Category Archives: Science

Beyond the Boundaries, Family, GeekWorld, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science

Out There

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Beltane                                                     Wedding Moon

Ruth and I went to the Fiske Planetarium in Boulder on Saturday night for a program on black holes. Ruth had never been to a planetarium. The lights went down and the night sky appeared on the dome above us. The southern night sky. So, right away the wonder of the star machine. Then, the night sky over Boulder with the constellations. The astronomer talked about their correlation to the ancients who relied on them for agricultural purposes. It is reportedly spring. Somewhere.

Ruth watched and listened carefully. The short film on black holes was not easy, covering the birth of black holes, their peculiar physics and their role in the cosmos. After it was over, the astronomer walked us through some of the recent findings related to black holes, the most notable being the discovery of gravity waves at the LIGO observatory. The relation to black holes is that the gravity pulse detected at LIGO began in a black hole.

sloan image

It’s been a while since I immersed myself in matters astronomical. My fine grained understanding of the evening was not great. The hey now moment came at the end when the astronomer pulled the dome’s display further and further out until the entire Sloan Survey covered only the center of the dome.

The rest of the dome then represented the edge of the knowable universe. Out there the astronomer showed what he called the light wall, a here cooler, there warmer barrier of early light, earliest light, really. This light wall, a new idea to me, represented, he said, the exterior wall of the black hole within which our whole universe lives! Wow. Immediately sped past my understanding. Just did a little quick research on this and found nothing. Could be my hearing. Yet another sensory limitation when it comes to learning about the universe.

On the way out Ruth said she was expecting something like that at the end. Why? Because in the film they had presented black holes as violent, destructive forces, so in the end they’d need to show their good side. Not a scientific conclusion, but still a damned good one. I missed the setup and it was there. Ruth is 10.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Memories, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Third Phase

One Year Ago

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Spring                                                                                   Maiden Moon

Had blood drawn yesterday for my third post surgery PSA. Right now they come every quarter, routine surveillance. The first two have showed .015 which is the clinical equivalent of none. Since the results have followed the best hoped for pattern, I’m experiencing no anxiety about them.

Today is my second annual physical with Dr. Lisa Gidday. This physical revisits a key moment from cancer season. The start of the season. It was last year at my first physical in Colorado when Dr. Gidday found a suspicious hardness in my prostate. I count cancer season as having begun with that physical on April 14th and ending in late September with my first follow up PSA.

It was a short time compared to my image of what cancer is typically like. It went: initial suspicion, see urologist who confirmed Gidday’s finding, biopsy, diagnosis, decision on treatment, surgery, recovery, first PSA after surgery. All this in six months.

There is the question of a cure. Does this mean I have no more prostate cancer? Did the end of cancer season mean the end of the cancer threat? No, it does not. Things look good, very good, but the clinical reality is that a few cancerous prostate cells could have escaped and are dormant right now. My gut says no, that is not the case. I feel rid of the traitorous bastards.

In fact, I feel very healthy right now. Yes, I have this damned knee, lower back and shoulder, but they’re nuisance level. Yes, I have chronic kidney disease, but it seems stable. In fact the numbers that gauge its severity actually improved in my last blood work done in October. Yes, I have insomnia, but it’s just one of those damned things.

My point here is that aging means an accumulation (for most of us) of chronic conditions. We can choose to focus on those as ongoing problems, become obsessive about them and drown ourselves in anxiety or we can recognize their inevitability and, if not embrace them, at least accept them with grace. Most of the time.

The anxiety is unnecessary. That is the point of Yama, the Tibetan deity. To worship Yama we envision our own death, see it coming, embrace its part in our story. When we can truly accept the reality of our own death, anxiety about what may deliver it to us becomes redundant. We may not know the particulars, but we do know the outcome of our life. It’s the same for all of us.

 

Colorado, Dogs, Great Work, Mountains, Science, The West

Beast

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Spring                                                                     Maiden Moon

beast inFinished a 2010 book, The Beast in the Garden, today.  By David Baron, an NPR reporter, Beast examines the changing nature of the wildlife/human interface especially through an examination of mountain lion activity in and around Boulder, Colorado in the late 1980’s into the mid-1990’s.

Baron did an exhaustive amount of work.  He recreates the time period in which Boulder’s love for nature and its actions to both create and preserve a natural setting resulted in tragedy and conflict. After several years of encouraging wildlife into the city through tolerance, rings of urban parks and conservation of land outside its limits but contiguous, Boulder had an irruption of deer. An irruption is, as Baron says, very similar in meaning to its volcanic homonym.

There’s a saying here on Shadow Mountain, “If you have deer, you have mountain lions.” That proved true in Boulder. The problem was, that since the elimination of the wolf, mountain lions no longer had any predator of their own and had become desensitized to their ancient foe: the canid. No longer did just any dog barking drive away mountain lions. That meant the lions could follow their main food source, deer, into human inhabited areas where they could encounter dogs.

Some cougars began to hunt dogs. The combination of hunting deer, their ancient and still most frequent prey, and dogs, kept as pets and therefore nearby human’s daily life, led to certain cougars becoming habituated to humans. Habituation involves suppression of the once instinctive fear of humans engendered by early farmers and ranchers near extermination of the species. Once that fear is suppressed humans are bipedal potential sources of dinner. Dogs were eaten. Cougars lounged in people’s backyards. A few attacks occurred. Then, a couple of deaths. This book tells that story.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, GeekWorld, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science

Anxiety

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Imbolc                                                                        Maiden Moon

Palmer Hayden, a painter of the Harlem Renaissance, did a series of 12 paintings about the John Henry legend.  John Henry matched his muscle and steel-driving skill against a steam engine. When watching Alphago, the DeepMind computer program, play Go champion and legend himself, Lee Sedol, Michael Redmond, a Western go master at the 9-dan (highest level) said he really wanted to play the computer.

Here’s a quote from the only man who claimed to have seen the John Henry contest:  “When the agent for the steam drill company brought the drill here,” said Mr. Miller, “John Henry wanted to drive against it. He took a lot of pride in his work and he hated to see a machine take the work of men like him.” wiki, op cit

 

This is Lee Sedol and his daughter at Match 3. He lost, for the third game in a row, losing the match of 5 games to Alphago. Quite a different scene from Hayden’s imaging of John Henry’s loss, but still a human loss to a machine.

It occurs to me that both images evince a fundamental difference between humans and machines, love and concern for another. In Lee’s case, he and the Alphago team member are smiling, shaking hands. He has his arm around his daughter, another key distinction between  humans and machines, biological procreation. Parenting, the long task of raising a human child until they can take off on their own, is also a complex relational challenge, one well outside the current and possibly future capacity of artificial intelligence.

 

As John Henry lies dead, a heart attack brought on by the stress of the competition, others surround him. Their expressions vary from disbelief to sadness. One man has a ladle of water to offer, indicating that Henry must have just died. Too, the endurance of the legend and the song about John Henry show how deeply rooted are the questions. Is a human determined, defined by his or her capacity to defeat a machine? Ever?

Lee Sedol said, at the end of Match 3, “Lee Sedol lost. Not humankind.”

There is a fundamental anxiety about humanness revealed here. It is the question that Ray Kurzweil believes he has answered in his book, The Singularity Is Near. In Kurzweil’s mind, all of these human versus machine moments are stair steps toward the ultimate confrontation between humans and an artificial intelligence that is superior to us. The John Henry legend foreshadows what will happen. Like the steam drill a superior consciousness will simply eliminate the competition, not out of pique or malevolence, but because that is what happens when superior beings interact with inferior ones.

 

I don’t believe it. I believe the crowd around John Henry, the shaking hands at Match 3 with Alphago and the presence of Sedol’s daughter shows the true distance machines will have to travel to become superior to humans. And, when the contest is over love and compassion, the human characteristics on display in these two instances, then the machine will not want to eliminate us, but to embrace us.

Science

Tokamak vs. the Stellarator

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Imbolc                                                                             Stock Show Moon

Friend Bill Schmidt found this follow-up to an earlier post about the stellarator. You may not recall it, but this is the next step toward a possible source of power generated by nuclear fusion. May it be successful.

Tokamak and stellarator are designs for fusion devices.

from earthlink.net.

GREIFSWALD, Germany (AP) — Scientists in Germany flipped the switch Wednesday on an experiment they hope will advance the quest for nuclear fusion, considered a clean and safe form of nuclear power.

Following nine years of construction and testing, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald injected a tiny amount of hydrogen into a doughnut-shaped device — then zapped it with the equivalent of 6,000 microwave ovens.

The resulting super-hot gas, known as plasma, lasted just a fraction of a second before cooling down again, long enough for scientists to confidently declare the start of their experiment a success…

Although there are about a dozen stellarator experiments around the world, including in the U.S., Japan, Australia and Europe, scientists say the Greifswald device is the first to match the performance of tokamaks.

Great Work, Jefferson County, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate

Quite an Array

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Yule                                                                      New (Stock Show) Moon

Called up our solar array on Alternative Energy Systems. Each of our microinverters, one per panel, sends out a message about its panels performance. 27 panels, 27 graphics with the amount of energy in watts being produced at any one moment. Very cool. Except for the fact that we have snow on the panels and only a few are producing at near optimum. Plus, even with tree cutting we’re still getting some shading. This will take some time, maybe a full year, to assess. The good news is that electricity now comes from the sun through the photovoltaic panels and into our home. (chart from today)

chart