Yes, these hauntings are very appropriate. I think the need to regulate where the science golem is directed is another reason the machine cannot be completely disconnected from philosophy and other modes of thought. Empiricism doesn't really justify itself! 😅
A big problem is that the field has always been dominated by a focus on physics - whether or not you agree with it, a small book I recommend is Mayr's 'What Makes Biology Unique'
The TRAPPIST-1 system is an extraordinary natural lab for studying planetary habitability: 7 Earth-size planets orbiting a nearby dim, red star. All 7 pass in front of their star, so we can watch the way they block its light. (2/n) #science#life#astronomy
Probably unpopular point of view: I hate the phrase “science communicator” & always have. We don’t have history or policy communicators - just historians and policy experts who can share their subject. Saying science needs a “communicator” just serves to isolate it as a weird hard thing that needs special magic powers to access. It implies that communication isn’t a normal part of science, but it is (or should be). Also, it undervalues teachers, who communicate science all the time. #science
@helenczerski Scientific research is uniquely dependent on public funding, which is why we need a translation layer between the esoteric language we use to communicate with each other and the lay public.
In that respect, I think there is an important distinction between "scientist" and "researcher"; I teach science, but I do research.
I'm also an off-putting nerd who appreciates the science communicators that inspire the researchers that I mentor in my lab to study science in the first place.
New article by Thomas Hostler in the Journal of Trial and Error:
“There is a high chance that without intervention, increased expectations to engage in open research practices may lead to unacceptable increases in demands on academics.”
Where we use a method originally used for AGN to answer the question whether
we can use variability in individual X-ray lines to probe the variable stellar wind.
And the answer is: yes, we can!
The paper (submitted not yet refereed) is:
"Stellar wind variability in Cygnus X-1 from high-resolution excess
variance spectroscopy with Chandra" by Härer et al. https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.14201
@MichaelKlann thank you 😊
We just got the news that the paper was accepted a few days ago (thus the re-boost of the post) 😊 It was actually a very good refereeing process that improved the paper!
@vicgrinberg you are welcome! 😃 I just saw the post of acceptance! Congratulations and have a nice weekend! And keep on creating those drawings please! 😄
I believe the most important phrase in science in coming decades will be "ontological shock." Our approach to scientific advancement thus far has largely focused on observing matter and energy at micro and macro scales, but it is clear that observation alone does not explain the behavior of said matter and energy.
In quantum mechanics, we see we do not understand the behavior of the tiniest constituents of matter.
In our observation if distant galaxies, we see we don't understand the nature of matter on a macro scale (ie: socalled "dark matter).
We have reached our limit of understanding by looking only at matter as a physical phenomenon, and we are on the brink of a new paradigm that will upheave everything we thought we knew.
This will overhaul our understanding of the nature of spacetime, quantum fields, and consciousness, through a "nonlocal" lens.
Modern physics cannot prove this statement true, but we know it to be true, indicating a significant, fundamental gap in the strictly materialist view of the universe.
I don't think anyone is saying physics is useless, but my personal belief is that the next breakthrough will NEED to bridge the gap I just mentioned above.
The fact that this very conversation has escalated in tone and resulted essentially in name-calling is exactly what I'm talking about with my original post about "ontological shock." People cannot even talk about the POSSIBILITY of an upset to the current paradigm without becoming emotional.
Maybe it's because we are on social media, but I don't think so.
My original post is also, admittedly, unscientific. I stated a feeling I have, nothing more. I could be wrong, and I would accept that possibility. It might even be best if I am wrong. But we owe it to ourselves to keep open minds and treat each other with respect.
If leaders in the Global North had shown true leadership 50 years ago — or perhaps 40 years ago or even 30 years ago — and begun an urgent shift away from fossil fuels and away from the mantra of growth-at-all-costs, then maybe we would be in a position today where some form of modern society could be maintained without enduring catastrophic collapse.
But they did not make that choice. They did not display any vision or show true leadership. Instead, they did the exact opposite.
Since 1990, greedy capitalists and the governments they own have doubled down (see attached graphs), completely wrecking our climate and environment, placing not only humans but thousands of other plant and animal species in grave danger of extinction.
If you've been following me for a while and reading my posts, chances are you already understand how bad our current situation really is. But if you're just being introduced to this topic, or if you simply want to learn more about our impossible predicament, then here is an article filled with relevant information:
@breadandcircuses
Came across a Mastodon post linking to a blog supporting continued growth.
It's hard to understand how apparently intelligent people can think, "We've continued to grow and increase greenhouse gases for the last 50 years knowing that it will result in climate change and now we should do some more growth because that will stop climate change."
But that seems to be the line taken.
@breadandcircuses People are not used looking ahead more than a couple of months. The #climatecatastrophe is happening in slow time. Humanity is almost literally the frog which is being boiled slowly to death. Because many greedy very rich people want to continue making huge profits regardless of the costs for the rest of humankind.
In 1916, 23 yr old chemist Alice Ball discovered a breakthrough in treatment for Leprosy (Hansen’s Disease). She was the 1st woman & 1st Black chemistry professor at UHawaii.
Tragically, Ball passed away months after her discovery due to complications from a lab accident.
What happened next? Arthur Dean, head of her dept, continued the work publishing Ball’s process as “Dean’s method.”
@Sheril I want to know more about this "lab accident" given that Dean subsequently grabbed credit for her work. If only Hercule Poirot had been available to investigate. 😉
The Gulf Stream system could collapse as soon as 2025, a new study suggests. The shutting down of the vital ocean currents, called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) by scientists, would bring catastrophic climate impacts.
The new analysis estimates a timescale for the collapse of between 2025 and 2095, with a central estimate of 2050, if global carbon emissions are not reduced.
A collapse of Amoc would have disastrous consequences around the world, severely disrupting the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America, and west Africa. It would increase storms and drop temperatures in Europe, and lead to a rising sea level on the eastern coast of North America. It would also further endanger the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets.
“I think we should be very worried,” said Prof Peter Ditlevsen, at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and who led the new study. “This would be a very, very large change. The Amoc has not been shut off for 12,000 years.”
The Amoc collapsed and restarted repeatedly in the cycle of ice ages that occurred from 115,000 to 12,000 years ago. It is one of the climate tipping points scientists are most concerned about as global temperatures continue to rise.
Research in 2022 showed five dangerous tipping points may already have been passed due to the 1.1C of global heating to date, including the shutdown of Amoc, the collapse of Greenland’s ice cap, and an abrupt melting of carbon-rich permafrost.
The most recent assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that Amoc would not collapse this century. But Divlitsen said the models used have coarse resolution and are not adept at analysing the non-linear processes involved, which may make them overly conservative.
Prof Stefan Rahmstorf, at the University of Potsdam, Germany, said: “There is still large uncertainty where the Amoc tipping point is, but the new study adds to the evidence that it is much closer than we thought. A single study provides limited evidence, but when multiple approaches have led to similar conclusions this must be taken very seriously, especially when we’re talking about a risk that we really want to rule out with 99.9% certainty. Now we can’t even rule out crossing the tipping point in the next decade or two.”
@breadandcircuses@EleanorFrajka Thank you for sharing this. I was reading about AMOC yesterday in fact and was perhaps a bit naively comforted by that IPCC conclusion that it wouldn't happen this century. I'll have to read that study. That's too important.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@breadandcircuses@EleanorFrajka To be fair, I don't think anyone at IPCC has claimed climate change wouldn't bite until 2100. But you're right that they've chronically underestimated its development. The IPCC reports are paradoxically both the most advanced scientific documents in human history and also a kind of policy document where the world's powerful nations need to come to a consensus (which obviously has nothing to do with science)
Rosalind Franklin’s research was crucial to discovering DNA’s double helix structure. But she never received proper acknowledgement for her contribution.
You have pieces labelled 1 to N.
You arrange them in a line N times, so that at turn k the piece labelled k is in position k. (so on the first turn piece 1 is at the start, on turn 2 piece 2 is next to that, and so on)
No piece can be in the same position for two consecutive turns.
How many ways of doing this are there?
For N=3, there's only one:
On turn 1, it must be 1xx
On turn 2, it must be x2x and 2 can't be where it was before, so turn 1 was 132 and turn 2 is 321.
On turn 3 it must be 213.
@christianp You were right, for N=4 I got 63 different games. I finally got around to messing with this again and looked at N up to 7. I build adajancy matrices for the graph generated by each game and this interesting looking pattern popped out.
To your eye, Betelgeuse is the bright "shoulder" star in Orion. A new simulation shows what it would look like if you could get up close: an enormous, boiling cauldron of gas.
If Betelgeuse were placed where the Sun is, Earth's orbit (blue circle) would be deep inside. That's how big it is!
Wow this is bad. Some Italian researchers decided there wasn't enough anti-right-to-repair hardware #DRM in the world already, and developed a way to physically profile and recognize individual battery cells that can be combined with classic DRM technologies to prevent non-OEM battery cells from working inside a device, even if the classic DRM portion is circumvented. Whyyyyyy?!
@jaseg why not just fill every device with resin after assembly and stop pretending it's about anything besides making technology into expensive disposable garbage
The key point that I think a lot of engineers still don't get is that their job is not about making widgets that get plonked on top of the world. This is about changing the shape of things inside a working system (Planet Earth) to shift how it operates. Those widgets become part of that system - it's like operating on a living human. The engineers of the future mustn't see their job as creating things external to the world. #science#engineering#climate#Earth
@helenczerski I am a chemical engineer in the vegetable oil industry and I have written and spoken about our industry and climate change. There's a lot we can do to reduce energy use and work towards 'net zero.' Hopefully we are doing more than making widgets but we always have to be guided by the economics. Saving energy saves money and reduces emissions but it has to be done in a financially viable way.
@helenczerski that's at most half the problem. The other half is that we aren't typically the ones making the most destructive design decisions. Our bosses, or their bosses, or bean counters are
Okay, last one for today on why collapse is inevitable, but this time with a bit of life wisdom thrown in at the end...
The official narrative is that we will get off of oil and switch to 'green energy', but this is a fantasy. Oil is the lifeblood of global industrial civilization.
Not only do we need oil to transport goods around the world on diesel-powered trucks and ships, we need fossil fuels to create thousands of everyday items we take for granted: Plastics, cosmetics, medicines, lubricants, adhesives, fertilizer, cleaning products, and much more.
Yes, some of these products could be made without oil. For example, hemp could be used to make plastic (although that could be difficult as we’re already using all of the arable land), but it won’t be cheap. Whether we use oil or not, everything is going to get a lot more expensive.
Consider the fact that we are already in a global food crisis with more people going hungry every day due to the high cost of food. In ten years, we’ll be well beyond 1.5°C of warming and approaching 2°C. Crop failures will be even more common, water shortages will be widespread, and we’ll have less energy to work with.
Now, if you could find out exactly when collapse will take your life, what would you do differently? Would you reconnect with old friends? Spend more time with your family? Read a book you always wanted to read? Learn an instrument you always wanted to play?
If so, why aren’t you doing these things right now? Given the fragility of our supply chains and power grids along with the increasing threat of nuclear war, it could all come crashing down by the end of the decade.
I’ve decided not to worry about it anymore. When people ask me when civilization is going to collapse, my answer is, “It’s already collapsing.”
Time is running out. Use what’s left of it wisely.
well said. accepting collapse for me also means recognizing that the lifeway of industrial civilization is probably the worst of all possible lifeways on a finite planet, and must come to an end, one way or another.
so many of us have grown up within it, internalizing its precepts and its fundamentally cruel and avaricious perspective, that it can be hard to let it go, despite its cruelty. but it must, and a better world is still possible.