Monthly Archives: February 2008

Miracle and Wonder

Lets pay a little game. Below you will find several headlines from the now-defunct Weekly World News. For those who never had the privilege of standing in a US grocery store checkout line during the 80′s or 90′s, let me explain that the WWN was a schlocky tabloid publication that eschewed the normal celebrity gossip in favor of the most randomly bizarre, outrageous, and absolutely preposterous “news stories” you can imagine. Tucked in the middle of all that nonsense is a real headline from an actual current news story.

Your mission is to see if you can identify the real news story:

Seeing Eye Squirrels For Blind Dogs

Blind Man Regains Sight After Doctors Implant Son’s Tooth in His Eye

Groom Freezes at Nudist Wedding

Severed Leg Hops 75 Feet!

Scientist Invents ‘Reverse Lightbulb’ that Makes Room Darker

Doctors Reattach Siamese Twins

Think you’ve got it figured out? Well, click here to see which one is actually news.

How did you do? If presented with that list, I believe I would have gone for the freezing nudist groom or the hopping severed leg. But, no.

The procedure is called Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis. It is described thusly:

McNichol’s son Robert, 23, donated a tooth, its root and part of his jaw for his father’s surgery. McNichol’s right eye socket was rebuilt, and a lens was inserted into a hole drilled in Robert’s tooth. The procedure required two surgeries lasting a total of 15 hours.

How wonderful that a man’s eyesight has been restored. But what is more striking to me about this is — even if you guessed correctly — how well that headline fits in with the others. We live in an age of such robust possibilities that it is getting difficult to make a claim that is so outrageous that it is rejected at face value. Maybe this is why the WWN went out of business; they just couldn’t compete with the real news any more.

A world in which real news is as outrageous as faux news becomes risky if we allow our sense of credulity to grow at the same pace that possibilities are increasing. I think the key is to continue to be startled by, and to push back against, claims that sound outrageous.

With that in mind, is anyone prepared to tell me that the headline linked above is, in fact, a hoax? If it is, I am hardly the first to fall for it.

As Paul Simon put it:

It’s a turn-around jump shot
It’s everybody jump start
It’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical and magical is art
The boy in the bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart

And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
Thats dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Dont cry

Via GeekPress.

Could Terrorists Use Robots?

University of Sheffield professor Noel Sharkey recently stated that armed military robots “pose a threat to humanity.”

The armed robots that have been fielded so far all have a human controlling the trigger. He thinks that could change. I agree. As AI’s grow in power we will be tempted to take humans out of the loop. We shouldn’t do this.

Sharkey also stated that terrorists might reverse engineer these devices and start using them instead of suicide bombers. Terrorists, of course, will use any method at their disposal, but I doubt seriously that reverse-engineering our robots will be the way they go.

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The SWORDS robot.
Click the picture for a better look.

It is much more likely that terrorists will continue to use off-the-shelf devices. Terrorists, of course, already use “improvised explosive devices” (IED’s) in Iraq.

01-call-missed.jpg

“01 Call Missed.”

If a terrorist duct taped an IED to a remote controlled 1/8 sized model car (like this one – video at the link), he could chase down a crowd of civilians or a squad of soldiers at 45 mph with little risk to himself. And he could do it for less than $500. With simple cheap possibilities like that, it’s just not likely that they would spend the money necessary to reverse-engineer our robots.

Robots like the SWORDS already help defend our soldiers against IED’s. Our need for these robots would only increase if the terrorists started improvising robots of their own.

Live to Drive It

Our friend Michael Darling sent a link this morning to an article entitled “The Road to the Future.”

The article presents some possibilities about where transportation technology could be going – self-driving cars, hybrids, air cars, transparent aluminum for windows, and modular personal transportation vehicles.

You’ll want to read the whole thing.

George Dyson on Orion

Here’s a Ted Talk from 2002, George Dyson on the secret Project Orion, which was a plan to send a spacecraft to Jupiter and Saturn propelled by nuclear bombs. Dyson’s father, Freeman Dyson, worked on the project.

We talked briefly about Orion an a recent FastForward Radio; I mentioned that I had heard of a similar idea proposed for interstellar travel, but had never heard of this variation on the idea. But what Dyson is describing here is obviously no variation — this was the original pan.

Ultimately it was killed by NASA. One of the things that strikes me about this project is the sheer, brazen scope of it. There was a time when the US government would entertain such magnificent visions. It’s hard to imagine them doing something like this today. The Space Elevator is an idea of about the same audaciousness, I suppose. Will NASA step up?

We’ll see.

The other part that caught my attention was that the plan (apparently) was to launch the Orion rocket from Earth! That just seems crazy. Dyson notes that when NASA finally took a look at the project — before rejecting it; it was originally a highly classified Air Force project — their plan was to launch components of Orion into orbit via Saturn V’s and then assemble them into the larger spacecraft that would fly to Mars. That would seem to make a lot more sense, if only because we would thus avoid having to detonate all those nukes within our atmosphere.

One very interesting tidbit — Dyson says there is a secret cabal within NASA still looking at Orion. Of course, the fact that they had to go to him to get a good deal of their background information on the project doesn’t instill me with a lot of confidence that they will be doing anything with the idea any time soon.

Still, it’s an intriguing possibility. Maybe the way forward with Orion would be to build the Space Elevator first, use it to launch all the component materials into orbit and then take it from there. That way, even if it didn’t work ot, we’d stil have the Space Elevator.

Although I have this feeling that – by the time we get the Space Elevator going — we might have a workable fusion propulsion system, which would make Orion obsolete.

More on Usefulness vs. Truthfulness

Following up on Saturday’s entry about the meme that united the world, I was struck by this piece (via InstaPundit) on how science plays into the debate over female genital mutilation. The gist of the piece is that some scientists may be fudging (or possibly just misunderstanding) research results to show that female genital mutilation is more likely to be harmful to reproduction than the evidence actually indicates. This “politically correct” interpretation of the data is brought forward in the service of the movement to abolish the practice altogether.

So now we have a new meme, much more serious than “Americans are stupid.” We’ll call this one “FGM harms reproduction.” The linked piece suggests that this meme — like “Americans are stupid” — has proponents who are more concerned with its usefulness than its truthfulness. I certainly don’t know enough about the research to venture an opinion. And while I’m pretty much in favor of any argument against what I consider to be a cruel and dehumanizing ritual, the notion of skewing scientific findings in the service of a greater cause — even a really noble cause — is pretty disturbing.

I noted in my earlier essay that passing memes on primarily because they are useful — without regard to their truth content — creates major questions about how much valid information is really making its way into blogs, Digg, Wikipedia, and other venues. Of course, everyone expects that a lot of that information will be subjective, partisan, slanted. But when scientific ideas get sticky because of their political expedience, the threshold of risk gets lowered considerably.

The major critique that has been raised against current research in climate change is that it is mostly political ideas wrapped in scientific language. Then again, maybe the critique is politics disguised as science. It’s actually kind of hard to tell, and being socially or politically predisposed to see the issue a certain way only makes it harder.

Philip K. Dick wrote that reality is that which, when we stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. We expect science to be one of those factors that helps us gauge reality as we go, and thus — we hope — avoid getting knocked on our butts by reality when it becomes unavoidable. Unfortunately, science can’t serve two masters. The more we use it to produce expedient or otherwise politically useful findings, the less it will be able to tell us about how things really are.

And, you know, we really need to know how things are.

FastForward Radio

Sunday night Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon welcomed PJ Manney and Michael Darling to the show.

VW-1-Liter-Car-Front-Angle-small.JPG

The talked about the Oscars, “stupid Americans,” contact lenses with circuits, and VW concept cars.

Click “Continue Reading” for listening options and the show notes:

The Meme that United the World

Why would a nine-year-old Gallup poll suddenly emerge on Digg Science earlier this week as if it were news? This happens on Digg sometimes — it has happened on this site, too, I must confess — where a news story is found to be so compelling and so in line with the kinds of things that a particular blogger (or Digger) wants to write about that the enthusiastic blogger (or Digger) goes at it without noticing the date. It then takes an astute commenter to point out the vintage of the news item in question.

The nine-year-old Gallup poll reveals that nearly 20% of Americans believe (or at least believed back then) that the Sun revolves around the Earth. So what makes the story so compelling is that it falls in line with a meme that is (almost) universally loved, to wit:

Americans are stupid.

Now you’ll see a lot of variations on this, particularly from our brethren across the pond who are quick to point out that Americans are ignorant fundamentalists, racist louts, provincial rednecks, etc. But the underlying theme of stupidity is always there. However, what makes the “Americans are stupid” meme so effective is that it’s beloved not just by Europeans (and to a lesser extent Asians, Africans, and others) but by many if not most Americans!

In fact, I daresay that the Digger who got all enthusiastic upon finding this piece is most likely an American, and certainly many of the frothy commenters who could barely restrain their glee upon reading this news are also Americans. Now these folks might not necessarily agree with the blanket statement that “Americans are stupid.” They might prefer “Americans are stupid compared to Europeans,” or better yet, “Red-State Americans are stupid,” or something like that. But again, the underlying premise remains.

Nor would I suggest that buying into this meme is strictly a blue-state or left-of-center affair. Conservatives need this meme to argue for school choice, or — if they are of a more paleo variety — just to argue that the world (especially these here United States) is going to hell in a handbasket.

I have pointed out before that the press and popular media love this meme. It’s always good for a provocative headline or a special three-part series during sweeps week. Jay Leno has practically made a sub-career out of exploiting it. And there can be no question that the advertising industry buys into it wholesale — essentially willing it to be true.

Identifying the Coders

Now this is just darned interesting:

The secret of the Universe is not 42, according to a new theory, but the unimaginably larger number 10^122. Scott Funkhouser of the Military College of South Carolina (called The Citadel) in Charleston has shown how this number — which is bigger than the number of particles in the Universe — keeps popping up when several of the physical constants and parameters of the Universe are combined1. This ‘coincidence’, he says, is surely significant, hinting at some common principle at work behind the scenes.

10122.JPG

How about this? What we’ve manged to do is to uncover a little bit of the source code with which the computer program that we call “the universe” was written. We can see patterns in the code — amazing numeric coincidences! — but we still don’t know its rules, syntax, etc.We’re astounded to find these “coincidences” that would immediately stop being astounding if we knew anything about this underlying structure.

But this raises the question — which I think we’ve tossed around before — about whether source code is merely an analogy, or whether things like this numeric coincidence provide us an extremely remote and yet valid view into the minds of someone, or some group of beings, who exist (or existed) entirely outside of this universe and are responsible for its being here.

And even if it is a remote and very faint view that we have, i think we can say one thing for certain about these beings.

They’re geeks.

Just Where We Weren't Looking for Them

Last week we had the exciting discovery of a a solar system very similar to our own:

Two planets much like Saturn and Jupiter are orbiting a star roughly half the size of our sun in a solar system some 5,000 light years away, astronomers say.

The newly discovered complex seems like a parallel star system to the one that includes Earth, researchers say. Both planets are composed largely of gas and each is a bit smaller than its counterpart in our solar system. The smaller planet is about twice the distance from its star as the larger one, just as Saturn is roughly twice as far from the sun as Jupiter.

That’s cool, but what we want to find is not so much a solar system like ours as a planet like ours. For that, it turns out that we might have to look as far as we once thought:

A Second Earth in Our Solar System

Traveling to another Earth-like world just got a lot easier. It turns out that there may be many other dirt-and-water planets lurking at the edges of our solar system in places like the Oort Cloud. These planets, which could be roughly the size of our own, would contain all the elements we need for life. They’re just sitting in a cold, dimly-lit part of the solar system, waiting to be defrosted and colonized. Yesterday, NASA scientists announced that this changes the prognosis for nearby livable planets.

NASA’s Alan Stern said these planets are so far away from the sun that we haven’t seen them yet:

Stern says:

Our old view, that the Solar System had nine planets will be supplanted by a view that there are hundreds if not thousands of planets in our Solar System. It could be that there are objects of Earth-mass in the Oort cloud (a band of debris surrounding our planetary system) but they would be frozen at these distances. They would look like a frozen Earth.

Still, it might be something of a stretch to describe these planets as “livable.” They’re going to be darn cold. However, we ought to be able to think of ways to warm and brighten them up — maybe by moving them closer to the sun?

Just Where We Weren’t Looking for Them

Last week we had the exciting discovery of a a solar system very similar to our own:

Two planets much like Saturn and Jupiter are orbiting a star roughly half the size of our sun in a solar system some 5,000 light years away, astronomers say.

The newly discovered complex seems like a parallel star system to the one that includes Earth, researchers say. Both planets are composed largely of gas and each is a bit smaller than its counterpart in our solar system. The smaller planet is about twice the distance from its star as the larger one, just as Saturn is roughly twice as far from the sun as Jupiter.

That’s cool, but what we want to find is not so much a solar system like ours as a planet like ours. For that, it turns out that we might have to look as far as we once thought:

A Second Earth in Our Solar System

Traveling to another Earth-like world just got a lot easier. It turns out that there may be many other dirt-and-water planets lurking at the edges of our solar system in places like the Oort Cloud. These planets, which could be roughly the size of our own, would contain all the elements we need for life. They’re just sitting in a cold, dimly-lit part of the solar system, waiting to be defrosted and colonized. Yesterday, NASA scientists announced that this changes the prognosis for nearby livable planets.

NASA’s Alan Stern said these planets are so far away from the sun that we haven’t seen them yet:

Stern says:

Our old view, that the Solar System had nine planets will be supplanted by a view that there are hundreds if not thousands of planets in our Solar System. It could be that there are objects of Earth-mass in the Oort cloud (a band of debris surrounding our planetary system) but they would be frozen at these distances. They would look like a frozen Earth.

Still, it might be something of a stretch to describe these planets as “livable.” They’re going to be darn cold. However, we ought to be able to think of ways to warm and brighten them up — maybe by moving them closer to the sun?