Stirring things up.
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Rafa Spoladore Ψ
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17 Feb 22:56
Do Patent Laws Really Protect Small Inventors?
by samzenpus
whoever57 writes "Patent trolls like to claim that patent laws provide a way that small inventors can create products and benefit financially from their invention. One such inventor faces selling his house, despite inventing a product that has sold tens of millions worldwide. From the article: 'Inventor Trevor Baylis says he faces having to sell his house after failing to make money from his wind up radio and is now calling for the government to step into to protect inventors. “I’ve got someone coming around in the next couple of weeks to do a valuation on my house,” says Trevor Baylis, as he walks into the sitting room of his home on Eel Pie Island, in Twickenham, south-west London. “I’m going to have to sell it or remortgage it – I’m totally broke. I’m living in poverty here.”'" 
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Rafa Spoladore likes this
17 Feb 22:18
Freemasons To Have A Reality Show On Australian TV
by JacobSloan
I’m expecting the ritualistic hedonism of traditional reality programs, but with an occult flair. ANIMAL New York writes:
Freemasons have always had a bit of an image problem. Apparently, a clandestine fraternal order that counts world leaders among its ranks and which engages in secret occult rituals makes everyday people suspicious. So, over the past few decades, Masonic organizations have tried to change the public’s perception of their mysterious group.
Adding to this collective PR effort is a new 26 episode TV series called Freemasons: The Inside Story. It will profile masons in Victoria, Australia and promises that watchers will “gain unprecedented access into the truth about Freemasonry. Its people, its purpose and its past.” But with the majority of its members unaware of the more esoteric manifestations of the all-boys club, don’t expect any ‘Da Vinci Code’-like revelations.
Rafa Spoladore likes this
15 Feb 19:35
Drug Residue In The Water Changes Fish Behavior, Making Them Bolder And Gluttonous
Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Ecosystems are complicated and tightly integrated systems. One small change to any part of the system can and will affect another part of the system further down the line. As humans, it’s sometimes easy to forget that we’re also a part of a larger ecosystem and that even the tiniest of actions can affect another living thing somewhere down the line.
A recent study describes this sort of cause and effect chain reaction, finding that the drugs leaving our system end up medicating fish in the sea.
According to ecologist Tomas Brodin, lead author of this study, our bodies don’t absorb medicines with 100% efficiency. Traces of these medications leave our bodies as waste and therefore end up in wastewater. Low concentrations of certain drugs have been found in wastewater treatment plants, causing scientists such as Brodin to investigate what effect, if any, these medicines have on fish.
In particular, Brodin studied the effects of the anti-anxiety drug Oxazepam on perch. This medicine is usually prescribed to patients who are experiencing withdrawal from alcohol and works by slowing down activity in the brain to quell anxiety.
Brodin and team found that fish who live in waters where higher concentrations of this drug were found acted quite differently than normal.
“Normally, perch are shy and hunt in schools. This is a known strategy for survival and growth. But those who swim in Oxazepam became considerably bolder,” explained Brodin.
Rather than swim around with their school, these perch became less social and began striking out on their own to find food. This behavior is actually quite dangerous for these fish, as swimming in a pack helps protect them from other, predatory fish.
Brodin also noticed that the exposed perch did seem less “stressed and scared” than those fish that had not been exposed to the drug.
These fish also exhibited a different kind of behavior: They ate much more quickly than normal. As fish play their own important role in their ecosystem, these changes could dramatically disturb the ecological balance underwater.
“We’re now going to examine what consequences this might have. In waters where fish begin to eat more efficiently, this can affect the composition of species, for example, and ultimately lead to unexpected effects, such as increased risk of algal blooming,” explained Brodin.
Sweden isn’t the only place where the water has been tainted by our human drugs. Surface water all over the world has been found to contain human medicines, and not just the water surrounding sewage plants. What’s more, scientists expect that we’ll continue medicating ourselves, meaning more drugs in the water. Though he’s not the only scientist to note this trend, he’s only studied the effects of one drug on one type of fish in one part of the world.
When looked at on a broader scale, the ecological consequences could be severe.
“The solution to the problem is not to stop medicating ill people but to try to develop sewage treatment plants that can capture environmentally hazardous drugs,” suggested environmental chemist Jerker Fink.
The related report appears in the today's issue of the journal Science, which is published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.
Ecosystems are complicated and tightly integrated systems. One small change to any part of the system can and will affect another part of the system further down the line. As humans, it’s sometimes easy to forget that we’re also a part of a larger ecosystem and that even the tiniest of actions can affect another living thing somewhere down the line.
A recent study describes this sort of cause and effect chain reaction, finding that the drugs leaving our system end up medicating fish in the sea.
According to ecologist Tomas Brodin, lead author of this study, our bodies don’t absorb medicines with 100% efficiency. Traces of these medications leave our bodies as waste and therefore end up in wastewater. Low concentrations of certain drugs have been found in wastewater treatment plants, causing scientists such as Brodin to investigate what effect, if any, these medicines have on fish.
In particular, Brodin studied the effects of the anti-anxiety drug Oxazepam on perch. This medicine is usually prescribed to patients who are experiencing withdrawal from alcohol and works by slowing down activity in the brain to quell anxiety.
Brodin and team found that fish who live in waters where higher concentrations of this drug were found acted quite differently than normal.
“Normally, perch are shy and hunt in schools. This is a known strategy for survival and growth. But those who swim in Oxazepam became considerably bolder,” explained Brodin.
Rather than swim around with their school, these perch became less social and began striking out on their own to find food. This behavior is actually quite dangerous for these fish, as swimming in a pack helps protect them from other, predatory fish.
Brodin also noticed that the exposed perch did seem less “stressed and scared” than those fish that had not been exposed to the drug.
These fish also exhibited a different kind of behavior: They ate much more quickly than normal. As fish play their own important role in their ecosystem, these changes could dramatically disturb the ecological balance underwater.
“We’re now going to examine what consequences this might have. In waters where fish begin to eat more efficiently, this can affect the composition of species, for example, and ultimately lead to unexpected effects, such as increased risk of algal blooming,” explained Brodin.
Sweden isn’t the only place where the water has been tainted by our human drugs. Surface water all over the world has been found to contain human medicines, and not just the water surrounding sewage plants. What’s more, scientists expect that we’ll continue medicating ourselves, meaning more drugs in the water. Though he’s not the only scientist to note this trend, he’s only studied the effects of one drug on one type of fish in one part of the world.
When looked at on a broader scale, the ecological consequences could be severe.
“The solution to the problem is not to stop medicating ill people but to try to develop sewage treatment plants that can capture environmentally hazardous drugs,” suggested environmental chemist Jerker Fink.
The related report appears in the today's issue of the journal Science, which is published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.
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15 Feb 19:30
Russian authorities claim to have found the impact sites of some of the fragments of the Chelyabinsk meteor, according to the RIA Novosti news agency. Two have been found near Chebarkul Lake—one of them pictured here. The other one is near Zlatoust, a town 80 kilometers northwest of Chelyabinsk. More »
This Is the Russian Meteor Impact Site
by Jesus Diaz
Russian authorities claim to have found the impact sites of some of the fragments of the Chelyabinsk meteor, according to the RIA Novosti news agency. Two have been found near Chebarkul Lake—one of them pictured here. The other one is near Zlatoust, a town 80 kilometers northwest of Chelyabinsk. More »
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13 Feb 22:43
Bento XVI: o lado B
by Carlos Orsi
Uma prova da forte influência católica na sociedade global -- e, por tabela, na mídia -- é o fato de Joseph Ratzinger estar deixando o pontificado como "um grande teólogo" e não como um "um facilitador e acobertador de crimes sexuais contra crianças". Nada, é claro, impede que ele seja as duas coisas ao mesmo tempo, e ambos os títulos dependem, até certo ponto, de uma série de juízos de valor, mas a escolha de ênfase pelo noticiário é sintomática.
A justificativa mais ampla para o menos lisonjeiro dos títulos veio a público há quase dois anos, quando advogados ligados à causa dos direitos humanos apresentaram uma denúncia contra Bento XVI no Tribunal Penal Internacional, (TPI), em Haia. E em 2010, o jurista britânico Geoffrey Robertson já havia publicado o livro The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse
, onde argumenta que documentos ratificados por Ratzinger enquanto cardeal, responsável pela Congregação da Doutrina da Fé, a antiga Inquisição, impuseram uma lei do silêncio mafiosa a padres, bispos e católicos leigos, efetivamente proibindo-os de denunciar padres pedófilos às autoridades civis. O livro, aliás, saiu no Brasil, com o título O papa é culpado?, mas a acho que a imprensa estava ocupada demais babando ovo para a Jornada Mundial da Juventude para notar.
"Não existe dúvida de que a escala do escândalo de abuso sexual só foi atingida porque diretrizes do Vaticano -- especificamente, da Congregação para a Doutrina da Fé -- exigiam que todas as queixas de abuso sexual fossem processadas em absoluto segredo e escondidas da polícia e das cortes, sob uma Lei Canônica que era obsoleta e não-punitiva", escreve Robertson.
Em pelo menos um caso, o do padre Lawrence Murphy -- acusado de molestar cerca de 200 meninos deficientes auditivos -- o então cardeal Ratzinger foi informado, por carta, dos abusos, mas nada fez a respeito. O Vaticano defende-se dizendo que as cartas chegaram décadas depois de os crimes terem sido cometidos. Ainda assim, a ausência de qualquer tipo de reação ou resposta é intrigante.
Sua atuação como papa também não foi muito melhor que a de inquisidor, ainda que tenha envolvido algum esforço de relações públicas: como a punição de Marcial Maciel, o maníaco sexual fundador dos Legionários de Cristo, cuja carreira de crimes foi absurdamente relevada por João Paulo II. No entanto, a queda de Maciel, sob Bento XVI, foi um caso típico de "gato fora do saco": veio tarde demais, quando o escândalo já era de domínio público e o culpado se encontrava quase à beira da morte.
Criticamente, a norma De gravioribus delictus, editada no reinado de Bento XVI, em 2010, não exige que bispos que tenham conhecimento de atos criminosos praticados por padres os denunciem à polícia, mas apenas à Congregação para a Doutrina da Fé. De fato, o Vaticano chegou a publicar, depois de muita pressão, uma "sugestão" de que os bispos procurassem as autoridades civis, mas ela não foi incorporada à norma. Sugestões à parte, a lei da Igreja segue exigindo "o segredo dos julgamentos, para preservar a dignidade dos envolvidos".
A ONG americana Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) emitiu uma nota sobre a renúncia de Ratzinger, também largamente ignorada pela imprensa. A SNAP oferece, a meu ver, o melhor resumo do pontificado de Bento XVI, tanto sob o ponto de vista teológico quanto moral: "Bento deixa uma Igreja ainda regida por leis sob as quais (...) não se pode ser casado e padre, nem mulher e padre, mas pode-se ser um estuprador de crianças e padre".
A justificativa mais ampla para o menos lisonjeiro dos títulos veio a público há quase dois anos, quando advogados ligados à causa dos direitos humanos apresentaram uma denúncia contra Bento XVI no Tribunal Penal Internacional, (TPI), em Haia. E em 2010, o jurista britânico Geoffrey Robertson já havia publicado o livro The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse
, onde argumenta que documentos ratificados por Ratzinger enquanto cardeal, responsável pela Congregação da Doutrina da Fé, a antiga Inquisição, impuseram uma lei do silêncio mafiosa a padres, bispos e católicos leigos, efetivamente proibindo-os de denunciar padres pedófilos às autoridades civis. O livro, aliás, saiu no Brasil, com o título O papa é culpado?, mas a acho que a imprensa estava ocupada demais babando ovo para a Jornada Mundial da Juventude para notar."Não existe dúvida de que a escala do escândalo de abuso sexual só foi atingida porque diretrizes do Vaticano -- especificamente, da Congregação para a Doutrina da Fé -- exigiam que todas as queixas de abuso sexual fossem processadas em absoluto segredo e escondidas da polícia e das cortes, sob uma Lei Canônica que era obsoleta e não-punitiva", escreve Robertson.
Em pelo menos um caso, o do padre Lawrence Murphy -- acusado de molestar cerca de 200 meninos deficientes auditivos -- o então cardeal Ratzinger foi informado, por carta, dos abusos, mas nada fez a respeito. O Vaticano defende-se dizendo que as cartas chegaram décadas depois de os crimes terem sido cometidos. Ainda assim, a ausência de qualquer tipo de reação ou resposta é intrigante.
Sua atuação como papa também não foi muito melhor que a de inquisidor, ainda que tenha envolvido algum esforço de relações públicas: como a punição de Marcial Maciel, o maníaco sexual fundador dos Legionários de Cristo, cuja carreira de crimes foi absurdamente relevada por João Paulo II. No entanto, a queda de Maciel, sob Bento XVI, foi um caso típico de "gato fora do saco": veio tarde demais, quando o escândalo já era de domínio público e o culpado se encontrava quase à beira da morte.
Criticamente, a norma De gravioribus delictus, editada no reinado de Bento XVI, em 2010, não exige que bispos que tenham conhecimento de atos criminosos praticados por padres os denunciem à polícia, mas apenas à Congregação para a Doutrina da Fé. De fato, o Vaticano chegou a publicar, depois de muita pressão, uma "sugestão" de que os bispos procurassem as autoridades civis, mas ela não foi incorporada à norma. Sugestões à parte, a lei da Igreja segue exigindo "o segredo dos julgamentos, para preservar a dignidade dos envolvidos".
A ONG americana Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) emitiu uma nota sobre a renúncia de Ratzinger, também largamente ignorada pela imprensa. A SNAP oferece, a meu ver, o melhor resumo do pontificado de Bento XVI, tanto sob o ponto de vista teológico quanto moral: "Bento deixa uma Igreja ainda regida por leis sob as quais (...) não se pode ser casado e padre, nem mulher e padre, mas pode-se ser um estuprador de crianças e padre".
Rafa Spoladore and -1 others like this
13 Feb 22:42
The mirror and the periscope
by Seth Godin
A long time ago, real estate developers figured out that one way to save a lot of money was to put a mirror in the lobby next to the elevator banks. People would happily look at themselves in the mirror while patiently waiting for the elevator... meaning that the developers could get by with one fewer (expensive) elevator.
If we want to, we can turn social media (and our day) into a giant mirror. "I wonder what they think of me?" "I wonder what their reaction was to what we just shipped?" "I wonder if they've figured out I'm a fraud?" We hide this mirror gazing under the guise of customer research, but particularly for soloists, artists and anyone who puts her name on her work, what an opportunity to waste time and energy checking out what the online world tells us about our role in the universe.
On the other hand, social networks now give us a better opportunity than ever to find out how other people are doing. "I wonder if Trish is happy?" "I hope that those protesters have enough blankets." "Are our children learning?"
It's human nature to care how the tribe (and strangers) think about us. It's more important, though, to wonder how they feel about themselves.
Rafa Spoladore likes this
13 Feb 22:39
A proof of Intelligent Design?
by Luboš Motl
I hope that the title isn't too provocative. ;-)
Bill Z. has brought my attention to a December 2012 nuclear physics paper that was updated 3 days ago,
The detailed calculations are concerned with the Hoyle state. What is it and what did the authors of the new paper conclude?
In 1954, Fred Hoyle noticed that we were lucky about a seemingly technical coincidence in nuclear physics that was apparently needed for us to exist. Note that in the baryonic (proton- and neutron-based i.e. visible) matter in the Universe around us, hydrogen and helium are the dominant elements.
It's no coincidence. It was mostly hydrogen (\(Z=1\)) and helium (\(Z=2\)) – and just some lithium (\(Z=3\)), aside from negligible trace amounts of heavier elements (\(Z\geq 4\)), that was directly produced during the Big Bang nucleosynthesis in the first three minutes after the Big Bang. One may reconstruct the temperature in the Universe during these early formative stages of our Cosmos and calculate, using the statistical methods, the ratios of the concentrations of these three light elements. The results seem to match the observations of hydrogen, helium, lithium rather impressively – and this agreement is one of the important pieces of evidence supporting the Big Bang paradigm.
Looking from a practical perspective, are the three lightest elements enough to get everything we need to be happy? Well, lithium may be helpful for some laptop and cell phone batteries and helium is useful at most for funny tricks to change your voice into the voice of the Smurfs (fine, it's also great as the gas in balloons, either for kids or adults, and as the coolant in NMR and the LHC). We could also describe helium as the main waste product of the thermonuclear reactions in the Sun and other stars if it weren't too disrespectful.
Hydrogen is useful for a huge fraction of compounds we need and love. But where is the rest? It's obvious that the three elements aren't enough to build life and the civilization as we know it. In particular, two other major heavier elements behind the miraculous project of life – carbon and oxygen – seem to be absent. Yes, these are the same two elements found in the gas that they call a pollution but we call it life.
Aside from hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, the three major elements, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur are three more elements that are paramount for life we know. Other elements such as silicon or calcium or fluorine (because I mentioned the dentists) may be helpful to shape our bodies at various moments and/or to create various intelligent gadgets but they're no longer a universal "must". Where do all these elements come from?
The heavier elements are abundantly enough produced by helium burning in stars that have gone red giants. Our carbon, oxygen, and other elements arose from the production in these red giant stars that once existed but they are no more. In 7.5 billion years or so, our beloved Sun will become a red giant, too. It will devour the Earth and other planets – that's the less dramatic part of the story – but it will also produce completely new carbon, oxygen, and other elements that may be incorporated into the bodies of a future extraterrestrial civilization.
Fine. How do the red giants produce carbon (\(Z=6\))?
Note that six is a multiple of two: we call these numbers "even". So it has the right number of protons to arise from several, namely three, nuclei of helium which seem abundant. Moreover, the ordinary carbon nuclei we need have 6 protons and 6 neutrons, the same number, so it seems appropriate to combine three helium-4 nuclei to create carbon-12:\[
\Large {}^4_2{\rm He} + {}^4_2{\rm He} + {}^4_2{\rm He} \rightarrow {}^{12}_6{\rm C}
\] It's somewhat unlikely for three helium-4 nuclei – which I will call the alpha-particles just like everyone else – to hit each other and produce the carbon nucleus directly. So the reaction actually proceeds in two steps, with an unstable level of beryllium-8 or \({}^8_4{\rm Be}\) in between. This beryllium-8 nucleus combines with another alpha-particle to get the desired carbon but this second step has too low a rate.
We wouldn't get enough carbon in this way (if it were just a generic fusion of these nuclei) and it's actually known that something special is going on. There is a resonance, a \(0^+\) state of carbon-12 known as the Hoyle state. Fred Hoyle actually predicted – using the apparent abundance of carbon as the only input – that it should be somewhere over there and indeed, the prediction was soon experimentally confirmed.
There exists a state of carbon-12 whose mass/energy is equal to the mass/energy of three free alpha-particles plus \(\varepsilon=397.47(18)\keV\); we say that the state is \(\varepsilon\) above the three-alpha threshold (a threshold, in general, is the minimum mass/energy of an unstable/composite object that allows the corresponding state to decay to particular products without violating the energy conservation law).
In the relevant region of the parameter space, the reaction rate for the carbon-12 production – via the Hoyle resonance – may be approximated by \[
r_{3\alpha} = \Gamma_\gamma (N_\alpha/k_B T)^3 \exp(-\varepsilon/k_B T).
\] You see that up to an overall normalization constant, this is equal to the third power of the number (density) of alpha-particles per unit volume (because three of them have to meet) and a Boltzmannian factor that exponentially decreases with energy. This \(\varepsilon\) shouldn't be too high because the exponential suppression could be severe. It shouldn't be too small, either, for other reasons. In the past, it was argued that a 15% deviation of \(\varepsilon\) from the known value could still allow enough carbon etc. for life.
Now, what have they found about the dependence of this accident on the light quark mass?
They use a novel numerical method, nuclear lattice simulations, to calculate the dependence. It's something like lattice QCD except that it seems to work with some composite pion fields and the low-energy emergent nuclear physics mess instead of the fundamental QCD fields. The light quark mass is translated to the mass of the pion \(M_\pi\) and they discuss the dependence of the energies of several energy levels on either the light quark mass or the pion mass which is almost the same dependence.
I don't want to bore you with all the details – you may read the original paper, it's just 4 pages long. Instead, let me repost a graph summarizing some partial results of their analysis:
On the \(x\)-axis, they depicted the relative change of the binding energy of the alpha-particle; on the \(y\)-axis, you see the corresponding (much larger) relative change of the three energies related to the helium-4, beryllium-8, and carbon-18 nuclei, namely of\[
\eq{
\Delta E_h &= E_{12}^* - E_8 - E_4\\
\Delta E_b &= E_8 - 2E_4\\
\varepsilon &= E_{12}^* - 3E_4 = \Delta E_h + \Delta E_b
}
\] Because of the final relationship for \(\varepsilon\), it's not surprising that the yellow curve is in between the other two. But what may be surprising is that these two curves – and therefore all three curves – have pretty much the same slope. What does it mean? It means that the several fine-tunings are actually not independent from each other.
You could think that for the nuclear factory to work and produce the elements, you may need several miracles – several anthropic conditions, in this case three – and therefore God has to be even greater than the size He would adopt if there were just one miracle. God's omnipotence seems like the third power of a generic god's power (or three times? It depends whether His omnipotence is quantified on the log scale).
However, the new paper shows that this ain't the case. The three coincidences aren't independent from each other. Pretty much because of mathematical identities, they're more or less equivalent to one coincidence only. If one identity for the nuclear level energies holds, the other two will probably hold as well, with a highly acceptable accuracy. It means that one miracle is enough and life is much more likely than what you would expect if you thought that the three conditions are independent of each other.
Now, you could claim that we still need meta-God to explain the mathematical "metamiracle" that the three conditions are actually almost equivalent to each other. If you did so, you would cover these questions by lots of exciting religious fog. But the matter of fact is that they can actually explain this "metamiracle" – at least in a preliminary way – in terms of completely non-mysterious, irreligious arguments, too. The same slopes kind of follow from the alpha-cluster structure of beryllium-8 and carbon-12 nuclei. I won't present this derivation in its full glory but the alpha-particle-based compositeness of the two nuclei sort of rationally explains why the two slopes are almost the same.
Even though several levels and energy differences are involved, the authors de facto show that there is only one "miracle" we need for a sufficient production of the heavier elements behind life. Moreover, the tolerated error for \(\alpha_{\rm elmg}\) as well as \(m_q\) could be around 2 percent or so: the fine-tuning isn't extreme.
Although this very topic may make you "wish" that there is some evidence for the Intelligent Design and/or a stunningly convincing role for the anthropic principle, and the very fact that a paper about this metaphysical and mysterious question was written could manipulate you into a more spiritual thinking, I would say that the actual results of their analysis imply exactly the opposite conclusion. Different "miracles" aren't really independent from each other and they're not "terribly unlikely miracles", anyway. Good luck at the 1-in-50 level seems to be enough for the amount of carbon to be just fine. At most, you may need two such 1-in-50 fine-tunings – one for the fine-structure constant and one for the light quark mass – except that I think that only some combination of them will have a high enough impact on the essential processes needed for the elements of life to arise.
Now, you could still argue that 1-in-50 is a low chance. The probability \(p=0.02\) or so is pretty small, some of you could say, and this strengthens some arguments in favor of God, Intelligent Design, the anthropic principle, or something along these lines. Well, perhaps. I don't think it's a right way to think about this coincidence. Why?
First, \(p=0.02\) is equivalent to a "bump just a little bit larger than a 2-sigma bump". To make extraordinary claims about God or the anthropic principle – and one really doesn't know which of these (or other metaphysical) explanations "follows" from the "miracle" – and justify them by not-so-extraordinary evidence such as 2-sigma bumps seems to betray the lack of evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and this ain't one.
Second, this not-so-extreme probability \(p=0.02\) is the \(p\)-value before the look-elsewhere effect of a particular type is included. What I want to say is that we're computing the probability that a particular system of nuclear furnaces will be able to produce a particular type of life (determined by its elements etc.). However, there could very well be other types of life – perhaps \({\mathcal O}(50)\) types of life – that may arise in the same parameter space which means that the probability that at least one of these types of life will be allowed for a "random" choice of the values of parameters may approach 100 percent.
These observations of coincidences that are needed for life are intriguing but we shouldn't get carried away for two basic reasons. First, as argued above, the probabilities that we get a tolerable value of the parameters (values compatible with life) aren't extremely tiny and we should treat these "modestly suggestive" low probability just like any other 2-sigma bumps in physics. They're not enough to settle a question, they're not enough for a paradigm shift.
Second, it's pretty much guaranteed that if we calculate the odds that some "conditions constraining parameters that makes the theory friendly to life as we know it" are obeyed, it's unsurprising that the answer will probably be Yes because our type of life does exist, after all. The proposition that "conditions apparently needed for this life to arise with a significant probability were satisfied" is pretty much tautologicaly true. These conditions simply aren't independent of some empirical known facts. We're just measuring the answer to the question "Does life exist?" using a different, perhaps more contrived, procedure. But the fact that many such questions have "Yes" answers isn't a miracle; it's pretty much tautologically guaranteed because these questions were cherry-picked by their equivalence to the existence of life (or some of the aspects of this existence).
If the probabilities arising in similar anthropic coincidences were much tinier, i.e. much more extreme than 2-sigma bumps, I could be impressed. The tiny cosmological constant could be an indication of this sort. However, we may only argue that the "probability that the cosmological constant is below \(10^{-120}m_{\rm Planck}^4\) is of order \(10^{-120}\)" if we adopt a uniform probability distribution for cosmological constants in the interval comparable to \((0,m_{\rm Planck}^4)\).
While some plausible models that make the uniform distribution look natural exist, they're not "inevitably true" and it's still easy to imagine that this uniform probability distribution is a completely naive, wrong expectation. If we replace it by another one – one that follows from a slightly sophisticated mechanism and one that gives tiny values of the cosmological constant with far higher probabilities – the "unavoidably impressive" miracle goes away once again. If you wanted to convince me that there is a miracle that harbors strong evidence in favor of the anthropic reasoning or God or anything like that, you would have to show me a coincidence that has a tiny probability according to the right calculation of probabilities (a calculation which takes all mathematically guaranteed correlations such as those above into account) and a nicely justifiable probability distribution for the parameters.
If you used a quasi-uniform one, you would have to convince me that it's reasonable to expect that the distribution is quasi-uniform for that situation. It would have to be so reasonable – almost inevitable – that, in fact, I would find your anthropic principle or God more likely as an explanation than the mundane possibility that there simply exists a better argument or "better theory" telling you that a non-uniform distribution is actually a much more sensible (and likely) one. Or a better theory that simply allows you to calculate the observed value. How strong evidence is needed to prefer God over the "better theory" depends on subjective prior probabilities but be sure that 2-sigma or even 3-sigma bumps are way too small for people like me to pick God or His best pal, the anthropic anti-God, instead of a "better, so far unknown, theory".
If you can't show me such a thing, I would keep on insisting that there doesn't exist any tangible evidence to believe the anthropic/religious paradigm and because these things aren't mathematically elegant or explaining any true pre-existing mysteries in physics, they don't really deserve to become a part of physics, at least at this moment.
Bill Z. has brought my attention to a December 2012 nuclear physics paper that was updated 3 days ago,
The fate of carbon-based life as a function of the light quark massThey (Evgeny Epelbaum, Hermann Krebs, Timo A. Lähde, Dean Lee, Ulf-G. Meißner) try to determine the precision with which God or non-God had to fine-tune the average light quark mass – a parameter defined as \((m_{\rm up}+m_{\rm down})/2\) – in order to guarantee that there would be enough carbon, oxygen, and other elements that are crucial for the type of life that is recommended by 4 of 5 dentists.
The detailed calculations are concerned with the Hoyle state. What is it and what did the authors of the new paper conclude?
In 1954, Fred Hoyle noticed that we were lucky about a seemingly technical coincidence in nuclear physics that was apparently needed for us to exist. Note that in the baryonic (proton- and neutron-based i.e. visible) matter in the Universe around us, hydrogen and helium are the dominant elements.
It's no coincidence. It was mostly hydrogen (\(Z=1\)) and helium (\(Z=2\)) – and just some lithium (\(Z=3\)), aside from negligible trace amounts of heavier elements (\(Z\geq 4\)), that was directly produced during the Big Bang nucleosynthesis in the first three minutes after the Big Bang. One may reconstruct the temperature in the Universe during these early formative stages of our Cosmos and calculate, using the statistical methods, the ratios of the concentrations of these three light elements. The results seem to match the observations of hydrogen, helium, lithium rather impressively – and this agreement is one of the important pieces of evidence supporting the Big Bang paradigm.
Looking from a practical perspective, are the three lightest elements enough to get everything we need to be happy? Well, lithium may be helpful for some laptop and cell phone batteries and helium is useful at most for funny tricks to change your voice into the voice of the Smurfs (fine, it's also great as the gas in balloons, either for kids or adults, and as the coolant in NMR and the LHC). We could also describe helium as the main waste product of the thermonuclear reactions in the Sun and other stars if it weren't too disrespectful.
Hydrogen is useful for a huge fraction of compounds we need and love. But where is the rest? It's obvious that the three elements aren't enough to build life and the civilization as we know it. In particular, two other major heavier elements behind the miraculous project of life – carbon and oxygen – seem to be absent. Yes, these are the same two elements found in the gas that they call a pollution but we call it life.
Aside from hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, the three major elements, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur are three more elements that are paramount for life we know. Other elements such as silicon or calcium or fluorine (because I mentioned the dentists) may be helpful to shape our bodies at various moments and/or to create various intelligent gadgets but they're no longer a universal "must". Where do all these elements come from?
The heavier elements are abundantly enough produced by helium burning in stars that have gone red giants. Our carbon, oxygen, and other elements arose from the production in these red giant stars that once existed but they are no more. In 7.5 billion years or so, our beloved Sun will become a red giant, too. It will devour the Earth and other planets – that's the less dramatic part of the story – but it will also produce completely new carbon, oxygen, and other elements that may be incorporated into the bodies of a future extraterrestrial civilization.
Fine. How do the red giants produce carbon (\(Z=6\))?
Note that six is a multiple of two: we call these numbers "even". So it has the right number of protons to arise from several, namely three, nuclei of helium which seem abundant. Moreover, the ordinary carbon nuclei we need have 6 protons and 6 neutrons, the same number, so it seems appropriate to combine three helium-4 nuclei to create carbon-12:\[
\Large {}^4_2{\rm He} + {}^4_2{\rm He} + {}^4_2{\rm He} \rightarrow {}^{12}_6{\rm C}
\] It's somewhat unlikely for three helium-4 nuclei – which I will call the alpha-particles just like everyone else – to hit each other and produce the carbon nucleus directly. So the reaction actually proceeds in two steps, with an unstable level of beryllium-8 or \({}^8_4{\rm Be}\) in between. This beryllium-8 nucleus combines with another alpha-particle to get the desired carbon but this second step has too low a rate.
We wouldn't get enough carbon in this way (if it were just a generic fusion of these nuclei) and it's actually known that something special is going on. There is a resonance, a \(0^+\) state of carbon-12 known as the Hoyle state. Fred Hoyle actually predicted – using the apparent abundance of carbon as the only input – that it should be somewhere over there and indeed, the prediction was soon experimentally confirmed.
There exists a state of carbon-12 whose mass/energy is equal to the mass/energy of three free alpha-particles plus \(\varepsilon=397.47(18)\keV\); we say that the state is \(\varepsilon\) above the three-alpha threshold (a threshold, in general, is the minimum mass/energy of an unstable/composite object that allows the corresponding state to decay to particular products without violating the energy conservation law).
In the relevant region of the parameter space, the reaction rate for the carbon-12 production – via the Hoyle resonance – may be approximated by \[
r_{3\alpha} = \Gamma_\gamma (N_\alpha/k_B T)^3 \exp(-\varepsilon/k_B T).
\] You see that up to an overall normalization constant, this is equal to the third power of the number (density) of alpha-particles per unit volume (because three of them have to meet) and a Boltzmannian factor that exponentially decreases with energy. This \(\varepsilon\) shouldn't be too high because the exponential suppression could be severe. It shouldn't be too small, either, for other reasons. In the past, it was argued that a 15% deviation of \(\varepsilon\) from the known value could still allow enough carbon etc. for life.
Now, what have they found about the dependence of this accident on the light quark mass?
They use a novel numerical method, nuclear lattice simulations, to calculate the dependence. It's something like lattice QCD except that it seems to work with some composite pion fields and the low-energy emergent nuclear physics mess instead of the fundamental QCD fields. The light quark mass is translated to the mass of the pion \(M_\pi\) and they discuss the dependence of the energies of several energy levels on either the light quark mass or the pion mass which is almost the same dependence.
I don't want to bore you with all the details – you may read the original paper, it's just 4 pages long. Instead, let me repost a graph summarizing some partial results of their analysis:
On the \(x\)-axis, they depicted the relative change of the binding energy of the alpha-particle; on the \(y\)-axis, you see the corresponding (much larger) relative change of the three energies related to the helium-4, beryllium-8, and carbon-18 nuclei, namely of\[
\eq{
\Delta E_h &= E_{12}^* - E_8 - E_4\\
\Delta E_b &= E_8 - 2E_4\\
\varepsilon &= E_{12}^* - 3E_4 = \Delta E_h + \Delta E_b
}
\] Because of the final relationship for \(\varepsilon\), it's not surprising that the yellow curve is in between the other two. But what may be surprising is that these two curves – and therefore all three curves – have pretty much the same slope. What does it mean? It means that the several fine-tunings are actually not independent from each other.
You could think that for the nuclear factory to work and produce the elements, you may need several miracles – several anthropic conditions, in this case three – and therefore God has to be even greater than the size He would adopt if there were just one miracle. God's omnipotence seems like the third power of a generic god's power (or three times? It depends whether His omnipotence is quantified on the log scale).
However, the new paper shows that this ain't the case. The three coincidences aren't independent from each other. Pretty much because of mathematical identities, they're more or less equivalent to one coincidence only. If one identity for the nuclear level energies holds, the other two will probably hold as well, with a highly acceptable accuracy. It means that one miracle is enough and life is much more likely than what you would expect if you thought that the three conditions are independent of each other.
Now, you could claim that we still need meta-God to explain the mathematical "metamiracle" that the three conditions are actually almost equivalent to each other. If you did so, you would cover these questions by lots of exciting religious fog. But the matter of fact is that they can actually explain this "metamiracle" – at least in a preliminary way – in terms of completely non-mysterious, irreligious arguments, too. The same slopes kind of follow from the alpha-cluster structure of beryllium-8 and carbon-12 nuclei. I won't present this derivation in its full glory but the alpha-particle-based compositeness of the two nuclei sort of rationally explains why the two slopes are almost the same.
Even though several levels and energy differences are involved, the authors de facto show that there is only one "miracle" we need for a sufficient production of the heavier elements behind life. Moreover, the tolerated error for \(\alpha_{\rm elmg}\) as well as \(m_q\) could be around 2 percent or so: the fine-tuning isn't extreme.
Although this very topic may make you "wish" that there is some evidence for the Intelligent Design and/or a stunningly convincing role for the anthropic principle, and the very fact that a paper about this metaphysical and mysterious question was written could manipulate you into a more spiritual thinking, I would say that the actual results of their analysis imply exactly the opposite conclusion. Different "miracles" aren't really independent from each other and they're not "terribly unlikely miracles", anyway. Good luck at the 1-in-50 level seems to be enough for the amount of carbon to be just fine. At most, you may need two such 1-in-50 fine-tunings – one for the fine-structure constant and one for the light quark mass – except that I think that only some combination of them will have a high enough impact on the essential processes needed for the elements of life to arise.
Now, you could still argue that 1-in-50 is a low chance. The probability \(p=0.02\) or so is pretty small, some of you could say, and this strengthens some arguments in favor of God, Intelligent Design, the anthropic principle, or something along these lines. Well, perhaps. I don't think it's a right way to think about this coincidence. Why?
First, \(p=0.02\) is equivalent to a "bump just a little bit larger than a 2-sigma bump". To make extraordinary claims about God or the anthropic principle – and one really doesn't know which of these (or other metaphysical) explanations "follows" from the "miracle" – and justify them by not-so-extraordinary evidence such as 2-sigma bumps seems to betray the lack of evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and this ain't one.
Second, this not-so-extreme probability \(p=0.02\) is the \(p\)-value before the look-elsewhere effect of a particular type is included. What I want to say is that we're computing the probability that a particular system of nuclear furnaces will be able to produce a particular type of life (determined by its elements etc.). However, there could very well be other types of life – perhaps \({\mathcal O}(50)\) types of life – that may arise in the same parameter space which means that the probability that at least one of these types of life will be allowed for a "random" choice of the values of parameters may approach 100 percent.
These observations of coincidences that are needed for life are intriguing but we shouldn't get carried away for two basic reasons. First, as argued above, the probabilities that we get a tolerable value of the parameters (values compatible with life) aren't extremely tiny and we should treat these "modestly suggestive" low probability just like any other 2-sigma bumps in physics. They're not enough to settle a question, they're not enough for a paradigm shift.
Second, it's pretty much guaranteed that if we calculate the odds that some "conditions constraining parameters that makes the theory friendly to life as we know it" are obeyed, it's unsurprising that the answer will probably be Yes because our type of life does exist, after all. The proposition that "conditions apparently needed for this life to arise with a significant probability were satisfied" is pretty much tautologicaly true. These conditions simply aren't independent of some empirical known facts. We're just measuring the answer to the question "Does life exist?" using a different, perhaps more contrived, procedure. But the fact that many such questions have "Yes" answers isn't a miracle; it's pretty much tautologically guaranteed because these questions were cherry-picked by their equivalence to the existence of life (or some of the aspects of this existence).
If the probabilities arising in similar anthropic coincidences were much tinier, i.e. much more extreme than 2-sigma bumps, I could be impressed. The tiny cosmological constant could be an indication of this sort. However, we may only argue that the "probability that the cosmological constant is below \(10^{-120}m_{\rm Planck}^4\) is of order \(10^{-120}\)" if we adopt a uniform probability distribution for cosmological constants in the interval comparable to \((0,m_{\rm Planck}^4)\).
While some plausible models that make the uniform distribution look natural exist, they're not "inevitably true" and it's still easy to imagine that this uniform probability distribution is a completely naive, wrong expectation. If we replace it by another one – one that follows from a slightly sophisticated mechanism and one that gives tiny values of the cosmological constant with far higher probabilities – the "unavoidably impressive" miracle goes away once again. If you wanted to convince me that there is a miracle that harbors strong evidence in favor of the anthropic reasoning or God or anything like that, you would have to show me a coincidence that has a tiny probability according to the right calculation of probabilities (a calculation which takes all mathematically guaranteed correlations such as those above into account) and a nicely justifiable probability distribution for the parameters.
If you used a quasi-uniform one, you would have to convince me that it's reasonable to expect that the distribution is quasi-uniform for that situation. It would have to be so reasonable – almost inevitable – that, in fact, I would find your anthropic principle or God more likely as an explanation than the mundane possibility that there simply exists a better argument or "better theory" telling you that a non-uniform distribution is actually a much more sensible (and likely) one. Or a better theory that simply allows you to calculate the observed value. How strong evidence is needed to prefer God over the "better theory" depends on subjective prior probabilities but be sure that 2-sigma or even 3-sigma bumps are way too small for people like me to pick God or His best pal, the anthropic anti-God, instead of a "better, so far unknown, theory".
If you can't show me such a thing, I would keep on insisting that there doesn't exist any tangible evidence to believe the anthropic/religious paradigm and because these things aren't mathematically elegant or explaining any true pre-existing mysteries in physics, they don't really deserve to become a part of physics, at least at this moment.
Rafa Spoladore likes this
13 Feb 22:35
Scientific genius isn't extinct
by Luboš Motl
Rafa Spoladore ΨTexto excelente.
...just the number and influence of stupid people who don't care about it and who don't even try to see it has increased...
I am going to (mostly) agree with Sabine Hossenfelder after quite some time:
What does Mr Simonton actually want to say?
The first widely copied quote is the following:
But, as Sabine says in different words, this is a truly stupid criterion of progress because the separation of Man's knowledge into scientific disciplines is mostly a social convention rather than something important. Some activities are commonly divided into several disciplines although the experts in these disciplines have almost the same background and are applying almost the same insights and methods. On the other hand, there exist disciplines such as theoretical physics in which the number of radically different, inequivalent deep ideas is huge even though no one tries to "split the discipline".
At the end, there is one Nature (let's include the society and everything else that may be – perhaps – studied by the scientific method) which follows one set of rules or insights – insights that ultimately boil down to the fundamental laws of physics – and these insights are just organized into clusters for practical purposes, namely to allow the division of labor among scientists. I agree with Sabine that Mr Simonton hasn't grasped the essence of reductionism which is a severe handicap that prevents him from a proper understanding of the current state of science (and not only the current state).
Second, Mr Simonton is also wrong when he suggests that the progress in physics (and perhaps other sciences) is only seen in the (dull) increased amount of stuff that scientists have to memorize these days relatively to their predecessors. Quite on the contrary, mere memorization is increasingly inadequate in physics where people have needed an ever deeper depth, ever broader breadth, ever greater creativity, ability to think in entirely new and different ways and switch between these modes. People have needed minds that were increasingly wiser and creative in the human way, and therefore increasingly irreplaceable by computers.
Moreover, and this is my third criticism of Simonton's thesis, there is nothing new about the "new disciplines' being a hybrid". New disciplines of science were always a hybrid of some previous knowledge (or previous right or wrong beliefs). When Mr Simonton writes
Incidentally, the same is true about Olympic runners – and even pre-Olympic runners. Pretty much every runner in the history improved the world record (in sprint) by fractions of a second only. These improvements may have become numerically smaller – perhaps even if you express them as a percentage i.e. if you use the log scale – because we're perhaps getting closer to some "physical limits". But that doesn't mean that running has become unexciting. The people who care about running simply focus on the time differences that are smaller than the time differences a century ago. If they care about the discipline, they simply have to care and do care about the numerically smaller improvements of the world record. There is no rule that an amount of excitement \(X\) should always be associated with the improvement of the world record by \(\Delta t = CX\) where \(C\) is fixed. The proportionality constant \(C\) may be changing with time.
The same comments apply to science. Science is exciting for those who like science and the actual realistic advances we are making today define the "typical order-of-magnitude estimate" of how much scientific progress we need to get excited. If someone doesn't get excited by the progress of the ongoing scientific research, then it simply means that he isn't into science much. It doesn't say anything about the scientific progress itself; it only says something about the combination (scientific progress, the individual's relationship to science).
Moreover, I don't really agree that the progress has gotten slower or less deep in general. Physics is still making theories deeper as well as broader. Each decade or two, we add an order of magnitude to the characteristic energies (or subtract an order of magnitude from the characteristic distances) that our cutting-edge effective field theories work with. We keep on unifying concepts and adding new ways to look at the phenomena we thought we have understood, too: this sort of truly conceptual progress has been particularly striking in string theory. And aside from these aspects of progress, we are accumulating lots of ever more complex applications. Molecular biology is perhaps the best example of this kind of "extensive" growth of science.
The scientific image of the world keeps on collecting an increasing amount of data and applications; is unifying them ever more tightly; is increasing its resolution; is extending the domain of validity of its theories; and is adding new (intellectual) dimensions from which the seemingly well-known phenomena may be looked at and new (logical) relationships between concepts and whole disciplines that were once thought to be independent. Moreover, these are the types of progress that the scientific progress has always been composed of. There is nothing qualitatively new (or "worse") about the current age; poisonous comments that "we're bored by this" could have been said at every moment of the history of science (and human thinking in general).
What Mr Simonton seems to suggest by the meme "the progress has slowed down because totally new disciplines aren't being founded" is that his knowledge of the world is superficial and one slogan about a subset of the objects or phenomena in Nature that he may repeat counts as the "bulk or skeleton of the qualitative knowledge" and everything else are details.
But this is an extremely deceptive attitude. People – and monkeys or psychologists – could always say a sentence or two about an aspect of Nature and predict that the accuracy of their basic truth would be increasing. But that doesn't mean that they actually knew the majority of the important insights about the topics they briefly talked about. Why? Because the Devil is in the details, after all. What these people – and monkeys or psychologists – dismissed as "details" were often stunning intellectual gems, precious jewels that Nature was hiding for geniuses of the future.
One may always dismiss them as details but that doesn't mean that they're worthless for the people who actually care about science. We may also say – and Sabine does say – that Mr Simonton and similar folks expose their lack of imagination, too. If they say that "totally new insights" (whatever the criterion for this adjective is) in a certain discipline won't occur, they are making an assumption or assuming their prejudices. The only real justification for treating their prejudice as a fact is their lack of imagination. They just can't imagine a completely different form of extraterrestrial life, if I use Sabine's example (I would probably choose more realistic and perhaps more modest examples, however).
It's a subtle task to compare the "rate of progress" in science – or in a scientific discipline – except that in some cases, the comparison seems doable. For example, it seems clear that string theory isn't undergoing another revolution that would be analogous to the first or second superstring revolutions in the mid 1980s and mid 1990s, respectively. You may compare it to Olympic runners who aren't improving the world records much.
Except that when science is done correctly and people aren't forgetting things, it means that the current generation of scientists is always able to match the previous world records. They may be improving it slowly but whatever the rate is defines the normalization constant in the reasonably expected progress. Moreover, the expectation may always be wrong – it's always possible just like it has always been possible that some unexpected breakthroughs and revolutions will arrive tomorrow. People may switch from one scientific discipline to another if they find the latter more interesting or satisfactory or promising (one always needs to compare apples and oranges to generate such a verdict – but to some extent, it may be done and should be done because both apples and oranges are fruits, after all) but it makes no sense to say that "all of science" has lost its steam. In the most natural units, the rate of science is always "one" and if it is a wildly dropping function of time in your units, it says more about you than about science.
What I want to say – and I just wrote a similar essay in an e-mail to a younger, very bright physicist last night – is that what is important is that people care about science and the actual progress that is being done every year. Once they lose the interest in the "incremental" improvements that may be done this year or this decade (e.g. about string theory advances that contain "just" 5% of the importance of the discovery of D-branes) – once they start to consider the hundredths of a second in the Olympic sprint worthless and uninteresting – they're really out of the game. If it's so, they should be removed from the system, they should lose their influence on the scientific process because they have clearly become enemies of science whose judgment won't be meritocratic – they're explicitly telling us that it won't because they approximate the merit by zero in all situations.
Science is all about the constant revision (and usually gradual extension) of its cutting edge. It has always been all about this thing. At any moment, whoever liked this refinement of the cutting edge liked science; whoever didn't like it – for whatever reasons and with whatever excuses – just didn't like science. It's this simple. It has always been this simple. It's totally clear that Mr Simonton just dislikes science. It has almost no value for him. But this is mostly a statement about him; it isn't a pure statement about science itself.
Several paragraphs above, I mentioned Mr Simonton's misunderstanding of reductionism. His confusion about the role of physics is demonstrated by the following quote, too:
However, even if we ignore Mr Simonton's self-evident ignorance of string theory or quantum gravity, we're not listing all the problems with the quote. The main problem with the quote is that what Mr Simonton "complains" about is really an inevitable tautology. No other discipline except for theoretical physics may really offer us "dramatic anomalies and apparent contradictions between the basic laws" simply because no other discipline except for theoretical physics studies the basic laws!
All other disciplines of science study laws that are not quite basic; they may ultimately be reduced to the fundamental laws of physics. It means that whenever a contradiction is found in these disciplines, it's a contradiction in one of the candidate "emergent laws" that isn't really fundamental, and those may always be described as "loose ends". Only the basic laws in fundamental physics are "not loose ends" directly attached to the body of Mother Nature. Once you look at Mr Simonton's first sentence rationally, you will recognize it as a tautology: the scientific disciplines that study fundamental laws may sometimes face the apparent contradiction between the fundamental laws; the scientific disciplines that study non-fundamental laws may only encounter apparent contradictions between non-fundamental laws. ;-) He isn't saying anything else than this tautology and if he is, it is definitely wrong.
Lots of these end-of-science hacks are emotionally complaining about things that are tautologies, things that are inevitable. It's part of their propaganda and their self-brainwashing, too.
Finally, I want to mention another critical problem with Mr Simonton's essay that Sabine has also commented upon: his actual complaints have nothing to do with the title. In the title, he promised to discuss "scientific genius". But he hasn't discussed anything of the sort. A genius is someone with an exceptional intellectual creativity, skills, or originality. It is a characteristic of (some) human minds. Instead, what Mr Simonton's complaints are all about is concerned with the objective state of the knowledge in the scientific disciplines as of 2013.
These are completely different things. If you take a genius – who really deserves the title – and transfer him or her to another era, he will still be a genius because his or her being a genius is a property of his brain and thinking.
Needless to say, I find it implausible that the actual intrinsic ingenuity is dramatically changing. Neither the average IQ nor the standard deviation of the IQ is dramatically dropping so the number of extremely smart folks can't be decreasing, either. Of course, we may use a differently time-dependent definition of a genius so that the geniuses "officially" disappear from our world but once again, such a choice says much more about the person who picked this definition of a "genius" than about the real state of affairs.
What may be also happening is that the geniuses don't use (or can't use) their ingenuity as efficiently as their ancestors. But to the extent that this is avoidable at all, it is mostly the fault of the society and its state.
To summarize, if something is changing about the scientific progress, it's mostly the degree to which literate people appreciate this progress. This degree is decreasing, I think. A long time ago, writing of wise books and articles – and university jobs – were mostly reserved to those who loved wisdom (that's what the word "philosopher" means, too). But these days, writing of books, Nature articles, and chairs of distinguished professors is open to lots of morons who just don't give a damn about science and its progress so it's no surprise that we are reading lots of nasty defamation of science and its progress.
This state of the affairs mostly reflects the subjective opinions – and increased influence – of those idiots who don't know science and who don't like science rather than any objective property of science and its genuine progress.
P.S.: If you want to risk problems with your stomach, read the text by a super hardcore end-of-science crank named John Horgan, The End-of-Science Bandwagon Is Getting Crowded, who quotes many other similarly deluded assholes many of whom were included into the annual Edge.org question – probably to highlight the increasing influence of such scumbags (let me explicitly say that Steve Giddings isn't counted!) on institutions and events that claim to be pro-science but they are anti-science. 
I am going to (mostly) agree with Sabine Hossenfelder after quite some time:
The end of science is near, again (Backreaction)She discusses a January 30th essay in Nature written by self-described "distinguished professor" Dean Keith Simonton,
After Einstein: Scientific genius is extinct (Nature, behind a paywall)Sabine's points are good; see also another critical Big Think comment by Ross Pomeroy.
What does Mr Simonton actually want to say?
The first widely copied quote is the following:
Our theories and instruments now probe the earliest seconds and farthest reaches of the Universe, and we can investigate the tiniest of life forms and the shortest-lived of subatomic particles. It is difficult to imagine that scientists have overlooked some phenomenon worthy of its own discipline alongside astronomy physics, chemistry and biology. For more than a century, any new discipline has been a hybrid of one of these, such as astrophysics, biochemistry or astrobiology. Future advances are likely to build on what is already known rather than alter the foundations of knowledge. One of the biggest recent scientific accomplishments is the discovery of the Higgs boson – the existence of which was predicted decades ago.First, Simonton seems to equate "dramatic progress in science" with the "establishment of new scientific disciplines".
But, as Sabine says in different words, this is a truly stupid criterion of progress because the separation of Man's knowledge into scientific disciplines is mostly a social convention rather than something important. Some activities are commonly divided into several disciplines although the experts in these disciplines have almost the same background and are applying almost the same insights and methods. On the other hand, there exist disciplines such as theoretical physics in which the number of radically different, inequivalent deep ideas is huge even though no one tries to "split the discipline".
At the end, there is one Nature (let's include the society and everything else that may be – perhaps – studied by the scientific method) which follows one set of rules or insights – insights that ultimately boil down to the fundamental laws of physics – and these insights are just organized into clusters for practical purposes, namely to allow the division of labor among scientists. I agree with Sabine that Mr Simonton hasn't grasped the essence of reductionism which is a severe handicap that prevents him from a proper understanding of the current state of science (and not only the current state).
Second, Mr Simonton is also wrong when he suggests that the progress in physics (and perhaps other sciences) is only seen in the (dull) increased amount of stuff that scientists have to memorize these days relatively to their predecessors. Quite on the contrary, mere memorization is increasingly inadequate in physics where people have needed an ever deeper depth, ever broader breadth, ever greater creativity, ability to think in entirely new and different ways and switch between these modes. People have needed minds that were increasingly wiser and creative in the human way, and therefore increasingly irreplaceable by computers.
Moreover, and this is my third criticism of Simonton's thesis, there is nothing new about the "new disciplines' being a hybrid". New disciplines of science were always a hybrid of some previous knowledge (or previous right or wrong beliefs). When Mr Simonton writes
Just as athletes can win an Olympic gold medal by beating the world record only by a fraction of a second, scientists can continue to receive Nobel prizes for improving the explanatory breadth of theories of the preciseness of measurements.he clearly misunderstands that this description has always been true. At every moment of the history of science – or even philosophy or a "generalized thinking about Nature", people had some ideas about the external world and the rules it followed and they were refining this image, increasing its resolution, and replacing faulty parts of it by more correct or accurate or precise ones. After all, it's no coincidence that Mr Simonton's quote is almost identical to Lord Kelvin's quote articulated more than 100 years ago:
There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.Whether Lord Kelvin was right depends on whether we view radioactivity, quantum mechanics, atomic physics, nuclear physics, nuclear bomb, DNA, and millions of other things to be just more precise measurements of the 19th century scientific concepts. I choose not to describe these 20th century discoveries in this way. ;-)
Incidentally, the same is true about Olympic runners – and even pre-Olympic runners. Pretty much every runner in the history improved the world record (in sprint) by fractions of a second only. These improvements may have become numerically smaller – perhaps even if you express them as a percentage i.e. if you use the log scale – because we're perhaps getting closer to some "physical limits". But that doesn't mean that running has become unexciting. The people who care about running simply focus on the time differences that are smaller than the time differences a century ago. If they care about the discipline, they simply have to care and do care about the numerically smaller improvements of the world record. There is no rule that an amount of excitement \(X\) should always be associated with the improvement of the world record by \(\Delta t = CX\) where \(C\) is fixed. The proportionality constant \(C\) may be changing with time.
The same comments apply to science. Science is exciting for those who like science and the actual realistic advances we are making today define the "typical order-of-magnitude estimate" of how much scientific progress we need to get excited. If someone doesn't get excited by the progress of the ongoing scientific research, then it simply means that he isn't into science much. It doesn't say anything about the scientific progress itself; it only says something about the combination (scientific progress, the individual's relationship to science).
Moreover, I don't really agree that the progress has gotten slower or less deep in general. Physics is still making theories deeper as well as broader. Each decade or two, we add an order of magnitude to the characteristic energies (or subtract an order of magnitude from the characteristic distances) that our cutting-edge effective field theories work with. We keep on unifying concepts and adding new ways to look at the phenomena we thought we have understood, too: this sort of truly conceptual progress has been particularly striking in string theory. And aside from these aspects of progress, we are accumulating lots of ever more complex applications. Molecular biology is perhaps the best example of this kind of "extensive" growth of science.
The scientific image of the world keeps on collecting an increasing amount of data and applications; is unifying them ever more tightly; is increasing its resolution; is extending the domain of validity of its theories; and is adding new (intellectual) dimensions from which the seemingly well-known phenomena may be looked at and new (logical) relationships between concepts and whole disciplines that were once thought to be independent. Moreover, these are the types of progress that the scientific progress has always been composed of. There is nothing qualitatively new (or "worse") about the current age; poisonous comments that "we're bored by this" could have been said at every moment of the history of science (and human thinking in general).
What Mr Simonton seems to suggest by the meme "the progress has slowed down because totally new disciplines aren't being founded" is that his knowledge of the world is superficial and one slogan about a subset of the objects or phenomena in Nature that he may repeat counts as the "bulk or skeleton of the qualitative knowledge" and everything else are details.
But this is an extremely deceptive attitude. People – and monkeys or psychologists – could always say a sentence or two about an aspect of Nature and predict that the accuracy of their basic truth would be increasing. But that doesn't mean that they actually knew the majority of the important insights about the topics they briefly talked about. Why? Because the Devil is in the details, after all. What these people – and monkeys or psychologists – dismissed as "details" were often stunning intellectual gems, precious jewels that Nature was hiding for geniuses of the future.
One may always dismiss them as details but that doesn't mean that they're worthless for the people who actually care about science. We may also say – and Sabine does say – that Mr Simonton and similar folks expose their lack of imagination, too. If they say that "totally new insights" (whatever the criterion for this adjective is) in a certain discipline won't occur, they are making an assumption or assuming their prejudices. The only real justification for treating their prejudice as a fact is their lack of imagination. They just can't imagine a completely different form of extraterrestrial life, if I use Sabine's example (I would probably choose more realistic and perhaps more modest examples, however).
It's a subtle task to compare the "rate of progress" in science – or in a scientific discipline – except that in some cases, the comparison seems doable. For example, it seems clear that string theory isn't undergoing another revolution that would be analogous to the first or second superstring revolutions in the mid 1980s and mid 1990s, respectively. You may compare it to Olympic runners who aren't improving the world records much.
Except that when science is done correctly and people aren't forgetting things, it means that the current generation of scientists is always able to match the previous world records. They may be improving it slowly but whatever the rate is defines the normalization constant in the reasonably expected progress. Moreover, the expectation may always be wrong – it's always possible just like it has always been possible that some unexpected breakthroughs and revolutions will arrive tomorrow. People may switch from one scientific discipline to another if they find the latter more interesting or satisfactory or promising (one always needs to compare apples and oranges to generate such a verdict – but to some extent, it may be done and should be done because both apples and oranges are fruits, after all) but it makes no sense to say that "all of science" has lost its steam. In the most natural units, the rate of science is always "one" and if it is a wildly dropping function of time in your units, it says more about you than about science.
What I want to say – and I just wrote a similar essay in an e-mail to a younger, very bright physicist last night – is that what is important is that people care about science and the actual progress that is being done every year. Once they lose the interest in the "incremental" improvements that may be done this year or this decade (e.g. about string theory advances that contain "just" 5% of the importance of the discovery of D-branes) – once they start to consider the hundredths of a second in the Olympic sprint worthless and uninteresting – they're really out of the game. If it's so, they should be removed from the system, they should lose their influence on the scientific process because they have clearly become enemies of science whose judgment won't be meritocratic – they're explicitly telling us that it won't because they approximate the merit by zero in all situations.
Science is all about the constant revision (and usually gradual extension) of its cutting edge. It has always been all about this thing. At any moment, whoever liked this refinement of the cutting edge liked science; whoever didn't like it – for whatever reasons and with whatever excuses – just didn't like science. It's this simple. It has always been this simple. It's totally clear that Mr Simonton just dislikes science. It has almost no value for him. But this is mostly a statement about him; it isn't a pure statement about science itself.
Several paragraphs above, I mentioned Mr Simonton's misunderstanding of reductionism. His confusion about the role of physics is demonstrated by the following quote, too:
The core disciplines have accumulated not so much anomalies as mere loose ends that will be tidied up one way or another. A possible exception is theoretical physics, which is as yet unable to integrate gravity with the other three forces of nature.First of all, the last sentence has been known to be wrong for 39 years – we have known the consistent quantum theory of the curved spacetime since the 1974 paper by Scherk and Schwarz (although many people, including Ms Sabine Hossenfelder, are still failing to take notice).
However, even if we ignore Mr Simonton's self-evident ignorance of string theory or quantum gravity, we're not listing all the problems with the quote. The main problem with the quote is that what Mr Simonton "complains" about is really an inevitable tautology. No other discipline except for theoretical physics may really offer us "dramatic anomalies and apparent contradictions between the basic laws" simply because no other discipline except for theoretical physics studies the basic laws!
All other disciplines of science study laws that are not quite basic; they may ultimately be reduced to the fundamental laws of physics. It means that whenever a contradiction is found in these disciplines, it's a contradiction in one of the candidate "emergent laws" that isn't really fundamental, and those may always be described as "loose ends". Only the basic laws in fundamental physics are "not loose ends" directly attached to the body of Mother Nature. Once you look at Mr Simonton's first sentence rationally, you will recognize it as a tautology: the scientific disciplines that study fundamental laws may sometimes face the apparent contradiction between the fundamental laws; the scientific disciplines that study non-fundamental laws may only encounter apparent contradictions between non-fundamental laws. ;-) He isn't saying anything else than this tautology and if he is, it is definitely wrong.
Lots of these end-of-science hacks are emotionally complaining about things that are tautologies, things that are inevitable. It's part of their propaganda and their self-brainwashing, too.
Finally, I want to mention another critical problem with Mr Simonton's essay that Sabine has also commented upon: his actual complaints have nothing to do with the title. In the title, he promised to discuss "scientific genius". But he hasn't discussed anything of the sort. A genius is someone with an exceptional intellectual creativity, skills, or originality. It is a characteristic of (some) human minds. Instead, what Mr Simonton's complaints are all about is concerned with the objective state of the knowledge in the scientific disciplines as of 2013.
These are completely different things. If you take a genius – who really deserves the title – and transfer him or her to another era, he will still be a genius because his or her being a genius is a property of his brain and thinking.
Needless to say, I find it implausible that the actual intrinsic ingenuity is dramatically changing. Neither the average IQ nor the standard deviation of the IQ is dramatically dropping so the number of extremely smart folks can't be decreasing, either. Of course, we may use a differently time-dependent definition of a genius so that the geniuses "officially" disappear from our world but once again, such a choice says much more about the person who picked this definition of a "genius" than about the real state of affairs.
What may be also happening is that the geniuses don't use (or can't use) their ingenuity as efficiently as their ancestors. But to the extent that this is avoidable at all, it is mostly the fault of the society and its state.
To summarize, if something is changing about the scientific progress, it's mostly the degree to which literate people appreciate this progress. This degree is decreasing, I think. A long time ago, writing of wise books and articles – and university jobs – were mostly reserved to those who loved wisdom (that's what the word "philosopher" means, too). But these days, writing of books, Nature articles, and chairs of distinguished professors is open to lots of morons who just don't give a damn about science and its progress so it's no surprise that we are reading lots of nasty defamation of science and its progress.
This state of the affairs mostly reflects the subjective opinions – and increased influence – of those idiots who don't know science and who don't like science rather than any objective property of science and its genuine progress.
P.S.: If you want to risk problems with your stomach, read the text by a super hardcore end-of-science crank named John Horgan, The End-of-Science Bandwagon Is Getting Crowded, who quotes many other similarly deluded assholes many of whom were included into the annual Edge.org question – probably to highlight the increasing influence of such scumbags (let me explicitly say that Steve Giddings isn't counted!) on institutions and events that claim to be pro-science but they are anti-science.
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08 Feb 22:17
Could Camels Cure Cancer? [Life Lines]
by Dr. Dolittle
Image of camel from ukmedix news.
Researchers from King Abdulaziz University (Jeddah) have tested the effectiveness of micro and nanoshells for delivering a substance from camel urine, PMF701, thought to be a cure for cancer. These findings will be presented at the 2nd Biotechnology World Congress (Feb 18-21).
PMF701, not yet approved by the Saudi Food and Drug Authority, is currently in clinical trials. In a quote published by SciDev.net, the head of the university’s tissue culture unit and the principal investigator of the project Faten Abdel-Rahman Khorshid stated, “We made a natural product medicine, proved its safety and efficiency in vitro [in test tubes] and in vivo on animal models, and finished phase I clinical trials on healthy volunteers with no side effects”.
More research is needed to test the ability of this controversial therapy at treating cancer. In another quote from SciDev.Net, Dr. Edzard Ernst, Emeritus Professor in Complementary Medicine from the University of Exeter (UK) stated, “There is no evidence here that this new treatment does anything to the natural history of human cancers. Even if there were positive results, it would be wise to wait for independent replications.”
It will be interesting to watch the progress of this research.
Sources:
2nd Biotechnology World Congress
F. Khorshid, H. Alshazly, A. Al Jefery and Abdel-Moneim M. Osman, 2010. Dose Escalation Phase I Study in Healthy Volunteers to Evaluate the Safety of a Natural Product PM701. Journal of Pharmacology and Toxicology, 5: 91-97.
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08 Feb 21:17
AOL posted its fourth quarter financial results today, and we relearned, as we do each quarter, that AOL still earns most of its money from subscribers who for whatever reason actually pay to connect to the Internet using AOL. Worse, some people pay for AOL services while paying someone else for Internet. More »
AOL Still Earns Most of Its Money From Dialup Subscribers
by Mario Aguilar
AOL posted its fourth quarter financial results today, and we relearned, as we do each quarter, that AOL still earns most of its money from subscribers who for whatever reason actually pay to connect to the Internet using AOL. Worse, some people pay for AOL services while paying someone else for Internet. More »
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08 Feb 21:10
New study furthers Einstein's 'theory of everything'
(Phys.org)—Sussex physicists have taken a small step towards fulfilling Einstein's dream of proving there is only one fundamental force in nature.
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08 Feb 21:10
Free the quarks: Calculating the strong force
This year sees the 40th anniversary of the ground-breaking proposal that the interactions between quarks becomes weaker as they come closer together, laying the foundations of quantum chromodynamics, or QCD, the modern theory of the strong interaction.
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08 Feb 14:15
Physicists develop method for quantum computers
Quantum computers can solve certain problems much faster than their classical counterparts, but their realization on a scale relevent for practical applications has proven to be very difficult. However, this could change with a new method for solid state quantum computers devised by physicists from Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany, and Harvard University. The scientists around Dr. Hendrik Weimer from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Leibniz Universität report their results in the journal Physical Review Letters.
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06 Feb 19:38
Pirate Bay Promos Unblocked in Finland, With Music Industry Blessing
by Ernesto
A few months ago saw the launch of The Promo Bay, an artist promotion initiative supported by The Pirate Bay crew.
The website is entirely dedicated to promoting the work of independent musicians, filmmakers and other content creators. Through The Promo Bay these artists get to showcase their work to an audience of hundreds and thousands of people at no cost.
Unfortunately, however, artists in the UK and Finland were unable to submit their content after the site was blocked by their Internet providers due its affiliation with The Pirate Bay.
Recognizing this error, music industry group BPI instructed the UK’s ISPs to unblock the site. However, The Promo Bay remained blocked in Finland, until now.
Representing EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music and Warner Music, a representative from the Finnish Anti-Piracy Centre got in touch with the Promo Bay a few days ago, to ask whether site is indeed a legal operation.
“The interesting thing was that we didn’t ask them to,” Promo bay’s Will Dayble tells TorrentFreak.
The anti-piracy group mentions in their email that The Promo Bay domains are blocked because they were directly linked the The Pirate Bay in the past.
The anti-piracy group asked Dayble to confirm the legitimate nature of the site, and said it would then ask the court to unblock the domains “to allow digital consumers access to new legal alternatives to enjoy exciting new music.”
Needless to say, Dayble was pleasantly surprised by the inquiry.
“They went to the effort to find my personal email and get in touch. This means that someone at the Finnish anti piracy group is either being as diligent about things that aren’t piracy as those that are, or we have a kind soul out there annoying the powers that be on our behalf,” Dayble tells TorrentFreak.
After explaining what the Promo Bay is about, and assuring the Finnish labels that no copyright infringement is taking place through the service, it obtained the music industry’s blessing. Albeit with reservation.
Pirate Bay unblocked
“Your message clarified the legal aspects of your service. Although we do express our concern with regard to your partial cooperation with The Pirate Bay, which is an illegal service and whose operators have been convicted in Sweden, we have decided to remove Promo Bay from the said domain name list,” the Anti-Piracy Centre wrote.
The above means that the music labels do understand that some artists see value in getting promoted by The Pirate Bay. Quite a breakthrough if you think about it.
After a delay of a few months Finnish artists can now finally join The Pirate Bay promo bonanza. However, while magnet links to music are available on The Promo Bay, artists featured by The Pirate Bay can never see their own promos in full as The Pirate Bay’s main website remains blocked.
Source: Pirate Bay Promos Unblocked in Finland, With Music Industry Blessing
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06 Feb 19:28
Messier Monday: The Gateway Galaxy to Virgo, M60 [Starts With A Bang]
by Ethan
Rafa Spoladore ΨQue beleza.
“The thing’s hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God—it’s full of stars!” -Dave Bowman, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Back in October, we began a new, weekly series here called Messier Monday. Each Monday, we’ve taken a look at one of the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the Messier Catalogue, nebulous objects that might potentially be confused with comets by unaware comet-hunters.
Image credit: Lee Kelvin and Grant Miller, via http://star-www.st-and.ac.uk/~lsk9/.
These objects include stellar remnants, star-forming nebulae, young star clusters, ancient globular clusters, and distant galaxies far beyond the Milky Way. Today, we’re going to take an in-depth look at the sixtieth object in this catalog, the great elliptical galaxy Messier 60. To find it, head outside sometime between midnight and sunrise at this time of year and look towards the east/southeast to locate the two bright stars, Arcturus and Spica.
Image credit: Me, using Stellarium, available at http://stellarium.org/.
Just a little bit to the west of the imaginary line connecting these two bright stars, you’ll see three prominent but dimmer stars in a row: Vindemiatrix, Auva (δ-Vir), and Porrima. Head on over to Vindemiatrix, and aim your binoculars/telescope maybe three-to-four extra degrees away from the imaginary line connecting Arcturus-to-Spica.
Image credit: Me, using Stellarium, available at http://stellarium.org/.
Out in that sea of stars lies a faint, elliptical fuzzball that’s been known since the late 1770s: M60. What wasn’t known until less than 100 years ago was that this is actually a galaxy all unto itself: a giant elliptical galaxy more than 50 million light-years distant!
Image credit: Adam Block / Mount Lemmon Sky Center / University of Arizona.
We’ve looked at spiral galaxies in the Messier Catalogue before, but this is our first elliptical galaxy, and for good reason.
This is the first galaxy we’ve looked at from this portion of the sky. You probably notice a smaller companion galaxy that is a spiral just a small distance away from the elliptical M60. But what you may not notice — not unless you’re viewing M60 with a very wide-field imager — is that if you continued to look away from the direction that Vindemiatrix was in, you’d find that M60 wasn’t alone.
Image credit: © 2013 Scott Rosen’s Astrophotography.
On the contrary, other galaxies — mostly ellipticals but a few, smaller spirals — abound as we continue onwards through the sky. In fact, if we continued onwards in that same direction, looking at an even wider field of view, we’d find that this compact group of galaxies is just the edge of an even more impressive structure.
Image credit: Jim Burnell of http://www.jburnell.com/GalaxyClusters.html.
Messier 60 is a large elliptical galaxy on the outskirts of the largest cluster of galaxies in our neighborhood! While our local group — the group that the Milky Way is apart of — contains just two large galaxies (us and Andromeda) and a total of 54 known members if you include dwarf galaxies, the Virgo cluster of galaxies contains anywhere between 1,300 and 2,000 galaxies, and spans more than ten million light-years from end-to-end.
Image credit: George and Pat of http://www.geoandpat.com/GeorgesastrogalaxiesMarkarian.html.
This amazing, huge collection of galaxies is completely in line with the typical size of large systems that’s predicted by our current best model of the Universe, and if we were able to fast-forward into the far future, the thousands of galaxies in this cluster will all eventually merge together into one superstructure: an elliptical behemoth that rivals the largest known galaxy in the entire Universe. In fact, it’s only on account of dark energy that we won’t wind up as a part of it; our local group is actually an outlying member of the Virgo Supercluster!
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Andrew Z. Colvin.
Messier 60 is an impressive member of this great cluster of galaxies: it’s the third brightest galaxy in the entire Virgo Cluster, and that means something when you consider that the Virgo cluster is so prominent that sixteen of its galaxies are members of the Messier Catalogue!
But whereas most of the galaxies that aren’t found in clusters are spiral-shaped, Messier 60, like all the largest, brightest galaxies in the Virgo cluster, is a giant elliptical. Why is that?
Image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration.
While it’s true that a galaxy that forms (mostly) in isolation will almost always end up in a spiral shape, remember we have literally over a thousand galaxies in a relatively small region of space, clustered together. What do you suppose happens over the billions of years that these galaxies have been in close proximity to one another?
If you said, “they’re going to interact and occasionally merge,” you’ve hit the nail on the head. And — according to the best of our understanding — what happens when two comparably-sized spiral galaxies merge together? (The footage that illustrates this is about one minute long, starting at the 0:32 position, below.)
If you said, “they eventually form a giant elliptical galaxy,” you’re absolutely right. Over time, as large galaxies continue to merge together, the proportion of ellipticals to spirals increases, and is most heavily skewed towards ellipticals near the center of the largest galaxy clusters. No wonder the Virgo Cluster has so many!And this one in particular — Messier 60 — has an interesting story in its own right.
Image credit: NASA / Swift / S. Immler.
As this visible / UV / X-ray composite shows, the smaller spiral galaxy near Messier 60 — which is actually about 10 million light years farther away — is beginning to merge with the large elliptical. The ultraviolet light in the second panel — which indicates hot, young blue stars — is evidence of that gravitational interaction that triggers star formation.
But it’s that last panel — the X-rays — that’s the most fantastic. That giant X-ray source coming from the center of M60 tells us that there’s a supermassive black hole in there. When we do the math, we find that this one is over 1,000 times larger than the one at the center of the Milky Way. At an estimated 4.5 billion solar masses, this supermassive black hole alone outweighs over 90% of the galaxies in our local group!
We were also fortunate enough — just 9 years ago — to observe a supernova go off in M60!
Image credit: Odd Trondal / David Bishop (L), M. Moore and W. Li (R).
But — as always, where applicable — the best image of this supermassive elliptical galaxy comes courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope. Click the image below for a full-resolution behemoth.
Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Space Telescope (STScI/AURA).
To give you an example of just what’s there, remember that this “fuzzball” is lit up by individual stars; it’s estimated that there are over a trillion in this galaxy alone, making it more massive than our entire local group, combined.
The individual “stars” you can see are from our own foreground galaxy; individual stars are not resolvable at this distance.
But through the galaxy, you may be able to find background, even-more-distant galaxies! Here’s just a small strip — presented at high-resolution — that tears through the center of this behemoth.
Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Space Telescope (STScI/AURA).
And that’s Messier 60, a giant elliptical galaxy that’s your gateway into the amazing Virgo Cluster! Including today’s entry, we’ve taken a look at the following Messier objects:
- M1, The Crab Nebula: October 22, 2012
- M8, The Lagoon Nebula: November 5, 2012
- M13, The Great Globular Cluster in Hercules: December 31, 2012
- M15, An Ancient Globular Cluster: November 12, 2012
- M30, A Straggling Globular Cluster: November 26, 2012
- M37, A Rich Open Star Cluster: December 3, 2012
- M41, The Dog Star’s Secret Neighbor: January 7, 2013
- M44, The Beehive Cluster / Praesepe: December 24, 2012
- M45, The Pleiades: October 29, 2012
- M60, The Gateway Galaxy to Virgo: February 4, 2013
- M67, Messier’s Oldest Open Cluster: January 14, 2013
- M78, A Reflection Nebula: December 10, 2012
- M81, Bode’s Galaxy: November 19, 2012
- M83, The Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, January 21, 2013
- M97, The Owl Nebula, January 28, 2013
- M102, A Great Galactic Controversy: December 17, 2012
Come back next week for another Messier Monday,
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06 Feb 19:27
Musical brains smash audio algorithm limits
The mystery of how our brains perceive sound has deepened, now that musicians have broken a limit on sound perception imposed by the Fourier transform
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05 Feb 10:59
Um dia bizarro da Nokia: piada sem graça no Twitter e “review” do próprio aparelho
by Daniel Junqueira
Hoje foi um dia bastante estranho para a Nokia nas mídias digitais. O Twitter da Nokia Brasil soltou uma piada infame falando mal dos concorrentes enquanto o blog oficial da empresa fez um “review” do Lumia 620 – que depois de um tempo foi “corrigido” para hands-on.
É, foi isso. Um funcionário da Nokia escreveu um review de um aparelho da Nokia nos mesmos moldes dos reviews encontrados em sites e blogs por aí. E publicou em uma plataforma mantida pela própria Nokia.
Antes de mais nada, vamos dar uma olhada na presepada da Nokia Brasil. Pelo Twitter oficial da empresa por aqui, a seguinte mensagem foi postada:
Tem gente que prefere Semsunga, tem gente que curte Maçã… Eu gosto é da #Nokia! ;D
— Nokia Brasil (@nokiabrasil) February 4, 2013
Falar de concorrentes em um tweet já é estranho por si só, mas… Semsunga? Que trocadilho terrível! É melhor continuar usando o Twitter apenas para promover os próprios produtos.
Se o braço brasileiro deu um fora, o que a matriz da empresa fez conseguiu ser ainda pior. Com o título “Compacto, vibrante e cheio de diversão: nosso review do Lumia 620″, postado no blog Conversations by Nokia, é um review do aparelho lançado pela empresa.
Novamente: o autor Adam Fraser, um funcionário da Nokia contratado para escrever no blog da Nokia e que recebe o salário diretamente da Nokia, escreveu um review sobre um aparelho da Nokia. E, é claro, ele achou maravilhoso. Alguns trechos:
“Da parte da frente, você vai ver duas camadas de cores, mas de qualquer outro ângulo, tudo o que você verá são cores vibrantes”
“A tela TGT WVGA ClearBlack de 3,8 polegadas produz cores vivas, equivalentes à do Nokia Lumia 920 e do Lumia 820″
“Como de costume em qualquer novo telefone, tem um breve processo de selecionar horas e datas, assim como a opção de entrar com a sua conta da Microsoft, algo que você vai precisar fazer caso queira comprar qualquer um dos mais de 125 mil apps e jogos disponíveis na Windows Phone Store”
No fundo é apenas uma peça publicitária que a Nokia publicou como um review. Depois de um tempo, o artigo foi “corrigido” e ganhou o nome de “Hands-on”, mas não resolve muita coisa. É claro que a Nokia pode e deve promover seus produtos, mas não precisa tentar enganar o consumidor. Quando você lê um review, espera que alguém aponte pontos fortes e fracos sobre um aparelho, e não destaque apenas as suas qualidades.
Não tive ainda a oportunidade de colocar as mãos em um Lumia 620, mas não sei se acredito no que Adam Fraser disse sobre ele – considerando que ele é funcionário da Nokia, talvez não seja a pessoa mais indicada para fazer uma análise imparcial do aparelho. [Twitter da Nokia Brasil, Nokia Conversations, TechCrunch, Gizmodo US]
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05 Feb 10:56
How to Build a Nanotube Computer
IBM creates a new way to make faster and smaller transistors.
Researchers at IBM have assembled 10,000 carbon nanotube transistors on a silicon chip. With silicon transistors approaching fundamental limits to continued miniaturization, the IBM work points toward a possible new way of continuing to produce smaller, faster, more efficient computers.
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05 Feb 10:55
World's First Digital Laser Designed and Built in Africa
African physicists build the first laser with a beam that can be controlled and shaped digitally.
Lasers are one of the emblematic technologies of the modern world. The chances are that most readers will be less than a metre away from a laser of some kind as they read this. Lasers fill our world.
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05 Feb 10:54
Comparar a estatística de mortes causadas por acidentes de trânsito com o número de vidas perdidas em desastres de magnitudes várias já virou uma espécie de clichê: em Goldfinger, quando James Bond confronta o vilão com a monstruosidade que seria matar toda a população de uma pequena cidade apenas para abrir caminho para o saque de Fort Knox, o gênio do mal dá de ombros e diz que os motoristas americanos matam mais gente do que isso em um ano.
Ao contrário do insensível Auric Goldfinger, no entanto, a maioria das pessoas que buscam traçar paralelos entre a quantidade de vidas perdidas no trânsito e, por exemplo, em guerras, não pretende apresentar seus dados como uma forma de minimizar a tragédia, mas bem o oposto: mostrar como a imprudência ao volante pode provocar, num país em estado de paz, uma catástrofe comparável à que atinge uma nação conflagrada. Nos últimos anos, dizer que "o trânsito no Brasil mata mais que a guerra do Iraque" virou quase um mantra. Mas o que isso significa, exatamente?
Em números absolutos, trata-se de uma verdade incontestável: de acordo com o Iraq Body Count, no ano mais sangrento da guerra, 2006, perderam a vida 29.026 pessoas no Iraque. No mesmo ano, o total de mortes no trânsito brasileiro foi de 36.367, informa o Mapa da Violência.
Agora, de novo: o que isso significa? A imagem mental evocada é, certamente, hedionda -- carros e motocicletas brasileiros deixando um rastro de corpos maior que o de carros-bomba e lançadores de granadas. Motoristas matando mais que soldados, guerrilheiros e terroristas. A sensação de que deve ser mais seguro ir ao mercado em Fallujah do que descer para a praia de Santos no feriado... Epa, peraí. Há algo estranho nisso. Ou não? Alguém realmente acha que a Serra do Mar é mais perigosa, mesmo no sábado de carnaval, do que o Triângulo Sunita era em, digamos, 2004?
O que está faltando nesse quadro é contexto, algum dado que permita ancorar os números absolutos numa compreensão mais completa da realidade. Por exemplo: as populações envolvidas. Em 2006, para voltar ao ano mais sangrento da guerra, o Iraque tinha cerca de 30 milhões de habitantes; o Brasil, 190 milhões. Fazendo as contas, naquele ano, o risco de um iraquiano morrer na guerra era cinco vezes maior que o de um brasileiro morrer no trânsito. De fato, no acumulado de 2003 a 2009, o risco de um cidadão iraquiano morrer vítima de violência na guerra foi quatro vezes maior que o de um brasileiro se esborrachar numa rua ou estrada.
É bom notar que, mesmo postos em contexto, os números do Brasil não são nada animadores: se eu saio do meu país pacífico e vou para uma zona de guerra, minha expectativa seria de ver o risco de vida aumentar em dez ou doze vezes. Um aumento de apenas quatro ou cinco sugere que o lugar de onde saí não era tão pacífico assim, afinal.
Números absolutos têm valor de choque, mas o problema é que seu uso descontextualizado pode induzir ao erro e, no limite, é pura e simplesmente desonesto: por exemplo, deve ser verdade que mais mulheres são estupradas hoje em dia, no mundo, do que eram na Idade Média -- mas, antes de concluir que os direitos das mulheres sofreram uma aguda degradação no último meio milênio, lembre-se de que a população feminina do século XIII possivelmente equivalia a cerca de 6% da do mundo atual.
Esse tipo de manobra, a comparação de números absolutos vindos de contextos diversos, é algo em que jornalistas, principalmente, deveriam prestar mais atenção. E não embarcar em furadas apenas porque o número soa bem na manchete. Nem mesmo se a causa for boa e, por isso, a tentação, grande.
Trânsito mata mais que a guerra do Iraque... e daí?
by Carlos Orsi
 |
| Mortes no trânsito per capita, via Wikipedia. Escala vai de 'menos de 5' a 'mais de 40' |
Ao contrário do insensível Auric Goldfinger, no entanto, a maioria das pessoas que buscam traçar paralelos entre a quantidade de vidas perdidas no trânsito e, por exemplo, em guerras, não pretende apresentar seus dados como uma forma de minimizar a tragédia, mas bem o oposto: mostrar como a imprudência ao volante pode provocar, num país em estado de paz, uma catástrofe comparável à que atinge uma nação conflagrada. Nos últimos anos, dizer que "o trânsito no Brasil mata mais que a guerra do Iraque" virou quase um mantra. Mas o que isso significa, exatamente?
Em números absolutos, trata-se de uma verdade incontestável: de acordo com o Iraq Body Count, no ano mais sangrento da guerra, 2006, perderam a vida 29.026 pessoas no Iraque. No mesmo ano, o total de mortes no trânsito brasileiro foi de 36.367, informa o Mapa da Violência.
Agora, de novo: o que isso significa? A imagem mental evocada é, certamente, hedionda -- carros e motocicletas brasileiros deixando um rastro de corpos maior que o de carros-bomba e lançadores de granadas. Motoristas matando mais que soldados, guerrilheiros e terroristas. A sensação de que deve ser mais seguro ir ao mercado em Fallujah do que descer para a praia de Santos no feriado... Epa, peraí. Há algo estranho nisso. Ou não? Alguém realmente acha que a Serra do Mar é mais perigosa, mesmo no sábado de carnaval, do que o Triângulo Sunita era em, digamos, 2004?
O que está faltando nesse quadro é contexto, algum dado que permita ancorar os números absolutos numa compreensão mais completa da realidade. Por exemplo: as populações envolvidas. Em 2006, para voltar ao ano mais sangrento da guerra, o Iraque tinha cerca de 30 milhões de habitantes; o Brasil, 190 milhões. Fazendo as contas, naquele ano, o risco de um iraquiano morrer na guerra era cinco vezes maior que o de um brasileiro morrer no trânsito. De fato, no acumulado de 2003 a 2009, o risco de um cidadão iraquiano morrer vítima de violência na guerra foi quatro vezes maior que o de um brasileiro se esborrachar numa rua ou estrada.
É bom notar que, mesmo postos em contexto, os números do Brasil não são nada animadores: se eu saio do meu país pacífico e vou para uma zona de guerra, minha expectativa seria de ver o risco de vida aumentar em dez ou doze vezes. Um aumento de apenas quatro ou cinco sugere que o lugar de onde saí não era tão pacífico assim, afinal.
Números absolutos têm valor de choque, mas o problema é que seu uso descontextualizado pode induzir ao erro e, no limite, é pura e simplesmente desonesto: por exemplo, deve ser verdade que mais mulheres são estupradas hoje em dia, no mundo, do que eram na Idade Média -- mas, antes de concluir que os direitos das mulheres sofreram uma aguda degradação no último meio milênio, lembre-se de que a população feminina do século XIII possivelmente equivalia a cerca de 6% da do mundo atual.
Esse tipo de manobra, a comparação de números absolutos vindos de contextos diversos, é algo em que jornalistas, principalmente, deveriam prestar mais atenção. E não embarcar em furadas apenas porque o número soa bem na manchete. Nem mesmo se a causa for boa e, por isso, a tentação, grande.
Rafa Spoladore likes this
05 Feb 10:53
Um ser dotado de poder ilimitado, morto e sepultado por seus inimigos, promete que um dia voltará à Terra. Mais: que seu retorno precipitará o fim do mundo e, em meio a uma série de pragas e sofrimentos, criará uma nova realidade, onde o ser onipotente reinará absoluto e onde seus adoradores fiéis, principalmente os que sofreram agruras e perseguições em seu nome, terão uma vida eterna de delícias. Já seus adversários e os que não acreditaram nele serão condenados a um sofrimento indescritível e infindável.
Responda rápido: estou falando de Jesus Cristo ou do Grande Cthulhu?
A vida e o trabalho do escritor americano H(oward) P(hilips) Lovecraft, criador do supracitado Cthulhu – monstro alienígena que dá nome ao conto O Chamado de Cthulhu, cuja publicação original, no pulp Weird Tales, completa 85 anos neste mês – , foram analisados sob as mais diversas chaves.
Há desde a psicanalítica (onde o desapreço do autor por frutos do mar, explícito na concepção de monstros sob a forma de lulas, peixes e crustáceos, já foi interpretada como sinal de repugnância pela genitália feminina) à política (onde os críticos costumam chamar atenção para o posicionamento racista e elitista que transparece em várias obras lovecraftianas). Menos conhecidas, no entanto, são as análises filosóficas e teológicas do trabalho de Lovecraft – e que, no entanto, existem: em 2010, os escritos de Lovecraft sobre religião foram reunidos pelo crítico e biógrafo S.T. Joshi no volume Against Religion
, com prefácio de Christopher Hitchens.
Joshi e o escritor, editor, crítico e teólogo (de formação batista, hoje ateu) Robert M. Price são, aliás, os principais intérpretes modernos do pensamento religioso de Lovecraft. E ambos apontam para um forte senso de humor subjacente ao trabalho desse escritor, que foi uma das vigas mestras da literatura de horror em língua inglesa – e, por tabela, de toda a cultura pop global – no século passado.
Até hoje a indústria cultural, por meio de cinema, quadrinhos e livros, não se cansa de reciclar os temas e clichês que estabelecidos por ele, como a ideia de que a mitologia humana não passa de uma distorção da ciência de alienígenas que visitaram a Terra no passado distante (não, isso não foi invenção de Erich Von Däniken).
Esse senso de humor se faz presente, por exemplo, no jogo estabelecido entre Lovecraft e outros escritores do mesmo período, como Robert E. Howard (criador do bárbaro Conan), no qual um autor citava criações do outro – monstros, livros, personagens – dentro de sua obra, dando a impressão de que ambos estavam a se referir a uma fonte comum: uma mitologia obscura, ou algum tipo de doutrina mística secreta.
O melhor exemplo desse jogo é o Necronomicon, livro fictício que conteria a verdadeira história do planeta Terra e de suas interações com raças de outros mundos e de outras dimensões. Inventado por Lovecraft e logo adotado pelos demais autores de seu círculo – que submetiam a terríveis torturas personagens que ousassem ler o tomo proibido – o livro que nunca existiu acabou sendo levado a sério por ocultistas os mais diversos, e não são poucas as supostas “traduções” do original que circulam no mercado.
Ateu, materialista e racionalista, Lovecraft certamente acharia graça disso. O paralelo entre o cristianismo e sua mitologia de deuses adormecidos que prometem retornar; de deuses que se reproduzem com mulheres humanas é forte demais para não ser notado. Embora, de fato, não tenha sido, durante muito tempo.
Isso talvez se deva à roupagem popularesca em que as histórias apareceram originalmente (impressas em pulp magazines) e à influência posterior de August Derleth. Principal popularizador da mitologia lovecraftiana nas décadas que se seguiram à morte do autor, Derleth era católico e, talvez inconscientemente, retrabalhou muito do “mito artificial” deixado por Lovecraft num molde mais palatável de um duelo milenar entre anjos e demônios, ainda que travestidos em alienígenas “do bem” e “do mal”.
Mas, como escreve Robert M. Price, “os leitores de The Dunwich Horror não demoraram em notar a paródia da narrativa do Evangelho nesse conto”. Nessa história, uma virgem norte-americana é sexualmente possuída por uma “divindade” e dá à luz um filho que é morto pelas autoridades, depois de manifestar poderes sobrenaturais e pretensões messiânicas.
No conto, no entanto, os eventos são narrados fora da ordem clara apresentada nesta sinopse, e toda a trama aparece sob a forma da investigação em torno do roubo de um exemplar do Necronomicon, que faz as vezes de “mcguffin” hitchcockiano. Isso permite encarar a narrativa como um mero mistério sobrenatural, na linha que seria explorada, décadas depois, por séries como Arquivo X (ou, mais recentemente, Fringe).
Mas quando o mote principal da trama é explicitado, o paralelo com os Evangelhos é inegável, e a sugestão de que o “horror de Dunwich” representa uma visão paródica da Segunda Vinda torna-se inescapável.
Já em O Chamado de Cthulhu, um monstro alienígena que dorme sob os oceanos reúne, por meio de mensagens telepáticas que surgem sob a forma de sonhos, um culto dedicado a adorá-lo e a preparar o mundo para o seu despertar – depois do qual a Terra será destruída e recriada.
O paralelo com a escatologia cristã – com as aparições do Cristo Ressuscitado, como a que animou Saulo de Tarso a vestir o manto do apostolado, substituídas pelos sonhos de Cthulhu, a igreja cristã pelo culto do monstro, a Nova Jerusalém do Apocalipse substituída pelo Reino de Cthulhu – também é claro.
O Chamado de Cthulhu já foi traduzido várias vezes no Brasil. A primeira versão talvez tenha sido a publicada no volume O Que Sussurrava nas Trevas, da editora GRD, lançado em 1966, e que inclui também The Dunwich Horror. Em temos mais recentes, a Hedra publicou um volume onde a aventura de Cthulhu é o conto –título.
O estilo carregado de adjetivos de Lovecraft torna a tarefa de traduzir sua obra para o português um tanto quanto inglória. Não apenas porque o ritmo poético da prosa é difícil de preservar, como também pelo problema da tensão: se, em inglês, a adjetivação às vezes ajuda a reforçar o suspense – com o substantivo que define a ameaça aparecendo apenas ao final de uma cadeia de qualificações de arrepiar os cabelos – na estrutura tradicional do português, onde os adjetivos vêm depois do substantivo, o efeito torna-se, apenas, tedioso. As traduções variam muito em qualidade, e minha recomendação para quem lê inglês é procurar os textos originais.
Uma última curiosidade: The Dunwich Horror foi filmado em 1970, com o papel da virgem condenada a dar à luz o filho do alienígena a cargo de Sandra Dee, que na década anterior tinha se firmado como um ídolo adolescente. O filme foi produzido por Roger Corman.
(Este texto reaproveita e amplia um artigo anterior, publicado no blog Terroristas da Conspiração)
Grande Cthulhu, 85
by Carlos Orsi
Um ser dotado de poder ilimitado, morto e sepultado por seus inimigos, promete que um dia voltará à Terra. Mais: que seu retorno precipitará o fim do mundo e, em meio a uma série de pragas e sofrimentos, criará uma nova realidade, onde o ser onipotente reinará absoluto e onde seus adoradores fiéis, principalmente os que sofreram agruras e perseguições em seu nome, terão uma vida eterna de delícias. Já seus adversários e os que não acreditaram nele serão condenados a um sofrimento indescritível e infindável.Responda rápido: estou falando de Jesus Cristo ou do Grande Cthulhu?
A vida e o trabalho do escritor americano H(oward) P(hilips) Lovecraft, criador do supracitado Cthulhu – monstro alienígena que dá nome ao conto O Chamado de Cthulhu, cuja publicação original, no pulp Weird Tales, completa 85 anos neste mês – , foram analisados sob as mais diversas chaves.
Há desde a psicanalítica (onde o desapreço do autor por frutos do mar, explícito na concepção de monstros sob a forma de lulas, peixes e crustáceos, já foi interpretada como sinal de repugnância pela genitália feminina) à política (onde os críticos costumam chamar atenção para o posicionamento racista e elitista que transparece em várias obras lovecraftianas). Menos conhecidas, no entanto, são as análises filosóficas e teológicas do trabalho de Lovecraft – e que, no entanto, existem: em 2010, os escritos de Lovecraft sobre religião foram reunidos pelo crítico e biógrafo S.T. Joshi no volume Against Religion
, com prefácio de Christopher Hitchens. Joshi e o escritor, editor, crítico e teólogo (de formação batista, hoje ateu) Robert M. Price são, aliás, os principais intérpretes modernos do pensamento religioso de Lovecraft. E ambos apontam para um forte senso de humor subjacente ao trabalho desse escritor, que foi uma das vigas mestras da literatura de horror em língua inglesa – e, por tabela, de toda a cultura pop global – no século passado.
Até hoje a indústria cultural, por meio de cinema, quadrinhos e livros, não se cansa de reciclar os temas e clichês que estabelecidos por ele, como a ideia de que a mitologia humana não passa de uma distorção da ciência de alienígenas que visitaram a Terra no passado distante (não, isso não foi invenção de Erich Von Däniken).
Esse senso de humor se faz presente, por exemplo, no jogo estabelecido entre Lovecraft e outros escritores do mesmo período, como Robert E. Howard (criador do bárbaro Conan), no qual um autor citava criações do outro – monstros, livros, personagens – dentro de sua obra, dando a impressão de que ambos estavam a se referir a uma fonte comum: uma mitologia obscura, ou algum tipo de doutrina mística secreta.
O melhor exemplo desse jogo é o Necronomicon, livro fictício que conteria a verdadeira história do planeta Terra e de suas interações com raças de outros mundos e de outras dimensões. Inventado por Lovecraft e logo adotado pelos demais autores de seu círculo – que submetiam a terríveis torturas personagens que ousassem ler o tomo proibido – o livro que nunca existiu acabou sendo levado a sério por ocultistas os mais diversos, e não são poucas as supostas “traduções” do original que circulam no mercado.
Ateu, materialista e racionalista, Lovecraft certamente acharia graça disso. O paralelo entre o cristianismo e sua mitologia de deuses adormecidos que prometem retornar; de deuses que se reproduzem com mulheres humanas é forte demais para não ser notado. Embora, de fato, não tenha sido, durante muito tempo.
Isso talvez se deva à roupagem popularesca em que as histórias apareceram originalmente (impressas em pulp magazines) e à influência posterior de August Derleth. Principal popularizador da mitologia lovecraftiana nas décadas que se seguiram à morte do autor, Derleth era católico e, talvez inconscientemente, retrabalhou muito do “mito artificial” deixado por Lovecraft num molde mais palatável de um duelo milenar entre anjos e demônios, ainda que travestidos em alienígenas “do bem” e “do mal”. Mas, como escreve Robert M. Price, “os leitores de The Dunwich Horror não demoraram em notar a paródia da narrativa do Evangelho nesse conto”. Nessa história, uma virgem norte-americana é sexualmente possuída por uma “divindade” e dá à luz um filho que é morto pelas autoridades, depois de manifestar poderes sobrenaturais e pretensões messiânicas.
No conto, no entanto, os eventos são narrados fora da ordem clara apresentada nesta sinopse, e toda a trama aparece sob a forma da investigação em torno do roubo de um exemplar do Necronomicon, que faz as vezes de “mcguffin” hitchcockiano. Isso permite encarar a narrativa como um mero mistério sobrenatural, na linha que seria explorada, décadas depois, por séries como Arquivo X (ou, mais recentemente, Fringe).
Mas quando o mote principal da trama é explicitado, o paralelo com os Evangelhos é inegável, e a sugestão de que o “horror de Dunwich” representa uma visão paródica da Segunda Vinda torna-se inescapável.
Já em O Chamado de Cthulhu, um monstro alienígena que dorme sob os oceanos reúne, por meio de mensagens telepáticas que surgem sob a forma de sonhos, um culto dedicado a adorá-lo e a preparar o mundo para o seu despertar – depois do qual a Terra será destruída e recriada.
O paralelo com a escatologia cristã – com as aparições do Cristo Ressuscitado, como a que animou Saulo de Tarso a vestir o manto do apostolado, substituídas pelos sonhos de Cthulhu, a igreja cristã pelo culto do monstro, a Nova Jerusalém do Apocalipse substituída pelo Reino de Cthulhu – também é claro.
O Chamado de Cthulhu já foi traduzido várias vezes no Brasil. A primeira versão talvez tenha sido a publicada no volume O Que Sussurrava nas Trevas, da editora GRD, lançado em 1966, e que inclui também The Dunwich Horror. Em temos mais recentes, a Hedra publicou um volume onde a aventura de Cthulhu é o conto –título.
O estilo carregado de adjetivos de Lovecraft torna a tarefa de traduzir sua obra para o português um tanto quanto inglória. Não apenas porque o ritmo poético da prosa é difícil de preservar, como também pelo problema da tensão: se, em inglês, a adjetivação às vezes ajuda a reforçar o suspense – com o substantivo que define a ameaça aparecendo apenas ao final de uma cadeia de qualificações de arrepiar os cabelos – na estrutura tradicional do português, onde os adjetivos vêm depois do substantivo, o efeito torna-se, apenas, tedioso. As traduções variam muito em qualidade, e minha recomendação para quem lê inglês é procurar os textos originais. Uma última curiosidade: The Dunwich Horror foi filmado em 1970, com o papel da virgem condenada a dar à luz o filho do alienígena a cargo de Sandra Dee, que na década anterior tinha se firmado como um ídolo adolescente. O filme foi produzido por Roger Corman.
(Este texto reaproveita e amplia um artigo anterior, publicado no blog Terroristas da Conspiração)
Rafa Spoladore likes this
29 Jan 19:26
A complicada missão de encontrar o distintivo no uniforme
by Cassio Zirpoli
Os primeiros patrocínios nos uniformes brasileiros surgiram na década de 1980.
Não foi fácil vencer a barreira cultural. Foi uma mancha no manto sagrado. O que hoje parece normal, naqueles tempos foi algo bastante controverso.
E olhe que era apenas um patrocinador, na parte frontal da camisa…
Em seguida, uma época na qual grandes empresas conseguiam domar o mercado do futebol nacional, como em 1987, por exemplo, com a Coca-Cola estampando a sua marca em quase todos times do módulo verde do Campeonato Brasileiro.
A partir dos anos 90 o patrocinador ganhou um espaço gigantesco no orçamento dos clubes. Em vários casos, superior à bilheteria com as partidas.
Nos últimos anos, o patrocínio na parte frontal da camisa ganhou concorrentes. Nas costas, na manga, no peito, embaixo do próprio patrocinador-master e até nas axilas…
Segundo as normas orgânicas da CBF, o espaço máximo para uma marca é de 525 centímetros quadrados, com até 35 centímetros de extensão.
E assim vivemos a era do abadá no Brasil. Não importa a divisão. Do Ypiranga ao Corinthians, que deverá ter um faturamento de R$ 300 milhões nesta temporada.
Não por acaso chegou o dia em que o jogador quase não achou o escudo…
Realmente, está ficando difícil. Que o diga Paulo Victor do CRB.
29 Jan 19:18
It Is Now A Felony To Unlock Your Smartphone
by JacobSloan
The gadgets that you paid for control you, not the other way around. The Atlantic on the most ridiculous law of 2013:
Starting this weekend it is illegal to unlock new phones to make them available on other carriers. Seriously: It’s embarrassing and unacceptable that we are at the mercy of prosecutorial and judicial discretion to avoid the implementation of draconian laws that could implicate average Americans in a crime subject to up to a $500,000 fine and up to five years in prison.
When did we decide that we wanted a law that could make unlocking your smartphone a criminal offense? The answer is that we never really decided. Instead, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998 to outlaw technologies that bypass copyright protections. In practice it has terrible, and widely acknowledged, negative consequences that affect consumers and new innovation. The DMCA leaves it up to the Librarian of Congress (LOC) to issue exemptions from the law, exceptions that were recognized to be necessary given the broad language of the statute.
After Saturday it will be illegal to unlock a new smartphone, thereby allowing it to switch carriers. This is a result of the exception to the DMCA lapsing. It was not a mistake, but rather an intentional choice by the Librarian of Congress, that this was no longer fair use and acceptable.
Laws that can place people in jail should be passed by Congress, not by the decree of the Librarian of Congress. We have no way to hold the Librarian of Congress accountable for wildly unfair laws. There are still plenty of crazy laws passed by elected officials, but at least we can then vote them out of office.
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29 Jan 18:55
Patente do Cetem inova ao usar produto em biodiesel e óleos vegetais
Rafa Spoladore likes this
29 Jan 18:55
Software simula comportamento de multidões em grandes eventos para evitar incidentes
Única no Brasil, solução criada com apoio da FINEP é 10 vezes mais barata que concorrentes internacionais.
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29 Jan 18:54
Touching on Physics [The Weizmann Wave]
by Weizmann Science Writer
What happens when a former physics-student-turned-documentary-director is invited to create a video clip for the first ever physics reunion? The answer is below.
You may not learn anything new about physics by watching it, but you will note that Weizmann President Prof. Daniel Zajfman and VP Prof. Israel Bar-Joseph are featured, along with others.
Touching Something No One Found
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29 Jan 18:50
DailyDirt: Looking For Smarter Animals
by Michael Ho
The search for intelligent life might be more fruitful if we started looking more closely at other animals right here on Earth. The progress of artificial intelligence in computers might also be surpassed by breeding a few hyper-intelligent pets someday. Some zoo animals are already playing around with iPads, so maybe we'll have some super smart cyborgs... In any case, here are just a few examples of projects that are studying how smart our fellow vertebrates might be.
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- DARPA is scanning dog brains with MRI machines to figure out which dogs are best suited for military dog training. The FIDOS (Functional Imaging to Develop Outstanding Service-Dogs) project could help train dogs more effectively for all kinds of tasks -- from detecting drugs to being better therapy companions. [url]
- PBS has a great documentary that follows how raccoons are adapting to urban living. Anyone who has tried to protect their garbage cans knows how wily raccoons are. [url]
- What animal would you use to model the cognitive development of human babies? If you said piglets, then maybe you should try being a neuroscientist at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois. [url]
- The problem-solving capabilities of captive hyenas appear to be a bit better than their wild cousins. The tests administered to these hyenas were admittedly a bit biased.... [url]
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29 Jan 18:49
So here's something you should probably know. Starting this past Sunday, January 27th, retailers can now charge up to four percent extra on purchases made using a credit card. More »
Stores Can Now Charge You Extra Just for Using a Credit Card
by Kyle Wagner
So here's something you should probably know. Starting this past Sunday, January 27th, retailers can now charge up to four percent extra on purchases made using a credit card. More »
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29 Jan 18:49
Holy crap, boobs! Apple last week excommunicated 500px, a photo-sharing app, from the App Store because apparently it made it too easy for people to find nudie pics. Looks like it's been cleansed and baptized, though, because Apple has welcomed 500px back into the fold. More »
500px Is Back in the App Store After All the Porn Bullshit
by Leslie Horn
Holy crap, boobs! Apple last week excommunicated 500px, a photo-sharing app, from the App Store because apparently it made it too easy for people to find nudie pics. Looks like it's been cleansed and baptized, though, because Apple has welcomed 500px back into the fold. More »
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