All Hail Trisolaris

Shout out to one of the most epic scifi novels I've read in a while, The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin (and perhaps the first major Chinese scifi novel to be translated into English).

The book is about a race of people that live on a world of more than one sun called Trisolaris, which sucks, so they want Earth. The thing about the three body problem, or living on a world with more than one sun, is that it's really hard to predict what's going to happen next - do we get one day of 5,000 degree heat because one sun is too close or 5,000 years of subzero temperatures because all the suns are too far away.

Trisolarians dehydrate themselves and roll up like a piece of paper so they can't be damaged as easily, and they get stored in a big old pyramid for a hundred or a thousand years until it's safe to come back out again. The book is well written, full of hyperbolic machinations, and supertight on the physics. If you haven't already, see what's in the mind of a Chinese scifi writer (as a Westerner raised on Western scifi and Western ideologies, it's very eye-opening and refreshing to read something like this).

Also, how could I forget, they make a human computer, with hundreds of thousands of living people, all performing calculations together to crack the three body problem that plagues their civilization...

And so, in conclusion, this goes out to Cixin Liu:

16-million-year-old planet with three suns discovered

USA Today, July 2016

Tiny 'water bears' can teach us about survival
Mar 2019, phys.org


When the going gets tough for tardigrades, they curl up, dry out and wait. Then, when the environment gets better and they get water, they spring back to life.

Xenophiles Among Us

The potato is not indigenous to Ireland.

Just what you thought; almost all of our food comes from other places in the world. Here we find out that so many foods in the world are indigenous to somewhere else. I mean, you knew that already – tomatoes are not from Italy, and so on. Consider national identities via cuisine as similar to conceptions of self: you do not exist; you are instead a combination of others. What does it mean for a food to be Italian or Chinese. Ahh, to label and categorize.

Let us not forget that every atom in our little world was forged in a massive stellar furnace and propagated throughout the universe in a spacetime-crippling explosion. The very concepts of foreign, indigenous; of self and other; are all constructions of our minds, and like a rainbow that seems to get further away the closer we approach, they fall apart under increasing scrutiny.

'Foreign' crops dominate national food consumption and farming practices worldwide

phys.org, June 2016

Advancements in Paint

The Blue Morpho Butterfly; its color comes not from the pigments on its wings, but from the way the light refracts on the microstructures of its wings (see image below).

I really like the sound of plasmonic pixels. But let’s not forget the biomimetic method of structural color vs. chemicals and pigments. The Morpho butterfly is an example where the colors are not a matter of surface treatment but of the structure of the wings themselves. They refract light differently to create a colorful pattern, although the wing is really all the same “color.”

Plasmonic pixels could be used to make non-fading paint

phys.org, Jun 2016

This shows how the structures on the surface of the wings create the different colors.

Post Script:

Here’s a book about where color came from:

The Color Revolution, Regina Lee Blaszczyk, MIT Press 2012

And here’s my review

Microbial Collective Memory and the Future of Human Sociothermodynamics

stickers communicating with each other

I guess the easiest way to describe this is “distributed memory?” I’ll cut directly from the article:

“When an entire population is observed, rather than individual cells, the bacteria appear to develop a kind of collective memory. In populations exposed to a warning event, survival rates upon a second exposure two hours after the warning are higher than in populations not previously exposed. Using computational modelling, the scientists explained this phenomenon in terms of a combination of two factors. Firstly, salt stress causes a delay in cell division, leading to synchronization of cell cycles; secondly, survival probability depends on the individual bacterial cell's position in the cell cycle at the time of the second exposure. As a result of the cell cycle synchronization, the sensitivity of the population changes over time. Previously exposed populations may be more tolerant to future stress events, but they may sometimes even be more sensitive than populations with no previous exposure.”

So what this is saying is that the population has a memory. Not the individual cells, but the population as a whole. In other words, a collective memory, distributed, remembers what happened last time, and behaves accordingly. Behaves? Cells don’t behave, or at least we don’t normally say things like that. But alas, cells – plural – behave.

In the trendy field of sociothermodynamics, people are treated not even like cells but like molecules bouncing around. This idea of a collective memory changes the way we may think about these “molecules.” It seems kind of silly, we know humans have memory – individual memories inside our brains and a form of collective memory in the form of … cultural products, i.e., art, architecture, writing, etc.? – and we have theories about collective memory and the Noosphere, via Carl Jung and Tielhard de Chardin. But there’s no real metrics behind this stuff, it’s all theory. For now. Combining models of sociothermodynamics with the kind of work presented above may shed new light on human behavior, we’ll see.

Notes:

Collective memory in bacteria

March 2016, phys.org

Interlinks to things about the Noosphere and such:

SATURDAY, AUGUST 4, 2012

Decision-making, Public Oversight, and Privatization

THURSDAY, MARCH 14, 2013

The Macro Image Series and the Dematerialization of Artifact

THURSDAY, APRIL 18, 2013

Socio-Thermodynamics

WEDNESDAY, JULY 27, 2011

Civilization and the Noosphere as Zoological/Taxonomical Extension:

Beyond the Physical Horizon

This is a visual representation of the internet. Image source

Worldwide quantum web may be possible with help from graphs

phys.org, June 2016

Sometimes when I think about Kuhn’s paradigm shifts in science, I wonder if physics will ever be supplanted by something else, especially when considering that we are in the Information Age, one pivot away from the Industrial Age. Is information ultimately physical, or does it transcend the physical? Can information exist apart from the physical world?

Back on track, we have here in this mention of a quantum web is a glimpse of a potential future where network science (part graph science) is the new edge of science.

In this new study, thinking about quantum networks in light of abstract mathematical graphs really optimizes the architecture of the network. (A Scientist in the article declares that “a network is a physical system,” by the way.)

Notes:

Albert-László Barabási, head of Barabási Labs and author of two major books on network science as well as a full textbook on the subject:

Bursts: The Hidden Patterns Behind Everything We Do, from Your E-mail to Bloody Crusades, 2011

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life, c.2001

Network Science [the textbook]

Inter-links from Network Address:

-on Barabási’s Bursts

Current News in Network Science (aka Connection Science?)

Using data from social networks to understand and improve systems

April 2016, phys.org

Flat Earth Hate

Extra sensory perception, screenshot search results

Rats learn to sense infrared in hours thanks to brain implants

New Scientist, March 2016

“Rat brains quickly adapted to use data from four infrared sensors, allowing them to "see" in the dark and paving the way for augmenting the human brain.”

And what's next? Gravity sensors? jk

Graphomania

infinityenvisioned.com 

Scientists invent robotic 'artist' that spray paints giant murals

April 2016, phys.org

Though the method currently only supports painting on flat surfaces, one potential benefit of the new technique over standard printing is that it may be usable on more complicated, curved painting surfaces.