Technology

Journey to the Exoplanets

My first contribution to Download the Universe, our collaborative site that reviews ebooks on science, is now up. It’s a review of Journey to the Exoplanets, a snazzy and fun iPad app from Scientific American. Teaser:

When I was your age, we didn’t have any of these fancy hand-held portable ebook readers. We didn’t have any such thing as extrasolar planets, either. Planets orbited the Sun, and books were printed on paper. And we liked it that way.

I’m assuming here I was about your age in 1992 or maybe earlier, because that’s when the world changed forever. Sony introduced a “portable” device called the Data Discman, arguably the first hand-held ebook reader. That same year, Alex Wolszczan and Dale Frail made the first discovery of extrasolar planets, orbiting a pulsar with the romantic name of PSR 1257+12.

It’s been a busy twenty years. Everyone and their dog is reading ebooks, and astronomers are discovering planets around other stars (exoplanets for short) by the bushelful — 760 as of this writing, if we go by the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia. Which is why it seems perfectly appropriate that one of the first and snazziest ebooks devoted to science is Journey to the Exoplanets, written by Edward Bell and illustrated by Ron Miller.

Check it out.

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Books Made From Electrons!

[Updated to provide a better link for DtU overlord Carl Zimmer.]

The conventional presentation of a book — words and images printed on sheets, bound together in a folio — is a perfected technology. It hasn’t changed much in centuries, and likely will be with us for centuries to come.

But that doesn’t mean that other technologies won’t be nudging their way into the same conceptual space. Everyone knows that the practice of publishing is being dramatically altered by the appearance of ebooks — a very broad designation for book-length content that is meant to be read on an electronic device. At the simplest level, an ebook can simply be a text file displayed by a reading program. But the possibilities are much more flexible, allowing for different kinds of images, video, interactivity with the user, and two-way connections with the outside world. The production and distribution process is also much easier, which opens the door to books that are faster, shorter, longer, and quirkier than the usual set of hardbacks and paperbacks. If I put my mind to it, I could meander through this blog’s archives, pick out a few posts, and have an ebook published by this evening. It would suck — editing and presenting a good collection requires effort — but it would be published.

In the current state of the market, one question is: how do you find good ebooks to read, ones that don’t suck? Into this breach leaps Download The Universe, a new website devoted to reviewing ebooks about science. Not just “science books with electronic editions,” but books that only exist in the e- format. (Apparently we have already passed through the awkward hypenation phase, and gone from “e-book” right to “ebook.”) Because it would be embarrassing not to, we also have a Twitter account at @downloadtheuni.

This brand-new project has been led by our inestimable blog neighbor Carl Zimmer, who has assembled a crack editorial team consisting of some of the world’s leading new-media science journalists and also me. We’ll be contributing regular (one hopes) reviews of ebooks old and new, all with a science focus. Suggestions welcome, of course.

The world is going to change, whether we like it or not. It always feels good to help channel that change in constructive ways.

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Horological Concept Video of the Day

Mechanical watches have a complicated history. The first pocketwatch appeared in the early 1500’s, and they became popular fashion accessories long before they were very good at telling time. The idea of putting a watch on a strap and wrapping it around your wrist was very slow to catch on, and it wasn’t until the idea became popular among pilots and military personnel (for whom functionality trumped fashion preference) that wristwatches really took off. The course of the 20th century witnessed the rise of finely crafted mechanical wristwatches (especially Swiss) as both indicators of status and genuine works of technological art.

This all came crashing down with the quartz crisis of the 1970’s, when Seiko and other companies started to produce electronic timepieces that were both much cheaper and more reliable than mechanicals. For the kids today, of course, with their smartphones and iThings, wristwatches are seemingly going the way of the cassette tape. The Swiss watchmaking industry nearly collapsed, before the surviving companies were able to re-position themselves by appealing to horological connoisseurs and elitist yuppies who would like to think they are.

As someone who thinks about time as a full-time occupation (as well as a bit of an elitist yuppie myself), it was inevitable that I would become fascinated by watches. I don’t have nearly the financial wherewithal to splurge on the latest masterpieces out of Geneva, and my watch-snob credentials are ruined by the fact that I don’t mind wearing a well-designed quartz. But there’s a fascinating little sub-culture there, which you can experience at the WatchUSeek or TimeZone watch forums.

A reasonable argument could be made that we the Golden Age of mechanical watches is right now. As a luxury niche market, watchmakers at the high end have some freedom to experiment and innovate. There are some hits and some misses, of course. At some point I may find the time and energy to post something substantive about watchmaking, but right now I’ll just offer up this cool video for the Urwerk UR-110. (If you can find one for under $80,000, consider it a bargain.) It features a clever design in which a series of rotating barrels display the hour, and move by a dial on the side to indicate the minutes. There’s no attempt to explain what’s going on — this is pure glitz. Still — pretty compelling glitz.

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The Amorphous Menace Creeps Forward

We here at Cosmic Variance have long been warning of the coming robot menace. Not only are they gaining consciousness, they keep developing new and creepy ways to move. Along those lines, here’s a new robot from Harvard that looks like an innocent piece of plastic, but is actually a silent ninja with a variety of interesting gaits. (Via Mariette DiChristina’s Twitter.)

Soft Robot Walking and Crawling

Researchers at George Whiteside’s lab explain that the idea came from observing squid and worms. Well, that’s comforting.

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Biology and Self-Repair

I’ve been traveling like crazy, then hosting visitors, and now am laid up with a nasty cold. So not much energy for blogging. On the other hand — plenty of time for non-expert reflections on the nature of microscopic complex systems!

The thing is, I’m pretty sure that my body will eventually overcome this cold virus. That’s one of the great things about living organisms — they can, in a wide variety of circumstances, repair themselves. From fighting off germs to healing broken bones, the body is pretty darn resilient.

Which brings up something that has always worried me about nanotechnology — the fact that the tiny machines that have been heroically constructed by the scientists working in this field just seem so darn fragile. It’s amazingly impressive what modern nano-engineers can do by way of manipulating matter at the atomic and molecular level, creating new materials and tiny machines and motors. But surely one has to worry about the little buggers breaking down. My macroscopic car is also an impressive feat of engineering, but it’s no good if a crucial component breaks.

So what you really want is microscopic machinery that is robust enough to repair itself. Fortunately, this problem has already been solved at least once: it’s called “life.” Even at relatively tiny scales, living organisms are sufficiently loose and redundant to be able to fix themselves when something small goes wrong, greatly extending their useful lifespan.

This is why my utterly underinformed opinion is that the biggest advances will come not from nanotechnology, but from synthetic biology. Once we get to the point that we can truly create new organisms from scratch, not simply modifying existing stock, many of the biggest dreams of nanotech will become much more real.

Some time ago John von Neumann proposed the idea of self-replicating machines. Not everyone believed that such a thing was possible — after all, the machine would have to include blueprints for another version of itself, including the self-replication mechanism, and how do you fit a copy of a machine into itself? (You might think that living organisms are an obvious counterexample to this argument, but some people used it as an argument against the idea that organisms are “just” machines.) But von Neumann figured it out, and immediately proposed the obvious plan: sending self-replicating spacecraft to seed the galaxy.

But if the machine breaks, it defeats the whole purpose. So you really want a self-repairing self-replicating machine. Which is awfully close to a working definition of “life.” It might not be human beings who eventually fill up the galaxy, but my suspicion is that it will be life in some form or another.

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Data Fatigue

Hello out there in blog-land. I’ve been traveling (and working!) too much to actually blog, most recently at the terrific SciFoo Camp held at Google. This is an informal “unconference,” where on the first night participants scramble to a big whiteboard to suggest events for the next day and a half. I helped organize a session on “Time” that turned out to be popular, featuring short talks by Geoffrey West, Max Tegmark, David Eagleman, Mark Changizi, and Martin Rees. Other interesting sessions I went to talked about sleep, narratives, the brain, the Turing Test, and why the difficulty of putting chiral fermions on a lattice is evidence against the idea that we live in a computer simulation. (That last one was from David Tong.)

But just between you and me, while staring at the intimidating whiteboard full of interesting possibilities for what to do next, I was struck by a depressing insight: I am tired of data.

This isn’t to say that I am tired of experiments. We can’t learn anything about the world without looking at it, and my favorite areas of physics are bubbling along with provocative new results (or at least hints thereof). When data is taken by an experiment in the cause of deciding some scientific question, that’s fine.

It’s the fetishization of data for its own sake that I find fatiguing. It’s hardly surprising that, surrounded by sci-tech folks at the Googleplex, one would be overwhelmed by talk of data collection, data visualization, data analysis, and so on. And good for them! We are being swamped by data in unprecedented forms and quantities, and it’s a crucially important task to sort it all out and understand how we can use it.

I’m just personally kind of exhausted by it all. (And it’s my blog, so if I want to bust out the occasional irrational rant, who will stop me?) Data — like theory! — is a tool we use in the quest for a higher goal — understanding. If people want to show me that they understand some unanticipated new phenomenon on the basis of some data that they collected and analyzed, I am as enthusiastic as ever. But my standards are rising for simply being impressed by new ways of gathering or visualizing data for its own sake.

At least, for the moment. Next time I see a really pretty picture, I’ll undoubtedly forget I said any of this.

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DNA Takes Square Roots

Around these parts we’ve been known to discuss whether it makes any sense to say that the universe is a computer. There’s little doubt, of course, that parts of the universe are computer-like. And in case you are wondering, you can now officially remove DNA from your personal list of “things I suspect are not computers.”

Caltech researchers Lulu Qian and Erik Winfree have managed to coax 130 strands of DNA into performing what is unquestionably a calculation: taking the square root of a number. (Ars Technica post; Science paper behind paywall; open-access background paper.) Not a big number: we’re talking about four-digit binary numbers, so 15 at the biggest. And not very efficiently: with prodding, the calculation took eight hours. Moore’s Law isn’t really in danger here.

Still, pretty cool stuff. Mostly it’s interesting because it seems scalable: the authors claim that this kind of circuit architecture could be made much larger. It’s not the first biochemical circuit; RNA and bacterial colonies have been made into logic gates. But it’s the first to do something as elaborate as taking a square root.

Best of all, the authors decided to illustrate their method for a wide audience by means of a … whimsical YouTube video! Let’s hope this idea catches on.

The seesaw magic book: the computational power of DNA molecules
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Open Science

[Note: this post was published prematurely, then deleted, and is now back.]

Michael Nielsen gave a great talk at TEDxWaterloo about the idea of “open science”:

Open science: Michael Nielsen at TEDxWaterloo

There’s a great deal of buzz about “openness” in certain sectors of the science community; largely this has passed physics and astronomy by, because we’re already pretty darn open. It’s hard to image something more open than arxiv, where everyone puts their papers up for free even before they’re published in a journal.

But Michael’s talking about something much more ambitious: opening the process of creating science, not just publishing it. For experimentalists this would be difficult, for obvious reasons. (You think people who sweat to build an experiment are going to invite the public in to take a whirl?) For theory it is also hard, but the reasons are more subtle.

The point is that credit in science is given out on the basis of getting your name on published papers. In the arxiv era, the papers don’t necessarily have to appear in a traditional journal — but that’s a topic for another day. The model is set in stone: you have an idea, you work out its consequences to the point where it’s publishable, and you write a paper. Without that last step, you’re not going to get any credit. (Very occasionally you will see references to “unpublished work” or “private communication,” but it’s rare and not really for big-ticket ideas.)

So if I had an idea, I would either work it out myself or start working with students or collaborators. I certainly would not go around publicizing an undeveloped idea; I wouldn’t get any credit for it, and someone else could take it and develop it themselves. I might give seminars in which I mention the idea, but that’s only recommended once it’s to the point where a paper is on the horizon.

Michael and others want to overthrow that model. Their shining example is this blog post by Tim Gowers. Gowers is a mathematician who proposed attacking an open math problem right there on his blog, by asking for comments from the crowd. If they succeeded, they could publish a paper under a collective pseudonym. He next chose a problem — developing a combinatorial approach to the Hales-Jewett theorem — and, several hundred comments later, announced that they had succeeded. Here’s the paper. Buoyed by this success, people have set up a Polymath Wiki to expedite tackling other problems in this way.

Could this work for theoretical physics? I don’t see why not. But note that Michael spends a lot of his time in the talk pointing out the obvious — crowdsourcing doesn’t always work. I could easily imagine ways in which such a project could fail; too much noise and not enough signal, everyone with good ideas deciding they would rather work on them by themselves rather than sharing openly, etc.

Might be worth a shot, though. I’m thinking of suggesting some ideas here on this blog and seeing whether we get any useful input. Let me sleep on it.

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How Much Does Your Phone Company Know About Your Life?

Let’s just round up and say “everything.” In Germany they are currently debating rules on what data companies can keep and analyze, vs. what they must throw away. To make a point, Green Party politician Malte Spitz went to court to force Deutsche Telekom to share the data they had collected about him, just from his mobile phone. What is revealed, basically, is where he was essentially at every moment of the day. Spitz handed the information over to Zeit Online, who combined it with information he revealed himself via Twitter and his blog, to make a scarily detailed chronological map of his daily activities. (Via FlowingData.com.)

Check it out, they have a great animated reconstruction of Spitz’s daily movings, combined with a sidebar display saying how many phone conversations he was having and how many text messages. There’s even a spreadsheet so you can play with the data yourself if you are so inclined. They removed the actual phone numbers with which he was communicating, but of course the phone company has those.

People can decide for themselves whether this is intrusive or benign; more than a few people put nearly as much information online anyway, without thinking twice. But you should know that it’s out there.

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