Machines.  We have been dependent on them throughout human history.  The more advanced we’ve become, the more advanced have our machines become.  In the latter half of the 20th century, we developed computers.   Now, we live much of our lives with, and through, computers and other machines (a computer is really nothing but a machine…an interesting one, for certain, but a machine).  Many people wonder if we really control the machines, or if the machines control us.  I admit to being a fan of the Terminator and Matrix franchises, but I’m not going to tell you if I have any hacking skills until I check with an attorney.

This is the main fragment of the Antikythera Mechanism, believed to be an ancient mechanical computer designed to calculate anastromical postions. This is from about 150-100 BCE. Image by French Wiki User Marsyas, copyrighted, all rights reserved.

Three things have advanced our technology through the last 60 years; greed, war, and space exploration.  “Greed” because if you designed something newer/cooler/better/faster than your competitors, you got rich.  “War” because if your perceived enemy — the dreaded “THEM” — gets ahead of you in technology they can control you.  “Space exploration” because it was there.  No philosophical arguments about greed or war from me (or you, please).  They are with us, and we have to deal with them.  Shall we just accept for today that competitiveness and aggression is in our nature, and move on to what’s really interesting?  I’m talking about space exploration.

This is the IBM AN/FSQ7 (well, part of it). It's ONE computer. Built to detect bombers, it was in operation until 1979. Image by Debbie Vaters

When we were first developing the technology to go into space, I admit I had some serious doubts.  Remember, we’re talking about the very beginning of the 60′s.  If you suppose life then was much as it is now, you are sadly mistaken.  Let me think:  Okay, the telephones weighed five pounds and were permanently affixed to one spot.  There was no caller ID, no answering machines, no call waiting, no texting.  You had a black and white television (maybe) and three channels.  No cable, no satellites, no pocket calculators, no cell phones, and no home computers.  And we’re going to the moon.  Okey dokey.

The Apollo 11 Lunar Module - Taken by Neil Armstrong (that's Buzz Aldrin you see) NASA

Obviously we did it.  And kept doing it.  It cost a lot in money and lives, and not just in the United States.  People all over the world have paid the price, at the time most notably in the USSR and the US.  We did it because we developed the machines to take us where our two feet couldn’t.  A space ship is nothing but a machine designed to move you from one place to another, much like your automobile.  Granted it’s a bit more complicated than this year’s Honda, but the concept is the same.  We can trace our most advanced vehicles, I’d say the space shuttles, way back to the simple cart.  As soon as you get the concept down, and build the first machine for it, you can keep growing and improving from there.

A reproduction of the Model T Ford - PhotoBucket Public Domain image

Operating a machine in space brings on new and exciting challenges, of course.  For one, if your vehicle fails you have a whole boat load of problems in space that you don’t have on the ground.  Beyond that, we’ve now developed machines to go where we can’t go yet.  Our rovers on Mars, the Voyagers, Cassini, Messenger… we have a whole pack of them roaming around out there.  Sure, we have some (very) limited control over them, but basically we’ve designed machines to go out where we can’t and collect specific information for us.

Artist conception of the Spirit Rover on Mars - NASA

That’s the beginning.  That’s the concept.  This is part one of Trudy’s post, and tomorrow we’ll talk about the machines we use in space exploration.

While I was at TAM 8 a breathless story came out claiming that methane erupting from the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico was going to cause a catastrophic global extinction event. I knew the story smelled bad right away^* but was a bit busy at the meeting, so I couldn’t attack it.

Happily, my pal Annalee Newitz at io9 did. She talked to actual experts and found out there simply isn’t enough methane leaking from the oil plume to do much except to the local environment. In my humble opinion, this ecological disaster sucks enough without adding hysteria to it.

Tip o’ the top hat to Rob Sheridan and aeontriad.

On the distinction between yuppies and hippies: Individual differences in prediction biases for planning future tasks.

“The present study investigated variables related to errors in predicting when tasks will be completed. Participants (N = 184) responded to the Time Structure Questionnaire (TSQ; Jones, Banicky, Pomare, & Lasane, 1999) and Temporal Orientation Scale (TOS; Bond & Feather, 1988) and predicted when they would complete either a desirable or undesirable task. Factor analysis of the TSQ and TOS identified two factors: yuppie traits, which involved being hard-working and goal-oriented, and hippie traits that reflected “living for the moment”. Overall, individuals tended to underestimate when they would complete both tasks. However, for the undesirable task, yuppie traits corresponded with less prediction bias whereas hippie traits were associated with greater bias.”

Bonus excerpt from the Introduction:
“Kahneman and Tversky (1979) observed that individuals typically underestimated how much time they needed to complete their projects despite the fact that similar tasks in the past had taken longer than expected. They described this optimistic bias as the “planning fallacy” which subsequent research has shown to occur for predictions about the completion of many different tasks, including honors theses (Buehler, Griffin, & Ross, 1994), word puzzles, tax forms (Buehler, Griffin, & MacDonald, 1997), origami, furniture assembly (Byram, 1997), and computer programming (Connolly & Dean, 1997).”

Thanks to David for today’s ROFL!

Photo: flickr/Wineblat Eugene – Portraits

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It’s what happens to your brain after you’re born that makes you human.

Jason Hill and colleagues were comparing the structure of newborn brains to those of adults when they came upon a striking find, documented this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Clearly, the brain expands greatly as you grow from baby to adult. But the researchers discovered not only that the brain grows in a non-uniform way, but also that the parts of the brain that change most rapidly as people grow up are the same parts that changed the most as humans evolved away from our primate relatives.

The research revealed that brain regions involved in higher cognitive and executive processes—such as language and reasoning—grow about twice as much as regions associated with basic senses such vision and hearing…. “The parts of the [brain] that have grown the most to make us uniquely humans are the same regions that tend to grow the most postnatally,” Hill said [National Geographic].

But why would we be born with brains more like those of the apes? At birth, more basic abilities like the physical senses are more important for survival, the researchers say. Study author David Van Essen also hypothesizes that it could be advantageous for those brain regions to grow once you’re out of the womb, allowing, for instance, the extraordinary capacity of children to pick up language.

Lastly, there’s the more practical side of the birth process:

The limitations on brain size imposed by the need to pass through the mother’s pelvis at birth might also force the brain to prioritize, said study researcher Dr. Terrie Inder, professor of pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine [LiveScience].

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Image: iStockphoto

The bits that make up Earth apparently took their time pulling themselves together. New research hints that our home didn’t form as a fully-fledged planet until 70 million years after its currently accepted birth date, making the planet younger than scientists believed.

The evidence appears in Nature and looks at the Earth’s “accretion”–the swirling together of gas and dust that formed our planet. Researchers previously believed that the Earth’s accretion was a fairly steady process, happening in about 30 million years, but this study suggests that Earth took a lot longer to form.

“The whole issue hinges on working out how long it took for the core of the Earth to form, which is one of the big unknowns in this area of science,” said Dr. John Rudge, one of the authors at the University of Cambridge. “One of the problems has been that scientists usually presume Earth’s accretion happened at an exponentially decreasing rate. We believe that the process may not have been that simple and that it could well have been a much more staggered, stop-start affair.” [The Telegraph]

Specifically, the scientists compared isotopes in our planet’s mantle with those found in meteorites, which are as old as the solar system. The researchers used meteorites as samples of our embryonic planet’s materials, and by comparing the isotopes in these building materials to the final product–the earth’s mantle–they could make several computer models to determine how the planet formed.

After looking at models using different isotopes, the researchers believe that the planet had one great growth spurt (sticking together about two-thirds of the Earth’s current mass) followed by a period of long slow growth. They say the formation could have ended with a walloping by a planet-sized chunk of materials that gave us the last of our mass and also broke off a chunk to form the Moon.

“If correct, [this model] would mean the Earth was about 100 million years in the making altogether,” Dr. Rudge said. “We estimate that makes it about 4.467 billion years old–a mere youngster compared with the 4.537 billion-year-old planet we had previously imagined.” [BBC]

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Image: NASA

I love stuff like this: what would the credits of "Firefly" have been like had the show been made in the 1980s? Pretty much like this:

This was done by Garrison Dean and my bud Charlie Jane Anders from io9.

I saw right away (like many others) that they left off Simon Tam from the credits! So what did they do? In a sense, they apologized but in a freaking brilliant and hilarious way:

Awe. Some. Makes me want to sit down with my DVD set of "Firefly", too. Into the black once more…

Tip o’ the Crazy Ivan to Wil.