WORMHOLES
I feel like this is a bigger deal than just some Collgehumor video.
Electronic Tattoo Display runs on Blood
Remember getting your mind really blown by new technology?
Clive Thompson on Science Fiction
"If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas."
Have you ever wondered what space smells like? Yeah, me neither.
NASA beams the Beatles into space
NASA broadcast "Across The Universe" into outer space using the Deep Space Network. Asked to comment, Paul McCartney wisely noted, "Amazing! Well done, NASA! Send my love to the aliens."
The Environmentally Non-Disturbing Under-ice Robotic Antarctic Explorer (ENDURANCE) is a $2.3 million project funded by NASA's Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets Program. It's autonomous underwater vehicle designed to swim untethered under ice, creating three-dimensional maps of underwater environments, and ostensibly is a test for exploring Europa, the icy Jovian moon that just might harbor life.
The Archive of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences: as amazing as it sounds.
Literally!
I love it when the New York Times gets all tripped out on science stuff.
Hugest Black Hole Ever Discovered
18 billion times the size of our sun!
LATEST POSTS
Computers are Interesting, Part Two
CATEGORIES
animal life (3)
earth life (18)
human life (25)
Mathematics Life (1)
outer space life (23)
sea life (2)
skullface life (6)
technology life (6)
UNIVERSE ARCHIVED
February 2008 (2)
January 2008 (1)
December 2007 (4)
November 2007 (2)
October 2007 (2)
September 2007 (4)
August 2007 (3)
June 2007 (2)
May 2007 (3)
April 2007 (3)
March 2007 (5)
February 2007 (3)
January 2007 (7)
December 2006 (1)
November 2006 (2)
October 2006 (3)
September 2006 (3)
August 2006 (4)
July 2006 (6)
June 2006 (3)
May 2006 (3)
April 2006 (3)
March 2006 (3)
February 2006 (4)
January 2006 (6)
December 2005 (5)
February 2006 Archives
Computers are Interesting, Part Two
Archived From February 26, 2006 (11) Comments
If we take at least as hypothetical truth my previous assumption that the Internet bears uncanny parallels to the Universe, it is in interesting to begin a discourse on the translation of both the conceptual and physical properties of the Universe onto its microcosm -- the man-made web of chaos and information that is the Internet. After all, the guiding laws of the world are physical ones -- properties of physics. Are graphical web browsers, designed to aid people in their navigation through an otherwise conceptually baffling system, analogous to natural structures? After all, they must have been designed with usability in mind, and the explosive popularity of Netscape in the early 1990's must have been due -- to a certain extent -- to its intuitive ease of use. Our computer memories are organized in files and folders, for example, so that the lay computer user isn't intimidated by the digital cataloguing of information. Software designers refer to these as "metaphors;" the Apple Computer style guide urges programmers to "use metaphors that represent concrete, familiar ideas, and make the metaphors obvious, so that users can apply a set of expectations to the computer environment." Were windows and this click-by-click navigation we are now so accustomed to similarly designed to ease the blow of something as interminably complex as the World Wide Web, let alone the internet?
After all, if the ultimate goal of science is to understand the physical world through the taxonomy of its physical properties, then understanding the internet should be a similar gesture. In any case, I think that the internet and the Universe do share at least one galactical characteristic: they both have a sun.
The world of the internet is a visual one, of course, and in following suit has particularities which shadow the visual world of our day-to-day. There are many things we take for granted in our web browsing because they are so intuitive; most of these are, in fact, illogical. For instance, the presence of shadows. Many, if not most, websites -- especially those designed for quotidian use -- contain "buttons" and other such interactive dialogs.
Is there any rational reason why these buttons must appear three-dimensional, and, when pushed, manifest their depression through a change in shading? These, as well as the rest of the widespread use of shadows throughout the World Wide Web appear logical to us because we are accustomed to a three-dimensional world, a world of shadows. However, the internet has no sun nor any single light source. It certainly not does not have the imaginary and suggested sun of push-button dialogs, which implicitly always lies, incidentally, in the upper left-hand corner of the screen.
Where is the digital sun? If these were real shadows, the light source would be somewhere in the upper left, just out of the view of our screens. What is that, West? Doesn't the real sun set in the West? Is the Digital Sun the inverse of our Galaxy's real sun? Perhaps it has nothing to do with astronomy, but rather with our understanding of linearity. After all, we read from left to right, and in following suit understand linear progression as being, in some sense, from the left to the right. Whether reading precedes this conception, or this conception is a product of language, is something yet to be determined. The design of platform video games -- Super Mario, for example -- similarly relies on left to right movement and the implicit drive to always want to know what is just out of sight on the right-side, since this is the side which leads to resolution, the end of the sentence.
In any case, one thing is for sure -- as far as I know, the digital sun never sets.
Hi guys! This jam is a more serious version of a Power Point lecture I gave for part of a We Two & The Universe performance with Jona at PS1 MoMA.
9:49 PM | Permalink | (11) Comments
Computers are Interesting
Archived From February 25, 2006 (8) Comments
I've always considered myself to be computer-savvy. After all, my Dad works for a major semiconductor manufacturer, I hung out deeply with MS-DOS when I was six, taught myself HTML in high school, and -- I promise you -- I have been on Myspace.com for much longer than you have. I've always scoffed at the kind of people who type with just their pointer fingers, have trouble installing software, and refer to that endless database of ours as the "internets." And, yet, when a friend of mine earnestly asked me, just the other night, "so, where is the internet, exactly?" I found myself stammering into my glass of wine, clueless.
How quickly we fall.
Of course, I did some research. The internet is huge, apparently!
It is physically made up of millions of computers around the world, sending information back and forth in packets. It was born recently, in the early 1970s, as a U.S. Defense Department network called ARPAnet, which was used primarily for military research -- whatever that means, right? This was an interconnected group of computers. What we call the World Wide Web -- an interconnected and hyperlinked group of documents, a different thing entirely from the Internet -- came later, around 1993, with the first graphical "web browsers." These hit extraordinary popularity almost instantly, birthed the stupid expression "surfing the web," and introduced a generation of geeks to the endless possibilities offered by arguing about RPG games in chat rooms.
Perhaps this isn't news to you. Nor, perhaps, does it come as a surprise to you that approximately 1.5 million pages are added to the Web every day. Maybe you're so computer-savvy, even, that you're aware that the most comprehensive of search engines barely give you access to even half of the Web's indexed material. But did you know that there is a distinction between the "Surface Web," which is the Internet we all know and love -- the Internet of irreverent Google Image searches, blogging, animated GIF icons, message boards, and eBay -- and the "Deep Web," the sheer information databases upon which the whole system delicately sits? The Deep Web is at least 450 times larger than the Surface Web, and most people never access it.
Countless studies have attempted to wrangle with the sheer size of the Internet and tabulate once and for all just how much information is or could be stored on this contraption. In 1998, the storage capacity of the Internet exceeded all of the world's known information for the first time, and it has only exponentially chugged along ever since. A 2003 study by the School of Information Management and Systems at UC Berkeley estimated that the "World Wide Web" contains about 170 terabytes of information its surface alone; this is to say, it is about seventeen times the size of the Library of Congress' print collections. As for the Deep Web...91,850 terabytes. Trip on that!
Why am I throwing these numbers around? Because it is resolutely staggering to think that humankind has haphazardly created, in the last 30-odd years, an entity as amorphous, lawless, and endlessly vast as this Internet of ours. This isn't the work of a few people; it is the product of the overzealous millions of the world and represents, conceptually, the radical democratization of both technology and information. More importantly, however, it is a sprawling and essentially physical thing which no man will ever be able to measure, much less control.
The Internet is both exceedingly chaotic -- on the surface -- and reassuringly stable, in its sheer mass and presence. It grows massive amounts daily. No single computer lies at its center, nor does any part of the network have privilege over any other part. It is vital to the functioning of our daily world. It is fundamentally immeasurable. It could contain all of the information in the world, although it could just as equally contain nothing but nonsense. It has infinite unseen parts lying below the surface. There is only one other entity, to my knowledge, which shares all of these properties: the whole damn Universe itself.
Placing how much I am about to sound like an evangelical cyber-punk aside, isn't it strange that after all of our developments in the sciences and in technology -- which ostensibly have as a final goal the cataloguing and understanding of the Universe -- humans have only managed to recreate the mess they started with, in the form of an equally impenetrable web of energy and information? Assuming that this analogy stands, if the world and its workings as we know them are like the "Surface Web" we interact with on a daily basis, then what vastness -- what uncharted knowledge -- does our Universe's "Deep Web" contain?
Part Two of "Computers Are Interesting" may or may not address the following questions: Are hackers, thus, the true explorers of our modern times? If the internet IS the Universe, then where are its black holes? Have you read Necromancer?
11:37 AM | Permalink | (8) Comments
The Expanding Cosmos
Archived From February 19, 2006 (5) Comments
I've been having a lot of good ideas recently. Some of them are for art installations I'll never be able to do without the assistance of a gallerist, some of them are cool advertising tag-lines like "The Internet: A Window to Someone Else's Computer(tm)," and some of them, like this one, are nebulous concepts that will dance around my brain in a haze until someone literally asks me point-blank, "Hey, Claire, what do you think is the key figurative parallel between science and literature?"
Which is why blogs exist, I guess.
Science writing is difficult, as difficult as literary writing. At its worst, it can become crippled by its own material, which is by definition too steeped in jargon to be communicable; it can hover awkwardly between being too dense for its readership and too simple for its provenance, the scientific community. Good scientific writing, however, builds a little dinghy that steers a clear, straight, and small path through a sea of information, clarifying those incredibly vast and arcane concepts to people who wouldn't intuitively understand them.
Popular science writing contains, however, some essentially literary gestures. Take this example, as cited in Alan Lightman's marvelous compendium, Best Science Writing 2005. For years, students of astronomy (myself only vaguely included) struggled with the concept of an expanding universe without a center. After all, this is a notion which violently bucks against reason. Cosmologists, however, came up with an image -- a metaphor, if you will -- which lightens the load: imagine that the Universe is an expanding balloon, and the stars and objects in space are dots drawn on the surface of this balloon. From any one star's vantage point, all the other objects in space moving away from it, but without any perceivable pattern. The more distant points would appear to be moving faster. Apart from being a devastatingly simple image that conveys more information that entire astronomy textbooks, it is also an elegant metaphor. It accomplishes the same things as the most successful of literary metaphors: a world of feeling and information, the very chaos of the known Universe, in one image.
If only Keats were so altruistic.
10:57 PM | Permalink | (5) Comments
Smashing Plutocracy
Archived From February 14, 2006 (0) Comments
There are a great deal of things in this civilized world of ours which we accept as truth primarily out of laziness or convenience; in fact, it would not be radical to say that our fragile social universe is built upon such precepts. The structure of language, for example, is pretty much arbitrary. So is the practice of putting books vertically on bookshelves, which people did not really invent until two centuries after the arrival of printed matter. The necessity of eating meat? These things are cultural concepts -- they standardize us, and give us a sense of order in a deeply irrational world. Every once in a while, however, something comes along to remind us of just how capricious our taxonomies really are.
The recent discovery by a team of German astronomers of 2003 UB313, a ball of ice and rock hurtling through outer space, has become an unwitting example of such a force for conceptual change. The ice-ball, which was affectionately dubbed Xena by geeks -- errr, scientists -- has turned out to be considerably larger than the planet Pluto. It is, in fact, 30 times wider than the smallest planet in our Solar System.
More interestingly though, it also shares with Pluto pretty much all of the tenuous traits that make the latter a planet in the first place: being large enough to be shaped into a sphere by gravitational force, and being orbitally present on the outskirts of our Solar System. Scientists, faced with this information, are now stuck with an organizational problem -- they can either give Xena planet status (hopefully without its current warrior princess moniker), effectively revising our conception of the word planet, and in suit, our understanding of space; or they can demote Pluto from the Solar System, which would have a similar effect. In either case, we are looking down the barrel of a major paradigm shift.
Whether or not we are aware of it, the astronomical construction of a Solar System -- an organized entity which tidily observes the laws of physics as it hums peaceably in space -- has an iconic status. As children, we were all painstakingly taught, through one mnemonic device (and styrofoam diorama) after another, the firm order of the planets.
Anyone with a primary school education can tell you: nine planets, and nine planets only, the rest being just comets and space dust. Sure, our ninth planet was only discovered in the 1930s, but Pluto still has a firm grip on the cosmological conceptions of many people; I for one always thought of it as the final guardian of our segment of space, the bridge between us and the rest of the cosmos. While I am no scientist, to hear of it being taken away from our hallowed nine; something about it just seems so heretical.
That initial buck against Plutonic reclassification, however, is just an example of how quickly and genially we accept major cultural paradigms, and how such short-sightnedness can always return to freak us out. It was not so long ago, in the 1840s, that astronomers counted no fewer than 11 planets in our solar system. Pluto, too, has only been a planet for close to 80 years. The West has only been using the modern Gregorian calendar since the 1750s, for goodness sake. How quickly a society forgets what it once believed: we happily shed the pre-Pluto universe and moved onto the clear-cut nine planet universe. Now that Xena has come along, we are naturally all aflutter because, as far as we know, Pluto has been our ninth planet for all time.
Because it is the modern tendency to think of time only in terms of cripplingly short increments, it seems we are going to have a harder and harder time accepting and absorbing these kinds of changes, which, as technology frantically develops, are only going to start happening more and more. As a society, we cannot forget so quickly -- nor can we let ourselves be fazed by an altered solar system.
In his excellent book The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, inventor and theorist Stewart Brand puts it into perspective by pointing out that our galaxy rotates once in 220 million years. Earth itself has only been around for about 25 of those rotations, and life on Earth for 19. The human time frame, writes Brand, is narrower than that of life, of the planet, and of galaxies. Just like there was a time before we decided to include Pluto in our Solar System, there was an even longer time before we were even part of it. The galaxy, Pluto included, is far too old for us to talk authoritatively about it with our new science.
Talk about a paradigm shift.
11:27 AM | Permalink |