Tuesday, April 19, 2016
Religion ... Society ... Spirituality ... Technology ...
I recently posted a blog about an article that I came across via Real Clear Science regarding whether the human race could become extinct in the foreseeable future. Now I want to ponder another recent article from Real Clear Science regarding extinction. This time the question is whether religion is on the way to becoming extinct, courtesy of the wonders of modern science. The article was written by RCS editor Ross Pomeroy, a zoologist and biologist. OK, with those credentials, you can assume that Pomeroy knows a thing or two about extinction, and about the wonders of science. But is he right that science will inevitably become humankind’s new religion? To me, this smacks of “scientism“, which I have already expressed my reservations about.
Pomeroy claims that science will become the new “faith of humankind”. He notes the writings of Sir James George Frazer, who said that religion, science, and magic are similar conceptions, providing a framework for how the world works and guiding our actions. Frazer said that humanity moved through an Age of Magic before entering an Age of Religion. So, Pomeroy asks, “is an Age of Science finally taking hold?” At the end of his article, he concludes that
One of science’s primary aims is to seek out knowledge that will hopefully better our world and the lives of all who live on it . . . so not only does science dispel religious belief, it also serves as an effective substitute for it.
Given that Pomeroy is a scientist himself, we expect that he will provide empirical evidence to support his claim. And indeed, he does offer some interesting statistics » continue reading …
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
Current Affairs ... Science ... Technology ...
I regularly peruse the Real Clear Science web site and usually open up two or three articles from their latest daily list of interesting science articles. A frequent theme of the articles that the RCS editors select for their list regards “how the world could/might/will end”. If you are in a gloomy mood, then you can find examples of such articles here and here and here and here and here.
A few days ago, the RCS daily list included an article from the Science20 web site entitled “Could Anything Make Humans Extinct In the Near Future?” The author (Robert Walker, an inventor and computer geek) reviews more than fifteen possible candidates, including climate change, a comet or asteroid strike, pandemics, overpopulation, runaway nanotechnology, nuclear war, etc. According to Walker, the human race is pretty hard to kill. Many of the candidate “extinction events” could severely reduce our numbers and would probably end civilization as we now know it; but somewhere on the planet, a band of humans would mostly likely live on despite all the calamity.
(FOOTNOTE, strangely enough, Walker did not consider an H-Bomb “Doomsday Machine” like the one in the movie Doctor Strangelove. But then again, in that movie, the good Doctor himself came up with a way to save humankind with a scheme to send small groups to live in caves for the next 25 years. So perhaps Dr. Strangelove was just another example of how hard it is to totally eradicate the human species.)
Overall, Walker seems pretty optimistic that the homo sapiens species is quite robust and thus is not headed for extinction in the foreseeable future. However, there is one thing that does seem to scare him. And if » continue reading …
Thursday, December 31, 2015
Current Affairs ... Society ... Technology ...
I recently read about how some western nations (including Great Britain and Germany) are teaching elementary school students computer coding and programming as part of their required curriculum. Back in September, Australia made computer coding and programming a required part of the school curriculum from 5th grade on up. These lessons aren’t an occasional project or a one-semester deal; starting from the age of 10, computer programming skills become an integral part of the Australian student’s school-day. In order to make time for this, the Australian schools are cutting back on their geography and history lessons; these topics will no longer be “stand alone” subjects. A new “Humanities and Social Sciences” subject will merge the existing topics of history, geography, economics, business and civics and citizenship into a single learning area from the 5th grade on.
I don’t know all of the details of Australia’s plan, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that I don’t like it. I consider myself a science and computer geek, and I’m all in favor of using our education system to prepare today’s children for the world in which they will live (and try to make a living). And that clearly means more emphasis on science, technology, engineering and math (“STEM” as the popular acronym goes). And yet . . . we can’t shortchange the classic mission of preparing our youth to be thinking citizens who can appreciate and defend the noble and yet frail ideal of civilization. Perhaps I’m wrong, but the general drift of the new Australia plan seems to put less emphasis into “humanities and social sciences”, by placing a greater share of school resources into science, tech and computer skills.
In my humble opinion, teaching 10 year olds the ins and outs of do-loops and IF/THEN statements and database queries and object instantiation is not going to guarantee them a place in the modern high-tech world. Sure, some introduction into computing logic at that age is needed; schools need to build the learning foundations that future computer people will need. But really — like an 8th grader should or even could become ready for a job with Apple or Google? Or be able to » continue reading …
Saturday, December 26, 2015
Science ... Technology ...
In one off my past blog entries from way back in 2004, I admitted my interest in cold fusion, along with my hope that there might be something to it. Recall that cold fusion became a big topic of interest for the public back in 1989 when two chemical scientists named Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons claimed to have come up with an electrically powered table-top device that produced more energy output (heat generation) than would be expected from any known chemical reaction. Their device consisted of palladium metal dunked in heavy water, i.e. water which has a lot of deuterium; deuterium is a “heavy” isotope of hydrogen, because its atomic nucleus contains both a proton and neutron, while the regular hydrogen found in plain water has only a proton in its core. Deuterium is a necessary material in the process of nuclear “fusion”, the process which keeps the sun burning and which converts regular nuclear bombs into super-powerful “H-Bombs”. Fleischmann and Pons made a bold and ultimately unsustainable claim: that they had come up with a simple way to exploit nuclear fusion for small-scale power and energy producing applications.
If you have followed the story of science’s attempts over the past 50 years or so to harness the power of fusion in a controlled manner so as to generate heat and electricity (without blowing everything sky-high), you know that it’s a rather sad story. Since the 1960’s there have been various government and internationally funded projects attempting to devise a commercial fusion reactor; but despite all the experiments and test reactors that have been set up, fusion turned out to be a “wild maverick” that could not be tamed by “standard” technological methods. The standard methods either involve creating a super-hot bottle of gas (a “plasma”) held together in mid-air by magnetic fields, or by aiming a whole slew of laser beams at a small pellet of deuterium fuel and trying to create the crushing pressures and temperatures needed to force the neutron reactions that would break the barriers and unleash the reservoir of energy stored in heavy hydrogen’s atomic nucleus.
Why put all the money and effort into developing fusion? Well, if it could be made to work, fusion would be a relatively low-pollution energy source that wouldn’t need much input fuel; the hydrogen in a gallon of seawater would give the equivalent energy of 300 gallons of gasoline or around 16 barrels of oil. Since the USA now uses about 7 billion barrels of oil » continue reading …
Friday, December 11, 2015
Foreign Relations/World Affairs ... History ... Technology ...
I read up recently on international military news. Once you get past all the crazy, never-ending Middle Eastern stuff, you next get a big dose of bad news from China. You’d think that the main Chinese threat would be its huge army, but no more; times have changed. In the past few years, the Chinese have been designing and building an increasingly sophisticated network of high-tech satellites, drones, stealth planes, subs and missiles, with the intent of keeping the US Navy and any of its cronies (especially Japan) far away from its coastline. Thus leaving China to do as it pleases with Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, etc.
Until recently, the US Pacific Fleet, even with its huge sitting-duck aircraft carriers, could cruise the Taiwan Straits and South China Sea feeling relatively safe. The Chinese Navy generally couldn’t find our ships, as it didn’t have the sea-borne tracking and recognizance capacities that we do; and even if it could, it didn’t have enough modern subs and jets and destroyers to put up a credible challenge. That ain’t so today. What’s even worse, the Chinese now have missiles that can be launched by land or sea which are accurate enough (when coupled with a monitoring system of satellites and airborne radar drones and tracking planes) to hit a ship out in the open sea, thousands of miles away. Nuclear warheads are not needed; these missiles and their guidance systems are so good and so accurate that they can hit a carrier deck out in mid-ocean with a heavy conventional explosive warhead.
So, that’s a big headache for the US. And as if that weren’t enough, you can throw in what the North Koreans and Iranians are doing to develop long-range nuclear missiles, which in a few years could reach the US mainland. Yes, we are building anti-missile systems, but we are not sure if they are ready for prime time yet. As for the Chinese anti-ship missiles, the US Navy has » continue reading …
Sunday, November 22, 2015
Current Affairs ... Society ... Technology ...
Driverless cars are now being developed by a number of high-tech enterprises that are out to make a buck . . . eventually (this is not an easy way to get rich quick). The most famous driverless car venture is probably led by Google, which has set-up a small fleet of prototypes and has actually been trying them out in the real world. Some people think that driverless cars will start being sold and regularly used between 2020 and 2025 (5 to 10 years from now). That’s going to be interesting.
I’ve seen a number of articles (e.g., here and here and here and here and here) about the moral quandaries that the designers of driverless cars will need to face. When you make and sell a regular car controlled by a human, you don’t worry so much about the moment-to-moment decisions being made by the driver (although increasingly, automated systems in the car constantly monitor what the driver is doing, and try to warn the driver when they or someone else near them does something really bad . . . like when they are about to ram someone else’s vehicle while backing up in a parking lot, or when they start making a left while an oncoming truck is getting too close). When you design and sell a driverless car, by contrast, you have to program all of the driving decisions into the vehicle. So, in effect it’s you, the builder of the car, who makes the big decisions (through the computer program that you put into the vehicle to run it).
As such, people such as philosophy professors are pointing out that those who program these cars will need to decide what to do in morally conflicting situations. E.g., say your driverless car is cruising down the road, and it detects that a group of four people have suddenly run out into the road » continue reading …
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Outer Space ... Science ... Technology ...
It looks like the whole “space-plane” idea is not dead, even though the US Space Shuttle program ended in late 2011. The British “Skylon” idea has been generating increased press attention lately (you can see the November bump for it on Google Trends), even though the Skylon idea has been kicked around at least since 2000.
The Skylon spaceplane would be different in many ways than the Shuttle was, although the overall goal is similar (i.e., a rocket that takes off into orbit, drops off a payload in space, and then returns to a landing field so as to be used again). In an important sense, Skylon is even more of a “space-plane” than the Shuttle was; it looks more like a regular airplane than a rocket (somewhat reminiscent of the X-15 “semi-spaceplane” experiment of the early 1960s). By comparison, the Shuttle was just the reverse — mostly a rocket with a plane on its back.
So Skylon’s differences from the Shuttle are significant; one big factor is that Skylon would be a “single-stage-to-orbit” vehicle, something that hasn’t yet been achieved. But these differences might also be seen as an evolution of the overall space-plane concept, and not as a radical shift from the Shuttle’s basic intent. Skylon would be a bit smaller than the Shuttle was, perhaps around half as large. It would be un-manned, and is designed to put a 15,000 kg payload into low earth orbit. The Shuttle, by comparison, » continue reading …
Friday, February 13, 2015
Society ... Technology ...
You may or may not have read or heard about the tragic SUV – passenger train crash that took place on the evening of February 3 in Valhalla, NY, when 6 people were killed after the train caught fire from the SUV’s gas tank. There are plenty of stories in the press about all of the various fatal accidents, crashes, explosions and other sorts of mayhem that occur when the infrastructure of modern society goes astray. A new one seems to appear almost most every other day; a bridge collapses, an airliner crash-lands, a chemical factory blows up, a ship sinks . . . and this is just the accidental stuff, not even counting all the crime, terrorism and wars that happen all over the world. Then fold in all the diseases and physical disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, etc.) that nature throws at us. So yes, a fatal train-car crash in the suburban New York metro area doesn’t really move the dial too much relative to everything else going on in the national and world news.
But still, this accident sort-of hits home for me. Valhalla is not that different from Montclair, as they are both upper-income suburbs of New York. The Metro North line there is similar in many ways to the NJ Transit Montclair-Boonton train line that runs about a ¼ mile from my apartment. And I am an old “railroad hand”, was always interested in trains and even worked part-time for a railroad during my college years. So, I couldn’t help but give this one some attention. (In a way it’s sad how we have to “triage” what we get from the news; we just don’t have time to mourn and grieve for every unfortunate victim being reported in the news these days).
The woman driving the car, Ellen Brody was about 12 years younger than me; she was a mother of three, lived in an upper-crust suburban town (Edgemont section of Scarsdale) not far away from Valhalla, and worked nearby in a jewelry store (in Chappaqua). The news stories are unclear on the details, as they always are; but from the reports I read about what was said to reporters by witnesses and officials, it appears » continue reading …
Saturday, December 27, 2014
Economics/Business ... Science ... Technology ...
The cover story in the December, 2014 issue of Scientific American was about “World Changing Ideas, 10 Transformative Technologies”. I usually take articles like this, which predict the next big techno revolution, with a grain of salt (or less than a grain, since I’m trying to keep a low-sodium diet). Science magazines are good at tracking the latest interesting ideas coming out of the research labs and theoretical papers, but they aren’t all that sharp regarding market economics. And they often do not appreciate the engineering challenges and the skills that are needed to bridge the gap between an interesting new technology and the means to design, produce and successfully market a new gizmo (or gizmo system).
So, you see all sorts of interesting possibilities in magazines like Popular Science and SciAm (although really, SciAm should go back to its former focus on “pure science” and leave the inaccurate predictions about the impact of emerging discoveries in the real world to mags like Popular Science). But very seldom do you look actually look back 3 or 4 years later and say “hey, they were right about those thingies, which they said would soon be in use”.
One of the big-ten technologies that SciAm thinks will be a game changer is “wireless charging with sound waves”. The subtitle to the article sums it up: “An efficient way to beam electricity through the air”. In a nutshell, a young woman named Meredith Perry got interested » continue reading …
Wednesday, December 3, 2014
Art & Entertainment ... Society ... Technology ...
In updating my web site pages about the modern academic interest regarding the physics and metaphysics of human consciousness, I made reference more than once to a popular movie that had some interesting things to say about consciousness. i.e., the 1999 sci-fi classic “The Matrix”. I don’t believe that there are very many Americans out there who haven’t at least heard about, if not seen The Matrix . . . and many have seen it more than once, including the two sequels (Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions, which like all sequels, just weren’t as brilliant as the original).
Well, obviously I am rather familiar with The Matrix . . . but let me admit it, I never sat down to watch it. Thus, I finally decided to get with it, 15 years later. I don’t pay for cable and I don’t have a good streaming connection, but you can pick up a used Matrix DVD for $3 or less these days on eBay, so I am finally “Matricized”.
How did I like it? Well, the acting was good and the characters were compelling. The cinema work was quite good, and the techno-creepy aspects to it were about on par with some of the wackier X-Files episodes. But as to the plot . . . well, the overall “big idea” that we are all living in world that’s not really real, that what lies beneath our conscious experiences is different » continue reading …