“I’m not an idiot,” the artist confided in an interview. “I know that people are mostly interested in it because it’s David Bowie. But I think it’s still a valid artwork.”
In addition to positioning such influences as collaborator John Lennon, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, and former roommate Iggy Pop as atomic numbers, Robertson’s table allows for artists who came after.
“Fly My Pretties Fly (Thank You. We’ll Take It From Here)” includes Lady Gaga, Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, and fellow dandy, Morrissey, while Bowie’s 90s-era costumer, designer Alexander McQueen and artist Jeff Koons hold down “History Is a Choice the Future Decides Upon.”
Fittingly, author Oscar Wilde appears in the Hydrogen slot.
It’s probably no stretch to say that mass disinformation campaigns and rampant anti-intellectualism will constitute an increasing amount of our political reality both today and in the future. As Hannah Arendt wrote, the political lie has always been with us. But its global reach, particular vehemence, and blatant contempt for verifiable reality seem like innovations of the present.
Given the embarrassing wealth of access to information and educational tools, maybe it’s fair to say that the first and last line of defense should be our own critical reasoning. When we fail to verify news—using resources we all have in hand (I assume, since you’re reading this), the fault for believing bad information may lie with us.
But we so often don’t know what it is that we don’t know. Individuals can’t be blamed for an inadequate educational system, and one should not underestimate the near-impossibility of conducting time-consuming inquiries into the truth of every single claim that comes our way, like trying to identify individual droplets while getting hit in the face with a pressurized blast of targeted, contradictory info, sometimes coming from shadowy, unreliable sources.
Carl Sagan understood the difficulty, and he also understood that a lack of critical thinking did not make people totally irrational and deserving of contempt. “It’s not hard to understand,” for example, why people would think their relatives are still alive in some other form after death. As he writes of this common phenomenon in “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” most supernatural beliefs are just “humans being human.”
In the essay, a chapter from his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan proposes a rigorous but comprehensible “baloney detection kit” to separate sense from nonsense.
Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives.
Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations.
If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified…. You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.
Calling his recommendations “tools for skeptical thinking,” he lays out a means of compensating for the strong emotional pulls that “promise something like old-time religion” and recognizing “a fallacious or fraudulent argument.” At the top of the post, in a video produced by Big Think, you can hear science writer and educator Michael Shermer explain the “baloney detection kit” that he himself adapted from Sagan, and just above, read Sagan’s own version, abridged into a short list (read it in full at Brain Pickings).
Like many a science communicator after him, Sagan was very much concerned with the influence of superstitious religious beliefs. He also foresaw a time in the near future much like our own. Elsewhere in The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan writes of “America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time…. when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few.” The loss of control over media and education renders people “unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true.”
This state involves, he says a “slide… back into superstition” of the religious variety and also a general “celebration of ignorance,” such that well-supported scientific theories carry the same weight or less than explanations made up on the spot by authorities whom people have lost the ability to “knowledgeably question.” It’s a scary scenario that may not have completely come to pass… just yet, but Sagan knew as well or better than anyone of his time how to address such a potential social epidemic.
Once reserved for rebels and outliers, tattoos have gone mainstream in the United States. According to recent surveys, 21% of all Americans now have at least one tattoo. And, among the 18–29 demographic, the number rises to 40%. If that number sounds high, just wait until tattoos go from being aesthetic statements to biomedical devices.
At Harvard and MIT, researchers have developed “smart tattoo ink” that can monitor changes in biological and health conditions, measuring, for example, when the blood sugar of a diabetic rises too high, or the hydration of an athlete falls too low. Pairing biosensitive inks with traditional tattoo designs, these smart tattoos could conceivably provide real-time feedback on a range of medical conditions. And also raise a number of ethical questions: what happens when your health information gets essentially worn on your sleeve, available for all to see?
To learn more about smart tattoos, watch the Harvard video above, and read the corresponding article in the Harvard Gazette.
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“Video,” as we now say on the internet, “or it didn’t happen,” articulating a principle to which the ever-forward-thinking National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has adhered for about 70 years now, starting with film in the time before the invention of video itself. Even setting aside the wonders of voyaging into outer space, NASA has done a few things right here on Earth that you wouldn’t believe unless you saw them with your own eyes. And now you easily can, thanks to the agency’s commitment to making the fruits of its research available to all on its YouTube Channel. Take for example this recently-uploaded collection of 400 historic flight videos.
Here we have just a sampling of the hundreds of videos available to all: the M2-F1, a prototype wingless aircraft, towed across a lakebed by a modified 1963 Pontiac Catalina convertible; a mid-1960s test of the Lunar Lander Research Vehicle, also known as the “flying bedstead,” that will surely remind long-memoried gamers of their many quarters lost to Atari’s Lunar Lander; a spin taken in the Mojave Desert, forty years later, by the Mars Exploration Rover; and, most explosively of all, a “controlled impact demonstration” of a Boeing 720 airliner full of crash-test dummies meant to test out a new type of “anti-misting kerosene” as well as a variety of other innovations designed to increase crash survivability.
These historic test videos were all shot back when the Armstrong Flight Research Center (re-named in 2014 for Neil Armstrong, whose legacy stands as a testament to the cumulative effectiveness of all these NASA tests) was known as the Hugh L. Dryden Flight Research Center: you can watch the 418 clips just from that era on this playlist.
Rest assured that the experimentation continues and that NASA still pushes the boundaries of aviation right here on Earth, a project continuously documented in the channel’s newest videos. As astonishing as we may find mankind’s forays up into the sky and beyond so far, the aviation engineer’s imagination, it seems, has only just gotten started.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Humanity faces few larger questions than what, exactly, to do about climate change — and, in a sense larger still, what climate change even means. We’ve all heard a variety of different future scenarios laid out, each of them based on different data. But data can only make so much of an impact unless translated into a form with which the imagination can readily engage: a visual form, for instance, and few visual forms come more tried and true than the map.
And so “leading global strategist, world traveler, and best-selling author” Parag Khanna has created the map you see above (view in a larger format here), which shows us the state of our world when it gets just four degrees celsius warmer. “Micronesia is gone – sunk beneath the waves,” writes Big Think’s Frank Jacobs in an examination of Khanna’s map. “Pakistan and South India have been abandoned. And Europe is slowly turning into a desert.”
But “there is also good news: Western Antarctica is no longer icy and uninhabitable. Smart cities thrive in newly green and pleasant lands. And Northern Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia produce bountiful harvests to feed the hundreds of millions of climate refugees who now call those regions home.”
Not quite as apocalyptic a climate-change vision as some, to be sure, but it still offers plenty of considerations to trouble us. Lands in light green, according to the map’s color scheme, will remain or turn into “food-growing zones” and “compact high-rise cities.” Yellow indicates “uninhabitable desert,” brown areas “uninhabitable due to floods, drought, or extreme weather.” In dark green appear lands with “potential for reforestation,” and in red those places that rising sea levels have rendered utterly lost.
Those last include the edges of many countries in Asia (and all of Polynesia), as well as the area where the southeast of the United States meets the northeast of Mexico and the north and south coasts of South America. But if you’ve ever wanted to live in Antarctica, you won’t have to move into a research base: within a couple of decades, according to Khanna’s data, that most mysterious continent could become unrecognizable and “densely populated with high-rise cities,” presumably with their own hipster quarters. But where best to grow the ingredients for its avocado toast?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Before Pantone invented “a universal color language” or big box hardware stores arose with proprietary displays of colorfully-named paints—over a century before, in fact—a German mineralogist named Abraham Gottlob Werner invented a color system, as detailed and thorough a guide as an artist might need. But rather than only cater to the needs of painters, designers, and manufacturers, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours also served the needs of scientists. “Charles Darwin even used the guide,” writes This is Colossal, “during his voyage to the Madeira, Canary, and Cape Verde islands on the H.M.S. Beagle.”
Werner’s is one of many such “color dictionaries” from the 19th century, “designed to give people around the world a common vocabulary,” writes Daniel Lewis at Smithsonian, “to describe the colors of everything from rocks and flowers to stars, birds, and postage stamps.” These guides appealed especially to naturalists.
Indeed, the book began—before Scottish painter Patrick Syme updated the system in English, with swatches of example colors—as a naturalist’s guide to the colors of the world, naming them according to Werner’s poetic fancy. “Without an image for reference,” the original text “provided immense handwritten detail describing where each specific shade could be found on an animal, plant, or mineral. Many of Werner’s unique color names still exist in common usage, though they’ve detached from his scheme ages ago.
Prussian Blue, for instance, which can be located “in the beauty spot of a mallard’s wing, on the stamina of a bluish-purple anemone, or in a piece of blue copper ore.” Other examples, notes Fast Company’s Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, include “’Skimmed Milk White,’” or no. 7… found in ‘the white of the human eye’ or in opals,” and no. 67, or “’Wax Yellow’… found in the larvae of large Water Beetles or the greenish parts of a Nonpareil Apple.” It would have been Syme’s 1814 guide that Darwin consulted, as did scientists, naturalists, and artists for two centuries afterward, either as a taxonomic color reference or as an admirable historic artifact—a painstaking description of the colors of the world, or those encountered by two 18th and 19th century European observers, in an era before photographic reproduction created its own set of standards.
The book is now being republished in an affordable pocket-size edition by Smithsonian Books, who note that the Edinburgh flower painter Syme, in his illustrations of Werner’s nomenclature, “used the actual minerals described by Werner to create the color charts.” This degree of fidelity to the source extends to Syme’s use of tables to neatly organize Werner’s precise descriptions. Next to each color’s number, name, and swatch, are columns with its location on various animals, vegetables and minerals. “Orpiment Orange,” named after a mineral, though none is listed in its column, will be found, Werner tells us, on the “neck ruff of the golden pheasant” or “belly of the warty newt.” Should you have trouble tracking these down, surely you’ve got some “Indian cress” around?
While its references may not be those your typical industrial designer or graphic artist is likely to find helpful, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours will still find a treasured place in the collections of designers and visual artists of all kinds, as well as historians, writers, poets, and the scientific inheritors of 19th century naturalism, as a “charming artifact from the golden age of natural history and global exploration.” Flip through a scanned version of the 1821 second edition just above, including Werner’s introduction and careful lists of color properties, or read it in a larger format at the Internet Archive. The new edition is now available for purchase here.
What is it about the Voynich Manuscript—that cryptic, illustrated 15th century text of unknown origin and meaning—that has so fascinated and obsessed scholars for centuries? Written in what appears to be an invented language, with bizarre illustrations of otherworldly botany, mysterious cosmology, and strange anatomy, the book resembles other proto-scientific texts of the time, except for the fact that it is totally indecipherable, “a certain riddle of the Sphinx,” as one alchemist described it. The 240-page enigma inspires attempt after attempt by cryptologists, linguists, and historians eager to understand its secrets—that is if it doesn’t turn out to be a too-clever Medieval joke.
One recent try, by Nicholas Gibbs, has perhaps not lived up to the hype. Another recent attempt by Stephen Bax, who wrote the short TED Ed lesson above, has also come in for its share of criticism. Given the investment of scholars since the 17th century in cracking the Voynich code, both of these efforts might justifiably be called quite optimistic. The Voynich may forever elude human understanding, though it was, presumably, created by human hands. Perhaps it will take a machine to finally solve the puzzle, an artificial brain that can process more data than the combined efforts of every scholar who has ever applied their talents to the text. Computer scientists at the University of Alberta think so and claim to have cracked the Voynich code with artificial intelligence (AI).
Computer science professor Greg Kondrak and graduate student Bradley Hauer began their project by feeding a computer program 400 different languages, taken from the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” While “they initially hypothesized that the Voynich manuscript was written in [ancient] Arabic,” reports Jennifer Pascoe, “it turned out that the most likely language was [ancient] Hebrew.” (Previous guesses, the CBC notes, “have ranged from a type of Latin to a derivation of Sino-Tibetan.”) The next step involved deciphering the manuscript’s code. Kondrak and Hauer discovered that “the letters in each word… had been reordered. Vowels had been dropped.” The theory seemed promising, but the pair were unable to find any Hebrew scholars who would look at their findings.
Without human expertise to guide them, they turned to another AI, whose results, we know, can be notoriously unreliable. Nonetheless, feeding the first sentence into Google translate yielded the following: “She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people.” It’s at least grammatical, though Kondrak admits “it’s a kind of strange sentence to start a manuscript.” Other analyses of the first section have turned up several other words, such as “farmer,” “light,” “air,” and “fire”—indeed the scientists have found 80 percent of the manuscript’s words in ancient Hebrew dictionaries. Figuring out how they fit together in a comprehensible syntax has proven much more difficult. Kondrak and Hauer admit these results are tentative, and may be wrong. Without corroboration from Hebrew experts, they are also unlikely to be taken very seriously by the scholarly community.
But the primary goal was not to translate the Voynich but to use it as a means of creating algorithms that could decipher ancient languages. “Importantly,” notes Gizmodo, “the researchers aren’t saying they’ve deciphered the entire Voynich manuscript,” far from it. But they might have discovered the keys that others may use to do so. Or they may—as have so many others—have been led down another blind alley, as one commenter at IFL Science suggests, sarcastically quoting the wise Bullwinkle Moose: “This time for sure!”
Though now more than twenty years gone, Carl Sagan, through his many books and his classic television series Cosmos, continues to teach us all he knew about life, the universe, and everything. Three decades’ worth of students will also remember learning from him in person, in the lecture halls of Harvard and Cornell where he kept up his professorial duties alongside the considerable demands of his career as a public intellectual. If you’ve ever learned anything from Sagan, whether from the man himself or from his work, you know he didn’t just want to teach humanity about outer space: he wanted to teach humanity how to think.
That goal became explicit in Astronomy 490, also known as “Critical Thinking in Science and Non-Science Context,” which Sagan taught at Cornell in 1986. You can read its course materials at the Library of Congress, whose Jennifer Harbster writes that they “include mention of the important balance between openness to new ideas and skeptical engagement with those ideas in science,” a point that “animates much of Carl Sagan’s work as an educator and science communicator.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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