Category: Science

Hitchbot comes to America!

Hitchbot’s trip across Canada

Hitchbot, the hitchhiking robot who safely made its way across Canada with the generosity of strangers, has been in the United States for a few days now. I don’t know exactly what it is about this story that makes me so giddy and gleeful, but I love Hitchbot and the social experiment behind it. For the first time in my life, I actually want to see someone’s vacation photos.

Here’s Hitchbot’s official page. Here are detailed travel logs of its Canadian trip and its vacation in the Netherlands, both of which have plenty of photos. The following photo is one of my favorites:

I’m disappointed Americans are reacting so pessimistically to Hitchbot’s travels in the United States. The general consensus is the police are going to mistake Hitchbot for a bomb and shoot it or some redneck’s going to scrap it or worse. I don’t know. I have a lot more faith in Americans, but then again I’m not conditioned to live my life in fear because A) I leave the house every once and a while and have a pretty good concept of this thing called reality, and B) I haven’t been brutally murdered yet. I’m willing to bet money Hitchbot isn’t going to end up in a ditch.

*Update: goddamn it, Philadelphia.*

Seriously, though, if Obama doesn’t take time out of his schedule to meet with Hitchbot, I’m going to be pretty damn disappointed. I really want this to become a national news story everyone here is talking about.

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Chatbots have a conversation

Have I posted this before? I don’t remember, but it sure is amusing. 
I’ve got superintelligence on my mind tonight. I was going to post this NPR article, but the title is pretty silly: Should Science End Humankind? 
Hmm. Let’s think about this one for a bit.
I’m thinking no. No, it should not. Now, should journalists refrain from asking silly questions in their headlines? Yeah. Probably. But what do I know? 
Let’s ask Cleverbot:

That’s conclusive.

Interstellar’s physics

Interstellar, which comes out tomorrow, just might be huge. Gravity, although a damn fine picture, was hyped beyond belief yet is rarely talked about anymore less than a year later. Something about Interstellar—if you’ll allow my gut instinct a moment to speculate—tells me it might have more of the staying power that 2001: A Spacey Odyssey did. I think it’s less of a gut instinct and more of an educated wager: consider Christopher Nolan’s filmography up to this point. I think it’s pretty obvious he’s been building towards a really huge movie all along now. Is it so hard to believe Interstellar might be that movie?

Then again, it might just bomb, so there’s no point in reviewing the movie before the movie’s even out. So far the only “review” I’ve heard was from the lead actor himself, telling the media he cried all three times he watched it. Reviews be damned, Interstellar is one of those very rare movies for me: the kind I’ve gotta see on day one, something I haven’t done much of since I was a kid. (The next movie I have to see on day one is Star Wars Episode 7, and that’s more than a year away.) Naturally, I’m rooting for it.

What I think is interesting is how the film is being promoted. The marketing material has focused on the drama while revealing more and more of the plot’s technical side as we get closer to the release date. We don’t have to see the movie to talk about that.

When the teaser trailer for Interstellar premiered nearly a year ago, I immediately wondered how director Christopher Nolan would create a believable story in which his human characters travel to another star system. When you think about all the space travel films so far, they tend to fall in one of two categories (and forgive me for simplifying because I am not saying one category is better than the other). It’s typically “serious” filmmaking if it’s set within our own solar system (2001: A Space Odyssey, The Right Stuff, Blade Runner, etc.) or it’s “leave your brain at the door” space fantasy if it’s set anywhere else in the universe, specifically if it includes FTL travel (Star Wars, Guardians of the Galaxy, Galaxy Quest, etc.). The closest we’ve gotten to a movie that closes the gap between the two categories is the uneven and overproduced adaptation of Carl Sagan’s Contact, which some argue was a classic, but I beg to differ if only on the basis it included a CGI Bill Clinton.

A second trailer of Interstellar revealed “[Earth] ran out of food” and had us believe Matthew McConaughey and friends were setting off to find a suitable planet to colonize (“We’re not meant to save the world,” Michael Caine says during the preview, “We’re meant to leave it.”). Yet the film doesn’t seem to be set very far into the future, which is possibly a warning sign that this is typical Hollywood science. Nothing wrong with Hollywood science, it’s just that I would be very surprised to see Nolan’s brand of human drama work within the confines of such a film, even if it did play nice with Batman.

Now, do I doubt scientists and engineers (and despite what one trailer says, the world will always need engineers, particularly in this scenario) would kick into high gear if our home planet was in serious trouble? Not at all. But traveling to another star, not to mention promising your kids you’ll be back before they’re dead of old age, is a bit of a stretch. All I’m saying is you don’t see that kind of space travel (in other words: the all-but impossible kind) promoted in films with scenes as potentially heart-wrenching as the one in which McConaughey tells his daughter, “We have to fix this before I leave.”

Then we got the third trailer. In it, McConaughey’s character said something that simultaneously excited and worried me: “Are you ready to say goodbye to our solar system? To our galaxy?” And at that moment we knew beyond a doubt: this isn’t just a space film, it’s a drama with FTL travel in it. They’re not only talking about going to another star system. They’re talking about going to another galaxy. (I guess “Interstellar” makes a more poetic title than “Intergalactic,” and the latter term certainly encompasses the former in this context, so we’ll let that slide.) Now, I have my doubts humanity will accomplish such a thing in the next million years, much less in the near future. Then again, I sometimes have my doubts we won’t.

Nonetheless, the idea intrigued me. While I try to stay clear of the promotional material of a film I’ve already decided is must-see, Interstellar was one that lured me in too much to stay entirely away. There were just too many questions. I couldn’t help but peeking at the Wikipedia article and I’m pretty pleased there’s already an entire section devoted to the film’s scientific accuracy. I’ll post an excerpt, but check out the entire “scientific accuracy” section here. I don’t believe it contains even minor spoilers unless you’re extremely serious about going into a movie “fresh.”

In creating the wormhole and rotating black hole, Dr. Thorne collaborated with visual effect supervisor Paul Franklin and a team of 30 computer effects artists at Double Negative. Thorne would provide pages of deeply sourced theoretical equations to the artists, who then wrote new CGI rendering software based on these equations to create accurate computer simulations of the gravitational lensing caused by these phenomena. Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, and ultimately resulted in 800 terabytes of data. The resulting visual effect provided Dr. Thorne with new insight into the effects of gravitational lensing and accretion disks surrounding black holes, and will lead to the creation of two scientific papers; one for the astrophysics community and one for the computer graphics community.[54]

“Dr. Thorne,” by the way, is the theoretical physicist Kip Thorne who worked on Contact, which also starred Matthew McConaughey and dealt with wormholes. This time, Thorne also serves as executive producer on the picture.

And I’m cool with that: that the film is about exploiting natural wormholes. That still leaves a lot of questions (For one: how does one find a natural wormhole, then get there and back within a lifetime?), but that’s already a lot more plausible than, say, “World was messed up so a bunch of scientists got together and invented an FTL drive just in time to save the planet.” In the context of a (presumably) near-future movie, I think what they’ve got going on is very exciting, not to mention a step in the right direction for big Hollywood films. I can’t wait to see it. Man, I really cannot wait.

For more on the subject of Thorne’s work on Interstellar, check out this article from Wired. I haven’t read it all yet for fear it’s going to spoil too much of the movie, but I plan to check it out as soon as I’m back from the theater.

Cosmic Megastructures @ Popular Mechanics

I love cosmic megastructures or, as some call them: big dumb objects. Larry Niven’s Ringworld and The Ringworld Engineers are two of my favorite examples of the genre (I regretfully never got through the third book in the series, as the quality took an inexplicable nosedive). The first time I ever played Halo, I did an awful lot of sight-seeing in between battles—the scale of that original game was like nothing we had ever seen.

my copy of Ringworld

Right now, Popular Mechanics is running a series on these kinds of big science fiction ideas. These articles serve more as primers than in-depth analyses, but it’s still a decent batch of reading material. Here’s a list of the ones I’ve checked out so far:

There might be others, so keep an eye out for them. In the meantime, here’s a picture of Niven’s Puppeteers, who initially seem to be a cowardly race of aliens, but they turn out to be one of science fiction’s most interesting creations:

I see Barlowe’s Guide at second hand stores all the time, but it’s worth the price for a new copy.

* * *
On an unrelated note, I don’t read fantasy nearly as much as I read science fiction, but David Gemmell’s Legend is kicking all kinds of ass for me. It’s a light read that’s half about the circumstances leading up to the inevitable castle siege, and half about the siege itself. Fun, fast-paced, and gloriously violent. I also have a soft spot for aging warriors, especially if they have a reputation to live up to, and the main character Druss is certainly that. Considering his age and physical flaws in this novel, I’m not sure how Gemmell went on to write more books with the character, not if they’re as action-packed as this.

Which reminds me: we need more fun books. I’ve been reading so much dour shit lately I can’t see straight. I liked Accelerando as much as anyone, but singularity fiction is getting capital-B Boring, much like the devout transhumanists who consistently barge into serious threads on futurism forums and bark about how the A.I. revolution is upon us. No, the technological singularity is not a given. If it does happen, what we’ve speculated so far is going to be as innaccurate as the Jetsons’ view of the future. More importantly, stories set in the future don’t have to be about the singularity, nor do they even need to mention why it did not occur.

For fuck’s sake, I just want to see humans cruising around the galaxy in rocket ships again. Throw in some sword fights and pirates just for the hell of it. Too much to ask for?

You’re gonna need a bigger boat: Shark Week’s biggest show was unapologetic bullshit

I haven’t had cable in so long I didn’t know how bad the networks’ programming had become. Yeah, I’ve heard of such bottom-of-the-barrel scrapings as Ancient Aliens and Finding Bigfoot, but I assumed nobody actually bought into that stuff outside of the Weekly World News readership. All but the hopelessly gullible will know the Ghost Hunters stuff is faker than suntan in a bottle, but according to the video above it appears a megalodon program was carefully constructed to trick even objective viewers.
your typical Weekly World News article

Neal Stephenson insisted that a hundred years from now, the majority of people might think the moon landings were faked. I thought that was farfetched, but now I’m not as optimistic. Cable networks are really turning to shit in the factual accuracy department and they’re among the biggest opponents of net neutrality in the world. If we lose internet freedom (and there’s a huge chance we will lose it), does anyone think the “educational” programming on privately owned television networks will suddenly get better? It’s hard to imagine cable programming getting any worse, but they have always found new ways to lower the bar just a little bit more.

It will get worse and there’s currently no sign it will ever get better. Let’s not pretend it’s completely Discovery Channel’s fault. Obviously someone’s watching this stuff. At least a few of them believe every bit of it, too. If the internet becomes what the major telecoms want it to become, I believe Mr. Stephenson is right: people will be watching a lot more cable TV, not to mention visiting the kinds of websites put out by the same people who control cable TV. That’s gotta have a negative affect on the average humans’ bullshit radar in the long run.

Sharks, man. Seriously.

Don’t worry, folks, Mars is the same temperature as Earth! — Academia

You have no idea how much easier this makes my current science fiction novel, which is partially set on Mars. Perhaps “Academia” can publish their findings on Martian gravity, proving that it’s exactly as it is on Earth. That’ll make my life, and the production of several Hollywood movies, even easier.
relevant xkcd
I know a lot of Kentuckians are probably ashamed of this guy right now, but as an Oklahoman, I’d argue my Senators are even dumber. Certainly seems they’re in the news for saying dumb things more frequently. So don’t judge a state by its senators. This is not a problem with the fine state of Kentucky, this is the problem with ignorant and/or lobbied politicians. To be fair, which is more than this twat deserves, I do believe him when he clarifies on Twitter that he had a brain fart, if only because I don’t want to believe anyone could possibly be so stupid. The problem is his statement still doesn’t make any sense. And if you’re going to become an obstacle to greenhouse gas regulations, making sense is probably the first fucking thing you should do.
This is not simple ignorance. This is pure, ought-to-be-publicly-shamed stupidity. There’s nothing wrong with disagreeing with science as long as A) you actually know and understand the decades of research you’re allegedly disproving and B) you provide actual evidence to back up your extraordinary claim. I don’t know why that’s so hard for people to understand: if what you believe is at odds with our highest form of understanding, the burden of proof falls on you. We’re not shutting you out because of some mass conspiracy. We’re shutting you out because you’re naive and gullible or, as in the senator’s case, a fucking idiot.
Either way, I would like to elect Senator Brandon Smith as the first President of Mars. We’ll just one-way ship him out there with the tens of thousands of people who’ve already applied for the unlikely Mars One project. He already reminded me of this applicant’s quote:
Ma Qing, a 39-year-old bookseller, said, “I think the chance to be part of the project is a cool way for me to change a dull daily life. Besides, the air on Mars must be much cleaner and easier to breathe.”

The only difference is Ma Qing, bless his little pumpkin heart, isn’t a fucking U.S. Senator and probably wasn’t afforded the education this twat chose to disregard.