“There are things I can’t force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint.” – Denis Diderot

Denis Diderot
By Louis-Michel van Loo

Humanities scholars tend to dismiss the Enlightenment, the period of time in Western thought that produced the American and French Constitutions and the Scientific method. In fact, my alma mater, Virginia Tech, offered literature courses in every possible culture and era except the Enlightenment. Dr. James Schmidt argues in his lecture series Making Man in Reason’s Image, The Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Humanity that scholars characterize the Enlightenment as somewhat frivolous, just a bunch intellectuals hanging out in coffee shops and waxing philosophical.

I have an alternative hypothesis. Humanities scholars disparage the Enlightenment for imposing reason on their poetical frivolity. Intellectuals like Thomas Paine, philosophical father of the American Revolution, and John Locke, who wrote the bible of Empirical thought, freed humanity from the chains of tradition during the Enlightenment, but the Humanities tend to regard them as imposing the chains of reality on their creativity.

Denis Diderot was also one of the powerful minds of this age. Diderot oversaw the writing of a comprehensive set of encyclopedias, to which the church and monarchy worked every legal means against him to prevent the publication of each volume. Diderot contributed over 1,000 articles to the 17-volume set, which took 14 years to produce.

There are powerfully forward-thinking concepts in Diderot’s philosophical writings. At the time of his life, 1713 – 1784, Descartes’ Cartesian Duality, the idea that the mind and physical body were separate and distinct entities, was the popular notion. It was a philosophical argument for the existence of a soul. We have to have an immaterial soul, the argument goes, because matter alone cannot be imbued with conscious thought.

In his philosophical dialogue D’Alembert’s Dream, Diderot explained how stones may come to think. If you take stones, grind them up, mix them with compost, grow plants with the compost, and then eat the plants, you have produced thinking stones. It is not that conscious and unconscious matter are distinct realms of being, but rather that consciousness is a characteristic of certain configurations of matter.

Clavier
Credit: europealacarte

Diderot proposed that all matter was in a state of constant flux, that even species on Earth were perpetually changing. Extending from this idea, Diderot proposed that we might invent machines with consciousness. He used the clavier musical instrument as an example, suggesting that with consciousness, claviers could play themselves. If sufficiently complex, claviers could feed themselves and produce offspring. As outrageous as this idea sounded centuries ago, today we work with intelligent machines, where the current generation of processing chips is responsible for designing the next generation of processing chips.

Computer Lab
Credit: Archigeek

While the Cartesian Duality provided a simplistic way of understanding the Universe, where we conscious beings are special and distinct from nature, Diderot’s understanding makes no such distinction. We are irreducibly intertwined with nature, a swarm of atoms that produces consciousness, but nature, in the form of a blow to the head, turns off our awareness and any perception of our distinction from inanimate matter.

If all of the cells in our bodies are replaced regularly, then what is the common thread that defines who we are? In his philosophy, it was conscious memory. Today, we know that we really don’t have even that much to define our uniqueness.

Diderot died on this day 325 years ago, and as we know through modern science, his atoms dispersed, some becoming air, others consumed by bacteria, others consumed by trees. We are breathing atoms that once belonged to Diderot, just as we are breathing atoms that belonged to dinosaurs, or were forged in the interiors of stars gone supernova billions of years ago. Our irreducible parts are one with nature and the Cosmos, and that is a more inspiring understanding of our place in the Universe than the idea that we are separate and isolated from it.

Symbol for the Medical Sciences

Health Care is a science issue. Beyond the higher-purposes of discovery and enlightenment, science provides daily improvements to our quality of life through improved agriculture, technological conveniences, and a better understanding of our place in the Cosmos. A large part of this endeavor is the enhancing and extending our quality of life through the medical sciences, but in America the system is barring many of us from enjoying the fruits of the medical profession’s labors.

America has the highest per capita health care costs of any other industrialized nation, spending 44 percent more on health care than the nation with the second highest costs, Switzerland. Yet, we get fewer physician visits and shorter hospital stays on average compared to most other industrialized nations. 40 million Americans are without insurance, meaning they are one bout of pneumonia away from financial ruin.

The Health Insurance Company practice of rescission, where the companies do not audit the veracity of customer applications until the customer gets sick and needs treatment, at which point they look for any little discrepancy between the policy-holder’s application and their health history to deny them coverage, means there are millions more Americans who think they are covered, but are in for a horrible surprise someday. In one extreme case, a woman was denied breast cancer surgery because she failed to disclose that she had been treated for acne. The federal government refuses to regulate such underhanded, crooked behavior on the part of insurance companies, which means that individuals who have been paying into their health insurance plan for 20 years have a 10 percent chance of being rejected for coverage when they finally need it.

Most of us don’t know this because most of us have employer-sponsored group plans. But thanks to the Information Age, more and more of us are going the self-employed route. I was an independent contractor in Washington DC from 1998 to 2001, responsible for my own health insurance. Juggling that $250 a month bill with my rent, electricity, gas, and lack of steady income was a perpetual stress factor in my life. At the same time, the libertarian news magazine The Economist argues that failing to tax employer-sponsored health care plans has artificially inflated the market in America. In other words, one of the reasons we pay so much for health care in America is because tax-exempt health-policies have made health care cheaper than it should be for those of us lucky enough to be in a company large enough to offer it.

What about that 10% of people insurance companies deny treatments to for failing to understand the cryptic language used on the applications, which even health insurance executives admit they have no idea what they are talking about? We pay for them. Hospitals are required to treat the sick whether they can pay or not, which is why people aren’t dying in the streets currently for lack of coverage. Hospitals recoup this loss by increasing the prices of their services to consumers.

Not only are Americans paying for the health care of people who cannot afford it, at the same time we are subsidizing the health insurance companies that refused to pay for them. Think about that in the context of health insurance companies experiencing a 1,084 percent increase in profits between 2002 and 2006. That’s not socialism; that’s a concept so financially ludicrous as to defy rationality.

But even without all these economic manipulations and diabolical practices, insurance alone is socialism. In a health insurance system, everybody pays for everyone else’s illnesses. The only difference is that we have a for-profit company managing the whole thing instead of the government.

The American Medical Association endorses the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009. They do not think the plan to reform health care is perfect, but they understand that the current system is spiraling down into an increasingly worsening state that cannot be supported. When doctors give health advice, wise people listen to them.

Taxonomy of Flight

Walking around this fantastic collection of aircraft, I was immersed in thoughts of the Technium, the idea that technology is the seventh kingdom of life. The technodiversity surrounding me in the main hangar display was overwhelming. The technological adaptations for vertical flight, human-powered flight, jet propulsion, and numerous others are designed by human minds, which makes them memetic innovations rather than genetic, but they evolve and adapt nonetheless.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Triumph of Christianity
Tommaso Laureti

Academics now refer to it as the “Middle Ages,” because the term “Dark Ages” is biased. It’s not considered politically correct to refer to this millennium-long period of Western Civilization as “Dark” because it suggests the culture of this period was culturally backward and characterized by ignorance. According to extreme notions of multiculturalism, where all cultural practices have value and worth, it is wrong to disparage 600AD-1000AD (the narrowest definition of the age) as a dark time in Western history, because theological cultures flourished during it.

I recently discovered a copy of the New York Public Library Science Desk Reference, compiling the world of common scientific facts as they were known in 1995 (and much has changed since then, I assure you). Each chapter summarizes a different subject, such as biology, chemistry, physics, and medical science, with key figures, discoveries, and facts pertinent to it. There is also a timeline within each chapter, and there is a glaring gap within the three-millennia timelines.

I took four discoveries or achievements that occurred in Western Civilization from each timeline¹ (more in some subjects), starting from the Dark ages and sampling outward. Here’s what I found:

If I were to plot all the years of discoveries into a spreadsheet and plot them on a graph, we would see the plot line bottom-out between 100 and 1300 AD, a black hole of cultural stagnation for Western Civilization.

For Christianity and Islam this thousand years without scientific progress was a triumph of light. It was the scholar Petrarch who turned this idea on its head, arguing that Christianity was the darkness destroying the wealth of knowledge and achievements of the previous millennia, contributing nothing to civilization in return.

What did Christianity and Islam accomplish during their 1,000-year reign? They took turns destroying the Library of Alexandria, burned the mathematician Hypatia alive, and waged perpetual war with one another. Who knows how many more achievements would be listed before the Dark Ages, if they had not worked so tirelessly to eradicate all evidence of the accomplishments that preceded them?

To me, this great big gap, spanning a thousand years, is a cultural wasteland because science is culture. It outrages me the wealth of cultural knowledge burned to the ground in religious fervor. We’ll never know how advanced the Classical world was in understanding our universe, because those advances were lost to ideological extremism.

¹There were many accomplishments in Eastern civilization during this time period, and I did leave one Dark Age accomplishment off the timeline because–and this may be my personal bias–I don’t consider the Bubonic Plague an accomplishment.

Note: Without a hint of irony, one of my sources argues on the Internet that we are currently living in the Dark Ages.

Brainiac by Alex Ross Copyright: DC Comics

The 1938 version of Superman was stronger than human beings because his home world, Krypton, was larger than Earth. As a result, the Kryptonians had evolved adapted to survive a force of gravity many times that of the Earthlings. This was a popular idea at the time. H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds’ Martians flop about unimpressively, struggling in Earth’s stronger gravity.

Keeping with this scientific explanation, the original Superman could not fly, but rather leapt across great distances, beams did not shoot from his eyes, and he was not immune to sleeping gas. Over the years, this science fiction Superman of the 1940s was slowly morphed into the flying across the galaxy, x-ray-telescopic-microscopic visioning, refrigerant-breathing, nuclear-holocaust-surviving, godlike being we know today, powered by the Sun and rendered powerless by kryptonite.

I recently got sucked into an entire weekend of comic book reading after discovering what is arguably Superman’s most challenging enemy, Brainiac, and wanted to learn more about this character who was the origin of the slang term for “genius.” One graphic novel, Superman VS. Brainiac, which collects various Superman issues from the past 50 years featuring the many, extremely different portrayals of Brainiac was especially interesting, because I got to see Brainiac evolve with the scientific concepts that captured people’s imaginations over the decades.

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Krypton City’s Sun on Tracks 1958
Copyright: DC Comics

In the 1958 first appearance of the villain, Brainiac was an uber-intelligent extraterrestrial, flying about the cosmos miniaturizing cities to collect in bottles, eventually planning to rule over them. Superman finds the city of Krypton miniaturized on Brainiac’s ship, where the citizens give him a tour of their farms run by robots, many many missiles, and a makeshift sun, which is a fireball that passes over the city on tracks each day.

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Brainiac the Computer 1964
Copyright: DC Comics

After DC discovered that Berkeley had a DIY “electric brain” computer kit named “Brainiac,” they modified the villain’s origin in 1964. Brainiac was actually a robot of 11th-level intelligence built by other robots and given an organic exterior to fool other civilizations because… I’m not sure really. Maybe aliens are more trustworthy than robots in 1960’s culture. The comics featuring this new computer Brainiac also featured advertising for the Brainiac Electric Brain Kit.

Light from Krypton Reaches Earth
Copyright: DC Comics

The computer Brainiac evolved to have a web of networking nodes across his bald head. He made an appearance in a Superman comic noteworthy for its astronomy-driven plot, where Superman is dealing with the emotional challenges of his lost home world, as the light from Krypton’s destruction is just reaching Earth in 1978.

Omniscient Brainiac 1983
Copyright: DC Comics

In 1983, Brainiac gets a huge upgrade, as he is converted from matter to energy and learns all there is to know about the Universe, even going back in time to watch it all happen from the big bang. He/It learns of another intelligence in the Universe, a “Master Programmer,” which we may assume is supposed to be god, and it wants Brainiac, who is a virus taking over the system, dead. Brainiac finally takes physical form as a robot that looks suspiciously like the Terminator, but with a bigger dome-head.

There’s a period of time in the late 1980s and early 1990s where Brainiac appears to inhabit the body of a psychic. Perhaps writers felt this was a natural extension of the idea that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I wasn’t too fond of this twist on the character.

Brainiac 2000
Copyright: DC Comics

The year 2000 bug brought an awesome storyline where an upgraded Brainiac from the future comes to Metropolis, assimilates the populace into its network, and then begins “upgrading” the city so that the robot may conquer it. He even refers to it as his “motherboard.” Brainiac continues to evolve, with issues exploring his biological versus mechanical aspects, and the fact that he is an indestructible force because there will always be other copies of his consciousness out there. We’ve gone from robots, through missiles, through the boundary between science and supernatural, and into the information age.

Note: I believe I am within the bounds of fair use in displaying these copyrighted images in my blogpost as this blog is not-for-profit, the images were chosen because they best illustrate the subject-matter of my post, they are of low digital quality, and there are no non-copyrighted images that may be used instead.

James S. McDonnell Space Hangar

It’s a happy coincidence that I had a space-themed flickr set to upload just the day before the 40th anniversary of humans stepping foot on the Moon with the James S. McDonnell Space Hangar. Displays of toys and science fiction models really convey the cultural impact space exploration has had on our society, while rockets and satellites everywhere visually communicate the incredible number and diversity of tools and instruments we have put into space in the last five decades. The display has grown dramatically in the short time since it opened, as we can see by comparing my photos with this one from just a few years ago.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Grrrrr! Credit: Brian Scott

Colin Powell’s appearance on State of the Union recently stirred up many healthy debates on Iraq, Obama’s presidency, and Sotomayor, but I found his thoughts on American families most interesting, especially the following:

And I’m kind of a simple guy on things like this, John. I watch National Geographic and Animal Planet, and I love to watch lion shows or tiger shows, where a cub is born. And there is the mother and the father.

The father may be away at a distance, but he’s providing protection for the family. And the family unit knows exactly how much a cub is able to do at what age. And until you‚re 4 months old, you never leave the mom. And then when you’re 6 months old, you can go out a little way, but you’ll get smacked back if you ever exceed the limits of which you’re capable of managing.

Are we the only mammal who thinks we don’t have to follow these rules? That we don’t have to pass on a thousand previous generations of experience? That’s not acceptable.

Powell is a powerfully persuasive speaker with a great deal of integrity. Earlier he had mentioned children’s need to belong to a group, be it a family or a gang. I admire his comparing human families to a lion pride and specifically referring to us as “mammals,” who are subject to the same basic needs and instincts.

It’s dangerous when humans try to distinguish ourselves from the animal kingdom, as somehow above it. Philosophers and theologians have spent millennia trying to find a solid argument for why we are not animals, but this line of thought abandons all we may learn by studying our animal nature. Powell has deep insights into what motivates us by watching Animal Planet, and we have much to learn about ourselves by observing our primate relatives on the evolutionary tree.

Powell’s example of the lion pride resembles hierarchies found in ape and monkey societies. In 1925, the London Zoo put together a baboon exhibit, bringing 99 male baboons and 36 females into an enclosure where each had about 60 square feet of personal space. Six years later, 35 of the males and five of the females were still alive. The remaining females were removed for their own safety, as fighting among the male baboons had killed off much of the zoo’s population.

The incident was seen as reinforcing the idea of animal savagery, that such violence was in the baboons’ nature and humans were above such baser instincts, but if such behavior were to occur in the wild, baboons would quickly be driven to extinction. Eventually, a more rational explanation came to light, as Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan elucidate:

What had gone wrong on Monkey Hill? First, almost all of the baboons introduced to the “colony” were unknown to one another. There was no long-term mutual habituation, no prior establishment of dominance hierarchies, no common understanding in these harem-obsessed males of who was to have many females and who none at all. No kinship-based female dominance hierarchy had been established.

Baboons in the wild are born into a cultural context, where there are adults with social relationships already worked out. The London Zoo’s baboons were all thrown in together at random, stripped of their social network, and forced to work out a completely new social hierarchy on the spot, resulting in unconscionable acts of mortal violence. As with Powell’s lion pride example, baboon children are part of a culture, a social network and they learn their place in it, the way it works, and how they may rise in status within it.

Piled baboons Credit: Tambako the Jaguar

There are examples of patriarchal and matriarchal social hierarchies in primate societies, each conferring the advantage of stability on the whole. Rather than look down on the animal kingdom as something meant for subjugation, we can see the importance of family and community for providing social stability from which we all benefit.

Awhile back I wrote a column for the Science Creative Quarterly titled The Tragedy of the Commons Explained with Smurfs. It was easily the most buzzed-up thing I’ve every written, earning lots of praise from scientists who understood the reality, and lots of scorn from economists, who are easily offended by reality and prefer to believe in invisible hands. The Tragedy of the Commons is the phenomenon where people will exploit a natural resource until it is completely gone and no one may use it any longer, be it oil, fish, clean water, or air. We can see it all around us, and occasionally we institute measures to conserve those resources. That’s what Cap and Trade is all about, making companies factor in the environmental costs selling their product places on all of us through increasing global temperatures.

Sarah Palin’s Washington Post column The ‘Cap And Tax’ Dead End argues that taxing the oil industry for carbon emissions will bring economic disaster. Instead, we should emulate her state:

In Alaska, we are progressing on the largest private-sector energy project in history. Our 3,000-mile natural gas pipeline will transport hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of our clean natural gas to hungry markets across America. We can safely drill for U.S. oil offshore and in a tiny, 2,000-acre corner of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge if ever given the go-ahead by Washington bureaucrats.

The hypocrisy of Palin’s column is that her own state of Alaska profits from a system based on the same principle as cap and trade. Alaskan residents each receive $2,000 a year in return for letting the oil industry have its way with their natural resources. Governor Palin even instituted a windfall tax on oil companies, which the state government turned into an additional $1,200 check to each Alaskan to help them cope with gas prices. What does it say about Palin’s character that she is able to criticize Americans for demanding compensation for the environmental consequences brought on by corporations, while demanding the exact same compensation for her own constituents?

Aral Sea 1989 – 2003 Photo courtesy NASA

Whenever I hear someone complain: Why should I have to pay for someone else’s [Fill in the Blank]??? be it Health Care, Welfare, Public Education, or what-have-you, I immediately wonder why I should have to pay for everyone else’s simple carbohydrates and red-meat addictions through farming subsidies, 12-lane highways so people can take their cars to work rather than take a train, or economic stimulus to preserve the wealth of bankers so the rest of us won’t suffer from their irresponsibility. All of these government expenditures are subsidies, paying for conveniences. We are all paying for one another’s modern lifestyle; we are all on welfare.

But who pays for the mercury saturation rendering fish poisonous from Coal Power plants? Who pays for the expanding dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, caused by fertilizer runoff from American farms flowing into it from the Mississippi River? Who pays for the collapsing fish stocks brought on by over-fishing, which impact all other life in the food chain, including ourselves? Who pays for the uninhabitable desert wasteland produced when farmers drain a sea to irrigate their crops?

Aral Sea Today Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)

Anthropogenic Climate Change contributes to all of these deleterious phenomenons, costing people all over the world billions to adapt to the new environment. In addition to exorbitant prices at the pump, the oil companies are also charging us the environmental costs of their industry. They then turn around and spend this savings on distorting science through advertising campaigns and lobbying politicians to write columns and pass legislation defending their industry. There is no injustice in having them put that money towards helping the world clean up the mess our collective oil addiction has made of it. Injustice would be allowing them to push that cost off on us.

Yellow-Crowned Night-Heron

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Dermacentor variabilis, female Credit: National Tick Collection

Vicky and I went for a short hike in Chesapeake’s Northwest River Park last weekend, a lovely site filled with marshland and waterways for canoeing, camping, … and ticks. Hot summer days combined with the humidity of the wetlands climate equals lots and lots of ticks, and this hike was no exception.

Except for Vicky. While I had to stop every so many hundred yards to scan my legs for the little bloodsuckers, of which I was literally finding dozens, Vicky found maybe four on her the whole trip. What gives?

Carl Sagan gives a brief description of the life of a tick in his book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, and the small set of instinctual rules that command its life. Lacking eyes, ticks must find each other to mate by detecting the pheromones C₆H₃ OHCl₂. Then:

After mating, the female climbs up a bush or shrub and out onto a twig or leaf. How does she know which way is up? Her skin can sense the direction from which light is coming, even if she cannot generate an optical image of her surroundings. Poised out on the leaf or twig, exposed to the elements, she waits. Conception has not yet occurred. The sperm cells within her are neatly encapsulated; they’ve been put in long-term storage. She may wait for months or even years without eating. She is very patient.

Makes the tick sound like a tiny clockwork machine, doesn’t it? It’s possible to have some fun with this instinctual behavior too. As when Vicky and I put a blood-engorged tick in a sealed vial, where it soon laid a bazillion eggs, which hatched a few months later.

Baby Ticks Credit: Vicky

The baby ticks all climbed to the top of the vial. When the vial was turned over, they all climbed to the highest point again. Over and over again, until they eventually stopped moving (Don’t tell PETA). It was like some twisted version of an hourglass, appropriate for some Tim Burton film. Try this sometime, it makes a great conversational piece when you have guests over that you’re not very fond of.

Eventually, the right stimulus comes along the forest path, triggering the tick to drop, hopefully (for her), onto something full of blood:

What she’s waiting for is a smell, a whiff of another specific molecule, perhaps butyric acid, which can be written C₂H₇COOH. Many mammals, including humans, give off butyric acid from their skin and sexual parts. A small cloud of the stuff follows them around like cheap perfume. It’s a sex attractant for mammals. But ticks use it to find food for prosepctive mothers.

Here’s the clue as to why I was getting bum-rushed with blood-sucking arachnids, while Vicky was passing through the forest virtually untouched, butyric acid. Vicky had showered that morning and put on fresh clothes, while I figured I’d shower after the hike, and put on my workout clothes from the day before. I even wore the same icky socks. Vicky was virtually clean of butyric acid, while I was fairly drenched in the stuff.

So while I like to joke that the ticks preferred me because I was sweeter, in reality, they wanted me because I was stinkier! (Why am I sharing this with you?)

In fact, this basic instinctual set of commands can cause the arachnid to exhibit some buggy (in a software-metaphor sense of the word) behavior, as with the stimulus to trigger her blood-drinking response:

It’s not the taste of the blood that attracts her, but the warmth. If she drops onto a butyric acid-scented toy balloon filled with warm water, she will readily puncture it and, an inept Dracula, gorge herself on tap water.

I think I have plans for some future fun with stinky socks and warm-water filled balloons in my future. : )