Explore the Largest Online Archive Exploring the Genius of Leonard da Vinci

in Art, Computer Science, Design, Science, Technology | July 10th, 2023

We dare not spec­u­late as to what Leonar­do DaVin­ci would make of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence.

We are, how­ev­er, fair­ly con­fi­dent that he would love the Inter­net.

The Renais­sance-era genius applied his sophis­ti­cat­ed under­stand­ing of the human body and the nat­ur­al world to oth­er types of sys­tems, includ­ing plans for civ­il engi­neer­ing projects, mil­i­tary pro­jec­tiles, and fly­ing machines.

Google Arts & Culture’s new ini­tia­tive Inside a Genius Mind offers an inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence of the codices in which Da Vin­ci made his sketch­es, dia­grams, and notes.

It’s also a cura­to­r­i­al col­lab­o­ra­tion between a human — Oxford art his­to­ry pro­fes­sor Mar­tin Kemp  — and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence.

Pro­fes­sor Kemp, author of Liv­ing with Leonar­do: Fifty Years of San­i­ty and Insan­i­ty in the Art World and Beyond, brings a life­time of rig­or­ous study and pas­sion for the sub­ject.

His non-human coun­ter­part used machine learn­ing to delve into the note­books’ con­tents, inves­ti­gat­ing some 1040 pages from 6 vol­umes and “draw­ing the­mat­ic con­nec­tions across time and sub­ject mat­ter to reflect Leonardo’s spir­it of inter­dis­ci­pli­nary imag­i­na­tion, inno­va­tion and the pro­found uni­ty at the heart of his appar­ent­ly diverse pur­suits.”

Upon launch­ing the exper­i­ment, you bush­whack your way through the indi­vid­ual codices by click­ing on the sketch­es float­ing toward you like ele­ments in a clas­sic space-themed video game, or choose to enjoy one of five curat­ed sto­ries.


We went with Earth as Body, which gath­ers sev­en pages from the UK’s Roy­al Col­lec­tion Trust’s Codex Wind­sor, and one from the Codex Leices­ter, which inspired an ani­mat­ed mod­el that should sure­ly please its cur­rent own­er, Bill Gates.

 

Using a dis­creet and some­what fid­dly nav­i­ga­tion bar on the left side of the screen, we toured Leonardo’s ren­der­ings of the flayed mus­cles of the upper spine, the ves­sels and nerves of the neck and liv­er, the Arno val­ley with the route of a pro­posed canal that would run from Flo­rence to Pisa, a view of the Alps from Milan, the fall of light on a face, stud­ies of optics and men in action, and obser­va­tions of the moon and earth­shine.

How are these things relat­ed?

“Leonar­do believed that the human body rep­re­sent­ed the whole nat­ur­al world in minia­ture” and the selec­tions do offer food for thought that Leonardo’s pas­sion for the under­ly­ing laws of nature is the com­mon thread run­ning through his research and art.

Each image is accom­pa­nied a but­ton invit­ing you to “explore” the work fur­ther. Click it for infor­ma­tion about dimen­sions, prove­nance, and media, as well as some tan­ta­liz­ing bio­graph­i­cal tid­bits, such as this, adapt­ed from the cat­a­logue for the 2019 exhib­it Leonar­do da Vin­ci: A Life in Draw­ing:

Leonar­do had first stud­ied anato­my in the late 1480s. By the end of his life he claimed to have per­formed 30 human dis­sec­tions, intend­ing to pub­lish an illus­trat­ed trea­tise on the sub­ject, but this was nev­er com­plet­ed, and Leonardo’s work thus had no dis­cernible impact on the dis­ci­pline. His only doc­u­ment­ed dis­sec­tion was car­ried out in the win­ter of 1507–8, when he per­formed an autop­sy on an old man whose death he had wit­nessed in a hos­pi­tal in Flo­rence. The stud­ies on this page from Leonardo’s note­book are based on that dis­sec­tion: on the ver­so Leonar­do depicts the ves­sels of the liv­er; and in notes else­where in the note­book he gives the first known clin­i­cal descrip­tion of cir­rho­sis of the liv­er.

Per­haps you’d like to cir­cum­vent the machine learn­ing and use your own genius mind to make  con­nec­tions a la Da Vin­ci?

Try mess­ing around with the AI tags. See what you can cob­ble togeth­er to forge a cohe­sive alliance between such ele­ments as wing, horse, map, musi­cal instru­ments, and spi­ral.

Or cleanse your palate by putting a mash-up of two codex sketch­es on a dig­i­tal sticky with the help of Google AI, mind­ful that the mas­ter, who lived to the ripe old age of 67, was prob­a­bly a bit more inten­tion­al with his time…

Begin your explo­rations of Google Arts & Culture’s Inside a Genius Mind here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Inge­nious Inven­tions of Leonar­do da Vin­ci Recre­at­ed with 3D Ani­ma­tion

Leonar­do Da Vinci’s To Do List (Cir­ca 1490)

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Leonar­do Da Vinci’s Codex Atlanti­cus, the Largest Exist­ing Col­lec­tion of His Draw­ings & Writ­ings

How Leonar­do da Vin­ci Made His Mag­nif­i­cent Draw­ings Using Only a Met­al Sty­lus, Pen & Ink, and Chalk

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Map of Medicine: A Comprehensive Animation Shows How the Fields of Modern Medicine Fit Together

in Health, Science | June 2nd, 2023

The Hip­po­crat­ic Oath is pop­u­lar­ly imag­ined as begin­ning with, or at least involv­ing, the com­mand “First, do no harm.” In fact, noth­ing like it appears among the orig­i­nal Greek words attrib­uted to Hip­pocrates; the Latin phrase pri­mum non nocere seems to have been added in the sev­enth cen­tu­ry. But the prin­ci­ple makes a high­ly suit­able start­ing point for Dominic Wal­li­man’s video tour above of his new Com­pre­hen­sive Map of Med­i­cine. A physi­cist and sci­ence writer, Wal­li­man has pre­vi­ous­ly been fea­tured many times here on Open Cul­ture for his Youtube chan­nel Domain of Sci­ence and his maps of oth­er fields, from physics, chem­istry, and biol­o­gy to math­e­mat­ics, engi­neer­ing, and com­put­er sci­ence.

This new map marks a return after what, to Wal­li­man’s fans, felt like a long hia­tus indeed. The pro­longed absence speaks to the ambi­tion of the project, whose sub­ject demands the inte­gra­tion of a large num­ber of fields and sub-fields both the­o­ret­i­cal and prac­ti­cal.

For med­i­cine exist­ed long before sci­ence — sci­ence as we know it today, at least— and two and a half mil­len­nia after the time of Hip­pocrates, the con­nec­tions and inter­ac­tions between the realm of med­i­cine presided over by doc­tors and that presided over by sci­en­tists are com­plex and not eas­i­ly under­stood by the pub­lic. Hence the impor­tance of Wal­li­man’s clar­i­ty of visu­al expla­na­tion, as it has evolved through­out his sci­en­tif­ic map-mak­ing career, as well as his clar­i­ty of ver­bal expla­na­tion, on dis­play through all 50 min­utes of this video.

As Wal­li­man empha­sizes right at the out­set, he isn’t a med­ical doc­tor — but he is a “doc­tor” in the sense that he has a PhD, and intel­lec­tu­al­ly, he comes more than well-placed to under­stand how each part of med­i­cine relates to the oth­ers. This is espe­cial­ly true of a less­er-known area of study like med­ical physics, whose fruits include imag­ing tech­niques like X‑ray, MRI, CT, and ultra­sound, with which many of us have first-hand expe­ri­ence as patients. Few non-spe­cial­ists will ever be direct­ly involved in the prac­tice of, say, biol­o­gy or engi­neer­ing, but in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, it’s the rare human being indeed who nev­er encoun­ters the real­i­ty of med­i­cine. The next time you find your­self in treat­ment, it cer­tain­ly could­n’t do any harm to ori­ent your­self on its map.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Map of Biol­o­gy: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Biol­o­gy Fit Togeth­er

Every­thing You Need To Know About Virus­es: A Quick Visu­al Expla­na­tion of Virus­es in 9 Images

The Map of Chem­istry: New Ani­ma­tion Sum­ma­rizes the Entire Field of Chem­istry in 12 Min­utes

Down­load 100,000+ Images From The His­to­ry of Med­i­cine, All Free Cour­tesy of The Well­come Library

Info­graph­ics Show How the Dif­fer­ent Fields of Biol­o­gy, Chem­istry, Math­e­mat­ics, Physics & Com­put­er Sci­ence Fit Togeth­er

The Archive of Heal­ing Is Now Online: UCLA’s Dig­i­tal Data­base Pro­vides Access to Thou­sands of Tra­di­tion­al & Alter­na­tive Heal­ing Meth­ods

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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Cats Migrated to Europe 7,000 Years Earlier Than Once Thought

in Biology, History, Life, Science, Travel | May 9th, 2023

The ani­mals were imper­fect,

long-tailed,

unfor­tu­nate in their heads.

Lit­tle by lit­tle they

put them­selves togeth­er,

mak­ing them­selves a land­scape,

acquir­ing spots, grace, flight.

The cat,

only the cat

appeared com­plete and proud:

he was born com­plete­ly fin­ished,

walk­ing alone and know­ing what he want­ed.

- Pablo Neru­da, excerpt from Ode to the Cat

We find our­selves in agree­ment with Nobel Prize-win­ning poet, and cat lover, Pablo Neru­da:

Those of us who pro­vide for felines choose to believe we are “the own­er, pro­pri­etor, uncle of a cat, com­pan­ion, col­league, dis­ci­ple or friend of (our) cat”, when in fact they are mys­te­ri­ous beasts, far more self-con­tained than the com­pan­ion­able, inquis­i­tive canine Neru­da immor­tal­ized in Ode to the Dog.

We can bestow names and social media accounts on cats of our acquain­tance, chan­nel them on the steps of the Met Gala, attach GPS track­ers to their col­lars, give them pride of place­ment in books for chil­dren and adults, and try our best to get inside their heads, but what do we know about them, real­ly?

We even got their his­to­ry wrong.

Com­mon knowl­edge once held that cats made their way to north­ern Europe from the Mediter­ranean aboard Roman — and even­tu­al­ly Viking — ships some­time between the 3rd to 7th cen­tu­ry CE, but it turns out we were off by mil­len­nia.

In 2016, a team of researchers col­lab­o­rat­ing on the Five Thou­sand Years of His­to­ry of Domes­tic Cats in Cen­tral Europe project con­firmed the pres­ence of domes­tic cats dur­ing the Roman peri­od in the area that is now north­ern Poland, using a com­bi­na­tion of zooar­chae­ol­o­gy, genet­ics and absolute dat­ing.

More recent­ly, the team turned their atten­tion to Felis bones found in south­ern Poland and Ser­bia, deter­min­ing the ones found in the Jas­na Strze­gows­ka Cave to be Pre-Neolith­ic (5990–5760 BC), while the Ser­bian kit­ties hail from the Mesolith­ic-Neolitic era (6220–5730 BC).

In addi­tion to clar­i­fy­ing our under­stand­ing of how our pet cats’ ances­tors arrived in Cen­tral Europe from Egypt and the Fer­tile Cres­cent, the project seeks to “iden­ti­fy phe­no­typ­ic fea­tures relat­ed to domes­ti­ca­tion, such as phys­i­cal appear­ance, includ­ing body size and coat col­or; behav­ior, for exam­ple, reduced aggres­sion; and pos­si­ble phys­i­o­log­i­cal adap­ta­tions to digest anthro­pogenic food.”

Regard­ing non-anthro­pogenic food, a spike in the Late Neolith­ic East­ern Euro­pean house mouse pop­u­la­tion exhibits some nifty over­lap with these ancient cat bones’ new­ly attached dates, though Dr. Dani­jela Popović, who super­vised the pro­jec­t’s pale­o­ge­neti­cians, reports that the cats’ arrival in Europe pre­ced­ed that of the first farm­ers:

These cats prob­a­bly were still wild ani­mals that nat­u­ral­ly col­o­nized Cen­tral Europe.

We’re will­ing to believe they estab­lished a bulk­head, then hung around, wait­ing until the humans showed up before imple­ment­ing the next phase of their plan — self-domes­ti­ca­tion.

Read the research team’s “his­to­ry of the domes­tic cat in Cen­tral Europe” here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Cats: How Over 10,000 Years the Cat Went from Wild Preda­tor to Sofa Side­kick

A 110-Year-Old Book Illus­trat­ed with Pho­tos of Kit­tens & Cats Taught Kids How to Read

Cats in Medieval Man­u­scripts & Paint­ings

via Big Think

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day, human ser­vant of two feline Mail­room Böyz, is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Why Renaissance Masters Added Egg Yolk to Their Paints: A New Study Sheds Light

in Art, History, Science | May 2nd, 2023

Today we think of the Renais­sance as one of those peri­ods when every­thing changed, and if the best-known arti­facts of the time are any­thing to go by, noth­ing changed quite so much as art. This is reflect­ed in obvi­ous aes­thet­ic dif­fer­ences between the works of the Renais­sance and those cre­at­ed before, as well as in less obvi­ous tech­ni­cal ones. Egg yolk-based tem­pera paints, for exam­ple, had been in use since the time of the ancient Egyp­tians, but in the fif­teenth cen­tu­ry they were replaced by oil paints. When chem­i­cal analy­sis of the work of cer­tain Renais­sance mas­ters revealed traces of egg, they were assumed to be the result of chance con­t­a­m­i­na­tion.

Now, thanks to a recent study led by chem­i­cal engi­neer Ophélie Ran­quet of the Karl­sruhe Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, we have rea­son to believe that painters like Bot­ti­cel­li and Leonar­do kept eggs in the mix delib­er­ate­ly. Oil replaced tem­pera because “it cre­ates more vivid col­ors and smoother col­or tran­si­tions,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Tere­sa Nowakows­ki.

“It also dries slow­ly, so it can be used for longer after the ini­tial prepa­ra­tion.” But “the col­ors dark­en more eas­i­ly over time, and the paint is more sus­cep­ti­ble to dam­age from light expo­sure. It also has a ten­den­cy to wrin­kle as it dries,” vis­i­ble in Leonar­do’s Madon­na of the Car­na­tion below.


Putting in a bit of egg yolk may have been a way of using oil’s advan­tages while min­i­miz­ing its dis­ad­van­tages. Ran­quet and her col­lab­o­ra­tors test­ed this idea by doing it them­selves, re-cre­at­ing two pig­ments used dur­ing the Renais­sance, both with egg and with­out. “In the may­olike blend” pro­duced by the for­mer method, writes Sci­ence­News’ Jude Cole­man, “the yolk cre­at­ed stur­dy links between pig­ment par­ti­cles, result­ing in stiffer paint. Such con­sis­ten­cy would have been ide­al for tech­niques like impas­to, a raised, thick style that adds tex­ture to art. Egg addi­tions also could have reduced wrin­kling by cre­at­ing a firmer paint con­sis­ten­cy,” though the paint itself would take longer to dry.

In prac­tice, Renais­sance painters seem to have exper­i­ment­ed with dif­fer­ent pro­por­tions of oil and egg, and so dis­cov­ered that each had its own strengths for ren­der­ing dif­fer­ent ele­ments of an image. Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Tay­lor Michael writes that in The Lamen­ta­tion Over the Dead Christ, seen up top, “Bot­ti­cel­li paint­ed Christ, Mary Mag­da­lene, and the Vir­gin, among oth­ers, with tem­pera, and the back­ground stone and fore­ground­ing grass with oil.” Thanks to the oxi­diza­tion-slow­ing effects of phos­pho­lipids and antiox­i­dants in the yolk — as sci­en­tif­ic research has since proven — they’ve all come through the past five cen­turies look­ing hard­ly worse for wear.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Car­avag­gio Paint­ed: A Re-Cre­ation of the Great Master’s Process

Dis­cov­er Harvard’s Col­lec­tion of 2,500 Pig­ments: Pre­serv­ing the World’s Rare, Won­der­ful Col­ors

The Largest & Most Detailed Pho­to­graph of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch Is Now Online: Zoom In & See Every Brush Stroke

A 900-Page Pre-Pan­tone Guide to Col­or from 1692: A Com­plete High-Res­o­lu­tion Dig­i­tal Scan

A 3,000-Year-Old Painter’s Palette from Ancient Egypt, with Traces of the Orig­i­nal Col­ors Still In It

The Old­est Known Globe to Depict the New World Was Engraved on an Ostrich Egg, Maybe by Leonar­do da Vin­ci (1504)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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Parrots Taught to FaceTime Each Other Become Less Lonely, a New Study Shows

in Biology, Life, Science | May 1st, 2023

It’s telling that the avian par­tic­i­pants in a recent study where­in pet par­rots, assist­ed by their own­ers, learned to make video calls to oth­ers of their kind were recruit­ed from the online edu­ca­tion­al forum Par­rot Kinder­garten.

In the above footage, the humans’ hope­ful, high-pitched cajol­ing, as they encour­age their birds to inter­act with a new “friend”, car­ries a strong whiff of those Mom­my and Me class­es where a dozen or so adults sit cross­legged in a cir­cle, shak­ing tam­bourines and bright­ly war­bling “Twin­kle, Twin­kle, Lit­tle Star,” while an equal num­ber of tod­dlers wan­der around, marked­ly less invest­ed in the pro­ceed­ings.

Though, real­ly, who am I to judge? I don’t have a par­rot, and it’s been over two decades since my youngest child required parental inter­fer­ence to foment social inter­ac­tion…

Eigh­teen pet par­rots enrolled in the study, hang­ing out with one anoth­er dur­ing self-ini­ti­at­ed video chats, to see how and if such inter­ac­tions might improve their qual­i­ty of life.

No one was forced to make a call if they weren’t feel­ing it, or to remain on the line after their inter­est flagged.

I’m hunch­ing the aver­age parrot’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy clocks in far south of the aver­age Amer­i­can toddler’s, which may explain why they com­plet­ed a mere 147 calls over the course of two months (and 1000 hours of com­bined footage.)

That said, I can eas­i­ly imag­ine a sce­nario in which the aver­age human tod­dler, hav­ing suc­cess­ful­ly got­ten their beak, excuse me, hands on a touch­screen tablet, los­es all inter­est in Face­Tim­ing with a peer, pre­fer­ring the soli­tary plea­sures of Bal­loon Pop or Peek-a-Zoo.

Typ­i­cal­ly, human tod­dlers have more oppor­tu­ni­ties for “inter­species eth­i­cal enrich­ment” than crea­tures whose lives are pri­mar­i­ly spent in a cage. As the authors of the study note, “over 20 mil­lion par­rots are kept as pets in the US, often lack­ing appro­pri­ate stim­uli to meet their high social, cog­ni­tive, and emo­tion­al needs.”

The par­rot par­tic­i­pants may not have thrown them­selves into the pro­ceed­ings with the vig­or of Bye Bye Birdie’s teenaged tele­phone cho­rus, but all placed calls, the major­i­ty exhib­it­ed “high moti­va­tion and inten­tion­al­i­ty”, and their humans indi­cat­ed that they would glad­ly con­tin­ue to facil­i­tate this social exper­i­ment.

The human con­tri­bu­tion is not incon­sid­er­able here. It took vast amounts of time and patience to ori­ent the birds to the sys­tem, and care­ful mon­i­tor­ing to make sure calls didn’t run off the rails. Noth­ing like hav­ing your iPad screen smashed by a par­rot who’s got beef in an online forum…

Sev­er­al legit friend­ships formed over the course of the exper­i­ment — a Goffin’s cock­a­too and an African grey who made each other’s vir­tu­al acquain­tance dur­ing the pilot study were still chat­ting, a year after they met.

Data col­lect­ed in the field shows that the num­ber and dura­tion of out­go­ing calls were close­ly tied to the num­ber and dura­tion of incom­ing calls. The most pop­u­lar birdies did not take their con­nec­tions for grant­ed.

It’s a find­ing humans would do well to absorb if we are to com­bat feel­ings of iso­la­tion from with­in our own species.

Read Birds of a Feath­er Video-Flock Togeth­er: Design and Eval­u­a­tion of an Agency-Based Par­rot-to-Par­rot Video-Call­ing Sys­tem for Inter­species Eth­i­cal Enrich­ment here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

What Kind of Bird Is That?: A Free App From Cor­nell Will Give You the Answer

Explore an Inter­ac­tive Ver­sion of The Wall of Birds, a 2,500 Square-Foot Mur­al That Doc­u­ments the Evo­lu­tion of Birds Over 375 Mil­lion Years

Cor­nell Launch­es Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929

Par­rot Sings AC/DCs “Whole Lot­ta Rosie”

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

 

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Carl Sagan Explains How the Ancient Greeks, Using Reason & Math, Discovered That the Earth Isn’t Flat Over 2,000 Years Ago

in History, Science | March 31st, 2023

The denial of sci­ence suf­fus­es Amer­i­can soci­ety, and no mat­ter what the data says, some con­ser­v­a­tive forces refuse efforts to cur­tail, or even study, cli­mate change. Astro­physi­cist Katie Mack calls this retrench­ment a form of “data nihilism,” writ­ing in an exas­per­at­ed tweet, “What is sci­ence? How can a thing be known? Is any­thing even real???” Indeed, what can we expect next from what Isaac Asi­mov called the Unit­ed States’ anti-intel­lec­tu­al “cult of igno­rance”? A flat earth lob­by?

Welp… at least a cou­ple celebri­ty fig­ures have come out as flat-earth­ers, per­haps the van­guard of an anti-round earth move­ment. Notably, [Dal­las Mav­er­icks] guard Kyrie Irv­ing made the claim on a pod­cast, insist­ing, Chris Matyszczyk writes, that “we were being lied to about such basic things by the glob­al elites.” Is this a joke? I hope so. Neil DeGrasse Tyson—who host­ed the recent Cos­mos remake to try and dis­pel such sci­en­tif­ic ignorance—replied all the same, not­ing that Irv­ing should “stay away from jobs that require… under­stand­ing of the nat­ur­al world.” The weird affair has played out like a sideshow next to the main­stage polit­i­cal cir­cus, an unset­tling reminder of Carl Sagan’s pre­dic­tion in his last book, The Demon Haunt­ed World, that Amer­i­cans would soon find their “crit­i­cal fac­ul­ties in decline, unable to dis­tin­guish between what feels good and what’s true.”

Sagan devot­ed much of his life to coun­ter­ing anti-sci­ence trends with warmth and enthu­si­asm, park­ing him­self “repeat­ed­ly, arguably com­pul­sive­ly, in front of TV cam­eras,” writes Joel Achen­bach at Smith­son­ian. We most remem­ber him for his orig­i­nal 1980 Cos­mos minis­eries, his most pub­lic role as a “gate­keep­er of sci­en­tif­ic cred­i­bil­i­ty,” as Achen­bach calls him. I think Sagan may have chafed at the descrip­tion. He want­ed to open the gates and let the pub­lic into sci­en­tif­ic inquiry. He char­i­ta­bly lis­tened to unsci­en­tif­ic the­o­ries, and patient­ly took the time to explain their flaws.

In the very first episode of Cos­mos, Sagan addressed the flat-earth­ers, indi­rect­ly, by explain­ing how Eratos­thenes (276–194 BC), a Libyan-Greek schol­ar and chief librar­i­an at the Library of Alexan­dria, dis­cov­ered over 2000 years ago that the earth is a sphere. Giv­en the geo­g­ra­ph­er, math­e­mati­cian, poet, his­to­ri­an, and astronomer’s incred­i­ble list of accomplishments—a sys­tem of lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude, a map of the world, a sys­tem for find­ing prime numbers—this may not even rank as his high­est achieve­ment.

In the Cos­mos clip above, Sagan explains Eratos­thenes’ sci­en­tif­ic method: he made obser­va­tions of how shad­ows change length giv­en the posi­tion of the sun in the sky. Esti­mat­ing the dis­tance between the cities of Syene and Alexan­dria, he was then able to math­e­mat­i­cal­ly cal­cu­late the cir­cum­fer­ence of the earth, as Cyn­thia Stokes Brown explains at Khan Acad­e­my. Although “sev­er­al sources of error crept into Eratos­thenes’ cal­cu­la­tions and our inter­pre­ta­tion of them,” he nonethe­less suc­ceed­ed almost per­fect­ly. His esti­ma­tion: 250,000 sta­dia, or 25,000 miles. The actu­al cir­cum­fer­ence: 24,860 miles (40.008 kilo­me­ters).

No, of course the Earth isn’t flat. But Sagan’s les­son on how one sci­en­tist from antiq­ui­ty came to know that isn’t an exer­cise in debunk­ing. It’s a jour­ney into the move­ment of the solar sys­tem, into ancient sci­en­tif­ic his­to­ry, and most impor­tant­ly, per­haps, into the sci­en­tif­ic method, which does not rely on hearsay from “glob­al elites” or shad­owy fig­ures, but on the tools of obser­va­tion, infer­ence, rea­son­ing, and math. Pro­fes­sion­al sci­en­tists are not with­out their bias­es and con­flicts of inter­est, but the most fun­da­men­tal intel­lec­tu­al tools they use are avail­able to every­one on Earth.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017. This ver­sion has been light­ly edit­ed and updat­ed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Pre­dicts the Decline of Amer­i­ca: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “With­out Notic­ing, Back into Super­sti­tion & Dark­ness” (1995)

Hear Carl Sagan Art­ful­ly Refute a Cre­ation­ist on a Talk Radio Show: “The Dar­win­ian Con­cept of Evo­lu­tion is Pro­found­ly Ver­i­fied”

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: 8 Tools for Skep­ti­cal Think­ing

 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Beethoven’s Genome Has Been Sequenced for the First Time, Revealing Clues About the Great Composer’s Health & Family History

in History, Music, Science | March 24th, 2023

Lud­wig van Beethoven died in 1827, a bit ear­ly to be sub­ject­ed to the kinds of DNA analy­sis that have become so preva­lent today. Luck­i­ly, the Ger­man-speak­ing world of the ear­ly nine­teenth cen­tu­ry still adhered to the cus­tom of sav­ing locks of hair from the deceased — par­tic­u­lar­ly lucky for an archae­ol­o­gy stu­dent named Tris­tan Begg and his col­lab­o­ra­tors in the study “Genom­ic analy­ses of hair from Lud­wig van Beethoven,” pub­lished just this month in Cur­rent Biol­o­gy. In the video from Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty just above, Begg intro­duces the research project and describes what new infor­ma­tion it reveals about the com­pos­er whose life and work have been so inten­sive­ly stud­ied for so long.

“Work­ing with an inter­na­tion­al team of sci­en­tists, I iden­ti­fied five genet­i­cal­ly match­ing, authen­tic locks of hair and used them to sequence Beethoven’s genome,” Begg says. “We dis­cov­ered sig­nif­i­cant genet­ic risk fac­tors for liv­er dis­ease and evi­dence that Beethoven con­tract­ed the Hepati­tis B virus in, at the lat­est, the months before his final ill­ness.”

And “while we could­n’t pin­point the cause of Beethoven’s deaf­ness or gas­troin­testi­nal prob­lems, we did find mod­est genet­ic risk for Sys­temic Lupus Ery­the­mato­sus,” an autoim­mune dis­ease. His­to­ry remem­bers Beethoven as a not par­tic­u­lar­ly healthy man; now we have a clear­er idea of which con­di­tions he could have suf­fered.

But this study’s most rev­e­la­to­ry dis­cov­er­ies con­cern not what has to do with Beethoven, but what does­n’t. The famous lock of hair “once believed to have been cut from the dead com­poser’s head by the fif­teen-year-old musi­cian Fer­di­nand Hiller” turns out to have come from a woman. Nor was Beethoven him­self “descend­ed from the main Flem­ish Beethoven lin­eage,” which is shown by genet­ic evi­dence that “an extra­mar­i­tal rela­tion­ship result­ed in the birth of a child in Beethoven’s direct pater­nal line at some point between 1572 and 1770.” This news came as a shock to “the five peo­ple in Bel­gium whose last name is van Beethoven and who pro­vid­ed DNA for the study,” writes the New York Times’ Gina Kola­ta. But then, Beethoven’s music still belongs to them — just as it belongs to us all.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Stream the Com­plete Works of Bach & Beethoven: 250 Free Hours of Music

Beethoven’s Unfin­ished Tenth Sym­pho­ny Gets Com­plet­ed by Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Hear How It Sounds

The Sto­ry of How Beethoven Helped Make It So That CDs Could Play 74 Min­utes of Music

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Cre­ativ­i­ty Machine Learns to Play Beethoven in the Style of The Bea­t­les’ “Pen­ny Lane”

Hear a “DNA-Based Pre­dic­tion of Nietzsche’s Voice:” First Attempt at Sim­u­lat­ing Voice of a Dead Per­son

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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Behold an Astonishing Near-Nightly Spectacle in the Lightning Capital of the World

in Environment, Nature, Science, Travel | March 21st, 2023

Extreme weath­er con­di­tions have become a top­ic of grave con­cern. Are floods, earth­quakes, tor­na­does and cat­a­stroph­ic storms the new nor­mal?

Just for a moment, let’s trav­el to a place where extreme weath­er has always been the norm: Lake Mara­cai­bo in north­west­ern Venezuela.

Accord­ing to NASA’s Trop­i­cal Rain­fall Mea­sur­ing Mis­sion’s light­ning image sen­sor, it is the light­ning cap­i­tal of the world.

Chalk it up to the unique geog­ra­phy and cli­mate con­di­tions near the con­flu­ence of the lake and the Cata­tum­bo Riv­er. At night, the moist warm air above the water col­lides with cool breezes rolling down from the Andes, cre­at­ing an aver­age of 297 thun­der­storms a year.

Watch­ing pho­tog­ra­ph­er Jonas Pio­ntek’s short film doc­u­ment­ing the phe­nom­e­non, above, it’s not sur­pris­ing that chief among his tips for shoot­ing light­ning at night is a point­ed warn­ing to always keep a safe dis­tance from the storm. While view­able from as far as 400 kilo­me­ters away, the area near­est the light­ning activ­i­ty can aver­age 28 strikes per minute.

More than 400 years before Pio­ntek shared his impres­sions with the world, Span­ish poet Lope de Vega tapped Cata­tum­bo light­ning in his epic 1597 poem La Drag­ontea, cred­it­ing it, erro­neous­ly, with hav­ing  thwart­ed Sir Fran­cis Drake’s plans to con­quer the city of Mara­cai­bo under cov­er of night. His poet­ic license was per­sua­sive enough that it’s still an accept­ed part of the myth.

The “eter­nal storm” did how­ev­er give Venezue­lan naval forces a gen­uine nat­ur­al assist, by illu­mi­nat­ing a squadron of Span­ish ships on Lake Mara­cai­bo, which they defeat­ed on July 24, 1823, clear­ing the way to inde­pen­dence.

Once upon a time, large num­bers of local fish­er­men took advan­tage of their prime posi­tion to fish by night, although with recent defor­esta­tion, polit­i­cal con­flict, and eco­nom­ic decline dec­i­mat­ing the vil­lages where they live in tra­di­tion­al stilt­ed hous­es, their liveli­hood is in decline.

Mean­while the Eter­nal Storm has itself been affect­ed by forces of extreme weath­er. In 2010, a drought occa­sioned by a par­tic­u­lar­ly strong El Niño, caused light­ning activ­i­ty to cease for 6 weeks, its longest dis­ap­pear­ance in 104 years.

Envi­ron­men­tal­ist Erik Quiroga, who is cam­paign­ing for the Cata­tum­bo light­ning to be des­ig­nat­ed as the world’s first UNESCO World Her­itage Weath­er Phe­nom­e­non warns, “This is a unique gift and we are at risk of los­ing it.”

See more of Jonas Piontek’s Cata­tum­bo light­ning pho­tographs here.

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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