As the latest in our Terry obsession with Science-Inspired Music, check out Jim Bumgardner’s “Wheel of Stars”

Image: European Space Agency/Hubble

To make this, I downloaded public data from Hipparcos, a satellite launched by the European Space Agency in 1989 that accurately measured over a hundred thousand stars. The data I downloaded contains position, parallax, magnitude, and color information, among other things.

…

As the stars cross zero and 180 degrees, indicated by the center line, the clock plays an individual note, or chime for each star. The pitch of the chime is based on the star’s BV measurement (which roughly corresponds to color or temperature). The volume is based on the star’s magnitude, or apparent brightness, and the stereo panning is based on the position on the screen (use headphones to hear it better).

Jim has a series of other fascinating projects blending mathematics and geometry with music, including the Whitney Music Box.

(via Pharangula, via This Blog Contains Caffeine)

I haven’t seen Julie vs. Julia, but this is the best thing to ever appear on the interwebs.

Julia Childs teaches about the possible conditions which created the so called “Primordial Soup” in contemporary theories of Abiogenesis. The video is from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Life in The Universe gallery which opened in 1976, but is now closed.

Abiogenesis is a fascinating topic. Another prominent theory is that some of the precursors of life were created elsewhere in space and brought here via asteroid or comet. This theory (sometimes called, panspermia) was recently bolstered by the discovery of an amino acid on a comet.

In response to the shocking revelation of comments by Canada’s Minister of State for Science and Technology on evolution.

(see here for some great responses from the research community)

As a student in scientific field, I wish to express the deep concern I felt reading about Minister Goodyear’s comments on a central fact of scientific knowledge - evolution. I was disappointed to learn that the man in charge of scientific development in this country is so deeply ignorant of his domain. The fact is that evolution is a central pillar of many avenues of scientific research today - from biomedical advances which increase our ability of understand and fight diseases, to even seemingly unrelated fields such as my own - artificial intelligence - where concepts of evolution have been adapted into successful computational techniques. Far from being a controversial issue, as some dishonest partisans imply, there is no controversy amongst scientists; Evolution is a fact, and an important one.

Moreover, it is confusing that the Minister would frame the question as a matter of belief in the first place - evolution is the result of overwhelming evidence and consistent data from a wide array of research avenues. To frame the issue as one of personal belief or even as a matter of religious freedom is to miss the point entirely, and suggests a frightening lack of understanding on the Minister’s part.

To have the Minister of Science be so ignorant of a central fact of scientific knowledge is absurd - as absurd as if the Finance Minister did not “believe” in supply-and-demand, or if the Minister of Defense did not “believe” in the existence of Iraq. How can Canada hope to remain relevant and competitive as a location for research if those in charge are so incompetent? As a student looking towards graduate school, such revelations about our country’s leadership make me seriously question whether I wish to continue my studies in Canada, or go elsewhere.

I sincerely hope that further clarifications will be made on the Minister’s stance on this issue and that, if it his found that he is as ignorant as his previous comments suggest, a more suitable replacement will be found.

Beyond the comments on evolution, I am further concerned that the minister hinted at an approach the research focusing on commercial applications. Such a focus on research that will sell will harm the research community in Canada; pure research is important and valuable, and it should not be the domain of the government to decide which avenues are likely to be the most profitable.

Sincerely,
Nicholas FitzGerald

In this morning’s Globe and Mail, an article about an interesting approach to overcoming social prejudices currently at Guelph University, amongst other places. The initiative is called Living Library - where the “books” are people from marginalized minority groups, and “readers” sign up for 30-minute sessions to talk with these people and learn about their experiences. Participants are encouraged to discuss their prejudices and stereotypes openly, so than they can be overcome.

In Guelph, the book catalogue touched on many taboo topics, with titles such as Don’t Call Me a Homo, HIV Positive and Transsexual Guy.

Perhaps the most brave to be found at the liberal campus: Pro-Life.

For Julia Chapman, editor of the student newspaper and contact for the Guelph event, the Living Library was a natural fit. “There is so much diversity on campus, we felt it important to provide a forum for constructive conversations on contentious issues.

While not all differences can be resolved by a simple conversation (the “Pro-Life” and “Feminist Lesbian” books are unlikely to see eye-to-eye), it is a fact that much of what divides us is simply the gulf of the unknown. Once you have a face to go with a stereotype, it tends to promote tolerance. Numerous studies have shown strong links between, for instance, familiarity with homosexual individuals and support for gay rights (source).

It seems like this would be a very valuable experience; a chance to discuss openly the prejudices that all of us have - I think even those of us who consider ourselves tolerant and open-minded would, if we are honest, concede that we harbour at least some untested prejudices. An initiative like these Living Libraries would, if nothing else, allow us to distinguish those differences between us which are real and salient, from those which are but the product of ignorance.

(Douglas College in New Westminster, BC has a permanent version of the Living Library, although theirs seems to be geared more towards experts in a field or hobby, rather than social minorities)

Do you get bored with Top-40 radio, or the same 500 songs you’ve been listening to for months on your iPod? Ever feel like what you’d really like to be listening to is a robotic voice reading off all the known base-pairs of the human genome? Well now you can! The same people who produced the fascinating DNA-Rainbow have a new project, DNA-Radio, which streams the sounds of the human genome 24/7. At the rate at which it reads it will take about 23.5 years to complete. Listen to the exciting live action here!

This is one of a number of projects which have sprung up recently to turn the human genome into art. Companies such as DNA 11 offer to sequence your DNA to produce unique personalized wall hangings. There is much artistic potential in the code which creates human life. Perhaps next someone should try and write a short story using only the 4 letters of the genome…

Or not.

This is a re-hash of a topic I previously posted on my own blog, but I’m hoping the larger audience of Terry might provoke a more… lively discussion than the one spam comment it has so far received…

The occasion was my having just read Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science by David Lindley, a very enjoyable and instructive look into the history and personalities surrounding the development of early Quantum Mechanics which I would recommend to any who, like me, knows less about physics than they would like to. Or if you’re stuck on an airplane with terrible film selection, as was the case.

Something which struck me was that many of the insights the book provided into the personalities and private arguments surrounding the historical events were gleaned from letters which the major players had sent to each other, detailing their thoughts and perspectives on the issues.

This got me thinking: how will future science historians gain similar insights into modern scientists, when the nature of modern communication is so transitive? In a world where email, IP-telephony and instant messaging are the dominant modes of discourse, what will remain as a public record for the documentation of scientific development “as-it-happened”? Few people keep old emails forever, and once they are deleted they are pretty much gone forever (unless future historians will be both remarkably skilled in forensic data recovery, and remarkably lucky). Heck, even writing in the margins of hard-copy books, which has historically provided insight into the reader’s personality, and maddening enigmas to spur development, may soon be a thing of the past.

Interestingly, unlike paper media like letters and books, which are more likely to survive if jealously guarded by their owners and more liable to entropy with use, digital data gains longevity from heavy trafficking. Newsgroup, forum and blog posts are likely to have long shelf-lives with services like WayBackMachine and Google caching, whereas private emails, instant-message and Skype conversations will likely be lost. So there’s an interesting conflict between privacy concerns and public interest. Perhaps Google or Amazon or Facebook storing private data might have long-term practical benefits - despite the backlash such occurances generally produce? Now, I’m not for one second suggesting that I like the idea of multinational corporations trawling my private data in order to subtly sell me things, but I do wonder how future historians will gain insight into the personailities of today’s important developers without some storing of personal information. Perhaps we should be giving greater thought to the preservation of digital data - even if it is private?

For my first post on the Terry project, I thought I’d riff on the popular chain-letter currently infecting Facebook profiles everywhere. But rather than write about myself (a subject less interesting than any of the items on the following list) I thought I’d write about 10 cool ideas which are currently rattling around my brain. Feel free to continue this modified version of the meme!

(Modified) Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 10 random things, facts, or ideas about something OTHER than yourself. At the end, choose some people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about your thoughts.

1. Though it is cliché to say, I really do not often pay attention to chain-letters. This one caught my attention for two reasons - first that it was so popular, and secondly that it turned up in different unconnected parts of my social web within a very short period of time. I was intrigued that the meme could spread to so many disparate social groups so quickly. I realized that this was just one more example of the Small World Phenomenon - a property of sufficiently connected graphs such as social networks, wherein the average path length between any two nodes is surprisingly small. This phenomenon underlies popular games such as “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” or the more modern “Six Degrees of Wikipedia“.

2. About 20 minutes from the time of writing this (meaning it will have long since passed by the time I post this), UNIX time will read 1234567890. UNIX time, a count of the number of seconds since midnight UTC on January 1, 1970, is the system of time-counting used by UNIX-like computer systems. That means you Mac and GNU/Linux users, and likely the webserver on which the Terry site is hosted. This “cool” event is (as far as I can tell) the last significant number which will occur before UNIX time suffers it’s own version of the Y2K-problem at 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, 19 January 2038. (Update: WOOHOOOOO!)

3. Pangolins are pretty awesome. I first learned about them watching a random nature documentary on the BBC over winter holidays (thanks, David Attenborough!). They are independently evolved ant eaters whose fur have fused into a scaly shell, with powerful digging claws for attacking termite colonies. They also have the largest tongue-body ratio of any animal - now that’s impressive.

4. I’m annoyed by the chauvinism some philosophers apply to discussions of intelligence and consciousness. The best definitions we seem to be able to come up with for intelligence are based around certain capabilities that are apparent in humans. But as soon as a computer system is designed which has that capability, the definition of intelligence is refined to exclude that capability! Some philosophers (ie. Searle) go so far as to say that even if a computer system were functionally and empirically indistinguishable from a human, it would not be intelligent or conscious. How much more human-centric can one get? This comic (from Ray Kurzweil) sums it up nicely (click picture for larger version):

5. If you mess around with statistics for long enough you learn some pretty surprising things. For instance, take the problem of Authorship Attribution, which is an area of Artificial Intelligence research where you try to determine the author of a particular anonymous text by comparing it to a corpus of writing from several different authors. Intuitively, you might think that the best way to do this would be to examine the grammatical and semantic structure of the piece, the words used, etc. But in fact, the some of the most successful approaches do something much less literary, much more statistical. What you do is count each bigram - combinations of two letters (so for example the word “write” would yield the bigrams set {wr, ri, it, te}). Measuring the relative frequencies of each bigram used, you get a “fingerprint” for each piece and each author. Comparing how close the fingerprint of the anonymous piece is to the fingerprints of the various authors is one of the best current ways to attribute authorship. Who woulda thunk it! (source1, source2[pdf])

6. Renaissance astronomer (and webcomic namesake) Tycho Brahe was long thought to have died in a pretty hilarious way. The story goes that he was at a banquet and really needed to go to the bathroom, but felt it would be rude to leave before the dinner was finished. The subsequent bladder infection was thought to have been the cause of his death. Recent research, however, has overturned this legend in favour of mercury poisoning and a possible murder plot. History is cool!

7. This is an amazingly clever application of simulated annealing. Here’s me after about 5 hours:

8. Most people don’t know this, but Alan Turing, widely considered the founder of modern computer science, was homosexual. He was prosecuted for this under the laws of the time, forced to undergo hormone-therapy, and ultimately committed suicide by ingesting an apple laced with cyanide. The old Apple Computers logo (rainbow apple with a bite missing) is thought to be a reference to this, though this has never been confirmed.

9. No matter how unlikely it seems, I secretly hold out hope that P=NP.

10. It is very important that people hear about the issue of Net Neutrality. What makes the internet such a valuable construct is that anyone can post anything they want and it their data will be given equal priority to all else. But recently, ISPs have been threatening to change this situation by - for example- giving faster data rates to websites who pay them for the privilege. The end result of this could be a situation where the internet becomes like cable TV - you pay for a subscription package which gives you access only to a certain set of websites, and have to pay extra to see other sites. For more information on the legal process relating to this in Canada see: http://saveournet.ca/