Lugnasa Hiroshima Moon
How about that? Mars and us.
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Lugnasa Hiroshima Moon
Woollies met for our first Monday restaurant meal at an Indian restaurant near Wayzata. So-so food, but great conversation.
The prime topic of the night was an epistemological one. Mark said he reserved judgement on the facticity of the Curiosity project. More than once he said he wanted to check other sources, see if they agreed. This comes in part from a deep disillusionment with the government during the Vietnam war as well as an incident involving his father. (Which I didn’t hear. It was noisy.) It also comes, I suspect, from his creative personality which prizes openness, non-foreclosure. It comes, too, from a knowledge of the world of science gained while creating exhibits for the Minnesota Science Museum.
At any rate Tom, Bill and I had no question about the Curiosity landing, at least not as to its occurrence. We went back and forth for a hour or so over what constitutes evidence, the possible reasons for deception, the notion that some biases can be inherent to the observer (sexism, mechanistic as opposed to vitalistic understandings–well, we didn’t really discuss this, but we could’ve, if I’d thought about it then, accepting rather than skeptical bents).
It is not my usual experience to find someone being more skeptical than I am and I had to consider my own gullibility factor. It may be that I’m too quick to accept the work of physicists, astronomers, NASA engineers but I see no reason to believe that right now. I proposed a continuum of science from the realm of physics, astronomy, chemistry–the hard sciences, with a mid-point perhaps being biology and extending on to experimental psychology and economics, for example. I have less skepticism about the hard sciences and the work in them than I do about the biological sciences and I’m definitely show me when it comes to the softer end of this continuum.
This was an intense, even impassioned, but calm and deliberate conversation. The kind I hope I can have more and more despite my tendency to jump in with both feet.
Thanks, guys.
Wow
Lugnasa Hiroshima Moon
These are the first images taken by NASA’s rover Curiosity after landing in Gale Crater on Mars, shot with the rover’s Hazcam cameras. The image on the left shows one of the rover’s wheels. When it first showed up on the screen in JPL’s mission control, someone could be heard shouting “It’s the wheel, it’s the wheel!” The image on the right shows rocks, dust, and the rover’s shadow on the surface of Mars.
Shortly after these images were sent to Earth, the rover’s signal was blocked by Gale Crater’s central peak, known as Mt. Sharp. We’ll bring you more images from Curiosity as they become available.
Images: JPL/NASA
Curious? Watch (Correction on Landing Date–August 6th, not the 5th)
Lugnasa Hiroshima Moon
Watch this one-ton lab-on-wheels land on Mars.
Watch Curiosity’s Landing!
Aug 5, 2012 10:31 p.m. Pacific
Aug 6, 2012 1:31 a.m. Eastern
Aug 6, 2012 5:31 a.m. Universal
Countdown to landing:
| 1 days |
: | 12 hrs |
: | 29 mins |
: | 6 secs |
Watch NASA TV Show Online
Begins Aug 5: 2012
8:30 p.m. Pacific
11:30 p.m. Eastern
Find Live Events in Your Town
Event Map
Mission Briefing Schedule
Where? See the following from Wired.com:
The first place to check out will be here, at Wired Science, where we will be providing two live feeds from JPL, the rover’s headquarters, via NASA TV. The first feed will feature commentary from scientists and engineers who work on Curiosity and will play Aug. 5 from 8:30 to 11 p.m. Pacific (11:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. Eastern) and then again from 12:30 to 1:30 a.m. Pacific (3:30 to 4:30 Eastern) on Aug. 6. For those looking for to get the nitty-gritty behind-the-scenes details, the second feed will carry only audio from mission controllers regarding Curiosity’s progress and will begin on Aug. 5 at 8:30 p.m. Pacific (11:30 Eastern). If all goes well, NASA has stated that they might be able to share the first image from the ground during these feeds, likely a shot of the rover’s wheel indicating that everything’s in working order.
We will also host another great feed created by Universe Today, the SETI Institute, and CosmoQuest. On their Google+ page, the team will have commentary by astronomers Pamela Gay and Phil Plait and feature live coverage from JPL and the Planetary Society’s PlanetFest with reporters Scott Lewis and Amy Shira Teitel. Those interested can find more information and sign up to “attend” the Hangout on Air. The show will begin at 8 p.m. Pacific (11 p.m. Eastern) and go four hours, covering the entire landing sequence and aftermath.
One more feed will be from the Exploratorium in San Francisco. This webcast will start at 10:15 p.m. Pacific (1:15 a.m. Eastern) on Aug. 5, just when the rover is expected to be touching its wheels down on Mars. The museum’s staff and visiting scientists will be on hand to talk all about the exciting mission and provide updates as they come in.
A.C. Not Run A.C.
Summer Hiroshima Moon
When I have to keep calling a repair service to fix the same thing over and over, I begin to feel weird about it. Not guilty exactly, but weird. Case in point: our a.c. I called yesterday because it had stopped. The first time I called it started when I turned it back on for the repairman. Yesterday it started just as the next guy called to say he was on his way. WTF.
(Just put Kate in mind with the sword. Our house.)
Last night it went out again. OK. Evidence. Kate asked if I had a recorder. No. But, she said, how about a movie on the phone? Oh, yeah. I can do that. [after checking] Then, it does its dead a.c. thing and I’m there. With my hand-held computer. (phone is incidental, let’s admit it.) Click on video. And, voila, I have 26 seconds of humming, thrumming and then OMG I can’t stand it anymore thunk just before the whole thing stops. Again.
Also, we counted. Well, Kate counted the number of times it performed this same activity. 17 times in one hour. So. We have empirical evidence quantified over time. That should do it.
So, now I don’t feel weird. Maybe it’s a man thing, not wanting to admit I don’t know, can’t fix it? Nah. I can’t fix anything, so an air conditioner? Well above my fix-it paygrade.
Then there’s that damn shower door.
The Big Blue Brain
Summer Under the Lily Moon
Oops. The Human Brain Project has a featured article in this month’s SA.
The blue brain project was an early work created, like the Human Brain Project, at the Brain and Mind Institute. Don’t know what they’re smoking over there in Switzerland, but it must be powerful stuff.
The blue brain project has a feature article in Scientific American:
*”Reconstructing the brain piece by piece and building a virtual brain in a supercomputer—these are some of the goals of the Blue Brain Project. The virtual brain will be an exceptional tool giving neuroscientists a new understanding of the brain and a better understanding of neurological diseases.
The Blue Brain project began in 2005 with an agreement between the EPFL and IBM, which supplied the BlueGene/L supercomputer acquired by EPFL to build the virtual brain.
The computing power needed is considerable. Each simulated neuron requires the equivalent of a laptop computer. A model of the whole brain would have billions. Supercomputing technology is rapidly approaching a level where simulating the whole brain becomes a concrete possibility.
As a first step, the project succeeded in simulating a rat cortical column. This neuronal network, the size of a pinhead, recurs repeatedly in the cortex. A rat’s brain has about 100,000 columns of in the order of 10,000 neurons each. In humans, the numbers are dizzying—a human cortex may have as many as two million columns, each having in the order of 100,000 neurons each.
Blue Brain is a resounding success. In five years of work, Henry Markram’s team has perfected a facility that can create realistic models of one of the brain’s essential building blocks. This process is entirely data driven and essentially automatically executed on the supercomputer. Meanwhile the generated models show a behavior already observed in years of neuroscientific experiments. These models will be basic building blocks for larger scale models leading towards a complete virtual brain.”
A reasonable caveat: I’m a big fan of IBM’s Brain and Mind Institute (BMI) and the Blue Brain project. Initiated in May 2005, the Blue Brain project is an attempt to to model the mammalian cerebral cortex with computers. The intention is not to re-create the actual physical structure of the brain, but to simulate it using arrays of supercomputers. Ultimately, the developers are hoping to create biologically realistic models of neurons. In fact, the results of the simulation will be experimentally tested against biological columns.
But I take exception to the recent claim that IBM has created a simulation that is supposedly on par, in terms of complexity and scale, with an actual cat’s brain. The media tends to sensationalize these sorts of achievements, and in this case, grossly overstate (and even misstate) the actual accomplishment.
Audacity
Beltane Garlic Moon
Here there be giants. Fin de siecle Europe. We’ve not recovered yet from the explosion of ideas that erupted there: quantum mechanics, relativity, Marxism, symbolists, dada, surrealism, the airplane, electricity, lights, antibiotics, cubism, expressionism, fauvism, psychoanalysis, world war.
Just finished watching A Dangerous Method with Vigo Mortennsen as Freud, Michael Fassbender as Jung and Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein. To my taste Cronenberg’s focus on Jung’s mistress tilted the film away from the revolutionary work Freud and Jung had created. But, perhaps my approach would lead more to documentary.
Still, what I got was a clear sense of the frisson between them and the astonishing, breath-taking really, courage it took to think the thoughts and engage in the work they did. That’s what led me back to the fin de siecle.
There were radicals alive. It must have been in the water. Seeing visions. Looking inside the mind. Down inside the atom. How to lift humankind into the air. How to cure disease.
The audacity and daring inspires me, makes me want to tread as far out on the pier as I can go, to risk falling into the void, the abyss. To see. To feel. To embrace.
To Live In This World
Beltane Garlic Moon
…To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Mary Oliver’s In Blackwater Woods
Things of metal and gears. Engines and oil. Brake cylinders and transmissions. These are not mortal things. They are inanimate. Without feeling or care. Whether they are here or there does not matter to them.
So we say.
And yet. I just watched the tow trucker driver hook up my 1994 Celica, red and still shiny, a car the like of which I’ll never own again. He has taken the red car, as I always called it, away.
A rational decision. 273,000 miles, not quite to 300,000 which I wanted, irrationally, to reach. We can’t afford two cars anymore. And it had begun to do this and that. Though it always had, some. But now, we didn’t need it.
The boy is gone. Once in junior high and high school the boy and I rode in that car ten times a week, back and forth to St. Paul, every two weeks. It carried us and kept us warm, safe.
He’s been gone, of course, for years. He went off to college in 2000 and at that time the red car was 6 years old. I drove it to the Sierra Club, to the Woollies, to the MIA. I drove it to Denver and down to Florida to see the boy after he went off to the Air Force.
There did come a time, five years ago or so, when I no longer trusted it for long trips. So those ceased. Then, its winter performance began to lag, the engine knocking sometimes, sometimes tires blowing out. So I drove it less and less in the winter. It could no longer climb the driveway in icy weather. Much like me.
It had become old. Not feeble, never feeble. It could still take the big curve off 35 at 70 
mph, laying flat in the lane, as if on a city street. Its engine always had plenty for passing, for getting in and out of traffic. But it wasn’t the car it used to be.
And now it’s gone.
Science and Wonder
Beltane Garlic Moon
Why all the attention to the transit of Venus? People lined up in the Tate Astronomy Lab to view through 4 scopes and the line Kate and I were in took at least ten minutes to inch us forward for our few seconds of viewing time.
This was an event. A celebration of the heavens, rather than a celebration aimed at getting into heaven. Heaven knows we were already there. Hubble looked on these proceedings, too.
This had a definite secular feel to me, a coming together around the scientist, their domain, but in so doing reclaiming science as our mutual endeavor, not the province of cloistered brainiacs, but a common work joyfully embraced by all.
We are, as someone put it, the universe seeing itself. That was what this felt like.
It also revealed to me a public hunger, the science literate want to lay hands on the tools and observations that make science what it is. We want to see the transit of Venus just as, I’m sure, we want to see DNA sequenced, hydrology experiments, atom smashing and whatever can make the wonder, the deep miracle of our universe visible.
In my mind this might be the first of many such encounters between the thoughtful, systematic observer/hypothesizers and the just folks who also want to see, feel, touch.
Auntie Biotic
Spring Beltane Moon
Kate is home and her arm (cellulitis) looks much better. Still a ways to go both on the antibiotics and healing, but the right direction. Among the vagaries of strong antibiotic treatment is its kill all nature. Like Round-up can’t tell the difference between weed and grass, most antibiotics can’t tell the difference between the pathogens and the friendly flora and fauna of your gut.
As a large symbiotic organism with literally billions of helper one-celled creatures throughout our body, it’s not a good idea to kill the guest-workers. It would be sort of like throwing all the immigrants in jail (or deporting them) that you need to do the work in agriculture, manufacturing and domestic services. Oh, wait…
How does the old song go? You don’t know what you’ve got ’til its gone. The digestive tract needs these wee beasties, needs them bad. When they get killed off in sufficient quantities, the intestinal tract can get thrown way outta whack.
Now, I’m not sayin’ the cure is worse than the disease, but at certain points in time it can feel like a toss up. This very problem can cause cancer patients to push away chemo-therapy, concluding that in this case, in spite of a terrible disease, that the cure is worse.
A lot of medicine relies on harsh chemicals, the internal equivalents of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides. It’s popular in some circles to acknowledge this and give a blanket condemnation of Western medicine. This kind of criticism only makes sense in a world where dying from an infection triggered during gardening seems impossible. Why impossible? Because we have the harsh chemicals to combat the even harsher outcomes of untended infection.
Overuse has begun to erode our edge against infections, so we might again have an era when the yearning will be for the time when we could beat stuff back.