WXshift (from the Climate Central folks) is taking a pretty serious stab at showing climate predictions on a local scale (or larger if you want), and integrating it with weather (at least a bit). Since I’m doing some related work, it’ll be really interesting to see where it goes, and how much interest they get. They could certainly be doing better on data visualization and user interface, but of course they’ll probably improve it as it matures…thanks, Mike!
[For anyone interested in science fiction, science, or, well, imagination, this is a pretty great site 🙂 -egg]
This is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings. It’s 100% free, no registration required.
[Some very interesting answers to this question on Quora -e]
What happens to an ant that gets lost? If it loses a pheromone trail, will the ant keep trying to find it again till it dies? Is it hard coded for survival without the backing of its colonial cousins? If it finds a new colony, will the new colony accept it?
Excellent piece in the NYT, written in 2011:
The girls surely have a complicated conception of what they mean by “me.” If one girl sees an object with her eyes and the other sees it via that thalamic link, are they having a shared experience? If the two girls are unique individuals, then each girl’s experience of that stimulus would inevitably be different; they would be having a parallel experience, but not one they experienced in some kind of commingling of consciousness. But do they think of themselves as one when they speak in unison, as they often do, if only in short phrases? When their voices joined together, I sometimes felt a shift — to me, they became one complicated being who happened to have two sets of vocal cords, no less plausible a concept than each of us having two eyes. Then, just as quickly, the girls’ distinct minds would make their respective presences felt: Tatiana smiled at me while her sister fixated on the television, or Krista alone responded with a “Yeah?” to the call of her name.Although each girl often used “I” when she spoke, I never heard either say “we,” for all their collaboration. It was as if even they seemed confused by how to think of themselves, with the right language perhaps eluding them at this stage of development, under these unusual circumstances — or maybe not existing at all. “It’s like they are one and two people at the same time,” said Feinberg, the professor of psychiatry and neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. What pronoun captures that?
Dohanos was a prolific American painter and illustrator with over 125 Saturday Evening Post covers to his credit.
Source: Mid-Century Misery: the discontented delights of Stevan Dohanos – Boing Boing
Lots more here.
Blum imagines the Internet as a series of rivers of data crisscrossing the globe. I find it a lovely visual image whose metaphor should be extended further. Like water, the Internet is vast, familiar and seemingly ubiquitous but with extremes of unequal access. Some people have clean, unfettered and flowing data from invisible but reliable sources. Many more experience polluted and flaky sources, and they have to combine patience and filters to get the right set of data they need. Others must hike dozens of miles of paved and dirt roads to access the Internet like water from a well, ferrying it back in fits and spurts when the opportunity arises. And yet more get trickles of data here and there from friends and family, in the form of printouts, a song played on a phone’s speaker, an interesting status update from Facebook relayed orally, a radio station that features stories from the Internet.
Krista and Tatiana Hogan are conjoined twins who have directly connected brains, born in 2006.
Here’s a pretty good documentary about them, made at the age of 7.
And here’s a paper (in an undergrad journal) that considers some of the implications.
Craniopagus twins, who are conjoined at the head, are uncommon and often misunderstood. While craniopagus is rare in itself, Krista and Tatiana Hogan are unique even among craniopagus twins: their brains are connected…Consequently, Krista and Tatiana are left with a connection that is both novel to documented research and exquisitely mysterious. They possess what their pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Doug Cochrane has called a “thalamic bridge” (Dominus, 2011a). Krista and Tatiana’s thalamic bridge will provide significant insight into the study of cognition and behaviour, and may even have significant implications to the philosophy of mind. Furthermore, their connection will be accompanied by major social change, as we must redefine our definition of what it means to be an individual. For us to understand how being part of a pair is more important than being an individual to one’s identity, we must shift our perspective and eliminate our preconceived notions of individuality.
[It won’t be so long before we can connect brains technologically, so it’s extremely interesting to see how that might turn out in practice. -egg]
[Warning: full article contains spoilers. -egg]
Something I came to love about Pratchett was his inability to go on disliking either a character or a race. In his early novels vampires are disgusting and nasty. But then he gets interested in them, he lets them cautiously in as Captain Vimes lets them reluctantly into the Ankh-Morpork Watch, he allows them a black ribbon of temperance (eschewing human blood) and we come to love them – or some of them. Goblins in early stories are conveniently unpleasant creatures, but then Pratchett and his characters start to like them, and the hidden music they turn out to have, and they become, despite their persisting stink, part of Ankh-Morpork society.
The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett review – the much-loved author’s last Discworld novel
According to Hinde, when a baby suckles at its mother’s breast, a vacuum is created. Within that vacuum, the infant’s saliva is sucked back into the mother’s nipple, where receptors in her mammary gland read its signals. This “baby spit backwash,” as she delightfully describes it, contains information about the baby’s immune status. Everything scientists know about physiology indicates that baby spit backwash is one of the ways that breast milk adjusts its immunological composition. If the mammary gland receptors detect the presence of pathogens, they compel the mother’s body to produce antibodies to fight it, and those antibodies travel through breast milk back into the baby’s body, where they target the infection.
At the same time that it is medicine, breast milk is a private conversation between mother and child. While my daughter lacks words, breast-feeding makes it possible for her to tell me exactly what she needs. The messages we are sending each other are literally made of ourselves, and they tell us about what is going on in our lives at that very moment.
Great article from The Stranger
Dr. Adams, who was also drawn to themes of repetition, painted one upright rectangular figure for each bar of “Bolero.” The figures are arranged in an orderly manner like the music, countered by a zigzag winding scheme, Dr. Miller said. The transformation of sound to visual form is clear and structured. Height corresponds to volume, shape to note quality and color to pitch. The colors remain unified until the surprise key change in bar 326 that is marked with a run of orange and pink figures that herald the conclusion.
Ravel and Dr. Adams were in the early stages of a rare disease called FTD, or frontotemporal dementia, when they were working, Ravel on “Bolero” and Dr. Adams on her painting of “Bolero,” Dr. Miller said. The disease apparently altered circuits in their brains, changing the connections between the front and back parts and resulting in a torrent of creativity.
“We used to think dementias hit the brain diffusely,” Dr. Miller said. “Nothing was anatomically specific. That is wrong. We now realize that when specific, dominant circuits are injured or disintegrate, they may release or disinhibit activity in other areas. In other words, if one part of the brain is compromised, another part can remodel and become stronger.”
