Category — Science

In the Large Magellanic Cloud, stars form and evolve, blazing with high-energy radiation, lighting up glowing tapestries of dust and gas in the surrounding nebula (click on image to enlarge).

Hubble Image of NGC 2074

This image was taken in commemoration of the 100,000th orbit of the Hubble telescope around the Earth, in it’s 18th year of operation. The image shows a small portion of the nebula near the star cluster NGC 2074. “It lies about 170,000 light-years away near the Tarantula nebula, one of the most active star-forming regions in our local group of galaxies.” (Astronomy Mag.)

Gaseous filaments glow under cosmically intense ultraviolet radiation, and giant pillars of dust form canyons a hundred light years wide.

Did you see the news item about fears of a micro black hole being created by the new Large Hadron Collider at the European particle physics laboratory (CERN) - a black hole that could eat up the Earth? Yeah, some dude in Hawaii was worried enough to sue them. Here it is: “Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More”

Well anyway I just ran across a video from CERN – basically an advertisement for them. Cool but slightly scary in a sci-fi sort of way:

This (reassuring) article from Science Daily reflects the view of scientists that there’s no danger:

If The Large Hadron Collider Produced A Microscopic Black Hole, It Probably Wouldn’t Matter

Here are some good links about the Large Hadron Collider. There’s even an “outreach” site from CERN.:

Wired: Science

LHC Machine Outreach

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider website

What is the proper, or true relationship between humans, nature, and technology? The other night I scribbled a diagram on a post-it note. I just found the note, and made a cleaner version:

We are embedded in nature, whether we realize it or not. As individuals and as a species, living on a planet, nature is our context, now, and what gave birth to us in the past.

The word “technology” is derived from the Greek word “technos”, which means “art” or “craft”. I am using the word here to mean all things that humans create: tools, weapons, art, language, drugs, cities, civilizations – all artifacts.

Coming up the stairs from our apartment, I spied a couple of palm trees sprouting from the seeds that had dropped. There is a large Date Palm right at the top corner of this walkway. The walkways was recently covered in sand (decomposed granite actually), and apparently it provided proper conditions for the dropped dates to germinate. A few days ago they were just thin little green fingers, plain and straight, sticking up. Now that first vertical leaf is starting to develop the typical palm folds - the ones evolved over millions of years to survive wind and tropical storms.

It hit me: That all the amazing structure, all of a large tree, or any other organism, is contained within molecules within that seed. So much information unfolds, from a molecular scale, into a large creature.

Do we have anything to match this in a computer chip? Nature out shines all our technology, using atomic and molecular machinery. Though it’s not really machinery is it? An atom is captive vibrations, and a molecule is a structured collection of those.

Here is the scenario:

A character who finally, after years of struggling with depression and anxiety, finds a drug that helps him be happy. He concurrently also rediscovers his abilities as a writer. Working in that high-tech field made him very ill – physically and mentally – from the stress.

He then tried his hand at photography, and had some success. Then he gets into painting from his photos. He was good at it, creating works of great technical proficiency, impressive in their clarity and mastery, but lacking in warmth and feeling. To him, the reward was in the accomplishment, in solving a problem, getting good at it, proving he could do it. The learning. Not in the doing. The doing was pure hard work

He would spend weeks or months slaving away on a painting, pushing himself to the edge of his abilities. But then, what did he have? A mere image. Something to look at for seconds, minutes perhaps. Something that people would ooh and aah at, and compliment him on. But there was no real dialogue, no meat for his mind. On top of that it brought in none of the extra money he used to pay his bills, pay off his loans and buy toys. All that intense work for a few minutes of pleasure didn’t seem worth it to him.

Then writing out of desperation, as an outlet or therapy for his frustrations and all the thoughts and questions and ideas plaguing his mind.

However the drug also takes away his ability to write because it knocks out short term memory and word retrieval, so all he can write is very poor quality material, like from an adolescent or a drunk. How does he resolve this, what ways does he try?

Without the drug, he wrote brilliant essays skewering current political, social and scientific events, but he was an intolerable, irascible crank socially, a critical ball of irritability constantly in a struggle with himself to not say what he was thinking about what his wife, or anyone else was doing, or the state of society. On the drug, he became a warm, friendly, funny, loving person. But all he could write were silly verbal gymnastics, like “perhaps the perfunctorily piddilating pooch prefers perambulating in the presidio”. Which were enjoyed by his wife, who liked his silliness, but elicited nothing but groans from his editors and literary friends.

It was no contest for his spouse: the choice between the calm, friendly, relaxed, tolerant, affectionate man, and the prickly grump was a no-brainer. They had enough money to live on from her family (her father made sure she was taken care of before he died), and the house was paid off. But to him it was a serious and terrible dilemma, of Greek proportions.

Things had only gotten worse lately - he had tried alternating weeks, on and off the medication. When he was off it, he became increasingly irritable. He’d recently gotten irate about having to pay for a “public museum” , asking the museum clerk “Is this public or is this private!? Do you sell the works here?” Fortunately, he quickly brought himself under control and calmed his nerves - a trick years of meditation had taught him.

A modern pharmaceutical Scylla and Charybdis.

On the one hand was his wife: the cute, sexy, fun, warm (and rich) infinitely supportive female with and about whom he said he felt like he’d “won the lottery”. The woman that loved him absolutely.

Charybdis - the whirlpool - was the drug. It swallowed his talent whole. His writing is what gave his life as a whole a meaning. It was the forge where he could take anything in life, any experience, any confusing or distressing thoughts, and make sense of them, or at least create art from chaos. It’s what gave him public recognition, pride, a love for work, a sense of accomplishment, a way of connecting with people in the world. It was a way for the inner and outer to mesh: essential for an inward thinking type personality like him.

Scylla was his life and work without the drug: alluring, and deadly to his marriage.

Cycad plant with cone - from a walk around the neighborhood

A thought that occurred to me on my walk this morning (maybe reading this interesting biography of Philip K. Dick, and this interesting article - Divine Interference - about him last night influenced me):

How does biological information differ from computer information?
How are they defined in those respective fields?