The Singularity Film
The site says this is coming out this year. It looks interesting if not promising.
And for fun, here’s “I am the very model of a Singularitarian”:
New Journal: The Evolutionary Review
Making the rounds in twitter is a link to a new journal, The Evolutionary Review, with comments calling the concept cool but questioning starting a new print journal. As a member of the editorial board of a born-digital journal some 14-years old, I can understand the sentiment. For me, the print vs. digital debate for new journals is far overshadowed by the concept and focus, which is described as such:
An annual publication that uniquely and forcefully elucidates the intersections of evolutionary science, the humanities, arts, and popular culture.
The Evolutionary Review offers a forum for evolutionary critiques in all the fields of the arts, human sciences, and culture: essays and reviews on film, fiction, theater, visual art, music, dance, and popular culture; essays and reviews of books, articles, and theories related to evolution and evolutionary psychology; and essays and reviews on science, society, and the environment. Essays in The Evolutionary Review implicitly affirm E. O. Wilson’s vision of “consilience,” that is, the unity of knowledge. They also give evidence that an evolutionary perspective can yield a richer, more complete understanding of the world and ourselves.
The idea of an interdisciplinary journal of this kind is exciting in and of itself, but what caught my attention is that the journal is meant to “affirm E. O. Wilson’s vision of ‘consilience’.” E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis was a key text for what became Ong’s Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness and related works. Thomas Farrell, rightly, identifies Fighting for Life as a sociobiological work as E. O. Wilson himself defined the field “the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior” (Walter Ong’s Contributions to Cultural Studies, 169) while Ong himself identified the text as noobiology, “the study of the biological setting of mental activity” (Fighting for Life, 11).
Fr. Ong, I’ve been told by the late Dr. Thomas Walsh, former graduate student, SLU colleague, and close friend of Ong, that Ong was fascinated by Wilson’s Sociobiology when it came out in the mid-70s and spent much time studying it and talking about it. (I want to say that the Ong’s copy is heavily marked up, but I can’t check to confirm this. The book is, however, part of the Ong Collection. I do remember that.) I don’t think most people in the humanities realized that Ong consciously understood himself bridging the gap between the humanities and biology. In a letter to Thomas Farrell, I want to say written during the time Farrell was working on his book on Ong, Ong wrote the following, which I blogged about early on during my work with the collection: “I’ve always been a biologist at heart, in study and hobbies.” Likewise, as I reported in my M/MLA 2004 presentation “The Walter J. Ong Archive: A Preliminary Report” the Ong collection includes a number of sketches of flora and fauna and some field notes listing the flora and fauna he observed in some places he visited.
Consilience is an idea that both Wilson and Ong share, and it’s a vision of knowledge our world needs.
The Mutating Genre Meme, Machina Memorialis Variant
Brendan’s tagged me, sort of, in a meme evolution experiment started by Pharyngula. I’m going to do what Brendan did and say that if you want to play, follow the instructions below.
My parent is: The Digital Sextant.
1. The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…
Elvissey by Jack Womack (alternatively, Night Watch by Terry Pratchett).
2. The best mockumentary movie in comedy is…
This is Spinal Tap
3. The best political song in industrial rock is…
“Terror” by KMFDM
If you’re interested in participating, rules are below the fold. Read more
DIY Cosmic Ray Detector: The Manga Version
Neurophilosopher, one of my sources of all things cool online, has a post on Nagoya University’s Solar-Terrestrial Evironment Laboratory‘s use of manga to teach students about cosmic rays. The example he includes in his post is the section from how to build your own cosmic ray detector. This is cool on so many different levels.
The Simpsons and Science
To help celebrate The Simpsons movie opening (on my birthday!), I’m emerging from dissertation revising and frantic last-minute Ong archiving to call attention to the post “Science in The Simpsons” by Mo at Neurophilosophy.
Evolving Curcuits
Another story from the Science Fiction Now files.
“GO!” barks the researcher into the microphone. The oscilloscope in front of him displays a steady green line across the top of its screen. “Stop!” he says and the line immediately drops to the bottom.
Between the microphone and the oscilloscope is an electronic circuitthat discriminates between the two words. It puts out 5 volts when it hears “go” and cuts off the signal when it hears “stop”.
It is unremarkable that a microprocessor can perform such a task–except in this case. Even though the circuit consists of only a small number of basic components, the researcher, Adrian Thompson, does not know how it works. He can’t ask the designer because there wasn’t one. Instead, the circuit evolved from a “primordial soup” of silicon components guided by the principles of genetic variation and survival of the fittest.
Thompson’s work is not aimless tinkering. His brand of evolution managed to construct a working circuit with fewer than one-tenth of the components that a human designer would have used. [Read more.]
Via Cognews.
Cyborg Soldiers in the Near Future
Wired reports that within three years Darpa plans to prototype binoculars that are directly wired into soldiers’ brains:
U.S. Special Forces may soon have a strange and powerful new weapon in their arsenal: a pair of high-tech binoculars 10 times more powerful than anything available today, augmented by an alerting system that literally taps the wearer’s prefrontal cortex to warn of furtive threats detected by the soldier’s subconscious.
In a new effort dubbed “Luke’s Binoculars” — after the high-tech binoculars Luke Skywalker uses in Star Wars — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is setting out to create its own version of this science-fiction hardware. And while the Pentagon’s R&D arm often focuses on technologies 20 years out, this new effort is dramatically different — Darpa says it expects to have prototypes in the hands of soldiers in three years. [Read more.]
Update: I see the story has also been blogged by Neurophilosophy, which also provides a link to an earlier Neurophilosophy article on Augmented Cognition. Here’s a snippet:
Whereas brain-computer interfaces enable people to control various aspects of their environment, the goal of augmented cognition is to determine peoples’ cognitive state in order to enhance it. Augmented cognition has many potential military applications, and its proponents promise that it will also greatly improve productivity in the workplace.
That is not dead which can eternal lie…
Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of the earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one could read the old writing now, but things were told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret–that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. — “The Call of Cthulhu”
I maintain, as do others, that Lovecraft’s Mythos stories are as much science fiction as they are horror, and science, it seems, is now catching up with him:
There may be a state of being between life and death, suggest the authors of a new paper who argue that certain organisms, tissues and cells can survive in an in-between, limbo-like state.
“We think that viability, the middle state between life and death, can best be defined as ‘resting life,’” said Rene Severijnen, a pediatric surgeon at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in the Netherlands. [Read more.]
So we now know the meaning of the chant “Ph-nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,” quoted in translation above, and of Abdul Alhazred’s couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange eons even death may die.
Cthulhu is in a state of “resting life.”
Erasing Memories One at a Time
Part of the fun of near-future science fiction is in watching its prediction success rate unfold. Quite often, what seems plausible doesn’t happen and what seems implausible does. Quite often, what seems plosible doesn’t happen and what seems implosible does.1 Ripped from the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is this news from News@Nature.com:
A single, specific memory has been wiped from the brains of rats, leaving other recollections intact. The study adds to our understanding of how memories are made and altered in the brain, and could help to relieve sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) of the fearful memories that disrupt their lives. The results are published in Nature Neuroscience. [Read more.]
- In honor of Steven Krause, who likes to point out he still doesn’t have a personal jet pack or a flying car, we might call this “Krause’s Law of Technological Development.” [↩]
Archeology and Science Roundup
Neolithic houses with the same floor plan as Skara Brae found near Stonehenge. [BBC World News]
New Homo floresiensis (aka hobbit) news: Another study finds that Homo floresiensis are a new species rather than microcephalics (BBC News), and Mike Morwood, one of the Homo floresiensis discoverers believes they may have originated on the island of Sulawesi and is planning a research expedition there (Sidney Morning Herald).
Imagining the Tenth Dimension, a Flash tutorial. I first came across back in August (via Johndan) and have been meaning to link to it ever since.
An interactive map of the History of Influences in the Development of Intelligence Theory and Testing. [Via Neurophilosopher]
Video lecture: “The Origin of the Human Mind: Insights from Brain Imaging and Evolution,” presented by Martin Sereno. [Via Neurophilosopher]
“Human Brain Region Functions Like Digital Computer” (Science Daily, Oct. 6, 2006). [Via CogNews]
Twitter Feed- Four separate sets of plans canceled on me this weekend. With few friends in this state, that's an epic failure.
- One class down and one to go.
- The Call of Cthulhu in Under 2 Minutes http://nblo.gs/7sqXb
