Descartes’ robot daughter and the zombie problem

By: | May 30, 2018

You’ve heard of René Descartes. 17th century French philosopher; cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am); first principles of enlightenment philosophy and science and all that.

You might be less familiar with Descartes’ robot daughter Francine. The tale of her birth and gruesome death makes for a wild historical(ish) ride in its own right, but it is also finding new relevance in the 21st century. The people who study artificial intelligence and robotics are finding it a helpful tool in thinking through one of the most controversial problems now roiling these academic disciplines: just how humanlike should we make AI and robots?

Anyway let’s back it up before we all get a nosebleed.

In 1635, Francine Descartes was born, the real flesh-and-blood (but illegitimate) daughter of Descartes and a Dutch servant girl. It seems that he loved them both so much that he broke with fairly serious convention to live with them. Just as he was getting ready to bring five-year-old  Francine back to France for a proper education, however, the little girl contracted scarlet fever and died. And that’s when things got weird. Continue reading →

Email is an Untamable Beast, 2018 edition

By: | May 29, 2018

In 2015, I thought my email was out of control. Hahahahahaha. When I remember back to 2015, all I can think is… girl, you have no idea. But back to email: I recently went almost a week without receiving emails from my work address. I didn’t notice that my email program had developed a glitch, because it took that long for me to miss an email I cared about. It’s gotten to where I don’t even open half the messages that land in my inbox. Every time I’ve used one of those timers to log where I spend my time, I find that email is the biggest time suck. Which is why I am offline this week. I’m taking a much-needed vacation to somewhere far away, and I’m logging off of email and all those other distractions on the internet. It’s quite possible that I’ll just delete all the emails that came in while I was gone. Life is ephemeral, and it seems silly to let email take up so much of my attention. When I return from vacation, I might spend half a day slogging through the emails that arrived and the other half of a day rebuilding some of those filters and tools that once helped me make email more manageable. Or, I might just spend that time outside inhaling some fresh air and soaking up a little sunshine. In the meantime, here’s what I wrote about email in 2015.Email

It’s not my imagination. Even gmail is telling me that my email is out of control, threatening that if I don’t dump some of my tens of thousands of emails (or pay them money) I will be “unable to send or receive emails.” That’s starting to sound appealing. I’ve caught myself fantasizing about creating an auto reply: sorry world, email no longer works for me. If it’s important, find me another way.

OutOfSpaceCropped

On November 30, I had 78,787 unread emails in my main email account. Today, that number is up to 78,929. Do the math and that works out to 142 unread emails in eight days, or just under 18 per day. Which does’t sound so bad, until you consider that this is just one of my five email accounts — the one with the best wheat to chaff ratio. Continue reading →

In the “Synthetic Age,” can technology save nature?

By: | May 28, 2018

Christopher Preston is a philosopher at the University of Montana, but he’s originally from England. Moving to the American West changed him. “First I was in Colorado and then Alaska and Oregon. Here I was having encounters with spectacular charismatic animals and elemental processes like glaciers grinding through valleys.”

His first week in the states he visited Rocky Mountain National Park, where he puzzled over a strange, twisted object on the ground that turned out to be a dead pine tree “100 years into its decomposition process,” he says. “In England, no one lets a tree decompose for 100 years.” Preston found himself impressed by “The moral weight of these historic processes,” and paying special philosophical attention to natural things and places ruled by forces shaped by millions of years of geology and evolution. “There is some sort of moral significance to the history, to the deep time,” he says.

But as Preston was coming to appreciate the wild world, he also mulling over our species’ massive influence on nature: moving species from continent to continent, turning land under the plow, polluting land and sea, and changing the climate. Our influence has become so pervasive and impossible to miss that some people are calling our era “the Anthropocene”—the epoch of man. And it alarmed Preston to hear that many proposed solutions to problems of the Anthropocene were to intervene more in nature, not less.

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | May 26, 2018

May 21 – 25, 2018

Sarah’s ingenious new way of measuring the heat index: a finely-calibrated, exquisitely-sensitive dogmometer.  You won’t know how you lived without one.

Jenny’s guide to the healthiest ingestion of insects (it’s called entomophagy, but you already knew that) includes nutritive value and the all-important assessment of flavor.

Former Person of LWON, Roberta Kwok, on the only way that olden-times people could look at images in groups and be educated & entertained thereby: the magic lantern.

Jessa has veered off the straight-and-narrow of journalism over to ghostwriting, and finds pleasure, appreciation, and a reasonable living.  Move over, Jessa.

Under the spectacular pictures of volcanos/earthquakes/tornadoes/hurricanes/fires/floods and behind the fascinating science, are people who go through it and know what it’s like and what it means.

 

Redux: Much As I Loved It, I’m Not Going Back

By: | May 25, 2018

We live surrounded in time by unavoidable, uncontrollable catastrophes.  Depending on where we live, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, and wildfires are just a matter of time.  When they happen, they’re all over the news and for good reason, those of us who are not wiped out like to ignore those of us who are.  Here’s an old catastrophe that might become new again.

This originally ran February 4, 2014.  It begins:  Behind science news stories, which are facts or predictions of facts, is a reality which gives them their context and sometimes their meaning.

Science magazine, January 23, 2014: “A new analysis . . . indicates that modern-day rumblings in the New Madrid Seismic Zone are not echoes of the 1811 to 1812 quakes, however. Instead, they are signs the seismic zone is still alive and kicking.”

Like New Madrid, Missouri, my home in Baltimore, Maryland is in the stable center of the stable North American plate.  Earthquakes don’t happen here, except when they do.  July 22, 2010, a little magnitude 3.6 earthquakerumbled through my bedroom and back out again, I woke up, thought “Oh, earthquake,” and went back to sleep.

August 23, 2011, a much bigger magnitude 5.8 earthquake rumbled into my office building, stuck around for a bit, left, then came back and rumbled around some more.  The four-story 19th century brick factory building shimmied, it shuddered, and I was viscerally afraid.  Like when I was a kid in the cellar because the radio was saying a tornado was coming and the air was thick, the sky was dark, the winds in the clouds going crazy and tearing apart the black clouds showing their green insides.  Whatever is happening, it’s big.  And I’m small, soft, and easily smashed, and I’m afraid. I’m so afraid. Continue reading →

The Joys of Ghostwriting

By: | May 24, 2018

I remember the thrill of my first byline. The feeling faded pretty quickly but it returned every time I broke into a new publication and saw my name on the page of a magazine I respected. Having a little bit of name recognition has been useful. But for the last seven years—the same length of time I’ve been blogging here—I’ve been gravitating more and more toward writing under someone else’s name.

For the general public, ghostwriting has a mysterious air about it. Nobody quite knows how secret it’s supposed to be and how you can tell when someone didn’t write their book themselves. To fellow writers, though, ghostwriting is not a well-regarded activity. It’s kind of déclassé—the top-tier writers seldom do it—and the mendacity of the whole thing puts journalists on edge.

If my colleagues are being generous, they put my ghostwriting into the same general sell-out category as communications work—the place where journalists go to die, lemming-like, throwing ourselves onto Print Media’s funeral pyre. Continue reading →

Guest* Post: The Scientist Who Became Obsessed with Magic Lanterns

By: | May 23, 2018
A magic lantern slide.

When Kentwood Wells was 12 years old, he and his parents stumbled across a magic lantern in an antique shop during a Maine vacation. The instrument, an old image projector that used a kerosene lamp for illumination, came with beautiful German glass slides depicting scenes of hunters, soldiers, and children. Wells’ family became fascinated by these historical objects and started collecting them on trips. One of their rituals was to bring a bottle of kerosene and project pictures on the wall of their room. “Luckily, we didn’t burn down any motels,” he says.

Wells grew up, went to college to study biology, and dropped the hobby. He became a herpetologist at the University of Connecticut, investigating questions such as how frogs communicate and care for their young. But after his parents passed away in 2003, leaving him a collection of about 85 magic lanterns and roughly 5,000 slides, he decided to return to the topic. “That was the main motivation—just to do something other than having all this stuff sitting in a cabinet in my house,” he says. Wells began editing The Magic Lantern Gazette, a publication of the Magic Lantern Society of the United States and Canada, and scouring newspaper archives for details about the use of these instruments in 19th- and early 20th-century American society. Continue reading →

Redux: Meal, Worm

By: | May 22, 2018

shutterstock_108198206Reminder: There’s protein in that there bug. (And yes, I know that “bug” and “insect” aren’t one in the same, but please allow it.) Can you stomach this redux written long before my vegetarian days? Sure you can.

—

I eat meat. Most kinds. Beef, pork, chicken, bison, turkey.* Dark meat, white meat, legs, breasts. I’m not big on lamb—too much flavor, or perhaps too fragrant. Same goes for goat and venison. And I say no to veal, no matter how delicious it may be. Not that other farm animals aren’t treated poorly, but those little lambs immobile in those tiny crates…I can’t stand it.

Even if we promise to be cruelty free, those of us who are carnivores think little about carving away parts of animals to gobble down the protein and fat and vitamins disguised within. And yet, when we think about another kind of meat, insect meat, we cringe in disgust.

Of course, it’s all about what you’re used to. People who grow up with insects (and their insect-like relatives) for dinner don’t consider them unpalatable. But those who shriek bloody murder at a spider sighting or own the long-handled “bug vacuum” (try SkyMall) to avoid close encounters are less likely to order grasshopper tacos, if given the option. Give us our ground up cow or shredded chicken any day.

I’ve asked around. Part of what turns some away from entomophagy (insect eating) is the idea that you are eating the whole animal then and there. A baking sheet in the oven with rows of caterpillars—full bodies, lots of legs, and eye-topped stalks intact—is somehow harder to stomach than the wings of a bird on a grill (which don’t really look like what they are at that point). And there’s the “ick” factor of bugs to begin with. Other than spidery basements or mothy pantries, most modern houses are pretty good at keeping insects out. And when bugs do find gaps and sneak in, we are willing to spray noxious chemicals rather than spoon a weevil out of our oatmeal.

We’re fooling ourselves, though: Continue reading →