Han Purple: A 2,800-year-old artificial pigment that quantum physicists are trying to understand. Han purple is an artificial pigment created by the Chinese over 2,500 years ago, which was used in wall paintings and to decorate the famous terracotta warriors, as well as ceramics, metal ware, and jewelry.
The pigment is a technological wonder, made through a complex process of grinding up raw materials in precise proportions and heating to incredible temperatures. So intricate was the process, that it was not reconstructed again until 1992, when chemists were finally able to identify its composition. But this was just the beginning. According to a news report on io9.com, research since then has discovered amazing properties of Han purple, including the ability to emit powerful rays of light in the near-infrared range, as well as being able to collapse three dimensions down to two under the right conditions. For an unknown reason, Han purple disappeared entirely from use after 220 AD, and was never seen again until its rediscovery by modern chemists in the 1990s. What's Wrong with Technological Fixes? If you are looking for some smart, informed skepticism about the promise of digital technology to cure important problems, Evgeny Morozov is the critic for you.
In his second book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, the BR contributing editor takes aim at what he describes as Silicon Valley’s “amelioration orgy.” According to the ameliorationists, “all that matters” is “to get humans to behave in more responsible and sustainable ways, to maximize efficiency.” Morozov characterizes this impulse to fix everything as “solutionism,” and offers two broad challenges to the solutionist sensibility. First, solutionists often turn public problems into more bite-sized private ones. Instead of addressing obesity by regulating the content of food, for example, they offer apps that will ‘nudge’ people into better personal choices. Last Christmas, Rob Rhinehart realised that food doesn’t work. The Art of Conjecturing. In the time loop, drawing by Stanisław Lem, via In his prophetic nonfiction, Stanisław Lem described a technologized world where humans do not plagiarize from nature but invent creatively and freely In his memoir of childhood, Stanisław Lem describes the activity that absorbed his attention around the age of twelve.
The Polish science fiction writer and polymath invented an elaborate bureaucracy worthy of a pubescent Kafka, complete with passwords and paperwork, requisitions and requests, and above all, documents of authorization. In the center of the bureaucracy’s imaginary hierarchy, “a shape began to emerge from nothingness, a Building, a Castle unbelievably High, with a Center of Mystery never named, not even by the most daring — the place where, after passing through all the gates, halls, and guard stations, you could finally receive full authorization!”
TNI Vol. 16: New World Order is out now. The secrets of cicada survival. “Periodical cicadas have the longest life cycles known for insects.
They are called ‘periodical’ because in any one population all but a trivially small fraction are exactly the same age. The nymphs suck juices from the roots of forest trees and finally emerge from the ground, become adults, mate, lay their eggs, and die, all within the same few weeks of every 17th (or in the South, every 13th) year. Not one species does this, but three, and they always do it together.” —Monte Lloyd and Henry S. The Era of Private Space Travel Is Just Beginning. Solar Road Panels Offer Asphalt Alternative. A lot of thought is put into how much energy we use to drive from point A to B.
But what if the road itself could generate energy? Julie and Scott Brusaw, a married couple from Sandpoint, Idaho, have taken on just such a concept, which they hope will make the auto transport of the future cleaner and safer. The idea is as simple as it is ingenious. Wherever roads are laid, solar panels could go instead. An Acoustic Arms Race. Bats and other animals use sound as a hunting tool—but their prey has also evolved ways to thwart detection William E.
Conner Animals hunt using sound in two distinct ways. Status Flight and the Gendering of Google Glass. Does this phone make me seem like…less of a man?
When did mobile phones go from being symbols of status and power to being “emasculating”? Probably around the time they became easier to access than toilets are. Sergey Brin, of course, would likely say that emasculation arrived with the touchscreen smartphone—when using a mobile phone became a matter of “standing around and just rubbing this featureless piece of glass” while looking down, instead of flexing one’s bicep to bark orders into a massive handset while staring straight ahead (or glaring at a subordinate).
Real men don’t “stand around”; real men do stuff! Real men punch buttons with authority, and take decisive action! What Do Scientific Studies Show? The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.
As any regular reader of news will know, popular media report “scientific results” nearly every day. They come delivered in news reports and opinion pieces, and are often used to make a variety of points concerning important matters like health, parenting, education, even spirituality and self-knowledge. How seriously should we take them? The key feature of empirical testing is not that it’s infallible but that it’s self-correcting.
For example, since at least 2004, we have been reading about studies showing that “vitamin D may prevent arthritis.” In both the above examples, earlier studies had shown a correlation but not a causal connection. Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science - David H. Freedman. In 2001, rumors were circulating in Greek hospitals that surgery residents, eager to rack up scalpel time, were falsely diagnosing hapless Albanian immigrants with appendicitis.
At the University of Ioannina medical school’s teaching hospital, a newly minted doctor named Athina Tatsioni was discussing the rumors with colleagues when a professor who had overheard asked her if she’d like to try to prove whether they were true—he seemed to be almost daring her. She accepted the challenge and, with the professor’s and other colleagues’ help, eventually produced a formal study showing that, for whatever reason, the appendices removed from patients with Albanian names in six Greek hospitals were more than three times as likely to be perfectly healthy as those removed from patients with Greek names. “It was hard to find a journal willing to publish it, but we did,” recalls Tatsioni. “I also discovered that I really liked research.” That question has been central to Ioannidis’s career.
Model, Theory, and Evidence in the Discovery of the DNA Structure. Should the History of Science Be Rated X? I suggest that the teacher who wants to indoctrinate his students in the traditional role of the scientist as a neutral fact finder should not use historical materials of the kind now being prepared by historians of science: they will not serve his purposes.
He may wish to follow the advice of philosopher J. C. C. Smart, who recently suggested that it is legitimate to use fictionalized history of science to illustrate one's pronouncements on scientific method (56). Machines of Laughter and Forgetting. Fortunately, he added a charming clarification: “Human slavery is wrong, insecure and demoralizing.
On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.” Wilde was not alone. Philip Ball – Microscopic worlds. When the Dutch cloth merchant Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked at a drop of pond water through his home-made microscope in the 1670s, he didn’t just see tiny ‘animals’ swimming in there. He saw a new world: too small for the eye to register yet teeming with invisible life. The implications were theological as much as they were scientific. Invisibility comes in many forms, but smallness is the most concrete. Light ignores very tiny things rather as ocean waves ignore sand grains. Seashell Sound. Ear trumpet made from a whelk shell, date unknown. Courtesy Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library.
Shell of the bright sea-waves! What is it, that we hear in thy sad moan? Is this unceasing music all thine own? Dreams of Digital Death: Winstates and narrative limitations. In 2006, the body of Joyce Carol Vincent was found in her apartment. The TV was still on and she was surrounded by unwrapped Christmas presents. She had been dead for three years. No one had noticed. This might seem like odd subject matter for a game, but in fact a game was planned around it, to coincide with the release of a documentary about Vincent entitled Dreams of a Life.
Algorithmic Rape Jokes in the Library of Babel. On March 2, 2013, the KEEP CALM and DO WHATEVER meme reached peak terrible. A t-shirt company called Solid Gold Bomb was caught selling shirts with the slogan “KEEP CALM and RAPE A LOT” on them. They also sold shirts like “KEEP CALM and CHOKE HER” and “KEEP CALM and PUNCH HER”. The Internet—especially the UK Internet—exploded. Artisinal sharing and the “Like Economy” I just finished reading this paper, “The Like Economy: Social Buttons and the Data-intensive Web” by Carolin Gerlitz and Anne Helmond. The main thrust of it is to describe how Facebook, under the guise of making Internet activity more “social,” has planted Like buttons across the Internet to instigate flows of proprietary, centralized data on internet users. “The increasing presence of Facebook features on the web contributes to generating connections between websites beyond the traditional hyperlink,” generating a new standardized data form that Facebook basically controls to capture various user interactions.
PBS features DARPA’s ARGUS-IS. Rebecca Solnit · Diary: Google Invades · LRB 7 February 2013. False wins and the machine zone. Origins of the Augmented Subject. Thomas Laqueur reviews ‘The Wreck of the ‘Titan’’ by Morgan Robertson, ‘Shadow of the ‘Titanic’’ by Andrew Wilson, ‘‘Titanic’ 100th Anniversary Edition’ by Stephanie Barczewski, ‘The Story of the Unsinkable ‘Titanic’’ by Michael Wilkinson and Robert Hamil. For Our Consideration. You know, some people just don’t get art. Yesterday, a number of websites reported on a special collector’s edition of the upcoming zombie-game sequel Dead Island: Riptide.
Available now for preorder in the United Kingdom and Australia, the “Zombie Bait Edition” comes with a few extras commissioned by the studio, Deep Silver. The package includes special artwork and a steel case to protect your copy of Dead Island from the elements. Resistance in the materials. Genes, Cells and Brains by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose - review. Infrastructure: Commentary from Nikhil Anand, Johnathan Bach, Julia Elyachar, and Daniel Mains — Cultural Anthropology. State of the Species. Bringing Schrödinger's Cat to Life. Quantum Computing with Ions [Repost]