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Javier E

The James Webb Telescope Finishes Deployment in Space - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...telescope-nasa-deployment.html

telescope cooperation science research technology space

shared by Javier E on 08 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Observatories, who chaired a report that led to what would become the Webb telescope, said “what resonates at this moment is the extraordinary ability of our species to collaborate, to organize thousands of people to work carefully, relentlessly, unselfishly, and seemingly endlessly toward some greater human good.”
  • Chanda Prescod Weinstein, an astrophysicist at the University of New Hampshire, echoed his remarks: “This is such a reminder of how successful people can be when they work together.”
  • While the telescope is considered fully deployed, much remains to be completed. There are still 49 of those “single point failures,” according to Mr. Menzel. Problems with any of them could affect the mission’s individual instruments or the entire spacecraft.
Javier E

Data on inbred nobles support a leader-driven theory of history | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...eader-driven-theory-of-history

history leadership genetics research

shared by Javier E on 01 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • a recent working paper by Nico Voigtländer and Sebastian Ottinger of the University of California at Los Angeles argues that leaders’ impact can indeed be isolated—thanks to the genomes of kings like Charles.
  • In theory, each round of inbreeding should have made monarchs slightly stupider—and thus worse at their jobs. This yields a natural experiment. Assuming that countries’ propensity for incest did not vary based on their political fortunes, the periods in which they had highly inbred (and probably dim-witted) leaders occurred at random intervals.
  • The authors analysed 331 European monarchs between 990 and 1800. They first calculated how inbred each ruler was, and then assessed countries’ success during their reigns using two measures: historians’ subjective scores, and the change in land area controlled by each monarch. The authors only compared each ruler against their own country’s historical averages.
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  • The change in their land areas tended to be about 24 percentage points greater under their least inbred rulers than under their most inbred ones.
  • Sure enough, Spain’s tailspin under Charles was predictable. Countries tended to endure their darkest periods under their most inbred monarchs, and enjoy golden ages during the reigns of their most genetically diverse leaders.
  • the study’s finding—rulers who preside over setbacks tend to be relatively unintelligent—has timeless implications.
  • Javier E on 01 Jan 22
     
    The authors analysed 331 European monarchs between 990 and 1800. They first calculated how inbred each ruler was, and then assessed countries' success during their reigns using two measures: historians' subjective scores, and the change in land area controlled by each monarch. The authors only compared each ruler against their own country's historical averages.
Javier E

A Hair-Raising Hypothesis About Rodent Hair - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mice-hair-infrared.html

rodent sense perception science

shared by Javier E on 16 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • It’s tough out there for a mouse
  • Mice compensate with sharp senses of sight, hearing and smell. But they may have another set of tools we’ve overlooked. A paper published last week in Royal Society Open Science details striking similarities between the internal structures of certain small mammal and marsupial hairs and those of man-made optical instruments.
  • Over the years, he has developed an appreciation for “how comfortable animals are in complete darkness,” he said. That led him to wonder about the extent of their sensory powers.
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  • Observations of predator behavior further piqued his interest. While filming and playing back his videos, he noted how cats stack their bodies behind their faces when they’re hunting. He interprets this, he said, as cats “trying to hide their heat” with their cold noses. He has also observed barn owls twisting as they swoop down, perhaps to shield their warmer parts — legs and wingpits — with cooler ones.
  • Maybe, he thought, “predators have to conceal their infrared to be able to catch a mouse.”
  • Eventually, these and other musings led Dr. Baker to place mouse hairs under a microscope. As it came into view, he felt a strong sense of familiarity. The guard hair in particular — the bristliest type of mouse hair — contained evenly-spaced bands of pigment that, to Dr. Baker, closely resembled structures that allow optical sensors to tune into specific wavelengths of light.
  • Thermal cameras, for instance, focus specifically on 10-micron radiation: the slice of the spectrum that most closely corresponds with heat released by living things. By measuring the stripes, Dr. Baker found they were tuned to 10 microns as well — apparently homed in on life’s most common heat signature. “That was my Eureka moment,” he said.
Javier E

How will humanity endure the climate crisis? I asked an acclaimed sci-fi writer | Danie... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...te-crisis-kim-stanley-robinson

climate change crisis response politics international humanity science technology writer cli-fi

shared by Javier E on 11 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • To really grasp the present, we need to imagine the future – then look back from it to better see the now. The angry climate kids do this naturally. The rest of us need to read good science fiction. A great place to start is Kim Stanley Robinson.
  • read 11 of his books, culminating in his instant classic The Ministry for the Future, which imagines several decades of climate politics starting this decade.
  • The first lesson of his books is obvious: climate is the story.
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  • What Ministry and other Robinson books do is make us slow down the apocalyptic highlight reel, letting the story play in human time for years, decades, centuries.
  • he wants leftists to set aside their differences, and put a “time stamp on [their] political view” that recognizes how urgent things are. Looking back from 2050 leaves little room for abstract idealism. Progressives need to form “a united front,” he told me. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation; species are going extinct and biomes are dying. The catastrophes are here and now, so we need to make political coalitions.”
  • he does want leftists – and everyone else – to take the climate emergency more seriously. He thinks every big decision, every technological option, every political opportunity, warrants climate-oriented scientific scrutiny. Global justice demands nothing less.
  • He wants to legitimize geoengineering, even in forms as radical as blasting limestone dust into the atmosphere for a few years to temporarily dim the heat of the sun
  • Robinson believes that once progressives internalize the insight that the economy is a social construct just like anything else, they can determine – based on the contemporary balance of political forces, ecological needs, and available tools – the most efficient methods for bringing carbon and capital into closer alignment.
  • We live in a world where capitalist states and giant companies largely control science.
  • Yes, we need to consider technologies with an open mind. That includes a frank assessment of how the interests of the powerful will shape how technologies develop
  • Robinson’s imagined future suggests a short-term solution that fits his dreams of a democratic, scientific politics: planning, of both the economy and planet.
  • it’s borrowed from Robinson’s reading of ecological economics. That field’s premise is that the economy is embedded in nature – that its fundamental rules aren’t supply and demand, but the laws of physics, chemistry, biology.
  • The upshot of Robinson’s science fiction is understanding that grand ecologies and human economies are always interdependent.
  • Robinson seems to be urging all of us to treat every possible technological intervention – from expanding nuclear energy, to pumping meltwater out from under glaciers, to dumping iron filings in the ocean – from a strictly scientific perspective: reject dogma, evaluate the evidence, ignore the profit motive.
  • Robinson’s elegant solution, as rendered in Ministry, is carbon quantitative easing. The idea is that central banks invent a new currency; to earn the carbon coins, institutions must show that they’re sucking excess carbon down from the sky. In his novel, this happens thanks to a series of meetings between United Nations technocrats and central bankers. But the technocrats only win the arguments because there’s enough rage, protest and organizing in the streets to force the bankers’ hand.
  • Seen from Mars, then, the problem of 21st-century climate economics is to sync public and private systems of capital with the ecological system of carbon.
  • Success will snowball; we’ll democratically plan more and more of the eco-economy.
  • Robinson thus gets that climate politics are fundamentally the politics of investment – extremely big investments. As he put it to me, carbon quantitative easing isn’t the “silver bullet solution,” just one of several green investment mechanisms we need to experiment with.
  • Robinson shares the great anarchist dream. “Everybody on the planet has an equal amount of power, and comfort, and wealth,” he said. “It’s an obvious goal” but there’s no shortcut.
  • In his political economy, like his imagined settling of Mars, Robinson tries to think like a bench scientist – an experimentalist, wary of unifying theories, eager for many groups to try many things.
  • there’s something liberating about Robinson’s commitment to the scientific method: reasonable people can shed their prejudices, consider all the options and act strategically.
  • The years ahead will be brutal. In Ministry, tens of millions of people die in disasters – and that’s in a scenario that Robinson portrays as relatively optimistic
  • when things get that bad, people take up arms. In Ministry’s imagined future, the rise of weaponized drones allows shadowy environmentalists to attack and kill fossil capitalists. Many – including myself – have used the phrase “eco-terrorism” to describe that violence. Robinson pushed back when we talked. “What if you call that resistance to capitalism realism?” he asked. “What if you call that, well, ‘Freedom fighters’?”
  • Robinson insists that he doesn’t condone the violence depicted in his book; he simply can’t imagine a realistic account of 21st century climate politics in which it doesn’t occur.
  • Malm writes that it’s shocking how little political violence there has been around climate change so far, given how brutally the harms will be felt in communities of color, especially in the global south, who bear no responsibility for the cataclysm, and where political violence has been historically effective in anticolonial struggles.
  • In Ministry, there’s a lot of violence, but mostly off-stage. We see enough to appreciate Robinson’s consistent vision of most people as basically thoughtful: the armed struggle is vicious, but its leaders are reasonable, strategic.
  • the implications are straightforward: there will be escalating violence, escalating state repression and increasing political instability. We must plan for that too.
  • maybe that’s the tension that is Ministry’s greatest lesson for climate politics today. No document that could win consensus at a UN climate summit will be anywhere near enough to prevent catastrophic warming. We can only keep up with history, and clearly see what needs to be done, by tearing our minds out of the present and imagining more radical future vantage points
  • If millions of people around the world can do that, in an increasingly violent era of climate disasters, those people could generate enough good projects to add up to something like a rational plan – and buy us enough time to stabilize the climate, while wresting power from the 1%.
  • Robinson’s optimistic view is that human nature is fundamentally thoughtful, and that it will save us – that the social process of arguing and politicking, with minds as open as we can manage, is a project older than capitalism, and one that will eventually outlive it
  • It’s a perspective worth thinking about – so long as we’re also organizing.
  • Daniel Aldana Cohen is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative. He is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal
Javier E

Rothko at the Inauguration | Hazlitt - 0 views

hazlitt.net/...rothko-inauguration

art market

shared by Javier E on 07 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • Miller likes art. He finds the business fascinating in a grotesque, mirror-on-society kind of way. But he also sees it as a reflection of a lot of what’s wrong in America today. “It’s easy to pin a lot of things on the art world, but it is a symptom, I think, in the way that student loan debt is a symptom,” he said. “It’s just a distillation of the free market and every horrible thing that it’s capable of doing.”
  • It’s a world of the rich, by the rich, that’s divorced now from the comparatively normal. “You work in newspapers,” he said. “It’s similar to that, in the way that private equity has profited off of the media industry and left journalists and editors holding the bag. That’s the case in the art world. A small amount of people has gotten very, very rich off it and everyone else has suffered greatly. And there’s no turning back once you get there.”
Javier E

Climate Change Data Deluge Has Scientists Scrambling for Solutions - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ling-for-solutions-11638720016

climate change data technology research

shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • For decades, scientists working to predict changes in the climate relied mostly on calculations involving simple laws of physics and chemistry but little data from the real world. But with temperatures world-wide continuing to rise—and with data-collection techniques and technologies continuing to advance—scientists now rely on meticulous measurements of temperatures, ocean currents, soil moisture, air quality, cloud cover and hundreds of other phenomena on Earth and in its atmosphere.
  • “Now we can truly do climate studies because now we have observations to precisely say how weather trends have changed and are changing,
  • “When you are trying to develop long-term environmental records, including climate records, consistent measurement is incredibly valuable,” says Kevin Murphy, who as NASA’s chief science data officer oversees an archive of Earth observation data used by 3.9 million people last year. “It’s irreplaceable data.”
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  • Over the next decade, officials managing the main U.S. repositories of climate-related information expect their archives’ total volume to grow from about 83 petabytes today to more than 650 petabytes.
  • One petabyte of digital memory can hold thousands of feature-length movies, with 650 enough to hold the contents of the Library of Congress 30 times over.
  • All that information, though, is more than conventional data storage can handle and more than any human mind can readily assimilate,
  • To accommodate it all, the federal workers tasked with managing the data are moving it into the cloud, which offers almost unlimited memory storage while eliminating the need for scientists to maintain their own on-site archive
  • archive managers are devising new analytical techniques and adapting a standard format for the data no matter who collected it and who wants to study it.
  • In essence, they are reinventing climate science from the ground up.
  • “We are in the midst of a technology evolution,
  • As of last September, government agencies and private companies had about 900 Earth-orbiting satellites gathering data about our planet, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. That is almost three times as many as were aloft in 2008. More are being readied for launch.
  • ASA’s $1 billion Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission will measure Earth’s lakes, rivers and oceans in the first detailed global survey of the planet’s surface water.
  • That is a drop in the data bucket compared with the space agency’s $1.5 billion Nisar radar imaging satellite, which is scheduled for launch in January 2023. Its sensors will detect movements of the planet’s land, ice sheets and sea ice as small as 0.4 inches, transmitting 80 terabytes of data every day.
  • With current data handling systems and typical internet connections, it would take a climate researcher about a year to download just four days’ worth of Nisar dat
  • NASA and NOAA are working with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Corp. to move their climate databases into the cloud.
  • Earlier this year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the first time used data on past climate behavior to gauge the reliability of climate models for policy makers.
Javier E

How to Accept the Things You Can't Change - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...620876

sadness depression victim feelings stoicism buddhism attitude

shared by Javier E on 04 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • Everyone—even the most privileged among us—has circumstances they would like to change in their life.
  • How might you improve the situation? Your answer might be, “I should move, get a new job, and meet new people.” In other words, you should change the outside world to make it better for you.
  • Between the conditions around you and your response to them is a space. In this space, you have freedom. You can choose to try remodeling the world, or you can start by changing your reaction to it.
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  • Sometimes, changing your circumstances is difficult but absolutely necessary, such as in cases of abuse or violence. And sometimes, changing your circumstances is fairly easy: If you are lethargic every morning, start going to bed earlier.
  • But in the gray areas in between, fighting against reality can be impossible, or incredibly inefficient. Maybe you have been diagnosed with a chronic illness for which there are no promising treatment options. Perhaps your romantic partner has left you against your wishes and cannot be persuaded otherwise.
  • In these sorts of situations, changing how you feel can actually be much easier than changing your physical reality, even if it seems unnatural.
  • No surprise, then, that chronic stress often leads to maladaptive coping mechanisms in modern life. These include the misuse of drugs and alcohol, rumination on the sources of stress, self-harm, and self-blaming
  • That can be blamed in part on biology. Negative emotions such as anger and fear activate the amygdala, which increases vigilance toward threats and improves your ability to detect and avoid danger.
  • In other words, stress makes you fight, flee, or freeze—not think, What would a prudent reaction be at this moment? Let’s consider the options.
  • But in the modern world, stress and anxiety are usually chronic, not episodic.
  • you no longer need your amygdala to help you outrun the tiger without asking your conscious brain’s permission. Instead, you use it to handle the nonlethal problems that pester you all day long. Even if you don’t have tigers to outrun, you can’t relax in your cave, because the emails are piling up.
  • Your emotions can seem out of your control at the best of times, and even more so during a crisis
  • These ideas (especially the last) have inspired modern schools of psychotherapy, such as rational emotive behavior therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, which aim to create practical strategies for changing our reactions to negative situations in our life—and thus becoming happier.
  • Buddhism posits that our minds are habitually unbalanced, but not intrinsically so; the key is to build new habits of thinking.
  • Similarly, the Stoics believed that human reason, practiced studiously, could override knee-jerk emotions.
  • 4. Give more.
  • Ancient thinkers recognized this difficulty but believed that we can manage our reactions effectively if we have the right tools.
  • 1. Notice your feelings.
  • Self-observation requires that you be mindful of what you are feeling in the moment and approach your emotions with detached curiosity.
  • Say you are sick of working from home all day, with endless Zoom meetings and no real human contact. Rather than fantasizing about quitting, spend some time dissecting your boredom and discomfort. At what time of day are they worst?
  • Following this procedure during the coronavirus pandemic shutdowns, I started taking virtual meetings while out for a walk. It made a big difference.
  • 2. Accept your feelings.
  • in much of life, negative feelings are part of a full human experience; erasing them would make life grayer. Furthermore, ample research shows that negative emotions and experiences help us find life’s meaning and purpose.
  • In the journal you started in Step 1 above, ponder the things that you can’t realistically alter and the emotions they spark in you. Ask what you are learning about yourself from each of these feelings, and how you might grow as a result.
  • 3. Lower your expectations.
  • Once, as a young man, I told my father over the phone that I planned to quit my job. “Why?” he asked. “Because it doesn’t make me happy,” I told him. He paused for a long time, and finally said, “What makes you so special?
  • My problem—and it’s a common one—was that I had set unreasonable expectations about how happy the world was supposed to make me.
  • Calmly ask yourself whether you’re asking the world for something it can’t or won’t give you. If you are, you might be looking in the wrong place for your bliss
  • you shouldn’t assume that all your happiness can come from any single romance, material object, or activity. You need a “portfolio” approach, balancing faith or philosophy, family, friendship, and work in which you earn your success and serve others.
  • you can follow four steps to arrive at a happier frame of mind:
  • Research from the INSEAD business school in France shows that people who consider themselves a victim of circumstances don’t feel like they have any responsibility for them. They are also likely to be victimizers themselves, hurting the people who try to help them.
  • One way to break this cycle is to help others voluntarily and charitably. Not only is serving others one of the most effective ways to raise one’s own happiness; maintaining the two opposing ideas that you are both a victim and a helper is very difficult.
Javier E

EU to limit political ads, ban use of certain personal info - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...c-a7b8-9ed28bf23929_story.html

social media ads EU regulation technology

shared by Javier E on 27 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Facebook, which has faced heavy criticism for its lack of transparency on political ads, welcomed the move.
  • “We have long called for EU-wide regulation on political ads and are pleased that the Commission’s proposal addresses some of the more difficult questions, in particular when it comes to cross border advertising,” the company, which recently renamed itself Meta, said in a press statement.
  • Google said in a blog post that it supported the proposals and recommended the commission clearly define political ads and spell out responsibilities for tech platforms and advertisers while still keeping the rules flexible.
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  • Twitter, which banned all political ads in 2019, said it believed that “political reach should be earned, not bought” and noted that it has also restricted and removed micro-targeting from other types of ads like cause-based ones.
  • Under the EU plan, political ads would have to be clearly labelled, and prominently display the name of the sponsor, with a transparency notice that explains how much the ad cost and where the funds to pay for it came from. The material would have to have a direct link to the vote or poll concerned.
  • Information must be available about the basis on which a person, or group of people, is being targeted by the advertisement, and what kind of amplification tools are being used to help the sponsor reach a wider audience. Ads would be banned if such criteria cannot be met.
  • Jourova told reporters that “the sensitive data that people decide to share with friends on social media cannot be used to target them for political purposes.” She said that “either companies like Facebook are able to publicly say who they are targeting, why and how or they will not be able to do it.”
Javier E

I'm a therapist to the super-rich: they are as miserable as Succession makes out | Clay... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...r-rich-succession-billionaires

billionaire problems psychology

shared by Javier E on 23 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • I work as a psychotherapist and my specialism is ultra-high net worth individuals.
  • I got into working with billionaires by accident. I had one wealthy client, who passed my name around to their acquaintances. They are called the 1% for a reason: there are not that many of them and so the circle is tight.
  • Over the years, I have developed a great deal of empathy for those who have far too much. The television programme Succession, now in its third season, does such a good job of exploring the kinds of toxic excess my clients struggle with that when my wife is watching it I have to leave the room; it just feels like work.
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  • What could possibly be challenging about being a billionaire, you might ask. Well, what would it be like if you couldn’t trust those close to you? Or if you looked at any new person in your life with deep suspicion? I hear this from my clients all the time: “What do they want from me?”; or “How are they going to manipulate me?”; or “They are probably only friends with me because of my money.”
  • Too many of my clients want to indulge their children so “they never have to suffer what I had to suffer” while growing up.
  • If all your necessities and much more were covered for the rest of your life – you might struggle with a lack of meaning and ambition too. My clients are often bored with life and too many times this leads to them chasing the next high – chemically or otherwise – to fill that void.
  • There is a perception that money can immunise you against mental-health problems when actually, I believe that wealth can make you – and the people closest to you – much more susceptible to them.
  • Then there are the struggles with purpose – the depression that sets in when you feel like you have no reason to get out of bed. Why bother going to work when the business you have built or inherited runs itself without you now?
  • But the result is that they prevent their children from experiencing the very things that made them successful: sacrifice, hard work, overcoming failure and developing resilience. An over-indulged child develops into an entitled adult who has low self-confidence, low self-esteem, and a complete lack of grit.
  • These very wealthy children start out by going to elite boarding schools and move on to elite universities – developing a language and culture among their own kind. Rarely do they create friendships with non-wealthy people; this can lead to feelings of isolation and being trapped inside a very small bubble.
  • There are few people in the world to whom they can actually relate, which of course leads to a lack of empathy
  • Notice the awkwardness and lack of human connection and how dreadfully they treat each other. It’s fascinating and frightening. When one leads a life without consequences (for being rude to a waiter or cruel to a sibling, for example) there really is no reason to not do these things. After a while, it becomes normalised and accepted. Living a life without rules isn’t good for anyone.
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