via ResearchBuzz Firehose: Lisa Nikolau in Humanosphere
Researchers have developed a drought and flood monitoring tool for farmers without easy means of anticipating such weather events, even though their livelihoods rely almost solely on rainfall.
Developed at the request of UNESCO, the program provides a way to view a vast amount of weather data across Africa and Latin America, including some of the world’s most environmentally and economically vulnerable regions. Users can access a wealth of information on wind speed, temperature, precipitation and stream runoff, and organize the data to better visualize weather patterns over short-term, seasonal and climatic time frames.
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Population will soon hit 8 billion. Here’s why that scares people
via OUP Blog by Molly Farrell
“A Rolling Stones crowd” by Sérgio Valle Duarte. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Any day now, global population will hit 7.5 billion. Experts predict that we humans will reach eight billion in number sometime around the year 2024. Does that fact fill you with trepidation? Chances are that it does, even though it’s only a number, after all. “Eight billion” says nothing about innovations in agriculture or renewable energy technologies, and certainly nothing about global social justice. How we will live as eight billion, and how we will interact with our planet’s ecosystems is still a question that is very much up in the air. Yet I can predict with relative certainty that the stories that will appear when population reaches eight billion will be couched in terms of grave concern, perhaps even catastrophic foreboding, and not solely because this is how we discussed population when we reached the milestone of seven billion in 2011. I know this because the tendency to talk about potential cataclysm when we talk about population dates back to the origins of the word “population” itself. We literally do not have the words to discuss our collective numbers with each other without invoking potential devastation.
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The kingdom of women: the Tibetan tribe where a man is never the boss
via the Guardian by Hannah Booth
It’s a place where women rule, marriage doesn’t exist and everything follows the maternal bloodline. But is it as good for women as it sounds – and how long can it last?
A Mosuo woman weaves with a loom at her shop in Lijiang, China. Photograph: Chien-min Chung/Getty Images
Imagine a society without fathers; without marriage (or divorce); one in which nuclear families don’t exist. Grandmother sits at the head of the table; her sons and daughters live with her, along with the children of those daughters, following the maternal bloodline. Men are little more than studs, sperm donors who inseminate women but have, more often than not, little involvement in their children’s upbringing.
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Astronomy: The Gateway Drug of Science
via Big Think Editors
People wait for the sun to go down to view Mars at the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Doing astronomy may be the closest activity we have to science-for-science’s-sake – gazing across endless distances to view objects that aren’t in the location we currently perceive them to be in. While the common dream of space travel, and the colonization of the solar system, has been a dream for millennia, our ability to make real the promises of space are still several decades off – at least.
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Orson Welles interviews Andy Kaufman (1982)
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
I was expecting this to be a train wreck, but Orson Welles (in an unusually ungrumpy mood) did a terrific job of interviewing Andy Kaufman, who was always a tough nut to crack. Welles basically took over and did most of the talking and was very funny.
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Preserving the Past in Damascus Builds Hope for the Future
via Research Buzz Firehose: Sami Moubayed in Syria Deeply
The Tetrapylon was destroyed in the historical architectural complex of Ancient Palmyra in Homs Governorate, Syria. Palmyra was captured by the Syrian army with a support from the Russian air force.
Long before Damascus became Syria’s capital, the city was conquered by Alexander the Great, redesigned by ancient Roman architects and established as the capital of the Umayyad caliphate. Each civilization left its mark on the city, giving it an unparalleled cultural, political, social, economic and architectural history that has survived since the third millennium B.C.
However, after six years of war in Syria, many of the city’s ancient palaces, historical homes, museums, artifacts and government documents have fallen into disrepair, been destroyed, stolen or even abandoned as people flee the conflict.
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Scientists Discover Fast-Moving Galaxies That May Contradict Einstein’s Theory of Gravity
via Big Think by Paul Ratner
A present-day near-miss of two spiral galaxies NGC 5426 and NGC 5427, which is possibly comparable to the early flyby of the Andromeda Galaxy past our own Milky Way. Courtesy of © Gemini Image Gallery.
A discovery of fast-moving galaxies, 10 million light years wide, may cause physicists to re-examine Einstein’s theory of relativity. A team from University of St. Andrews in Scotland found the enormous ring of galaxies speeding away from our galaxy much faster than existing physics modeling predicts. In fact, the scientists believe the galaxies are moving so quickly that they are calling this expansion “a mini Big Bang”.
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Copulating seahorses and a lavish snail ballet: the underwater wonders of Jean Painlevé
via the Guardian by Hettie Judah
Desperately seeking the nose of a shrimp … Jean Painlevé with his camera in a waterproof box, 1935 Photograph: Image courtesy of Archives Jean Painlevé, Paris
In the course of his lifetime, the aquatic French film-maker Jean Painlevé hung out with Man Ray and Alexander Calder, showed his work in galleries alongside the surrealists, and inspired George Balanchine to choreograph a lobster ballet. His most successful film, 1934’s L’Hippocampe ou Cheval Marin, didn’t just incur the wrath of censors with its intimate footage of copulating seahorses. It also provoked such a mania for the arresting little creatures that the Frenchman, somewhat improbably, launched a range of fashion accessories.
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Artificial Stupidity
via 3 Quarks Daily by Ali Minai
“My colleagues, they study artificial intelligence; me, I study natural stupidity.” – Amos Tversky, (quoted in “The Undoing Project” by Michael Lewis).
Not only is this quote by Tversky amusing, it also offers profound insight into the nature of intelligence – real and artificial. Most of us working on artificial intelligence (AI) take it for granted that the goal is to build machines that can reason better, integrate more data, and make more rational decisions. What the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky shows is that this is not how people (and other animals) function. If the goal in artificial intelligence is to replicate human capabilities, it may be impossible to build intelligent machines without “natural stupidity”. Unfortunately, this is something that the burgeoning field of AI has almost completely lost sight of, with the result that AI is in danger of repeating the same mistakes in the matter of building intelligent machines as classical economists have made in their understanding of human behavior. If this does not change, homo artificialis may well end up being about as realistic as homo economicus.
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Public entomologists struggle with an epidemic of delusional parasitosis
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
Dr Gale Ridge is a public entomologist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, where an average of 23 people a day call, write or visit; an increasing proportion of them aren't inquiring about actual insects, they’re suffering from delusional parasitosis, and they’re desperate and even suicidal.
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