Amira

"Right now we’re living in what Carl Sagan correctly termed a demon-haunted world. We have created a Star Wars civilization but we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. That’s dangerous. (…) Constant turmoil occurs in modern human societies and what I’m suggesting is that turmoil is endemic in the way human advanced social behavior originated in the first place. It’s by group selection that occurred favoring altruism versus individual level selection, which by and large, not exclusively, favor individual and selfish behavior. We’re hung in the balance. We’ll never reach either one extreme or the other. (...) I’ve also felt very strongly that we needed a much better understanding of who we are and where we came from. We need answers to those questions in order to get our bearings toward a successful long-term future, that means a future for ourselves, our species and for the rest of life. (...) We have a kind of resistance toward honest self-understanding as a species and I think that resistance is due in part to our genetic history. And now, can we overcome it? I think so.” - Amira

“There was this American physiologist who was asked if Mary’s bodily ascent from Earth to Heaven was possible. He said,“I wasn’t there; therefore, I’m not positive that it happened or didn’t happen; but of one thing I’m certain: She passed out at 10,000 meters.” - Amira

+1 for Feyerabend, anything goes: science as mythology within experimental constraints http://www.marxists.org/referen... - Adriano

"One way to define linguistics is as the study of language itself, which can be contrasted with language behavior. Language behavior is studied by people in the fields of psycholinguistics, language development, natural language processing, and computational linguistics, and there is often an attempt to keep these fields distinct from linguistics "proper". I believe that it is more productive to see all of these fields as making up "the language sciences" or "language science", and it is really this meta-field that is the topic of this book." - Amira

"The Earth is depicted as big, blue, and beautiful in NASA photos taken from space, but here’s one you might not have seen. NASA’s photos are said to be composites of multiple images, but a Russian satellite has captured one single 121-megapixel photo that simply looks stunning. We’re most used to seeing an expanse of white and blue, but here you can see some earth tones (no pun intended) in the mix too. The Elektro-L weather satellite captured the image from 22,369 miles away, although it has been tweaked slightly. The images that NASA usually throw up are apparently “boring”, so near-infrared imagery has been overlaid on this photo to provide a swath of browns and oranges. The below video is comprised of around 350 shots, with one taken every 30 minutes, and 0.62 miles fitting into each pixel." - Amira

"The vascular system of a leaf provides its structure and delivers its nutrients. When you light up that vascular structure with some fluorescent dye and view it using time-lapse photography, details begin to emerge that reveal nature's mathematical formula for survival. (...) "If you begin looking at them in any degree of detail, you will see all of those beautiful arrangements of impinging angles and where the big veins meet the little veins and how well they are arranged," (...) It's a pattern that can neutralize the effect of a wound to the leaf, such as a hole in its main vein. Nutrients bypass the hole and the leaf remains completely intact. "Something that looks pretty looks pretty for a really good reason. It has a well defined and elegant function. We can scan the leaves at extremely high resolution and reconstruct every single little piece of vein, who talks to who, who is connected to who and so forth," (...) - Amira

"This research is a unique interdisciplinary partnership in which physics is used to address biological problems, and it is our belief that the mathematical and physical sciences will play a major role in biomedical research in this century," (...) Magnasco says this research is a jumping off point for understanding other systems that branch and rejoin, including everything from river systems to neural networks and even malignant tumors. "When a tumor becomes malignant it vascularizes, so understanding all of this is extremely important for understanding how these things work." - Amira

Revealing Nature's Mathematical Formula for Survival (video) http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Amira

Harvard literary scholar Leah Price "argues that literary critics should stop assuming that reading is the most important thing people do with books. (...) We tend to think of literature as something that ties individuals and cultures together, but as books proliferated in the Victorian era they often drove people apart. (...) With so many new books, and so many new readers, a few Victorians began investing books themselves with symbolic power. For the first time, Price suggests, these people turned books into something special—into something you shouldn’t write in or treat like a decoration. Up to this point, reading books was rare enough that the act itself made you stand out. “People took for granted that you could use a book for all kinds of things,” Price says. But for all of these reasons, that began to change with the Victorians. “This was the moment where you start to become embarrassed about these nontextual uses,” she says, “where you start to say, ‘Other people do these things with books. But I don’t—I’m a reader.’” (...) “In the 18th century,” she notes, “the ability to concentrate on a book was actually proof you’re an idle daydreaming loafer.” (...) Price points out that, when the first bulky e-readers came out, people complained that you couldn’t read them in bed: “Well, for most of the book’s history you couldn’t read it in bed, either, or the curtains would catch on fire.” " - Amira

Great set of images! - Son of Groucho

"Though quantum teleportation has existed for well over 10 years, it has never actually happened at a distance that would be of any use to people in the real world. But for the first time, Chinese researchers were able to teleport a quantum object nearly 100 kilometers, ramping up the real world applications for the idea. (...) The quantum teleportation does not involve dematerializing and then re-materializing physical matter, but rather using a photon to transmit the quantum state of one object to another, thus allowing the recipient to become a clone of the sender (think of it kind of like your consciousness inhabiting someone else's body). Using a 1.3 watt laser, the scientists developed a guide mechanism that allows a photon to make it from point A to point B without getting lost. Satellite based quantum communications—which could be useful for quantum cryptography—are an application which scientists are particularly excited about." http://gizmodo.com/5909610... - Amira

do the chinese call them alice, bob, and charlie too? - Winckel

"Philip Glass is one of the most influential and polarising composers of the last 50 years. His trademark sound is repetitive, rhythmic and hypnotic - some call it musical minimalism. Stephen Sackur asked what music meant to him. " - Amira

"Music is a place... and once you know where this place is, you can go there." - Amira

"Edward O. Wilson has revolutionized science and inspired the public more often than any other living biologist. Now he is blending his pioneer work on ants with a new perspective on human development to propose a radical reframing of how evolution works.First the social insects ruled, from 60 million years ago. Then a species of social mammals took over, from 10 thousand years ago. Both sets of “eusocial” animals mastered the supremely delicate art of encouraging altruism, so that individuals in the groups would act as if they value the goal of the group over their own goals. They would specialize for the group and die for the group. In recent decades the idea of “kin selection” seemed to explain how such an astonishing phenomenon could evolve. Wilson replaces kin selection with “multi-level selection,” which incorporates both individual selection (long well understood) and group selection (long considered taboo). Every human and every human society has to learn how to manage adroitly the perpetual ambiguity and conflict between individual needs and group needs. What I need is never the same as what we need." - Amira

“Mythmaking could never discover the origin and meaning of humanity” — and contemporary philosophy is also irrelevant, having “long ago abandoned the foundational questions about human existence.” The proper approach to answering these deep questions is the application of the methods of science, including archaeology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Also, we should study insects.” http://www.nytimes.com/2012... - Amira

"There are growing number of people who have decided to live light on the earth 'to not be a part of problem anymore'. I spent the last few years with four of them striving for harmony with nature in the most pristine corners of United States." - Amira

A mix of the Wild West and Robin Hood scenery :-) - Amira

"Like novelists, mathematicians are creative authors. With diagrams, symbolism, metaphor, double entendre and elements of surprise, a good proof reads like a good story. (...) [Reviel] Netz reveals the stunning stylistic similarities between Hellenistic poetry and mathematical texts from the same era. (...) In the very layout, in the use of a particular formulaic language, in the structuring of the text (...) its success or failure depends entirely on features residing in the text itself. It is really an activity very powerfully concentrated around the manipulation of written documents, more perhaps than anywhere else in science, and comparable, then, to modern poetry. (...) Metaphor is fairly standard in mathematics. Mathematics can only become truly interesting and original when it involves the operation of seeing something as something else – a pair of similarly looking triangles, say, as a site for an abstract proportion; a diagonal crossing through the set of all real numbers." - Amira

Indeed, Amira, linguists have mostly ignored the grammar and syntax of hand gestures which is more primitive than oral or written communication. We implicitly accept its deep structure and understand its rich semantics, conveying more than words sometimes :-) - Adriano

Fr. "Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; roughly translated: "workshop of potential literature" is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members have included novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poets Oskar Pastior, Jean Lescure and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud. The group defines the term littérature potentielle as (rough translation): "the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy." Constraints are used as a means of triggering ideas and inspiration, most notably Perec's "story-making machine." - Amira

I wonder if it's not just a matter of not entering the appropriate HTML command, however, it should be noted in footnote or introduction. - Amira

"The Circle at Zurich Airport that is designed by Zaha Hadid, takes this dynamic fluid shape in respond to two urban conditions. First, the compactness of the form and the continuous adjacency to the airport from one side. Second, is to maximize its perimeter, for the purpose of embracing the nature and taking the maximum advantage of views. The River ‘flows’ as a continuous curve on one side, as a convex erosion on the other – within, ‘interior urbanism’ promotes interaction between different program elements, incorporating three major ‘canyon’ voids to define entry points and circulation routes. A top level open plan streetscape houses retail, cafes and restaurants. (...) The building’s “interior urbanism” encourages interaction amongst different programmatic modules and sharing of facilities open to the public, whilst maintaining a practical vertical stacking for each module, aimed at rationalizing services and circulation. (...) While Clarity of access is of paramount importance, with access to both horizontal and vertical circulation within the complex. These will be related to three major atriums or “canyons” cutting through the building section and merging in the top floor. These “canyons” cover three critically important functions: to highlight the major circulation elements (both horizontal and vertical) , to indicate main entry points to the complex, and also to create a variety of floor plans that fit the mixed uses of the building." - Amira

"Leonardo da Vinci sketched out tanks, helicopters, and mechanical calculators centuries before the first examples were built. Now another of his flights of imagination has finally been realized—an imaging device capable of capturing every optical aspect of the scene before it.
 Lytro, a Silicon Valley start‑up, has just launched the world’s first consumer light-field camera, which shoots pictures that can be focused long after they’re captured, either on the camera itself or online. Lytro promises no more blurry subjects, and no shutter lag waiting for the camera’s lens to focus. A software update to the camera, coming soon, will even let you produce 3-D images.
 (...) The next generation of light-field optical wizardry promises ultra-accurate facial-recognition systems, personalized 3-D televisions, and cameras that provide views of the world that are indistinguishable from what you’d see out a window.
 (...)" - Amira

"Instead of merely recording the sum of all the light rays falling on each photosite, a light-field camera aims to measure the intensity and direction of every incoming ray. With that information, you can generate not just one but every possible image of whatever is within the camera’s field of view at that moment. (...) The information a light-field camera records is, mathematically speaking, part of something that optics specialists call the plenoptic function. (...) It’s a function of five dimensions, because you need three (x, y, and z) to specify the position of each vantage point, plus two more (often denoted θ and φ) for the angle of every incoming ray. 
(...) “Viewers already decide what they see in a picture. Pick any artwork that speaks to you, think about what you see in it, and then ask someone else. They will see something different.” 
 - Amira

"Where the world’s wires once hummed with the electrical impulses of people talking, that conversation, in the digital age, has been subsumed by all the other information we are exchanging. “At this point, voice isn’t even a rounding error in network operators’ calculations,” Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography, a telecom research company, recently told me. To underscore the point, he sent me a chart showing “switched voice” as a thin wedge, gradually squeezed to a nearly invisible nothing by the oceanic thrust of “Internet” (and a smaller stratolayer of “private networks”). It looks as if the world has gone quiet. (...) While in 2003 the average local mobile phone call lasted a leisurely three minutes, by 2010 it had been trimmed to a terse one minute and 47 seconds. (...) Consider, for example, this casual dismissal by TheNew York Times in 1939: “The problem with television is that people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn’t time for it.” (...) - Amira

"A British band and a group of scientists have made the most relaxing tune in the history of man. (...) Sound therapists and Manchester band Marconi Union compiled the song. Scientists played it to 40 women and found it to be more effective at helping them relax than songs by Enya, Mozart and Coldplay. Weightless works by using specific rhythms, tones, frequencies and intervals to relax the listener. A continuous rhythm of 60 BPM causes the brainwaves and heart rate to synchronise with the rhythm: a process known as ‘entrainment’. Low underlying bass tones relax the listener and a low whooshing sound with a trance-like quality takes the listener into an even deeper state of calm. (...) Brain imaging studies have shown that music works at a very deep level within the brain, stimulating not only those regions responsible for processing sound but also ones associated with emotions." The study - commissioned by bubble bath and shower gel firm Radox Spa - found the song was even more relaxing than a massage, walk or cup of tea." - Amira

+ - Koleksiyoner Ali

"A truly unique work of fiction, ‘The Codex Seraphinianus‘ is a book that appears to be a visual encyclopedia of some unknown world or dimension. Written down in one of that worlds beautiful curving languages, the book by Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini, explains the odd inhabitants and their colorful behaviors. The book was created between 1976 and 1978 and for the low price of about $500.00 you can ponder over your own copy." - Amira

"Speed Demo” the FishIE Tank demonstrates hardware acceleration, canvas based image manipulation and PNG based sprite sheet animation." http://adamkinney.com/blog... - Amira

“For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new. (…) The past is a foreign country, but the recent past—the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s—looks almost identical to the present. This is the First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History. (…) Movies and literature and music have never changed less over a 20-year period. Lady Gaga has replaced Madonna, Adele has replaced Mariah Carey—both distinctions without a real difference. (...) Ironically, new technology has reinforced the nostalgic cultural gaze: now that we have instant universal access to every old image and recorded sound, the future has arrived and it’s all about dreaming of the past. Our culture’s primary M.O. now consists of promiscuously and sometimes compulsively reviving and rejiggering old forms. (...)" - Amira

"Why is this happening? In some large measure, I think, it’s an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out. (...) The more certain things change for real (technology, the global political economy), the more other things (style, culture) stay the same. (...) [But] more people than ever before are devoting more of their time and energy to considering and managing matters of personal style. (...) But the other part of the explanation is economic: like any lucrative capitalist sector, our massively scaled-up new style industry naturally seeks stability and predictability. (...) Today, Starbucks doesn’t want to have to renovate its thousands of stores every few years. (...) Information technology; which leads us to embrace the past and turn the present into a pleasantly eclectic for-profit museum; which deprives the cultures of innovation of the fuel they need to conjure genuinely new ideas and forms; which deters radical change, reinforcing the economic (and political) stagnation." - Amira

"Researchers from the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore, demonstrates a new way in which computers based on quantum physics could beat the performance of classical computers. When confronted with a complicated system, scientists typically strive to identify underlying simplicity which is then articulated as natural laws and fundamental principles. However, complex systems often seem immune to this approach, making it difficult to extract underlying principles. Researchers have discovered that complex systems can be less complex than originally thought if they allow quantum physics to help: quantum models of complex systems are simpler and predict their behaviour more efficiently than classical models. A good measure of the complexity of a particular system or process is how predictable it is. For example, the outcome of a fair coin toss is inherently unpredictable and any resources (beyond a random guess) spent on predicting it would be wasted. Therefore, the complexity of such a process is zero. (...) If quantum dynamics can be exploited to make identical predictions with less memory, then such systems need not be as complex as originally thought." - Amira

"Two studies published online today in Cell1, 2 suggest that DNA duplication errors that happened millions of years ago might have had a pivotal role in the evolution of the complexity of the human brain. The duplications — which created new versions of a gene active in the brains of other mammals — may have endowed humans with brains that could create more neuronal connections, perhaps leading to greater computational power. The enzymes that copy DNA sometimes slip extra copies of a gene into a chromosome, and scientists estimate that such genetic replicas make up about 5% of the human genome. (...) “Ten years after the human genome was sequenced and declared done, we’re still finding new genes in new places that are really important to human brain function and evolution,” Eichler’s team calculates that SRGAP2C appeared roughly 2.4 million years ago, around the time that big-brained species of Homo evolved in Africa from smaller-skulled Australopithecines, and around the time that stone tools appeared in the fossil record. These ancient hominins eventually gave rise to Homo erectus, which were the first human ancestors to wander beyond Africa, roughly 1.8 million years ago. (...) “If you’re increasing the total number of connections, you’re probably increasing the ability of this network to handle information,” Polleux says. "It’s like increasing the number of processors in a computer." - Amira

"When Edvard Munch painted "The Scream" he did not have enough money to buy canvas, so the painting that sold on May 2nd at Sotheby's for $120m is on cardboard. It is a remarkable image with a history to match: during the second world war when Norway was occupied by the Nazis, it was hidden in a hay loft. But it is not unique: Munch painted several versions, which makes its record-breaking price surprising to some. The other versions are in museums, and thus beyond the reach of the anonymous buyer who broke the record for a work sold at auction. Yet the sale is only a record in nominal terms: adjusted for inflation, several more expensive paintings have been sold (see chart). When private sales are taken into consideration, "The Scream" looks like a bargain: press reports suggest that a buyer paid $250m for Paul Cézanne's "The Card Players" in 2011." See also: http://www.washingtonpost.com/busines... - Amira

"Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology have created the first complex works of nanoarchitecture. Using their own custom made high-precision 3-D printer, the team recreated models of Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral and London’s Tower Bridge at the scale of a dust mite. The feat was made possible through two-photon lithography, whereby a laser is guided by a chain of controllable mirrors through a liquid resin to form a solid polymer line only several hundred nanometers wide. The resin solidifies only when the initiator molecules within in have absorbed two photons of the spent laser beam at once, or when the polymer molecules fall directly under the laser’s central focal point. The experiment’s achievement, however, lay in the rapid rate at which the printer laid down material lines. Whereas “the printing speed [of similar printers] used to be measured in millimeters per second,” says Professor Jürgen Stampfl of TU Vienna, ”our device can do five meters in one second.” (...) Ahigh wire act of incredible precision involving the perfect synchronization of the constantly moving mirrors. University scientists hope to develop and introduce bio-compatible resins into the process for medical applications, wherein infinitesimal infrastructures could be printed to buttress cells leading to the creation of biological tissues." - Amira

Kinda reminds me of Superman's microscopic/bottled city of Kandor - CarlC

"German artist Cornelia Konrads creates mind-bending site-specific installations in public spaces, sculpture parks and private gardens around the world. Her work is frequently punctuated by the illusion of weightlessness, where stacked objects like logs, fences, and doorways appear to be suspended in mid-air, reinforcing their temporary nature as if the installation is beginning to dissolve before your very eyes. One of her more recent sculptures, Schleudersitz is an enormous slingshot made from a common park bench, and you can get a great idea of what it might be like to sit inside it with this interactive 360 degree view." http://www.360cities.net/image... - Amira

"I asked Hammond to predict what percentage of news would be written by computers in 15 years. At first he tried to duck the question, but with some prodding he sighed and gave in: “More than 90 percent.” (...) That’s not to say that computer-generated stories will remain in the margins, limited to producing more and more Little League write-ups and formulaic earnings previews. Hammond was recently asked for his reaction to a prediction that a computer would win a Pulitzer Prize within 20 years. He disagreed. It would happen, he said, in five. (...) To construct sentences, the algorithms use vocabulary compiled by the meta-writers. (For baseball, the meta-writers seem to have relied heavily on famed early-20th-century sports columnist Ring Lardner. People are always whacking home runs, swiping bags, tallying runs, and stepping up to the dish.) The company calls its finished product “the narrative.” (...) Users can customize the tone of any story—from breathless financial reporter to dry analyst. (...)" - Amira

"Maybe at some point, humans and algorithms will collaborate, with each partner playing to its strength. Computers, with their flawless memories and ability to access data, might act as legmen to human writers. Or vice versa, human reporters might interview subjects and pick up stray details—and then send them to a computer that writes it all up. As the computers get more accomplished and have access to more and more data, their limitations as storytellers will fall away. It might take a while, but eventually even a story like this one could be produced without, well, me. “Humans are unbelievably rich and complex, but they are machines,” Hammond says. “In 20 years, there will be no area in which Narrative Science doesn’t write stories.” - Amira

"The New York City Municipal Archives just released a database of over 870,000 photos from its collection of more than 2.2 million images of New York throughout the 20th century. Their subjects include daily life, construction, crime, city business, aerial photographs, and more." - Amira

"TV shows and films give them the dangerous idea that great authors just wait to get inspired, and then genius pours out of their pens in an unstoppable flood. The reality is different. Writers—especially the great ones—mostly sit at desks feeling rotten, struggling to write crumpled sentences that they can smooth into something acceptable. (This may be part of the reason that writers have higher rates of substance abuse, depression, and suicide). The science fiction writer Kurt Vonnegut wrote hilarious, poignant novels like Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions, and Galapagos. But most days he didn't feel like a poignant genius. "When I write," Vonnegut said, "I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth."" - Amira

“This article provides the first comprehensive conceptual account for the imagistic mental machinery that allows us to travel through time—for the time machine in our mind. It is argued that language reveals this imagistic machine and how we use it. Findings from a range of cognitive fields are theoretically unified and a recent proposal about spatialized mental time travel is elaborated on. The following novel distinctions are offered: external vs. internal viewing of time; “watching” time vs. projective “travel” through time; optional vs. obligatory mental time travel; mental time travel into anteriority or posteriority vs. mental time travel into the past or future; single mental time travel vs. nested dual mental time travel; mental time travel in episodic memory vs. mental time travel in semantic memory; and “seeing” vs. “sensing” mental imagery. Theoretical, empirical, and applied implications are discussed. (...) Many conceptualizations observed in language have also been found to exist in mental representations that are more basic than language itself. (…)" - Amira

"The evolution of the capacity to simulate possible future events, based on episodic memory, enhanced fitness by enabling action in preparation of different possible scenarios that increased present or future survival and reproduction chances. Human language may have evolved in the first instance for the sharing of past and planned future events, and, indeed, fictional ones, further enhancing fitness in social settings.” - Amira

Time is a very odd thing - for years and years I've been perplexed by the difference between objective and subjective time. I would just add this to the conversation - we used to think of time as a distinct thing and we grew up - evolutionarily speaking acting like it was - and now (post Einstein) we know beyond any reasonable doubt that time and distance (space) are the same thing, spacetime, not just time and not just space, so in about 50,000 years perhaps this will be reflected biologically in how we consider time. - Winckel

time seems to be just the by-product of how we fast we simulate causal events -- just a thought #Gedankenexperimenten :-) - Adriano

"Most of the time our autobiographical memories and beliefs match up - we remember last week's journey to a conference and believe that journey really took place. Other times, we believe an event happened - we know we travelled to that conference - but our memory for the event eludes us, perhaps because the trip was so boring or because we drank too much wine. Recently, psychologists have begun to examine the rarer reverse scenario, in which we have what feels like a memory for an event, but we know (or believe) that the event never happened - we recall the conference journey but know we couldn't have made it. A recent survey (pdf) of over 1,500 undergrads found that nearly a quarter reported having a non-believed memory of this kind. Now Andrew Clark and his colleagues have gone further - for the first time actually provoking non-believed memories in the lab. (...) A question for future research on non-believed memories is whether belief is needed for the initial formation of the memories, even if that belief later falls away. "Or, alternatively," the researchers said, "can memories form completely in the absence of belief?"." - Amira

:-) - Amira

love! - Todd Hoff