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Jun. 11th, 2013
Via James Nicoll, I learned of China's newest manned space mission, the Shenzhou 10.
China's latest manned spacecraft successfully blasted off Tuesday on a 15-day mission to dock with a space lab and educate young people about science.
The Shenzhou 10 capsule carrying three astronauts lifted off as scheduled at 5:38 a.m. ET from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the edge of the Gobi Desert.
It is China's fifth manned space mission and its longest. The spacecraft was launched aboard a Long March 2F rocket and will transport the crew to the Tiangong 1, which functions as an experimental prototype for a much larger Chinese space station to be launched in 2020. The craft will spend 12 days docked with the Tiangong.
On the heels of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield's wildly popular YouTube videos from the International Space Station, the Chinese crew plans to deliver a series of talks to students from aboard the Tiangong.
The craft carried two men, mission commander Nie Haisheng and Zhang Xiaoguang, and China's second female astronaut, Wang Yaping.
Yesterday I posted a link to sociologist blogger Kieran Healy's use of metadata to identify Paul Revere as a person of particular interest in the pre-revolutionary United States, based solely on the memberships and affiliations of several hundred Americans in clubs. Written in mock-Georgian language, Healy's piece emphasizes the great power of big data, for good and for ill.
I will simply start at the very beginning and follow a technique laid out in a beautiful paper by my brilliant former colleague, Mr Ron Breiger, called ”The Duality of Persons and Groups.” He wrote it as a graduate student at Harvard, some thirty five years ago. (Harvard, you may recall, is what passes for a university in the Colonies. No matter.) The paper describes what we now think of as a basic way to represent information about links between people and some other kind of thing, like attendance at various events, or membership in various groups. The foundational papers in this new science of social networke analysis, in fact, are almost all about what you can tell about people and their social lives based on metadata only, without much reference to the actual content of what they say.
[. . .]
From a table of membership in different groups we have gotten a picture of a kind of social network between individuals, a sense of the degree of connection between organizations, and some strong hints of who the key players are in this world. And all this—all of it!—from the merest sliver of metadata about a single modality of relationship between people. I do not wish to overstep the remit of my memorandum but I must ask you to imagine what might be possible if we were but able to collect information on very many more people, and also synthesize information from different kinds of ties between people! For the simple methods I have described are quite generalizable in these ways, and their capability only becomes more apparent as the size and scope of the information they are given increases. We would not need to know what was being whispered between individuals, only that they were connected in various ways. The analytical engine would do the rest! I daresay the shape of the real structure of social relations would emerge from our calculations gradually, first in outline only, but eventually with ever-increasing clarity and, at last, in beautiful detail—like a great, silent ship coming out of the gray New England fog.
I admit that, in addition to the possibilities for finding something interesting, there may also be the prospect of discovering suggestive but ultimately incorrect or misleading patterns. But I feel this problem would surely be greatly ameliorated by more and better metadata. At the present time, alas, the technology required to automatically collect the required information is beyond our capacity. But I say again, if a mere scribe such as I—one who knows nearly nothing—can use the very simplest of these methods to pick the name of a traitor like Paul Revere from those of two hundred and fifty four other men, using nothing but a list of memberships and a portable calculating engine, then just think what weapons we might wield in the defense of liberty one or two centuries from now.
Wired Science's Nadia Drake writes about a new cloaking device.
Scientists in Singapore and China have crafted a cloaking device that works in natural light, and they’ve recorded videos of animals disappearing inside it. You wouldn’t want to wear it, though. The cloak is made from thin sheets of glass, and it doesn’t work from all angles.
This new device, described June 7 in a manuscript uploaded to arXiv.org, works by redirecting light waves around objects inside it. But unlike other recently described cloaking devices built from metamaterials — artificial materials with properties not found in nature — it’s made from a type of ordinary glass that bends and disperses light. Scientists reasoned that since human eyes cannot perceive light phase or polarization, it should be possible to achieve a cloaking effect without needing to keep redirected light waves in phase, which has been a challenge for other forms of cloaking.
Instead, ordinary materials arranged in clever ways should do the trick.
First, the team placed six thin pieces of glass inside a hollow, transparent hexagonal chamber. The result is a device with six-fold radial symmetry that will cloak an object from six different directions. To demonstrate its effectiveness, the team submerged the cloak in an aquarium — and watched as a goldfish disappeared as it swam through it while plants in the background remained visible.
Next, the team built a larger version of the device that could hide a cat. Unlike the hexagonal device, this cloak only shields an object from viewers directly in front of or behind it, as evidenced by bits of the curious cat disappearing while inside. Like the fish experiment, the cloak didn’t obscure the background, which in this case was a flowery scene projected onto the wall.
The cloak isn’t ready for prime time yet. In both environments — terrestrial and aquatic — the device itself is still partially visible, owing to the shadows it casts on the projected background and the bits of glue joining the glass with the container.
There are videos at the article.
This new device, described June 7 in a manuscript uploaded to arXiv.org, works by redirecting light waves around objects inside it. But unlike other recently described cloaking devices built from metamaterials — artificial materials with properties not found in nature — it’s made from a type of ordinary glass that bends and disperses light. Scientists reasoned that since human eyes cannot perceive light phase or polarization, it should be possible to achieve a cloaking effect without needing to keep redirected light waves in phase, which has been a challenge for other forms of cloaking.
Instead, ordinary materials arranged in clever ways should do the trick.
First, the team placed six thin pieces of glass inside a hollow, transparent hexagonal chamber. The result is a device with six-fold radial symmetry that will cloak an object from six different directions. To demonstrate its effectiveness, the team submerged the cloak in an aquarium — and watched as a goldfish disappeared as it swam through it while plants in the background remained visible.
Next, the team built a larger version of the device that could hide a cat. Unlike the hexagonal device, this cloak only shields an object from viewers directly in front of or behind it, as evidenced by bits of the curious cat disappearing while inside. Like the fish experiment, the cloak didn’t obscure the background, which in this case was a flowery scene projected onto the wall.
The cloak isn’t ready for prime time yet. In both environments — terrestrial and aquatic — the device itself is still partially visible, owing to the shadows it casts on the projected background and the bits of glue joining the glass with the container.
There are videos at the article.
BBC News' Tom Geoghegan writes about GLBT people uninterested in equal marriage rights. According to Geoghegan, these people fall in two categories: GLBT people who think that marriage is purely heterosexual and that other legal constructions, like civil unions, are adequate; and, GLBT people who think that marriage is inherently oppressive.
Jonathan Soroff lives in liberal Massachusetts with his male partner, Sam. He doesn't fit the common stereotype of an opponent of gay marriage.
But like half of his friends, he does not believe that couples of the same gender should marry.
"We're not going to procreate as a couple and while the desire to demonstrate commitment might be laudable, the religious traditions that have accommodated same-sex couples have had to do some fairly major contortions," says Soroff.
Until the federal government recognises and codifies the same rights for same-sex couples as straight ones, equality is the goal so why get hung up on a word, he asks.
"I'm not going to walk down the aisle to Mendelssohn wearing white in a church and throw a bouquet and do the first dance," adds Soroff, columnist for the Improper Boston.
"I've been to some lovely gay weddings but aping the traditional heterosexual wedding is weird and I don't understand why anyone wants to do that.
I will, of course, be going to this exhibition. From the CBC:
The David Bowie exhibit that has Londoners flocking to the Victoria and Albert Museum is coming to the Art Gallery of Ontario this fall.
The AGO announced Tuesday that the exhibit of 300 objects from the singer’s personal archives would open in Toronto on Sept. 25.
Bowie, a pioneering musician, performer and style icon, burst back into the spotlight this year with his first new music in 10 years — the album The Next Day — and proved he still could provoke controversy with his video for the title song.
The London show helped focus attention on his theatrical approach to performance.
Bowie’s showbiz incarnations from Ziggy Stardust to The Thin White Duke are explored through costumes, set designs, photographs and music videos from each stage of his 40-year career. The Ziggy Stardust bodysuits designed by Freddie Burretti are among the more than 50 costumes on view.
Included in the exhibit:
• Set designs created for the Diamond Dogs tour (1974).
• Kansai Yamamoto’s flamboyant creations for the Aladdin Sane tour (1973).
• Photographs by Helmut Newton, Brian Duffy and John Rowlands.
• Album sleeve artwork by Guy Peellaert and Edward Bell.
• Video excerpts from Top of the Pops (1972), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Saturday Night Live (1979).
The Victoria and Albert, London’s museum of art and design, curated the exhibit with objects from the David Bowie Archive, a collection of more than 75,000 objects kept by Bowie himself. Working with Sandy Hirskowitz, the collection’s archivist, Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh of the V&A hand-picked the costumes, footage and objects that mark the journey of a unique British artist.