ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 619
December 8, 2015
New Camera Can See Around Corners
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The camera could be used in disaster zones, or for cars moving around corners. Heriot-Watt University
It seems like something from James Bond: to be able to track objects moving when they are out of view hidden around a corner. And yet this is exactly what researchers have managed to do. A team from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, has developed a camera that logs individual photons, which allows them to track objects moving out of sight.
Should You Sleep With Your Pets?
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Cats and dogs can help you sleep, according to this new study. Alena Ozerova/Shutterstock
Having difficulty getting to sleep? Whether you have a few sleepless nights behind you or you’ve got full-blown insomnia, millions around the world wake up bleary-eyed, more often than not wondering how they could nod off slightly faster. According to a survey carried out by the Center of Sleep Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona, you might be able to get all of your 40 winks if you have a pet beside you as you snooze. The study has been published in Mayor Clinic Proceedings.
Are perpetual motion machines possible?
A wheel that spins forever; a bird that never quenches its thirst; a clock that never stops ticking, an endless source of free energy. These are but the dreams of inventors striving to make perpetual motion machines, machines that can work forever without any energy input. Are these machines possible without violating the laws of physics? No.
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Unbalanced wheel designed, laser cut and assembled by engineer Kyle Kitzmiller – kylekitzmiller.com
Writer: Sophia Chen
Editors: Jabril Ashe and Dianna Cowern
Host: Dianna Cowern
Weather footage: NASA Goddard
Zimara’s Windmill drawing: Burton Lee Potterveld
Cox’s Timepiece drawing – Mr. Cox’s Perpetual Motion, a Prize in the Museum Lottery, single sheet, 225mm. x 174mm., full-page engraving with letterpress on verso, London, 1774. (Ex) Item 4848706
Music: APM and YouTube
Perpetual Motion Machines
Impossible Machines
December 7, 2015
Recently Released Rare Images of a U.S. Seaplane Lost on December 7, 1941 Commemorate the First Phase of Pearl Harbor Attack
For the first time, archeologists have been able to map and image the sunken fleet of seaplanes destroyed in a prelude to the Pearl Harbor attack exactly 74 years ago. To commemorate the anniversary, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Hawaii have released rare images of one of the sunken planes today.
The Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, killed 2,403 U.S. personnel, destroyed 169 aircraft and sunk 19 ships. Although, the Harbor’s sunken ships, where a rainbow-like sheen of ever-leaking oil reflects off the surface of the ocean, mark a unique memorial themselves, many forget that remnants of the earlier attack lurk in a nearby bay.
Minutes before attacking Pearl Harbor, Japanese aircraft bombed the nearby U.S. Naval Air Station on the east coast of Oahu, just 10 nautical miles away from Pearl Harbor. The Japanese air forces successfully destroyed 27 Catalina PBY-5 aircraft—common seaplanes used during World War II—located on the ground and in the Kāne‛ohe Bay and damaged six others. It was a significant loss to the U.S. military and meant that the station had lost all its long-range bombers capable of following the attackers. In fact, damages were so extensive, that only three aircraft out on patrol were fit to fly by the end of the attack.
The starboard engine nacelle (housing) extending into the silt. Credit:UH Marine Option Program
Since 1994, the University of Hawaii has made several efforts to map and take images of the sunken wreck but has been deterred because of murky waters that limit visibility. Last June, thanks to better equipment and visibility, students from the University of Hawaii Marine Option Program—a field school that teaches students how to survey shipwrecks underwater—were able to map the entire site and produce the first systematic photos and video documentation. The images released today document one of the seaplanes that sunk during the opening minutes of the first attack. It’s now clear that it rests in three large pieces 30 feet beneath the surface. Although its precise identity remains unknown, the team speculates that it was likely attempting to take off in the face of the attack.
"The new images and site plan help tell the story of a largely forgotten casualty of the attack," Hans Van Tilburg, a maritime archaeologist with NOAA and the team’s coordinator, said in a statement. "The sunken PBY plane is a very important reminder of the ‘Day of Infamy,' just like the USS Arizona and USS Utah. They are all direct casualties of December 7."
Cockpit detail showing portside wheel and throttle controls (left) extending downward (to the right) from the overhead. UH Marine Option Program
Without Government, the Marketplace Will Not Solve Climate Change
Whether or not the world reaches an international emissions agreement, the U.S. government holds the real solution.
American rejection of climate action is based on suspicion of big government, often expressed as a threat to freedom.
Free markets will not solve climate change by themselves; they have failed to account for the damage done by carbon emissions to people and the environment.
A carbon tax, or emissions-trading system, could slow climate change, but government is needed to create those systems.
History shows that government is also needed to create and fund major technological innovations of the scale required to solve climate change. For that to happen, Americans will have to stop demonizing government.
Will Nations ever come together to keep climate out of the severe danger zone? The question looms like a cloud over United Nations negotiations in Paris this month—the 21st such attempt to forge an international agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions. A big reason for failing to find common ground is American intransigence on the role of government. If nations are to succeed, the U.S. will have to give up on the idea that free markets alone can adequately address climate change and embrace a government-led plan of action.
A U.N. treaty is effective only if signatory nations are prepared to follow suit with firm domestic policies, but American politicians have resisted action, afraid of paying a political price. The rejection of climate action is largely based on suspicion of big government, and an international treaty is government at its biggest. Yet making a substantial impact on something so fundamental as the sources of energy that drive our civilization is going to require billions (if not trillions) of dollars of investments and incentives that span diverse industries—the kinds of actions that the private sector has historically not made. If nations are ever going to put the brakes on climate change, the U.S. will have to overcome its aversion to government playing a major role.
Unreasonable reliance on free markets
It has long been a maxim in American life that the government that governs best governs least. It was expressed in the weakness of the original Articles of Confederation, in the structure of the U.S. Constitution (designed to prevent the concentration of power) and at various times throughout U.S. history. In the 20th century it was an important element in reactions against federal labor standards, rural electrification and, especially, the New Deal, the spectacular government intervention that followed the equally spectacular market failure of the Great Depression. The deal empowered the federal government with substantive oversight of business, industry, and financial and labor markets. But the opponents of the New Deal never denied the fact of the Depression.
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Answer Monday
Let’s take another look at last week’s fossil, just to remind ourselves what we're dealing with.
What is it? It’s a tooth! What kind of a tooth? A GIANT SLOTH TOOTH!!!
Okay, I was very excited to finally give you all something that was actually from a giant sloth. I know you all love giant sloths. How can you not love giant sloths? Here’s a picture of Rusty, the giant sloth who lives at the UIowa Natural History museum.
As you can see, he’s adorable. It’s too bad these guys are no longer extant because they look like they would give great rides. But a few facts: The giant sloths went extinct not so very long ago. The proper name for this particular species is Megalonyx jeffersonii. These sloths lived all throughout North America from a bit more than ten million years ago to a frankly suspicious 11,000 years ago. What happened to them? It’s not completely certain, but most evidence supports the contention that they were too delicious for their own good.
Our molar this week is one of many sloth parts in the museum collections from the Tarkio Valley ground sloths. Found in 2001 in Northboro, Iowa by Bob and Sonia Athen after the creek on their property suffered from serious flooding in 1993, the Tarkio Valley sloths represent an interesting group of fossils. Specimens from an adult, a juvenile, and a baby sloth were all found together. Research teams are working now to discover if these sloths were indeed a family group. Check out some more information here; UIowa’s got all the sloth-related resources you could desire!
The winner this week? Dan Coleman again! Dan, you have won too many times in a row! We all stand in awe of your fossil identification skills, and I ask as a personal favor that next time you submit a plausible yet deliberately incorrect response. Let someone else have a shot at the glory!
If you have a fossil you want to share, send your pictures to me at schoerning at ncse.com.
Climbing Mount Improbable, p 199
“Now we come to a piece of genuine uncertainty and a spectrum of opinion among biologists. At one extreme are those who feel that we can take genetic variation more-or-less for granted. If the selection pressure exists, they feel, there will always be enough genetic variation to accommodate it. The trajectory of a lineage in evolutionary space will be, in practice, determined by the tussle among selection pressures alone. At the other extreme are those who feel that available genetic variation is the important consideration determining the direction of evolution. Some even go so far as to assign natural selection a minor, subsidiary role. To take our two biologists to the point of caricature, we might imagine them disagreeing on why pigs don’t have wings. The extreme selectionist says that pigs don’t have wings because it would not be an advantage for them to have wings. The extreme anti-selectionist says that pigs might benefit from having wings, but they can’t have them because there never were mutant wing stubs for natural selection to work upon.”
-Climbing Mount Improbable, p 199 (US edition)
Discuss!
Humanist And Former “Moderate Muslim” On How To Tell A Moderate Muslim From A Radical Muslim
by Amy Alkon
Short answer: “You can’t.”
Simi Rahman, a female US pediatrician, writes in a pretty incredible Facebook post:
Every Muslim humanist is asking themselves a question I first asked myself in September 2001.
How do you tell a radical Muslim from a moderate peace loving one?
And here is my train of thought.
The 9/11 hijackers reminded me of boys I had gone to school with in Dubai in the 80s and 90s. They were the same age, background, and modern enough to have listened to 80s pop and chased girls. Meaning that just like most young people in the Muslim world, we weren’t that religious.
So, I thought, maybe I could locate the differences between them and me, and at some point I would identify a breakaway point. Something they would do that I never would. And it took me a while to realize this, and now with the California shootings, it has reaffirmed for me, that indeed, when it comes to being able to tell a moderate from a radical in Islam, you can’t.
You really can’t tell until the moment before they pull the trigger, who is moderate and who is jihadi. Tashfeen has broken our moderate backbone, by revealing that she lived among us, unnoticed, normal, experiencing motherhood, enveloped in our secure community and yet, had radicalized.
And that’s the problem, that there are many others like her with exactly the same beliefs, who may not have been ignited yet by a radical cleric, but if the opportunity presented itself, they would follow. They’re like a dormant stick of dynamite, waiting for the fuse to be lit. The TNT is already in there.
What’s it made of? Not the 5 pillars, belief, charity, prayer, fasting and pilgrimage. Not the sayings of the prophet as to how to lead a good and just life. Not the celebration of Eid ul Fitr.
It possibly glimmers through in the fealty that Allah demands during the Eid ul Adha, when Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son as a sign of his superior faith is commemorated in a sacrifice and celebration very much like the American Thanksgiving, with family and food. But without the football. And oh yes, the fratricide.
It is there in the silence one must maintain during prayer, brooking no interruptions, because it would make the prayer invalid. It is there in the severity of the hijab when it is followed to a tee. Not a hair can show. It is there in the forced separation of men and women at social gatherings.
It is present in every act that is performed that excludes us from the mainstream. It is present in the very concept of Us and Them. Because the only way we remain Us is to reject Them. The only way to be an exemplary Us is to reject westernization at every turn. Halal only is a sham, constructed out of this notion of meat that has been cut a certain way. It’s the same meat. And yet there is a magical difference that people will attest to in all seriousness.
…And so, to understand the moderate mind, you have to envision it on a continuum from radical to middle, but the closer you get to liberal, there is a wall. It creeps up on you, in the condemnation of homosexuality, in the unequal treatment and subjugation of women, but it’s there. Beyond that wall that they are afraid to look over, for fear of eternal hell fire and damnation, is where the answer lies though. So being a Muslim moderate these days is like running a race with a ball and chain attached to your feet. A handicap. Unless you can imagine what the world beyond that wall looks like, you can’t really navigate it. If you’re so terrified of blasphemy that you refuse to look over, you’re forever stuck. Right here. And behind you is the jihadi horde, laying claim to real Islam, practicing it to perfection, as it is laid out in the Quran. A veritable rock and a hard place. I feel your pain. I’ve been there. And it was untenable.
I read, discussed, debated alongside many good Muslim young people from all over the world, in Internet forums, trying to argue our way to a solution, much like we are doing on social media right now. I knew I rejected the homophobia, I knew I rejected the subjugation of women. And it all remained a theory until I saw it in practice. In the drawing rooms of the Midwestern professional moderate Muslim. There was the discussion of whether the verse that allows a man to strike his wife instead actually means, he should strike her with a feather. As a doctor, I am a humanist first, and so the blatant homophobia was irrational, dangerous and something I stopped tolerating politely. I attended presentations at the mosque of videos from the Palestinian Territories, played to rouse the outrage of the gathered congregation…[continue reading]
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The Inspiring Manifesto of the Muslim Reform Movement #MuslimReform
Moderate Muslims Have Hit Their “Wall”
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