March 03, 2005
How to destroy the Earth
With apologies to Marcus over at Collision Course, I'd like to point out this extremely useful guide to destroying the Earth. The page offers dozens of methods of destroying our planet, from negating its existence via time travel, to shaking it to pieces at the planetary resonant frequency (or frequencies), to annihilating it with antimatter. The last method requires a "mere" 12 kg of antimatter, but, as one commenter on the page says, "I still think that antimatter is crazy s**t, i.e. wouldn't want it on my flapjacks." The page even has career advice to the aspiring Earth-destroyer.
Of all the methods suggested, I am most intrigued by Total Existence Failure, with its vaguely existentialist implementation of planetary suicide:
You will need: nothingMethod: No method. Simply sit back and twiddle your thumbs as, completely by chance, all 2*1049 atoms making up the planet Earth suddenly, simultaneously and spontaneously cease to exist.
Note: the odds against this actually ever occuring are considerably greater than a googolplex (1010100) to one.
Failing this, some kind of arcane (read: scientifically laughable) probability-manipulation device may be employed.
Posted by Chris at 10:23 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 15, 2005
Goin' nuke
A Birdhouse entry on pro-nuclear Greens points to an excellent Wired article about new developments in nuclear power technology and politics. It seems prominent environmental thinkers such as James Lovelock and the founder of Greenpeace are starting to think nuclear power might not be such a bad idea after all. The basic idea being that by concentrating your environmental damage in one place -- analogous to the paving of paths in national parks -- you wind up better off in the aggregate. Fossil fuels have enormous social and environmental costs: not only does the huge amount of carbon deposited into the air cause health problems, but the geostrategic politics of fossil fuels force us into untenable positions where we are reliant on, and supportive of, extremely nasty Islamic regimes.
All this reminds me of a high school report I once did on the MHTGR, or Modular High-Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor. The idea behind MHTGR is to build a small (500-megawatt) reactor with an intrinsically safe design: it's meltdown-proof because of the core design, and immune to Three Mile Island-style radioactive coolant leaks because it's cooled by helium (which doesn't become radioactive). And, being modular, the MHTGR can be mass-produced.
Of course, technology has moved along in the 15 years since I did that little report, and pebble-bed reactors are the latest in safe-by-design nuclear power tech. The pebble-bed looks like a similar concept to the MHTGR, and has been used successfully in Germany. New ones are now being built in China.
If James Lovelock is thinking positively of nuclear power, it seems we may be close to unbranding one of the enviro movement's sacred cows. With more research we should be able to come up with ways to solve the waste storage problem. But if Green opposition stymies nuclear research and development before it can get started, that's unlikely to happen.
Posted by Chris at 01:23 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 29, 2004
Deep structure
Last night my PBS affiliate rebroadcast a NOVA episode about a team of climbers scaling the Vinson Massif, Antarctica's highest mountain, by a route never tried before. It's a spectacular episode. At one point, the team is faced with a difficult decision: to climb an ice wall via a direct but very technical and steep route, or take an easier indirect route that lies under some dangerous hanging seracs.
Seracs are giant blocks of ice that form when glaciers flow downhill and fracture in the process. The ice is being stretched out, and breaks into blocks, which tilt upwards at one end, making a chaotic ridge-valley-ridge pattern. The seracs precarious position means they can break away and collapse at any moment, with little or no warning. The team's dilemma consisted in a Sophie's choice between a route that might kill their less experienced climbers, or a route that might get everyone crushed under tons of falling ice.
What I realized is that seracs have the same basic structure as basin-and-range fault systems, seen in extensional tectonic environments like those in the American Southwest (roughly covering the area from the Sierra Nevada east to western Texas). (The illustration at right is an abstraction of a basin-range "normal" fault.) In this region, and other similar ones like the Persian Gulf, the crust is extending, stretching outwards, as a continental plate divides itself in two. Huge blocks of crust break apart as the earth stretches, and tilt upwards at various angles, producing an extremely regular range-basin-range pattern. The ranges are all about the same height (roughly a mile) because the thickness of crust is roughly consistent. The exception here is the Sierra, which are higher (two to three miles) because they sit on thicker crust.
The odd similarity between seracs and basin-range systems caught my attention at a moment when the movement of earth has been much on my mind. An upcoming trip to Death Valley, as usual, prompted my tectonic ponderings. And thanks to Sunday's catastrophe in the Indian Ocean, tectonic upheaval has been heavily featured in the news these last few days. One of the most interesting pieces was in the NYT, where Simon Winchester reflects on the earthquake and its attendant curtain of water:
In recent decades, thanks largely to the controversial Gaia Theory developed by the British scientists James Lovelock, it has become ever more respectable to consider the planet as one immense and eternally interacting living system - the living planet, floating in space, every part of its great engine affecting every other, for good or for ill.Mr. Lovelock's notion, which he named after the earth goddess of the Ancient Greeks, makes much of the delicacy of the balance that mankind's environmental carelessness increasingly threatens. But his theory also acknowledges the somber necessity of natural happenings, many of which seem in human terms so tragically unjust, as part of a vast system of checks and balances. The events that this week destroyed the shores of the Indian Ocean, and which leveled the city of Bam a year ago, were of unmitigated horror: but they may also serve some deeper planetary purpose, one quite hidden to our own beliefs.
The deep structure of two radically disparate systems: ice and rock, both incomprehensibly huge blocks of solid matter cracked into pieces by slow, slow forces we can't even imagine. The forces that cause the cracking leave the pieces perched precariously above us, while we wait for the tension to become too great. Eventually, the fault will slip, or the block will tumble down the slope, and in neither case will it care that we are in its way.
Posted by Chris at 11:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 20, 2004
When is a landslide not a landslide?
No, not the 2004 election: we're talking about slow-moving landslides, a commonplace in the East Bay hills. The Chronicle reports the slow slides are wreaking havoc with residential property owners. There seems to be a bit of an epistemic problem: does your property right occupy a fixed coordinate in space, or does it encompass a particular patch of specific rocks and dirt? From the article:
[Robert] Mathews learned recently of two bitter property-line disputes just blocks away that city records show are in a landslide hazard area. In one case, an arbitrator ruled that although the land had moved, a survey determined ownership -- and thus a couple of feet of disputed earth belonged to the downhill neighbor."Now I'm worried,'' said Mathews. "What is that going to do to my (home's) resale value?''
Scientists have mapped and studied slow-moving slides in California for decades, and there are thousands in the Bay Area, said Richard Pike of the U.S. Geological Survey. Most move only as a result of moisture or disturbance.
Living as he does in the Hayward Fault Zone, Mathews might do well to wonder what a slippage on that fault is going to do to his property values.
Posted by Chris at 10:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 03, 2004
Have my brain, I'm not using it
Scot links to a gee-whiz page about a non-photorealistic camera technology, which
promises to facilitate and pioneer complicated rendering of mechanical objects, plants, or internal anatomical parts. Because of its ability to detect depth discontinuities, it may render shapes that would otherwise be difficult to perceive. For instance, a car engine could easily be captured in a non-photorealistic image and then superimposed over an actual photograph of the engine resulting in a superior manual illustration.
The "neat-O" factor distracts from what this technology is, at heart (like all technologies): a way of eliminating messy non-engineer humans from the equation. Note how the text describes the multi-flash technology as able to "render shapes that would otherwise be difficult to perceive". It does this by using "four strategically placed flashes that cast shadows along the depth discontinuities of a scene" (emphasis added). In other words, it does the heavy lifting of artistic perception for you. Accurately perceiving the important aspects of a car's engine is difficult: that's why we hire illustrators to do it for us.
This technology is a classic example of hyperreal culture: we use our cleverness to design a machine that decides for us where the significant boundaries are in a particular image, and render the decision back to us in the form of another, more cartoonish, image. It's as if we have a desire to automate away our facility of abstraction and determination -- those pesky, difficult, and time-consuming "depth discontinuities". This rush to hyperreality and a frictionless world of images goes hand in hand with usurping human creativity for machine-made decisions. That's no accident; it's by design.
Posted by Chris at 04:22 PM | Comments (3)
April 22, 2004
The truth in photography
In Salon today, Farhad Manjoo uses the infamous photo of two Iraqi boys with Lance Corporal Ted J. Boudreaux -- you know, the one that had the boys holding a sign that said "Lcpl Boudreaux killed my dad. then he knocked up my sister!" -- as a jumping-off point for a great meditation on photography and its slippery relationship to reality. There are competing versions of the Boudreaux photo out there, with different texts scrawled on the cardboard the boys are holding, and nobody is sure which one is real. It's fiendishly difficult to authenticate the photographic veracity of a text on a flat surface. You don't have the usual cues of light and shadow to guide you: the text is intrinsically more manipulable than other surfaces.
Manjoo interviews Ken Light, the photographer who took the original image that got photoshopped to show John Kerry with Jane Fonda. Light worries
that fake pictures will be mistaken for true pictures, rattling the political discourse. But a scarier proposition for him is that, in the long run, people will start to ignore real pictures as phonies. When every picture is suspect, all pictures are dismissible, Light fears, and photography's unique power to criticize will decline.
But opposed to this is the view of Mexican photographer Pedro Meyer, who thinks:
I'm not suggesting that a photograph cannot be trustworthy. But it isn't trustworthy simply because it's a picture. It is trustworthy if someone we trust made it. ... We don't trust words because they're words, but we trust pictures because they're pictures. That's crazy. It's our responsibility to investigate the truth, to approach images with care and caution. People need to realize that an image is not a representation of reality.
Manjoo also brings up Ed Lake, the Internet's "Fake Detective", who spends massive amounts of time combing Usenet for Photoshop fakes of nude celebrities. He posts them and points out the giveaway details. Lake is an obsessive collector of celebrity photographs, and his detective work is intended to provide legitimacy to his regular collection.
It's no accident that the obsessive collector's outlook goes hand in hand with a passion for identifying the real McCoy. A thing is only collectible if its authenticity can be identified over against things that are not authentic. Given something collectible, there will be obsessives who spend their time tracking down the reals and the fakes.
Ultimately I come down closer to Meyer's view than Light or Lake here. Light's photographs aren't carrying the truth within themselves like some precious irreplaceable cargo. Their truth arises textually, relationally: we know certain things about Ken Light (that he's a known photographer with a reputation for not manipulating his images) and thus we come to believe certain things about the subjects he communicates to us through his photos. It's Ken Light shining through those images, not the real world. But we get the real world too, albeit indirectly, because it's one of Light's concerns.
Posted by Chris at 07:09 AM | Comments (0)
April 15, 2004
Are we dead, or is this Ohio?
While searching for references for my recent peneplains post, I found a great essay called "Why The Midwest Is Square". It's from the 1987 Old Farmer's Almanac:
A farmer in Wyandot County, Ohio (so help me), insists that at the end of a harvest day in the field, his drivers park tractors, harvesters, and trucks square with the world and exactly parallel to each other. Doesn't matter whether east or west or north or south, but by heaven all shall be the same or the worker is sent back to correct his mistake. Neatness is a primary virtue. A crooked dead furrow is more to be lamented than a crooked banker. Another farmer - a good friend, I must confess - feels compelled to keep the corners of his hay field exactly 90 degrees as he mows. Instead of sashaying around the turn, as I do, so I can finish before next Tuesday, he mows through the corner, stops, backs slowly and carefully around until the mower blade comes square to the standing hay, then proceeds ahead again. A neighbor spent thousands of dollars to move a creek that meandered evilly through his land, so that the could "square off" a field. Midwesterners have studded their land with right angle corners; they think the earth is square, not round.
The essay goes into detailed history about how Ohio and the other Midwestern states got to be so resolutely rectilinear. It's at its most hilarious where it describes the confusions of people who live on the border between Ohio's flat lands and its rolling hills: a collision between flatland and paisleyland.
Posted by Chris at 12:47 PM | Comments (0)
The mind's eye
There was an interesting story on NPR's Morning Edition today, talking about eureka moments, or flashes of inspiration when an insight arrives very suddenly. Researchers used functional MRI and EEGs to map brain activity while the subjects were solving a series of word problems. Their results suggest a spike of right-hemisphere cortical activity -- the area "associated with making connections across distantly related information during comprehension" -- immediately precedes an "aha" moment. This area is implicated not just in insightful problem solving, but in the understanding of jokes, story themes, and metaphors.
What's even more interesting to me is that the insight moments are preceded by a suppression of activity in the visual cortex. The study glosses this as "attenuating bottom-up activation or other neural activity not related to solution that would decrease the signal-to-noise ratio for the actual solution". In other words, an associative insight temporarily and partially blinds you to the outside world. This is quite analogous to the way a metaphor crystallizes an understanding, but also stands in the way of direct perception. A good metaphor congeals, until all you can see is the literalized metaphor. "Insight" turns out to be "blindsight", or your mind's eye at work.
It's no surprise to me that there's neurological confirmation of this. I want to add the usual hedge that neurological imaging can act as an uncritical confirmation of doctrinal truths, but the truth expressed here is too compelling to ignore -- perhaps because it's confirming my own doctrinal truths. Indeed, just writing up this metaphorical similarity between insightful problem solving and literary thematics tempts me to elide the distinction between them: to see artful metonymy as a species of plain old neurochemistry.
Posted by Chris at 07:26 AM | Comments (1)
April 10, 2004
Don't take my tuna melts away
The reporter with the name everybody wants -- Jennifer 8. Lee -- reports on a decline in tuna consumption after a federal warning about high mercury levels in white albacore tuna. Typically, overblown media coverage and a headline-scrolling TV culture rips the subtleties right out of context, and makes people fear all types of tuna, or even all types of fish:
Never mind that the federal advisory is just for young children and women who plan to have children. Never mind that the advisory covers only white albacore tuna, and not light tuna, which has a lower mercury content - and is cheaper. Never mind that the advisory actually recommends limiting consumption of albacore tuna to six ounces per week - that is one or two meals - as opposed to eliminating it entirely. And never mind that the federal government says tuna is actually very good for people - an affordable, low-fat, high-protein source of the omega-3 fatty acids that reduce heart disease. ..."The message of fish being good has been lost," said Eric Rimm, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, "and people are learning more about the hypothetical scare of a contaminant than they are of the well-documented benefits of coronary disease reduction."
Posted by Chris at 10:30 AM | Comments (1)
March 29, 2004
Protecting the rights of corporations
The NYT reports that Wal-Mart is experiencing delays in the adoption of RFID tags to track its goods. Naturally, the RFID companies are most eager to deploy their technology to prescription drugs. They don't pretend that the end consumer gets any benefit, however; the tags are mainly used to speed up the supply chain and prevent "counterfeiting and tampering".
Seems the infrastructure has some problems: the tags are too expensive, for one thing. For another, the effort to scan and classify the entire universe is getting hung up on that troublesome issue of interiority:
Everyone, meanwhile, faces challenges like figuring out how far electronic readers can be positioned from the tags without missing crucial data and how to overcome the tendency of liquids and metals to block the signal. While today's readers can easily identify a pallet of Coca-Cola in cans, for example, and cartons on the outside edge of a pallet, they have trouble picking out cartons in the middle of the pallet.
In the photo used to illustrate this story, a Matrics executive holds up her company's RFID tags, which look like little stylized swastikas. Telling.
Posted by Chris at 06:44 AM | Comments (2)
March 17, 2004
Porn, art, and your amygdala
Interesting new research in the role of the amygdala in gendered differences to, among other things, erotic images. Men show more amygdala activity than women when they're shown images of sex -- or even think about sex.
This in particular struck me:
Once thought to be involved exclusively with emotions like fear and anger, the amygdala is now believed to be more complicated. ... The amygdala is known to have intricate connections to primates' visual systems.
Putting this together with Steven Johnson's view of the amygdala -- that it plays a role in humans' "psychic" ability to perceive, almost subliminally, what other humans are feeling -- and you have a very interesting line of thought to pursue. What if our visual creative imagination grew from the same source as our intuitive sense of others' feelings? In other words, this amygdala research suggests that the instant intuitive assessment of people as attractive/not attractive, and the ability to size up a composition and say "that's right, this is wrong", and the ability to size up another's emotional state from very subtle, almost ineffable cues, are all drawn from the same brain space.
Put it another way: seeing something attractive and perceiving someone else's mood tickle the same area of your brain. This suggests to me that men and women are not necessarily so different in the conventional hackneyed sense that "men are visual, women are emotional". It's more a matter of emphasis, or habit: women express these thoughts emotionally, men express them sexually. There's clearly social conditioning going on there to cause and promote the difference, but the basic brain reason is very similar.
And that's how the NYT piece wraps, on this great quote:
"Differences between genders are boring," Dr. Tiefer said. "The big differences are within the sexes, between individuals. It is not the case that every person pays attention to the same thing."It's like everything else in life — eating, dancing, traveling. The whole experience is shaped by your history and by what you're paying attention to."
Some people have spent their lives paying more attention to visual composition, and their amygdalae are tuned artistically. Some people have tuned themselves to hotties of the appropriate gender(s), they're the sexual gourmands. And some have tuned themselves to emotional states; they're the communicative wizards. Of course in real life everyone is a balance of all these, but it's just a schematic.
(The preceding has been brought to you by Strata Lucida's Armchair Neuroscience Department, and should not be construed as particularly authoritative or, indeed, entirely thought out one way or another.)
(NYTimes article via, of course, Amygdala)
Posted by Chris at 01:08 PM | Comments (0)
February 19, 2004
Arbitrarily deep nested trees
Very cool stuff: an interactive Tree of Life, with all the phylogenetic relationships you could possibly ask for. It's interesting how the arbitrary (and stupid) system of kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species, which is what I learned in school some dozen years ago, has been almost entirely abandoned. In its place is a tree that has as many nodes and linkages as it needs to. It's a change from a fixed, rigid classification to a fractal system.
My favorite lineage is Aves, the birds:
Eukaryotes -> Animals -> Bilateria -> Deuterostomia -> Chordata -> Craniata -> Vertebrata -> Gnathostomata -> Sarcopterygii -> Terrestrial Vertebrates -> Amniota -> Diapsida -> Archosauromorpha -> Archosauria -> Dinosauria -> Theropoda -> Coelurosauria -> Aves
Posted by Chris at 09:58 AM | Comments (0)