Ok, this totally breaks this page’s formatting, but what the heck. Forget the Olympics. This is the greatest spectacle going on right now and it’s not even on Earth. Yes it’s a CGI rendition instead of real imagery but what do you expect about something going on on Mars? The landing procedure is the stuff of science-fiction.
Recent Interesting Science Articles (July 2012)
July 2012 has been a less awesome, insofar as science articles go. I guess things do slow down in the summer.
- This isn’t the first article about empathy for humans as displayed in dogs that has appeared in this blog, and it won’t be the last! This article from The Economist covers experiments performed to see if dogs can really perform actions out of empathy for the perceived suffering in humans, as opposed to acting out of curiosity. This was done by observing the behavior of dogs when alternately encountering a human crying and exhibiting other signs of distress or merely humming. They also alternated between using a trusted human for the dogs and a complete stranger. The results were that the dogs could indeed recognize distress in humans and react by whining, nuzzling, licking, and fetching toys for the human perceived to be suffering. They did this to the suffering human even if he or she was a stranger and their master was in the same room, indicating that it was the comfort of the suffering human that they sought rather than their own comfort.
- Just last month I had an article talking about how more modern pop music is getting sadder and sadder while becoming more emotionally ambiguous. This month I have a new article from Reuters making a different claim: that pop music is getting louder and louder, while at the same time becoming less diverse with a more limited variety of sounds. They’re not directly contradictory but they are odds enough that the two teams should probably have a good long discussion with each other about just what is going on.
- This next one is cheating a bit as it’s more of a demonstration video than a science article. Its about the color shifting abilities of a species of cuttlefish in Australia, Sepia plangon. Nothing new, you say? Except that this one is not only capable of shifting its colors, it can apparently shift each side of its body to a different color scheme, in this case, mimicking a female with half of its body and a male with the other half. This demonstrates not only as astounding level of control over its own colors but also an awareness of just who is looking at it from each direction.
- Ever wondered while walking in the rain if it would be more effective to run through the rain or walk steadily through it to minimize wetness. I did and judging by the contents of this Washington Post article, I’m not the only one. Intuitively, running is better to minimize your time spent in the rain but at the same as you travel fast, you run into more raindrops in your path. Walking steadily increases your exposure time, but you present a small target and you don’t walk into raindrops. The paper summarized in this article concludes that for most cases, running is best but the true answer really depends on your body shape, the direction of the rainfall (vertically or at a lateral angle), the angle of the path you are traveling across and so forth. It is truly a profound topic.
- Finally, no rundown would be complete without the biggest scientific news of the month: the confirmation of existence of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. There are many articles about it on the web but I’m partial to this one from the BBC. There are no practical applications for this but it is pretty solid confirmation of the Standard Model of physics.
The Tree of Life
Back when I started my series of “Favorite Films” posts in 2007, I took extra pains to define what that title meant. It isn’t sufficient for a film to be merely entertaining and likeable. A film must pass that test, I thought, but more than that it must also aspire to be a work of art. Either by conveying a profound meaning or by expanding the vocabulary of cinema through innovation.
However I failed to consider that it might be possible for a film to fail the first test but completely blow the competition out of the water on the second. For this reason, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is in a class of its own. I do not find it entertaining. Yes, it is utterly captivating to watch but it is also so intense that it is too mentally exhausting to be considered entertaining.
Recent Interesting Science Articles (June ‘2012)
It’s time for our monthly round-up of the coolest, most fascinating science articles of the previous month and June 2012 has been an especially bountiful month in that regard. So here goes:
- How exactly does mainstream pop music evolve over time? This article from the Pacific Standard summarizes research demonstrating that on general pop music has been getting sadder and sadder over time. This is reflected not only in increasingly negative lyrics but also in the slower tempo and music with mixed emotional cues.
- The next article belongs in economics which many dispute is really a science at all, though I tend to disagree. This one is from the Library of Economics and Liberty and talks about how employers in different countries are averse to firing workers in different ways. The survey finds that there are two extremes, reflecting the different values of the countries involved. The Anglo-American business world likes being efficient, even if that means ruthlessness. They are more likely to fire expensive, middle-aged workers with middling performance. The Germans are more sympathetic towards middle-aged workers, preferring to fire a younger worker with comparable performance even if his wages are cheaper.
- The Economist has an article on a subject that Thomas Kuhn would no doubt heartily approve of: it is dangerous to generalize findings in experimental psychology too widely. This is because a lot of such research uses test subjects that fall into the same demographic category which the authors of the paper being cited have summed up in a media-savvy acronym: WEIRD. This stands for White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. To solve this, the authors have tried to use crowdsourcing to open surveys to a wider group of participants and since there seems to be an infinite supply of people willing to work for next to nothing on services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, it’s dirt cheap too.
- Normally the articles I like to select about new scientific discoveries rather than the latest technological gizmos. Gadgets are cool and all, but the years and years of research behind the principles that make them work are the really intellectually interesting part in my opinion. But I make an exception when it’s something that could open up cybernetics in a big way as this article from ExtremeTech explains. It’s an implantable fuel cell that generates electricity from the glucose in the human body. Once installed it can generate electricity indefinitely to power any other cybernetic implants you might have. Heck, there’s no reason why you couldn’t have an external port built into your body to charge your mobile phone or similar device with it. The only cost being that you might feel the need to eat a bit more than usual.
- The Turing Test is a well known test to determine the quality of an AI by engaging it in conversation. This article, again from the Pacific Standard, can be thought of as a variation of that. Can sophisticated, specially trained music aficionados tell the difference between a composition that is written by a human and one written by a computer program? It turns out that they can’t as a blind survey of musically knowledgeable listeners revealed that they found computer-composed works just as appealing as those written by real humans.
- Finally just for fun, this article from the Mail Online covers one of the greatest scientific achievements of humanity: the Voyager 1 space probe that was launched in 1977 is now leaving the solar system. Incredibly it is still in contact with NASA, despite a communications delay of 16 hours. We probably shouldn’t expect it to be able to keep that up for long once it enters interstellar space.
Assorted links
Every month I read tons of articles online and save the science ones for my monthly features. I happen to have found too many cool articles this month and since some of these aren’t science-article, I thought I’d throw in an assorted links posts for them. Here goes:
- Google gets involved in a lot of odd projects that on the face of it have little to do with their primary online search business. Well, this one may just be the oddest of them all. This article from The New York Times talks about how a Google laboratory cobbled together a machine-learning neural network from 16,000 processors and set it to the task of watching cat videos on YouTube. Result: a neural network that is really, really good at recognizing cats no matter what their size, shape or color and no matter what the cats are doing. Cue jokes about why Skynet wants to kill all humans.
- The next article is notably mostly because of how well it lends itself to jokes. It’s America’s hottest new export and it’s man-made! Talk about gross national product! Erect a new future today! America is in good hands! Follow the link to this The Daily article to find out what it is.
- Okay, so everyone know the Japanese are crazy about giant mecha but this post on the Anime News Network shows just how crazy that can be. Some quarters in the Japanese government are looking into the feasibility of building piloted walking combat robots and two members of the Liberal Democratic Party claim that they working to include realization of a Gundam Development Project into their manifesto.
- This last one isn’t a joke and will likely be of interest only to Malaysians. The listing of Felda Global Ventures Holdings Bhd. (FGVH), effectively the third largest oil palm company in the world, has hit headlines due to being the second biggest IPO this year, after Facebook. This investor’s report from a Netherlands-based analyst makes for an eye-opening read since it goes far beyond FGVH’s financials into the history of the Felda project, its links with key government officials and why the settlers are so opposed to the IPO. It basically tells global investors to stay away because it’s a gigantic scam due to poor expected returns and undisclosed political risks and further argues that investing in it would be unethical as the IPO directly undermines Malaysia’s fledgling democracy.
You Are The Apple of My Eye
If you’re Chinese, you can’t help but be inundated by posts about how innumerable Facebook friends were moved by You Are The Apple of My Eye and how it left them teary-eyed. Clearly it does something right. It’s been a chart-topper in every Chinese-language market it has been released in and made instant stars of its two leads. So my wife was understandably insistent that we watch it, which we did this weekend.
I think it’s won’t be a surprise to readers of this blog that I don’t think very highly of this film. Teen love movies are a well-worn genre after all and unfortunately this film does nothing to break new ground. In fact, all too often director Giddens Ko falls back on familiar, overworn tropes. In fact, he explicitly lampshades it, ‘this is the fat friend, this is the joker friend, this is the plain girl who is the heroine’s constant companion’ because, you know, every teen love movie needs one of each.
Midnight Riot
Midnight Riot is a book that I picked up as light reading from book recommendation threads on QT3 and Broken Forum. I had some trouble finding information about it on the net and later discovered that this is because it was originally published as Rivers of London is the UK but its US publishers chose the title Midnight Riot, probably because the original name sounded like a boring treatise on British geography. The Americans also changed its cover, creating controversy by choosing to depict the lead character in silhouette. The critics claimed that this was to hide the fact that the protagonist is of mixed race, which would supposedly turn off would-be buyers.
Anyway the book’s back blurb describes it accurately as what would happen if Harry Potter grew up and became a policeman in the UK. Peter Grant, a young constable who has just completed his probation, seems set on a boring career of pushing paper at the Case Progression Unit, when a chance event alters the course of his life. He is standing guard at the scene of a seemingly random act of murder when an eyewitness comes up to him with critical information. The witness turns out to be a ghost, the uncanny nature of the case gets it referred to Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, who is the sole member of the London’s Metropolitan Police to specialize in magical crimes, and Grant becomes the first officially sanctioned wizard’s apprentice in Britain in 50 years.