Category: Science
The race to space
Everyone has his or her obsession, one of mine is collecting Mexican amate painting, for some people it is investing in space travel.
The tangible pieces of John Carmack’s dream are scattered around an 8,000-square-foot warehouse: industrial water-purification tank, aluminum cones, compressed air cylinders, used Russian spacesuit.
All are components of the software developer’s project to launch a manned rocket 62 miles up by January 2005.
What binds the pieces together are Carmack’s quiet intellect and considerable bankroll.
“We mostly look at it as a two-horse race,” the 33-year-old millionaire said of the international competition for the $10 million X Prize, offered by a St. Louis-based foundation.
The entrepreneur has a background in computer games and works with a team out of a warehouse, sometimes using the parking lot for small-scale launch attempts. Rather than pursuing secrecy, progress is publicized on the project website, there you can even see videos of failed launch attempts.
NASA had the following response:
NASA has no official comment on the civilian attempts.
“It’s certainly a complicated business. Sometimes [sic] we make it look easy,” said Melissa Mathews, a space agency spokeswoman.
Is Carmack crazy? Beats me, read this interview if you want more data. The whole point is that there is only one way to find out, which is to let him try. Maybe he is right that “Aerospace is plumbing with the volume turned up.”
Thanks to Marko Siladin for the pointer.
Should we renorm IQ tests?
The year in which IQ is tested can make the difference between life and death for a death row inmate. It also can determine the eligibility of children for special services, adults’ Social Security benefits and recruits’ suitability for certain military careers, according to a new study by Cornell University researchers.
That’s because IQ scores tend to rise 5 to 25 points in a single generation. This so-called “Flynn effect” is corrected by toughening up the test every 15 to 20 years to reset the mean score to 100. A score from a test taken at the end of one cycle can vary widely from a score derived from a test taken at the beginning of the next cycle, when the test is more difficult, says Stephen J. Ceci, professor of human development at Cornell.
In other words, our definitions of intelligence and mental retardation are more relativistic than we would like to think. Yet the law, and various institutional categories, look to IQ scores as if they were fully objective. Here is the full story.
The Flynn effect implies, if you take it literally, that most people were morons as recently as a few generations ago. Just think, “someone who scored among the best 10% a hundred years ago, would nowadays be categorized among the 5% weakest. That means that someone who would be considered bright a century ago, should now be considered a moron!” So much as I believe in the idea of progress, I don’t think we can take the numbers at face value. If you are not convinced, try reading David Hume. Here is another survey of hypotheses, and why they fail to explain the data.
We’re past the point where nutrition can explain the rise in IQ scores, and more generally the Flynn effect numbers are inconsistent with more general data about the limits on environment for improving IQ scores. The less culturally specific the test, the stronger the Flynn effect appears. Bill Dickens and Flynn offer some interesting evidence on how genes and environment interact.
My favorite hypothesis, which has no hard data to support it, cites “the impact of the visual and spatial demands that accompany a television-laden, video-game-rich world. ” In other words, TV helps us do well on IQ tests. This does not explain why the Flynn effect predates 1950, but perhaps the more general increase in world complexity forces our brains to adapt. In earlier times people were “smart enough” for their environments, and still could create brilliant achievements on the frontiers they faced, still they might have been ill-suited to live in modern times.
Ths secret of Stradivarius?
I have long wondered why the modern world has never been able to equal Stradivarius and Amati violins. After all, it wasn’t too many years ago that we were using computer punch cards and bulky machines, instead of laptops. Most other goods have improved in quality since the 17th century, and more than just a bit. Why should violins be so resistant to technological advance?
We may now know the answer as to why Stradivarius violins are so special. In addition to first-rate craftsmanship, the wood from that time had a special quality. Why? Longer winters, due to a mini-Ice Age. The cold weather yielded denser Alpine spruces: “narrow tree rings would not only strengthen the violin but would increase the wood’s density.” In other words, the greenhouse effect will raise the prices of good Stradivarius violins, by making it harder for us to match that achievement.
What would it cost to send a man to the moon?
Recently the Bush administration has been making noises about sending a man to the moon again. Gregg Easterbrook offers some cogent critical points:
A rudimentary, stripped-down Moon base and supplies might weigh 200 tons. (The winged “orbiter” part of the space shuttle weighs 90 tons unfueled, and it’s cramped with food, oxygen, water, and power sufficient only for about two weeks.) Placing 200 tons on the Moon might require 400 tons of fuel and vehicle in low-Earth orbit, so that’s 600 tons that need to be launched just for the cargo part of the Moon base. Currently, using the space shuttle it costs about $25 million to place a ton into low-Earth orbit. Thus means the bulk weight alone for a Moon base might cost $15 billion to launch: building the base, staffing it, and getting the staff there and back would be extra. Fifteen billion dollars is roughly equivalent to NASA’s entire annual budget. Using existing expendable rockets might bring down the cargo-launch price, but add the base itself, the astronauts, their transit vehicles, and thousands of support staff on Earth and a ten-year Moon base program would easily exceed $100 billion. Wait, that’s the cost of the space station, which is considerably closer. Okay, maybe $200 billion.
What can a man do on the moon that automated vehicles cannot? Virtually nothing, and of course he requires far more maintenance and protection.
Given all that, where should we go from here?
NASA doesn’t need a grand ambition, it needs a cheap, reliable means of getting back and forth to low-Earth orbit. Here’s a twenty-first century vision for NASA: Cancel the shuttle, mothball the does-nothing space station, and use all the budget money the two would have consumed to develop an affordable means of space flight. Then we can talk about the Moon and Mars.
Mostly I agree, though I expect private enterprise can beat NASA in this latter project, at least provided we allow the privatization of space.
2, raised to the 20,996,011, minus 1.
That number is unlikely to ring a bell:
A 26-year-old graduate student in the US has made mathematical history by discovering the largest known prime number.
The new number is 6,320,430 digits long. It took just over two years to find using a distributed network of more than 200,000 computers.
Prime numbers are positive integers that can only be divided by themselves and one. Mersenne primes are an especially rare type of prime that take the form 2 p-1, where p is also a prime number. The new number can be represented as 2 raised to the 20,996,011, minus 1 [I have changed the presentation here, in lieu of upper case power notation]. It is only the 40th Mersenne prime to have ever been found.
Here is the full story, from NewScientist.com. George Woltman adds: “There are more primes out there.”
The saga is also an account of the voluntary private production of public goods, given the large number of computers whose “spare processing power” was donated toward this end. If you want to contribute toward this sort of endeavor, sign up here.
Credit cards under your skin
Read Randall Parker on this new innovation:
Advanced Digital Solutions has announced their Veripay embedded radio frequency ID (RFID) cash and credit card technology.
Some day we may be able to walk into a store and be completely alone and not have to see a living person in sight, imagine walking out holding the items you want and being billed instantly just as you leave the store. No confrontations, no customer service, no cute check-out girl, isn’t our future grand…The chip is embedded in the arm.
Parker also quotes this more formal descrption of the technology:
VeriChip is a subdermal, radio frequency identification (RFID) device that can be used in a variety of security, financial, emergency identification and other applications. About the size of a grain of rice, each VeriChip product contains a unique verification number that is captured by briefly passing a proprietary scanner over the VeriChip. The standard location of the microchip is in the triceps area between the elbow and the shoulder of the right arm. The brief outpatient “chipping” procedure lasts just a few minutes and involves only local anesthetic followed by quick, painless insertion of the VeriChip. Once inserted just under the skin, the VeriChip is inconspicuous to the naked eye. A small amount of radio frequency energy passes from the scanner energizing the dormant VeriChip, which then emits a radio frequency signal transmitting the verification number. In October 2002, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ruled that VeriChip is not a regulated device with regard to its security, financial, personal identification/safety applications but that VeriChip’s healthcare information applications are regulated by the FDA. VeriChip Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of Applied Digital Solutions.
By the way, the first 100,000 registrants to be “chipped” get $50 off.
My take: I don’t see this product taking off as a useful means of buying things, though of course it would no longer be a problem if you forgot your wallet at home. Too much talk about “mark of the beast” and all that, plus the general creepiness of the idea. As Parker suggests, more likely applications are for people at risk of having heart attacks (the device could send a signal, much like a cell phone call), diabetics, epileptics, Alzheimer’s patients, and children at risk of kidnap or running away from home.
Dreaming of a White Christmas?
It is less likely than ever in many parts of the country, read here for some exact figures, based on data since 1948. Here is the geographic distribution of the changes, snow is less likely in the east but more likely in some mountain states:
The decrease in the number of snow days has been especially pronounced east of the Mississippi River, where 117 of 125 stations reported an average of five fewer days with snowfall.
“Five fewer days of snowfall over a 30-day period may not seem all that significant until you consider that, in many regions, snow days occur relatively infrequently,” Kaiser said.
One region that is more wintry between the holidays, however, extends from the Central Rocky Mountain states (Utah, Colorado and Wyoming) eastward into the Central Plains (mainly Nebraska), where the number of days with snow has increased significantly.
“The area across the Central Rockies and Central Plains is the one part of the country that is bucking the trend, with a few stations in Utah and Colorado seeing nearly 10 more days with snowfall,” Kaiser said.
The researchers caution against thinking that this is a tale of global warming, one way or the other.
Does evolutionary biology weaken left-liberal views?
An interesting review of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate suggests that a better understanding of biology does not damage the prospects for social engineering, “The more we understand our nature, the better we’ll be at nurturing.” Here is one lengthier bit:
Contrary to what its critics say, evolutionary psychology does not threaten our ability to assess and transform our social and cultural landscapes. Quite the opposite–understanding the particular channels that we’re prepared to learn can throw into sharper relief the achievements of culture. Knowing something about our reproductive drives and our tendencies toward violence makes the extraordinary drop in murder and birthrates experienced by many Western countries over the past few centuries all the more impressive. And just because our mental modules are implicated in political issues, that’s no reason to hand over our societal reins to the evolutionary psychologists. To include biological explanations in a discussion of human society by no means eliminates the validity of other kinds of explanations. What Pinker and E.O. Wilson are proposing is not biological determinism but rather biological consilience…
This is half correct. Future social engineering, if done with noble motives and an informed basis, will have a better chance of succeeding a century from now. But I have long felt that the “public choice” critique of social engineering — you can’t trust people, especially not politicians — carries more weight than the informational critique. Scroll down one post and read my remarks on the all-too-frequent lack of meta-rationality as well, or scroll up one post and read about the prosperous marvel that is North Korea. And evoloutionary psychology suggests that, short of genetic engineering (not the topic at hand, and besides, who do you trust to do that?), human nature is not about to change anytime soon. So score at least half a point against social engineering, which should make Michael happy at www.2blowhards.com.
Meta-rational animals
Monkeys and dolphins are capable of recognizing when they do not know the answer to a question. Here is a brief summary of the experiments:
In the first one, trained monkeys sat at a computer joystick and watched the density of colored dots in a square on the screen. When there were many dots, the monkey moved the joystick to the square itself, choosing “dense.” When there were few dots, the monkey put the cursor on an “S,” superimposed on the screen, indicating “sparse.”
Gradually, examiners added more dots to the “sparse” test until the monkey reached a threshold where it could not easily discern whether the panel was “dense” or not. At that point, the monkey chose to put the cursor on a star, indicating uncertainty.
Smith said the two monkeys displayed uncertainty at almost the same threshold as seven humans who also took the test. This result, Smith and his co-authors said, “presents one of the strongest existing matches between human and animal performance in the comparative literature.”
In the second test, a bottlenose dolphin was trained to press a lever when it heard a “low” tone, and another lever when it heard a “high” tone. At first, the dolphin was so enthusiastic that it kicked up swirls of water as it raced to the levers.
But when researchers raised the low tone until it approached the high tone, “he would creep in because he didn’t know what to do,” Smith said. “It was the dolphin equivalent of scratching its head.” The dolphin would then resort to a third lever, indicating uncertainty.
In other words, very intelligent animals are aware of their own cognitive limitations, here is the full story. So far it has not been possible to induce comparable behavior in rats, nor in many political commentators.
The bottom line: Of all kinds of rationality, meta-rationality is perhaps the hardest to come by. It is most rare when more than one person, or questions of status, are involved. For whatever reasons, a kind of false certainty must have yielded evolutionary advantages in earlier times, and perhaps still does today. Those animals would really impress me if they dropped their admissions of uncertainty when a member of the opposite sex was watching.
Quotation of the day
…the GM [genetically modified] food controversy is a feature of societies for which food is not a life-and-death issue. In India, where people literally starve to death…up to 60 percent of fruit grown in hill regions rots before it reaches market. Just imagine the potential good of a technology that delays ripening, like the one used to create the Flavr-Savr tomato. The most important role of GM foods may lie in the salvation they offer developing regions, where surging birthrates and the pressure to produce on the limited available arable land lead to an overuse of pesticides and herbicides with devastating effects upon both the environment and the farmers applying them; where nutritional deficiencies are a way of life and, too often, of death; and where the destruction of one crop by a pest can be a literal death sentence for farmers and their families…The opposition to GM foods is largley a sociopolitical movement whose arguments, though couched in the language of science, are typically unscientific.
From James Watson’s recent DNA The Secret of Life, p.160, the book is also a good introductory read on DNA issues more generally.
By the way, here is a picture of aquarium fish, they are genetically modified to glow in the dark, thanks to Chris Mooney for the link and commentary.
The best new ideas in applied science
Read this feature article from Popular Science magazine, or just buy the December issue. My two favorite new products are the following:
1. Binoculars that repeat the last 30 seconds. Instant replay, right there in your hands, and only $600 from bushnell.com.
2. Speakers that know how to listen. The speakers can measure what kind of sound they are producing in a particular room, and adjust their output accordingly to sound even better, they are called Beolab 5. This item costs a steeper $16,000, I will buy them when they start paying bloggers, from Bang-Olufsen.
Alex will be interested to hear about the new “Lifeport Kidney Transporter,” see organ-recovery.com, now FDA-approved, which makes it easier to move kidneys around the world, the device makes a soon-to-be transplanted kidney last for 17 more hours than previous technologies.
Blood supply and the FDA
Have you ever heard of Chagas disease? It is rare in the United States but common in Latin America, where 18 million people are infected and 50,000 die of it every year. Some little thingie crawls down your mouth and sucks your blood when you are sleeping (lovely), beware the thatched hut, and next thing you know, maybe about ten or thirty years later, your weakened heart or organs explode. There is no known vaccine, cure, or treatment.
Chagas is now making its way into the United States blood supply. Ideally, all donated blood should be screened for Chagas. But, can you believe this, the FDA needs to approve all blood tests of this kind. They haven’t approved any test for Chagas, nor have they shown much urgency in this regard, here is the full story.
About 30 tests are currently in use in Latin America, but none would appear to meet the FDA’s accuracy guidelines. In the meantime it appears someone would prefer that we have no test at all.
The New York Times put it as follows:
The failure of the blood industry and its regulators to develop a test since it was endorsed by a Blood Products Advisory Committee in 1989 seems to be a combination of bureaucratic inertia and divided responsibility for such a decision. Blood banks cannot use a test that the F.D.A. has not approved. The agency usually defers to its advisory committees, which have many experts from blood banks as members.
“It’s a political process that is not always fully engaged,” said Dr. Stuart J. Kahn of the Infectious Disease Research Institute, a Seattle group hunting cures for tropical diseases.
Whatever you think of the FDA as a regulator of drugs, this kind of bureaucratic control is hard to understand. Now it is longer enough for you to beware the thatched hut, you have to worry about the blood supply as well.
When is the rematch?
The fourth and final game between Fritz and Kasparov is drawn. Both sides played well, and rapid simplifications drew all the tension out of the position. You can find the game here.
The bottom line: The machine didn’t outplay Kasparov once. K must still be kicking himself for his stupid blunder in game two.
Being a bigot is exhausting, and makes you stupider
People with implicit racial prejudices are left mentally exhausted after interacting with someone from a different race, perhaps because they are trying to quell their feelings.
The new study, the first of its kind, shows that areas in the brain associated with self-control light up in white people with implicit racial biases when they are shown images of black people.
Furthermore, the study showed that the level of this brain activity correlated very closely with poor performance in a test of thinking ability given right after a face-to-face interview with a black person. The researchers believe this indicates that the subject’s mental resources have been temporarily drained by their efforts to suppress their prejudices.
Here is the full story.
A good mom should be sociable
At least in the world of baboons:
Baby baboons born to outgoing mums who enjoy hanging out with other females are considerably more likely to survive their crucial first year than infants born to less friendly mothers…
And the difference is a big one:
Susan Alberts, at Duke University in North Carolina, and one of the research team was surprised by the significance of sociability. “Eight per cent of infant survival is explained by sociality,” she told New Scientist. That is “striking”, she explains, because “we wouldn’t expect to have a large amount of variation that is deterministic – things that a mother can actually control – it’s amazing.”
Here is the full story. In my family of primates, the wife/mother is definitely the sociable one, at night I like to stay at home and write my blog or read.