IdeaFestival

"Titan-like" life: Would we know it if we saw it?

[Cross-posted, edited from Kentucky Space] Sure, water ice and liquid water may have been confirmed on the surface of Mars. And microbial life has been resurrected from a million and a half year glacier nap on Earth. But given the distance from its parent star and the presence of an ethane oceans and methane rain and clouds, Titan's unique hydrology might be the best place to find a brand new kind of life. Technology Review:

We know that life has arisen once in the solar system, but unfortunately this tells us nothing about its ubiquity elsewhere. Life on Earth may be a one-off.

But were we to find evidence that life had independently arisen twice in the solar system, it would provide strong evidence that the universe is teeming with ET creepy crawlies. The key word here is "independently."

Key question: Given our complete lack of understanding of such life, would we know it if we encountered it?

Wayne

A Physics of Information?

If energy and information are two halves of the same whole, then why do we only have a physics of energy? What would a physics of Information look like? Somehow I think that Bob Berman, author of Biocentrism and speaker at the upcoming 2009 IdeaFestival, might have some thoughts on the matter. But why not ask him yourself?

All-access, day and individual event passes are on sale now.

Wayne

The Crow and the Pitcher

At least one of Aesop's Fables could well be true, according to the New York Times. For an interesting take on animal perspective-taking, listen to this audio with University of Louisville professor of biology Dr. Lee Alan Dugatkin, who will again speak at the IdeaFestival. Passes to his and 35 incredible events are on sale now.

Wayne

"Luxuriate in its beetle-ness, its daffodility" What's in a name?

Here is a lovely concluding meditation on what it means to name the world.

Just find an organism, any organism, small, large, gaudy, subtle — anywhere, and they are everywhere — and get a sense of it, its shape, color, size, feel, smell, sound... [M]editate, luxuriate in its beetle-ness, its daffodility. Then find a name for it. Learn science’s name, one of countless folk names, or make up your own. To do so is to change everything, including yourself. Because once you start noticing organisms, once you have a name for particular beasts, birds and flowers, you can’t help seeing life and the order in it, just where it has always been, all around you.

Do things retain their essence regardless of name, as Shakespeare wrote, or do we change the world and a little of ourselves in the process of giving the world's objects a name? I wonder what Harvard Shakespeare scholar Marjorie Garber - who will be speaking at this year's IdeaFestival - believes Shakespeare might say about this? Even better, what might he write?

Wayne

Gertrude got it

The many ironies and masterful word play found in Shakespeare's work have had a lasting effect throughout the last four hundred years. In fact Harvard's Marjorie Garber, who will be at the IdeaFestival this year, is acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent scholars on his work. But what you might not know is that semantic theory can make a contribution to understanding why the Bard's work has had such a lasting impact. According to one quantitative reading with a valuable logical, and even more valuable, human, dimension, there can be more informational content in a factual contradiction than in an apparently true statement. In that sense, a contradicting sentence asserts too much, making it too informative to be true. While a stumbling block to a perfectly logical formulation of semantic, or human readable, information, it's value to us comes in our appreciation and understanding of the famous scene Shakespeare set in Hamlet Act 3, scene 2.

Player Queen:
Both here and hence pursue me lasting strife,
If once I be a widow, ever I be a wife!

Player King:
'Tis deeply sworn. Sweet, leave me here a while,
My spirits grow dull, and fain I would beguile
The tedious day with sleep.

Player Queen:
Sleep rock thy brain,
And never come mischance between us twain!

Hamlet:
Madam, how like you this play?

Queen:
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Gertrude certainly got it.

Wayne

Hamlet, Marjorie Garber

Animal irony: Pigeons a real judge of beauty

Animal irony from Freakonomics: Like humans, pigeons can develop the ability to judge beauty in paintings.

Wayne

Lee Alan Dugatkin, Altruism and the Giant Moose

Dr. Lee Alan Dugatkin, a professor of Biology at the University of Louisville, has been doing research on the evolution of goodness in humans and non-humans for the last twenty years. As he points out here and in his 2008 IdeaFestival presentation, altruistic behavior can be found throughout the animal kingdom. His forthcoming book, "Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose" is a tale of both natural and American history and will be the subject of talk planned for IF'09.

Wayne

Generative architecture and the cold dead body of Euclid

Have a look at some of these "generative scapes" on the blog of Portuguese architect Paulo Guerreiro, whose interest in these forms reminded me of a recent discussion between modern art curator Paola Antonelli and creator of fractal geometry, Benoit Mandebrot, about the intersection between mathematics and art. See this video exchange in SEED's Salon series.

The key idea: our perceptions of what makes for the modern object has changed, and for a very good reason. "Sticks to cylinders or cubes or parallelepipeds" are no longer the idealized, and ideal, structure, but architects and designers are playing, instead, with fractals and generative algorithms and examining the architecture and just-so subtleties of biology. I have real soft spot for mid-century modern, but as Antonelli and Benoit pointed out in their discussion, Euclid died at the hands of a particularly perceptive mathematics.

No doubt as-yet undiscovered tools will make for other modern objects, but that's part of the fun, isn't it? Until then, enjoy.

Wayne

Buying the footnotes

Holding out while newspapers are suffering major financial hardship, books, in terms of people willing to pay for ink-on-paper, have so far bucked the digital tide. But any concern for their future would be better spent on the future of reading, according to Clive Thompson. He makes this point in Wired:

Books have a centuries-old tradition of annotation and commentary, ranging from the Talmud and scholarly criticism to book clubs and marginalia. [Alan] Stein believes that if books were set free digitally, it could produce a class of 'professional readers'—people so insightful that you'd pay to download their footnotes. Sound unlikely? It already exists in the real world: Microsoft researcher Cathy Marshall has found that university students carefully study used textbooks before buying them, because they want to acquire the smartest notes.

Hat tip: Putting People First

Wayne

SEED: Did cooking make us human?

By making more calories available for digestion, did cooking make us human? A new book speculates that the practice of heating food resulted in some pretty grim anthropological consequences - like marriage.

Wayne