Category Archives: Science And Society

General Science, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Getting Better All The Time

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Men no longer have go through the drudgery of determining whether or not chix are hawt. We can now have the computers do it for us:

“The computer produced impressive results — its rankings were very similar to the rankings people gave.” This is considered a remarkable achievement, believes Kagian, because it’s as though the computer “learned” implicitly how to interpret beauty through processing previous data it had received.

I wonder what units it used to judge? Millihelens (that amount of female beauty required to launch a single ship)?

Of course, that was the easy part:

Kagian, who studied under the Adi Lautman multidisciplinary program for outstanding students at Tel Aviv University, says that a possible next step is to teach computers how to recognize “beauty” in men. This may be more difficult. Psychological research has shown that there is less agreement as to what defines “male beauty” among human subjects.

No kidding. I’ve sure never been able to figure it out. Maybe it can just check his bank balance.

Which brings up an interesting (and potentially politically incorrect) point. I think that women are clearly much better at determining whether other women are attractive to men than men are at figuring out whether or not other men are attractive to women (at least physically). I suspect that this is because physical attributes are (for evolutionary reasons, unfortunately) where women primarily compete, so they have to be more attuned to it. I also think that this is why women tend to be more receptive to same-sex relations than men, even nominally heterosexual women (hence the concept of the LUG–lesbian until graduation). In order to be a judge of feminine pulchritude, it helps a lot to appreciate it, and it’s a shorter step from there to wanting to experience it up closer and personal than it is for a guy. Particularly a guy like me, who finds men disgusting, and is eternally grateful that not all women do.

General Science, Science And Society

Can Animals Think?

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It’s always been obvious to me that they do, at various levels. I’ve always found bizarre the notion of some scientists that only humans are capable of cognition. As this long but interesting article points out, it makes no sense in evolutionary terms. The cognitive traits that we have had to have their origins somewhere, though what’s even more interesting is that it seems to be a parallel development (that is, like the eye, intelligence has evolved more than once). And it’s not anthropomorphizing to recognize clear thoughtful and volitional behavior in cats and dogs. I don’t understand the thinking of these modern-day Descartes (he didn’t believe that animals were capable of feeling pain) who believe that animals are simply automatons. But then, some of these loons didn’t believe that newborns were capable of feeling pain, either, and used to (and perhaps still do) perform major surgery sans anesthesia, ignoring the screaming.

[Via Geek Press]

Science And Society, Space

The Evidence Continues To Mount

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I remember when I first started blogging, over six years ago, it was considered quite controversial to state that being hit by extraterrestrial objects was a legitimate concern, and one in which we should invest resources to prevent. But over the past few years, evidence continues to accumulate that there have been significant events within historical times that, had the occurred today, could cause millions of casualties. For example, some researchers are now quite confident that if God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, He did it with an asteroid.

On the other hand, a half-mile-wide object would make a hell of a bang that should be pretty obvious from orbit today, so one has to be a little skeptical. I’d like to see how they arrived at that diameter.

Popular Culture, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

More Clarke Thoughts

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From John Derbyshire:

It is plain from his life and his work that Clarke was deeply in love with the idea of space. In 1956 he went to live in Sri Lanka so that he could spend his spare time scuba diving, the nearest he could get to the silence, weightlessness, and mystery of space. That profound imaginative connection with the great void is one of the things that separates science fiction writers and fans from the unimaginative plodding mass of humanity — the Muggles. Clarke had it in spades. The other thing he dreamt of, and wrote about, constantly was alien civilizations: how incomprehensibly magical they will appear to us when we encounter them, and how they will deal with us.

He mentions Bradbury in his remembrance. Some thought of them as four: Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and Bradbury. I never did. I like Ray Bradbury, both as an author, and personally (I met him occasionally when I lived in LA), but I never considered his work science fiction, at least not hard science fiction. It was more in the realm of fantasy and poetry to me (and of course, Fahrenheit 451, which was a political dystopia).

[Late morning update]

Bruce Webster agrees:

I’m not sure I’ve ever met, talked to, or read of an engineer or scientist who was inspired to become such because of something Bradbury wrote. I’m not saying they’re not out there — I just think it’s a very small number, especially when compared to Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.

Yes. I enjoyed some (though not all) of Bradbury’s work, but I was never inspired by it. It just seemed too far from an attainable reality to me.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Even Bradbury himself agrees:

First of all, I don’t write science fiction. I’ve only done one science fiction book and that’s Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it’s fantasy. It couldn’t happen, you see? That’s the reason it’s going to be around a long time–because it’s a Greek myth, and myths have staying power.