Linklist: January 25, 2023
Links (links with excerpts below):
A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate
Reenchanted Science: How did Cormac McCarthy become a shill for libertarian utopianism?
How a Rock Band, a Recording Company, and a Nobel Laureate Developed Computed Tomography
☁️ A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate
"Luke Iseman, the cofounder and CEO of Make Sunsets, acknowledges that the effort is part entrepreneurial and part provocation, an act of geoengineering activism.
He hopes that by moving ahead in the controversial space, the startup will help drive the public debate and push forward a scientific field that has faced great difficulty carrying out small-scale field experiments amid criticism."
"Even now, there’s no consensus about how to draw the Periodic Table. Hydrogen, the first and lightest element, has always been awkward: it tends to get plonked on top of the first column (the alkali metals), but it doesn’t really fit there—it’s not a metal, after all. Some prefer to see it float freely above the rest, a hydrogen balloon over the edifice of elements. And representing the rather awkward nuances of the quantum shell structure in a two-dimensional diagram involves compromises, which have prompted the invention of all manner of ingenious alternatives to the traditional block format: spiral and circular tables, loops and stadium shapes, tiered ziggurats, three-dimensional models, dizzyingly imaginative cartographies of elements. None has caught on."
"In 2020, a study by London’s Science Museum Group’s Digital Lab used image processing to analyze photographs of consumer objects manufactured between 1800 and the present. They found that things have become less colorful over time, converging on a spectrum between steel and charcoal, as though consumers want their gadgets to resemble the raw materials of the industries that produce them. If The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit once offered a warning about conformity, he is now an inspiration, although the outfit has gotten an upgrade. Today he is The Man in the Gray Bonobos, or The Man in the Gray Buck Mason Crew Neck, or The Man in the Gray Mack Weldon Sweatpants — all delivered via gray Amazon van. The imagined color of life under communism, gray has revealed itself to be the actual hue of globalized capital. “The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow,” wrote Hardt and Negri. What color does a blended rainbow produce? Greige, evidently."
"Darwin himself carried an imperial sensibility with him, lauding British efforts when he arrived in Sydney, Australia, in January 1836. After walking through the town, he noted that it was “a most magnificent testimony to the power of the British nation,” in the book we now know as The Voyage of the Beagle. “Here, in a less promising country, scores of years have done many more times more than an equal number of centuries have effected in South America,” he wrote. “My first feeling was to congratulate myself that I was born an Englishman.”"
"But dreams die hard. In McCarthy’s pair of new novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, they don’t die at all—neither the dreams of his characters, whose ectoplasmic residue is constantly dripping across the boundary between reality and hallucination, nor McCarthy’s dream of the Santa Fe Institute, which resides almost in hiding at the moral center of the diptych. These are deliberately frustrating novels. They hint at plot development that never quite materializes; they contain hundreds of pages of obscure Socratic dialogue between personages real and imagined; in the final analysis, they resist any straightforward reconstruction of “what really happened.” McCarthy appears to intend these features of the novels to serve something of the function of the Zen koan: to illustrate the limits of certainty, language, and rational knowledge. But McCarthy refuses to allow the void of non-knowing to remain empty for long. Past the limits of scientific hubris, McCarthy suggests, there is a realm where a different sort of science flourishes—poetic, private, and uncertain; transacted by a secret priesthood of genius scientific seekers who are in, but not of, the world whose mysteries they plumb. Readers already predisposed to embrace this scientific romanticism will find their patience rewarded. But for those of us who doubt the transcendent potential of even the most mystical-minded scientific endeavor, these books ultimately amount to something new for McCarthy: a slog."
"Somehow we’ve embarked on the biggest project in history even though it has no articulable purpose, offers no benefits, and will cost taxpayers more than a good-sized war. Even the builders of the Great Pyramid at Giza could at least explain what it was for. And yet this project has sailed through an otherwise gridlocked system with the effortlessness of a Pentagon budget. Presidents of both parties now make landing on Mars an official goal of US space policy. Even billionaires who made their fortune automating labor on Earth agree that Mars must be artisanally explored by hand.
The whole thing is getting weird.
When you hold on to a belief so strongly that neither facts nor reason can change it, what you are doing is no longer science, but religion. So I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program."
"The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk.
It's like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life – all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators."
"Opinions based on disclosed true facts are protected speech — even if they are completely irrational. As a typical case says, “[E]xpression of opinion based on disclosed or assumed nondefamatory facts is not itself sufficient for an action of defamation, no matter how unjustified or unreasonable the opinion may be or how derogatory it is.” Piccone v. Bartels, 785 F.3d 766, 774 (1st Cir. 2015). Hence, “because Ken got a B in ‘Laws of War’ in law school, likely because it was a 24-hour take-home exam but he was so thoroughly sick of law school he went out drinking and just bullshitted his way through it a few hours before the deadline, I believe he’s probably a squirrel importuner” is completely irrational, but also completely protected.
But what about when the basis for the opinion is magic?"
"Eric Schlaepfer was trying to fix a broken piece of test equipment when he came across the cause of the problem—a troubled tantalum capacitor. The component had somehow shorted out, and he wanted to know why. So he polished it down for a look inside. He never found the source of the short, but he and his collaborator, Windell H. Oskay, discovered something even better: a breathtaking hidden world inside electronics. What followed were hours and hours of polishing, cleaning, and photography that resulted in Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components (No Starch Press, 2022), an excerpt of which follows. As the authors write, everything about these components is deliberately designed to meet specific technical needs, but that design leads to “accidental beauty: the emergent aesthetics of things you were never expected to see.” "
"My interest in and commitment to image data integrity spans more than two decades. In 2002, I initiated a policy at The Journal of Cell Biology to screen all images in all manuscripts accepted for publication for evidence of image manipulation/duplication. That work was described in a Scholarly Kitchen interview nearly a decade ago. At the time, all of the screening was done using visual inspection, aided by adjustments of brightness and contrast in Photoshop, which can reveal inconsistencies in background that are clues to manipulation, or consistencies that are clues to duplication.
In my opinion, visual inspection remains the gold standard for screening images for manipulation/duplication within an individual article or for image comparisons across a few articles, especially when a processed image in a composed figure can be compared directly to the source data that were acquired in the lab. But that process does not scale to comparisons across the entirety of the biomedical literature."
"There’s no injustice more frightening – more definitive, more irredeemable – than inequality of life expectancy: a form of discrimination whereby years, sometimes decades, are stolen from the majority and given to a select few, based solely on their wealth and social class.
Indeed, the most important form of ‘social distance’ imposed by the pandemic was not spatial, not a matter of meters. It was the temporal distance between rich and poor, between those who could escape the worst effects of the virus and those whose lives were abbreviated by it. Modernity established a biopolitical chasm – a social distancing of death – that was widened and accentuated by the Covid-19 crisis."
"Computed Tomography (CT) is an indispensable element of medical care used throughout the world, and first developed for clinical use by Hounsfield in 1971. The largest source of monetary support for Hounsfield’s work was from his employer, Electrical Musical Industries, Ltd. (EMI) and, in turn, the most lucrative source of income for EMI through the 1960’s was their recording contract with the English quartet, the Beatles. The purported link between the Beatles’ productive oeuvre with EMI and Hounsfield’s discovery of CT has not been well established. We endeavored to elucidate the technological and creative talents that linked Hounsfield with EMI and the Beatles and which ultimately led to one of the greatest medical innovations of the 20th century."