But simple, beautiful mathematical explanations can make us greedy. While we wish for all explanations of the world around us to be elegant, science often involves “the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact,” in the words of biologist Thomas Henry Huxley. Before positing elliptical orbits, Kepler himself succumbed to the desire for beauty when he suggested that the planets’ orbits could be modeled as the Platonic solids nested inside each other. His theory was beautiful, but it was soundly disproved by later observations of the outer planets. In a way, it was almost too beautiful to be right. But beauty cannot be our only metric; beauty must be hampered by reality, if it is to have anything to say about the world around us. Gustav Fechner, a 19th-century psychologist, tried to experimentally prove that people naturally preferred golden rectangles in all kinds of settings, an effort that has not been borne out by subsequent research. It seems he was misled by his “vision of a unified world of thought, spirit and matter, linked together by the mystery of numbers.” This tendency can lead us astray. We see the golden ratio where it doesn’t really exist, and concoct beautiful theories that don’t describe reality.

via Math as Myth – Preview Issue: The Story of Nautilus – Nautilus.

[Interesting video for a great song. -egg]

Darkside – A1 on Vimeo.

[Whoa. -Egg]

In the announcement, NIMH Director Thomas Insel says the DSM lacks validity and that “patients with mental disorders deserve better”.

As a result the NIMH will now be preferentially funding research that does not stick to DSM categories:

Going forward, we will be supporting research projects that look across current categories – or sub-divide current categories – to begin to develop a better system. What does this mean for applicants? Clinical trials might study all patients in a mood clinic rather than those meeting strict major depressive disorder criteria. Studies of biomarkers for “depression” might begin by looking across many disorders with anhedonia or emotional appraisal bias or psychomotor retardation to understand the circuitry underlying these symptoms. What does this mean for patients? We are committed to new and better treatments, but we feel this will only happen by developing a more precise diagnostic system.

via National Institute of Mental Health abandoning the DSM « Mind Hacks.

BLDGBLOG: Forest Tone
http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/forest-tone.html?m=1

But surely this also sets the stage for the design of some incredible future greenhouse somewhere, chilled from within and spanning whole hills, streams, and meadows at a time, where perfectly refrigerated forests grow slowly under controlled conditions to form violins in three centuries: lined with weights and counter-weights, they are pruned, cut, sliced, and pulleyed to stretch the grain toward specific densities, to hit frequencies hundreds of years from now in an echoing concert hall built for music from modified trees.

Families tend the chambered forest, introducing a new carbon dioxide mix every third Sunday of the month according to some arcane unwritten formula, and these perfectly strange trees, ideally shaped for music, roll deliriously inside with their own tuned tides of sap and water. Instrument makers step gingerly over the roots and soils of the controlled forest floor where, barely whispering out of respect for their surroundings, they remove calipers from leather bags, they prism their laser-levelers through passing banks of mist, and they pay on credit three hundred years in advance to reserve well-measured sections of trees for future violins and cellos, imagining whole new forms of music that might emerge someday, given the right, surgically placed sequences of cuts, as if all trees are secretly hiding musical instruments and only the smallest percentage of them have so far been revealed.

(via Instapaper)

Emiliana Torrini – Fisherman’s Woman – YouTube.

OpenWorm is a very cool project that also scares me a little bit: a collaborative, open source attempt to construct an artificial life form — a simple worm, computationally created from the cellular level to a point where it’s sophisticated enough to solve, as the site explains, “basic problems such as feeding, mate-finding and predator avoidance”. This would be the first digital life form of its kind, but if the project is successful, more sophisticated species are sure to follow.

I first heard about this open source project because OpenSim pioneer John Hurliman recently joined OpenWorm’s development team, helping with improving the code’s deployment processes. “In the future I’d like to help with the physical and neural simulation aspects,” he tells me. “It strongly overlaps with the simulation research I did at Intel, even though we were virtual world/avatar focused, for the implementation the theory is equally applicable to a project like this.”

How’s progress on the worm itself going?

“Not a lot from the ‘download and run it’ perspective, it’s a pretty massive undertaking,” John tells me. “I was just in a Google Hangout meeting with the team this morning showing the latest demo, which showed a particle simulation of five connected muscle segments moving together through a body of water. The neuron simulation is also working and there have been some early tests of sending the outputs of that simulation (signals to the muscles to contract or relax) to the physics simulation. It will probably be 3-5 months before both simulations have been debugged and integrated to the point where the average curious developer could build and run the project and see the muscular shell of a worm swimming around.”

via New World Notes: An Open Source Artificial Life Project Called OpenWorm.

xkcd: AirAware.

[Damn, these are just incredible. Is he using really powerful spotlights to be able to shoot with such a short shutter speed? -egg]

Liquid Sculptures: Powerful Waves Photographed by Pierre Carreau Seem Frozen in Time | Colossal.

When we last looked at Curiosity — What’s Inside the Cube?, we were curious to know why half a million people were compulsively working together to tap and destroy the imaginary green cube in this iPhone app.

A few months later, they haven’t stopped. In fact, ten times that many people are now taking part in this “experiment.” Some are drawing crude pictures on the cube’s surface. Others are just trying to break the cube and get to its center. Still others are paying real money in an attempt to thwart them by adding layers back onto the cube. Today, its developer told Wired that just 50 layers of the cube now remain.

The end is near. But what happens when Curiosity‘s cube is gone?

After Billions of Clicks, Players Near the Center of Peter Molyneux’s Cube | Game|Life | Wired.com.

A team of scientists at the Boston Children’s Hospital have invented what is being considered one the greatest medical breakthroughs in recent years. They have designed a microparticle that can be injected into a person’s bloodstream that can quickly oxygenate their blood. This will even work if the ability to breathe has been restricted, or even cut off entirely.

This finding has the potential to save millions of lives every year. The microparticles can keep an object alive for up to 30 min after respiratory failure. This is accomplished through an injection into the patients’ veins. Once injected, the microparticles can oxygenate the blood to near normal levels. This has countless potential uses as it allows life to continue when oxygen is needed but unavailable. For medical personnel, this is just enough time to avoid risking a heart attack or permanent brain injury when oxygen is restricted or cut off to patients.

via Scientists Invent Oxygen Particle That If Injected, Allows You To Live Without Breathing | TechWench.com.