This weekend, an estimated 20,000 agnostics, atheists and ardent secularists gathered on the National Mall in rainy Washington DC. They were attending the first Reason Rally, an event intended to “unify, energize, and embolden secular people nationwide, while dispelling the negative opinions held by so much of American society… and having a damn good time doing it!” Lawrence Krauss, Michael Shermer, Eddie Izzard — they all spoke to the crowd. And then came Richard Dawkins, the high priest of reason, the author of The Selfish Gene, who spent decades teaching evolutionary biology at Oxford. In the middle of his 16 minute talk, he tells the audience, “We’re here to stand up for reason, to stand up for science, to stand up for logic, to stand up for the beauty of reality, and the beauty of the fact that we can understand reality.” I’m with you Richard on that. But then comes the scorn we’re now so accustomed to (“I don’t despise religious people; I despise what they stand for.”), and my guess is that changing perceptions of agnostics, atheists and secularists will need to wait for another day.
Filmmaker James Cameron Going 36,000 Feet Under the Sea
This week, filmmaker James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar, The Abyss) hopes to go where only two men have gone before, diving 36,000 feet beneath the sea, to the Mariana Trench, the deepest known place on Earth. It’s basically Mount Everest in the inverse. Cameron plans to make the historic solo journey in The Deepsea Challenger, a 24-foot-long vertical torpedo, built secretly in Australia over the last year eight years. (More on that here.) And when he reaches his destination, he’ll spend six hours shooting 3‑D video of the trench and collecting rocks and rare sea creatures with a robotic arm. Or so that’s the plan.
Above, James Cameron describes his mission in a National Geographic video. Below, you’ll find an animation of the Mariana Trench dive created by The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). You can track Cameron’s voyage on the NatGeo website and find a detailed description of the actual dive right here.
Astronaut Films Auroras from Above
As the sun’s 11-year cycle of magnetic storms moves closer to peak intensity sometime early next year, people who live at higher latitudes can expect to see colorful auroras lighting up the night sky. But what would it be like to look down at the auroras, or to move through them? In these striking images from NASA, we find out. Astronaut Don Pettit has been orbiting the Earth since December, as a Flight Engineer for International Space Station Expedition 30, and while up there he’s been taking advantage of the increased solar activity by filming some of the fireworks in the Earth’s magnetosphere. “We can actually fly into the auroras,” Pettit says in this NASA ScienceCast. “It’s like being shrunk down and put inside of a neon sign.” To learn more, you can read the article at NASA Science News, and to watch other episodes in the series, visit the ScienceCasts home page. Find more excellent clips in our collection of Great Science Videos.
Albert Einstein Archive Now Online, Bringing 80,000+ Documents to the Web
It’s not hard to jump online and learn about Albert Einstein’s intellectual contributions. Thanks to Yale, you can get a 60 minute primer on Einstein’s theoretical work. It’s called Einstein for the Masses. Or you can embark upon a longer, 10-lecture exploration of Einstein’s groundbreaking ideas (iTunes – YouTube) with Leonard Susskind, a Stanford professor known for his own groundbreaking work on String Theory.
And then there’s this: Starting this week, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is bringing online an extensive archive of papers and letters belonging to the great humanist and scientist. The collection currently features 2,000 documents and will eventually surpass 80,000. And it all gives a rounded view of Einstein’s life and work. The documents shed light on his personal relationship with his mother, wife and many mistresses; his views on the Arab-Israeli conflict; and his work on physics itself. A quick way to sample the archive is to enter this gallery, where, among other things, you’ll find Einstein’s manuscript introducing his famous equation, e=mc2.
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ParaHawking in Nepal: What It’s Really Like to Fly with Birds
We’ve always had the desire to leave our earth-bound bodies and take flight with the birds. We achieved the miracle of flight over a century ago. But only recently did we create a robot that can mechanically reproduce the beauty of birds in flight. And now we’ve taken the next step, actually joining birds high in the air. Above you can watch ParaHawking in action, a fusion between falconry and paragliding that lets you interact with birds of prey in their own environment. It all takes place in Nepal. And it’s all part of an effort to conserve Asia’s threatened vulture population. Learn more about these conservation efforts and ParaHawking itself at, of course, Parahawking.com.
And if you want to see what happens when a paraglider (not affiliated with this project) accidentally runs into an eagle, watch below:
H/T Metafilter
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Neil deGrasse Tyson: ‘How Much Would You Pay for the Universe?’
“Nobody’s dreaming about tomorrow anymore,” says astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in this compelling little video on the decline of the American space program. “After we stopped going to the moon, it all ended. We stopped dreaming.” The video was put together by Evan Schurr with material from various sources. In it, Tyson asks us to imagine the possibilities for tomorrow if NASA’s budget were increased to just one penny for every tax dollar. It’s a point he raised earlier this month before a U.S. Senate committee (read the full testimony here), when he said:
The 2008 bank bailout of $750 billion was greater than all the money NASA had received in its half-century history; two years’ U.S. military spending exceeds it as well. Right now, NASA’s annual budget is half a penny on your tax dollar. For twice that–a penny on a dollar–we can transform the country from a sullen, dispirited nation, weary of economic struggle, to one where it has reclaimed its 20th century birthright to dream of tomorrow.
via The Daily Beast
Autonomous Flying Robots Play the Theme From the James Bond Movies
Yesterday we featured a video of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” being played on a pair of Tesla coils. Today we keep the music going with something perhaps even more amazing: a swarm of autonomous flying robots playing the theme from the James Bond movies.
The robots were developed at the University of Pennsylvania’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) lab by graduate students Daniel Mellinger and Alex Kushleyev, founders of KMel Robotics, under the supervision of Professor Vijay Kumar. The researchers are working to develop agile, autonomous flying robots that can mimic the swarming behaviors of birds, fish and insects. In the video above, which was created specially for Kumar’s February 29 TED talk, a swarm of nine quadrotor helicopters play musical instruments. An article on the UPenn website explains:
In this demonstration, the “stage” is in a room fitted with infrared lights and cameras. The nano quads all have reflectors on their struts, which allows the camera system to plot their exact position and relay that information wirelessly to each unit.
Lab members can then assign each unit a series of waypoints in three-dimensional space that must be reached at an exact time. In this case, those times and places translate into notes on a keyboard or a strum of a guitar. Figuring out how to get from waypoint to waypoint most efficiently and without disturbing their neighbors is up to the robots.
The robots are remarkably agile, and may someday be useful for a wide variety of applications. To learn more, watch Kumar’s 17-minute TED talk, below, which includes several astonishing video demonstrations of the robots in action.
Michael Shermer’s Baloney Detection Kit: What to Ask Before Believing
Earlier this week The New York Times published an interesting discussion between philosopher Michael Lynch and physicist Alan Sokal on epistemic first principles, or, as Lynch put it in an earlier essay, the “Reasons for Reason.” To illustrate the practical advantage of observation and inductive reasoning in the formation of beliefs, Sokal quotes a passage from James Robert Brown’s Who Rules in Science?:
Certain reasoning patterns tend to promote survival; others don’t. If Og reasoned: “In the past tigers have regularly eaten people, but I’m sure this one will be quite friendly,” then very likely Og is not your ancestor.
Beliefs are important. How we form them can have profound consequences for our own lives and–especially in a democracy–for the lives of the people around us. In this 15-minute video from the Richard Dawkins Foundation, Skeptic magazine founder and editor Michael Shermer gives practical advice on how to separate sense from nonsense when forming beliefs. The next time someone tries to convince you of a tiger’s friendliness, do yourself a favor and take heed of what Shermer has to say.
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