Ryan Somma's Blog, page 2
January 19, 2018
Celebrating 50 Years of Humanism in Star Trek
The following is the full-length version of a shorter commentary I wrote for The Humanist in 2016. The version at the link has the benefit of editorial oversight and fact-checking. This version is the messier director’s cut:
Optimism for the Future
It feels like we live in a culture where movie and television studios are perpetually finding ways to make stories darker. It’s a pop culture where viewers tune in for their weekly dose of misery on The Walking Dead, depravity on Game of Thrones...
April 1, 2016
Take our Daughters and Sons to Work Day 2016 – 3D Modeling with OpenJSCad
What follows here is an outline of activities we did for TODS Day 2016.
Hello World!
OpenJSCad 3D Modeling Open JS Cad is a programming environment that allows you to build 3D models that you can print.
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function main() {
var word = vector_text(0,0,...
February 27, 2016
Arduino Time Zone Portal LED Project
Bally Time Zone / Space Time Pinball Backglass
Credit: Shadowsclassic Introduction
I recently became interested in arcade history. Pinball history is particularly fascinating for the way inventors have come up with so many mechanical innovations over the years. From the first springer launch to the first speaking pinball to incorporating a wide variety of illusions, pinball remains something that simply can’t be replaced with virtual versions.
While investgating a 1972 Bally Time Zone pinb...
June 7, 2015
A Tale of Two AI’s: “Her” VS “Ex Machina”
Ex Machina
Human beings have speculated about Artificial Intelligence for over 2,000 years, our fantasies evolving as our technology evolves. More recent films, like Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick’s A.I., Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and George Lucas’ THX-1138 all tackle the hard questions and present insightful ways of looking at the issue. Most recently, I was wowed by the Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, a film about an AI undergoing the turing test, where the consequence of failing mea...
December 20, 2014
Celebrating the Winter Solstice at The Humanist
Winter Solstice Article in The Humanist
The Humanist has posted my celebration of the Winter Solstice, the annual cosmological event around which almost all of the season’s holidays orbit, in the article The Darkest Day: A Quintessentially Humanist Celebration.
Here’s a sample:
The winter solstice connects me to Galileo, who revealed humanity’s true relationship to the Sun, usurped our place at the center of the universe, and was among the myriad revolutionary intellects that ushered in the Enl...
November 1, 2014
Nicolas de Condorcet’s “Progress of the Human Mind”
It frustrates me bitterly that the works of the Enlightenment are almost forgotten in America’s universities. Science classes ignore them because scientists must focus on the most current understanding of our world. Humanities classes ignore them because the Age of Enlightenment, with its rationality and empiricism, is seen as the oppressor of creative expression.
But we owe so much to this age, which abolished god-appointed kings, established the sciences that so dramatically improved our qu...
July 20, 2014
Number Spiral Mandalas with HTML Canvas
12-Spiral in HTML Canvas
(Primes highlighted in red)
Mathematics is about exploration, not the rote memorization of algortithms. It’s about finding patterns, appreciating how numbers relate to one another. That’s why I love programming. Much of writing code involves experimentation with mathematics, tweeking a variable to see what comes out of a complex function. It’s wonderful when a program doesn’t give you the answer you designed it to; that means you are about to learn something.
I was reall...
February 22, 2014
How the IPCC’s Climate Report is a Model of Good Science
Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis
Credit: IPCC
Weighing in at over 1,500 pages, surveying the results from thousands of journal articles, and written by 259 experts from fields including meteorology, physics, oceanography, statistics, engineering, ecology, social sciences and economics, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis is the single most thorough, most comprehensive, and most accessible document in existence for...
December 22, 2013
Creative Commons Children’s Book: ABC’s of Biodiversity
ABCs of Biodiversity from ideonexus
Download a PDF Version Here (30MB)
Download a PPTX Version Here (103MB)
This book is another tool in the myriad strategies we parents use to teach our children. The ebook format allows something print books don’t: an alphabet book with 10 examples of each letter. This means there are 260 images in this book. That can be quite overwhelming, but that’s nothing compared to the Earth’s actual biodiversity.
There are a lot of ways you can read this book with yo...
October 20, 2013
Evolutionary Wonders in a Newborn Baby
Want to get closer to your primal beginnings? Have kids. During nine-months of pregnancy, you will learn about all the evolutionarily-influenced mechanics of giving birth, from the fetal acrobatics involved in maneuvering an enormous head required to house our big brains through a birth canal constrained in size so that human females can walk upright. Next time you look at a newborn baby, take a moment to appreciate these many echoes to our primitive origins.
Lanugo
Lanugo
Jerry Coyne’s Why Evol...
