Filed under: Apollo program, Art, Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Buzz Aldrin, Government, NASA, Neil Armstrong, Science, Society, Space, tech, Travel
. . . I decidedly *do* remember this, but it is a blast to see the pix again! From Phil Plait:
You just knew The Big Picture would take on the premier space event of the 20th century now, didn’t you?
Whoa. Head on over there for high-res spacey goodness! Many of those images made me a little choked up, in fact. Sigh.
I couldn’t agree more.
Further recollections on the 20th.
Jim Downey
Filed under: General Musings, Science, Science Fiction, tech, Travel, Writing stuff, YouTube
I’d sent around a YouTube link to some of my friends, showing what happen when a freight train encounters a tornado – it’s worth watching (stick with it to the end of the 2 minute clip!). But in the discussion about it on MeFi, someone posted the following item with Richard Feynman explaining just how a train stays on its tracks:
As I told a friend this morning: “I did not know that.”
And, thinking about it as I have gone through my morning routine, I keep coming back to just how clever us monkeys can be. The basics of modern railroad technology are over 200 years old. The solutions to the problems that Feynman explains in that clip are classic applications of mechanics & geometry – but they are still really quite clever, being simple & self-correcting (once properly constructed in the first place).
And yet, I did not know this. I’m reasonably smart, well educated, curious about the world around me, and with a high level of mechanical aptitude. Still, I did not know this.
Now, I don’t mean to over-think this. There is no end to the things that I don’t know. There is even a lot about the underpinnings of our current technology that I don’t have a clue about. Coming across something I don’t know about railroads should be no real surprise.
And yet . . .
This is something I explored a bit in Communion of Dreams, in the discussions about *how* intelligence or technological sophistication could manifest itself very differently in an alien race. I used one of the characters, who has studied the matter in different human cultures, as a foil for examining different strategies to achieve a given level of technology. Why? Well, for my own enjoyment, mostly. But also to prompt a reader to consider the matter from perhaps a different perspective. In fact, that is a lot of what the whole books is about. So I spent over 132,000 words trying to do it.
And Richard Feynman accomplished much the same thing with an anecdote a bit more than two minutes long.
Ah, humility.
Jim Downey
Man, this stuff never gets old:
I am happy that I lived at the right time to see this whole technology develop. Amazing stuff.
Jim Downey
PS: That’s footage from the STS-125 mission. More available here, naturally.
Just a follow-up to this post the first of the month. From Richard Wiseman’s blog:
In short, all four trials were misses.
When I analysed believers and sceptics separately, the results were the same, with no difference between the groups. So the study didn’t support the existence of remote viewing, and suggested that those who believe in the paranormal are good at finding illusory correspondences between their thoughts and a target .
* * *
Update: I have just looked at the data from those who claimed some kind of psychic ability, and had a high confidence in their choice of target. This sub-group of participants also scored zero out of four.
Surprise, surprise.
Thanks, Richard –
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Government, Heinlein, Humor, Nuclear weapons, NYT, Publishing, Robert A. Heinlein, Science, Science Fiction, tech, Terrorism
Heh:
U.S. Releases Secret List of Nuclear Sites Accidentally
The federal government mistakenly made public a 266-page report, its pages marked “highly confidential,” that gives detailed information about hundreds of the nation’s civilian nuclear sites and programs, including maps showing the precise locations of stockpiles of fuel for nuclear weapons.
* * *
Several nuclear experts argued that any dangers from the disclosure were minimal, given that the general outlines of the most sensitive information were already known publicly.
“These screw-ups happen,” said John M. Deutch, a former director of central intelligence and deputy secretary of defense who is now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s going further than I would have gone but doesn’t look like a serious breach.”
Yeah, everyone knows where their local stockpile of enriched uranium is, right? I mean, really. I can’t see the problem here.
Jim Downey
*Sorry, I couldn’t resist the connection to Heinlein’s classic SF story “Blowups Happen” because of the topic and attitude.
Cross posted to UTI.
I’m not quite sure what to make of this:
Twitter’s first scientific study needs you!
Can some people correctly identify a place using mind power alone?
Psychologist Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, wants to find out, and New Scientist readers can help.
Over the course of this week, we’ll be carrying out an experiment to find out if there’s any substance to claims that some people are “remote viewers” – able to psychically identify a distant location without being shown or told where it is through conventional means.
I dunno – I’d think that twits and woo make a bad combination. The sort of thing that would have you hunched over a toilet after the party, if you know what I mean. But the way that they are doing it at least seems reasonable on first glance:
So, how is the experiment going to work?
Well, at 3pm (UK time) each day, I will travel to a randomly selected location. Once there, I will send a Tweet, asking everyone to Tweet about their thoughts concerning the nature of the location. Thirty minutes later, I will send another Tweet linking to a website that will allow everyone to view photographs of five locations (the actual location and four decoys), think about the thoughts and images that came to them in the thirty minutes before, and vote on which of the five they believe to be the actual target location.
If the majority of people select the correct target then the trial will count as a hit, otherwise it will count as a miss. There will be trials at 3pm on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday this week. Three or more hits in four trials will be seen as supporting the existence of extrasensory perception.
Not in any way scientific (I can think of many ways the results could be skewed), but could be interesting. And is at least as good a use of Twitter as any that I have heard of so far.
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi. Cross posted to UTI.)
Just a brief post this morning to pass on this:
Mannahatta Project Recreates What New York City Looked Like 400 Years Ago
* * *
Included was a map from 1782, when the British occupied New York during the Revolutionary War. It is an incredibly detailed and accurate map, showing brooks, hills, marshes, forests and streets. Features were sketched with pen and ink, then hand-colored with blue, pink, brown and green watercolor.
It is an invaluable window into long-ago Manhattan, a Manhattan that already was ecologically altered by European immigrants, but nothing like the massive changes that would come with the 19th and 20th centuries.
What if, Sanderson immediately wondered, he was to use his landscape ecology skills and layer that map over a modern map of Manhattan? Could he get them to mesh? Would he be able to discern if today’s Times Square was once meadow or marsh, wet or wooded? What was Greenwich Village long ago? What, in fact, did Manhattan look like 400 years ago, when Henry Hudson sailed past Manhattan on a September day?
The result can be found here: The Mannahatta Project.
Jim Downey
(Hat tip to ML!)
Filed under: Civil Rights, Constitution, Government, NYT, Privacy, Society, tech
N.S.A.’s Intercepts Exceed Limits Set by Congress
WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year, government officials said in recent interviews.
Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in “overcollection” of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional.
The legal and operational problems surrounding the N.S.A.’s surveillance activities have come under scrutiny from the Obama administration, Congressional intelligence committees and a secret national security court, said the intelligence officials, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because N.S.A. activities are classified. Classified government briefings have been held in recent weeks in response to a brewing controversy that some officials worry could damage the credibility of legitimate intelligence-gathering efforts.
Hey, it’s no big deal. Just a small bout of ‘overcollection’. Like having a few too many Tupperware containers, right? Or like being a bit ‘overdrawn’ at the bank. You know, to the tune of $1.3 Trillion or something. Easy mistake for anyone to make.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: ACLU, Civil Rights, Government, Politics, Predictions, Privacy, Society, tech
Huh, a couple of weeks ago I complained about this:
The city of Columbia has installed a cluster of four surveillance cameras at Ninth Street and Broadway as a demo for a larger project to monitor and deter downtown crime.
Well, seems that my bitching (along with a lot of others), had an effect:
Council kills surveillance camera plan
In a move that surprised city staff and the downtown business community alike, the Columbia City Council last night on a 6-1 vote denied a transfer of funds that would have allowed the lease of surveillance cameras for downtown streets.
The mobile camera units, perched on trailers at downtown intersections for the past month during a trial period, will soon be hauled away, Assistant City Manager Tony St. Romaine said.
What started out as a transfer of funds from one account to another to cover a budgeted expense became a lengthy discussion of privacy, safety and civil rights among council members and members of the public.
I’ll be damned. Maybe there’s hope for us, yet.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Connections, Expert systems, Feedback, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, tech
The term “bump” has been used online for at least the last couple of years, particularly on larger group blogs when someone who administers the site wants a specific post or comment to get more attention or not be lost in the flow of information.
Curious now that there’s an emerging use of the term pertaining to another aspect of information: “bumping” technological tools to share specific information. From a column by a friend sent me:
From University of Chicago, a bump joins networking grind
It is fitting that University of Chicago business school students would develop an iPhone app that works by bump.
After all, it was a former U. of C. professor, President Barack Obama, who helped to popularize the fist bump.
The new iPhone app, called Bump, transfers data from one iPhone to another simply by bumping. When two people holding iPhones bump hands, detailed contact information or just certain data, such as a phone number, can be shared.
I bumped an iPhone with an iPod Touch and contact information was transferred between the devices in about 5 seconds. Both gadgets asked for confirmation.
As my friend said in the email:
Not quite as handy as the handshake in your book, but on its way.
Well on it’s way, indeed. For those who don’t recall (or who haven’t yet read the book), the standard tech people use for my novel contains a palm ‘key’ which is linked to a worn (actually, embedded) personal computer. Among other things, this key allows people to just shake hands and exchange business-card type information, which is automatically filed away for reference by your personal expert system.
As I’ve said before, it’s always fun to see the technology developing as I predict in Communion.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 