laodan's favorite science web sites

Last login: 8 hours agoLaodan: laodan is a 56 year old guy from Wisconsin, USA.; Likes 1,585 pages, 24 videos, 8 photos • 227 fans • Received 64 reviews; Member since Aug 08, 2005

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Shedding Light on Life&&(May-June&2008): Apr 19, 1:27pm 2 reviews science, art, visualization, worldviews
http://harvardmagazine.com/2008/05/shedding-light-on-life.html; Shedding Light on Life in Harvard Magazine by Courtney Humphries
"The human brain is vision-focused," says professor of molecular and cellular biology Jeff Lichtman. "If we see things, then we think we know what they mean." To be able finally to see events that were known only in theory is incredibly satisfying for scientists. Even more important, this revolution also opens up the possibility of learning things about life that could never be studied before. \u201cWhat we hope to do at the end of the day,\u201d he says, \u201cis to understand biology as it unfolds in vivo rather than in snapshots.\u201d The resurgence in imaging excites biologists for two reasons: it allows them to see individuals, and it allows them to count the masses. Being able to watch and track a single molecule, cell, or process offers a much more complete picture of how life works. Tom Kirchhausen predicts that in the next few years, scientists will use imaging to better understand complex processes such as cell division and the paths that viruses take to cause infection. Shedding Light on Life via Harvard Magazine, Courtesy of Jeff Lichtman Laboratory Color-coded neural circuits in the brains of mice allow Jeff Lichtman to trace the fate of individual nerve cells over time and across distances.
via Harvard Magazine, Courtesy of Gene-Wei Li and Peter Sims, Harvard University Sunney Xie combines a transmission image of bacteria (blue) with a fluorescence image of molecules (yellow) binding to sites on the bacteria\u2019s DNA in order to create a complete picture of the interaction. This article is a useful follow-up on my post about Could Science and Art Become One and the Same? . The subject of my comment is thus visualization versus art. In recent years science has made a dramatic usage of visual imaging techniques to understand what is going on at the micro and macro levels. But the fact is that digital imaging are photos taken from various kinds of microscopes or telescopes that are then often reprocessed by pairing 2 or more of those initial cliches in order to try to catch the meaning of what is going on in those images. Those images are often stunning and offer a depth of meaning and beauty that puts to shame most modern art works. But for scientists it is only a question of making sense in what they observe. Visual imaging is no more than a tool. But what about the images they obtain? Are those art works? Those digital images are not art works in the traditional sense of the concept of art: the production of visual signs about the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day. Those images are tools for scientists to discover sense and they are only fragments of the ensemble of images and ideas that forms their worldview. Art should not be confused with scientific imaging. The mission of the artist is to illustrate the worldview of the men of knowledge of our days. And the men of knowledge in late modernity and early post-modernity are not the scientists. Those men of knowledge are the rare individuals who are succeeding to integrate scientific knowledge within the more globally encompassing realm of philosophy and history. Some are scientists, some are philosophers or historians and some are artists. The late-modern and early post-modern artist has thus to accumulate the widest possible knowledge-base in order to be able to pinpoint the rare true men of knowledge in his time. And his mission is then to render visual signs about their worldview for all to share.

Reality Sandwich | Could Science and Art Become One and the Same?: Apr 15, 6:03pm 2 reviews science, art, reality, worldviews
http://www.realitysandwich.com/could_science_art_become_one_same; Could Science and Art Become One and the Same? in Reality Sandwich by Greg Wendt
Reality encompasses that which is beyond science as we know it, or at least beyond that which the current scientific mindset can explain. Is it possible that art can be used in a scientific way to create a more accurate expression of reality and a greater understanding of human experience? Capra points out that Da Vinci's genius came from his ability to use art as a way to be scientific, hence throwing the whole distinction between science and art into question. Could Science and Art Become One and the Same? To answer our most fundamental questions, science needs to find a place for the arts. by Jonah Lehrer in Seed The Science of Leonardo new book of by Fritjof Capra Artsense by myself Acrylic n#39 of my "artsense collection". In summary Jonah Lehrer posits that "If we want to get an answer to our deepest questions - the questions of who we are and what everything is - we will need to draw from both science and art, so that each completes the other". Unfortunately this is a position that is founded on a confused understanding of what is knowledge and what is art. 1. Knowledge: Humans, since times immemorial, tried to understand reality in the sense of "the whole in which we are such tiny particles". We distinguish 3 ages in the history of human understanding of reality or of human knowledge and those 3 ages are driven by the sharing of a common "worldview" that is a vulgarization of the understanding attained by the men of knowledge of the day: - the animist age: all parcels of the whole are inter-related: the shaman is the man of knowledge. - the religious or philosophic age: god or wisdom: the priest or the wise man are the men of knowledge. - the modern age: the logic of capital and its ideology of rationality: the capital holder and the scientist are the men of knowledge. 2. Art: Since time immemorial visual arts served at giving visual signs of the understanding of reality by the men of knowledge of the day. This societal functionality of art was lost upon all sometime around 1900 when thinker-artists experimented in devising something else than the first degree image that projects on the retina. But those experimentations concluded in the absurd when everything the artist was positing as being art was deemed to be art. The societal functionality of art was lost because rationality and science don't offer a global model of understanding of reality. Rationality and science are following a path of questioning that pushes till later the discovery of the answer. This model does not supply the artist with a knowledge of everything to illustrate and the artist is most often in no position to devise his own knowledge base, for, he never was given the tools for such an exercise. I agree with Jonah Lehrer that science left on its own will never come to the end of its mission to understand reality. But I disagree that art has to produce knowledge. This should be left to the philosophers and researchers of humanity's early cultures and most importantly animism. As Fritjof Capra mentioned in his "The tao of physics" the most advanced physics, chemistry, and other sciences often rediscover the fundamental truths expressed in animism and the later philosophies built over it. My take is that a new worldview for artists to illustrate will emerge out of the contact between science and animism.

Case Closed for Free Will? -- Youngsteadt 2008 (414): 3 -- ScienceNOW: Apr 14, 4:51pm 1 review science, worldviews
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/414/3?rss=1; Case Closed for Free Will? in ScienceNOW Daily News by Elsa Youngsteadt
Our brain may make up our minds before we do. Coffee or tea with lunch? Which pants to wear to work? Which movie to watch? Your mind might be made up before you know it. Researchers have found patterns of brain activity that predict people's decisions up to 10 seconds before they're aware they've made a choice. "We weren't expecting this kind of lead time, " Haynes says. Even though the predictions weren't perfect, "there's not very much space for operation of free will," Haynes says. "The outcome of a decision is shaped very strongly by brain activity much earlier than the point in time when you feel to be making a decision." Case Closed for Free Will? Libet's short delay The conclusions of this research paper imply that our personal decisions are not really determined by our consciousness. Wow! But let's not err, Our personal decision-making process is not determined by pre-determination either. It's more as if the working of our brains was producing decisions that we then consciously accept. But this would thus mean that free-will is a myth and that our personalities are resulting from the "computing process" of our neurones instead of what we long thought being ourselves or our freely thinking personalities. Practically that would mean that our present state of mind would be the computing result of all our lives' inputs since being born, or perhaps earlier since we were conceived and even earlier since our DNA could possibly be part of the total input. But then what about the idea of personal responsibility? If our decisions are the computing result of all of the inputs, one should think that, we should not be held responsible for our decisions and actions. But this squares with any societal form and norm. Societies are indeed the ones that fix the rules and personal responsibility is then no more than self imposed respect of those rules. This brings us back to the content of my earlier comments on You Can Blame the Bugs. Morality and personal responsibility are then the result, for each individual alike, of his sharing with all the others of the common societal worldview.

Treemaps | EagerEyes.org: Apr 14, 11:53am 1 review science, art, visualization
http://eagereyes.org/Techniques/Treemaps.html; Treemaps in EagerEyes by Robert Kosara
Treemaps are the single most used 'real' InfoVis technique there is. Interestingly, they have proven to be even more useful for unstructured data than for the hierarchies which they were originally developed for. Here is a brief history, discussion of current practical uses, and of the importance of treemaps for the adoption and understanding of information visualization. Treemaps The history of treemaps Beyond Treemaps Visualization has long been used by scientists to get a better grasp of what happens at the micro and macro levels. This has been extended to the field of information in order to make sense of what is going on amidst the saturation and overload that assails us daily. It's all about detecting the trends, rhythms, tendencies and patterns that operate within a given complexity. We can then zoom on a trend or a pattern and pick the information that has been accessed by the most people for example. Visualization let's us use our eyes to see something that our eyes normally would not see. It helps expand our visual range to deeper levels of knowledge and helps us transmitting to the brain a visual picture that sheds light on something the brain left on itself would have to labor in order to abstract an idea out of the complexity at hand. Visualization simplifies and orders the perceived chaos of multiplicity and complexity in a way that is similar to what the brain does normally.

Begley: Blame the Bugs | Newsweek Voices - Sharon Begley | Newsweek.com: Apr 10, 7:05pm 1 review science, society, life
http://www.newsweek.com/id/130623; You Can Blame the Bugs in Newsweek by Sharon Begley
For years scientists have scratched their heads over why collectivism declines with distance from the equator, and why living in colder regions should promote individualism (you'd think polar people would want to huddle together more). The answer seems to be that equatorial regions breed more pathogens. How might pathogen-fighting customs and attitudes arise, or fail to? Maybe people make conscious efforts to act in ways that inhibit the spread of pathogens, such as by shunning strangers and demanding conformity. Or maybe there are genes for behaviors that, at the level of a whole society, manifest themselves as collectivism or individualism, and genes for individualism get wiped out in disease-plagued regions. But when East Asians move to the West or Westerners go East, says Nisbett, they begin to see, think and behave like people in their adopted society. That would be hard to do if they were in the grip of collectivist or individualistic genes. You Can Blame the Bugs "The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently - and Why" Individual atoms left to themselves are nothingness. Their being is given by their being part of an assembling. In H2O each atom has a specific place in the assembling. When H, for example, is extracted from H2O it does need to be contained by an outside force to remain H. Without this containment the H atom would readily assemble with other atoms present in its near environment. The same goes for individual humans. They readily assemble with other individual human atoms present in their environment. Left to themselves they rapidly die. What all this means is that atoms (individual) and the assembling they are a part of (collective) are inseparable. Indeed the combination of the individual and collective form results in the existence of a constitutive unity. When H combines with O into H2O we have the atomic and collective forms combining in their constitutive unity that we know as water. The same goes for human atoms and their societal collective forms that are giving the constitutive unity that we have the habit to call humanity. The atomic and collective forms are inseparable they are the polarities of any unity. The one depends on the other and vice-versa. But the weight of each polarity within any given unity is variable. That means that sometimes one of the polarities is stronger than the other and so it exerts a stronger influence on the being of the unity. The relative weight of the polarities results from a complex web of interacting factors: - factors that are internal to the constitutive unity. - factors that are external to the constitutive unity, for example, bugs are forming individual demands for more or less collective relations. "... people make conscious efforts to act in ways that inhibit the spread of pathogens, such as by shunning strangers and demanding conformity."

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/top-0-amazing-k.html: Mar 11, 11:22am 3 reviews environment, science, art
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/top-0-amazing-k.html; Kinetic Sculptures in Wired by Aaron Rowe
Kinetic sculptures are simply breathtaking. Drawing green engineering and art together, they give a glimpse at what great beauty can emerge from an unconstrained mind. Perhaps the world will overflow with these spectacles in a time of better education and less strife. Amazing Kinetic Sculpture Videos http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMqftVhOuTw&feature=related Always amazing to see Theo Jansen's works. He succeeds in showing us that something else than the mechanical logic of capital is possible in shaping our daily lives: openness to nature and creativity. "The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds" says Jansen. There are 30 videos available on YouTube presently about Kinetic Sculptures. Check here: Theo Jansen - Kinetic Sculptor

Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?: Scientific American: Feb 29, 9:17am 1 review science
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=science-2-point-0-great-new-tool-or-great...; Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk? in Scientific American by M. Mitchell Waldrop
Wikis, blogs and other collaborative web technologies could usher in a new era of science. Or not. The explosively growing World Wide Web has rapidly transformed retailing, publishing, personal communication and much more. Innovations such as e-commerce, blogging, downloading and open-source software have forced old-line institutions to adopt whole new ways of thinking, working and doing business. Science could be next. A small but growing number of researchers--and not just the younger ones--have begun to carry out their work via the wide-open blogs, wikis and social networks of Web 2.0. And although their efforts are still too scattered to be called a movement--yet--their experiences to date suggest that this kind of Web-based "Science 2.0" is not only more collegial than the traditional variety, but considerably more productive. Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk? The collective consciousness gained by web users has spun into a debate pitting greed and the personal gain of the few against free sharing and prosperity for all. It all started with free software that was followed by Open Source Software. After a few years of Open Source practice the Goliath Microsoft seems at a loss to imagine its future and is trying to absorb Yahoo in an effort to resemble the corporate winner in the Open Source movance. The Open Source software model has since been imitated in various fields. This article extends the model to the creation of scientific knowledge and the prospects are simply fascinating. Check the following article published on Open Business. It pushes the boundaries of the Open model to the societal; to the Open Society model that eliminates corruption... Eradicating the evil of corruption

DNA Is Blueprint, Contractor And Construction Worker For New Structures: Feb 4, 10:38am 3 reviews science, economy
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080130130652.htm; DNA Is Blueprint, Contractor And Construction Worker For New Structures via KurzweilAI, in ScienceDaily from adapted materials provided by Northwestern University in EurekAlert
DNA is the blueprint of all life, giving instruction and function to organisms ranging from simple one-celled bacteria to complex human beings. Now Northwestern University researchers report they have used DNA as the blueprint, contractor and construction worker to build a three-dimensional structure out of gold, a lifeless material. ... By changing the type of DNA on the surface of the particles, the Northwestern team can get the particles to arrange differently in space. The structures that finally form are the ones that maximize DNA hybridization. DNA is the stabilizing force, the glue that holds the structure together. "These structures are a new form of matter," said Mirkin, "that would be difficult, if not impossible, to make any other way." ... "Once you get good at this you can build anything you want," said Mirkin, director of Northwestern's International Institute for Nanotechnology. "The rules that govern self-assembly are not known, however," said Schatz, "and determining how to combine nanoparticles into interesting structures is one of the big challenges of the field." DNA Is Blueprint, Contractor And Construction Worker For New Structures Computer rendition of a structure created by using DNA to assemble nanoparticles into well-defined crystal lattices. (Credit: Northwestern University) Letting biology, or better nano-bilology, work for us. This work done at Northwestern University colors the future in more livable tones. Imagine what a potential this work could unleash indeed!

Home -: Feb 1, 4:07pm 2 reviews science, video, reality, worldviews, animism
http://www.livingthefield.com/; Lynn McTaggart via BurkinaLoveFaso , on an interview of Lynn McTaggart on Google Video
Video interview with journalist and author Lynn McTaggart. She and her publisher/husband Bryan Hubbard are directors of a public company called What Doctors Don't Tell You Ltd, which publishes newsletters which scientifically critique mainstream medicine. As well as continuing to write about alternative medicine and editing the What Doctors Don't Tell You publications, McTaggart has also developed a program called Living The Field, based on an understanding of the zero point field that is not accepted by the scientific community. She is heading The Intention Experiment, a large scale web-based investigation to discover if intentions can affect the physical world. Living The Field the scientific exploration of spirituality, offering a bridge between science and spirit. The Intention experiment http://www.wddty.com/ http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4498209488786757374&hl=en an interview of Lynn McTaggart on Google Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dUsRWs-pZY Lynne McTaggart, author of the Field, talks about her vocation, the basis of happiness and the power of intention. Specialization leads to separation, dependency and sickness. Freedom and health come with autonomy. What we know for a fact: 1. We are particles of the whole we live in (humans, all other animals and all matter). 2. All particles are interconnected within the whole. 3. Healthy particles are open to the others and also to the resonance of our global interconnectedness. Willpower separates us. Willpower results out of greed, the search for prestige and more generally the effects of individualism that tend to collapse the societal polarity of humanity. Holistic health systems are thus concentrating on relaxation, meditation and "letting go" as techniques to "stop the mind" in order to allow the self to open to the other particles. Two schools of thoughts are thinking along the lines of what I describe here above. - the top to bottom school of specialists who try to impose their truths on the individuals. Lynn McTaggart falls in this category and makes a living from her status of specialist. - the bottom to top school that rejects the truths of any top to bottom specialist. Buddha, Lao Tze and others fall in this category. This was also the case of the "men of knowledge" or shaman under animism.

Organic Cuba without Fossil Fuels: Jan 25, 10:42am 4 reviews science, energy, sustainability
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/OrganicCubawithoutFossilFuels.php; Organic Cuba without Fossil Fuels in The Institute of Science in Society Online
Cuba's experience has opened our eyes to agriculture without fossil fuels, a possibility rapidly turning into a necessity for mitigating climate change as world production of petroleum has also peaked. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho Organic Cuba without Fossil Fuels FAO report on Cuba UN report "Hunger and malnutrition in the countries of the Association of Caribbean States" Comments on MetaFilter This is no time for ideological sabre-rattling. All societal experiments to power the economy with non-fossil fuels are important. Peak-oil is at our doors and we better have access to experiments shedding light on possible alternative paths for entering the future.