Art and Science in India November 12, 2009

Another Reason, by Gyan Frakash

From the Science Blog The Primate Diaries:

As Jawaharlal Nehru wrote of his native land but as a stranger in the process of discovery, “India is a geographical and economic entity, a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by invisible threads.” These invisible threads were the spiritual beliefs of the people, the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita and the Manu Smriti. The sacred Ganges was a symbol of India’s life blood, as much for the Indian people as for the British colonialists, that, as Rudyard Kipling described in his story “The Bridge Builders,” was a natural force that needed to be conquered if the British were to successfully impose their hegemony. In this way “Mother Gunga–in irons” became a metaphor for the use of Western science in conquered lands. Princeton historian Gyan Prakash, in his survey of science in colonial India, seeks to show that science was both a means of expanding British control over the region and was a conflict zone that the nationalist elite of India sought to reimagine as an indigenous concept in order to reclaim their land.

Another Reason, as Prakash describes it, is a story of “science’s cultural authority as the legitimating sign of rationality and progress” (7). The colonial state used European science to conquer and exploit India and Prakash reveals how the history of science and the history of Western hegemony are akin to the two snakes intertwined around Hermes’ Caduceus, a symbol of reason and authority that seeks to heal but also to control. This can be seen in the early anthropological studies incorporated as part of the 1869 General Industrial Exhibition that sought to celebrate Western science in conquered lands. George Campbell, ethnologist and governor of Bengal, emphasized the importance of studying the “wild tribes” of the land under his purview because “Of all sciences, the neglected study of man is now recognized as the most important.” The racial politics were very clear, as Campbell explained.

“The world is becoming more and more one great country; race meets race, black with white, the Arian with Turanian and the Negro; and questions of miscegenation or separation are very pressing” (28).

Read the whole original post

How is technology shaping the way we view writing? November 6, 2009

It used to be you weren’t an “author” until you’d had your name come out above a few paragraphs of text in some hard, durable format involving ink and parchment. With the Internet, that is changing entirely. SEED Magazine’s take on it:

Nearly everyone reads. Soon, nearly everyone will publish. Before 1455, books were handwritten, and it took a scribe a year to produce a Bible. Today, it takes only a minute to send a tweet or update a blog. Rates of authorship are increasing by historic orders of magnitude. Nearly universal authorship, like universal literacy before it, stands to reshape society by hastening the flow of information and making individuals more influential.

To quantify our changing reading and writing habits, we plotted the number of published authors per year, since 1400, for books and more recent social media (blogs, Facebook, and Twitter). This is the first published graph of the history of authorship. We found that the number of published authors per year increased nearly tenfold every century for six centuries. By 2000, there were 1 million book authors per year. One million authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. Since 1400, book authorship has grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year. That’s 100 times faster. Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.

But does increasing authorship matter? And is this increase a blip or a signpost? Authorship has risen steeply before. The period of the first steep rise, near 1500, coincides with the discovery of the New World and Protestantism, which saw the publication of the first vernacular Bible, translated by Martin Luther. The second, near 1800, includes the Industrial Revolution and its backlash, Romanticism. The current rise is much steeper.

Read on…

Science video on Humanity November 5, 2009

What elusive gem of inspiration causes a scientist to choose his or her vocation? And more importantly, is there a way to draw inspiration from these stories, in order to motivate the next generation? That’s the mission of The Elements of Humanity, a new series of inspirational interviews published online by MAKE magazine.

These interviews of working scientists and technologists were recorded at SciFoo, an unstructured conference on Science and Technology organized this past summer by O’Reilly Media along with Nature Magazine and Google. In an ongoing effort to get more students interested in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), Dale Dougherty, founding editor and publisher of MAKE, sought to uncover each person’s own fascination with science and how that has shaped their life’s work. “It is important to see that scientists are human and they have lots of passion for what they do. They connect their own personal interests to work they enjoy doing and which benefits others,” says Dougherty. The interviews are informal and offer a view of scientists that is not often seen in traditional media. “I wanted to know what fascinated them most about science when they were young and how they were fascinated with the work they are doing today,” said Dougherty.

The site currently features interviews with over a dozen scientists, including Drexel University mathematician Andrew Hicks, who creates unusual custom mirrors using mathematics, Fiorenzo Omenetto, a Professor of Biomedical Engineering & Physics at Tufts who is experimenting with silk as a high-tech material, and Heather Lang, who earned a PhD in “the gray area between biochemistry and physics” and who runs an after-school program teaching chess to students. While topically each scientist’s specialty differs radically from the next, what they share is a passion for science. What spark of inspiration can be harnessed to encourage more kids to become scientists? Hopefully the project finds out.

Visit ElementsOfHumanity.com to learn more.

Stolen from Wired

LCROSS Twitters “Hitchhiker” October 13, 2009

OMG So Cute! From The Guardian:

In one of its less-reported actions last week, Nasa’s LCROSS lunar mission last week gave Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the extra-planetary exposure it has always deserved. A Twitter feed from the satellite sent crashing onto the moon’s surface on Friday channelled the voice of an improbably created sperm whale that discovers itself hurtling towards a different outer-space collision in Adams’s much-loved story.

Published 30 years ago, the classic novel features two missiles, aimed at Zaphod Beeblebrox’s spaceship the Heart of Gold, turned into a whale and a bowl of petunias by the vessel’s Improbability Drive (at an Improbability Factor of 8,767,128 against). The whale spends the last few minutes of its life pondering its existence – “Ahhh! Woooh! What’s happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What’s my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I?” – before it crashes into the surface of the planet Magrathea.

As Nasa’s LCROSS spacecraft travelled towards the moon at more than 9,000 kilometres per hour on Friday afternoon, it tweeted in the whale’s words: “And what’s this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round … it needs a big wide sounding name like ‘Ow’, ‘Ownge’, ‘Round’, ‘Ground’! … That’s it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it’ll be friends with me?”

Then it crashed into the moon, unfortunately failing to produce the 10km plume of dust and rock which could have been scanned for evidence of frozen water. Nasa made no mention of Adams’s bowl of petunias, which thought only “Oh no, not again” as it tumbled towards Magrathea.

Read on…

Review of the latest in science culture September 29, 2009

I’m a little late today with my posts (and not very insightful), my apologies. I’m also taking the rest of this week off, so we’ll see if this blog will magically keep itself alive.

From Discover Magazine, a review of all the latest in science culture, including cinema, books, and other art/science goodies.

The most intriguing to me?

How to Build Your Own Spaceship, by Piers Bizony
When it comes to actually building a craft, your mileage may vary, but Bizony delivers an engaging survey of the commercial space technology that could soon send multitudes of civilians into orbit. Explanations of modern rocketry are remarkably readable, and there are even tips for space-bound entrepreneurs on lunar-base placement and space suit redesign.

Free Museum Day tomorrow September 25, 2009

September 26th is Annual Museum Day, and lots of museums and parks are offering free admission in celebration. Read on for more:

On Sept. 26, as part of the fifth annual Museum Day program, Smithsonian magazine has convinced more than 1,200 other museums, zoos, and arts and cultural attractions across the country to also welcome visitors for free.

In California, you’ll can use your Museum Day admission card to visit the classic cars displayed at the California Automobile Museum in Sacramento (regular adult admission: $8), in New York City you can use your pass at the South Street Seaport Museum (regular adult admission: $10), and in Dallas, your pass will get you into the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza (regular admission: $13.50), which explores the assassination and legacy of President John F. Kennedy. 

To see the full list of all the participating museums so you can plan your day, visit the Smithsonian’s Museum Day 2009 Web site and poke around. Be ready to be a bit overwhelmed.

I love museums August 18, 2009

Enough said:

Behind the Scenes at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History

Among the treasures hidden from sight at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History are the world’s biggest egg, Stephen Jay Gould’s seashells and Vladimir Nabokov’s collection of butterfly genitalia.

So when the museum’s curator asked photographer Mark Sloan if he’d be interested in photographing the most unique specimens from their behind-the-scenes collection, Sloan was glad to oblige. In exchange, he got the tour of a lifetime.

The results were collected in the book The Rarest of the Rare, and a selection are now on display at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.

Read the full story and see the left-out artifacts.

giant morpho butterfly

Historical Lit gets modern twist August 7, 2009

John Quincy Adams (the former and very dead president) has a Twitter account.

The psychology behind a good book July 29, 2009

From LiveScience:

Any avid reader knows the power of a book to transport you into another world, be it the wizard realm of “Harry Potter” or the legal intrigue of the latest John Grisham.

Part of the reason we get lost in these imaginary worlds might be because our brains effectively simulate the events of the book in the same way they process events in the real world, a new study suggests.

The new study, detailed in the July 21 issue of the journal Psychological Science, builds on previous work that links the way our brains process images and written words to the way they process actions we perform ourselves.

Examining these links could shed light on why some people enjoy reading more than others and how our reading abilities change with time. Essentially, some people might paint a more vivid mental picture of written prose than others.

Read the full article

Understanding how our brains process the events and changes while reading could help us understand some of the individual differences in reading, for example, why some people are sucked in by stories more than others.

While some readers can actually picture what they read, may not.

“There are readers, competent readers, who say ‘I have no pictures in my head when I read’,” says study author Jeffrey Zacks said.

PhD Comics July 21, 2009

Just stumbled upon Jorge Cham’s PhD Comics looking for something else, and had forgotten just how amusing it is.

The target audience is really anybody who has spent a long time in academia, either going for a graduate degree or just working in an academe setting. But it definitely tickles the funny bone of scientists everywhere, and I think for the Generation X/Y crowd of scientists it can hit a funny nerve. 

I have met also Jorge Cham, and he is a very cool guy, so I want to promote his stuff.

A recent favorite of mine:

Great Tweets of Science