“If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.” – Niels Bohr
It’s not a crab, it’s the manifestation of Schrödinger’s cat energy levels from outer space!
science
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half crazy all for the love of you. It won’t be a stylish marriage, I can’t afford a carriage. But you’ll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.
The National Museum of Computing fires up the Harwell Dekatron, aka Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computation — WITCH. The world’s oldest working original digital computer, first built in 1951, two-and-a-half tons, 828 flashing Dekatron valves, and 480 relays of it. “In 1951 the Harwell Dekatron was one of perhaps a dozen computers in the world.” It doesn’t calculate in binary code, but decimal code, hence the name “Dekatron.”
The Harwell Atomic Energy Research Establishment provided the Dekatron its first tasks, cranking out calculations formerly done by hand. When it passed into obsolescence there in 1957, Staffordshire Technical College took the massive computer off Harwell’s hands, and there it became the WITCH, used for teaching purposes over the next sixteen years. When it outlived even its educational use, the WITCH went on display at the Birmingham Museum of Science and Industry.
An operation to boot it up again stared in 2008, it now offers a whirring, clattering, flashing, retro-technological spectacle to new generations of computer enthusiasts.
Maybe we still have a chance
Gerald Crabtree, the leader of a genetics laboratory at Stanford University, argues that humans evolved to be hunter/gatherers, a high risk occupation that tended to keep the gene pool tidy. Life as a hunter-gatherer was probably more intellectually demanding than widely supposed, “a hunter-gatherer who did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter probably died, along with his or her progeny, whereas a modern Wall Street executive that made a similar conceptual mistake would receive a substantial bonus and be a more attractive mate.” A comparison of the genomes of parents and children has revealed that on average there are between 25 and 65 new mutations occurring in the DNA of each generation. Professor Crabtree says that this analysis predicts about 5,000 new mutations in the past 120 generations, which covers a span of about 3,000 years.
Jerry Coyne complains, “another problem is that scientists like me are intimidated by philosophical jargon, and hence didn’t interrupt the monologues to ask for clarification for fear of looking stupid. I therefore spent a fair amount of time Googling stuff like “epistemology” and “ontology” (I can never get those terms straight since I rarely use them).” This is an amazing confession. He is not wondering about the distinction between de dicto and de re, but about a Philosophy 101 distinction. It would be as if a philosopher couldn’t distinguish between velocity and acceleration, or mass and weight, or a scalar and a vector, or thought that a light-year was a measure of time.
«They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found a Secret Society Inside.» :)
Out of this world
The Stuttgart University team who studied it was able to classify it as an ataxite, a rare class of high nickel, iron meteorite. The statue itself is worth considerable value but being made from such a rare material it is considered invaluable.
Given the extreme hardness of the meteorite the artist or artists who created it may have known their material was special. It could have been produced by the 11th century Ben culture but the exact origin and age of the statue – as opposed to the meteorite it is made from – is still unknown.
Nepal’s sherpas are tired of climate change researchers
For their part, some organizations say they have always worked with the local community. One in particular held workshops and created flyers to raise awareness about their efforts. However, some researchers criticize their fellows for even being there: Studies of Himalayan glaciers “are often conducted at lower parts of the mountains that are easily accessible and the results are then extrapolated for the entire region.” Lack of coordination among different groups also contributes to the frustration felt. At this point, according to one Sherpa representative, “many…do not even want to hear the words ‘climate change’ these days.”
A sherpa climate change denier was a complete alien concept to me! :D
Behind absolutely everything
Where to start? How the human intellect passes from its original state, in which it does not think, to a subsequent state, in which it does think. For centuries thinkers tried to shed a light over the active intellect and the unmoved mover, until someone pointed out uncertainty and recursion were a plausible answer to the origins.
“It’s turtles all the way down,” someone joked as a way of fully explaining the concept of the world supported on the back of a giant tortoise.
When I read «German scientists find internet-addiction gene», I wonder on the thousands of billions of protein folds over millons of years, sequenced over millenias as a developed ape aimed to flourish the gene which put me here writing this poor post.
Kids playing around
For centuries great thinkers have debated whether or not humans are born with innate traits like morality and empathy. Some fancied the idea of tabula rasa, believing that infants are blank slates waiting to be written on by parents, society and experience, while others suggest that evolutionary adaptations help shape our brains, providing us with the biological and psychological context for playing nice with others.
In 2007, a study suggested that infants as young as 6 months could tell friend from foe, the study had shown that babies possessed a “moral compass” that was” universal and unlearned.” The infants both 6 months of age and 10 months of age watch two different staged play scenarios. In one, a wooden toy tried to climb a hill. A “helper” toy then assisted the climber. In the second scenario, a “hinderer” toy got in the way and pushed the climber down the hill. When the infants were later presented with the option to choose the “helper” or the “hinderer” toy for play, most went straight for the “helper.” Then a second condition was added, a neutral toy, that neither helped nor hindered the climbing toy, was added to the mix. When asked to choose between a helper and the neutral toy, the infants went for the helper. When asked to choose between the hinderer and the neutral toy, they preferred the neutral toy.
Now a new study suggests that the babies weren’t evaluating the social situation but showing a preference for the toys engaged in more interesting play. Basically, the babies weren’t making judgments on “good” or “bad” toys, but preferred the toys that did more interesting things. While reviewing the data tapes from the previous study researchers noticed that toys bounced up and down at the top of the hill at the end of the helping scene. Toys also collided in some scenarios. And so the researchers repeated the study, manipulating collisions and bouncing in some new trial conditions. Sure enough, they discovered that infant preferences were linked to the bouncing more than the helping. For example, when the toy bounced in the “hinderer” scenario but not the “helper” scenario, babies preferred the bad guy.
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