Are you watching?

If you have not been watching the revamped sequel to Cosmos, starring Neil deGrasse Tyson, you really should be and here's why. Aside from it being incredibly entertaining with unprecedented visual effects and story telling, it could just be the most important show of our generation. Of course, I am biased in saying that because of my interest in physics and the natural world, but every episode covers important topics that we cannot keep avoiding. I truly believe that if everyone in the world watched this show, the world would be a better place. For too long, much of the world has remained in the dark about the world's origins, the importance of knowing our place in the universe, the impact we are having on the world and the truth of evolution. Cosmos brings these issues and many more to light and presents them in scientifically sound ways that even younger children could begin to understand. The last episode of the series is showing this Sunday the 8th, and its undoubtedly going to be a big one. If you haven't been watching here's a link to the shows website where you can watch them all for free. Enjoy!

Undersea Potential

We know more about outer space than we do about the Earth's oceans, an ecosystem that covers over 70 percent of our planets surface. That is about to change with this ambitious project created by Fabien Cousteau, called Mission 31. It is a 30 day mission for "aquanauts" to live in an underwater station and study the vastly unexplored world of the seas. With so many problems in the world today, I think it is vital that we direct more efforts towards learning about the oceans, afterall, this is our home planet, and it only seems right that we should know everything about it. Our future depends on the ocean more than we realize. I don't mean to say that we should forget about space exploration, i think it is equally important for the survival of the human race, but we cannot continue to set the oceans aside any longer. 

We do not have nearly the understanding of the oceans that we should have. Some of the things that we do know are that life began there, it is where the vast majority of the biomass of the world lives. But to us land animals, it seems like a harsh, unforgiving place for our kind of life. But that is because we have not adapted to the ocean. In the future, we may be forced to expand into the ocean. With rising shorelines causing islands and coastal cities to flood, we may need to free ourselves from the shackles of land. Floating underwater cities and undersea bases are possibilities for future dwellings, and the more we know about the oceans, the better prepared we will be to make this transfer over. We are far away from this strange future, but we must increase our knowledge begging now. Here you can even watch some of the live feed videos from the mission, and see what the crew is up to. 

Future of Food?

Have you heard about IBM's Watson, the smartest machine on earth? Well aside from trivia, it is apparently an inventor as well. I came across this interesting article about Watson, which has created a barbecue sauce that tastes pretty damn good apparently. The ingredients are also rather unusual, its a combination of flavors that most people would not think of putting together, but that is the advantage Watson has over us mere humans. Watson can access millions of documents and understand the content. In doing so, you can have Watson read tons of food documents and compare how food flavors go together, and Watson can generate a ton of ingredients that are reported to go together well and throw them together in a specific way. This isn't quite computer generated creativity, just calculated numbers; but its something I have never heard of a machine doing before. This is the next step towards creating a real thinking, creative artificial intelligence. The future is gonna be a strange place..

Future transport

I went to China my sophomore year here at NCC to study abroad, and I must say it was a hassle. Expensive plane tickets, changing flights, confusing airports - these are all things I had to deal with to get all the way across to the other side of the world. Now China has proposed this future project to link the nations of China, Russia, Canada and America. A railway that connects the two sides of the world would be a project unlike anything ever attempted before and would require many years of construction, financing and loads of other factors that I wont get into right now. But lets face it, if anyone right now has the industry and labor to do something like this right now, its China; and they have offered to fund and construct this massive railway themselves.

Now whats this mean for us? I dunno, but for me - This is amazing news! When I went to China to study abroad I had the time of my life, it was indescribable. I would give anything to go back there just for fun, but that's not practical at this point in my life. However, if in the future this railway existed, it would make the possibility of travelling to the other side of the globe way easier. I can imagine a future where citizens of all these nations readily come and go, and are truly global citizens. Of course we consider ourselves global right now, but this is an illusion. We can transfer our thoughts, and images to other places via the internet, and occasionally we do fly all the way around the world in planes. But this project would make transferring our actual physical bodies to other places much easier. I'm all for it, but of course this is not yet a certain thing. There are many political, financial, blah, blah, blah factors that need to be considered before this project can begin.

Elementary School Got it Wrong

We were talking in class today about common experiences, and how as our online experiences become more and more personalized, we are not exposed to as many new things that may exist outside our bubble of interests. This got me thinking about a story I heard a while back on Radiolab. If you don't listen to Radiolab and you have a bit of time to kill, here's the link to a very interesting story I heard that refutes the current theory of how dinosaurs went extinct on our planet some 65 million years ago...

Back in elementary school we were all taught that long ago when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, an asteroid hit which blasted dust and debris into the atmosphere sparking global climate change and eventually over hundreds of years, the dinosaurs could no longer withstand the conditions and all died out. Wrong! One of the most common stories of our youth that we all learned is false, the truth is much more dramatic than that. I wont get into too much of the science, if you want to listen to the story I will leave that up to you. But here are the basics of the new theory on how the dinosaurs went extinct. The culprit was the asteroid alright, but the dinosaurs did not die out due to global climate change, their death was about as sudden and painful as it gets. When the asteroid hit the earth it blasted debris into the atmosphere that the earths gravity eventually pulled back down. This super-heated debris became little glass bullets that rained down all over the entire surface of earth, all the while burning up in our atmosphere. This heated up the sky to the point that it turned red, and the entire surface of the planet was baked by the intense heat of burning little trails from these glass balls. Every last dinosaur was killed in a matter of hours as their blood in their bodies began to boil. The only survivors were swimming deep in the ocean or had burrowed underground. When it was all over, our ancestors, the mammals, emerged to witness a dinosaur graveyard.

So why am I telling you all this? Well, for one, I think it is really cool! And I was surprised to hear about how few people actually know of this new theory of the extinction of the dinos. It just goes to show that with so much information out there, it is easy to miss new stories and discoveries that don't always make it into our own personal bubbles. 

On Cyber Bullying

Bullying has likely been a part of life for everyone of us at one point or another. We've all been exposed to it, but unlike past generations, we have had to adjust our views on bullying in the physical world as well as the online world. Bullying in the real world is no different than bullying online, except for the key fact that the online world remains, and what happens online can stay there forever. The real world does not share this problem. So what are we to do about this? I agree with Dana Boyd when she says that a zero tolerance policy is not the solution. Many schools still adopt this method of dealing with bullies, but with little success. The problem is that bullies are generally not concerned about the punishments they will receive for their behavior. Indeed, many times they are simply seeking attention for themselves by engaging in bullying. If we choose to come down hard on bullies with zero tolerance rules, this is not going to help. I don't know of any true solution to bullying, online or in the real world. There probably isn't one, or we should have found a solution by now and bullying would be a thing of the past. More likely, I think bullying will be a social phenomenon forever, but we can come up with better ways to deal with it, perhaps addressing the psychological reasons they have for bullying. As for cyber bullying, for now it may just be best to teach our kids of the possible repercussions of their behavior online. Not in order to scare them, but to teach them to learn from our generations mistakes.

A Few Thoughts on Cybervetting

So after reading about Lori Andrews' argument that we should adopt a Social Network Constitution to prevent employers from using information on social network cites as part of their hiring process, the major issue that comes to my mind is, "How's it gonna work?" Come on people, how often has regulating anything on the internet actually worked effectively? The very nature of the internet says that this is hard to accomplish because anyone can access any cite at any time. Of course I agree that it is morally wrong  to base the hiring process on what an employer can dig up about you on your Facebook page, but it is your own responsibility to limit the access of any questionable material you post about yourself, or not to post it at all.

In her book, I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy, she argues that this constitution should say, "Social networks are private spaces and that employers, schools and other institutions are prohibited from accessing social network pages or taking adverse actions against a person based on anything they post on a social network." No! Social networks are NOT private spaces and they never will be. You are posting content on the web for the explicit purpose that others can view your content. What is private about that? There is a much easier and simple way of protecting your privacy on your social networking cites if you are worried about being judged by employers - don't post stupid shit about yourself online! Maybe you shouldn't post that picture of you throwing up in the parking lot after a heavy night of drinking, or that video of you taking 12 shots in a row, or set your Facebook banner to that picture of you exhaling a cloud of smoke after that massive bong rip. And if you truly can't stop yourself from posting things like this to the public, at least have the sense to adjust your privacy settings so that you don't let random people (or perspective employers) see the questionable content you posted, its that simple. If you follow these simple rules, you should not have a problem. Your privacy is in your own hands, good luck!