perceiving Erotic Stimuli from the Future
The first experiment described in Bem’s new paper involves perceiving erotic stimuli from the future — specifically, perceiving whether an erotic picture is going to appear in a certain location or not. As usual in empirical psychology, the experimental setup is a bit involved — but if you want to really appreciate the evidence for precognition that Bem has obtained, there’s no substitute for actually understanding some of the experiments he did. So I’m going to quote Bem’s paper at some length here, regarding his first experiment.
The setup was, in Bem’s words, as follows:
One hundred Cornell undergraduates, 50 women and 50 men, were recruited for this experiment using the Psychology Department’s automated online sign-up system. They either received one point of experimental credit in a psychology course offering that option or were paid $5 for their participation. Both the recruiting announcement and the introductory explanation given to participants upon entering the laboratory informed them that
[t]his is an experiment that tests for ESP. It takes about 20 minutes and is run completely by computer. First you will answer a couple of brief questions. Then, on each trial of the experiment, pictures of two curtains will appear on the screen side by side. One of them has a picture behind it; the other has a blank wall behind it. Your task is to click on the curtain that you feel has the picture behind it. The curtain will then open, permitting you to see if you selected the correct curtain. There will be 36 trials in all.
And the result? From the same source as above:
1. “Across all 100 sessions, participants correctly identified the future position of the erotic pictures significantly more frequently than the 50% hit rate expected by chance: 53.1%.” (which is highly statistically significant given the number of trials involved, according to the calculations shown in the paper)
2. “In contrast, their hit rate on the non-erotic pictures did not differ significantly from chance: 49.8. This was true across all types of non-erotic pictures: neutral pictures, 49.6%; negative pictures, 51.3%; positive pictures, 49.4%; and romantic but non-erotic pictures, 50.2%.”In other words the hypotheses made in advance of the experiment were solidly confirmed. The experiment yielded highly statistically significant evidence for psychic precognition. Much more than would be expected at random, given the number of subjects involved, the Cornell students were able to perceive the erotic stimuli from the future — but not, in this context, the non-erotic ones.
* * * * * * *
[Spoilers ahead.]
In Communion of Dreams the discovery is that we live in a reality which has been subject to artificial controls on our psychic abilities. Why this was done is unclear, and exactly what range of ‘natural’ psychic ability humans have isn’t known. These are things which I may explore at greater length in subsequent books (hint, hint.)
But I do find it fascinating that there are these cracks in our current perception of reality. Little glimpses into perhaps a greater understanding. There may not be a concerted effort to hide the truth from us, as in my book, but there is something going on, some way in which our scientific theories only ride along the surface of a wave without penetrating it. Perhaps we exist not in the moment, but in a moving field of possibilities, some of which are so powerful that they echo backwards in time.
It’s something to consider. Playfully.
Jim Downey
The morning after a “wave election“, this seems like the perfect time to talk about: 
Wait – what?
I noted about a month ago that I was going to stop writing ‘reviews’ of the Sixty Symbols videos, though I intended to keep working through them for my own edification and enjoyment, and I left open the possibility that I might again blog about a particular video. Well, that particular wave form has collapsed, you might say.
So, let’s talk about art. (Trust me, this actually makes sense.)
One of the things I most loved about owning and operating an art gallery was getting to know more artists, better. I’ve always been fascinated by intelligent and creative people and how they view the world – how they can almost see more deeply into reality and understand relationships which are otherwise opaque to the rest of us. A good artist uses that insight, shares that vision, by translating what they perceive into a form which is understandable to others. The character of Duc Ng from Communion of Dreams is supposed to be this kind of person, and the insight he shares about the alien artifact is crucial to understanding the mystery at the heart of the book.
This idea is hardly new – indeed, it is one of the fundamentals of good philosophy as well as good art. And so while I was very pleased to see it brought out in the “wave function” video (at about the 8:00 mark) I wasn’t terribly surprised. The point made was that Claude Monet, founder of the Impressionist school of art, had the ability to mentally ‘step back’ from his paintings, and envision them as they would be perceived from a distance, thereby providing a bridge between the microscopic and the macroscopic.
And this is a very good metaphor for the differences between the quantum mechanical world where the wave function rules and the classical physics world we live in.
See, this is the problem – quantum physics is so counter-intuitive that the tag line for the Wave Function video is: “If you think you understand this video, you probably don’t.”
So why make it? Well, because.
Because you can start to approach an understanding of what is happening at the quantum level through analogy and art and metaphor, even if you can’t quite wrap your head around what is actually going on with the math. Or at least you can be pushed to realize that the reality you have been living in doesn’t exactly jibe with the one which actually functions in terms of probabilities and possibilities. We deal in hard facts – or at least think we do. We make decisions. We put that daub of paint in one particular place, and so freeze our vision into a frame.
And yet . . .
And yet we edit. Stories are tweaked. A line sketched here is erased. A new daub of paint is put down, covering the last one. A new fact appears, and our understanding of the past changes – the universe changes before our eyes. We realize that the world we live in is somehow in flux – unable to be pinned down.
Just as a certain alien artifact appears just a little bit different to everyone who sees it.
Just as an election is interpreted from each unique vantage point.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Fermi's Paradox, Phil Plait, Predictions, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Seth Shostak, SETI, Space
The Fermi paradox is at the heart of Communion of Dreams – given what we know, where are the extra-terrestrials?
What do I mean “given what we know”? Well, the Drake equation has been a staple of science fiction (and at least part of the justification for SETI) for decades. Filling in the factors in the equation has always necessitated a lot of guesswork – the Wiki entry goes into that fairly well – but now we have more solid information on at least one of the more important components of the equation: how many terrestrial (Earth-like) planets are there in our galaxy?
Phil Plait has a good rundown on this, coming at the number from two directions, using the latest astronomical observations:
How many habitable planets are there in the galaxy?
By now you may have heard the report that as many as 1/4 of all the sun-like stars in the Milky Way may have Earth-like worlds. Briefly, astronomers studied 166 stars within 80 light years of Earth, and did a survey of the planets they found orbiting them. What they found is that about 1.5% of the stars have Jupiter-mass planets, 6% have Neptune-mass ones, and about 12% have planets from 3 – 10 times the Earth’s mass. This sample isn’t complete, and they cannot detect planets smaller than 3 times the Earth’s mass. But using some statistics, they can estimate from the trend that as many as 25% of sun-like stars have earth-mass planets orbiting them!
And what does that mean? Here’s the closing calculation from Plait:
2 x 1013 / 8000 = 2,500,000,000 planets
Oh my. Yeah, let that sink in for a second. That’s 2.5 billion planets that are potentially habitable!
How many of them would host indigenous life? How many of *those* would develop intelligent, technological civilization? There’s a nice interactive on the PBS site which allows you to play with this. Using that 2.5 billion number, but assuming that only half the planets which could support life will actually develop it, and that only 1% of those will develop intelligent life, and that only 10% of those intelligent lifeforms will develop technological civilizations capable of interstellar communication . . . you wind up with 125,000 such civilizations. You then have to make some assumptions about how long such a civilization would last, and what the likelihood would be that they would be around now (at the same time we are), but still . . .
I’ve complained previously that I worry that solid evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence will be discovered before Communion of Dreams makes it into print. That window is now closing. But you know, I really wouldn’t complain too much now if such evidence beat me to press.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 