Isle Royale

Years, that is.  It’s the anniversary of Galileo discovering Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto orbiting Jupiter.

Read more about it here and here.

So since I took twenty minutes of my time I ask you to take twenty minutes of your time to review this TED talk on A Brief History of Violence by Harvard linguist, Steven Pinker. Shotts if you are looking for an “popularized” science book, you can’t go wrong with anything by Pinker though I have only read The Language Instinct.

Anyway, this is sort of an evidenced based “feel good” story about how the chances of human being killed by another human have consistently dropped throughout history. Pinker talks about why we may believe that the opposite is true and what we may have done right in the last 400 years or so to make this possible. Please take time to view this. I think it’s really important.

The thing that has made me uncomfortable about Peters statement is that it seems that every action can be defended as serving a need.

The thing that I have been wrestling over with Liz’s statement is that it can be taken to imply a sort of determinism that denies freewill, which I’m not sure I’m ready to give up yet.

J.E.’s statement may explain why I would make sacrifices for friends and family, but it explains nothing about a character such as Mother Teresa, Paul Farmer, or Simone Veil. I also think that IF genocide can be argued as an evolutionary process, I would in turn then suggest that evolutionary processes, at such times, should be resisted. This thinking is what led some of the Nazi ideas of Eugenics to take hold in the United States during the forties.

I want to make myself clear. This is in no way to be seen as an attempt to convince anyone of anything. It is merely my attempt to try to understand things more fully.

At any rate, I’ll be dipping into the Moral Animal after the Berger book. My sister Kathleen heard Dawkins speak at K.U. a while back and we had a good discussion about his book, I think it’s called The Selfish Gene. I have not read it, but may yet. Though admittedly, I have other things to do.

I feel that Paul Farmer has had thoughts about these kinds of things from quotes of his in the Kidder book. I originally said I wasn’t going to quote the blasted book, but who am I kidding. No one is planning on reading the book any time soon and no one responded to Farmer’s article I posted a link to a while back. So here’s the quotes.

“‘If you’re making sacrifices, unless you’re automatically following some rule, it stands to reason that you’re trying to lessen some psychic discomfort. So, for example, if I took steps to be a doctor for those who don’t have medical care, it could be regarded as a sacrifice, but it could also be regarded as a way to deal with ambivalence.’ He went on, and his voice changed a little. He didn’t bristle, but his tone had an edge: ‘I feel ambivalent about selling my services in a world where some can’t afford to buy them. You CAN feel ambivalent about that, because you should feel ambivalent. COMMA.’

This was for me one of the first of many encounters with Farmer’s use of the word COMMA, placed at the end of a sentence. It stood for the word that would follow the comma, which was asshole. I understood he wasn’t calling me one – he would never do that; he was almost invariably courteous. Comma was always directed at third parties, at those who felt comfortable with the current distrubution of money and medicine in the world. And the implication, of course, was that you weren’t one of those. Were you?”

And then this, perhaps most challenging from Farmer:

“‘When others write about people who live on the edge, who challenge their comfortable lives – as it has happened to me – they usually do it in a way that allows the reader a way out. You could render generosity into pathology, commitment into obsession.That’s all in the repertory of someone who wants to put the reader at ease rather than conveying the truth in a compelling manner.’”

I declare this the king of Goldberg machines:  http://baynhamtyers.com/contraptionII.html

Cocaine + Corn=
http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/article.html?in_article_id=54522&in_page_id=2

Our childhood dreams are a reality: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/transportation/4217989.html

The little red spot: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/technology/technology.html?in_article_id=452130&in_page_id=1965

J.E.’s next clock: http://technabob.com/blog/2007/06/18/modern-flip-clock-updates-an-old-standard/

The new Transformers movie is already obsolete: http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/06/more_than_meets_the_eye

Nature already had it figured out: http://www.sycamorefan.com/fan/feature/features.html

Female Chimps Can Become Killers

Scientists in Scotland have discovered that female chimpanzees can be just as violent as their male counterparts.

The St Andrews University psychologists found examples of female chimps killing the offspring of incoming mothers, previously regarded as a male trait.

The Fife team has been studying chimps in the Budongo Forest, Uganda.

The researchers said only three previous instances of lethal aggression in wild female chimps had been documented in the past 50 years.

The belief was that male and females differed greatly in nature but the psychologists found that if the chimps’ resources come under threat, the females could become just as aggressive as males.

While observing chimps in the Sonso community, the researchers came across three examples of female apes killing the offspring of incoming mothers.

One attack was so violent that a baby chimp’s head was bitten off.

Simon Townsend, who led the study, said: “It’s true that males are much more often seen to engage in extreme physical violence than females, and this has led to the notion of violent and demonic males in contrast to quite peaceful females.

“However, our research shows that, under the right socio-ecological circumstances, these chimp gender stereotypes collapse completely.

“If their resources are under threat, females can become just as violently aggressive as males.”

Similar behaviour was described by a leading primatologist in the 1970s, but her findings were later disregarded as inconsistent.

Mr Townsend said female aggression only occurred under specific circumstances.

He added that an increase of immigrant females entering the Sonso community had put pressure on food and mate resources, which had caused the violence.

“It is impossible to predict when another instance may occur,” Mr Townsend said.

“However, we are very interested in keeping a close eye on levels of female aggression in the Sonso community, especially in the instances when new females attempt to immigrate.”

For the next few Mondays I’m going to try to post a science related. Today I’ve expurgated Salon’s review of Daniel H. Wilson’s “Where’s My Jetpack”. You can also read the complete review but if you are not a Salon subscriber you may have to watch an advert.

Staring out of my window in Manhattan’s East Village the other day, it struck me suddenly that the street scene below did not differ in any significant way from how it would have looked in 1967. Maybe even 1947. Oh, the design of automobiles has changed a bit, but combustion-engine-propelled ground-level vehicles are still how we get around, as opposed to flying cars or teleportation. Pedestrians trudge along sidewalks rather than swooshing along high-speed moving travelator. 21st century New York looks distressingly nonfuturistic. For a former science science fiction fanatic like me, this is brutally disappointing.

Nostalgia for the future, neostalgia — whatever you wanna call this peculiar unrequited feeling — is widespread enough to constitute a market. Enter Daniel H. Wilson’s “Where’s My Jetpack? A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived.” This paperback sometimes strikes a melancholy note: A passage on moon colonies, which the New York Times in 1969 predicted were a mere 20 years away, notes that “the centerpiece of Disney’s Tomorrowland attraction was the luxurious Moonliner spaceship. But a future that included giant glass moon domes never appeared. Tomorrowland was torn down.”

Some of the best material here entails a sort of archaeology of stillborn or prematurely abandoned futures. In the 1960s, for instance, concerted attempts were made to build living environments at the bottom of the ocean, in the form of the U.S. Navy’s Sealab program. But instead of aquadome cities nestling on the ocean floor and a massive exodus of pioneers emigrating to settle the briny depths, all that remains today of the dream is a solitary subaquatic hotel, the Jules Undersea Lodge, located just off Key Largo, Fla.…

Another classic futuristic idea made real is “cultured meat,” i.e., animal protein grown in the laboratory, where, Wilson reports, it is repeatedly stretched as a surrogate for physical exercise, in order to give it the texture of a living, active organism. This grotesque technology was memorably anticipated in Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s 1952 novel “The Space Merchants,” a corporate dystopia of the 21st century in which peon workers hack slices off a gigantic blob of animate but nonsentient poultry breast called Chicken Little. But in our nonfictional 21st century, the idea languishes in the laboratory thanks to consumer resistance. Our cultural biases reject cultured meat as gross, unnatural, an abomination. Indeed, popular taste is trending the opposite way, toward the organic, the uncaged, the nonprocessed.

Wilson’s talk of space elevators and other grandiose inventions like solar mirrors or the fully enclosed city indicates how our expectations of the “futuristic” have undergone an insidious scaling down in recent decades. Mostly, “the future” seems to infiltrate our lives in a low-key, subtle fashion. In their own way, the miniaturization of communications technology (cellphones, BlackBerrys, etc.) and the compression of information (iPods, MP3s, YouTube, downloadable movies, etc.) are just as mind-blowing as the space stations and robots once pictured as the everyday scenery of 21st century life. Macro simply looks way more impressive than micro.

Sometimes it feels as if progress itself has actually slowed down, with the 1960s as the climax of a 20th century surge of innovation, and the decades that followed consisting of a weird mix of consolidation, stagnation and rollback. Certainly change in the first half of the 20th century seemed to manifest itself in the most dramatic and hubristic manner. It was an era of massive feats of centralized planning and public investment: huge dams; five-year plans of accelerated industrialization; gigantic state-administered projects of rural electrification, freeway construction and poverty banishment. Science fiction writers who grew up with this kind of thing (including the darker side of “public works” — the mobilization of entire populations and economies for war, the Soviet collectivization of peasant farms that resulted in massive famine, genocide) naturally imagined that change would continue to unfold in this dynamic and grandiose fashion. So they foresaw things like the emergence of cities enclosed inside giant skyscrapers and grain harvested by combines the size of small ships voyaging across vast prairies.

The 1950s and 1960s were characterized by future-mindedness, an ethos of foresight that attempted not just to identify probable outcomes but to steer reality toward preferred ones. It’s no coincidence that those decades were the boom years for both sci-fi and a spirit of neophilia in the culture generally — the streamlined and shiny aesthetic of modernity that embraced plastics, man-made fabrics and glistening chrome as the true materials of the New Frontier.

Today we seem to have trouble picturing the future, except in cataclysmic terms or as the present gone worse (“Children of Men”). Our inability to generate positive and alluring images of tomorrow’s world has been accompanied by the fading prominence of futurology as a form of popular nonfiction. It carries on as an academic discipline, as research and speculation conducted by think tanks and government-funded bodies. But there are no modern equivalents of Buckminster Fuller or Alvin Toffler. The latter, probably still the most famous futurologist in the world, warned in his 1970 bestseller “Future Shock” that change was moving too fast for ordinary citizens’ nervous systems and adaptive mechanisms to cope with; 1980′s “The Third Wave” sounded a more positive note about the democratic possibilities of technology. But Toffler was just the most visible exponent of a bustling paperback subgenre of “popular thought.”.

In the ’80s, thinking about the future in nonnegative terms seemed to become almost impossible. Yesteryear seemed more attractive: Postmodernism and retro recycling ruled popular culture, while politically the presiding spirits of the era, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, were dedicated to restoration of an older order, to rolling back the gains of the abhorred ’60s… and the bestsellers in the “popular thought” tended to be jeremiads and “Where did we go wrong?” investigations like Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” (1985) and Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” (1987).

The ’90s, however, saw a slight resurgence of futurism, driven by the information technology boom, theorized by magazines like Wired and Mondo 2000, soundtracked by another wave of electronic music (the techno-tronica rave-olution). While some of the new breed of futurologists were classic gee-whiz technology types like Kevin Kelly, others were “zippies,” hippies sans any Luddite technophobia or back-to-the-land nostalgia, people like Jaron Lanier and Ray Kurzweil.

After the info-tech boom’s bust and 9/11, we haven’t heard as much from these digi-prophets. All that Dow Jones-indexed mania has sagged to a sour calm. Futurology as a popular nonfiction genre has been largely reduced to short-term trend watching, cool hunting in the service of marketing people and brand makers.

Then again, perhaps sociocultural and political prediction is simply a mug’s game. In the 1970s, no one would or could have imagined that the dominant form of pop music of the last two decades of the 20th century would be rhythmatized boasts and threats delivered over beats; few would have foreseen the emergence of reality TV as the most popular entertainment format. On the political front, the annals of sci-fi are littered with dystopian soothsayings that now look laughably off-base, from Anthony Burgess’ “1985,” a 1978 novel about a trade-union-dominated U.K. of the near future in which the country is brought to a standstill on a weekly basis by general strikes, to Kingsley Amis’ 1980 novel “Russian Hide-and-Seek,” a vision of Britain 50 years after its conquest by the Soviets. “Where’s My Jetpack?” shrewdly sticks to science and technology. But this relentless focus on machines, gadgets and life-enhancing innovations means that Wilson never touches on that whole other aspect of the “unrequited future” — the dismay and disbelief felt by many who came of age in the ’60s and ’70s only to witness a drastic deceleration in the rate of social and cultural progress.

Perhaps the expectations of the 1960s, that era of rampant radicalisms, were hopelessly unrealistic. Still, if you grew up, like me, reading radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone (who argued in “The Dialectic of Sex” that female liberation would come only with the invention of an artificial womb that could unshackle women from the procreative function) or New Wave of science fiction authors like Thomas M. Disch (who in his novel “334″ imagined men being able to get mammary implants and breast-feed their offspring), scanning contemporary popular culture with its supermodel competitions, desperate housewives and scantily clad pop divas is acutely disheartening. And these are about gender, just one zone of stalled progress or outright regression. Race, gay rights, drugs, socioeconomic equality, religion — on just about every front, things either are not nearly as advanced as we’d have once expected or have actually gone into reverse. Forget the goddamn jetpack: It’s the sociocultural version of the “amazing future that never arrived” that really warrants our anguish.

R.I.P.?

]]> http://www.wearethehollowmen.com/2007/04/whats-going-on-with-apis-mellifera/feed/ 15 http://www.wearethehollowmen.com/2007/01/rapatronic-wednesday/ http://www.wearethehollowmen.com/2007/01/rapatronic-wednesday/#comments Thu, 04 Jan 2007 02:35:31 +0000 J.E. http://www.wearethehollowmen.com/2007/je/rapatronic-wednesday/ From Damn Interesting (one of my favorite ways of wasting time on the internet).

I saw this for the first time two months ago and the images have set up shop in the same part of my brain that houses the 500 kV video I posted last month. I find these images sublime and hypnotic — like catching a glimpse of the end and beginning of the universe.

During the early days of atomic bomb experiments in the 1940s, nuclear weapons scientists had some difficulty studying the growth of nuclear fireballs in test detonations. These fireballs expanded so rapidly that even the best cameras of that time were unable to capture anything more than a blurry, over-exposed frame for the first several seconds of the explosion.

Before long a professor of electrical engineering from MIT named Harold Eugene “Doc” Edgerton invented the rapatronic camera, a device capable of capturing images from the fleeting instant directly following a nuclear explosion. These single-use cameras were able to snap a photo one ten-millionth of a second after detonation from about seven miles away, with an exposure time of as little as ten nanoseconds. At that instant, a typical fireball had already reached about 100 feet in diameter, with temperatures three times hotter than the surface of the sun.

I have recently been thinking in systems theories, particularly as they partain to groups like ours. How closely does life imitate art, I ponder. In a system, each part of that system serves a function and hopefully the whole of the system is able to obtain homeostasis, that is to say, a conistancy in functioning. Our group, I would contend has been consistent over time to a degree, and has righted itself here and there over the years. So, when TV shows, movies, and theater is written, one wonders how much of what they are trying to capture could be represented in our little group. What I would suggest is that this may occur more than we think.

An interesting little experiment we might do here is to have each person consider the cast of a few shows and movies and submit them to me. Feel free to add shows, or movies we might all have some degree of familiarity with. What I would be interested in is:

1) how we see ourselves; what roles we envision ourselves in
2) how others see us
3) how well those match.

This may give us some clues as to some of the roles we fulfill with in the structure of our group. Some obvious shows: Star Trek (original and next generation), Lost, U2 (not a written cast, but a group whose members function as a system), Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, M*A*S*H*, the Office. Maybe we want to choose 2 or three to get started. Suggestions? Send them to me this week, and I will tally and report on them next Monday. I am also open to any suggestions on how to better this experiment.

The next line of business is not related with any intention to the first. I would submit that we all look at taking 5 minutes and filling out a Myers-Briggs test. Human Metrics has one that has a number of questions which should provide some validity to the project. This is strictly for fun only, and does not have any problematic mental health implications. This is a test used primarily by psychologists and is a fun way to compare what the test says about personality traits so we might compare how that measures up with observation of self and others. Really not much more than a conversation peice which may give everyone a little insight about themselves and how they function and work, what strengths they might have. I would be interested to get feedback on how whether or not everyone feels the tool is accurate or inaccurate and why. There are several of these on line, and they are not the actual test, but my experience has been that they are fairly predictive in capturing the flavor of the test. This one is a little longer than the others which should help create more validity. There are no right answers just how you feel. being honest with yourself and not playing to the bias that you feel the questionare is seeking is most likely to result in the most accurate tabulations. I took it and will take it again after I post to see if my result is consistent again. I was an INTJ.

Here is one more if you get bored or want to compare your result to another test.

I am looking forward to hearing what you guys find out. By the way, Happy New Year to all.

Here is my offering: The Fletcher Capstan Table.

[quicktime width="320" height="260"]http://www.dbfletcher.com/files/dbfletcher_capstan_schwartz.mov[/quicktime]

History is darkened by forgetting discoveries like this: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/12/07/forgotten_invention_.html

Here’s more:
http://www.rexresearch.com/wilkes/1wilkes.htm