IdeaFestival

New digital tribe discovered in the wired, wired west: us

In the wired age, retrospectives come early. Like David Weinberger's seminal 2004 suggestion that thanks to the Internet, "everything is miscellaneous," this Kansas State professor goes deep, deep, deep on mediated culture, providing an anthropological introduction to YouTube.

Weinberger suggested that there was a new order for ordering, that a "folksonomy" (as opposed to a formal, top down taxonomy) was emerging; Michael Wesch describes that new digital tribe.

Wayne

Cosmology rap: The Large Hadron Collider in verse

This is just plain fun. The lyrics reflect the state of cosmology and raise some of the questions the LHC hopes to answer.

Wayne

Conserving the Soundscape

Using the movie Wall-E as her entree, Jennifer Ouellette writes about preserving natural soundscapes, places where nature's acoustics are unretouched by humans. Former musician Bernie Krause, interviewed by her at NewScientist, has collected the world' largest private bioacoustical archive.

I hadn't previously thought of acoustics as a conservation issue. I do now. Jennifer:

[Krause] been telling biologists for years that natural soundscapes are at risk, and since human noise diminishes the ability of certain species to communicate, some populations are declining rapidly -- such as the spadefoot toad in Yosemite.

Wayne

Wikipedia: bioacoustics

Richard Kogan on the versatility of Leonard Bernstein

Psychiatrist and world-class concert pianist, Richard Kogan, describes the versatility of Leonard Bernstein in the latest in the series of IF Conversations. Richard will be back exploring Mozart in September. 

Wayne

Good vibrations: "Playing the web"

Using the sonorous qualities of a famous kinetic sculpture has her point of departure, Cocktail Party Physicist Jennifer Ouellette describes how science and the arts might make use of the discovery of phonons - the rough acoustical equivalent of photons.

Just as we can manipulate light with mirrors or pipe it through fiber optic cables, she describes how phonons might be manipulated in unusual ways. For example, material science might create "blind" and "deaf" materials, substances that do not interact - that have "bandgaps" in other words - for certain optic and sonic frequencies.

The math of eternal life

In The Infinite Book, mathematician and cosmologist John Barrow writes about the many ways in which humans approach the idea of forever.

Using a play by Karel Čapek about a women named Elina Makropulos, who chooses, then after 342 years, renounces, immortality, and another novel by Arthur C. Clarke, Barrow raises an interesting problem and then follows with a surprising insight.

The question is this: wouldn't an infinite life exhaust friends, experiences and knowledge? Wouldn't it ultimately be boring? Barrow:

[Philosopher] Bernard William's mediation on the case of Elina Makropulos convinces him that death is a bad thing, because it closes of possibilities that would otherwise be open to us. None the less, immortality should not be preferred to mortality - at least if we retain or present human nature - because mortality imbues life with its most important goals. Thus, although at any moment there is good reason to try to live longer, there is no reason to continue living forever. This dichotomy is similar to some of the features of infinite series that we have encountered in previous chapters. We have seen that it is possible for the sum of an infinite number of terms to have a property that is not shared by any member of the series. Williams's dichotomy is not dissimilar in its jump to a negative conclusion, despite all that has gone before.

I like here how Barrow uses a mathematical example (in the supplied italics) to illustrate that a future, even one the runs infinitely long need not be the same. Its sum - its meaning if you will - need not be predictable.

Having set the table, here's how he applies that unpredictability:

All these evaluations of the pros and cons of living forever that we find in the works of philosophy are similar in one interesting respect. There is never a mention of anyone but oneself.... Elina Makropulos didn't look to future of helping other people.

By this I think he means that in any eternal future, shared meaning can result in infinite possibilities. Predictable?

Nah.

Wayne

Wikipedia: set theory

Worlds from algorithms

Characterizing it as the "science design movement," the current issue of SEED features a number of articles related to the convergence between disciplined observation - science - and design.

While fractal art has gained popularity, the use of the term "fractal architecture" in a Salon video featuring Paola Antonelli, the senior curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, and Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry, attracted me.

Paola Antonelli:

What is really amazing to me right now is how contemporary architects are using the idea that is behind fractals, the idea of a rule that lets them work at different scales indifferently, at least until the moment when the real design application, the reality of the client or manufacturer wanting a building or a toaster, sets in. I am thinking, for instance, of Ben Aranda and Chris Lasch, who you may remember spoke right after you when we had the salon at MoMA. They are two architects that have founded their practice on understanding algorithms and finding ways to take scientific concepts and translate them for architecture's benefit and evolution. So, it seems to me that it is not only and simply about the formal beauty of fractals, it is the idea of growth that your theory has really given to architects and designers. And now we're seeing the algorithm become the principle, and the subject of research, for so many architects today. They're hoping that they can ultimately input an algorithm, give it a push, and then all of a sudden an object, a building, a city, and a world will grow out of it.

I'll add a couple of thoughts:

Natural objects such as ferns and blood vessels can be described in the language of fractals, which means that their unfolding can be described as an algorithmic progression. Fractals, interestingly, can produce nearly limitless two-dimensional shapes, but a finite number of things in three dimensions.

Secondly, I really appreciate Mandelbrot's description of the movement of a cognitive discipline like math toward its biological and physical roots, a point recently driven home in Pulse, a book about the "coming age" of biologically inspired design, which makes just that point about economics. There is no denying the essential natural processes that can be found in presumptively cognitive pursuits.

A transcript of the Antonelli-Mandelbrot exchange is here.

Paola, by the way, also created the MOMA exhibit, "Design and the Elastic Mind," mentioned previously.

Wayne

Wikipedia: fractals

Growing compassion

Having first read a story about how experiments with the cooperation of Bhuddist monks had shown a marked change in brain structure as a result of meditative practices - particularly those areas thought responsible for compassion and consciousness -I was gratified to see that Newsweek's Sharon Begley recently brought the story forward.

New research demonstrates that the voluntary generation of compassion thought and feeling can result in long lasting changes for the better in our brains. We can indeed grow the areas of our brain responsible for compassion.

Cool, isn't it?

Similarly, UCLA psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz touched on the idea last September in Louisville while arguing that practiced "reframing" can curb obsessive-compulsive behavior.

Wayne

Breaking the "mixed reality" barrier

Jaron Lanier popularized the term "virtual reality" and we're all familiar with, well, reality. But is there a mixed reality?

In a post yesterday, Jennifer Ouellette describes some experimentation reported at the American Physical Society meeting this week that points to a Matrix-like mixed reality state. Get this:

[University of Illinois professor Alfred Hubler used] a real system -- in this case, a standard mechanical pendulum -- coupled with a virtual system (a virtual pendulum) that was programmed to follow the well-known equations of motion. He and his colleagues sent data about the real pendulum to the virtual one, while sending information about the virtual pendulum to a motor that influenced the motion of the real pendulum. They found that when the two pendulums were of different lengths, they remained in a "dual reality state" in which their motion was uncorrelated, and thus not synchronized....

But then they discovered that when the pendulum lengths were similar, they reached a critical transition point and became correlated, or, in Hubler's words, 'They suddenly noticed each other, synchronized their motions, and danced together indefinitely.'

...Hubler thinks his lab-induced mixed reality states could be used to better understand real complex systems with a large number of parameters, by coupling a real system to a virtual one until their constant interactions result in a mixed reality state -- for instance, modeling neurons by coupling a real neuron with a virtual one.

Being a lapsed private pilot and fan of all-things-flying, my mind went to the transition state reported by 1940's era pilots who approached the sound barrier. There was intense buffeting, poor axis control and no certainty about what might happen next.

Sounds about right.

Alfred Hubler's web site is here.

Wayne

"Fastest global diffusion of technology in history"

What does it mean when there is one cell phone for every two people on the planet? The Washington Post reports. Hat tip: Putting People First.

Wayne