Archive for Science - page 3

I swiped the headline from within the story.  Couldn’t resist.  The story via Yahoo News is from Australia: School Bans Cartwheels.  Seems that the school principal initiated the rule because, you know, “someone could get hurt”.  Huh.  I had such high hope for the Ozzies.  In their defense, everyone except the principal at fault seems to think this is a bad idea, including her superiors at the Education Ministry or whatever they call it.

A few months ago I wrote about a study done in New Zealand where the elimination of such playground “rules” did not result in more injuries.  Not only that, but there was a decrease in bullying and the overall discipline at the school improved.   After that, I was hopeful that we might reverse the trend to childproof childhood.  Guess I was wrong.

At least that’s my opinion.  Every step forward is not neccessarily progress.

Let’s back up a little in case you aren’t familiar with the phrase “internet of things”.  More and more devices we use have microprocessors and internet connectivity built in for automation or for more efficient operation.  In practicality it means many things we use are becoming “smart”.  The “internet of things” refers to this grid of interconnected smart devices.

As I have stated in the past, I am skeptical of our implementation of new technologies, mostly in regard to the development of robotics and artificial intelligence.  Now you can add to that the smartification and internet connectivity of every damn thing we own.  Apparently I’m not alone.  At The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer have co-authored a piece entitled “When Everything Works Like Your Cell Phone” that outlines a few concerns starting with three things that happen to an object when it connects to the internet.  It becomes smart, it becomes hackable and it becomes something you no longer completeley own.  It goes downhill from there.

Companies are working on this technology in ways you probably would never imagine, in order to Make Your Life Easier.  Pull quote:

“Smartness” implies a smartphone-like upgrade cycle…This aspirational smartness is not just coming to watches. Any product that’s worth more than a few bucks will have some intelligence and communication abilities embedded in it. Companies that exist today are trying to create smart umbrellas and smart crockpots.

Do you want a crockpot that has to be replaced at every few years—or at least that will be forever upgrading itself? Would apps change your mind?

Let’s talk about a few examples that exist today.  The “smart” thermostat comes to mind.  The utility company will “give” you one – free of charge!  To help you save money on your bill.  How nice of them.  The little bastard will also rat you out to the utility company if you set it too low or too high, and the utility company can take control over it in certain situations.  Not really yours, is it?  What about your Smartphone?  Well, you can’t do everything you want with it.  Your only allowed to use it consistent with the carrier’s terms of service.  And you can’t unlock it and use it on another carrier.  Plus it spies on you.  Is it really yours?

So do you really want to be driving around in a Smart Car that won’t go as fast as you want it to?  You want to get to work today don’t you?  Click here to agree to our terms of service.  Don’t agree?  Get out and walk.  Do you want to have a Smart Toaster  or other Smart Appliances collecting data about your kitchen habits and sending them up to the cloud?  All just so you can control them with your smartphone without having to get up off the couch ten feet away?  I don’t.

The more automation simplfies our lives, the more it complicates our lives.  And the only reason to have autonomous machines is so that human decision making and judgement are not required for their operation.  You see where that’s going?  As our machines get smarter and smarter, we get dumber and dumber.  And dumberer.  Don’t believe me?  Look around.

I will make an exception for the Manhattan Project BarBot.  Lemme just look over these terms of service.  Hmmm……two drink maximum per person?

Dammit!

The Stonehenge ruin in England continues to pique our interest.  Built before the advent of written language, the motives of it creators have ever been a subject of curiosity and scholarly study.  According to this article at LiveScience.com, modern technology such as ground penetrating radar and computer modeling are being used to study the site and the surrounding area; the results are showing a vastly larger and more complex design to what is now believed to be a regional ritual site.  Notice that I said believed to be.  Speculation and educated guesswork is the order of the day since as I stated earlier, no written records exist.  So as researchers learn more about the people who built the monuments, they may have a better idea as to why they were built.

The earliest activity at the site, evidence of timber structures, dates from approximately 8000 years B.C., with the large  familiar stone structure having been built around 2600 years B.C.  The last known construction appears to have happened around 1600 years B.C.  which means that the organized activities surrounding the site have spanned a period of some 6,400 years!  The main activities performed here seem to be burials and cremations, and these apparently were ritual internment rather that human sacrifice.

Since the stones line up with various celestial events like the solstices, it is speculated that the site may be an astonomical observatory.  As it seems to coincide with the transition of the then current civilization (such as it was) from a hunting/gathering society to an agricultural one, perhaps the site served as a calendar so that crops could be planted at the correct time, and an accurate prediction of harvest time could be made.  I don’t know a lot about what type of belief system was practiced by the inhabitants of the area, but I assume they believed in deities that controlled natural forces (the heavens, the seasons, etc) and this calendar was part shrine to their deities as well.  The fact that they buried their dead here leads me to believe that it was also considered a pathway to the afterlife.  Strictly my opinions, as I said, I have no expertise in the area.

I don’t subscribe to the various theories of extraterrestrial involvement at Stonehenge.  I think that primitive people were very observant and adaptive and capable of great ingenuity when their very survival may have been at stake.  The history of our species and the collective experiences of our forebears are all part of what makes us who we are.  The things we have learned along the way are the reasons why we do what we do and so to better understand our past is to better understand ourselves.

If, like me you are naturally curious about our origins and history, it is well worth the few minutes of your time it will take to click this link and read the article at LiveScience.com.  There are several more informative links and a video within that article.  Enjoy!

The headline of this story at NBC.com is “Stephen Hawking Fears Higgs Boson Doomsday and He’s Not Alone“.  I have no idea what that actually means, but if Stephen Hawking fears it then so do I.  I guess that’s why he’s not alone.  Here is an article that explains what the Higgs Boson Doomsday is.  Let me see if I can get this straight – because the Higgs Boson, the energy field of which is the source of mass for everything in the universe, is estimated to be just the right mass in itself to cause the potential instability of said universe, there is a theoretical possibility that said universe might become unstable and instantaneously cease to exist.  Yeah.  I don’t understand it either.  But these guys do and they say it’s possible.  Ironically (!) if the mass of the Higgs Boson were different by just a few percent, we wouldn’t be doomed!  Boy did we luck out.  Nailed it on the first try.  Better go buy a lottery ticket.

But don’t worry:

“You won’t actually see it, because it will come at you at the speed of light,” Lykken said. “So in that sense don’t worry.”

Super.  We’re all gonna die instantly at any second.  But we won’t see it coming.  So don’t worry about it. Nope.  Don’t give it a second thought.

Stevie says don’t you worry ’bout a thing:

…Pretty Mama.  On second thought, forget the lottery ticket.  If I won and then the universe ended, I would have to kill myself.

With the exception of my (future)  Manhattan Project BarBot, maker of the “Perfect” Manhattan.  I’m gonna love that guy…err…thing.

“perfect”

But I digress.  I’ve written a few posts about my skepticism of Robotic Technology, referring (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek to the coming Robot Revolution.  I’ve also written a few posts about the differences between humans and animals, and now there’s information about a similarity that humans and chimpanzees share.  And it’s why I say “never trust a chimp”.  Turns out that Chimpanzees are natural born killers, and they prefer mob violence.  Apparently this is not new information to researchers, you just don’t hear about it because no one wants to think of cute little animals as potential murderers.  That’s right, I said murderers.  Chimps don’t kill for food.  They kill each other.  Just like us.  Isn’t that sweet?

Of course, we can only guess at the motives because chimps haven’t mastered language – yet.  So it’s going to be Robots or Chimps.  We’re screwed either way.

“They” being animals.  I lifted the post title from the Time.com article “What are Animals Thinking? (Hint:More Than You Suspect)”. There are some interesting observations in the short article, but after reading it turns out that it’s just a preview – almost an advertisement –  for the Time book “The Animal Mind” (On Newsstands Now!).

Since the most popular post on the blog is “What Makes a Human Different From an Animal?” I thought that this would be a natural topic to do a follow up post.  The original post ended up being more of a reflection on animal rights vs. human rights.  Not having read “The Animal Mind” because I do not know where I might find one of these “newsstand”  things, I can only go with the ideas put forth in the preview article which seem to focus more on animal intelligence and “intellect” if you will, based on animals’ exhibition of so-called “human” behaviors and their relative success at performing those behaviors.  There is no doubt that all animals have some degree of intelligence.  We’ve heard for years that some animals are “smarter” than others – A pig is smarter than a horse, which is smarter than a dog, which is smarter than etc, etc.  Also, a (fill in the blank) is as intelligent as a (blank) year old child.  A quote from the article:

“Animals, the research is proving, are creatures capable of reflection, bliss, worry and more. Not all of them in the same ways or to the same degrees, surely, but all of them in far deeper measures than we’ve ever believed.”

Interesting, if true.  I guess I’ll have to read “The Animal Mind” to find out how you measure whether an animal feels “bliss” or whether they worry.  I think that these type of “human behaviors”, if that’s what you want to call them, require a certain amount of self- awareness.  All animals are self-aware to some extent – they’d have to be to survive.  I think the question lies in determining how much of their behavior is geneticaly embedded “instictive” behavior and how much is driven by intellectual reasoning and emotion.  To the extent that certain behaviors are noted I think that it is interesting that the behaviors do not seem to overlap species which leads me to believe that much of it, no matter how human it seems, is instinct.

I don’t believe that cats groom themselves because they worry that their hair  doesn’t look good.  But that doesn’t mean that I like cats any less because of it.  There are a lot of people who are emotionally invested in portraying animals as “beings” – just look to the animal rights movement for proof.  I think animals have it better today than at any time in the past; machines have taken over a lot of the labor we used to use animals for.  The animals we eat are raised and slaughtered more humanely than in the past and we’re probably eating fewer of them to boot.  Animal cruelty is socially unacceptable today.  These are all good things.

Often I would like to know what is going on inside my dog’s head, though I don’t think there’s a lot of intellectual activity going on there.  But that won’t stop me from trying to live up her expectatations and to be the kind of person she thinks I am.  Or rather the kind of person I imagine that she thinks I am.

I have speculated that the future could get weird, and now the speculation is over – the future WILL get weird, no ifs ands or buts.  Here is the Prima Facie evidence: this article at ExtremeTech.com cites a report by The Pew Research Center that states “robotic sex partners will be commonplace” by 2025.  What’s weird about that you may ask?  Well, most of you will just say “Eeewww”, but some of you may ask.  Here’s a clue:

I can’t wait for all the political unrest over people demanding the right to marry their Dutch Wives.  And don’t think that the sexbots wouldn’t turn on us in a minute.  Turn ON us, not turn us on.  Get your mind out of the gutter.

I have contemplated a time or two the imminent Robot Revolution.  These next two stories only add to my paranoia.  Did I say that out loud?  I mean apprehension.

The first story is about scientists who have taught (programmed?) swarms of micro-robots to act in unison to form larger objects or shapes.  They even  title the article “Mini-robots Self-organise into Army”.  You know…like the hordes of androids in the movie “I, Robot”.  That’s reassuring.

The next story is about one of those industries that is uniquely Japanese – the Sex Doll Industry.  Yes, there is a Japanese Sex Doll Industry,  Well, they call them “Dutch Wives”.  Read the story if you don’t believe me.  No, they don’t explain why they call the that, and I’m not sure I want to know.  They are simply detailed, life like poseable dolls with realistic….never mind.  They’re not actual robots – yet.

Anyhoo…the story is about how the industry has reached “the next level” in creating the perfect Dutch Wife.  The only conclusion I can reach is that we are destined to be taken over by a sentient self-organising army of Dutch Wives with perfect skin.  And that could get weird.

Some rumors were started on the internet that an eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano was imminent;   Alternative new sites had reported earthquakes, road closures, and that the park was being evacuated in advance of an eruption, and so the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory felt obligated to release a statement denying the “reports”. The YVO released an official statement  denying the rumors and “reports”:  Yellowstone Park Adresses Rumors of Earthquakes, Eruptions and Evacuations.  

This immediately fueled internet rumors and alternative news source reports that a Large Asteroid Impact on the Continental United States is imminent.

Having been busy the last few days I have not had time to note the 45th Anniversaries of the first manned moon landing by Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969 and the first men walking on the moon – Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin on July 21.  I was twelve years old when it happened, and I remember the interest in the event was intense and universal.  It was broadcast live on all three major networks, TV and radio were the only sources for live information at that time – no internet or cable TV yet.  Looking back now, especially at the moon landing sequence, it was a little risky airing it live.  Some years afterward we found out that the landing computer “overloaded” and began spewing error codes, and rather than wasting effort to translate the codes Armstrong and Aldrin shut it off and flew the Eagle in manually.  They landed with 30 seconds of fuel remaining.  Here are some highlights:

People worldwide were glued to their TV sets.  For at least a brief moment, it seemed humanity shared a common dream, embodied by two men and an idea.  It was a monumental feat carried out at great risk.  I do not believe that a mission like this could even be carried out today as risk averse as we seem to be, and as evidenced by the fact that manned space flight has been all but abandoned.  And we are worse off for it.