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Lawrence Hrubes

Ceres, Pluto, and the War Over Dwarf Planets - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...dawn-ceres-pluto-dwarf-planets

science language classification astronomy

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Whatever the probes find, it probably won’t help untangle the tortuous reasoning that led to Pluto and Ceres being labelled as dwarf planets in the first place. That happened in 2006, a few months after New Horizons launched and about a year before Dawn did, at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union, the organization that is in charge of classifying and naming celestial objects. The I.A.U. defines a dwarf planet according to four criteria: it must orbit the sun, it must be spherical, it must not be a satellite of another planet, and it must not have “cleared the neighborhood” of other objects of comparable size. Ceres has a diameter of fewer than six hundred miles, Pluto of about fourteen hundred miles. By comparison, Mercury, now the smallest official planet in our solar system, is more than three thousand miles across. So it’s not unreasonable, Stern says, to call Pluto both a planet and a dwarf, provided that one doesn’t cancel out the other. “I’m the one who originally coined the term ‘dwarf planet,’ back in the nineteen-nineties,” he told me. “I’m fine with it. But saying a dwarf planet isn’t a planet is like saying a pygmy hippopotamus isn’t a hippopotamus. It’s scientifically indefensible.”
  • Why, then, did the I.A.U. demote Pluto? As David Spergel, the head of the astrophysics department at Princeton University, explained to me, once scientists discovered the Kuiper Belt, which includes several Pluto look-alikes, and once they discovered Eris, a dead ringer for Pluto, the organization became worried about a slippery slope. If Pluto was a planet, Eris would have to be, too, along with any number of Kuiper Belt objects. Things risked getting out of hand. Fifteen or twenty or fifty planets was too many—who would be able to remember them all? That last question may sound absurd, but in a debate held last year at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Gareth Williams, the astronomer representing the I.A.U.’s position, couldn’t come up with a better argument. “You’d need a mnemonic to remember the mnemonic,” he said. “We really want to keep the number of planets low.” He lost the debate on the merits, but the demotion had already been won.
Lawrence Hrubes

Ninth Planet May Exist in Solar System Beyond Pluto, New Evidence Suggests - The New Yo... - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...solar-system-beyond-pluto.html

science astronomy models observation planet reason

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • What Dr. Brown and a fellow Caltech professor, Konstantin Batygin, have not done is actually find that planet
  • Rather, in a paper published Wednesday in The Astronomical Journal, Dr. Brown and Dr. Batygin lay out a detailed circumstantial argument for the planet’s existence in what astronomers have observed — a half-dozen small bodies in distant, highly elliptical orbits.
  • This would be the second time that Dr. Brown has upended the map of the solar system. In January 2005, he discovered a Pluto-size object, now known as Eris, in the ring of icy debris beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper belt.A year and a half later, the International Astronomical Union placed Pluto in a new category, “dwarf planet,” because it had not “cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.”In the view of the astronomical union, a full-fledged planet must be, in essence, the gravitational bully of its orbit, and Pluto was not.
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  • “The theorists didn’t really take it seriously,” he said. “They figured it was all some observational effect. The observers didn’t take it seriously, because they figured it was all some theoretical thing they couldn’t understand.”
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Pluto Is a Planet, and Eris Is Too - 0 views

www.space.com/-a-planet-and-eris-is-too.html

science definitions planet space classification reason astronomy

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The International Astronomical Union (IAU) got it wrong. Our solar system has 10 planets. As NASA's New Horizons spacecraft glides its way to the cold outer reaches of our solar system to take the first-ever up-close look at Pluto, the time is right to revise the International Astronomical Union (IAU)'s 2006 definition of a planet, which resulted in Pluto's "demotion" from planet to ambiguous dwarf-planet status.
markfrankel18

Did Jesus Save the Klingons? - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...rrestrials-jesus-save-klingons

TOK technology religious knowledge systems

shared by markfrankel18 on 17 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Which religion will have the toughest time reconciling aliens with its beliefs?
  • Which religions are more open to the idea of alien life?
  • Let’s say you discover some aliens on some other planets and you decide that you should convert them to Christianity. A reasonable question should be why? If they live on planet Earth, they could be descendants of Adam and Eve but if they are Klingons living on planet whatever, they couldn’t suffer from original sin because they’re not descendants of Adam and Eve. Christianity would make no sense for these creatures, unless our understanding of original sin makes no sense.
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  • Or does Jesus have to separately visit their planet? Right. That’s a serious theological problem. Most theologians are pretty seriously averse to the idea that the son of God will have to visit every planet and get crucified on every planet.
markfrankel18

The People Have Voted: Pluto is a Planet! | TIME - 2 views

time.com/...pluto-planet-vote

TOK science classification

shared by markfrankel18 on 04 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • That would be just too confusing, argued the second debater, astronomer Gareth Williams, associate director of the IAU’s Minor Planet Center. If you let Pluto stay, he said, you logically have to let the number of planets rise to 24 or 25, “with the possibility of 50 or 100 within the next decade” as more objects are found. “Do we want schoolchildren to have to remember so many? No, we want to keep the numbers low.”
  • David Aguilar, the Center’s director of public affairs, who set up the debate, wanted to look at the question not just from a scientific perspective, but also through the lens of history. The first speaker, therefore, was the eminent Harvard astronomer and historian of science Owen Gingerich. “Planet,” he pointed out, “is a culturally defined word that has changed its meaning over the ages.”
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - Why the world is awesome in 60 facts - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...-facts-about-our-awesome-world

science

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Earth Unplugged crew give you epic facts that show why the world is awesome.
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Mar 14
     
    8-minute fast-paced video with brief, interesting facts about the planet, animals and humans, from physics to biology to chemistry; good for a stimulating end to a class...
markfrankel18

Episode 189: Why A Dead Shark Costs $12 Million : Planet Money : NPR - 4 views

www.npr.org/...-a-dead-shark-costs-12-million

TOK arts economics

shared by markfrankel18 on 24 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • On today's Planet Money: Why a dead shark costs $12 million, and a photo of steel wool that looks like a tornado costs $1,265. In other words, we wade into the economics of the art world.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Culture - The greatest mistranslations ever - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...-greatest-mistranslations-ever

TOK language translation history culture politics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 03 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 03 Feb 15
     
    "Life on Mars When Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli began mapping Mars in 1877, he inadvertently sparked an entire science-fiction oeuvre. The director of Milan's Brera Observatory dubbed dark and light areas on the planet's surface 'seas' and 'continents' - labelling what he thought were channels with the Italian word 'canali'. Unfortunately, his peers translated that as 'canals', launching a theory that they had been created by intelligent lifeforms on Mars. Convinced that the canals were real, US astronomer Percival Lowell mapped hundreds of them between 1894 and 1895. Over the following two decades he published three books on Mars with illustrations showing what he thought were artificial structures built to carry water by a brilliant race of engineers. One writer influenced by Lowell's theories published his own book about intelligent Martians. In The War of the Worlds, which first appeared in serialised form in 1897, H G Wells described an invasion of Earth by deadly Martians and spawned a sci-fi subgenre. A Princess of Mars, a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs published in 1911, also features a dying Martian civilisation, using Schiaparelli's names for features on the planet. While the water-carrying artificial trenches were a product of language and a feverish imagination, astronomers now agree that there aren't any channels on the surface of Mars. According to Nasa, "The network of crisscrossing lines covering the surface of Mars was only a product of the human tendency to see patterns, even when patterns do not exist. When looking at a faint group of dark smudges, the eye tends to connect them with straight lines." "
markfrankel18

Thinking about the mind: an anti-linguistic turn | OUPblog - 2 views

blog.oup.com/...philosophy-language-mind

TOK language mind philosophy

shared by markfrankel18 on 23 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • It would be extremely surprising if the way the mind is shaped had anything to do with language as language is such a late addition to our mental life. A much more natural suggestion is that it has a lot to do with the actions the organism performs. We are evolved creatures and what matters in evolution is really whether one performs actions successfully (and not what one thinks). The mind is shaped in a way that would help us to perform actions. What we should expect then is that the structure of the mind is geared towards facilitating actions and not towards representing propositions. Of course, some select minds can also do that – and, may even use propositional thoughts to perfect one’s performance of actions. But it would be a methodological mistake to start with propositions. We should start with actions.
  • This doesn’t mean that we should no longer talk about beliefs and thoughts — these are clearly important constituents of the human mind. So the anti-linguistic turn I am proposing is more like an anti-linguistic half-turn. But linguistically structured representations are late, last minute additions to our mental life — in the same way as humans are last minute additions to our planet. And while humans radically transformed the way the Earth looks, it would be a mistake to try to understand the planet merely focusing on human-made features.
markfrankel18

BBC News - Pareidolia: Why we see faces in hills, the Moon and toasties - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...magazine-22686500

ToK Science psychology consciousness reason

shared by markfrankel18 on 31 May 13 - No Cached
  • People have long seen faces in the Moon, in oddly-shaped vegetables and even burnt toast, but a Berlin-based group is scouring the planet via satellite imagery for human-like features. What's behind our desire to see faces in our surroundings, asks Lauren Everitt. Most people have never heard of pareidolia. But nearly everyone has experienced it. Anyone who has looked at the Moon and spotted two eyes, a nose and a mouth has felt the pull of pareidolia. It's "the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist", according to the World English Dictionary. It's picking a face out of a knotted tree trunk or finding zoo animals in the clouds.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Astrologers look to the stars to help Indian businesses - 4 views

www.bbc.com/...business-25971921

TOK astrology business culture India faith religion religious knowledge systems

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 11 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • It is another busy day for Abhishek Dhawan in Delhi. His phone has not stopped ringing and he has a series of business meetings. Many of his business clients want to know when is the best time to release their products. Abhishek has been studying a number of factors and charts to try to help them. But he is not a marketing guru or an economist - he is an astrologer and he uses the position of the stars and the planets as a guide to help businesses maximise their profits.
  • When I ask Abhishek what his success rate is, he answers immediately. "Eighty per cent - this is like a science and when we make mistakes it is because people do not provide us with the correct information."
markfrankel18

Time-shifting man predicts the future › Dr Karl's Great Moments In Science (A... - 0 views

www.abc.net.au/...3834436.htm

ToK psychology perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 18 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • "Time" is something that both philosophers and physicists have been wondering for about, well, a long time. And now, the neuroscientists have joined in. They have found a man who, when he looks at you, hears what you are saying to him before your lips move.
  • We don't notice this delay in reality because we have evolved to be able to deal with this. We can anticipate actions or patterns through experience.
  • Now you might not realise this, but in terms of vision you are always living 0.3 second (or 300 milliseconds) behind reality. That's how long it takes between when the incoming light lands on the cells in your retina, and you get that full magnificent wraparound 3D colour sensation that we call vision.
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  • So how come we normally see the lips moving at the same time as we hear the voice? Almost certainly, it's because our brain deliberately inserts a delay of about 200 milliseconds on the audio circuit. Now sure, there would be an advantage in being able to hear dangerous things, such as the killer kangaroo bearing down upon you that extra 200 milliseconds earlier. But all of us are a product of an evolutionary pathway that decided it was more important for us to be able to easily communicate with our fellow humans, than to hear the killer kangaroo that 200 milliseconds sooner. After all, we humans are quite pathetic as a hunting animal. We can't run very quickly, our eyes are not very sharp, and neither is our sense of smell. Our claws are silly little fingernails, and our teeth are not very good at ripping and tearing. But thanks to our amazing brain, we can organise ourselves into groups and so we have become masters of the planet. So, getting back to Mr PH, if the sound of the outside world was deliberately electronically delayed by 200 milliseconds, suddenly audio and vision were in sync for him again. And when the neuroscientists did an MRI scan on his brain, they found damage in areas that were well-placed to disrupt audition and/or timing.
Lawrence Hrubes

This Is The True Size Of Africa - 0 views

www.filmsforaction.org/...his-is-the-true-size-of-africa

maps geography perception

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 12 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • How large is Africa compared to the United States, or Western Europe? Most inhabitants of the latter places might guess it is a little larger, but few would have any idea of the scale of the difference. This has led German graphics designer Kai Krause to produce this map to shake people's perceptions a little.
  • Any attempt to map a spherical planet onto a flat map will involve distortions of size, shape or both. There is a passionate debate among cartographers about the best way to hang the world on a wall, but most agree that the most common maps we get our sense of the world from are very bad ways to do it. The problem is that these maps exaggerate the size of the countries at high  latitudes, and shrink places near the equator - leading to a perception that Europe is larger than South America, to pick just one example among many.
  • Africa, which spans the equator, fares particularly badly on these sorts of projections: Krause says, "Africa is so mind-numbingly immense, that it exceeds the common assumptions by just about anyone I ever met: it contains the entirety of the USA, all of China, India, as well as Japan and pretty much all of Europe as well - all combined!”  Some have argued that since people associate size with importance this encourages the already strong tendency of the world's wealthiest nations to disregard those who live in the tropics. 
Lawrence Hrubes

What Exxon Knew About Climate Change - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...xxon-knew-about-climate-change

science ethics climate global warming business

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • The documents they have compiled and the interviews they have conducted with retired employees and officials show that, as early as 1977, Exxon (now ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest oil companies) knew that its main product would heat up the planet disastrously. This did not prevent the company from then spending decades helping to organize the campaigns of disinformation and denial that have slowed—perhaps fatally—the planet’s response to global warming.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - The last unmapped places on Earth - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...41127-the-last-unmapped-places

TOK maps bias

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 28 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Today it is safe to say there are no unknown territories with dragons. However, it’s not quite true to say that every corner of the planet is charted. We may seem to have a map for everywhere, but that doesn’t mean they are complete, accurate or even trustworthy.For starters, all maps are biased toward their creator’s subjective view of the world. As Lewis Carroll famously pointed out, a perfectly objective and faithful 1:1 representation of the world would literally have to be the same size as the place it depicted. Therefore, mapmakers must make sensible design decisions in order to compress the physical world into a much smaller, flatter depiction. Those decisions inevitably introduce personal biases, however, such as our tendency to place ourselves at the centre of the world. “We always want to put ourselves on the map,” says Jerry Brotton, a professor of renaissance studies at Queen Mary University London, and author of A History of the World in 12 Maps. “Maps address an existential question as much as one that’s about orientation and coordinates.“We want to find ourselves on the map, but at the same time, we are also outside of the map, rising above the world and looking down as if we were god,” he continues. “It’s a transcendental experience.”
markfrankel18

Are Scientists on "Cusp of Knowing" How Weird We Are? | Cross-Check, Scientific America... - 1 views

blogs.scientificamerican.com/...of-knowing-how-probable-we-are

TOK science

shared by markfrankel18 on 24 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • “The Copernicus Complex addresses some of the deepest questions humans have ever asked. How weird are we? Was our existence highly probable, or improbable? Even miraculous? You can break this question down into more specific questions: How probable was our universe? Our galaxy? Solar system? Planet? How probable was life? And how probable were creatures like us, who can ponder their probability?
  • Scientists still don’t have a clue why our universe has the form we observe, or how life began on the Earth some 3.6 billion years ago, or whether life exists elsewhere. During his talk at Stevens, Scharf acknowledged that we may never observe exoplanets in sufficient detail to know, with certainty, that they harbor life.
  • “Unfortunately, you cannot determine the probability of the universe or of life on Earth when you have only one universe and one history of life to contemplate. Statistics require more than one data point.
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  • We may be on the cusp of knowing, and yet still infinitely far away.
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