An elegant medium, for a civilized age

Last summer, Science published a study from researchers at Harvard who had successfully encoded bits of digital information in strands of DNA. A few days ago, another paper was published demonstrating that researchers had done it again, this time having improved the accuracy, capacity and efficiency of the technique. This recent experiment successfully converted 739 kilobytes of digital data into genetic code, which was then retrieved without a single error. Among the information translated was the entire collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Anyway, it got me thinking about the sonnets and inspired me to revisit several of them. And I am so glad I did because golly they’re good. Four hundred years of distance and they're still relevant. One of them, Sonnet 55, especially stands out to me in light of all of the current public discussions about The Information. It recalls another way of preserving and imparting information... an age-old method, both accessible and powerful. And unlike other media used for recording information, it is not static. In fact, I would say that it is persistent precisely because of its mutability. It is adaptable and interpretive and imperfect. It can't be buried or owned or pinned down. And because of this, it can link people through time and space. What I'm talking about is language.

LV
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents 
Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn

The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity

Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room

Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.

- William Shakespeare

I appreciate the reminder to get out and play today.

Check out the awesomeness of this sledding crow.

That Elusive Higgs Boson

Tomorrow at CERN, researchers will announce their latest findings in the search for the last undiscovered particle in the current model of subatomic particles – the Higgs boson. Canadian researchers have a big role in one of the two experiments involved. Perimeter Institute is holding a webinar to discuss the results tomorrow at 12:30 ET http://goo.gl/8kJG0. Also, in Vancouver, TRIUMF will host a public seminar in its auditorium at 2:30 p.m. PT [http://goo.gl/g9YQG].

Why the head should know how the tail is behaving

The next issue of Science News has a good article on predicting financial risk. It covers how traditional models of estimating risk are missing a lot by discounting rare, freak events in their calculations. Gaussian distribution models fail to account for the outliers (the long tail of a probability distribution) that can drastically alter market behaviour. Although a normal distribution model does account for a lot of economic activity, it ignores the rare large freak events, so it doesn’t fully capture reality. Which is where power law models come in.

“Long tails are a mathematical clue that a different kind of behavior may be at play, one that physicists have long been fascinated by. When data follow what is called a power law distribution, the outlandish data points that generate the tail aren’t aberrant freaks; they fit right in.”

Gaussian distribution and power law regimes will predict fairly similar outcomes for unlikely but possible events, such as an event with a one-in-a-hundred likelihood of occurring. But for highly unlikely events, such as a one-in-ten-thousand event, the two models deliver hugely different predictions. The differences can’t be ignored. The article points out that most economists think that current models are too simplistic, but the challenge remains how to reconcile freak occurrences with traditional models based on stability.

La vie est ailleurs

If you haven't yet discovered the most awesome World Science Festival website, I highly recommend you put your evening plans on hold and spend a good few hours checking it out. One of the more recent videos is a three-minute explanation of the Holographic Principle -- the idea that a volume of space, or maybe even the entire universe, can be described as a holographic projection of information encoded elsewhere in a two-dimensional surrounding boundary. Kind of puts a new spin on the old adage, "Life is elsewhere."

http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/2011/08/what_is_the_holographic_principle/

Work-Life Fusion

Doing some research on 20th century art and artists this weekend, I came across some cool photos of Ray and Charles Eames, the great 20th century designers. The couple did some pretty extraordinary work together, even beyond architecture and design, and I was delighted to find their short documentary Powers of Ten (1968) available online.

Narrated by Philip Morrison, the film is a neat examination of perspective, showing the relative scale of the cosmos by factors of ten, from the view of our human world, to the expanse of the observable universe, to up close and personal with a proton.

And for those of you who prefer a more tactile approach to scaling the universe, there's also the Powers of Ten flipbook, which has the special advantage of allowing you to set your own transition pace. Of course it's very easy nowadays to access cool NASA videos of outer space phenomena, but in 1968, when the Eames' film was released, depictions of the universe weren't so prevalent. Nor were extraordinary designing couples like Ray and Charles. So -- today -- as I was reading about this most innovative couple, I was surprised to discover this in their biographical info: They died ten years apart to the day. That day was today, August 21.

I, for one, welcome our new cartographer overlords

So an article was published yesterday in a few journals profiling recent findings by Australian researchers that have developed lingodroids — robots designed to explore, map out, and name places in their environment. The mobile robots were equipped with surveillance apparel (camera, laser, sonar), a syllabary, and technology that enables them 'speak' their invented words to each other. What the researchers found is that they took to socializing — sharing their made-up words and confirming their linguistic agreement by playing several hundred games to demonstrate their mutual understanding.

Amazing as this all is, I do think the suggestion that the robots have invented a language is questionable; a better description is that they are developing a lexicon. Whether that grows into a language with verbs (expressing descriptions of time, which is more than just nominal descriptions of space) is another question. If so, just wait until they develop syntax and inflection. Despite the hype about the language, though, the "spoken words" documented in this study do seem like a byproduct of the robots' spatial calculations, facilitated by the technology that enables them to make sound, and then reinforced by trial and error identification. What is really cool about this experiment, though, is that the robots invented names (and several of them) for places that they couldn’t explore. For some reason, the article includes this as parenthetical information, but it seems to me that that is mindblowingly sophisticated. The robots' capacity to create and corroborate identities for locations other than where they are physically situated — mapping the elsewhere, so to speak — suggests that they have some 'awareness' not only of each other, but of each other's abilities to detect the world beyond their immediate physical environment.