Scientist

 Adam Lisagor makes some astute points based on hie recent use of iPad as a TV device:

iPad TV

However, when the iPad came, I found myself watching TV shows more often on it than on my TV. My preferred experience is to obtain TV content on my Mac, use software like the brilliant Air Video to convert it on-the-fly and stream it to my iPad, and watch in bed with my headphones while my girlfriend sleeps or watches her stories. If this isn’t the most thoroughly engaging way to take in video, I don’t know what is. And funny enough, when it’s time for a communal viewing experience, we’ll put it on the good ol’ TV.

What I started to notice about those newly rare occasions when the TV came back on, aside from their quaintness, was how much TV viewing actually promotes passivity in viewership. I feel my body become inert, my eyes, focused on a plane at a middle distance, I feel a tangible blankness to the experience, as though I’m close enough to partake, but far enough not to have to engage. I exit my body and look at myself from the outside, a 30-yard expressionless stare, and it’s a wonder we’ve let this thing dictate such vast portions of our lives for so long. Not to get all heavy.

Contrast that with the physical positioning of a personal video screen like the iPad, where our focus is forced to converge at a plane we’re more accustomed to for active participation, like reading or email or work or cat videos. I’m no scientist, but I’m guessing there are some psychological implications to the distance at which our eyes spend their time focusing as we engage with the world. And to my mind, holding a 10” screen a foot from my face in a dark room is more immersive than staring blankly at a 40” screen twelve feet away.

My point is, different-sized screens will always play roles in our media diets. But we should expect those roles to shift as technology does.

Cognitive scientists have learned that we reason differently when reading on our computer than when reading books (see Lifestreaming At The Edge), apparently engaging more of the 'executive function' that involves more crititcal thinking. Perhaps there is a similar effect here, where changing the nature of the experience changes in a basic way how we process it, and the nature of the benefits.

I also like Adam's conjectures about the direction for Apple TV, and how it might play with iPad. I am still holding off on the iPad until it has a webcam in it, though.

arcticstoat writes "Solid state disks could soon catch up with mechanical hard drives in terms of cost and capacity, thanks to a new data-packed chip developed by a scientist at the University of North Carolina. Using a uniform array of 10nm nanodots, each of which represents a single bit, Dr Jay Narayan created a data-density of 1 terabit per square centimetre. The end result was a 4cm2 chip that holds 4Tb of data (512GB), but the university says that the nanodots could have a diameter of just 6nm, enabling an even greater data-density. The university explains that the nanodots are 'made of single, defect-free crystals, creating magnetic sensors that are integrated directly into a silicon electronic chip.' Dr Narayan says he expects the technology overtaking traditional solid state disk technology within the next five years."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stephen Hawking has suggested that aliens almost certainly exist but has warned humanity not to try to contact them.

We recently wrote about the pharmaceutical industry in India, noting that it had been thriving prior to foreign pharma lobbyists pressuring India through international trade agreements to change its patent laws to cover pharmaceuticals. As usually happens when we write about examples like this, some patent supporters in the comments insisted that no Indian research could possibly result in serious drug breakthroughs without patents (apparently those who write this are unfamiliar with Jonas Salk's opinions on patents in reference to the polio vaccine he created: "Could you patent the sun?")

So it's nice to see that even now that India does allow patents on pharma (and, as we noted in the original story, Indian patent laws have been abused by foreign pharma firms in order to jack up prices on commonly used medicines), some Indian scientists have mapped out the tuberculosis genome, which should help creating new drugs that can help respond to that disease.

But rather than rushing to the patent office, the scientists are freeing up the research through an open source effort:

"What we have not done so far has been achieved. I thank all those students who have helped it become a reality. We are doing this through open source drug discovery (OSDD) and anyone across the world is free to join the effort," [Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) chief Samir] Bramhachari told IANS....

"OSDD is a completely new formula across the world. Here we are making all our progress available to public. Anyone can take advantage and develop a drug based on our research. The aim here is not patents but drug discovery for a neglected disease," said Rajesh Gokhle, a senior scientist associated with the project.

And I thought that no such breakthroughs were possible without patents?

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If the Insane Clown Posse and their juggalo fandom created a science textbook, this is what it would look like. Daniel O'Brien of Cracked.com, who is responsible for this here shizzle, says,

I've created a juggalo-friendly textbook, taking into account the song's claim that they "don't wanna talk to a scientist," who they consider to be a "lying motherfucker" intent on "getting [them] pissed." To that end, every lesson will be directly based on actual ICP lyrics, and every page will be packed with in-your-face juggalo clown-rage. Or, the best clown-rage I can muster.

Juggaloco Psycho Clown-speak is a shockingly complex language.

Learn Your Motherf#@kin' Science: A Textbook for Juggalos (Cracked.com, thanks, Susannah Breslin)

Scientist Uses Google Earth to Find Ancient Ancestor —

An anthropology professor from South Africa has successfully used Google Earth to find a new human ancestor.

To be exact, he found two partial skeletons, dating from between 1.78 and 1.95 million years ago, that belong to the species now known as Australopithecus sediba.

"Professor Lee Berger from Witswatersrand University in Johannesburg started to use Google Earth to map various known caves and fossil deposits identified by him and his colleagues over the past several decades," according to the Official Google Blog.

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Berger developed a correlation between the appearance of caves in satellite images and the presence of fossil deposits.

He started with 130 cave sites in the region around the Cradle of Humankind area northwest of Johannesburg, and about 20 fossil deposits. Using Google Earth's high-resolution satellite imagery, he was able to identify 500 previously unidentified caves and fossil sites. It was at one of those sites he found the new hominid.

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FDA Scientist Loses His Job For Saying Cancer Screenings Might Give You Cancer [Health] — There's been a lot of concern lately about the routine use of radiation-heavy scans to identify early signs of cancer. Could cancer detection actually give you cancer? One Food and Drug Administration researcher said yes... so the FDA fired him. More »

NYC Hackathon at NYU, Apr 2-3 — Hype-wise, Apple pretty much owns this weekend. Even though I swore I would sit this one out, I broke down and bought an iPad, scheduled to arrive on Saturday.

But before that, starting on Friday night at Courant Hall on the NYU campus, there's the NYC Hackathon. As I understand it, the goal is to get students from New York-area universities to meet New York-area startups, who will pitch their APIs, hoping to attract interesting overnight projects from the students, and longer-term interest once they enter the workforce.

I'll be there on Friday evening as an "ambassador" -- trying to help the students and entrepreneurs connect. I can be useful during the ideation stage, but I might try working on a project myself.

There's also an iPad party on Saturday night at Gawker, which I plan to make a stop at. It's all in the neighborhood!

The hackathon is a project of Chris Wiggins of Columbia, Hilary Mason of Johnson & Wales University, a member of NYC Resistor, and the lead scientist at bit.ly (a NYC startup); and Evan Korth of NYU. I've met both Chris and Evan and look forward to meeting Hilary.

And if you're in the area, with either an API or some undirected programming energy, maybe I'll see you at the Hackathon.

Reading comprehension.  Work on it.

Every time I touch on this topic of evolution versus creation, I get an avalanche of lurkers deciding they’re going to jump in and try to prove how dumb Uncle Rizzn is.

Let me first start out by saying that my initial post yesterday wasn’t about starting a debate on the topic. I was simply commenting on the fact that angry evolution proponents, like Mr. Angry, love to use science as a kludge to beat theists over the head. To them, anyone who believes in something bigger than themselves for any purpose whatsoever is an idiot, and in the process of putting their passion on display, they tend to engage in activities (like failure to check the definitions of the words they use, or parse their own logic) that make them look stupid.

Take this comment, for instance:

Angry, I’ve told you before (on Youtube) and I still have an optimistic mind when it comes to the end of religion. I think that religion will be largely nothing more than a memory by the end of this century. I think the rise of the internet and the access to free information and ideas that it contains will greatly assist the world in realising the truth about religions.

I hope so anyway. I hope that future generations can look back and realise how idiotic religion really is.

Perfect.  Sounds like an open mind to me.

To the point of reading comprehension:

At this present time, no-one knows how life began. Not any scientist, and certainly not any religious person. This does not change the fact that evolution is accepted as a FACT by everyone other than religious people who believe that God created us as we are today. That, by the way, is not backed up by a single piece of evidence; and if you think it is, please share the evidence with us.

Here’s the translation: “I don’t really support my own position with any facts or research, I think you’re an idiot because I suspect you’re religious, and I’m not willing to research what I think your position might be, but I’ll let you spill it here in a small comment window and then try to berate you over the inevitable holes you’ll leave trying to describe difficult concepts in concise sentences.”

Mr. Angry has a problem with it as well, in his response to my blog post:

Rizzn: Case in point. That is mindless fucking drivel. All you’re saying is you’re fucking clueless about science.

You can re-read my original post, but my response to a reader on Facebook best summarizes my thoughts. From an old friend, Carissa Winland:

The logic in this seems odd. Radioactive decay can accurately place the age of organic material, and genetics and molecular biology is irrefutable concrete evidence, outside of observations. Furthermore, it's like saying, just because we don't SEE a plant grow, doesn't mean that it doesn't grow. We also don't see physics, or gravity, but yet these are concrete laws by which all lives are built. Science uses evidence to infer, not simply observations.

Keep in mind, not a single one of these people responding are in fact scientists. Most of them aren’t even college graduates. My response to Carissa addresses some of her points:

Irrefutable? Radioactive decay is only accurate to +/- ~10k years (if you're talking about carbon dating). How do you prove something as irrefutable if
you aren't around to observe the margin of error? As a basis for comparison - I'm able to guess your weight within 100% accuracy, with a margin of error being +/- ~1 Ton just by simply touching you.

Sorta hard to refute that, too, eh?

I did a bit of quick research. According to scientists at the University of Florida, the margin of error generally ranges between 400 and 10,000 years, so my initial point stands, but it misses the larger point that Carissa either casually dismissed or overlooked completely.

In general, and certainly in my original comments, I’m not speaking of scientists per se (nor am I talking about theologians or apologists). I’m talking about the rank and file that tend to debate these topics (typically on the Internet) as if they were experts.  Watching the science channel doesn’t make you a scientist. Reading Origin of the Species doesn’t make you an expert. Watching Trinity Broadcasting Network doesn’t make you a theologian. Because you call Christians idiots on the Internet certainly doesn’t make you an authority on evolutionary theory.

See my original money quote: “Simply put, no one observed creation (or evolution), therefore one's conjecture and evidence interpretation is as good as another for justifying a worldview.”

I’ll re-write that again so some of you who are intentionally misinterpreting me will have a more difficult time doing so: most people interested in this topic are only looking to justify a worldview, and when that’s your goal, any old set of cherry-picked facts will do.

Since most people are simply justifying a worldview when it comes to this debate, any old set of facts they come across are as good as any others (see: climate change). They don’t bother looking for the best of the opposing view – they simply look for the weakest argument they disagree with, and then knock it down. It’s great for a debate tactic, but for a set of people looking for absolute truth, it makes them look like the type of moron you’d find on YouTube or Digg’s comments section by comparison.

Simply put, you can’t have it both ways.  As someone who has read both sides of the debate (and sits somewhere squarely between the two), you can’t say you’re in search of the truth and never look at smart people who disagree with you.

How do you think I got this smart, people? Was it by spending my life calling everyone who disagreed with me an idiot?

No. I read. I read the sources of research, not just the worldview-espousing books you find at Barnes and Noble. I dig past the wire report and what I saw on that science blog last week. I stay away from the faux-documentaries you find on cable TV. And when I’ve delved down to the source of the research, I look and see who they’re funded by to determine whether they’re constructing studies to prove a point or disclosing legitimate findings.

This isn’t rocket science, this are research techniques I learned in high school while most of my school mates were busy perfecting their keg stands and bong hits.

I like to call it voracious reading comprehension.

TALCA, CHILE -- When an aftershock nearly as big as Haiti's earthquake jolted this city on Friday, those already reeling from last month's huge quake shuddered in fear. But Jeff Genrich, a 53-year-old earthquake scientist from California, lolled in bed.

Admittedly, if you're not a chemist or physicist, you may find this post as boring as dirt. (Please forgive the simile, microbiologists. I know dirt is actually fascinating.) Then again, it's not everyday a new element is added to the periodic table.

The latest addition, number 112, was discovered on February, 9th, 1996 at 10:37 PM by a team under Professor Sigurd Hofmann at the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung (Center for Heavy Ion Research) in Darmstadt, Germany, who confirmed its existence by observing a characteristic "decay chain" of radioisotopes (illustrated above) that could only have originated with element 112.

Just a couple weeks ago, on February 19, that discovery was officially confirmed by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), who accepted the GSI team's recommendation of the name "Copernicium" in honor, naturally, of Nicolaus Copernicus, whom most will recall as the first scientist to stand up and declare that the earth revolves around the sun, rather than the other way 'round. The new two-letter symbol is "Cn."

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Barak Berkowitz, a veteran of Silicon Valley has joined Wolfram Alpha, an intelligent search engine by Wolfram Research, a Champaign, IL company founded by scientist Stephen Wolfram. He joins as the managing director, a position that is roughly equivalent to the title of chief executive officer. Wolfram, who is English by birth prefers the British corporate titles, it seems.

I ran into Berkowitz at an industry event earlier today and learned about his new gig. Berkowitz left as the chairman & chief executive officer of Six Apart, San Francisco-based software start-up in September 2007. I first met Berkowitz in the late 1990s. He had just co-founder Omnisky, a wireless Internet access provider. I loved Omnisky and it was with that device that my obsession with wireless internet began. It is good to see Barak back in action after a three-year hiatus from the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley.

Photo courtesy of Joi Ito via Flickr. Copyright Creative Commons.