Puck

I produced and edited this project for work. It took about three months to get to this 3-minute video, in part because I needed to travel to various locations in the state to conduct the interviews and then cull through some 20 hours of raw footage to find just the right sound bites. In any case, I’m fairly happy with it, though some of the shots and some of the sound are less than perfect. I do think the editing is fine and it tells a great story: the importance of science to a premium wine industry and, correspondingly, the key to the science is an outstanding education.

Using X-rays to literally delve beneath the surface of this mysterious portrait, Christopher Swann’s 1999 documentary is a fascinating examination of a beautiful painting.

One of only three portraits of women by Leonardo da Vinci, the subject of the painting was the 16-year-old Ginevra de Benci, a member of a wealthy family. The portrait may have been Leonardo’s first commission; he is thought to have been 22 when he painted it in 1474. The picture hangs in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. – or, rather, the upper half of the painting hangs there.

For at some point in its past, the picture was mutilated: the bottom half was cut away, so that Ginevra is portrayed only from about mid-bust upwards. Ginevra’s Story shows how art historians, using computer-aided design technology, reconstructed the bottom third of the painting. The reconstruction is based on sketches of Ginevra’s hands in the Windsor Castle art collection, and on comparison with Ginevra’s “sisters,” the Mona Lisa and the “Lady with an Ermine.” Read the rest of this entry »

Richard Powers is a master of sleight-of-hand. He writes novels full of science but escapes being called a science fiction writer. In Generosity: An Enhancement, the latest novel by the MacArthur “genius” grant and National Book Award winner (for The Echo Maker), Powers feints and flourishes in order to — presto-magico — pull together two seemingly unrelated themes: genetic engineering and creative nonfiction.

In Powers’ hands, the relation between the two themes is laid bare: they both are concerned with the nature, manipulation, and enhancement of reality. In recent years, we’ve seen the formerly innocuous genre of memoir mutate into the high-stakes blockbuster industry of creative nonfiction. And woe unto he who fudges the truth in his memoir, who tells a lie, however small. What used to be par for the course in memoir is now a cardinal sin: remember James Frey and A Million Little Pieces? Read the rest of this entry »

When we were in SoCal over the holidays, my sister and I made this wee movie.

The universe, why does she purr and growl and spit and coo the way she does? “Like the eye,” Leonard Susskind writes in The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, “the special properties of the physical universe are so surprisingly fine-tuned that they demand explanation.”

The eye, of course, was supposed to be the trump card of the cadre of crypto-creationists known as the intelligent design underground. The plan, as outlined in the infamous Wedge document, was to stealthily sow doubt and infiltrate key positions in order to get creationism taught in schools, along with morning prayers and the Ten Commandments mowed into the lawns of every courtroom in the U.S. Alas, the trial in Dover, Pennsylvania (a case fondly, if very unofficially, remembered as A Couple Dumb Cluck School Board Members and Their Discovery Institute Allies vs. Common Sense), put the kybosh on intelligent design.

Which might mean that Susskind’s 2006 book is passé and no longer useful. The influential and admired theoretical physicist wrote it, he says in his introduction, because he thinks the universe – quirky, special, and weirdly tuned as she is – can be explained without recourse to “supernatural agents.”

In fact, though, and except in the introduction, Susskind has way too much fun ogling the universe’s sexy features to really spend much time bashing creationists. He’s got “branes” on the brain while luxuriating in “a bubble bath universe,” washing off the mud (or whatever that stuff is) being slung in “the black hole wars.” Creationism be damned, let’s do math!

Or, since there aren’t any actual equations in The Cosmic Landscape, let’s do the diagram rumba and follow the squiggly lines that compose a Feynman diagram – but watch out! The dance floor is folding according to the weird rules of its own private geometry. And: energy is mass with no clothes on so, parents, shield your children from the wonders of the universe.

But that, ultimately, is Susskind’s point: you don’t need to bring in supernatural intelligence to explain the weird goings on in the universe; you don’t need “intelligent design” or, as brainy physicists with a metaphysical bent like to call it, the “anthropic principle.” The anthropic principle is the idea that the universe is designed just so, so that – guess who – humans can thrive in it. Things are neither too hot nor too cold; neither too inflationary nor too contractionary. It is kind of spooky. Better, though, Susskind says, to take a look at what he called “the physicist’s Darwinism.”

Survival of the fittest, that is, only as it applies to the laws of physics. Just as with biology, where you get highly adapted and complex things like eyes and duck-billed platypuses, the universe has strings, and branes and black holes. The laws that work, continue to work. The ones that don’t, stop being laws, either dying out or changing. There is, Susskind claims, a “landscape of possibilities” Out There – and The Cosmic Landscape is his delightful tour of it.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

In this 10-minute video, one of my favorite brain-science writers talks about how mirror neurons made human civilization possible.

The human brain is really coming along. Time was, and it wasn’t so long ago, that scientists figured that if you didn’t learn an essential skill when you were a kid, you weren’t going to learn it at all.

That may still be largely true of language (unless you’ve had the acquisition window propped open by early multi-language learning): unless you get it while young, you’re going to work like a dog to learn to speak another language and likely will never learn it well enough to sound like a native.

The same was long held to be the case with seeing in three dimensions. As Oliver Sacks writes in his introduction to Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist’s Journey Into Seeing in Three Dimensions, what Susan Barry experienced “went completely against the current dogma of ‘critical periods’ in sensory development… [Stereoscopy] had to be acquired in the first three or four years of life, or it could never be acquired, for the critical brain cells and circuitry needed for stereovision would fail to develop.” Read the rest of this entry »

The threat of an asteroid crashing into Earth has captivated the imaginations of movie audiences for years. Now, however, Russia is working to develop a very real plan to counter such a threat.

The Russian space agency says it is working to prevent a large asteroid from colliding with Earth.

Without giving many details, a spokesman for the agency said it is working on a way to divert the path of the asteroid, named Apophis, without destroying it.

NASA’s latest calculations put Apophis at having only a one in 250,000 chance of hitting Earth by, or during, the 2030s.

via Russia, US at Odds Over Future Asteroid Hit | Science and Technology | English.

There’s more! Russia’s Armageddon plan to save Earth from collision with asteroid

This post is especially for Zoe over at Zoe in Wonderland. If you haven’t checked out her site (it’s in Puck’s blog roll), I highly recommend it as a source of wondrous, fantastical art and writing.

There’s a new paper on the sources of inspiration for the famous works of the mathematician Charles Dodgson — better known to most of us as Lewis Carrol, author of the Alice books.

In an article in New Scientist, doctor of philosophy student and literary scholar Melanie Bayley proposes that Dodgson wrote his books as an attack on the new-fangled mathematics making headway in his day. Dodgson was a conservative geometer, Bayley claims, who was deeply upset by the seemingly arbitrary manipulation of numbers and, especially, figures:

The 19th century was a turbulent time for mathematics, with many new and controversial concepts, like imaginary numbers, becoming widely accepted in the mathematical community. Putting Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in this context, it becomes clear that Dodgson, a stubbornly conservative mathematician, used some of the…  scenes to satirise these radical new ideas.

Bayley points out that, surprisingly (though not really, considering the great divide between the arts and sciences), there are few critical works on Dodgson that take into account the fact that he was a mathematician. Bayley goes a long way toward remedying that situation. Her piece should be a model for literary scholars who turn a blind eye toward science and math when commenting on literature.

Via Slashdot:

“Surendra Pal, associate director of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Satellite Centre says that Chandrayaan-1 picked up signatures of organic matter on parts of the Moon’s surface. ‘The findings are being analyzed and scrutinized for validation by ISRO scientists and peer reviewers,’ Pal said. At a press conference Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union fall conference, scientists from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter also hinted at possible organics locked away in the lunar regolith. When asked directly about the Chandrayaan-1 claim of finding life on the Moon, NASA’s chief lunar scientist, Mike Wargo, certainly did not dismiss the idea.”

The U.S. has long had a secret base on the moon manned by astronaut-spies with telepathic powers. Telepathy is used to communicate with Earth-based controllers in order to avoid detection by foreign powers monitoring radio frequencies.