Category: Science

New data from the Cassini probe has revealed that Titan is one weird moon. Excerpts:

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The surface of Saturn’s moon Titan may be covered by thick drifts of combustible organic "snow" floating on lakes of liquid methane or water and ammonia ice flows, NASA (news – web sites) scientists said on Friday.

Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California have been poring over new radar and infrared images of Titan taken this week by the Cassini spacecraft in the closest fly-by ever of the smog-covered moon.

The slice of terrain captured by Cassini’s instruments in Tuesday’s fly-by showed sharply contrasting bright and dark areas with sharp and grooved features that scientists believe may be "wrinkle ridges," where the moon’s thin plates collided.

The data also seems to show that Titan could be covered in up to 656 feet of fluffy hydrocarbon "snow" that fell out of the heavy atmosphere. It is still not clear how much of the surface is liquid and how much is solid and whether the "land masses" are ice, scientists said.

"We are beginning to see a few things we recognize, but most of what we see is very alien," geophycist Laurence Soderblom said.

"The surface could be very flammable," scientist Toby Owen said at a Friday briefing. "We can imagine flammable swamps on Titan with liquid methane and flammable aerosols."

Contacted by the Daily Planet, 30th-century superheroine Saturn Girl (who is a native of Titan) said: "There is a reason why we have a planet-wide ban on smoking on my homeworld. If you visit Titan, leave your matches and lighters at home. We still haven’t recovered from the Great Marlboro Disaster."

FIND OUT MORE.

See, they think that there may be comets out there with very low reflectivity, making them hard to spot. Such comets might sneak up on Earth like a stealth bomber sneaking up on an enemy base and then smack into it (the Earth) with planetkilling force.

Since we can’t (yet) see stealth comets, we don’t know how many there may be. Hopefully, there are none, but if there are some then the chances of a planetkilling impact are higher than we’ve previously thought.

Fortunately, scientists have a new tool they hope will "de-cloak" the stealth comets that may be out there sneaking up on us.

GET THE STORY.

No word whether the same tool will work on Klingon or Romulan birds of prey.

Excerpts:

Somewhere in Florida, 25,000 disembodied rat neurons are thinking about flying an F-22.

These neurons are growing on top of a multi-electrode array and form a living “brain” that’s hooked up to a flight simulator on a desktop computer. When information on the simulated aircraft’s horizontal and vertical movements are fed into the brain by stimulating the electrodes, the neurons fire away in patterns that are then used to control its “body” — the simulated aircraft.

Currently the brain has learned enough to be able to control the pitch and roll of the simulated F-22 fighter jet in weather conditions ranging from blue skies to hurricane-force winds. Initially the aircraft drifted, because the brain hadn’t figured out how to control its “body,” but over time the neurons learned to stabilize the aircraft to a straight, level flight.

“Right now the process it’s learning is very simplistic,” said DeMarse. “It’s basically making a decision about whether to move the stick to the left or to the right or forwards and backwards and it learns how much to push the stick depending upon how badly the aircraft is flying.”

The bigger goal is to figure out how neurons talk to each other. MRI scans, for example, show millions of neurons firing together. At that resolution, it is impossible to see what’s happening between individual neurons. While scientists can study neural activities from groups of cells in a dish, they can’t watch them learn and grow as they would within a living body unless the neurons have some kind of body to interact with.

By taking these cells and giving them back a “body,” the researchers hope to uncover how the neurons communicate with each other and eventually translate that knowledge to develop novel computing architecture.

GET THE STORY FROM WIRED.

MORE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA.

And this just in from UNIVERSE TODAY:

In related news, EarthForce defense contractors announced project aimed at creating a powerful “shadow” warship using a human being as its central processing unit.

“We’re very excited about the new shadow ship,” said Gen. Wink Tinkley of EarthForce. “Using a human being as the CPU means a lot more computing than a simulated rat brain has. The only problem we’ve found is that telepaths can interfere with the human’s neural connection with the ship.”

EarthForce contractors also announced the creation of an even more ambitious program which will allow a detachable human as a ship’s CPU. When perfect, this pilot program will allow humans who pilot such ships–known as “pilots”–to live normal lives by being extracted from their ships at the end of missions.

Excerpts:

Somewhere in Florida, 25,000 disembodied rat neurons are thinking about flying an F-22.

These neurons are growing on top of a multi-electrode array and form a living “brain” that’s hooked up to a flight simulator on a desktop computer. When information on the simulated aircraft’s horizontal and vertical movements are fed into the brain by stimulating the electrodes, the neurons fire away in patterns that are then used to control its “body” — the simulated aircraft.

Currently the brain has learned enough to be able to control the pitch and roll of the simulated F-22 fighter jet in weather conditions ranging from blue skies to hurricane-force winds. Initially the aircraft drifted, because the brain hadn’t figured out how to control its “body,” but over time the neurons learned to stabilize the aircraft to a straight, level flight.

“Right now the process it’s learning is very simplistic,” said DeMarse. “It’s basically making a decision about whether to move the stick to the left or to the right or forwards and backwards and it learns how much to push the stick depending upon how badly the aircraft is flying.”

The bigger goal is to figure out how neurons talk to each other. MRI scans, for example, show millions of neurons firing together. At that resolution, it is impossible to see what’s happening between individual neurons. While scientists can study neural activities from groups of cells in a dish, they can’t watch them learn and grow as they would within a living body unless the neurons have some kind of body to interact with.

By taking these cells and giving them back a “body,” the researchers hope to uncover how the neurons communicate with each other and eventually translate that knowledge to develop novel computing architecture.

GET THE STORY FROM WIRED.

MORE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA.

And this just in from UNIVERSE TODAY:

In related news, EarthForce defense contractors announced project aimed at creating a powerful “shadow” warship using a human being as its central processing unit.

“We’re very excited about the new shadow ship,” said Gen. Wink Tinkley of EarthForce. “Using a human being as the CPU means a lot more computing than a simulated rat brain has. The only problem we’ve found is that telepaths can interfere with the human’s neural connection with the ship.”

EarthForce contractors also announced the creation of an even more ambitious program which will allow a detachable human as a ship’s CPU. When perfect, this pilot program will allow humans who pilot such ships–known as “pilots”–to live normal lives by being extracted from their ships at the end of missions.

Say same technique will allow making human zombies.

YOU’RE NEXT!!!

GET THE STORY.

Regarding our recent discussion of deafness and mentalese, a reader writes:

But what about deaf people who don’t know sign language? I recently read an article that claimed a surprising number of deaf people don’t know sign language, or at least don’t know it very well, especially deaf children who grow up with parents who have normal hearing. So how do they think? Or what about deaf people in remote areas who never encounter sign language? They are obviously thinking somehow but what form do the thoughts take?

If a person were totally deprived of language–both spoken, gestural, and anything else one might propose–then the person would have no option but to think in pure mentalese.

That being said, it isn’t clear to me how common completely language-less people are. I question whether they even exist. The language instinct is so strong in humans that the accounts I have read indicate that even deaf people not exposed to a formal sign languages come up with informal signs.

Recently I was reading an account of a deaf man from Mexico who was never exposed to formal signing. This gentleman not only was able to get across the border with the United States, he was able to survive in the Los Angeles area. When he was discovered, he did not know any established language, including sign languages. An effort was made to teach him a sign language, and soon he “made the breakthrough.” Afterwards, he not only was able to describe his prior experience, he also was able to lead those working with him to other non-signing deaf individuals, who were more common than had been known.

These individuals had a network amongst themselves that had previously escaped notice. Despite their lack of conventional language, they had found ways to communicate with each other and often entertained each others with elaborate pantomimes describing their experiences.

This suggests that the language instinct in humans is so strong that even in the absence of exposure to a formal language, they will come up with an informal one.

This suggests that even these individuals may not think in pure mentalese but might have an accompanying “translation” of their thoughts into the informal gestural methods of communication they invent.

It would be fascinating to have better data on this, however.

There’s going to be a total eclipse of the moon tonight, and North America has the best seat in the house for it.

You may be able to catch the eclipse on FOX, as it will occur during the World Series game that FOX is broadcasting.

For full viewing instructions, including when totality will occur in your timezone, as well as background on what a lunar eclipse is, etc., GO HERE.

For those in the continental US, totality (which lasts less than 5 min.) will occur at 7:18 Pacific, 8:18 Mountain, 9:18 Central, and 10:18 Eastern.

Enjoy!

P.S. Unlike an eclipse of the sun, you can look directly at an eclipse of the moon!

Concerning my recent post on Thinking Without Words, a reader writes:

What about people who are deaf from birth? How do they think? Do they make up their own words? Or do they think without words, in a form of mentalese?

Good question!

This is something I was thinking about a while back (actually, about twenty years ago), so I asked one of my cousins, who was born deaf.

He responded that he sees people signing in his head reflecting his internal monologue.

Deaf folks have the same translation reflex that we do, they just translate their mentalese into a gestural language (typically ASL or American Sign Language here in America) rather than into a spoken language (like English).

In a related question that occurred to me, I wondered what people blind from birth associate with colors. It occurred to me that they would likely associate colors with tactile sensations–their minds filling in something they are familiar with (tactile sensations) for something they aren’t familiar with (colors).

So I asked a blind friend and he told me that it was indeed true: He associated the color red with the tactile sensation of heat, the color green with the tactile sensation of handling a dollar bill, and the color yellow with the feeling of touching a little yellow wooden bench he sat on when he was a small child. He hadn’t ever seen these colors, but he formed the tactile substitute impressions for the colors based on what others told him about things having these colors (i.e., things that are “red hot,” “greenbacks,” and in his own case, a yellow child’s bench).

Amazing how the human mind works, isn’t it!

There’s a scene in Bablyon 5 where Capt. Sheridan has just met Lorien–who is the first intelligent being to arise in the history of the universe and who is still alive after all these years.

At the moment, Sheridan is quite distracted by recent events and is unable to appreciate a question Lorien is mulling over. Lorien points out to Sheridan that the Universe began with a Word, but which came first? The Word or the Thought behind it? You can’t have words without thoughts or thoughts without words, so there’s a kind of chicken-vs.-egg situation here.

There are several remarkable things about this scene. One is that it was written by Joe Straczynski, who is an atheist but was nevertheless willing to put on the lips of Lorien (a kind of cosmic Adam) a statement about Creation taken from the Gospel of John. As always, kudos to Joe for being willing to treat religion thoughtfully and respectfully in his fiction.

Another remarkable thing about the scene is that Lorien is wrong.

Oh, sure. You hear his view about the interdependence of thoughts and words articulated a lot, and it can seem prima facie justified: We have an awful hard time thinking without an internal monologue going in our heads. Yet it is still untrue that we can’t think without using words.

There are a variety of ways to show this, though I won’t go through them all here. I will mention two, however.

One is the ability of individuals to clearly think and understand complex realities without the ability to articulate them in words. I recently was reading a book by a cognitive scientist who cited the case of a man who had a stroke while he was sleeping and woke up unable to use language, even in his mind. He later regained his language ability and described his experience vividly. As soon as he woke up, he realized something was wrong. He couldn’t use certain parts of his body, and he quickly deduced that he must have had a stroke during the night. He tried to call out to his wife (who had already gotten out of bed) for help, but couldn’t remember how to use words.

He thus understood the concepts I have had a stroke and I can use words to get help without having the ability to cash out these thoughts in linguistic form.

He was (temporarily) reduced to a state of functioning only in what cognitive scientists call “mentalese”–the “language of the mind,” which we frequently experience with an almost-simultaneous accompanying internal gloss in English (or whatever the language is that we’re thinking in at the moment).

Yet it is possible to think without the gloss. Situations in which we have to think very fast are good for bringing this out, as we may be having to think so fast that we don’t have time to do the gloss that we normally reflexively provide.

Lately I’ve been trying to cultivate an awareness of my own thinking in mentalese, and I’ve found that driving offers a lot of opportunities.

For example, this Saturday I was driving up a particularly narrow, twisty road on a mountainside. The road had lots of intersections, and if a car came whizzing through one of these intersections under the control of a careless drive, it could smack into you in no time flat.

Thus as I drove up the hill, I was very sensitive to the cars that might pop in from the right or the left.

Sure enough, as I was rounding one turn that had an intersection, my peripheral vision caught a car coming right up to the intersection at a high rate of speed. Only having a second to decide whether to slam on the breaks or not, I quickly looked down at the roadsurface of the intersection to see if there was a white line at the intersection, blocking the car’s path and signalling it to stop. I realized that if there was a white line that the driver of the other car would be legally required to stop and, unless he was extraordinarily careless, he would stop, meaning that the risk of a collision was low enough that I shouldn’t swerve dramatically or slam on the breaks (which are themselves risky moves in such an environment). I saw that there was such a white line, kept driving, and the other car stopped.

I thought all of this–the need for the white line, its legal implications, its probable implications for the other car stopping, and the ensuing implications for what I needed to do as a driver–in under a second and didn’t have time to cash it out in words.

It was a moment of pure mentalese.

It took me a lot longer just now to articulate in words what happend than it took me to think it all as it happened when unencumbered by words.

And that’s the way it tends to work: We first reason through a situation very fast in mentalese and, upon having a particular insight, we start reflexively cashing it out in words in our internal monologues–unless events (like driving in a complex environment) force us to think about other things. This reflexive translation of mentalese into a verbal language is what generates the illusion that words and thoughts are mutually dependent on each other.

They aren’t.

You know those cool robots they have now?

A friend of mine has one that cleans the pool in her back yard.

I’ve toyed with the idea of getting one of those carpet cleaning robots.

Some people have lawn mowers that work the same way.

But robots don’t have to move from place to place in order to count as robots. The assembly-line robots in Detroit auto plants, for example, are fixed in one spot.

This got me to thinking: What exactly is a robot? Unless we artificially restrict the term to meaning “android” (i.e., a man-shaped robot) then they seem to be any device that, while activated, automatically performs a task that used to be performed by human effort. (See Wikipedia’s entry for more.)

So I started thinking: I’ve got this tall, oscillating fan in my bedroom. Is it a robot?

They’ve had fans for centuries, but not automatic ones. Before this century you either used a small hand fan to fan yourself (as one sometimes still does) or you had a servant use a large fan to cool a whole room. (Y’know, like in all those movies where Egyptian rulers are being fanned with the big, feathered fans.)

The oscillating fans we use today perform this function without the use of human labor.

That seems to make them robots.

Dish washers and washing machines seem to be, too. People used to (and sometimes still do) perform those tasks by hand.

HERE’S A STORY SAYING ROBOT USAGE IS EXPECTED TO SURGE SEVEN-FOLD BY 2007.

It seems to me that the robots are already here. They infiltrated our society a long time ago.

In preparation for the Robot Uprising.

I’m going to be sleeping lightly tonight.

I’ve got a robot in my bedroom.