Sonic you: The noise, failures and short circuits make you human

Would a perfectly faithful replica of you, a clone, really be you? It's an age old question that is answered in a rather unexpected way here. In this amazing video, journalist, sound enthusiast and host of Radiolab, Jad Abumrad, suggests that it's the noise, failure and broken bits that extend to us individuality as well as infinite possibility.

Beginning with a couple audio examples of machines failing, Abumrad points out that data visualization and sonfication has emerged as a scienfitic tool. I immediately thought of my favorite example of this, the Allosphere, which makes astro- and quantum-sized data available in a human readable format - that is, visually and sonically - in a four story dome like structure on the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

"Sonfication" has become a fertile area of collaboration between artists and scientists, used for example by researchers to listen to the sun.

Turned inwardly, one can also use the techniques to hear neurons firing in the head of a monkey making a choice during a simple game, as Abumrad demonstrates. Incredibly, out of the stochastic chaos one actually hears a decision pop out of the static. Similarly, he demonstrates that at the bottom of the protein producing machine that is you there are, biologically speaking, errors and broken, redundant and incomplete genetic material (broken mechanisms like the ability manufacture vitamin C, I might add, that we know work perfectly well in other mammals). Abumrad plays sounds of our bodies at work. Where one might expect a rhythmic, factory-like order to the stuff of life, syncopation prevails.

But rather than focus on the signal, it's the indecipherability of the noise that so interests Abumrad.

Listening to these noises creates a sensation of the vastness of things, like listening, one might imagine, to messages received by the SETI project. What interests me is that this thinking also fits nicely with what some philosophers of mind argue is the case when it comes to the first-person experience. Our conscious, reflective interior worlds are unique to each of us, and even a molecule-by-molecule reconstruction of a brain, a perfectly faithful replica, would not reproduce the same inward experience in any two people. Listening to molecules at work, it's hard to argue with the suggestion.

Abumrad says, concluding:

You will find scientists who will tell you, and they deeply believe it, that we are quantifiable. We are knowable. They will say 'If I could take a high enough resolution picture of you I could tell you everything about who you are and everything you will be..... What this tells me is no! No. All the way down at the bottom of our thoughts there's just more mystery, there's just more randomness, just more fluctuation. Just like white noise is a smattering of all different frequencies.... perhaps this noise right here represents on some level infinite possibility, that we can never be known.

Isn't that wonderful?

Wayne

Hat tip: Farnam Street

Two Lindberghs for Mars

Would you be willing to live in cramped quarters over the course of 501 days for the chance to be the first human to get a close look at Mars? If so, you might be in luck. The Inspiration Mars Foundation has just announced plans to send two people to the Red Planet - and in 2018 no less.

It might be doable.

Writing Mars Flyby: Daring to Venture, veteran space journalist Paul Gilster reflects on the attempt's feasibility, saying the proposal "on balance" feels much different than the incremental technology build-up that led to the lunar landings. He reaches back for the following historic comparison:

No, this doesn’t feel much like Apollo 8. It really feels closer to the early days of aviation, when attention converged on crossing the Atlantic non-stop and pilots like Rene Fonck, Richard Byrd, Charles Nungesser and Charles Lindbergh queued up for the attempt. As with Inspiration Mars, these were privately funded attempts, in this case designed to win the Orteig Prize ($25,000), though for the pilots involved it was the accomplishment more than the paycheck that mattered. Given the problems of engine reliability at the time, it took a breakthrough technology — the Wright J-5C Whirlwind engine — to get Lindbergh and subsequent flights across.

Like the Orteig Prize, Inspiration Mars Foundation is private. Dennis Tito, the pioneering citizen astronaut, is behind the effort. It's also backed by people who have spaceflight expertise and the business acumen to raise a lot of money. Naming rights, for example, might be sold. As for cost, the foundation has said that it would be "a fraction" of the $2.5b Curiosity rover, though no specifics have been ventured.

Inspiration Mars would be a free return, meaning it would require a single maneuver after escaping Earth's gravity well to establish the final trajectory that would send two occupants, a man and a woman Tito says, on a 16 month journey to within 100 miles of the surface of the Red Planet - and back. Not landing eliminates enormous complexity and expense. Energy for small course corrections during the interregnum would be available, but no more. The two occupants would be confined to a spartan environment inside the launch capsule that might, as illustrated above, include an inflatable module (inflatable technology is already on orbit). The temporary quarters would be discarded before re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, which would be the fastest ever attempted.

But why 2018? The year is a propitious one, minimizing the solar threat to astronauts on long duration spaceflight as well as the energy requirements for travel to and from the Red Planet. The next such alignment will occur in 2031.

Crucially, the technology to make the attempt would appear to be within reach. The principle technical challenges may be related to radiation hardening and life support for the extended journey, not the launch and spaceflight itself. And the desire is certainly there. Not content with a bureaucratic approach that has had the United States going, quite literally, in circles for the past 40 years since the last astronaut from the Moon, a number of space entrepreneurs from Elon Musk to Paul Allen to Jeff Bezos are thinking outside the atmosphere these days.

Musk has publicly stated that his goal is Mars. And his company, SpaceX, has made substantial progress toward establishing its spaceflight bona fides. The company's Dragon capsule is currently on the second of 12 resupply runs to the International Space Station under contract with NASA. It's been suggested that SpaceX's next rocket, Falcon Heavy, might supply the propulsion to send the Inspriation Mars astronauts on their way.

Still, the odds are stacked against the effort. But if the Inspiration Mars Foundation does manage to recruit, train, plan and launch a flight toward our nearest planetary neighbor, tracking two souls on a lengthy and perilous journey to Mars and back might have the same effect on the public that Lindbergh's flight had in his day.

Space reporter Jeff Foust has also written about this audacious mission if you're interested in learning more.

Wayne

Image credit: Inspiration Mars Foundation

Why would "cats" be masculine to the French? Who knows?

All of us have experiences of trying to convince other people with our words, and either being successful or not being successful

In a recent interview, Stanford Psychologist Lera Boroditsky says language, described as "Encapsulated Universes" by The Edge, is more than simply a method to convey information, but inextricably bound to context.

Her question: Does language change how we think, or does how we think change language?

Linking to the same interview, the blog of The Long Now uses it to point out the context in question. Hebrew and French, for example, assign a gender to everything in the world; Finnish does not. Russian verbs specify when an event has taken place while Indonesian verbs are timeless. Japanese tends to track causality closely in sentence structure. In her interview with The Edge, Boroditsky points out that in Turkish, one has "to change the verb depending on how you came to know this information." Even more interestingly, the Kuuk Thaayorre, an Aboriginal group, do not think in terms of left and right, but of how they occupy absolute space at any particular moment. 

Language can also reflect some interesting ideas related to time, according to Boroditsky. Testing this on volunteers:

I would give them a set of cards, and the cards might show a temporal progression, like my grandfather at different ages from when he was a boy to when he's an old man. I would shuffle them, give them to the person, and say 'Lay these out on the ground so that they're in the correct order.' If you ask English speakers to do this, they will lay the cards out from left to right. And it doesn't matter which way the English speaker is facing. So if you're facing north or south or east or west, the cards will always go left to right. Time seems to go from left to right with respect to our bodies. If you ask Hebrew speakers to do this, or Arabic speakers, they're much more likely to lay the cards out from right to left. That suggests that something about the writing direction in a language matters in how we imagine time. But nonetheless, time is laid out with respect to the body.

But these folks, the Kuuk Thaayorre, don't use words like 'left' and 'right.' So what would they do? How will they lay out time? Well, it turns out they do it from East to West. If a person is sitting facing south, they will lay out the cards from left to right. But if they're facing north, they will lay the cards out from right to left. If they're facing east, the cards will come towards them.

Aside from an academic's interest in answering the questions she poses, the idea that our biologies play host to individual universes, that language, like cognition, is irreducible to a chain of strict causality, would appear to be a result of embodiment, an idea that has spread to other disciplines like artificial intelligences as well. We are not just organic computers churning through information as it's presented. And our bodies are not there simply to ferry our heads from one appointment to another. As a practical matter, we think with our arms and legs and hand and feet, and abstractions such as notions of fairness and justice arise from a sense of being in the world.

Just as for the purposes of language all "cats" to the French are masculine, whether language or thought precedes expression is destined to remain a mystery.

Have a great weekend.

Wayne

Turning off the night light

Being an astronomy nerd, I'm continually looking for clear skies and lamenting the gradual upward spill of a noxious glare near my not-quite-rural, not-quite-suburban farm.

As the stars progressively wink out, I lose more than an immensely satisfying aesthetic experience. And I'm beginning to understand the why of that loss.

Dismissively describing the always-on glare in urban or suburban locations as the "night light," Andrew Sullivan, referring to Paul Bogard's book, "The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light,” links the electric glow to human disease, refers to evidence that it does not deter crime and, in addition to our rest, suggests that it disrupts the migrating, mating and eating habits of other species as well. We've been conditioned over the millenia to expect a period of blank quiet to cap the day.

Most don't realize how gradually the klieg lights have come up, but this illustration from the National Park Service shows just how the night has been overcome in the past few decades. Not coincidentally, on a trip last August to northern California, which happens to have some of the darkest skies in the country, the service at Lassen National Park was offering guided tours of a beglamored firmament staked to mountain peaks, one horizon to the other. It was breathtaking. Sadly, according to Bogard's book, 8 in 10 kids today will never see the Milky Way's ethereal display. To give you an idea what the night looks like without the phosphorescent competition, our galactic home is pictured over Utah's Bryce Canyon to the right. But for the synthetic glow, the same, or something similar, might be seen over Louisville too.

Of course, others have made similar observations about disconnect between our senses and sensibilities. Always-on media, for example, disrupts the rythmic cardinals that have kept us oriented toward regular periods of rest for time immemorial. Nicholas Carr has called it dancing to the same drum, and suggests that social media, and the connection it is meant to foster, might benefit from being, well, less social and more distant. Finding quiet in a noisy world has also become increasingly difficult, with the same result: our bodies crave time free of stimulation that doesn't originate in the swelling sounds of mother nature. As an introvert, I've always needed substantial breaks from the clamorous pinging of contemporary life to be the person I am, so it's interesting for me to talk with extroverts who don't quite know what to do when the social connections that have always been so rewarding no longer energize like they used to.

Whether it be turbid skies or the electric hum of our media-saturated culture, I sometimes think the experience of awe is being replaced by a kind of leaden monoculture of our own making - the bland similitude of continuous light and sound edges out, on the largest of chronographic scales, variability, the raw material for creative living.

Thankfully, there is good news. Cities like Paris and Flagstaff are requiring building and business owners to dim the marquee after hours so that the real show can begin. Here's hoping that the trend continues and we might, once again, have a chance to orient ourselves.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by madmiked

The Universe explained in 2:40 min.

It is my supposition that the Universe in not only queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can imagine - Geneticist and evolutionary biologist J.B.S Haldane

In this Minute Physics video, the universe, or what can be observed or perhaps described by mathematics, is differentiated from the Universe, which is helpfully defined as everything. Questions are addressed like is the future a part of the Universe? Is the math that describes the universe a part of the Universe, or does it live somewhere outside the whole? And, finally, what does the Universe think of the Harlem Shake?

In its brief life, the festival has hosted physicists like Brian Greene, Michio Kaku, Sean Carroll, Suketu Bhavsar, Leonard Mlodinow and Lisa Randall. All of them have contributed important answers to questions raised by festival goers, such as why does time have a direction when in principle it should go forward and backward? Linking it to entropy, or the process of moving from a highly ordered state to a disordered one, Carroll illustrated the point for the parents in the audience by noting that rooms do not, over a period of time, tidy themselves up.

None of the physicists appearing at the IdeaFestival have ever danced, though. We'll take it as proof that Universe, while fond of incredibly bright experimental and theoretical physicists, knows what it's doing.

Have a great weekend.

Wayne