ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 424

Virtual Reality Can Leave You With an Existential Hangover

By Rebecca Searles

When Tobias van Schneider slips on a virtual reality headset to play Google’s Tilt Brush, he becomes a god. His fingertips become a fiery paintbrush in the sky. A flick of the wrist rotates the clouds. He can jump effortlessly from one world that he created to another.

When the headset comes off, though, it’s back to a dreary reality. And lately van Schneider has been noticing some unsettling lingering effects. “What stays is a strange feeling of sadness and disappointment when participating in the real world, usually on the same day,” he wrote on the blogging platform Medium last month. “The sky seems less colorful and it just feels like I’m missing the ‘magic’ (for the lack of a better word). … I feel deeply disturbed and often end up just sitting there, staring at a wall.”

Van Schneider dubs the feeling “post-VR sadness.” It’s less a feeling of depression, he writes, and more a sense of detachment. And while he didn’t realize it when he published the post, he’s not the only one who has experienced this. Between virtual reality subreddits and Oculus Rift online forums, there are dozens of stories like his. The ailments range from feeling temporarily fuzzy, light-headed, and in a dream-like state, to more severe detachment that lasts days—or weeks. Many cases have bubbled up in the last year, likely as a response to consumer VR headsets becoming more widely available. But some of the stories date as far back as 2013, when an initial version of the Oculus Rift was released for software developers.

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Is Arrival the Best ‘First Contact’ Film Ever Made?

By Megan Garber and Ross Andersen

This conversation discusses plot points of Arrival, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Contact.

What if there’s more? What if, somewhere out there, there are others? What if, one day, everything—really, everything—changes?

Contact with extraterrestrial life is an ongoing theme in film, and there’s a good reason for that: As a story alone, it’s mysterious. It’s epic. It’s awe-inspiring. But it’s also, as a story, intimate and personal. Arrival, the most recent entry in the “first contact” genre, is a reminder of that. So, though, are many of its predecessors. Below, two Atlantic staffers, senior editor Ross Andersen and staff writer Megan Garber, discuss a small (and, be warned, not at all comprehensive) sampling of those movies.

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The Great A.I. Awakening

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Prologue: You Are What You Have Read

Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company’s popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He was astonished. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination.

Rekimoto wrote up his initial findings in a blog post. First, he compared a few sentences from two published versions of “The Great Gatsby,” Takashi Nozaki’s 1957 translation and Haruki Murakami’s more recent iteration, with what this new Google Translate was able to produce. Murakami’s translation is written “in very polished Japanese,” Rekimoto explained to me later via email, but the prose is distinctively “Murakami-style.” By contrast, Google’s translation — despite some “small unnaturalness” — reads to him as “more transparent.”

The second half of Rekimoto’s post examined the service in the other direction, from Japanese to English. He dashed off his own Japanese interpretation of the opening to Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” then ran that passage back through Google into English. He published this version alongside Hemingway’s original, and proceeded to invite his readers to guess which was the work of a machine.

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Breaking the Gender Barrier in Engineering

By Joseph J. Helble

Consider this: In a nation that will need 1.7 million more engineering and computing professionals in less than a decade, U.S. universities and colleges this year awarded less than 20 percent of engineering bachelors degrees to women.

That equation won’t work.

Gender equality in engineering programs should be the standard, not the exception. Those of us responsible for producing those 1.7 million engineers and computer scientists need to see gender equality as more than just an interesting statistic. At Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering, and at more and more of our peer schools, our approach to gender parity is a critical measurement we use to evaluate the success of our program.

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How the ‘War on Christmas’ Controversy Was Created

By Liam Stack

It’s that time of year again, folks. It’s time for the War on Christmas.

What is that, you may ask? The short answer: a sometimes histrionic yuletide debate over whether the United States is a country that respects Christianity.

For the longer answer, keep reading.

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First Amendment Defense Act Would Be ‘Devastating’ for LGBTQ Americans

By Mary Emily O’Hara

Earlier this month, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Senator Mike Lee of Utah, through his spokesperson, told Buzzfeed they plan to reintroduce an embattled bill that barely gained a House hearing in 2015. But this time around, they said, the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA) was likely to succeed due to a Republican-controlled House and the backing of President-elect Donald Trump.

FADA would prohibit the federal government from taking “discriminatory action” against any business or person that discriminates against LGBTQ people. The act distinctly aims to protect the right of all entities to refuse service to LGBTQ people based on two sets of beliefs: “(1) marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, or (2) sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage.”

Ironically, the language of the bill positions the right to discriminate against one class of Americans as a “first amendment” right, and bans the government from taking any form of action to curb such discrimination—including withholding federal funds from institutions that discriminate. FADA allows individuals and businesses to sue the federal government for interfering in their right to discriminate against LGBTQ people and would mandate the Attorney General defend the businesses.

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What If Consumers Just Want to Buy Junk Food?

By Adam Chandler

Earlier this week, the Pew Research Center released a study that analyzed over 40 years of American dietary habits. For the Bittmans, Pollans, and public-health junkies alike, the results were baffling and, by many possible interpretations of the word, disheartening. Using decades of data from the USDA, Pew found that Americans are consuming less milk, but more cheese; much less sugar, but much more high-fructose corn syrup; and 23 percent more calories in 2010 than in 1970. “Americans’ eating habits, in short, are all over the place,” concluded Drew DeSilver, a Pew writer.

To this mirepoix of contradictory news, add another Pew survey from earlier this month, which found that 54 percent of respondents said they believe that Americans are seeking out more-healthy food than they did 20 years ago—even though they are eating less healthfully than they did in that same timeframe. And, they’re convinced that high-protein products are good for them, even if most nutritionists say that Americans, if anything, are eating too much protein. Meanwhile, Americans also remain heavily split on the relative virtues and perils of genetically-modified foods (GMOs) and organic products. Given these contradictions and a general lack of consumer consensus, what are mass-market food manufacturers to do?

Apparently, thread the needle with kitchen twine. Around this time last year, Kraft took an extraordinary gamble with one of its most beloved foodstuffs—the iconic blue box of Mac & Cheese. After several years, Kraft replaced its classic recipe, laden with its fair share of artificial dyes and preservatives, with a new version. To replicate the taste and color of those increasingly unpopular synthetic ingredients, the company incorporated more familiar substitutes, such as paprika, annatto, and turmeric. But, despite all this work, Kraft didn’t publicly announce the change.

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Religion Plays A Bigger Role In Evolution Skepticism Than Climate Change Denial, Study Finds

By Antonia Blumberg

Religion drives American attitudes toward evolution, according to a new study, but that’s not necessarily the case for climate change.

A recent study set out to discover whether religion factors into anti-science attitudes across the board. It found that while religious views drive Americans’ skepticism of evolution, climate change denial is more dependent on conservative political views and a lack of confidence in the scientific community.

The study, published by Rice sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund and several other researchers, found that about 20 percent of U.S. adults are skeptical that climate change is occurring or that humans play a role in it. Roughly 45 percent of the U.S. population believes evolution to be false.

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Coming Out Atheist, pg 76

“And using the world more is a big part of what’s going to de-stigmatize it. Marnie, who grew up in southern New Hampshire in a generically Christian family, says, “I try to avoid hedging and avoiding the topic, when it’s brought up. I feel strongly that when ostensibly ‘normal’ people say they are atheists without immediately ripping the head off a nearby child, or invoking a dark lord, I think it subtly changes the way people view atheists. Id on’t think atheists need to be perfect or exceptional in any way, I think the most powerful thing they can be is relatable.”

Being vague or imprecise about your language can also make things difficult if you decide later on that you want to be more open. Stephanie, who grew up and lives in the fairly non-religious country of France, says, “These days, if beliefs come up in conversation I am comfortable prefacing my opinion with ‘I am an atheist,’ whereas in the past I would have said ‘I have many doubts,’ ‘ I have serious issues with organized religion but I’m not sure about divinity/spirituality,’ or ‘ I am an agnostic’… My close friends, my sister (a practicing Christian but not a devout or bigoted one) and my aunt (who believes lots of new-age-y nonsense), when I said this to them for the first time, responded by dismissing it. ‘You? No, you’re really not an atheist.’ Several people had that reaction. This is presumably based on previous conversations we had had. I let it go, but it annoyed me.”

–Greta Christina, Coming Out Atheist, pg 76

Discuss!

Scientists Say the Clock of Aging May Be Reversible

By Nicholas Wade

At the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., scientists are trying to get time to run backward.

Biological time, that is. In the first attempt to reverse aging by reprogramming the genome, they have rejuvenated the organs of mice and lengthened their life spans by 30 percent. The technique, which requires genetic engineering, cannot be applied directly to people, but the achievement points toward better understanding of human aging and the possibility of rejuvenating human tissues by other means.

The Salk team’s discovery, reported in the Thursday issue of the journal Cell, is “novel and exciting,” said Jan Vijg, an expert on aging at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

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