This blog is now rarely updated, but remains as an archive of bits and pieces I've collected from around the internet. To see what's caught my eye more recently, find me on twitter.
The group lives in the Javari valley, a South Carolina-sized region set aside by the Brazilian government for its indigenous people. About 2,000 uncontacted people are believed to live there, making it the last great stronghold of groups who've utterly eschewed industrial civilization.
"There are about seven groups who have been contacted, and what the Brazilian government says is that they've found references to about 14 uncontacted indigenous groups," said Watson. "Some of those groups may be the same people. It's hard to say exactly how many there are."
The most recent contact was made in 1996 with a group of Korubo tribespeople. Though government policy is to avoid contact altogether, they were moving toward an area occupied by loggers, making it necessary to warn them away.
Check this video from 1996:
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On a very different note, I thought I'd point you to a lovely Tumblr:
Let's kick things of with this: Data in Football:
Giles Revell tried to visualise the Champions League final for the FT Weekend Magazine. Here are some of the results:
The visualisations are done from the point of view of an artist rather than an interested fan or follower of football. The article itself is fascinating and well worth a read, but I'm disappointed that it is accompanied by superficial visualisations which are interesting aesthetically but of no use practically. The story being told in the article focusses on the use of statistics and data in football, so it seems odd that instead of visualising this data in an informative and revealing way, they have opted to create static artwork that fails to say very much at all. Either way, great article and interesting (despite being of little practical use) illustrations.
Finally a quick nod to what looks like it might be a crazy interesting event in Brighton in November, which is taking submissions at the moment. Visualising Science & Environment:
From the DNA double helix, to climate model simulations, to media footage of environmental protest, images play a central role in the construction and communication of scientific and environmental matters. However, the visual dimensions of science and environment communication are often overlooked in research. What forms of knowledge and understanding do images produce, facilitate and/or constrain when it comes to issues of science and the environment? How are the visual dimensions of science and environmental communication approached differently across diverse fields such as the physical sciences, the social sciences and the humanities? This symposium will explore the visual dimensions of science and environmental communication by addressing questions of knowledge, understanding, practice and power, through the visual.
The last few months of my life have been dominated by looming, impending, miserable final university exams. They are now done, and I am now free to turn my attention to the future and more cheerful things.
What will life post-Oxford hold for me? I'm not sure, but maybe I should move to Switzerland for my health, Luxembourg to earn a lot of money, or Denmark for the best "life satisfaction". Go check out the beautifully designed and really interesting OECD better life index. Interactive, informative, fun.
In a similar vein is the 2011 Global Peace Index. The video below runs through some of the big trends in global peace. Quantifying peace is a little like quantifying happiness - you can be happy in the worst place in the world and at war in your own home in the most peaceful country, but there's some nice stats here. You can go and take a more detailed look at each country here.
Want some facts about the internet in 2015? Check out this video. In truth the presentation of this fails to really highlight the most important changes and tell the stories of the predictions, which is a shame considering how pretty the design is & how carefully it has been animated. Some nice stuff, regardless:
And sometimes it's nice to sit back and admire nature's beauty. There's No Such Thing as a Jellyfish. Pretty AND educational. "Are jellyfish rare and elusive or poised to take over the world?":
So should I move to Iceland in search of national peace or sit around and think about jellyfish in space? Time will tell, while my single ambition remains to spend my life doing things that I want to do. I want to be interested and entertained by what I do. That's possible, right? Soon I'll be rebuilding my personal website and looking at working on some personal projects, but for right now I'm pretty happy to sit in the sun drinking beers.
Scenario i: You’re
at the zoo. You’re enjoying an ice cream
and watching the lions in their enclosure below. You jump over the barrier and
down into the lion pit. Your limbs are clinically detached and jaws around your
neck squeeze the life out of you. Over the screams of children and their
mothers from above, your last thought is “why
did I do that..?”
Scenario ii: You
are a man. You are several months pregnant. Maternal hormones course through your
body and, despite your confusion, you cannot help but protect the growing bulge
on your belly with a natural mother’s instinct.
Scenario iii: It’s
Saturday. You stroll into Trafalgar Square, climb Nelson’s Column, secure
yourself firmly at the top, and cheerfully die.
What’s going on? Mind controlling parasites are having their
way with you. Toxoplasmus gondii had
you deliver it into the body of a lion so that it could reproduce; That baby
growing in your belly was actually a parasitic barnacle, Sacculina, using you to provide a warm, cared for home; And a day or
two after you died at the top of Nelson’s Column, fungal shoots sprouted out of
your brain and body, and a few thousand Ophiocordyceps
camponotibalzani spores rained down on the happy tourists of Trafalgar
Square.
It may sound like low budget horror flick fodder, but this
happens everyday, albeit with rats, crabs and ants, respectively, rather than
humans. Nature has long since mastered the art of mind control, and crafty
microbes like these have been pushing around animals for millennia. Well,
anything nature can do, we can poke our fleshy digits, pointy scalpels and
electromagnets at, and over the last few decades we’ve tried our hardest to
figure out how to control the minds of others, & harness the full potential
of the human brain.
First came “brainwashing”. The word and concept first popped
up in the Korean War in 1950, when captured US soldiers emerged from war camps
as converted Communists. Everyone from the CIA to contemporary cult religions
has since allegedly attempted brainwashing, wherever a group has decided that
its mission, beliefs, and principles are more important than those of the
individual.
The concept has been engrained in the public consciousness
by countless films and books, from 1984 to A
Clockwork Orange, and, if you believe everything you read, a “hideous
and insidious enslavement agenda … today threatens virtually all of humanity….
In fact, life in the United States will soon become a carbon copy of Nazi
Germany of the late 1930's, just a lot more high tech and much more lethal."
A chilling prospect, and while this may be more hysterical conspiracy theory
than measured fear, the prospect of
brainwashing does not sit well with everyone.
For the most part, however, we have, with time, moved away
from the classic brainwashing techniques of the 50s and into more elegant and
sophisticated methods of mind manipulation. Conventional “thought reform” is
now a rarity. Psychological mind play does persist through, if nothing else,
the omnipresent advertising we experience and performers such as Derren Brown,
although here the “brainwashers” are restricted by an obligation to stick to a
fine code of conduct as they attempt to direct and manipulate people with a bit
more subtlety than can be achieved with an electric chair or wooden mallet.
Today, scientists are turning to drugs, electricity and
genetics to tinker with the brain. Nature’s puppeteering parasites themselves employ
a variety of methods to control their victims, but predominantly use a cocktail
of hormones, proteins and assorted chemicals. Recent work has tried to revive
the use of mind-altering drugs for potential medical uses (Grob et al, 2011), although this is not yet
an exact science. Any work using illegal drugs or mind-fiddling technologies is
controversial. Such societal tensions present a major barrier to the
development of our understanding, but is a barrier worth pushing past if we are
to truly understand the power of the brain.
This topic presents a fusion of biochemistry, neurology,
psychology and philosophy. Your mind is
constantly adapting, contorting and changing, and much of it remains a mystery
to us. We humans, however, are not the sort to let a little complexity dampen
our spirits as we try to truly understand how the brain works and figure out
how to control it. What's more, the direction of scientific progress is finally
towards positive, useful and ethical mind manipulation, rather than that rather
old-fashioned brainwashing and oppressive mind control.
In 2008 the journal Brain
Stimulation was launched, to cover "noninvasive and invasive techniques and technologies that alter brain
function." Research is advancing apace and our scientific poking and
prodding is starting to reap rewards. So what methods exist today to mould
people's minds?
We’re starting to get a grip on how the brain works, and
understanding that is the key to enhancing and altering it. Take the "Thinking
Cap", a device which selectively stimulates some areas of the brain and
dampens others by pushing electricity through the skull. Researchers claim it
can boost creativity and enhance the wearer's inventive capacities. Or how
about a bit of repetitive transcranial
magnetic stimulation (rTMS)? Using electromagnetic conduction,
experimenters have managed to reduce racial prejudice in subjects (Gallate et al, 2011). At the
flick of a switch can we unlock the Picasso inside ourselves, or eradicate
racism and hatred?
In the past, invasive electrodes implanted into the brain
have been required to alter behaviour. For example, using "deep brain
stimulation", specific areas of the brain have been stimulated or
disabled. But now we don't even need to go messing around with scalpels and
drills. Ultrasound has been used to alter the behaviour of specific neurons,
making mice move in certain ways. Electrodes on the scalp itself ("transcranial direct current stimulation",
if you're a fan of techno-jargon) have been used to improve language skills
(Baker et al, 2010), and even boost mathematical abilities (Kadosh et al, 2010). Pop a few electrodes on your skull and soon you could be
working out equations like Einstein. Going even further into experimental
territory, New Scientist reports that using "optogenetics" we can
turn specific individual neurons on and off using just different coloured
lights. Total control over individual neurons is an incredible step, but with
100 billion neurons in the brain, we should probably make sure we know what
does what before we get too trigger happy with the on-off switch. Wouldn’t want
to cut the wrong wire.
Reducing racism and boosting the brain seem like much more
productive and tolerable uses of mind-fiddling technologies than political
conversion, but any mind meddling will always provoke debate. Who are we to
remove someone's prejudices? Would that be a nobler act than converting someone
to communism and brainwashing them into submission, or does it all fall under
the same umbrella of free will restriction. If we were to truly master mind
control technologies, who would we trust to use them properly?
Deep questions indeed, and certainly ones with no
straightforward answers. So let’s wade out of the murky waters of mind control and
into the shining light of controlling with
the mind. This is where the science becomes more than a little X-Men, and with
sensational results. As neurobiology and technology has advanced, and our understanding
of how the brain transmits signals develops, we are starting to be able to use
the power of the mind to control the world around us.
Picture a
woman sitting deadly still, focussing on a screen. Without her moving a muscle she
moves small cursor on the screen and selects various options. In another room,
a motionless man sits next to a robotic arm, which picks up and moves a glass
as he silently instructs. All the while, a man can move his wheelchair through
the corridor just by thinking about it. These are all now a reality. In April
of this year a paper was published showing that a Braingate® computer
chip implanted in a woman's skull was still allowing her to telepathically
control a computer screen 1000 days after implantation. With just the power of
our minds, we can now move through a virtual reality world, control a computer,
and even interact with our environment without lifting a finger. The
significance of these breakthroughs for paralyzed and immobilised individuals
is unbelievable. This is science fiction technology being developed and used
right now on real people, to fantastic effect. (Don’t believe me? Have a look
at the videos below.)
History, not to mention cinema, has taught some fairly
dramatic lessons about the potential and dangers of mind control. Twisting the
human mind to the whims of one person or another is a risky game to play, and
the ethics involved are complex enough to be the subject of a whole book. The
more we understand about the psychology and neurology of the human brain, the
greater our ability to control and harness its power will become. There is a
lurking threat posed to the most fundamental of human rights – free will – and
we must proceed with caution, but truly great things could be achieved by this
fascinating science.
Take solace, then, in the fact that the driving
force of this research today is in medical fields and productive development
areas. We're learning more about the brain every day, both in terms of its
function and potential capacity. I personally look forward to the day when I
sit in my living room, turn
on the TV with my mind, and, while watching the latest episode of Robotbob
Squarepants, use my super-enhanced mind to solve a few unsolvable equations. Hell,
I’m just grateful the parasites haven't turned on us, yet.
First, this is nice. All our trips to Mars, visualised. Particularly interesting is the change in countries involved, and the improving success rate. Click here for a larger version (or, while we're talking space & stuff, here's what to do if you bump into an alien.)
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Secondly, these visualisations are quite clever. If the world was just one hundred people...
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This video is weird geeky awesomeness. I don't understand it, but I like it:
I love great data visualisation and the trend of data journalism and design and general enthusiasm is fantastic, so I thought this talk would be great - Aaron Koblin: Artfully visualizing our humanity. There are some very pretty visualisations of flight traffic at the start, and it's worth watching just because this guy was involved in the incredibly good Arcade Fire thing, but in truth most of the projects he discusses are fairly pointless, and fail to make any truly interesting products or reveal anything. It may be impending exam dampening my enthusiasm, but this to me shows that getting lots of people involved in something that is cleverly designed and built is no guarantee of making anything truly worthwhile.
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On a much cheerier note, this isn't the very best or most exciting timelapse video in the world, but it's about London, and it made me smile:
What would it be like if the earth had rings like Saturn? This video starts slowly, but skip to 1:00 for some very cool imaginings of what the rings would look like from earth.
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This is a video about our use of oil and the Deepwater-Horizon oil spill. I'm mostly posting it because I love the animation. It's all slick and beautiful. Some of the stats are very nice, and although it gets increasingly preachy as the clip moves on, it makes some good points. Worth remembering that oil spills themselves don't tend to have anywhere near the long-term environmental impacts that they are perceived to - public hysteria surrounding spills is huge relative to the long term ecosystem effects that tend to be seen. Anyway, very nice animation:
Watch this video (if you're not a fan of spiders, I'd skip past this one). For the first minute it's an oddly absorbing and eerie clip of a spider immobilising an ant, but make sure you keep watching till the end. It's worth it:
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Complicated physicsy stuff is generally too much for my biology-orientated brain, so this animated comic on dark matter is great. They highlight how little we actually know about the fundamentals of our universe
"We have no idea! we're only now, by looking at the details, realising what the questions we should be asking are. There's a huge amount of exploration left to do."
Isaac Asimov's three rules of robotics - a man ahead of his time. I want to feature the second part of this interview, but can't find it on Youtube. Go watch it HERE (it's only a minute long!)
"It seems to me that as robots become continually more advanced that people will not try to keep it entirely a matter of metal and electrons, that there will be cases in which attempts will be made to make use of the very great flexibility and minituarisibility of organic living tissue. At the same time we will have human beings who will make more and more use of artificial organs of metal and plastic. We may have a society in which robots will drift away from total metal toward the organic. And human beings will drift away from the total organic toward the metal and plastic. And that somewhere in the middle, they may eventually meet."
That's from 1965 - I love predictions of the future from the past. When you look at BrainGate & the TED talk I posted in the last entry on this blog, you can see that maybe we are going in that direction. Interesting stuff:
And finally in a science-heavy post, this TED talk is well worth a watch. It's concerning the direction of evolution in contemporary humans. Are we now entering a stage of human-driving evolution? Great stuff here, and also notice how elegant, simple and beautiful his visual aids are. A great talk with the perfect slides to accompany it:
The scale of some things are completely impossible to fully understand. CLICK HERE for Nikon's "Universcale". This sort of thing exists in many forms, but this one is very slick.
Similar, but better, is this. CLICK HERE and play with the solar system. Solar System Scope. Wicked.
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As Infographics continue to be the supercoolest thing around, Visual.ly is launching, and this is a very pretty video all about it. The smooth animation and typography make me happy:
Very much related, this page here has a lovely collection of visualisations.
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Space Quotations is a great assortment of quotations from people looking on earth from space
It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.
— Neil Armstrong
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Action for happiness is a new, interesting, and beautifully designed initiative. I love the idea of using science and our developing understanding to help the most important thing - people's happiness. And these posters are lovely. Simple, obvious advice, but things that everyone would benefit from considering a bit more:
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I can't get over how incredible BrainGate is. The Observer this weekend had a feature on this new technology that's allowing totally paralysed people to move objects with their mind via a chip in their brain. Science fiction becomes science fact, and this is going to make lives infinitely better. Amazing stuff, read more HERE - you won't regret it.
Reminds me of this TED talk - slightly less impressive, but still amazing (perhaps the fact that this is comparatively unimpressive is evidence of how incredible these developments are:
"Beware of long and preposterous words. Beware of jargon. If you are a science writer this is doubly important. If you are a science writer, you occasionally have to bandy words that no ordinary human ever uses, like phenotype, mitochondrion, cosmic inflation, Gaussian distribution and isostasy. So you really don't want to be effulgent or felicitous as well. You could just try being bright and happy."
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Got 9 minutes to spare? You couldn't spend it any better than watching this. Seemingly damming of humans for much of the video, Carl Sagan ends with fantastic optimism and foresight. So absorbing:
That's all for now. I mean to post all of these as I find them in a more constant stream, with proper thoughts on each item, but with exams approaching I haven't really got time, so they all come out in occasional vomit-like bursts. I trust my loyal readers will forgive me...
Degrade species and biology to statistical elements
Quote numerous papers for self-evident statements
I love this - directly addressing so many science journals' refusal to embrace engaging writing, opting to instead favour bland and depressingly functional literature. There's no need for cutting edge science, which should be the most exciting and engaging thing around, to be dull. (via Lone Gunman)
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You know those incredible Hubble images you see all the time? Well, here's how they're actually made:
Turns out it's not quite as simple as just a camera with a super long zoom.
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A very nice video about the value of biodiversity:
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I've updated my website with a little bit of new work:
Like this illustration for an article about Pixar:
Some cool things from Wired. First, these city posters are just wickedawesome:
Go check out the rest.
Also, in this month's edition, they give advice on how to discover new species. My dreams of discovering a new species of tiger and calling it the SuperAnt live on.
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Blue Peter gets a little bit sneered at these days, but its been enthusiastically encouraging young people for so long, and I like this story:
A boy called Anthony, from London (NW11... that's where I live) wrote to Blue Peter asking for help in his attempts to "make people or animals alive". He is now a record-breaking tissue engineer, and says of Blue Peter's reply:
If [Biddy Baxter's] letter had shown any hint of ridicule or disbelief I might perhaps never have trained to become a medical scientist or been driven to achieve the impossible dream, and really make a difference to a human being's life. I remember being thrilled at the time to have been taken seriously. Actually, even nowadays I am thrilled when people take my ideas seriously.
This may seem very strange, but I think I no how to make people or animals alive. Why Im teling you is because I cant get the things I need.
A list of what I need.
1. Diagram of how evreything works. [inside youre body.]
2. Model of a heart split in half. [both halvs.]
3. The sort of sering they yous for cleaning ears. [Tsering must be very very clean.]
4. Tools for cutting people open.
5. Tools for stiches.
6. Fiberglass box, 8 foot tall, 3 foot width.
[DIAGRAM]
7. Picture of a man showing all the arteries.
Sorry but in number 6 in the list the box needs lid. If you do get them on 1st March I can pay £10, £11, £12, £13 or £14.
Send your answer to me,
Love from Anthony,
London, NW11
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Dear Anthony,
Thank you very much for your letter. It was nice to hear from you again after such a long time and we are sorry we have been delayed replying.
We are receiving over 4,000 letters every week and are having difficulty answering them as quickly as we would like.
We were interested to hear that you think you know how to make living people - and your list of necessary items intrigued us!
We are sorry we can't help you at all, but we wondered if you had thought of talking to your family doctor - he might be glad to help you with some diagrams and other information.
We are sending you a photograph of the "Blue Peter" team - it has been signed specially for you.
With best wishes from Valerie, John, Peter, Lesley and all of us on the programme.
Yours sincerely
B (Biddy Baxter)
Editor
Blue Peter
I hope they are still taking the time to reply to letters as personally as this - just look what difference it can make.
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In completely unrelated news, what a great use of facebook this is:
The Smithsonian had too many fish to classify, so crowdsourced it, and got 5,000 samples identified in 24 hours.
They created a photo album of the catalog of the specimens they had collected on Facebook, and asked their fellow colleagues for help. Of course, these weren’t any kind of friends. “The majority of people commenting held a PhD in ichthyology or a related field, and hailed from a great diversity of countries including the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Guyana and Brazil,”
Clever.
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Finally, technology like this is incredible:
I can't wait till I can order my very own Iron Man suit.
