Beyond the human eye

PBS is such a treasure. This video shows why tech, when done right, not only shows how reality works but also how it benefits society when placed in the hands of researchers who know how to use it's power in imaginative ways. Exquisite, powerful, very cool, this is a must see. Enjoy.

Heads Up Display

Terminator view by FlavZZZ

Dailmation comes through with the mother of heads up display with clips from T1 through 3 showing how the T800 viewed the world.  The Verge has a good piece on Project Glass, Google's effort to build the first viable wearable computer, something also written about in BRT in a post titled, Minority Report, Circa 2012

7 Minutes of Terror

Not a horror flick but rather the incredibly precise moves Nasa's Curiosity must go through in order to safely land on Mars. Simply unbelievable. 

Gaming the System

Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith: How the Wall Street Mafia Holds America

 -- and the World -- Hostage

This is a must see video. The title links you to the transcript of  Bill Moyers interviewing Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith. The only thing missing is the connect to the Fed, the engine enabling the banksters
to steal our money with impunity.

Flat Earth

The belief that the Earth was flat was typical of ancient cosmologies until about the 4th century BC, when the Ancient Greek philosophers proposed the idea that the Earth was a sphere, or at least rounded in shape.[3] Aristotle was one of the first thinkers to propose a spherical Earth in 330 BC. By the early Middle Ages, it was widespread knowledge throughout Europe that the Earth was a sphere.[4]

The ability of some people to ignore reality continues to amaze, particularly when it comes to politicians whose ability to deny and pander to the ignorant knows no bounds. To whit.

State senators in North Carolina passed a measure Tuesday in open defiance of the laws of nature, making it illegal to take into account events such as melting polar ice caps when forecasting the rate of ocean level rise along the state’s 300 miles of vulnerable, tourist-saturated coast. (HB 819)

But the hubris of such a bid will likely have disastrous consequences for those living along the coast in the decades ahead. While North Carolina prepares for a sea level rise of a little over half a foot by the century’s end, Maine is getting ready for a wall of water at least 78 inches high. Delaware is planning for a 58-inch rise while Louisiana mounts a defense against a 39-inch one.

Virginia senators answer the call as well.

Virginia has commissioned a study to examine coastal flooding, but only after references to climate change were removed

Two Southern states have made it clear they want nothing to do with the idea of global warming.

A day after the North Carolina state senate passed a bill requiring science on rising sea levels to be ignored, Virginia lawmakers allowed a study on its coastline to begin on the state's dime only after all references to climate change or global warming were removed from its funding proposal.

As written in Common Dreams, the threat to modernity and common sense is gathering steam, something akin to what happened in the French Revolution when the Reign of Terror condemned thousands to death in order to insure that the revolution would "succeed" no matter the cost. 

We are witnessing an epochal shift in our socio-political world.  We are de-evolving, hurtling headlong into a past that was defined by serfs and lords; by necromancy and superstition; by policies based on fiat, not facts. 

Much of what has made the modern world in general, and the United States in particular, a free and prosperous society comes directly from insights that arose during the Enlightenment. 

Too bad we’re chucking it all out and returning to the Dark Ages.

Literally. 

Two main things distinguished the post Enlightenment world from the pre Enlightenment Dark Ages.

First, Francis Bacon’s Novo Organum Scientiarum (The New Instrument of Science) introduced a new way of understanding the world, in which empiricism, facts and … well … reality … defined what was real. It essentially outlined the scientific method:  observation and data collection, formulation of hypotheses, experiments designed to test hypotheses and elevation of these hypotheses to theories when data consistently supported them.  It was and is a system based on skepticism, and a relentless and methodical search for truth. 

It brought us advances and untold wealth and health.  From one-horse carts to automobiles to airplanes. From leaches and phrenology to penicillin and monoclonal antibodies.

Until recently. 

It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong. - Richard Feyman

Questions, Questions

Brian Greene's The Hidden Reality rocks. Elegantly written, Greenes uses deep physics to explain how reality may work at the ultimate level in a fashion accessible to non math guys like me. In the book, he describes gravity as "the ulitimate free lunch" as gravity can always go to a lower energy state,  (potential transformed into kinetic) which brings up an interesting question this non technical physics buff has had in the back of his mind for quite some time.

Question: If gravity is the ultimate free lunch, could it give rise to the quantum as gravity, by dropping to a lower energy state vis a vis wormhole evaporation (repulsive gravity?), could drive the multiverse through the mechanism of John Wheeler's Quantum Foam a theoretical construct of space-time consisting of minuscule black holes winking in and out of existence, forever powering a reality far vaster and more complex then anyone can imagine.

Gravity, according to M-Theory, is a closed string, able to move at will through all dimensions of the multiverse without a care in the world.

Another intriguing and far better researched conjecture then yours truly's is the notion posited by National Geographic in an excellent article titled Is Dark Energy really Repulsive Gravity?

It's worth considering don't you think?

Links

Being a firm believer in the quantum and the interconnectedness of things, the Physorg post titled

Foundational Concept of Ecology Tested by Experiment peaked this writer's interest as it focuses on the role of invasives in a given environment, a subject delved into at great length for many years by a close friend.

The scientists were able to track the effect of the loosestrife flowers across four trophic levels, or levels in the food web, and two ecosystems, the terrestrial and the aquatic ones.

The links worked as follows: Wetlands with abundant flowers attracted more pollinating insects; the insects in turn attracted more of the carnivorous dragonflies; the well-nourished dragonflies laid more eggs in the central ponds; the voracious dragonfly larvae that hatched from the eggs altered the diversity of the zooplankton communities in the ponds.

In an unexpected turn, flowering loosestrife actually increased zooplankton species richness, perhaps, speculates Smith, because they preferentially ate a dominant zooplankton species, releasing others from competition.

"To be honest," Smith says, "although the increase in zooplankton diversity is interesting and surprising, I don't think that specific detail matters too much. Nor, is the point simply that purple loosestrife might be affecting aquatic ecosystems, although that is important from a management perspective.

"What matters is that we showed the interconnections are actually strong enough to transmit disturbances through and across webs. We pushed on one link and something four links away in another ecosystem moved."

When looking at this, it makes eminent sense as the quantum is connected, where everything is linked to everything else, where probabilities rule along with black swans and, most importantly, why biodiversity must be preserved at all costs if we are to remain a viable species in an increasingly polluted and over populated planet.

Addendum: Elementary school kids did the experiments while researchers tagged along, finding out nature always surprises, without question. :)

Dragonfly larva, a predator supreme

The Lego Turing Machine

LEGO Turing Machine from ecalpemos on Vimeo.

Alan Turing lives and the Lego Machine construct of Turing's  seminal concept proves it. Enjoy

Ignorance - In a Good Way

Ah, another book to read, this time one on Ignorance, How It Drives Science, a work who's title reminds me of Beginner's Mind, the Zen approach of maintaining openness when dealing with the attainment of knowledge, something society needs to do if it is to survive the next 50 - 100 years, a time frame, yours truly thinks, is the most perilous humanity will ever face.

Many people think of science as a deliberate process that is driven by the gradual accumulation of facts. Legions of smart scientists labor to piece together the evidence supporting their discoveries, hypotheses, inventions and progress itself.

But according to Stuart Firestein, a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, this view is fallacious. Working scientists don’t get bogged down in factual swamps, he says, because they don’t care all that much for facts. Facts are not what science is all about. It’s only when the facts fail that scientists really put on their thinking caps.

Scientists, Dr. Firestein says, are driven by ignorance.

In this sense, ignorance is not stupidity. Rather, it is a particular condition of knowledge: the absence of fact, understanding, insight or clarity about something. It is a case where data don’t exist, or more commonly, where the existing data don’t make sense.

The book comes at an important time. Today’s most vociferous scientific controversies turn on different interpretations of facts — about climate change, about contraception, about evolution. When politics are injected, the shouting grows louder, the thinking muddier. Uncertainty is a dirty word.

Dr. Firestein, by contrast, celebrates a tolerance for uncertainty, the pleasures of scientific mystery and the cultivation of doubt. If more people embraced the seductive appeal of uncertainty, he says, it might take some acrimony out of our public debates.

The quantum rules, to ignore it is the expression of true ignorance, the province of intolerance, religion

nationalism and fear, characteristics all too common in today's fractured world.

Chasing Space

Chasing Space from Marco Bagni - LostConversation on Vimeo.

Bagni's elegant video knocks me out. Math, science and a sense of wonder.
Works for me. :)