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Vicky introduced me to the Relay for Life this year, an all-night fundraising event where teams raise money for the American Cancer Society. We brought some of the neighborhood kids to the event, and much fun was had by one and all. The most impactful moment of the night for me was the Luminaria Ceremony, where a seemingly endless list of the names of people who have died from or are currently surviving cancer is read. The names Patrick Swayze and Farrah Fawcett both came up, and that added to the impact, but also a name I that took me by surprise; although, it shouldn’t have:

Carl Sagan Luminary

Carl Sagan, my biggest hero, died of pneumonia after a two-year battle with bone marrow cancer on December 20, 1996. There is a memorial to Sagan on the planet Mars, where the marker displays a quote from him that reads, “Whatever the reason you’re on Mars, I’m glad you’re there, and I wish I was with you.” I envy the future humans who will get to see that monument in person.

Rosalind Franklin Credit: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

This very thoughtful luminary made me think of another scientist who died of cancer who I would like to see honored. Rosalind Franklin, who’s 1952 Photo 51 captured the basic structure of the DNA molecule, performed her research spending long hours directly in front of an X-ray beam, which almost certainly led to the ovarian cancer that ultimately killed her and prevented her from receiving the Nobel Prize with Francis and Crick for deciphering the molecule¹.

Marie Curie Credit: Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology

Physicist and chemist Marie Curie also deserves a note here. She was awarded two Nobel prizes, one for her research into radiation (she coined the term “radioactivity”), and another for her discovery of the elements radium and polonium. She was the first woman to win a Nobel prize, the first person to win two of them, and one of only two people to have been awarded two Nobels in two different fields. Curie died of aplastic anemia, an illness where bone marrow does not produce sufficient new cells to replenish blood cells, a condition certainly brought on by her over-exposure to radiation; however, she deserves mention here because it was under her direction that the world’s first studies were conducted into the treatment of cancers using radioactive isotopes. Today the United Kingdom charitable organization Marie Curie Cancer Care bares her name in honor of her achievements.

Even if you don’t have anyone close to you who has died of cancer or is currently wrestling with the disease, you could donate money toward a luminary for one of these visionary pioneers whose lives were cut short by it.

¹ It is unknown if she would have actually received the prize, but she did deserve to share in it; unfortunately, they do not award the Nobel posthumously.

Note: The Carl Sagan Appreciation Society (this is a staging version of the site) works to maintain Sagan’s incredible legacy.

The movement of troops through the islands of the South Pacific in World War II had a profound, unintended consequence for the native cultures living in them. These isolated aboriginal peoples were suddenly exposed to soldiers in the Japanese and Allied Forces, who brought incredible amounts of manufactured clothing, medicine, canned foods, tents, weapons, and other goods with them. These supplies, some of which were shared with the islanders, were even dropped miraculously from the sky.

Then the war was over, the airbases were quickly abandoned, and the wonderful cargo stopped falling from the heavens. The islanders, in an attempt to persuade their gods and ancestors to bring more cargo to them in planes, ships, and parachutes, began ritualistically imitating the behaviors of the soldiers. They waved landing signals while standing on the abandoned runways, now lit with torches. They carved wooden headphones and sat in replicas of control towers, all in an attempt to bring the wonderful riches from beyond.

From our technologically-advanced perspective, we may fall into the trap of looking down on these “Cargo Cults,” as they are known, but a bit of introspection finds that we may all be guilty of such magical thinking. In my own profession, we have the term cargo cult programming, where a novice programmer includes code that serves no purpose in their software simply because they don’t understand what it does. I know that I have been guilty of such a logical fallacy in my own coding as a novice, where I would incorporate a large block of another programmer’s code into my work because I lacked the skills to identify the smaller portion of it that I actually needed. I didn’t know how the code worked; I just knew that copying and pasting it into my software solved my problems.

Richard Feynman coined the term “Cargo Cult Science” in his 1974 commencement address at Caltech to describe scientific ideas that we accept because they are established dogma rather than because they provide evidentiary proof of their effectiveness:

There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you’ll see the reading scores keep going down–or hardly going up in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There’s a witch doctor remedy that doesn’t work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress–lots of theory, but no progress–in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.

Yet the true essence of science is to perpetually challenge the dominant paradigm. Someone once told me they didn’t trust science because it was, “One guy saying he saw something and some other guy agreeing with him;” but this is the very antithesis of the scientific process.

Science doesn’t say “This is what I saw, worship me!” Science says, “This is what I saw, this is how I saw it, now go see for yourself.” The whole purpose of peer-review is to have others try and replicate your experiments, and if they don’t get the same results? Well, isn’t that interesting?

Feynman has a word of warning to scientists who will compromise scientific truth for personal gain:

We’ve learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.

The cargo cults of the south pacific mostly vanished when their newfound rituals failed to procure the favor of the gods, but one of these religions, the John Frum Cult, still exists today, and the inhabitants of Tanna island in Vanuatu still hold a parade every year, waiting for their god to return. In the meantime, the cult believes it has some empirical evidence validating their faith, as the influx of tourists to the island bring with them some of the legendary riches of the past.

Which societies are better off, the ones who abandoned their magical thinking, or the ones still living the illusion?

“For now we see through a glass, darkly…”
- 1 Corinthians 13:12

There is a common theme among religions of the world: humans are flawed. We are subject to a cycle of suffering, guilty of original sin, or afflicted with a modern malaise of dissatisfaction, which may only be cured through adherence to Buddhism, accepting Jesus Christ as our lord and savior, or following the Sastras. If we fail to follow the official path, we are damned to misery of some form or another.

Science also recognizes the flaws in human beings, chiefly our stunted natural perceptions of the world around us. We don’t see that the solid world around us is made up of atoms that are mostly empty space because there was no evolutionary advantage to perceiving this fact. Optical illusions can distort our perspectives because our brains try to predict the way the world should be, rather than simply accept things as they are. As with religion, science purports to have the solution to such shortcomings as well.

Wavelengths for colors Credit: NASA

The visible spectrum, the range of light frequencies we can see with our eyes (ROY G BIV), is an itsy-bitsy subset of the possible frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. While we can see wavelengths from 380 to 750nm, the entire spectrum runs from 1 pm up to 100 Mm. We see ROY G BIV, but we don’t see radio, microwave, far and near infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma rays, or high energy gamma rays. At best, we must indirectly perceive these frequencies using the scientific innovations such as radios, night vision goggles, Geiger counters and other inventions.

The human senses of smell and taste are examples of chemoreception, where chemical signals are converted into stimuli. Receptors in our noses are triggered by molecules in the air and receptors in our tongues are triggered by molecules in what we eat. Humans have approximately 800 olfactory receptor genes, while mice have 1,400. There are more ways to combine molecules than there are atoms in the universe, so it’s easy to understand how limited our senses are in differentiating molecules, however the magnitude of how stunted our senses are is difficult to comprehend. Thank the Cosmos we have chemistry, through which we may detect the mercury, arsenic, and other toxins we cannot taste; spectral analysis, which reveals the elemental content of stars; or biochemistry modeling the molecular processes of life.

Chunking in Short-Term Memory Credit: Python Software Foundation

Human working memory can only hold about seven elements at time for a mere 18 seconds on average. When we are given a set of things, say {”blue”, “robot”, “mirror”, “a-flat”, “time”, “42″, “warm”, “E.O. Wilson”}, the overwhelming majority of us will fail to commit at least one of the items to memory. If this last is unconvincing, take a moment to try and memorize pi to one-million digits in order to understand the scope of the world around us and how little of it we can hold in our minds at any one time. One way we overcome this imprecision is through the discipline of computer science, where we may store everything we know about the world, and even generate new information from algorithms that do the inference for us.

Human long-term memory is incredible fallible. Our brains are not video cameras, recording things as they happen, but rather they recreate events in our minds in a biased and inaccurate manner, often giving false positives where a suggestion from someone causes us to remember something that did not actually happen. Eyewitness accounts can often be wrong, with victims identifying the wrong person in a line-up, but science has identified this problem and provides us with DNA testing, photography, recordings, citations, the peer-review process, archaeology, and psychology to compensate, so that we may discover even our own personal pasts the way they actually happened.

Science gives us infrared cameras that we may see in the dark, computers so that we may calculate the incalculable, writing and recording that we may revisit the past as it actually happened, chemical analysis, spectral analysis, medical diagnoses, telescopes, electric lights–Of course, without science, we would also be completely unaware of how incredibly stunted is our ability to perceive the world, but anyone who would like to give it up, return to life without antibiotics, modern agriculture, air conditioning, television, and a future where knowledge will continue to grow, along with the enhancements it will bring to our lives, is welcome to drop out of civilization anytime.

Nobody flunks a science museum. - Frank Oppenheimer, founder of Exploratorium

Center Director Jenny Eaton at the Port Discover Booth for Knobbs Creek Recreation Center’s Safety Day

There’s a feeling I get when I find a picture of a living species on Earth that looks as though it belongs in a science fiction film, come across a new mathematical equation that explains some part of the world around me I previously thought unquantifiable, or read the philosophical speculations of a researcher who has spent a decade immersed in the intricate details of some obscure scientific realm. These are discoveries already made known to the world, but I am discovering them personally for the first time, and I come away from them seeing the entire world around me with a new layer of understanding. I’m addicted to this feeling, constantly seeking it out, so that I am perpetually looking at the world in a different light.

This state of mind, the sense of harmony we receive from comprehending that our reality is orderly and understandable is known as the Ionian Enchantment, a term coined by the physicist and philosopher Gerald Holton, and I’ve always thought the Physicist Richard Feynman best articulated it in this passage:

The World looks so different after learning science.

For example, trees are made of air, primarily. When they are burned, they go back to air, and in the flaming heat is released the flaming heat of the sun which was bound in to convert the air into tree. [A]nd in the ash is the small remnant part which did not come from air, that came from the solid earth, instead.

These are beautiful things, and the content of science is wonderfully full of them. They are very inspiring, and they can be used to inspire others.

A regular visit to the Port Discover science center in downtown Elizabeth City offers a fresh bit of Ionian enchantment each month. Walk into the center one week and you might find a light box filled with rows of sprouting plants, another week might find a new terrarium filled with local plant life, and every month brings new guest speakers to present engaging perspectives on the infinite enlightening subjects science has to offer. This perpetual introduction of new ideas to engage the mind is an attribute of all good science centers.

When volunteers were helping to put the Port Discover together, Director LuAnne Pendergraft kept reminding everyone that we were building a center not a museum. Nearly 50 years ago the Science Center Movement began, a “dramatic shift toward the empowerment of students and individuals to be in control of their own learning,” and creating “new institutions of ideas rather than things.” Yet, despite being a half-century in age, the movement is still in its emergent phase, still catching on; however, as Alan Nursall of Science North argues, centers serve an important need in our communities:

A science center can illustrate to visitors that science is an energizing human activity and that great works of science are as passionate and inspirational as great music, art, and sport… [Science Centers] must provide an opportunity to enjoy science, to do science, to laugh at and about science, to be skeptical of science, and to be awed by science. We need places like that–science arenas–where we can play with our friends and let our minds work up a sweat.

Director LuAnne Pendergraft Setting Up LED Booklights at the Port Discover booth for the Fourth of July

Port Discover serves this fantastic function in our community, and it does so with a miniscule amount of space. Recently, the space adjacent to the science center became vacant, providing the perfect opportunity to expand; however, in order to do this, Port Discover needs public funding to purchase the space, and is asking for $50,000 each year for three years, which the center will match with equal funds raised through charitable donations:

May 6, 2009

Friend of Port Discover:

Port Discover is seeking to expand its operations to the former Arts of the Albemarle space adjacent to the current center location. Exhibits, activities and programs would expand along with the physical space. In order to be most successful, Port Discover is requesting public financial support from the City of Elizabeth City and Pasquotank County. The request from Port Discover’s Board of Directors is not from the general fund, but rather from funds that are restricted to tourism-related projects, for which Port Discover qualifies.

If you believe that Port Discover is a positive addition to Elizabeth City and that your family and the greater community would benefit from an expanded space, we need your help. Please express support by communicating about a positive experience related to Port Discover; your feelings about the need for informal science education centers; a family trip planned around a center like Port Discover or the positive effect Port Discover creates for visitors and residents. Or simply say “I support Port Discover and hope that you will too by helping them grow”.

Contact your Pasquotank County Commissioner. Information at www.co.pasquotank.nc.us/Departments/manager/commissioners.cfm

Contact your Elizabeth City Council representative. Information at www.cityofec.com

Write a letter of support to Port Discover at 613 E. Main Street, Elizabeth City

Email a letter of support to luanne@portdiscover.org

Become a Port Discover member. Download a membership brochure at www.portdiscover.org under “Get Involved.”

Send a monetary donation to Port Discover.

Thanks for your commitment to Port Discover!

Science centers nurture an environment conducive to free Inquiry, where young minds are encouraged to explore whatever suits their interests, and, by providing the means to explore the world of ideas, the science center tailors learning to the individual, empowering them. In fostering a community curious about the world of ideas around them, science centers can bring us a bit closer to Dennis Schatz’s dream:

I have a fantasy–that someday science will be as pervasive as sports in our society. Just think what it would mean to have intramural science, after-school science, and even that pickup science activity at the local park…. The ultimate test for knowing when science is as pervasive as sports will be when everyone has to rush home to see Monday Night Science.

“I believe that consciousness is, essentially, the way information feels when being processed.” - Max Tegmark

The ancient Greeks, Hindus, Buddhists, and Medieval Alchemists thought the universe was composed of five classical elements: air/wind, water, Earth, Fire, and Aether/Space. Recently, I came across the most basic way to categorize everything in our universe into two eleements, matter-energy and information.

In the realm of physics, everything is matter-energy, a single element that takes two basic forms as explained in special relativity. Then Cybernetic systems came along, which described systems in terms of matter-energy interactions, but added the element of information, which creates a feedback loop for the system. Throughout history, some philosophers and theologians have considered information processing a separate element, the soul, but we know this Cartesian Dualism is a conceptual illusion.

Cartesian Duality Credit: Rene Descartes

Roundworms do calculus to find food or avoid unpleasantness. Computers do calculus too. They do this with logic-gates inside the arithmetic logic unit (ALU), an electro-mechanical sequence of events in the circuitry that produces a result we read on a screen and understand through an electro-biochemical sequence of events in our brains, two very different matter-energy systems understanding the information in very different ways, but interfacing nonetheless.

Photons reflected off our surroundings hit the retinas of our eyes, which signal the brain via the optic nerve, where 100 billion neurons make sense of the image and decide how to react. It is unacceptable to write this symphony of interactions off as information. It seems as though we are simply labeling “information” what we cannot yet explain through matter-energy mechanisms in detail.

Can information be reduced to matter-energy, and return us to only that single element? Matter and energy were once considered two separate and distinct elements, until Einstein came along and proved they were the same thing with the E=mc² equation.

Stuart A. Umpleby published a paper in the journal Systems Research and Behavioral Science titled Physical Relationships among Matter, Energy and Information, which attempts to connect these three concepts. Using Einstein’s established mass-energy equivalence formula, the relationship between the frequency of light and photon energy, which is observed in the photoelectric effect, and Bremermann’s limit, which is the maximum rate at which any system can compute based on E=mc², 2×10⁴⁷ bits/second/gram, Umpleby comes up with the following triangle connecting the dots:

Energy-Matter-Information Triangle

Information is difficult to define in this context. It’s not the words on a sign, as the photons being reflected from the symbols exist regardless of there being an observer to see them. It’s not data, as numbers, charts, statistics are only meaningful at the moment someone sees their patterns in real-time or brings them into awareness from memory. Information is processing, an action, a verb. It does not exist when there is not a brain or computer to create it. Information and consciousness are synonymous, the merging of data and the immediate awareness of its significance.

Another diagram I found online, makes this relationship linear rather than triangular, information comes from matter, through energy:

Energy-Matter-Information Transformations

There is little else I could find on this question, and nothing concrete. All of this is still vague, speculative. Humans started out working primarily with matter through agriculture, then we began producing massive amounts of energy with the Industrial Revolution, now the Information Revolution is putting this question right in our collective face, and, in doing so, brings the possibility of answering it.

The 1700s were a century of phenomenal progress in the subject of electricity. Luigi Galvani discovered that electricity made dead muscles twitch, inspiring Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Alessandro Volta discovered that electricity was dynamic, flowing through conductive materials like water in a stream, which is why we call it an “electric current.” William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle discovered that running an electric current through water broke the molecular bonds, generating hydrogen and oxygen, linking the stuff of electricity to the very atoms themselves (Asimov, 1985).

Benjamin Franklin’s electrostatic motor Credit: Peter Collinson, Royal Society

The great American polymath, Benjamin Franklin, made some major contributions to our understanding of the stuff as well. In his Memoirs there is a section Wonderful effect of points.–Positive and negative Electricity, where he hypothesizes, correctly, that electricity is only one fluid, and electric currents, like static electric shocks and lightning, are the result of an excess of this fluid in one place and a deficit in another, which sought equilibrium.

A, who stands on wax, and rubs the tube, collects the electrical fire from himself into the glass… B, passing his knuckle along near the tube, receives the fire which was collected by the glass from A… To C, standing on the floor, both appear to be electrisied… If A and B approach to touch each other, the spark is stronger, because the difference between them is greater; after such touch there is no spark between either of them and C, because the electrical fire in all is reduced to the original equality… Hence have arisen some new terms among us; we say B is electrisied positively; A, negatively. Or rather, B is electrisied plus; A, minus.

We know now that this “electrical fire” Franklin speaks of is a surplus of electrons, and he was correct that static electric shocks were the result of deficits and surpluses of electrons. The problem was that he had no way of knowing where the surplus, the plus/positive, was. So he took a 50/50 guess… and got it wrong. He meant to give electrons the positive/plus/excess charge, and where they flow to the negative/minus/deficit charge.

For most conceptual purposes, this causes no problems with understanding electricity; however, in thinking of electricity as a flowing entity, it does vex slightly. As Isaac Asimov observes, when recounting how the scientist Michael Faraday used it in naming the two poles between a flowing electric current:

The two poles were “electrodes,” from Greek words meaning “electrical route.” The positive pole was the “anode” (”upper route”) and the negative pole, the “cathode” (”lower route”). This visualized the electric current flowing, as water would, from the higher positions of the anode to the lower position of the cathode.

Actually, now that we follow the electron flow, the electric current is moving from the cathode to the anode, so that, if we go by the names, it is moving uphill. Fortunately, no one pays any attention whatever to the Greek meaning of the words, and scientists use these terms without the slightest feeling of incongruity. (Well, Greek scientists might smile.)

So, thanks to Benjamin Franklin, electric currents are an excess of negatively charged electrons flowing to the deficit of electrons, where there is a positive charge. Thanks to this labeling, we inadvertently labeled the point from which the electrons flow lower and the point to which they flow higher.

You now have enough background to get the following cartoon:

Urgent Mission Credit: XKCD

I do have to side with those academics who argue Franklin wasn’t wrong in assigning electrons the negative charge. Electrons and protons could just have easily had their respective charges named “up” and “down,” as we do with some quarks, or “black” and “white,” or “male” and “female.” The labels “positive” and “negative” assign no characteristics to the particles except to describe them as opposites.

Okay… maybe it does irk me slightly. But, living in America, solving this problem has to take a lower priority than adopting the metric system or establishing phonetic spelling.

References

Asimov, Isaac (1985). Salt and Battery, printed in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Mercury Press Inc.

“Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints.”
- Chief Seattle

This quote from Chief Seattle, leader of the Suquamish and Duwamish Native American tribes, is paraphrased by modern naturalists as, “Take only photographs, leave only footprints” (and sometimes adding, “Kill only time.”).

Beetle in Flight Credit: Matthew Fang

In the past, Naturalists like Charles Darwin had to collect live specimens of animals, sometimes with amusing results. This method would present a moral dilemma for modern naturalists, as killing potentially endangered plants, insects, and animals is counterintuitive to preserving them.

Luckily, today’s naturalists have a non-destructive tool in cataloging the Earth’s biodiversity, the camera. The World Wildlife Foundation and other scientists have begun deploying Camera Traps, cameras with motion sensors that photograph everything that wanders by, and the technique has caught the existence of many animals not seen in nature for a very long time. Bioblitzes are 24-hour events where groups catalogue all the species they can find in a location, be it a forest or public park, where digital cameras come in especially useful. The wonderful iNaturalist.org website combines nature photography with mapping in such a way that the data will be used in future years to track species migrations in a warming world and the health of various populations.

Animation of a race horse galloping taken from photographs Credit: Eadweard Muybridge

Photography also contributes to science in other ways. Time is infinitely divisible, and humans are able to perceive the briefest instant of time, but a sequence of quick events are distorted in our minds. For instance, in 1872 there was a highly debated question about the gait of a galloping horse, and whether all of the horse’s hooves were off the ground at any time during a stride. Photographer Edward James Muggeridge was able to capture a series of images that conclusively resolved the question. Surprisingly, many museums, textbooks, and illustrators today still get the gait of dogs wrong despite having such evidence at their disposal.

Sequence of a race horse galloping Credit: Eadweard Muybridge

Digital cameras are cheap. Flickr accounts are free (basic ones at least). I think one of the best ways to introduce children to science and nature is to introduce them to both of these innovations. It’s like collecting beetles, comics, or stamps, only there’s a much larger realm of things to collect, a lot to learn in the process, and a whole Internet full of people to share with.

I have these in my RSS reader, where I let them mass up until there are hundreds. Then I go through and download all the ones that sound interesting to a folder and burn them to a CD (as MP3s) or store on a thumb drive. These are listed in order of my personal preference:

• Science Friday is indispensable. I’ll download hours worth of shows for company on long, thoughtful drives.
• Dr. Kiki co-hosts The Week in Science, another great science podcast.
• Quirks and Quarks is a longtime (by interweb standards) standard.
• Groks Science Radio Show (formerly Berkeley Groks) is fun for it’s rough, yet erudite content.
• Scientific American’s 60-Second Science makes for nice, quick blips of Science Data.
• The Microbworld Radio Show is another 60-Second podcast. I’ve downloaded the archives for regular listening.
• From the prestigious AAAS comes a weekly review of the most recent published research.

With MP3’s, daily links, science videos, and books, there’s not reason not to have science everywhere you go!

Sun Credit: onlinewoman

A hydroelectric dam converts the motion energy of water flowing downhill into electrical energy through mechanical turbines. The water flowing downhill expends the gravitational energy it stored when it was deposited up in the mountains. The water got from the ocean to the mountaintop via thermal energy, which evaporated it into the air to accumulate in clouds and rain. The thermal energy accumulated in the water when it absorbed the Sun’s radiant energy.

Hydroelectric Power Radiant->Thermal->Gravitational->Electric Credit: DOE

The motion energy of a car driving down the street comes from the mechanical energy that makes the wheels go round. The mechanical energy is driven by the combustion engine, which converts the chemical energy stored in gasoline to thermal energy, which expands the air and drives the pistons. The chemical energy stored in the gasoline’s hydrocarbons comes from plants, which converted the Sun’s radiant energy to chemical energy through photosynthesis.

Coal Formation Credit: DOE

It was the kind of thing my father would have talked about: “What makes it go? Everything goes because the sun is shining.” And then we would have fun discussing it:

“No, the toy goes becaues the spring is wound up,” I would say.

“How did the spring get would up” he would ask.

“I wound it up”

“And how did you get moving?”

“From eating”

“And food grows only because the sun is shining. So it’s because the sun is shining that all these things are moving” That would get the concept across that motion is simply the transformation of the sun’s power.

- Richard Feynman, Energy in Textbooks

The total solar energy hitting Earth is about 1.5×10²²J each day, while the Sun’s total daily output is 3.34×10³¹J.

Note: Nuclear Energy and bacteria that live off chemical energies would be exceptions to the Sun-origin of all energies for this game. : )

Baby and Godmother Credit: kton25

Harvard Psychologist Stephen M. Kosslyn presents a fascinating conundrum concerning the development of a human embryo: In order for the brain to process the two images our eyes transmit to it in 3-D stereovision, complete with the ability to estimate distances accurately, it must know the distance between the eyes; however, at the moment of conception, there’s no way for the genes to know this distance, which depends on bone growth, which depends on the mother’s and infant’s diet.

So how do the genes do it?

What the genes did is really clever: Young children (peaking at about age 18 months) have more connections among neurons than do adults; in fact, until about eight years old, children have about twice as many neural connections as they do as adults. But only some of these connections provide useful information. For example, when the infant reaches, only the connections from some neurons will correctly guide reaching. The brain uses a process called pruning to get rid of the useless connections…

…the genes overpopulate the brain, giving us options for different environments (where the distance between eyes and length of the arms are part of the brain’s “environment,” in this sense), and then the environment selects which connections are appropriate. In other words, the genes take advantage of the environment to configure the brain.

So one metaphor for the developing brain is natural selection, producing an overabundance of neurons, and then killing off the ones that aren’t performing. This is just one of many reasons the whole Nature versus Nurture debate is considered silly. Is it genes or environment? Genes and environment are not dichotomous, but rather a feedback loop.

The brain’s need to properly interface with the body is why babies kick in the womb according to researchers:

Rat pups in their litter display frequent muscle twitches and non-directed limb and whole body jerks, which are similar to human fetal movements. By studying the relationship between these movements and neuronal activity in the sensory part of the cerebral cortex, the researchers determined that the information provided to the developing brain by these random movements are critical for creating the proper representation of the body in the sensory cortex. By analogy, spontaneous kicks babies perform during the late stages of pregnancy should perform the same service for the human sensor.

The developing baby kicks, not only to work out the joints and muscles, but also so the brain can wire properly into the muscles. So another metaphor is that the brain is doing science, positing a plethora of hypotheses in the form of neurons, experimenting, testing out the environment of the body, keeping those hypotheses that work, and tossing those that don’t. Not only are scientists, learning to live in the environments we are born into, but our brains, the organ that houses our consciousness, acts as a scientist as well.

Science is in our scaffolding.

Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself. - Edward O. Wilson

In David Brin’s The Postman, greatest post-apocalyptic book ever, the protagonist finds shelter in an old mail truck and keeps warm by making a blanket out of the letters. Recently, Vicky and I checked out the Camden County Jeep Trail, where we came across the old mail truck below, inexplicably wedged between the trees way off the trail, as if it had been dropped from the sky into the wetlands. The style puts it at 50-plus years-old.

Old Mail Truck Out in the Middle of a Swamp (Complete Mystery how it got there) GeoCoordinates: 36 12.197, -76 01.593 Credit: Vicky

On another adventure, went exploring around the Newbold-White House Recreation Trail. There, on the shoreline, we found the nearly buried remnants of some sort of tractor, or automobile. Suspension springs and a rusting engine block were recognizable, just peaking out of the sand.

Unidentified Species of Automobile Credit: Vicky Sawyer

Many scientists agree that the Earth has entered a new geological age, the Anthropocene, marked by the profound changes we humans are making to the environment. It begins with the growth of farming 8,000 years ago, but the most dramatic effects have come with the industrial revolution.

The cars we found in the wilderness will quickly rust into unrecognizable dust, but the rubber tires and plastic will have longer lives. Plastic shopping bags can take up to 1,000 years to decompose, and if they are buried, they may not decompose at all… at least, not until something else on Earth evolves to get at the energy-rich hydrocarbons, found naturally in crude oil, just as microbes evolved to eat cellulose in plants.

Sand Filled Radio Credit: Vicky Sawyer

Glass is not biodegradable, and, unlike plastics, does not have any form of chemical energy stored within it. The silicas making up glass are also found in the cell walls of diatoms, but since the chemical compound is the most abundant mineral in the Earth’s crust, it’s doubtful life here will start deconstructing the glass we leave behind for spare parts.

Perfectly Preserved Fuses Credit: Vicky Sawyer

Wired magazine founder, Kevin Kelly, has coined the term Technium to refer the explosion of technology that survives within the unique ecological niche we have created. Modern life requires microwaves, computers, and cars. The best technologies survive and we reproduce them, evolve them to better suit our needs, and in this respect Kelly makes a persuasive argument that they are the “7th Kingdom of Life.”

If we go, the Technium will go, but together we have left a distinct mark on Earth’s timeline. An alien scientist studying the history of our planet millions of years from now will find a thin layer in the geological strata marked by heavy metals, plastic bottles, and a huge surge in carbon dioxide. The Earth will recover from us, but have to make sure we can recover from ourselves.

You can see more car fossil photos here.

When I was a kid, it was guaranteed we would get at the very least one good school-closing snowfall a year. It was like a bonus holiday, where all the neighborhood kids would come out for snowball fights, sledding, and maple-syrup snow cones. The snow was always gone in a day or two, leaving a few sad-looking snowmen to wither away into green lawns, but there was always the promise of next year.

In 1980, when I was 7, we had two record snowfalls, 12.4 inches in February and then 13.7 inches a month later. The snowdrifts were so huge, we made forts out of them that towered over the cars in our apartment complex’s parking lot. In February of 1989 we got 15.4 inches, but then I was 16 and snow was just a nuisance that kept me from exercising my newfound driving privileges.

In my last seven years of living here, I’ve gotten maybe two days off of work for snow, but I paid it no mind. It was only when I actively started looking for that yearly snowfall that I realized it was missing. It didn’t snow at all this last year, and it only snowed once the year before that, and that all melted away in just a few hours. I remember that, because I went outside to film my cats’ reaction to the alien landscape, but by the time I got my camera set up, the snow was gone.

Droop Credit: caldecott_rose

When I mention this absence of snow to my friends, they say there’s never been much snow in this area and that I’m making a big deal out of nothing. So why do I remember snow being a yearly event in my childhood? I have the photographs of my siblings and I playing in more than a foot of snow as children, evidence that I’m not imagining this.

I also have the climate record. Between 1990 and 2006 the National Arbor Day Foundation shifted the U.S. Hardiness Zones, the zones where different species of plants thrive, northward. I grew up in Zone 7 as a kid, but when I moved back to my hometown after college, it had become Zone 8.

Nobody living here noticed that it had stopped snowing. In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond referred to this phenomenon as “Landscape Amnesia,” we don’t remember the past in the setting in which it took place, but recreate it in the landscape we live in currently. That’s why we have to trust the temperature records and not our fallible memories.

It’s not fair that my kids won’t have snow days, unplanned vacations where the whole neighborhood comes out for snowball fights and snowmen, and to retire to warm dry clothes and hot chocolate at the end of the day. It’s not fair they’ll have to learn about it from my childhood photo albums.

General Jan Christiaan Smuts is probably equally remembered for his support of apartheid in South Africa and for originating the concept of holism, understanding systems as a whole, as opposed to reductionism, understanding them as the sum of their parts, in his book Holism and Evolution. Einstein found the work as impressive philosophically as his own Theory of Relativity was scientifically. Einstein referred to Smuts as “one of only eleven men in the world” who understood Relativity.

It’s always fascinating to watch the interplay of influence between science and philosophy, from John Locke’s philosophical influence on science to Charles Darwin’s influence on philosophy. Reading about Smuts, I find a man whose personal philosophy was enlightened by science, and whose personal philosophy inspires philosophical debate among scientists. There is something very thought provoking in these passages:

If matter is essentially immaterial structure or organization, it cannot fundamentally be so different from organism or life, which is best envisaged as a principle of organization; nor from mind, which is an active organizer. Matter, life and mind thus translate roughly into organization, organism, organizer.

Smuts uses the term “matter,” but today we would use “physics” or possibly “mathematics” as the base concept, with matter and life phenomena emergent from the base rules of our Universe (before the concept of emergence was articulated). Smuts articulated another hierarchy in the layers of this emergent process. Life is matter with the power to command matter. Mind is life with the power to command matter with purpose.

We can also see how the concept of entropy, and the idea of life swimming against its current, influenced Smuts’ ideas:

[While the] stream of physical tendency throughout the universe is on the whole downward, toward disintegration and dissipation, the organic movement, on this planet at least, is upward, and life structures on the whole becoming more complex throughout the course of organic evolution.

This quote reminded me of my favorite passage from Principa Discordia:

The whirlpools that swirl in a direction opposed to the main current are called “enclaves.” And one of them is life, especially human life, which in a universe moving inexorably towards chaos moves towards increased order. [sic]

We are a phenomena emergent from the basic laws of our universe, swimming against the tide of inert uniformity which everything not alive is moving toward.

I realize this is meandering, seemingly aimless post, but so is the subject matter. : )

The great tragedy of Science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. - Thomas Huxley

The recent news of scientists identifying the bodies of Tsar Nicholas II’s missing children, confirms they were executed in 1918 and ends nearly a century of fanciful stories and speculation about the possibility of his youngest daughter, Anastasia, escaping the rest of the family’s fate. A woman in Charlottesville claiming to be Anastasia was really just crazy, and the imaginative, lovable 1997 Don Bluth film romanticizing her life is now overcome with this grim reality.

Nicholas II with his wife, four daughters and son (1910)

Science has a long, distinguished history of taking beautiful ideas and smashing them to bits. Take, for instance, Zeno’s Paradox, which states that in order for a person to walk from point A to point B, they must cross point C, halfway between them, and point D, halfway between A and C, and point E, halfway between A and D, on and on until a person must cross an infinite number of points to get to B. How are we able to travel through space if we must cross an chasm of infinity to go anywhere?

Zeno’s Paradox

More than 2,000 years after the question was posed, calculus solved it. As the points a person must cross approaches infinity, the distances between them grows infinitely small; thus, an entire school of philosophical thought was rendered irrelevant.

As are so many other seemingly profound questions. Nature or Nurture? It’s both. The plasticity is innate, and the innateness is dynamic. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? They co-evolved. Next question. Did Adam and Eve have navals? Mitochondrial Eve did. Now shut up and sit down.

This slaying of fanciful ideas makes science out as a villain of sorts, crushing the dreams and aspirations of great thinkers. This characteristic of science contributes to the Two Cultures Divide between the sciences and the humanities, where the scientist stereotype finds the humanities stereotype ungrounded in reality and the humanities stereotype finds the scientist stereotype cold and unimaginative. Science always seems to be telling the humanities people what isn’t possible.

But that’s just the stereo type. The reality is that science has expanded our horizons, opened more doors of possibility than it has close. One need only compare science fiction literature to fantasy to see that this is true. Science has shown us the edge of the Universe, given us vitual worlds, extended our lifespans and our horizons. When we abandon our fanciful notions, science rewards us with more inspiring visions.