ABSTRACT: Some of the most pivotal moments in intellectual history occur when a new ideology sweeps through a society, supplanting an established system of beliefs in a rapid revolution of thought. Yet in many cases the new ideology is as extreme as the old. Why is it then that moderate positions so rarely prevail? Here, in the context of a simple model of opinion spreading, we test seven plausible strategies for deradicalizing a society and find that only one of them significantly expands the moderate subpopulation without risking its extinction in the process.
Prospero: Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air: And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148–158
Though "real Sci-Fi fans" would differ with me, I had to take a "Star Trek" break from my usual (and quite depressing) dystopian literary diet and read two from Old School Trek: "The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh," part 1 and part 2 by Greg Cox. Khan as a four-year-old was written just as arrogantly as Ricardo Montaban portrayed him in the original series. If you're familiar with the "Space Seed" episode, it fleshes out a probable history of the genetically engineered race of supermen juxtaposed in real-world events of the 70s and 90s quite well.
Hence, the posts this week have been somewhat targeted.
So, I was probably primed to find these items:
"Perhaps a Star Trek experience within our lifetime is not such a remote possibility." These are the words of Dr. Harold "Sonny" White, the Advanced Propulsion Theme Lead for the NASA Engineering Directorate. Dr. White and his colleagues don't just believe a real life warp drive is theoretically possible; they've already started the work to create one.
Abstract Excerpt: NASA/JSC is implementing an advanced propulsion physics laboratory, informally known as "Eagleworks", to pursue propulsion technologies necessary to enable human exploration of the solar system over the next 50 years, and enabling interstellar spaceflight by the end of the century.
The GRAIL mission so far has found little evidence for some hypothetical ancient impact basins. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MIT
A sneak peek at the first results from a NASA mission to measure the Moon’s gravitational field hints at a lunar crust that is only half as thick as once thought.
There were a few gasps among scientists in the audience at a 13 September seminar at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as they took in the data revealed by Maria Zuber, principal investigator for NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission. Zuber, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, showed a crisp, high-resolution gravitational map made with data collected by GRAIL’s twin spacecraft between March and June of this year.
A spacecraft orbiting Mars has detected carbon dioxide snow falling on the Red Planet, making Mars the only body in the solar system known to host this weird weather phenomenon.
The snow on Mars fell from clouds around the planet's south pole during the Martian winter spanning 2006 and 2007, with scientists discovering it only after sifting through observations by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The Martian south pole hosts a frozen carbon dioxide — or "dry ice" — cap year-round, and the new discovery may help explain how it formed and persists, researchers said.
Snow fall - at least on Earth - is not wierd at all. However, I'd caution against trying to make a snowball with dry ice. Remember those roses shattered in high school chemistry class? Yeah, it'd be kind of like that.
This mosaic image shows spherules, or 'blueberries,' partly embedded and spread over the soil on Mars. (Image courtesy NASA/JPL/Cornell University.)
...never count Rover out.
It’s unlikely anything lives on Mars today, but it may well have done so millions or billions of years past. And it may have left traces of its existence in the geology of the red planet.
One such tantalising hint was discovered by the NASA Opportunity Rover, which found small spherical hematite balls, dubbed ‘blueberries,’ in the Martian soil.
These were originally thought to have provided the first evidence of liquid water on Mars, but their existence may hold an even more profound implication.
Now researchers from the University of Western Australia and University of Nebraska have found that such iron-oxide spheroids, when they appear on Earth, are formed by microbes.
PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA-funded astronomers have, for the first time, spotted planets orbiting sun-like stars in a crowded cluster of stars. The findings offer the best evidence yet that planets can sprout up in dense stellar environments. Although the newfound planets are not habitable, their skies would be starrier than what we see from Earth.
The starry-skied planets are two so-called hot Jupiters, which are massive, gaseous orbs that are boiling hot because they orbit tightly around their parent stars. Each hot Jupiter circles a different sun-like star in the Beehive Cluster, also called the Praesepe, a collection of roughly 1,000 stars that appear to be swarming around a common center.
This would have been my mother's 87th birthday. I am thinking of her, mindful of matters near and far, great and small.
The current conflagration in the Near East at the US Embassies in Egypt and Libya that have spread to even more countries, my curiousity led me to this entry on PBS.org:
Muslims believe that God had previously revealed Himself to the earlier prophets of the Jews and Christians, such as Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. Muslims therefore accept the teachings of both the Jewish Torah and the Christian Gospels. They believe that Islam is the perfection of the religion revealed first to Abraham (who is considered the first Muslim) and later to other prophets. Muslims believe that Jews and Christians have strayed from God's true faith but hold them in higher esteem than pagans and unbelievers. They call Jews and Christians the "People of the Book" and allow them to practice their own religions. Muslims believe that Muhammad is the "seal of the prophecy," by which they mean that he is the last in the series of prophets God sent to mankind.
Poughkeepsie Journal: “Any way you dissect it, from a moral or religious standpoint, those protesters broke our commandments,” said Umar Ahmad, a longtime member of the Mid-Hudson Islamic Association located in the Town of Wappinger. “What happened in Libya is unforgivable.”
I am not a Muslim. I do have Muslim members of my family, as well as agnostic, Jehovah's Witness, nondenominational, etc. We respect one another. Proselytizing one another has never occurred in any conversations I've had with them. What counts most is the relationship; the familial bond.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow...one of the most famous soliloquies written by Shakespeare, spoken from the mouth of Macbeth, a fictional ruler grieving the loss of his wife, musing aloud the futility's of life, the emphasis on unimportant things with respect to the brevity of existence.
We are all involved in mankindby virtue of being a part of it. The oceans no longer separate us; our worldviews aren't dictated by our limited experiences where we immediately are.
I reject the notion any culture's sacred text - Buddhist, Christian, Hebrew, Hindu, Mormon, Muslim et al - is somehow in some bigoted comparison, worthy of desecration. I reject the notion of demonizing Agnostics or Atheists. I reject - as does the US Constitution - the idea of religious tests as a qualifier for elected office (though news pundits seem to count how many times the president uses the word "God" - and he does quite often - as if this is relevant). I reject the notion that an amateurish video of moribund, racist stereotypes falls under "free speech" and "our American values," unless those values now typify the classroom bully; the boot of empire stamped on the neck of the world. Freedom of speech does not give one the right to yell firein a building not ablaze!
I am as diminished by the loss of diplomats abroad as I am military service members deployed, as I am the senseless loss of life in inner cities across the United States.
I quote President Reagan, post the failed rescue attempt 1979 in Iran, Desert 1:
"This is the time for us as a nation and a people to stand united and to pray."
It is in times of triumph and tragedy our leaders are called upon to quell our fears; raise our hopes. Personal vendettas and assaults are the mark of petty minds, I am particularly diminished by candidates that would take death so lightly as to score political points.
Isaiah 11:6 ends: ...and a little child shall lead them.I end with this photo from Facebook, the future meek that will "inherit the earth." I wish mom could see it. I think it would make her smile, and speaks more volumes than the cleverest self-serving sound bite:
The usually quiet world of mathematics is abuzz with a claim that one of the most important problems in number theory has been solved.
Mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki of Kyoto University in Japan has released a 500-page proof of the abc conjecture, which proposes a relationship between whole numbers — a 'Diophantine' problem.
The abc conjecture, proposed independently by David Masser and Joseph Oesterle in 1985, might not be as familiar to the wider world as Fermat’s Last Theorem, but in some ways it is more significant. “The abc conjecture, if proved true, at one stroke solves many famous Diophantine problems, including Fermat's Last Theorem,” says Dorian Goldfeld, a mathematician at Columbia University in New York. “If Mochizuki’s proof is correct, it will be one of the most astounding achievements of mathematics of the twenty-first century.”
Like Fermat’s theorem, the abc conjecture refers to equations of the form a+b=c. It involves the concept of a square-free number: one that cannot be divided by the square of any number. Fifteen and 17 are square free-numbers, but 16 and 18 — being divisible by 42 and 32, respectively — are not.
Researchers in the US have invented a new nanofabrication technique that can generate 2D patterns with very high rotational symmetries over large areas. Until now, only spatially repeating structures – which have sixfold or less rotational symmetry – could be patterned over such large areas using industrial photolithography techniques.
Dubbed moiré nanolithography, the technique can produced patterns with rotational symmetries as high as 36-fold – something that has never been observed in nature. Such high rotational symmetries could prove useful for a huge range of applications, from making better photonic crystals to boosting the performance of photovoltaic devices.
I could have easily discussed the anniversary of 9-11, my recollection of the celebrations that broke out spontaneously last year (my neighbors made it quite hard to sleep); my shear luck of being in New York as those infectious celebrations happened.
No...instead I'm in a Trekkie mood, looking forward to the future; hopeful. We started the 21st Century on a sour note to say the least.
From the 100 Year Starship Symposium in Houston I blogged on yesterday, I stumbled on this item. The paper is at the link below. It took me aback that the Air Force commissioned the research, but I guess you have to study these things...even if we ultimately can't, what will we learn from the effort?
Lest you think that our friends at DARPA are the only ones interested in science-fictional possibilities, the USAF recently took delivery of a new study regarding the military potential of teleportation.
The Teleportation Physics Study was done by Eric Davis of Warp Drive Metrics. Its purpose -
"This study was tasked with the purpose of collecting information describing the teleportation of material objects, providing a description of teleportation as it occurs in physics, its theoretical and experimental status, and a projection of potential applications. The study also consisted of a search for teleportation phenomena occurring naturally or under laboratory conditions that can be assembled into a model describing the conditions required to accomplish the transfer of objects."
Credit: Adrian Mann. Daedalus was conceived as a two-stage vehicle, which would attain a speed of 12 percent of the speed of light, for a 50-year voyage to reach Barnard's Star
Scientists, visionaries, entertainers and the public will gather in Houston this week for the100-Year Starship Symposium, a meeting to discuss space travel to another star.
...at its farthest, Mars is about 20 light-minutes away from Earth, and even Pluto is only about 4 light-hours distant. But the nearest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, is more than 4 light-years from Earth, meaning a vehicle traveling at light-speed would take 4 years to arrive.
Since the fastest spaceships ever built can't even approach light speed, a probe or manned vessel would take many, many years to reach even the nearest stars.
That's why the 100-Year Starship initiative, a project started with seed money from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA ), has targeted the goal of developing a vehicle that could reach another star in 100 years.
Toward that end, the independent, non-governmental 100 Year Starship organization is hosting its public symposium Sept. 13 through Sept. 16 at the Hyatt Regency in Houston. Speakers include symposium chair Mae Jemison, the first female African American astronaut, as well as astronomer Jill Tarter, a co-founder of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, Johnnetta B. Cole, director of the Smithsonian Museum of African Art, space journalist Miles O'Brien, and photographer Norman Seeff.
"Star Trek" actors LeVar Burton and Nichelle Nichols will also participate. The event is backed by former President Bill Clinton, who will serve as the symposium's honorary chair.
"Taking place the week of the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's speech delivered at Rice University challenging America to send a man to the moon, the symposium will hold a salute to fifty years of human space flight and NASA's Johnson Space Center," symposium officials wrote in an announcement.
The meeting will feature presentations on spacecraft propulsion and technology, as well as discussions on the social, psychological and religious implications of space travel to other stars.
"The symposium's technical session will include scientific papers on topics such as time-distance solutions; life sciences in space exploration; destinations and habitats; becoming an interstellar civilization; space technologies enhancing life on earth; and commercial opportunities from interstellar efforts," conference organizers wrote.
This will be the second 100-Year Starship Symposium; the last meeting was held in Orlando in October 2011.
This year, DARPA awarded seed money to the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence to found the 100 Year Starship organization, with the goal of encouraging research that will enable interstellar flight. "100 Year Starship will bring in experts from myriad fields to help achieve its goal — utilizing not only scientists, engineers, doctors, technologists, researchers, sociologists and computer experts, but also architects, writers, artists, entertainers and leaders in government, business, economics, ethics and public policy," officials wrote.
BBC Science News - Artist's conception of White Dwarf pair and Gravity Waves
...and, actually finding them! D.E. Winget - on of the investigators on the paper - is a professor at UT Austin Astrophysics. It's a small club...we kind of all know each other.
Researchers have spotted visible-light evidence for one of astronomy's most elusive targets - gravitational waves - in the orbit of a pair of dead stars.
Until now, these ripples in space-time, first predicted by Einstein, have only been inferred from radio-wave sources.
But a change in the orbits of two white dwarf stars orbiting one another 3,000 light-years away is further proof of the waves that can literally be seen.
Gravitational waves were a significant part of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which viewed space itself as a malleable construct, and the gravity of massive objects as a force that could effectively warp it.
A marble mosaic of Greek goddess Minerva in the Library of Congress symbolizes the preservation of civilization as well as the promotion of the arts and sciences.
Earth’s climate is warming, and destructive weather is growing more prevalent. Coping with the changes will require collaborative science, forward-thinking policy, and an informed public.
I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion. Thomas Jefferson
The first sentence is from an article in Physics Today: "Predicting and Managing Extreme Weather Events" (link below). Yet, we question science as if it has a despicable political agenda; a conspiratorial, nefarious, dastardly plot.
Most scientists are in the Myers-Briggs INTJ category: Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging. The personality page for it is titled "The Scientist." The description: As an INTJ, your primary mode of living is focused internally, where you take things in primarily via your intuition. Your secondary mode is external, where you deal with things rationally and logically. It's probably not a good fit to make such a person a salesman, a politician, nor a "mad scientist" bent on taking over the world (Pinky and the Brain; Dr. No). Simply put, too busy with intellectual interests; without that kind of ambition or guile.
But our leaders aren't answering questions on science; candidates obfuscate climate change to please a dogma-driven "base," building a coalition of disparate parts into a missive mass of confusion. They fear citizenry and moneyed sources alike (well, probably the moneyed sources more so).
Judging from the LA Times, the reason for the tepid jobs numbers yesterday was because "OGs" are being called back to the work force, or not leaving it for younger workers, more apt to purchase stuff in our consumer-driven economy. So they stay home longer, having as much sex as before and procreating less (and those that do bring the bundle home), mooching off mom, dad cable TV and Internet access. So much for Carrousel. A simple math question: is 96,000 greater than zero? It's not ideal, but far better than where we've been.
I fear our ignorance, our worship of without-flaw market deities and hostility to reality will not lead to a blissful end.
This is a challenging time for the US and for US science. The economy, though it is beginning to show some positive signs, is still in bad shape. Extraordinary numbers of Americans are without jobs. The public holds a record-low opinion of government. The integrity of the scientific process is being questioned, and pressure to reduce federal spending is fierce. The irony is that the demand for services provided by agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is at an all-time high and growing. Our ability to deliver those services depends in part on our scientific enterprise. One significant reason why demand for services is growing is the increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. Last year, new records were set in the US for tornadoes, drought, wind, floods, and wildfires. Heat records were set in every state. At one time last summer, nearly half of the country’s population was under a heat advisory or heat warning. In late November, hurricane-force winds hit parts of Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, with winds reaching 97 mph in Pasadena.
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
American biologist James Watson and English physicist Francis Crick and their contribution to the discovery of the DNA structure, photo and article in Nature
Scientists unveiled the results of a massive international project Wednesday that they say debunks the notion that most of our genetic code is made up of so-called junk DNA.
The ENCODE project (Encyclopedia of DNA elements), which involved hundreds of researchers in dozens of labs, also produced what some scientists are saying is like Google Maps for the human genome.
"So the most amazing thing that we found was that we can ascribe some kind of biochemical activity to 80 percent of the genome. And this really kind of debunks the idea that there's a lot of junk DNA or really if there is any DNA that we would really call junk," NHGRI's Feingold said.
What has been called junk DNA is actually teeming with an intricate web of molecular switches that play crucial roles in regulating genes. The ENCODE project scientists found at least 4 million of these regulatory regions so far.
From her website: Dr. Aziza is a physicist by training and currently works as a science media producer in affiliation with AZIZA Productions, a science media production company she established in the year 2000. She has always been interested in communicating science to the lay public through television.
While working on her Ph.D. in theoretical nuclear physics at the University of Maryland at College Park, Dr. Aziza received a Mass Media Science & Engineering fellowship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and was assigned to CNN’s science and technology unit in Atlanta Georgia. During her fellowship, she gained hands-on experience producing science news video segments which aired on CNN’s newscasts. This experience launched her career as a TV science producer and on-air correspondent.
From MySciNet: Aziza Baccouche—Dr. Z, as she calls herself—has made a career connecting scientific research to the people it could affect, such as informing patients about medical developments and getting more minority students interested in science. Her medium is the screen, and she tells the stories of science through documentaries. But Baccouche, a Ph.D. physicist-turned-filmmaker, will likely never clearly see any of her finished products: She became legally blind at the age of 8, and ever since she's relied on her wits, passion for science, excellent memory, and what she calls her vision to achieve success.
"We know power is work over time, that strength is endurance over time. So I endured a lot of obstacles, but at the same time I created strength and vision and wisdom and endurance."
Simulated valence-charge density from x-ray and optical wave mixing shows the nuclei of carbon atoms as dark spots revealed by diffracted x-rays and the peaks of some of the bonds between them as white and blue spots induced by the polarized optical pulse. In diamond, the optical pulse primarily wiggles the charge that makes up chemical bonds.
Light changes matter in ways that shape our world. Photons trigger changes in proteins in the eye to enable vision; sunlight splits water into hydrogen and oxygen and creates chemicals through photosynthesis; light causes electrons to flow in the semiconductors that make up solar cells; and new devices for consumers, industry, and medicine operate with photons instead of electrons. But directly measuring how light manipulates matter on the atomic scale has never been possible, until now.
An international team of scientists led by Thornton Glover of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) used the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to mix a pulse of superbright x-rays with a pulse of lower frequency, “optical” light from an ordinary laser. By aiming the combined pulses at a diamond sample, the team was able to measure the optical manipulation of chemical bonds in the crystal directly, on the scale of individual atoms.
The researchers report their work in the August 30, 2012 issue of the journal Nature.
Researchers in the US have estimated that modification of stratospheric albedo – a widely discussed geoengineering technique to counteract some of the effects of climate change – could cost as little as $5bn a year. Although this is just a small fraction of the gross domestic product (GDP) of most western countries, the team stresses that there are many potential risks of geoengineering the planet in this way.
Geoengineering aims to mitigate man-made climate change by making large-scale modifications to the Earth's surface or atmosphere. One of the main proposals discussed by scientists is stratospheric albedo modification: changing the reflective power of the atmosphere 10–50 km above the Earth's surface so that more solar radiation is reflected back into space. Such a modification would be achieved by pumping tiny particles known as aerosols into the upper atmosphere.
Not to be a "Doubting Thomas," but I thought "aerosols in the upper atmosphere" (recall CFCs and the ozone layer) was a bad idea! I sincerely hope they've modeled this thoroughly.
