Category: Science & Nature

By using computers to create artificial societies and business, sociologists are coming models that do some startlingly realistic things — even though it’s not always obvious why they do ahead of time.

And there are implications from this that a bunch of contrary, independent human beings, doing the same, may still end up following aggregate patterns of behavior that are both predictable in type and apparently unrelated to individual intent. Some of the lessons may be usable to chart how societies and civilizations rise … how they fall.

I don’t think I’m alone in finding this artificial genocide eerie. The outcome, of course, is chilling; but what is at least as spooky is that such complicated—to say nothing of familiar—social patterns can be produced by mindless packets of data following a few almost ridiculously simple rules. If I showed you these illustrations and told you they represented genocide, you might well assume you were seeing a schematic diagram of an actual event. Moreover, the model is designed without any element of imitation or communication, so mass hysteria or organized effort is literally impossible. No agent is knowingly copying his peers or following the crowd; none is consciously organizing a self-protective enclave. All the agents are separately and individually reacting “rationally”—according to rules, in any case—to local conditions that the agents themselves are rapidly altering.

Seriously, seriously cool stuff.

(Via SlashDot)

The genders involved don’t make a bit of difference to me. It is just plain wrong for a deaf couple to intentionally arrange to have a deaf child.

In an interview with the Washington Post, the women claimed they would make better parents to a deaf child. They believed they would be able to understand the child’s development more thoroughly and offer better guidance, and said the choice was no different from opting for a certain gender.
They also said they were part of a generation that viewed deafness not as a disability but as a cultural identity.

I’m sorry, but while I have a great deal of respect for people who, with profound hearing loss, have managed to adapt and thrive, it remains a disability, a defect, a physical handicap. It’s not a moral judgment. It doesn’t make someone less of a human, less deserving of rights or respect. But to pretend that it’s no different from gender or race seems seriously flawed, judgment-wise.

If the couple were wheelchair-bound paraplegics, and wanted a child born to them with similar limitations, would anyone seriously argue that this was just a matter of “cultural identity”? Sure, they might be able to “understand the child’s development more thoroughly and offer better guidance” under such circumstances, but, damn.

For that matter, even “cultural identity” is not a blanket blessing for such things. The issue of female genital mutilation comes to mind. Most folks I know soundly reject the idea that it’s part of certain cultures to allow this, and so it should be allowed anywhere.

Yeesh.

(Via JillMatrix)

A new survey out finds that rudeness is getting worse in the US.

The question is: what to do about it?

Confront?

Ignore?

Withdraw?

“Teach your children well”?

Try to dig out the root causes and correct them?

Is the problem any more tractable than the Middle East issue?

Being a most diplomatic of souls, always concerned about giving offense (and handling it really clumsily when I intend to), rudeness is something that really bugs the bejeebers out of me, if you’ll pardon the expression.

Tuesday is the day workers are most productive. See how productive I’ve been today?

Yes, you really do act more stupidly when you’re feeling rejected.

Aggression scores increased in the rejected groups. But the IQ scores also immediately dropped by about 25 per cent, and their analytical reasoning scores dropped by 30 per cent.

(Via NextDraft)

Plastic surgeons think they may be within a decade of being able to build wings and tails for humans.

“Who would be interested in such things?” you ask? Well, the article has its own answer, but I have a different one.

I mean, who has really been the driving force in such diverse new-technology areas as VCRs/DVDs, the Internet, and, yes, plastic surgery? Who has been the money behind these areas, the drivers to get people involved with them?

The porn industry, of course …

Men want commitment as much as women. Except for a few oddballs who skew the averages. Yeah, you know who you are.

SciFi never completely recovered from the Mariner probes demonstrating that Mars was a dry, cratered planet, utterly lacking in canals. Though later probes showed the sign of past water flow, scads of classic sf from the 30s-50s was tossed out the windows.

Well, scientists are at it again, proposing that black holes, a staple of sf for decades, may not really exist. Well, poop on them.

Scientists have decided that the color of the universe is somewhere between “pale turquoise and medium aquamarine.” No, really.

Ivan Baldry and Karl Glazebrook at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, found the cosmic colour by combining light from over 200,000 galaxies within two billion light years of Earth. They worked with data from the Australian 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in New South Wales, Australia.
Combining the light gave a spectrum with a peak in the blue part of the optical spectrum – due to the large number of young stars burning hydrogen – and another in the red part of the spectrum -due to the glow of older red giants burning heavier elements.
[…] For any computer buffs wishing to put the colour on their desktops, the red-green-blue values you will need are 0.269, 0.388 and 0.342.

The point of this (aside from giving interior decorators fits) is that by tracking color changes over time, or in given areas, certain cosmological models can be supported or discredited.

Glazebrook and Baldry have already used their result to rule out some models of star formation. In 1994, astronomers working with images of the early Universe from the Hubble Space Telescope claimed that star formation in the Universe was slow to start with, peaked around six billion years ago, and has tailed off towards the present day.
But Glazebrook says such a scenario would produce a redder colour than is seen, because more old red stars from the early Universe would still be around. “We take account of star death in our model as well,” he says.

For those who don’t care for the tone, just hang around. As the Universe continues to age, it will become steadily more red. It will just take several billion years …

(Via Words Mean Things)

Did you feel something swoosh past your head Monday night? Well, you weren’t imagining things.

An asteroid that could pulverize a country zipped close by the Earth on Monday, only weeks after astronomers first noticed the big space boulder heading in our direction.
The Near Earth Object brightened enough for even simple telescopes to spot just before it raced past our planet on Monday, only two times the distance of the moon, according to spaceweather.com, a NASA-affiliated Web site.

Yeesh. I think most of us tend to dismiss such cataclysmic ends as being on the receiving end of an asteroid, but I think most such dismissal tends to be of the “If I think about this too much, I’ll be really frightened” variety.

On the lighter side, the story features a caption, “The space rock 2001 YB5, identified by the arrow, could have wiped out France, according to a scientist in Britain.” Yeah, I’ll bet that example was chosen at random.

(Via John Doe)

Science is usually criticized for one of two contradictory things.

Either scientists are so blindly accepting of How Science Says Things Are that they cannot be trusted to make judgments about stuff like flying saucers and ESP and the ghost of Elvis.

Or else scientists are so uncertain of How Things Really Are that it just proves that any hypothesis — flying saucers, ESP, the ghost of Elvis — is as good as any other.

Now, granted, some scientists are as enamored of knowing The Truth that they do get blinded by it. But most scientists are not, I’d say, and even those verging on that accept the scientific method: hypothesize based on what you’ve proven, develop an experiment to test the hypothesis, disprove the hypothesis or move onward.

Scientists do occasionally discover stuff that was hypothesized, and even widely accepted, is not true. Now that may be happening again. Some new experiments are hinting that a hypothesized subatomic particle called the Higgs boson — which has conveniently fit into quite a bit of the picture physicists have draw about the fundamental nature of matter and energy — may not actually exist.

The point to this is not that scientists don’t really know anything. If that were so, this computer wouldn’t exist. What it does mean is that scientists don’t know everything — and that good scientists are willing to change their worldview as the evidence changes.

As Isaac Asimov once put it:

The young specialist in English Lit … lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern “knowledge” is that it is wrong.
… My answer to him was, “… when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”
— Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), in The Relativity of Wrong (1996)

(Via Xkot)

The Pentagon has finally confirmed at least one disease scientifically linked to Gulf War service — Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The study compared nearly 700,000 military personnel who served in the Gulf War between August 1990 and July 1991 with another 1.8 million personnel who were not deployed to the region. It found that those who were deployed were nearly twice as likely to develop amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a fatal neurological disorder often called Lou Gehrig’s disease.
[…] The rate was not uniform among all personnel. Those who served in the Air Force were 2.7 times as likely to contract the disease, and those in the Army were twice as likely. Disease rates among Marine and Navy veterans were not statistically different from personnel not in the Gulf.

No specific cause has been identified, but there have been claims for years that exposure in the Gulf to everything from oil field fires to nerve gas to depleted uranium rounds was responsible for reported illnesses. The Pentagon has previously dismissed other studies which have claimed to find links to other diseases and conditions, particularly since any sort of causality has been difficult to establish.

(Via NextDraft)