Redeeming the Octopus - the most remarkable creature of our nightmares

book, review, octopus, consciousness, science, non-human

It’s not surprising that it has taken us a long time to reappraise the octopus, imbued with such mythical awe, as what it really is: an intelligent animal with entwining arms so filled with neurons that each of them possesses a separate personality. In the current nature writing boom– fuelled in part by new scientific discoveries – the revision of the octopus is just one in a series of natural histories, of creatures from corvids to cetaceans, which indicate that our awareness of other species is expanding exponentially. As an interviewee in Sy Montgomery’s remarkable book declares, “It’s really only in the last 20 years we could even be having this conversation. We’re only starting to understand animals.”

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/08/redeeming-octopus-most-remarkable-creature-our-nightmares

Here’s what happens when you try to replicate climate contrarian papers

climate, science, replication, contrarian, climate change, climate denial

Those who reject the 97% expert consensus on human-caused global warming often invoke Galileo as an example of when the scientific minority overturned the majority view. In reality, climate contrarians have almost nothing in common with Galileo, whose conclusions were based on empirical scientific evidence, supported by many scientific contemporaries, and persecuted by the religious-political establishment. Nevertheless, there’s a slim chance that the 2–3% minority is correct and the 97% climate consensus is wrong. To evaluate that possibility, a new paper published in the journal of Theoretical and Applied Climatology examines a selection of contrarian climate science research and attempts to replicate their results. The idea is that accurate scientific research should be replicable, and through replication we can also identify any methodological flaws in that research. The study also seeks to answer the question, why do these contrarian papers come to a different conclusion than 97% of the climate science literature?

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus–97-per-cent/2015/aug/25/heres-what-happens-when-you-try-to-replicate-climate-contrarian-papers

Transsiberian Slitscan Test - section9.co.uk Between March and April, 2015, my partner and I travelled over 10,000km. We covered…

Transsiberian Slitscan Test - section9.co.uk

Between March and April, 2015, my partner and I travelled over 10,000km. We covered one quarter of the way around the planet, the vast majority by train. Using a small, second hand digital camera and a sticky camera mount, I recorded the majority of the train journeys.

What you see is over 200GB of footage, shrunk into a single image using a technique known as slitscan. Every frame, I take the middle column of pixels and concatenate it to the image. Each vertical column of pixels represents 1/30th of a second. This adds up into a huge strip, which is then cut and pasted into a more pleasing rectangle.

‘Some Bookes are to be Tasted, Others to be Swallowed, and Some Few to be Chewed and Digested: That is, some Bookes are to be…

“‘Some Bookes are to be Tasted, Others to be Swallowed, and Some Few to be Chewed and Digested: That is, some Bookes are to be read onely in Parts; Others to be read but not Curiously; And some Few to be read wholly, and with Diligence and Attention. Some Bookes may also be read by Deputy, and Extracts made of them by others: But that would be, onely in the lesse important Arguments, and the Meaner Sort of Bookes: else distilled Bookes, are like Common distilled Waters, Flashy Things.’”

–Francis Bacon, ‘Of Studies’ (1625)

Being alive means being susceptible to viruses and so on. And far more generally, viruses, patterns, appearance, flowers,…

“Being alive means being susceptible to viruses and so on. And far more generally, viruses, patterns, appearance, flowers, art-these are all far from useless, they are intrinsic parts of being a thing at all. Causality itself is something to do with magical seduction. How that amounts to “tyranny” just beats me. To me, reality is literally an anarchy. Artists just aren’t tyrants. They can’t be.”

–Timothy Morton, taken from Bjork’s letters with Timothy Morton (vianataliekane)

Tsiolkovsky’s Space Conquest Diagram. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was a Russian rocket pioneer. Although he never built a rocket,…

chaosophia218:

Tsiolkovsky’s Space Conquest Diagram.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was a Russian rocket pioneer. Although he never built a rocket, Tsiolkovsky’s work was highly influential in the development of Soviet rocket and space technology. He became deaf after contracting scarlet fever at around the age of 10 and from then on he schooled himself, mainly from books in his father’s library. He determined that the Earth’s escape velocity was 8 kilometres per second and showed that this could be achieved using liquid-fuel rockets. He predicted many aspects of space travel, including double-walled hulls for meteor protection and the problems of weightlessness.

While many have said that Google long ago swept their previous “Don’t Be Evil” motto under their rugs, that might be an…

“While many have said that Google long ago swept their previous “Don’t Be Evil” motto under their rugs, that might be an oversimplification. When considering how anyone moves into James-Bond-esque super villain territory, I think it’s prudent to remember one of the central tenets of good storytelling: the villain never thinks they’re the villain. Cinderella’s stepmother and sisters, Elpheba, Jafar, Javert, Satan, Hannibal Lecter (sorry friends), Bull Connor, the Southern Slave-holding States of the late 1850’s — none of these people whom we all look at with a clear and rightly assessed scorn ever thought of themselves as being in the wrong. Everyone, every person who undertakes an action for any reason, is most intimately tied to the reasoning that brought them to those actions, and so perceiving that their actions might be “wrong” or “evil” takes us a great deal of special effort.”

–Google’s Dreams - Rebel News - Damien Patrick WIlliams (vianataliekane)

Fossil fuels subsidised by $10m a minute, says IMF

IMF, energy, economics, policy, subsidies, climate change, fossil fuel dependence

Fossil fuel companies are benefitting from global subsidies of $5.3tn (£3.4tn) a year, equivalent to $10m a minute every day, according to a startling new estimate by the International Monetary Fund. The IMF calls the revelation “shocking” and says the figure is an “extremely robust” estimate of the true cost of fossil fuels. The $5.3tn subsidy estimated for 2015 is greater than the total health spending of all the world’s governments.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/18/fossil-fuel-companies-getting–10m-a-minute-in-subsidies-says-imf?CMP=share_btn_tw

Soylent (it’s made of Lead and Cadmium)

food, soylent, food science, nutrition, pollution, bioaccumulation

Test results commissioned by As You Sow, conducted by an independent laboratory, show that one serving of Soylent 1.5 can expose a consumer to a concentration of lead that is 12 to 25 times above California’s Safe Harbor level for reproductive health, and a concentration of cadmium that is at least 4 times greater than the Safe Harbor level for cadmium. Two separate samples of Soylent 1.5 were tested. According to the Soylent website, Soylent 1.5 is “designed for use as a staple meal by all adults.” The startup recently raised $20 million in funding led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/as-you-sow-files-notice-of-legal-action-against-soylent-super-food–300128427.html

I’d assumed all these miles of cable—or, at least, the publicly managed ones—were long-ago mapped, and remapped regularly. It’s…

“I’d assumed all these miles of cable—or, at least, the publicly managed ones—were long-ago mapped, and remapped regularly. It’s one of the agreed-upon best practices of the 1999 Common Ground Study’s section on utility locating. However, the second-most repeated sentiment I heard from locators was “never trust a map.” It’s less a problem of inaccuracy so much as one of incompleteness and outdated records. It’s up to the locator to fill in the gaps with spray paint. Those markings rarely, if ever, end up back in maps (although, as I was also told many times, the only thing a locator should trust less than a map is someone else’s locate markings).”

–Technology Underground (viaiamdanw)

The octopus genome and the evolution of cephalopod neural and morphological novelties

Nature, cephalopod, octopus, squid, genetics

To investigate the molecular bases of cephalopod brain and body innovations, we sequenced the genome and multiple transcriptomes of the California two-spot octopus, Octopus bimaculoides. We found no evidence for hypothesized whole-genome duplications in the octopus lineage. The core developmental and neuronal gene repertoire of the octopus is broadly similar to that found across invertebrate bilaterians, except for massive expansions in two gene families previously thought to be uniquely enlarged in vertebrates: the protocadherins, which regulate neuronal development, and the C2H2 superfamily of zinc-finger transcription factors.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v524/n7564/full/nature14668.html

You’re in conversation, every day, with Jacquard and Korsakov, Ada Lovelace, Babbage, Herman Hollerith, Erna Hoover, Alan…

“You’re in conversation, every day, with Jacquard and Korsakov, Ada Lovelace, Babbage, Herman Hollerith, Erna Hoover, Alan Turing, John Napier, Heron of Alexandria, al-Jazari, Pingala, Liang Lingzan and all the way back to whoever cut tally marks into the Ishango Bone twenty thousand years ago. These are the spirits you speak to as you enact your shamanistic workings. These are your cunning folk.”

–Warren Ellis, Cunning Plans

Electronic Voice Phenomena

wchambliss:

The day I moved to Whidbey Island, WA in 1999, on the road back from Sea Tac, two friends and I were in a car accident that might have killed us under slightly different circumstances. That night, one of them left the radio on when he went to sleep. Whidbey is close enough to the Canadian border that one can pick up CBC 2. Between 12:00am and 4:00am, Monday through Friday, they used to air a program called Brave New Waves dedicated to (seriously) alternative music — underground rock, noise, musique concrète, etc. At midnight, without introduction, they launched into a show about Electronic Voice Phenomena, which, as you may already know, is when voices (of the dead, presumably) are detected in the background hiss of recorded audio. A ten-second clip of what sounded like pure static was played; then another, filtered version of the same clip; then another. Eventually, enough of the white noise was stripped out that a human voice became perceptible. It was shocking. You could clearly make out a little girl saying, “Mama, sono freddo.” Then a woman repeated, in a completely flat voice, “Mama, sono freddo.” Finally, in that same neutral tone, she said, “Mama, I’m cold.” And then the process started over again with more static. This went on for hours. I found it utterly terrifying. I actually felt like I was listening to dead people. Mostly, they complained: “It’s dark”, or “I miss you”, or “Where’s my hat?” By the end, I was lying spread-eagle on the carpet in front of the radio, almost in tears, but unable to turn it off. That’s when Patti Schmidt, the host of Brave New Waves, broke in to say, “Thank you for staying up with me all night, even if you couldn’t help it.”