The most famous debate of the 1900s was meant to determine what, exactly, was the center of the universe. The greatest lesson modern people can draw from it is that each of the debaters was both right and wrong.
Science never lacks for controversy. Whether it’s a conflict of ideology, modeling, or interpreting ambiguous data, it seems that most of the people are fighting most of the time. One debate, though obscure now, was known in its era simply as The Great Debate. Astronomers had improved telescopes, pooled data, and were beginning to come up with a model for the universe. Two debaters met, in a highly publicized event, to prove what the universe looked like and where the Earth was situated inside it. They ended up proving something else entirely.
Harlow Shapley was an ambitious man in his mid-thirties who had his eye on the position of director of the Harvard College Observatory – though it turned out he was not a candidate for it at that time. He did not relish the prospect of a public debate that might lose him the chance of advancement. His position was that the Milky Way contained nearly the entirety of the universe, and that anything outside of it was just a bubble of gas that had been blown into space by the radiation pressure of the massive central galaxy.
Heber Curtis was older, and had become rather an expert on the objects that Shapley belived were gas bubbles. He’d made extensive studies of the fuzzy, bright little objects that seemed to lie outside of the plane of the Milky Way. Curtis was convinced that these smudges were whole “island universes,” otherwise known as galaxies. After publishing several stunning images of these objects, he was in the process of becoming the director of the Allegheny Observatory. Winning the debate would gain him nothing. Still, Curtis's reputation stood on the idea that his published work was correct. He couldn't allow someone else to hand the victory to Shapley. He planned to take down Shapley’s single galaxy theory.
The debate was held in April of 1920, both men spoke for about forty-five minutes each. Knowing what we know now, it looks like Shapley was definitely on the losing side, but a closer look shows us how jumbled science is, and how data can cause people to cobble together pictures of the world that are both true and false.
Shapley’s idea of the universe was incorrect. There are galaxies outside of the Milky Way. But he based his assumptions on data that would allow him to think nothing else. His first mistake was believing the observations of a fellow astronomer, Adriaan van Maanen. Maanan claimed to have observed one of these bright clouds – that Curtis claimed were whole galaxies – rotating. Given the size of this supposed galaxy, if a human being could observe it rotating during their lifetime, the outer edges had to be moving faster than the speed of light. That was impossible. They had to be much smaller than a galaxy.
A bigger error, and one made by Shapley himself, was the location of the Cepheids. Discovered by Harvard astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt, the Cepheids were a group of stars that varied in brightness, pulsing brighter and dimmer. The longer the period of the pulse, the brighter the star. So if a long-period Cepheid was dim, its dimness had to be due to its distance. If it was bright, it had to be close up. Calculate the distance to any one of these stars, then, and it would be possible to calculate the distance to the rest. The problem was, there was no way at the time to calculate the distance to any one Cepheid. Shapley did some inventive, and rough, calculations, but ended up inadvertently including an extra population of stars that threw his calculations off. When he was done, his data showed that the main cluster of Cepheids, and the dwarf galaxies that housed them, were close to the Milky Way. They were about half the distance of the Milky Way away from the Milky Way. If anything, they were an extension of the Milky Way, and not some other faraway galaxies. In fact, the Cepheids were much farther than Shapley thought they were, but there was no way to be sure of that at the time.
Curtis had spent years studying these supposed gas clouds, and so his most compelling arguments were concrete data. He showed evidence that many of these supposed clouds were shaped the same way the Milky Way was shaped. They gave off the same light that the Milky Way gave off. Then he pointed to Andromeda, and rattled through its history. Astronomers had seen, at several times, bright points of light shoot out from this supposed cloud. Curtis believed that they were novae. Astronomers, he said, had seen more novae in Andromeda than they had in the Milky Way. How, exactly, would a small fringe cloud – which Shapely sometimes said might be no more than a developing solar system – produce all these novae?
Curtis then went on to shakier ground. With hindsight, we see that Shapley’s Cepheid calculations were off, but he had made some incredibly important discoveries within the Milky Way. Shapley had noticed globular clusters in the Milky Way galaxy. By calculating the distance to each, as well as to several other visible features, Shapley had realized how big the galaxy actually was. It’s true his final estimate was off by a factor of three. The Milky Way is 100,000 light years across, while Shapley thought it was 300,000 light years from end to end, but he had come up with a better approximation than anyone else had. Curtis asserted that Milky Way was much smaller, and the distances to other galaxies were much longer. He also disputed Shapley’s claim that the solar system was lodged at the edge of the Milky Way. Although Shapley had shown that the distribution of globular clusters -all in one half of the sky - showed that the Earth was off to the edge of the galaxy, Curtis believed it was lodged comfortably in the galactic center. Although outside the Milky Way, Shapley's facts were wrong, inside of it Shapley had the right data and Curtis was lost in miscalculation.
In the end, neither scientist carried the day. There simply wasn’t enough conclusive data. That had to wait until further observations of Van Maanen’s supposed rotating cloud proved that, although it did move, its rotation wasn’t anywhere near the gallop that Van Maanen believed it was. It also had to wait for Hubble, who put paid to the notion that there was only one galaxy and earned every telescope named after him.
Both scientists went on to academic positions and great discoveries. Curtis engineered, with prisms and plates, a way for astronomers to finally superimpose two images of the night sky and see the difference. He went on to study eclipses. Shapley came up with a little thing called the “liquid water belt” – the zone around a star that would allow an orbiting planet to have liquid water. It’s currently known as the "habitable zone."
What the debate proved conclusively, in a historical context, is the way that looking at certain data can mix in false conclusions with true ones. Both scientists were utterly at odds with each other, both were making false assumptions, but both were also arguing for truths that would forever change the way people saw the universe and their place in it.
I have bad news for the five people who believe that Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm would lead to the destruction of the perfect and completely unspoiled Star Wars franchise. It's happened!
Yes, Disney has desecrated the integrity of these beloved movies by merging it with its own cartoon characters, in this despicable attempt to advertise May 17th's Star Wars Weekend at Disney World!
I joke, of course. Lucas has already authorized a shit-ton of Disney/Star Wars mash-up merchandise already over the last decade, so this idea is hardly new. Mostly, I thought it would be fun to see Disney's first use of the franchise since they acquired it. Also, I really like the idea of Chip and Dale as Ewoks, who, as we all know, eat both the living and the dead. It explains a great deal about Rescue Rangers to me, frankly.
And to anyone who is actually freaking out over this completely innocent poster, please remember: LucasFilm was paying people in Star Wars costumes to embarrass themselves at Star Wars Weekends long before Disney ever bought Star Wars.
Amazing Italian comic artist Denis Medri is back, with even more beautiful Star Wars art. Last year we featured a collection of his images of Star Wars recast as 1980s teen drama characters, and now he's back with actual scenes. It's simply brilliant.
The Tatooine backyard sunset, the Millennium Falcon as a van with a Falcon airbrushed on the side, Darth Vader as the school bully. Someone needs to make this movie right now. Or at the very least drum up a fake trailer, please?
I spoke to three different experts, all of whom have given this subject considerable thought: Kevin Warwick, a British scientist and professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading; Ramez Naam, an American futurist and author of NEXUS (a scifi novel addressing this topic); and Anders Sandberg, a Swedish neuroscientist from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford.
They all told me that the possibility of a telepathic noosphere is very real — and it's closer to reality than we might think. And not surprisingly, this would change the very fabric of the human condition.
Connecting brains
My first question to the group had to do with the technological requirements. How is it, exactly, that we’re going to connect our minds over the Internet, or some future manifestation of it?
“I really think we have sufficient hardware available now — tools like Braingate,” says Warwick. “But we have a lot to learn with regard to how much the brain can adapt, just how many implants would be required, and where they would need to be positioned.”
Naam agrees that we’re largely on our way. He says we already have the basics of sending some sorts of information in and out of the brain. In humans, we’ve done it with video, audio, and motor control. In principle, nothing prevents us from sending that data back and forth between people.
“Practically speaking, though, there are some big things we have to do,” he tells io9. “First, we have to increase the bandwidth. The most sophisticated systems we have right now use about 100 electrodes, while the brain has more than 100 billion neurons. If you want to get good fidelity on the stuff you’re beaming back and forth between people, you’re going to want to get on the order of millions of electrodes.”
Naam says we can build the electronics for that easily, but building it in such a way that the brain accepts it is a major challenge.
The second hurdle, he says, is going beyond sensory and motor control.
“If you want to beam speech between people, you can probably tap into that with some extensions of what we’ve already been doing, though it will certainly involve researchers specifically working on decoding that kind of data,” he says. “But if you want to go beyond sending speech and get into full blown sharing of experiences, emotions, memories, or even skills (a la The Matrix), then you’re wandering into unknown territory.”
Indeed, Sandberg says that picking up and translating brain signals will be a tricky matter.
“EEG sensors have lousy resolution — we get an average of millions of neurons, plus electrical noise from muscles and the surroundings,” he says. “Subvocalisation and detecting muscle twitches is easier to do, although they will still be fairly noisy. Internal brain electrodes exist and can get a lot of data from a small region, but this of course requires brain surgery. I am having great hopes for optogenetics and nanofibers for making kinder, gentler implants that are less risky to insert and easier on their tissue surroundings.”
The real problem, he says, is translating signals in a sensible way. “Your brain representation of the concept "mountain" is different from mine, the result not just of different experiences, but also on account of my different neurons. So, if I wanted to activate the mountain concept, I would need to activate a disperse, perhaps very complex network across your brain,” he tells io9. “That would require some translation that figured out that I wanted to suggest a mountain, and found which pattern is your mountain.”
Sandberg says we normally "cheat" by learning a convenient code called language, where all the mapping between the code and our neural activations is learned as we grow. We can, of course, learn new codes as adults, and this is rarely a problem — adults already master things like Morse code, SMS abbreviations, or subtle signs of gesture and style. Sandberg points to the recent experiments by Nicolelis connecting brains directly, research which shows that it might be possible to get rodents to learn neural codes. But he says this learning is cumbersome, and we should be able to come up with something simpler.
One way is to boost learning. Some research shows that amphetamine and presumably other learning stimulants can speed up language learning. Recent work on the Nogo Receptor suggests that brain plasticity can be turned on and off. “So maybe we can use this to learn quickly,” says Sandberg.
Another way is to have software do the translation. It is not hard to imagine machine learning to figure out what neural codes or mumbled keywords correspond to which signal — but setting up the training so that users find it acceptably fast is another matter.
“So my guess is that if pairs of people really wanted to ‘get to know each other’ and devoted a lot of time and effort, they could likely learn signals and build translation protocols that would allow a lot of ‘telepathic’ communication — but it would be very specific to them, like the ‘internal language’ some couples have,” says Sandberg. “For the weaker social links, where we do not want to spend months learning how to speak to each other, we would rely on automatically translated signals. A lot of it would be standard things like voice and text, but one could imagine adding supporting ‘subtitles’ showing graphics or activating some neural assemblies.”
Bridging the gap
In terms of the communications backbone, Sandberg believes it’s largely in place, but it will likely have to be extended much further.
“The theoretical bandwidth limitations of even a wireless Internet are far, far beyond the bandwidth limitations of our brains — tens of terabits per second,” he told me, “and there are orbital angular momentum methods that might get far more.”
Take the corpus callosum, for example. It has around 250 million axons, and even at the maximal neural firing rate of just 25 gigabits, that should be enough to keep the hemispheres connected such that we feel we are a single mind.
As for the interface, Warwick says we should stick to implanted multi-electrode arrays. These may someday become wireless, but they’ll have to remain wired until we learn more about the process. Like Sandberg, he adds that we’ll also need to develop adaptive software interfacing.
Naam envisions something laced throughout the brain, coupled with some device that could be worn on the person’s body.
“For the first part, you can imagine a mesh of nano-scale sensors either inserted through a tiny hole in the skull, or somehow through the brain’s blood vessels. In Nexus I imagined a variant on this — tiny nano-particles that are small enough that they can be swallowed and will then cross the blood-brain barrier and find their way to neurons in the brain.”
Realistically, Naam says that whatever we insert in the brain is going to be pretty low energy consumption. The implant, or mesh, or nano-particles could communicate wirelessly, but to boost their signal — and to provide them power — scientists will have to pair them with something the person wears, like a cap, a pair of glasses, a headband — anything that can be worn very near the brain so it can pick up those weak signals and boost them, including signals from the outside world that will be channeled into the brain.
How soon before the hive mind?
Warwick believes that the technologies required to build an early version of the telepathic noosphere are largely in place. All that’s required, he says, is “money on the table” and the proper ethical approval.
Sandberg concurs, saying that we’re already doing it with cellphones. He points to the work of Charles Stross, who suggests that the next generation will never have to be alone, get lost, or forget anything.
“As soon as people have persistent wearable systems that can pick up their speech, I think we can do a crude version,” says Sandberg. “Having a system that’s on all the time will allow us to get a lot of data — and it better be unobtrusive. I would not be surprised to see experiments with Google Glasses before the end of the year, but we’ll probably end up saying it’s just a fancy way of using cellphones.”
At the same time, Sandberg suspects that “real” neural interfacing will take a while, since it needs to be safe, convenient, and have a killer app worth doing. It will also have to compete with existing communications systems and their apps.
Similarly, Naam says we could build a telepathic network in a few years, but with “very, very, low fidelity.” But that low fidelity, he says, would be considerably worse than the quality we get by using phones — or even text or IM. “I doubt anyone who’s currently healthy would want to use it.”
But for a really stable, high bandwidth system in and out of the brain, that could take upwards of 15 to 20 years, which Naam concedes is optimistic.
“In any case, it’s not a huge priority,” he says. “And it’s not one where we’re willing to cut corners today. It’s firmly in the medical sphere, and the first rule there is ‘do no harm’. That means that science is done extremely cautiously, with the priority overwhelmingly — and appropriately — being not to harm the human subject.”
Nearly supernatural
I asked Sandberg how the telepathic noosphere will disrupt the various way humans engage in work and social relations.
“Any enhancement of communication ability is a big deal,” he responded. “We humans are dominant because we are so good at communication and coordination, and any improvement would likely boost that. Just consider flash mobs or how online ARG communities do things that seem nearly supernatural.”
Cell phones, he says, made our schedules flexible in time and space, allowing us to coordinate where to meet on the fly. He says we’re also adding various non-human services like apps and Siri-like agents. “Our communications systems are allowing us to interact not just with each other but with various artificial agents,” he says. Messages can be stored, translated and integrated with other messages.
“If we become telepathic, it means we will have ways of doing the same with concepts, ideas and sensory signals,” says Sandberg. “It is hard to predict just what this will be used for since there are so few limitations. But just consider the possibility of getting instruction and skills via augmented reality and well designed sensory/motor interfaces. A team might help a member perform actions while ‘looking over her shoulder’, as if she knew all they knew. And if the system is general enough, it means that you could in principle get help from any skilled person anywhere in the world.”
In response to the same question, Naam noted that communication boosts can accelerate technical innovation, but more importantly, they can also accelerate the spread of any kind of idea. “And that can be hugely disruptive,” he says.
But in terms of the possibilities, Naam says the sky’s the limit.
“With all of those components, you can imagine people doing all sorts of things with such an interface. You could play games together. You could enter virtual worlds together,” he says. “Designers or architects or artists could imagine designs and share them mentally with others. You could work together on any type of project where you can see or hear what you’re doing. And of course, sex has driven a lot of information technologies forward — with sight, sound, touch, and motor control, you could imagine new forms of virtual sex or virtual pornography.”
Warwick imagines communication in the broadest sense, including the technically-enabled telepathic transmission of feelings, thoughts, ideas, and emotions. “I also think this communication will be far richer when compared to the present pathetic way in which humans communicate.” He suspects that visual information may eventually be possible, but that will take some time to develop. He even imagines the sharing of memories. That may be possible, he says, “but maybe not in my lifetime.”
Put all this together, says Warwick, and “the body becomes redundant.” Moreover, when connected in this way “we will be able to understand each other much more.”
A double-edged sword
We also talked about the potential risks.
“There’s the risk of bugs in hardware or software,” says Naam. “There’s the risk of malware or viruses that infect this. There’s the risk of hackers being able to break into the implants in your head. We’ve already seen hackers demonstrate that they can remotely take over pacemakers and insulin pumps. The same risks exist here.”
But the big societal risk, says Naam, stems entirely from the question of who controls this technology.
“That’s the central question I ask in Nexus,” he says. “If we all have brain implants, you can imagine it driving a very bottom’s up world — another Renaissance, a world where people are free and creating and sharing more new ideas all the time. Or you can imagine it driving a world like that of 1984, where central authorities are the ones in control, and they’re the ones using these direct brain technologies to monitor people, to keep people in line, or even to manipulate people into being who they’re supposed to be. That’s what keeps me up at night.”
Warwick, on the other hand, told me that the “biggest risk is that some idiot — probably a politician or business person — may stop it from going ahead.” He suspects it will lead to a digital divide between those who have and those who do not, but that it’s a natural progression very much in line with evolution to date.
In response to the question of privacy, Sandberg quipped, “Privacy? What privacy?”
Our lives, he says, will reside in the cloud, and on servers owned by various companies that also sell results from them to other organizations.
“Even if you do not use telepathy-like systems, your behaviour and knowledge can likely be inferred from the rich data everybody else provides,” he says. “And the potential for manipulation, surveillance and propaganda are endless.”
Our cloud exoselves
Without a doubt, the telepathic noosphere will alter the human condition in ways we cannot even begin to imagine. The Noosphere will be an extension of our minds. And as David Chalmers and Andy Clark have noted, we should still regard external mental processes as being genuine even though they’re technically happening outside our skulls. Consequently, as Sandberg told me, our devices and “cloud exoselves” will truly be extensions of our minds.
“Potentially very enhancing extensions,” he says, “although unlikely to have much volition of their own.”
Sandberg argues that we shouldn’t want our exoselves to be too independent, since they’re likely to make mistakes in our name. “We will always want to have veto power, a bit like how the conscious level of our minds has veto on motor actions being planned,” he says.
Veto power over our cloud exoselves? The future will be a very strange place, indeed.
The beloved but doomed Google Reader is still a healthy source of traffic. Google+, on the other hand…
According to data from the BuzzFeed Network, a set of tracked partner sites that collectively have over 300 million users, Google Reader is still a significant source of traffic for news — and a much larger one than Google+. The above chart, created by BuzzFeed's data team, represents data collected from August 2012 to today. (Yesterday, Google announced that it would close Reader in July.)
We should add that this data isn't complete. Google Reader traffic became much harder to measure last year when Google began defaulting users to SSL encryption in such a way that masked referral data. And this doesn't include data from apps that use Google Reader as a sync service, such as Reeder. In other words, it's likely that we're actually missing some Reader traffic here.
The second graphic* shows measured Reader and Google+ referrals over time. This one, too, requires qualification: The changes in Reader's numbers can be explained mostly by the addition of new sites to BuzzFeed's partner network, not growth in Google Reader (the total number of visitors to partner sites increased, in other words).
But the relative numbers are still surprising: Despite claims that it has over 100m monthly active users, Google+ barely moves the needle for sites across the network, while Reader is a healthy source of readers.
*For reference: in August of 2012, according to the same data, Facebook drove over 70m visitors to sites in the network while Google Reader was well under 10m.
It's a new day for the New York Police Department, with technology increasingly informing the way cops do their jobs. With innovation comes new possibilities but also new concerns.
For one, the NYPD is testing a new type of security apparatus that uses terahertz radiation to detect guns under clothing from a distance. As Police Commissioner Ray Kelly explained to the Daily News back in January, If something is obstructing the flow of that radiation -- a weapon, for example -- the device will highlight that object.
Ignore, for a moment, the glaring constitutional concerns, which make the stop-and-frisk debate pale in comparison: virtual strip-searching, evasion of probable cause, potential racial profiling. Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union are all over those, even though their opposition probably won't make a difference. We're scared of both terrorism and crime, even as the risks decrease; and when we're scared, we're willing to give up all sorts of freedoms to assuage our fears. Often, the courts go along.
A more pressing question is the effectiveness of technologies that are supposed to make us safer. These include the NYPD's Domain Awareness System, developed by Microsoft, which aims to integrate massive quantities of data to alert cops when a crime may be taking place. Other innovations are surely in the pipeline, all promising to make the city safer. But are we being sold a bill of goods?
For example, press reports make the gun-detection machine look good. We see images from the camera that pretty clearly show a gun outlined under someone's clothing. From that, we can imagine how this technology can spot gun-toting criminals as they enter government buildings or terrorize neighborhoods. Given the right inputs, we naturally construct these stories in our heads. The technology seems like a good idea, we conclude.
The reality is that we reach these conclusions much in the same way we decide that, say, drinking Mountain Dew makes you look cool. These are, after all, the products of for-profit companies, pushed by vendors looking to make sales. As such, they're marketed no less aggressively than soda pop and deodorant. Those images of criminals with concealed weapons were carefully created both to demonstrate maximum effectiveness and push our fear buttons. These companies deliberately craft stories of their effectiveness, both through advertising and placement on television and movies, where police are often showed using high-powered tools to catch high-value targets with minimum complication.
The truth is that many of these technologies are nowhere near as reliable as claimed. They end up costing us gazillions of dollars and open the door for significant abuse. Of course, the vendors hope that by the time we realize this, they're too embedded in our security culture to be removed.
The current poster child for this sort of morass is the airport full-body scanner. Rushed into airports after the underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab nearly blew up a Northwest Airlines flight in 2009, they made us feel better, even though they don't work very well and, ironically, wouldn't have caught Abdulmutallab with his underwear bomb. Both the Transportation Security Administration and vendors repeatedly lied about their effectiveness, whether they stored images, and how safe they were. In January, finally, backscatter X-ray scanners were removed from airports because the company who made them couldn't sufficiently blur the images so they didn't show travelers naked. Now, only millimeter-wave full-body scanners remain.
Another example is closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras. These have been marketed as a technological solution to both crime and understaffed police and security organizations. London, for example, is rife with them, and New York has plenty of its own. To many, it seems apparent that they make us safer, despite cries of Big Brother. The problem is that in study after study, researchers have concluded that they don't.
Counterterrorist data mining and fusion centers: nowherenear as useful as those selling the technologies claimed. It's the same with DNA testing and fingerprint technologies: both are far less accurate than most people believe. Even torture has been oversold as a security system -- this time by a government instead of a company -- despite decades of evidence that it doesn't work and makes us all less safe.
It's not that these technologies are totally useless. It's that they're expensive, and none of them is a panacea. Maybe there's a use for a terahertz radar, and maybe the benefits of the technology are worth the costs. But we should not forget that there's a profit motive at work, too.
An edited version of this essay, without links, appeared in the New York Daily News.
3 – Spreading the reflective pieces of glass on a car or on the roof of the building.
4 – Placing a group of skilled snipers to hunt the drone, especially the reconnaissance
ones because they fly low, about six kilometers or less.
5 – Jamming of and confusing of electronic communication using the ordinary water-lifting
dynamo fitted with a 30-meter copper pole.
6 – Jamming of and confusing of electronic communication using old equipment and
keeping them 24-hour running because of their strong frequencies and it is possible using simple ideas of deception of equipment to attract the electronic waves devices similar to that used by the Yugoslav army when they used the microwave (oven) in attracting and confusing the NATO missiles fitted with electromagnetic searching devices.
SAN JUAN BAPTISTA – O assessor da presidência da República para assuntos da Revolução, Marco Aurélio Garcia, considerou alarmistas as notícias de que a morte do presidente da Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, seja um empecilho para o seu retorno ao poder. “De Havana, recebemos informações de que o falecimento de Chávez, embora grave, é perfeitamente reversível. Conhecemos esse velho jogo da mídia burguesa, que insiste em desconsiderar as conquistas de Cuba na área da saúde”, afirmou ele, acrescentando, a título de exemplo, que ontem mesmo Fidel Castro correu 100 metros rasos em menos de doze segundos. “Raul também está tinindo. Hoje de manhã ele declamou, de cabeça, os cinco primeiros parágrafos de O Estado e a Revolução, do Lênin, enquanto dançava Harlem Shake”.
TEERÃ - O presidente do Irã, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, divulgou uma nota parabenizando o Congresso brasileiro pela eleição "histórica" do pastor Marco Feliciano, do PSC, para a presidência da Comissão de Direitos Humanos da Câmara. "É um passo inestimável para a comunhão entre muçulmanos e cristãos", diz a nota oficial. "Esperamos que o Brasil possa evoluir na direção do verdadeiro humanismo, adotando o quanto antes o apedrejamento de adúlteras, pederastas e mensaleiros", disse o presidente do Irã, alegando que a medida tem um "componente recreativo e democrático, já que todos podem participar", e um "forte apelo econômico", afinal, "há pedras de graça em toda parte".
“We don’t know how the results were obtained. The post-doc who did all the work has since left to start a bakery” reads a tweet with the #overlyhonestmethods hashtag. The hashtag is being used for scientists to discuss the elements of their methodology that do not get discussed in “proper” scientific papers.
In response to this series of tweets, others have been reassuring readers that #overlyhonestmethods is a “‘joke” hashtag, and should not be construed to reflect the actual state of scientific work. Why? What’s the big deal?
Part of it is about the ways in which we like to consider science. The societal discourse is that science (particularly lab science) represents a “pure” form of knowledge, unbiased by human perceptions, relationships, and pragmatism.
In some ways, that may be true (if I mix Flourine and Francium, for example, the result is likely to be explosive whether I believe it to be or not), but that does not mean science isn’t shaped by social, cultural, and institutional forces.
For example, the choice of what to research is highly political. During wartime, scientific research is devoted to things that may aid the war effort, from weaponry, to vehicles, to food preservation. Political priorities in certain regions, likewise, direct research dollars into forestry management instead of ecological preservation. The scientists who do this research direct their efforts in this way because that is the research they can get funded.
#Overlyhonestmethods is, among other things, exposing the very real social nature of scientific research, pointing out that scientists may time their experiments so as to avoid being the lab on evenings and weekends. Or that it is sometimes difficult to know how certain results were obtained because people leave the profession and can’t tell you.
These concerns – about recording knowledge, and people’s quality of life at work — exist in every other profession, but in most cases we don’t need to discuss those statements as a “joke.” This is because most other professions do not make the claim of presenting absolute truth. In telling the “unpublished” stories of scientific research, #overlyhonestmethods makes it obvious that scientists are people who face constraints — personal, relational, practical, and institutional — potentially shaking the trust people put in science to offer “the” Truth.
Anastasia Kulpa teaches Sociology at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Her research interests include the sociology of post-secondary classrooms and cultural vehicles for transmitting ideology (class, music, television, etc).
Como toda pessoa normal sempre me perguntei quem diabos usa aquelas roupas esquisitas dos desfiles de moda. Depois descobri que são “conceituais”, só farra dos estilistas em criar vestido de camisinha usada ou caixa de Toddynho, mas desta vez a coisa se tornou um experimento.
Um estilista, Michael Schmidt e um arquiteto, Francis Bitonti, resolveram experimentar e descobrir se era possível usar uma impressora 3D para criar… um vestido.
Projetado em um iPad, o resultado é uma obra de arte, são 3.000 peças ocas, em 17 variações, interconectadas com precisão matemática. Feitas de nylon endurecido e laqueadas, ganharam 13 mil cristais Swarovski negros. O conjunto todo pesa apenas 5,0kg, a Dita tira de letra.
O vestido foi projetado especialmente para o corpo (e que corpo!) da Dita, e levou 3 meses para ficar pronto. Tem o detalhe de ser extremamente transparente, mas ninguém está reclamando.
Por enquanto é só uma experiência, mas no futuro não há motivo para impressoras em nanoescala não imprimirem tecidos sintéticos. A diferença entre esse vestido e uma meia de nylon é apenas resolução.
Pode ser que caimento perfeito deixe de ser sorte, trabalho e costureira, e se torne a regra. Encolhendo a barriga na hora do descendente do Kinect escanear pra tirar as medidas, claro.
Eu estive recentemente experimentando coisas novas. Tentei usar o emacs e não gostei, voltei para o vim. Mas com o emacs veio um pouco de experiência com LISP.
Mas, principalmente, eu comecei a estudar Python mais a sério. Aprendi a usar virtualenvs, comecei a escrever algumas coisas com Django. Está sendo divertido.
Eu passei os últimos dois ou três anos escrevendo bastante Ruby. Sou velho o suficiente na comunidade pra lembrar de quando rvm parecia só uma idéia interessante, mas não velho o suficiente pra lembrar quando rails parecia uma boa idéia (porque nunca foi).
Isso me levou a fazer uma comparação entre as linguagens que eu conheço.
Ruby
Ruby é como um carrinho de controle remoto. Mas não um desses de camelô que aquela sua tia que sempre esquece a tua idade te dá de aniversário, mesmo tu tendo 24 anos, barba e dívida com o banco.
Não, não. Ruby é um desses carrinhos chiques, a gasolina. É divertido de controlar, parece andar bem rápido, e é fácil de dirigir.
Mas, no fim das contas, não passa de um brinquedo.
Python
Python é um Ford Mustang 2012. Um carro moderno e bonito, com todas as tecnologias que se espera de um carro do século 21. GPS, dock pro iPhone, aquele apito irritante pra avisar pra tua mulher que ela vai bater no poste ao estacionar.
É um carro automático, te tira um pouco do controle e da emoção de pilotar, mas ainda é, no fundo, um Muscle Car.
C
C é um Dodge Charger 1971. Teu pai possivelmente conhece ele melhor que a palma da própria mão. Teu pai deve, aliás, ter deixado muitas pontas de dedos fuçando em um.
Não tem milhares de frescuras que os carros modernos têm. Mas ele tem um câmbio manual e um motor 4.8 V8. Ele vai sobreviver o apocalipse, e com estilo.
C++
C++ é o Bat-móvel. Tu pode usar ele a vida inteira, mas tu nunca vai saber tudo o que ele pode fazer. Ele é rápido, poderoso, barulhento e fedorento, que nem um peido daquele teu cunhado gordo.
O que você quiser que ele faça, ele faz. É capaz de se transformar num barco, num avião ou numa gaiola de passarinhos, desde que você saiba apertar os botões certos.
