Sunday, 23 June 2013
Saturday, 11 May 2013
homity
I thought about what is cool virtual world he was saying to Judy, Jarrod, by you. Too, Steve, so much. But we are very real environmental material in a way that you were fired for Facebook, it became obsolete imagine network cyber space by itself.
I have to scroll to the top of this issue, I highly and I am glad to find that it started on the 1st January 2013. Judy wrote:
"You guys, when you leave it to you to take the night of 3 crystals before leaving the series I will not be able to make tonight the night together. Cakes I also had a fridge You can then ends with"
Please be patient. It is followed by the substances 131 days now. Unlike the concept of chat rooms to 90, but if you do not, it's strange, and technology, it is quite different in reality. But you know you're dealing with four others in the group when we used it with this stuff. It is sometimes, but you can use it, keep the forum itself. I will be able to ask questions about monster hunter especially, for some reason, somehow I Jarrod, Steve something where you have to choose to do it in a forum that you know he is accessible and Judy. I do not know how well!
For some reason, there is no difference in substance between one random scene is all, there is something pending more information on this topic. I wonder how long it be or. Now I practice with these cybermicroethnography believe you do not want to disrupt the process I am. So I did not comment on the content Facebook life into this thread. I want to see it evolve naturally.
This is a clear knowledge of David. Because it is a service to another, this channel of communication that differs with messenger function, on Facebook, by this time you and I - just to show you - I'm weird, why is that. Curious features in another. We used to sell these things like instant messenger only, but this conversation is basically the same as Facebook content including 5 really ours, but that's just us.
5 Ways, this type of communication with friends over and over again to find the story, but I think how strange that this part listed as follows. It's like being a member of any Senate or Rome you.
I write in Notepad. Until this moment, no letter paragraphs, I went to copy this paragraph Messenger, but then I thought about what it would sound like on the phone. So I sent him an email.
I want to add me: P: filter completely, not changes at the end of the message read:
"Note: I write in Notepad, where present, the messenger, letter paragraphs, filtering is not fully editable, going to copy this paragraph, e-mail me the idea is that you can bring to them, what would sound like on the phone .. '.
However, it is, but I have to be honest it is known to be written in a new window pop-up and a little Google was like five minutes after he wrote the original message. Since I did not know if you are using e-mail, you can strengthen contacts in Google something, I clicked the button to send. In any case, it was not from Notepad.
Tuesday, 16 April 2013
Picture that we have, the ice in the northern hemisphere, and vice versa 1 and replace the current southern hemisphere - It will say the earth exotic cosmic ray experiment 2nd This contact with each other in the world. How did you develop geopolitical world?
(Miracles do not hurt) if left, I could not decide whether to repeat or indigenous directly. Appeal.
I call on the card.
People all of the above people and civilization of the world was exactly the opposite case, it would be very strange.
As it will be the same back on each side only. Two of the same name running contact equator in exactly the same way, it is. Both methods, crashed into each other in the same way as the equator. They will try to talk to each other, if they do it at the same time. When shooting each other, I've met a shot equatorial atmosphere.
Interacting with many offspring came, it goes without saying.
 |
| According to the wiki, I have 10-12% of the world population in the southern hemisphere. Suddenly the ground 000 700 000th It's much less space, have a lot of infrastructure that has advanced to a relatively high level of standards of living in the South World. |
 |
| One meaning of this is that I South World advanced society is that you can see a more even and uniform. Between eliminate world hunger, Brazil, South Africa, South Africa, from Australia, I have a good foundation for international government and maybe. |
Each binary world unity and cooperation with the North? Hard to say.
Probably of salt in the northern Indian Ocean in the world. Red Sea can be toxic.
Why not?
It would be a very confusing time. People in France and distinguish between the North and the South of France people. Southern Sudan and South Sudan's north and south. North Korea North and South and North Korea.
I will garuntee unity between North Korea and the United Nations.
Panama Canal and Canals G must return and more than 500%.
To dig a channel to drive in Nicaragua, is currently working on.
As the neighborhood to see the tame, 1990, Congo and Central African disolves.
Currently, the Falkland Islands to Argentina. At least in the South-inch
In addition, South Korea without nuclear weapons, just for a moment. That is, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa's reserves of uranium in a nuclear reactor weaponizes only a matter of time.
 |
| Of course, the world is a great cultural loss are witnessing - extinct in North America, China, Europe, and others have become legendary. For hundreds of years, people have North Korea if you can find the ruins of Europe under the sea one day, or will ever really had. |
 |
| I think I will spend some time to think what would happen in the north, it will take some time to think it will be just a shit show. The world's population doubled immediately, many of the / person / country people, even if you do you will feel very right. |
So we had a glacier in global warming era rampant in the north and south of the world. The weather can be unpredictable terrain can be, crazy Southern Ocean to absorb CO2 while producing too many world is much smaller or sea, a lot of energy now generally swallowed, taking a lot of heat and dust on albedo.
How does this effect did not bring them.
You should consider legal Antarcticas.
North and the world, I think this means the foundations of the earth, when I bad is going to be soon.
He knows the northern southern hemisphere warm them and helped cooling in the northern part of the continent, the largest of the Antarctic continent and more to the south in the northern hemisphere.
Broken almost immediately by all currents not, can this be happening in the southern hemisphere, I is not catastrophic. Now, starting with the main cooling in Europe at the equator, you are in the north are not bringing the most heat. Current region will not be able to fall flat ocean low dead reoxygenated grow from the ocean floor, moving slowly going.
Now, were both killed on the beach if you want to change a few species, Permian extinction event greatly from continent dangerous gases and cooling Dead Sea several billion pollution degradation of marine organisms, especially I have.
I hope after all CO2 from the northern hemisphere, and most needed, I will be able to increase production, and their temporary ice age.
Climate, in most cases you can find something worse happens, it is not easy to fix. May be contaminated with a lot of sea dumping of corruption sulphide gas pump in atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases Imakita uncomfortable landing place, the atmosphere is already very.
 |
| Moreover, from the perspective of language, become de facto language of the world? English? Spanish? In this scenario, removing all language groups. But imagine the situation as a "World Language" as Latin so, and have been the amount of the payment Academy English language scholarly use my fast, fade eventually maybe I should could not. |
 |
| I'm particularly interested in what happens in my USAS between them. I can see the northern part of South America, and one of the brand identity and nation. I, North America, Mexico, the South to see and try to influence her. Because it is a "minister" overlap that has been created, it is, I wonder if it is possible in the Nordic ground to maintain legitimacy. |
Saturday, 6 April 2013
Me: But think about how Siri has easter egg, where the song "Daisy, Daisy". Same thing with Ponzi. We're creating imaginary worlds described in our
Dave: HAL handles the crew crazy ways
Me: I've always been this funny hilarious people to administrative commands to sing this song forever now
I would not mind the voice of HAL AI home
Dave: terrorize fuck me
Me: I started recording "BC too abstract for me" tonight is sweet The singing
Dave: remember the title, but I can not remember how it goes .. Can not wait to hear
Dave: Dude, I know it gets a lot of publicity, but the Evil Wild violated seriously, if you have checked out. Walter White is one of the best characters ever fucked.
Me: I watched the first two seasons. How many are there?
Dave: 5 Gets off the hook.
Me: Yes, and I hope you check it out. You should watch a soprano
Dave: Yes, I want to
Me: It should be handed over to the Americans, because it makes good TV
Way than anyone else. UK has some good performances, but in fact
Dave: Yeah, I totally agree. Especially recently.
Me: If I die when I'm 65 will be the 2054th You can too. This is stupid.
Everything is still so stupid
Even if you do not want to die 65
2054 as in 1954. I was born in 2089
Dave: Yeah, it's like 1910 is these days. I wonder what life 1000 years from now may be the case. I believe it will not kill yourself over the next 1000 years, but you know that it's really hard to say
Me: I have confidence in all the people at least a few thousand years. Not so, we have
I just hate to see all the options, but I will not be able to see updated
2113 to 2013 and set BioShock will be retro
Dave: Yes, it is a thing of the shittiest life, and be remote in this story is very interesting for a short time only scratched the surface area, how crazy is really what
Me: especially if you really care more about the story of long-term humanitarian assistance to his personal life.
Dave: Yeah, man you feel. I let the speculation.
Trrrrreeeeeeeetawwwww!
Me: I feel, 21 century it did me: me. I see now exactly 20 as a historical period. I feel that I want to keep the two perspectives - the man who was born in 1989 and is fully in line with the culture of this century, one where the entire 1901 to 2001 is the date and the Soviet Union may have and the Ottoman Empire
But I'm very jealous of the kids who were born in the decade of 2000, can claim to be completely different cultural legitmately world that produced the world wars
Dave: Yeah, I can not imagine how it must feel for children who were born after 2000. I feel that you will feel a slight difference between generations of crew members.
Me: I do not already, and do not exceed the maximum 13 years at this stage. We are still in the old mindset. We were lucky to have a dual perspective, but also to defend the little
But then, the children born in the decade of 2020 to several important changes that protrude from the children born to zero. It's just a matter of centuries, and I know it is national, but the base 10 has a lot of weight for me
Aion is a good way to study human
Tuesday, 21 June 2011
How Hominids holds up part 1: the science
Robert J Sawyer is one of the greatest living science fiction authors. His 2002 novel Hominids is one of my favourite novels of all time. You might call Hominids the grand-daddy of alternate history stories. I don't mean that in the sense that it represents an early example of the genre, but in the sense that the story's point-of-divergence from our own timeline takes places significantly further back in time than what you would normally find in alternative history. The setting of Hominids alternates between two parallel universes. One is our own; the other is a timeline which diverged from our own approximately 40 000 years ago. This divergent timeline is populated by an advanced technological civilization of Neanderthals. The first of a trilogy, Hominids tells the story of Ponter Boddit, a Neanderthal quantum physicist who is trapped in our universe due to a freak accident. The novel explores the science of paleoanthropology and what it means to be human through an elaborately designed Neanderthal universe with a fleshed out technological culture, legal system and a unique mating system/sexuality.
I was rereading the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy recently and I was struck by how applicable many of the novel's themes are to life in 2011. Issues such as the loss of privacy, surveillance and tracking, the role of religion in a modern society and even what constitutes a socially sanctioned "family" are all explored through a paleoanthropological lens. Sawyer often remarks that science fiction is really about the present and so its no surprise to find him exploring these ideas. His latest book (also a part of a trilogy) takes these ideas further and is probably more directly applicable to contemporary society, but you can see that a lot of the topics explored in his WWW trilogy are also present in Hominids, just examined differently.
Before I go to town with my interpretation of these topics, I would like to mentioned why this Hugo Award-winning book is one of my favourites. Recommended to me by a science teacher in seventh grade after I expressed an interest in human evolution, the novel got me thinking for the first time about many of the same things I do today - evolutionary biology, religion, the role technology plays in shaping culture and the nature of human cognition. Up until that point in my life, my main concerns were my daily struggles to figure out my identity in the context of my peer group. I was always trying to ascertain my relative position within the elaborate social hierarchy of my school. Once I read Hominids, my self-analysis became much broader in scope. Instead of spending so much time thinking about the minutiae of seventh-grade life, I often found myself deep in thought trying to understand my identity in the context of humanity (which is a much more interesting question in my opinion). Just what does it mean to be a human? I'm still working on that one.
Since the book is approaching 10 years of age, I thought it would be fun to go over some of the details of the trilogy to demonstrate the relevance of the work in 2011. In this first post I'm gonna talk almost exclusively about the paleoanthropological science present in Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids. My next two posts will focus on the technological culture Sawyer has created for the Neanderthals and the role of religion/spirituality in contemporary society, respectively.
Today in 2011, we know a great deal more about the Neanderthals than we did in 2002, though many of the details of their lives remain mysterious. Before we take a look at any Neanderthal stuff in particular, let's take a look at our picture of the human family tree, both as it was in 2002 and today. In 2002, we would have (more or less) considered the following to be the only members of the "Homo" genus:
The reason I bring up the number of shared base-pairs among modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans is that the findings have flown in the face of what Sawyer postulated in Hominids, demonstrating the amount of progress made in paleoanthropology in less than 10 years. At the time of Hominids' publication, it was science fiction (literally) that anyone would be able to perform genetic analysis with such precision. Consider the following excerpt from Hominids, which details the "Vaughan method" of DNA extraction using the PCR (polymerase chain reaction):
I apologize from the very long excerpt, but I felt cutting anything out of the passage would have been at the expense of context and clarity. As you can see, Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax operates around the assumption that Neandethals and humans were too genetically different from each other to have interbred and produced fertile offspring. Note that the trilogy explicitly states that the lack of interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans is a result of genetic incompatibility. Without spoiling any details, I will add that a major element of the trilogy's plot revolves around the impossibility of combining human and Neanderthal genomes without sophisticated technological intervention. Just go read the books!
Recently, however, the Net has been buzzing with headlines proclaiming that 1-4% of our genomes (sort of - read on) comes from Neanderthals. Though Sawyer made a well-reasoned, well-educated conjecture about the compatibility of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens sapiens genetic material, it turns out both that Neanderthal/modern human interbreeding did indeed occur and that children of such couplings were fully capable of reproduction (without advanced technological intervention). In fact, it's not really even appropriate to say "Neanderthal/modern human breeding" since some modern humans are in fact, Neanderthals, at least in the strictest sense of the word.
These findings have drastically reshaped the way we have to think about the chronology of human evolution. I should have specified earlier that the 1-4% of DNA that is Neanderthal only seems to be present in populations other than those of sub-Saharan Africa. Interestingly, this amount of Neanderthal present in modern populations is equally dispersed amongst people from Europe and Asia, meaning there is equal amounts of Neanderthal DNA in a French person as there is in a Chinese person. This suggests that interbreeding occurred before we had diverged into the many racial groups which span the area from western Europe to the far east, around 80 000 years ago. Richard Green et al. have presented four possible scenarios which describe the connection between modern humans and Neanderthals, but write that "gene flow between Neandertals and the ancestors of all non-Africans" to be the most consistent with their data. You can see the paper here and read the abstract here. Links are also on the bottom.
The real interesting question now is what exactly that 1-4% of Neanderthal DNA does, if anything. There is some exciting evidence to show that the transfer of certain human leukocyte antigen (HLA) alleles, presented by Peter Parham. The HLA system plays a major role in the human immune system, and the basic gist of Parham's hypothesis is that by acquiring HLA alleles from Neanderthals after hundreds of thousands of years of isolation and natural selection, modern humans were able to give their immune systems a boost to protect against dangerous pathogens localised to the new environments which were being explored by our ancestors.
This is an exciting idea and raises many scientific and philosophical questions. John Hawks disagrees that the common HLA alleles are definitive signs of interbreeding, but whatever the case, the fact that we are able to find so much info about the Neanderthal genome is very exciting and could provide us with great insight into the history of our species' great success.
Some readers might feel that the fact that the plot of Hominids doesn't hold up to the contemporary science detracts from the book, but I disagree. First of all, most science fiction does not stand the test of time and works that were taken very seriously as predictions of the future now seem slightly ridiculous in retrospect. Consider the level of technological sophistication supposedly present around the turn of the century in Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey. The fact that the science in the book doesn't correspond with real-world findings is only to be expected (eventually) and doesn't detract from the book or make it irrelevant. Even with these little inconsistencies, Hominids is still probably the most paleoanthropologically informative novel you will ever read.
A second and more important reason that Hominids is still relevant is the social commentary. As I mentioned before, Robert J. Sawyer has often commented that science fiction is really about the present as much as it is about the future. With this in mind I think an examination of the culture he's created in Hominids provides valuable insight into the possible consequences of several current trends, such as global access to information, the role of spirituality in a increasingly secular world, the merits of a technocratic society and most saliently, the lack of privacy that comes along with being connected to a global network at all times. Some people believe the lack of privacy is an inevitability of technological progress, exemplified by Scott McNealy's reality check "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." Others think that the key to keeping the Internet "free" (speech, not beer. That would be nice though) is to promote personal privacy, anonymity and decentralisation. These are the kinds of people who would sooner keep their data in a vault than in "the cloud" (an expression I despise).
In my next post I'm going to talk about the Neanderthal world Sawyer has created and discuss whether or not the kind of society he presents is realistic, feasible or even desirable in our world. Though Sawyer was careful to not make the Neanderthal world "perfect", his Neanderthal society is a pretty thinly-veiled metaphor for what I assume to be Sawyer's personal vision of a technological Utopia. In a third and final post about the Neanderthal Parallax, I'll also take a stab at Sawyer's vision of the place of human spirituality and religion in a technological society. It seems we may have a lot to learn from cavemen.
References:
Robert J. Sawyer's webpage - www.sfwriter.com
Richard Green et al. "A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome"
Before I go to town with my interpretation of these topics, I would like to mentioned why this Hugo Award-winning book is one of my favourites. Recommended to me by a science teacher in seventh grade after I expressed an interest in human evolution, the novel got me thinking for the first time about many of the same things I do today - evolutionary biology, religion, the role technology plays in shaping culture and the nature of human cognition. Up until that point in my life, my main concerns were my daily struggles to figure out my identity in the context of my peer group. I was always trying to ascertain my relative position within the elaborate social hierarchy of my school. Once I read Hominids, my self-analysis became much broader in scope. Instead of spending so much time thinking about the minutiae of seventh-grade life, I often found myself deep in thought trying to understand my identity in the context of humanity (which is a much more interesting question in my opinion). Just what does it mean to be a human? I'm still working on that one.
Since the book is approaching 10 years of age, I thought it would be fun to go over some of the details of the trilogy to demonstrate the relevance of the work in 2011. In this first post I'm gonna talk almost exclusively about the paleoanthropological science present in Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids. My next two posts will focus on the technological culture Sawyer has created for the Neanderthals and the role of religion/spirituality in contemporary society, respectively.
Today in 2011, we know a great deal more about the Neanderthals than we did in 2002, though many of the details of their lives remain mysterious. Before we take a look at any Neanderthal stuff in particular, let's take a look at our picture of the human family tree, both as it was in 2002 and today. In 2002, we would have (more or less) considered the following to be the only members of the "Homo" genus:
- Homo rudolfensis
- Homo habilis
- Homo ergaster
- Homo erectus
- Homo heidelbergensis
- Homo neanderthalensis
- Homo sapiens
- Homo gautenengis
- Homo georgicus
- Homo floresiensis (the famous "hobbits")
 | |
| Denisovan tooth |
 |
| Homo floresiensis skull - I think I would have enjoyed the Floresiensis parallax |
The reason I bring up the number of shared base-pairs among modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans is that the findings have flown in the face of what Sawyer postulated in Hominids, demonstrating the amount of progress made in paleoanthropology in less than 10 years. At the time of Hominids' publication, it was science fiction (literally) that anyone would be able to perform genetic analysis with such precision. Consider the following excerpt from Hominids, which details the "Vaughan method" of DNA extraction using the PCR (polymerase chain reaction):
In 1994, Mary had made a name for herself recovering genetic material from a 30,000-year-old bear found frozen in Yukon permafrost. And so, two years laters, when the Rheinisches Amt für Bodendenkmalpflege - the agency responsible for archeology in the Rhinelands - decided it wa time to see whether any DNA could be extracted from the most famous fossil of all, the original Neanderthal man, they called on Mary. She'd been dubious: that specimen was desiccated, having never been frozen and - opinions varied - it might be as old as 100,000 years, three times the age of the bear. Still the challenge was irresistible. In June 1996, she'd flown to Bonn, then headed to the Rheinisches Landesmuseum, where the specimen was housed.
The best known part - the browridged skullcap - was on public display, but the rest of the bones were kept in a steel box, within a steel cabinet, inside a room-sized steel vault. Mary was led into the safe by a German bone preparator named Hans. They wore protective plastic suits and surgeons' masks; every precaution had to be taken against contaminating the bones with their own modern DNA. Yes, the original discoverers had doubtless contaminated the bones - but after a century and a half, their unprotected DNA on the surface should have degraded completely.
Mary could only take a very small piece of bone; the priests at Turin guarded their shroud with equal jealousy. Still, it was extraordinarily difficult for both her and Hans - like desecrating a great work of art. Mary found herself wiping away tears as Hans used a goldsmith's saw to cut a semicircular chunk, just a centimeter wide and weighing only three grams, from the right humerus, the best preserved of all the bones.
The hard calcium carbonate in the outer layers of the bone should have afforded some protection for any of the original DNA within. Mary to the specimen back to her lab in Toronto and drilled tiny pieces out of it.
It took five months of painstaking work to extract a 379-nucleotide snippet from the control region of the Neanderthal's mitochondrial DNA. Mary had used the polymerase chain reaction to reproduce millions of copies of the recovered DNA, and she carefully sequenced it. She then checked the corresponding bit of mitochondrial DNA in 1,600 modern humans: Native Canadians, Polynesians, Australians, Africans, Asians and Europeans. Every one of those 1,600 people had at least 371 nucleotides out of those 379 the same; the maximum deviation was just eight nucleotides.
But the Neanderthal DNA had an average of only 352 nucleotides in common with the modern specimens; it deviated by a whopping twenty-seven bases. Mary concluded that her kind of human and Neanderthals must have diverged from each other between 550,000 and 690,000 years ago for their DNA to be so different. In contrast, all modern humans probably shared a common ancestor 150,000 or 200,000 years in the past. Although the half-million-year-plus date for the Neanderthal/modern divergence was much more recent than the split between the genus Homo and its closest relatives, the chimps and bonobos, which occurred five to eight million years ago, it was still far enough back that Mary felt Neanderthals were probably a fully separate species from modern humans, not just a subspecies: Homo neanderthalensis, not Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.
I apologize from the very long excerpt, but I felt cutting anything out of the passage would have been at the expense of context and clarity. As you can see, Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax operates around the assumption that Neandethals and humans were too genetically different from each other to have interbred and produced fertile offspring. Note that the trilogy explicitly states that the lack of interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans is a result of genetic incompatibility. Without spoiling any details, I will add that a major element of the trilogy's plot revolves around the impossibility of combining human and Neanderthal genomes without sophisticated technological intervention. Just go read the books!
Recently, however, the Net has been buzzing with headlines proclaiming that 1-4% of our genomes (sort of - read on) comes from Neanderthals. Though Sawyer made a well-reasoned, well-educated conjecture about the compatibility of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens sapiens genetic material, it turns out both that Neanderthal/modern human interbreeding did indeed occur and that children of such couplings were fully capable of reproduction (without advanced technological intervention). In fact, it's not really even appropriate to say "Neanderthal/modern human breeding" since some modern humans are in fact, Neanderthals, at least in the strictest sense of the word.
These findings have drastically reshaped the way we have to think about the chronology of human evolution. I should have specified earlier that the 1-4% of DNA that is Neanderthal only seems to be present in populations other than those of sub-Saharan Africa. Interestingly, this amount of Neanderthal present in modern populations is equally dispersed amongst people from Europe and Asia, meaning there is equal amounts of Neanderthal DNA in a French person as there is in a Chinese person. This suggests that interbreeding occurred before we had diverged into the many racial groups which span the area from western Europe to the far east, around 80 000 years ago. Richard Green et al. have presented four possible scenarios which describe the connection between modern humans and Neanderthals, but write that "gene flow between Neandertals and the ancestors of all non-Africans" to be the most consistent with their data. You can see the paper here and read the abstract here. Links are also on the bottom.
 |
| Four scenarios presented by Green et al. They consider Scenario 3 to be most consistent with their data |
The real interesting question now is what exactly that 1-4% of Neanderthal DNA does, if anything. There is some exciting evidence to show that the transfer of certain human leukocyte antigen (HLA) alleles, presented by Peter Parham. The HLA system plays a major role in the human immune system, and the basic gist of Parham's hypothesis is that by acquiring HLA alleles from Neanderthals after hundreds of thousands of years of isolation and natural selection, modern humans were able to give their immune systems a boost to protect against dangerous pathogens localised to the new environments which were being explored by our ancestors.
This is an exciting idea and raises many scientific and philosophical questions. John Hawks disagrees that the common HLA alleles are definitive signs of interbreeding, but whatever the case, the fact that we are able to find so much info about the Neanderthal genome is very exciting and could provide us with great insight into the history of our species' great success.
Some readers might feel that the fact that the plot of Hominids doesn't hold up to the contemporary science detracts from the book, but I disagree. First of all, most science fiction does not stand the test of time and works that were taken very seriously as predictions of the future now seem slightly ridiculous in retrospect. Consider the level of technological sophistication supposedly present around the turn of the century in Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey. The fact that the science in the book doesn't correspond with real-world findings is only to be expected (eventually) and doesn't detract from the book or make it irrelevant. Even with these little inconsistencies, Hominids is still probably the most paleoanthropologically informative novel you will ever read.
A second and more important reason that Hominids is still relevant is the social commentary. As I mentioned before, Robert J. Sawyer has often commented that science fiction is really about the present as much as it is about the future. With this in mind I think an examination of the culture he's created in Hominids provides valuable insight into the possible consequences of several current trends, such as global access to information, the role of spirituality in a increasingly secular world, the merits of a technocratic society and most saliently, the lack of privacy that comes along with being connected to a global network at all times. Some people believe the lack of privacy is an inevitability of technological progress, exemplified by Scott McNealy's reality check "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." Others think that the key to keeping the Internet "free" (speech, not beer. That would be nice though) is to promote personal privacy, anonymity and decentralisation. These are the kinds of people who would sooner keep their data in a vault than in "the cloud" (an expression I despise).
In my next post I'm going to talk about the Neanderthal world Sawyer has created and discuss whether or not the kind of society he presents is realistic, feasible or even desirable in our world. Though Sawyer was careful to not make the Neanderthal world "perfect", his Neanderthal society is a pretty thinly-veiled metaphor for what I assume to be Sawyer's personal vision of a technological Utopia. In a third and final post about the Neanderthal Parallax, I'll also take a stab at Sawyer's vision of the place of human spirituality and religion in a technological society. It seems we may have a lot to learn from cavemen.
References:
Robert J. Sawyer's webpage - www.sfwriter.com
Richard Green et al. "A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome"
Thursday, 16 June 2011
Strange Projections part 2
This is Stuart McArthur's Universal Corrective Map:
McArthur's Universal Corrective Map has always been my favourite depiction of Earth. As you can see, the map is oriented "upside-down" compared to what we are used to seeing. While learning about differences between the Mercator projections and equal area projections like the Mollweide projection helped me gain a more accurate understanding of the distribution of land on Earth, McArthur's projection yields a more philosophical insight and raises some interesting questions. Before I talk about the reasons I like this map, I'd like to give a little background information.
You may notice that Australia is at the dead centre of this map. The story goes that when Stuart McArthur was 12 years old he attempted to pass in a map oriented like this as geography homework. Following the rejection of his map by his geography teacher and sick of constantly being referred to as from the country at the "bottom of the world" or (more commonly) "Down Under", McArthur became resolutely determined to publish the world as he saw it.
The main thing that attracted me to this map when I first saw it (which was in the same geography class I previously mentioned) was that up until then, I had never questioned the relation between north-south and up-down. Though I recognize that the desire to separate Earth into two hemispheres is itself quite arbitrary, it has always made some sense to me to designate the north and south as the top and bottom of the globe due to both Earth's rotational axis and the direction of our magnetic field. McArthur's map made me question why we put north on the top of the map and not the bottom.
So who put north on top?
Sadly, we have no original copies of Ptolemy's world maps. Instead, we have carefully reconstructed maps based on the insane amount of detail of Ptolemy's text. You can see that the maps are really accurate - it boggles the twenty-first century mind that such precision could be achieved using second century technology.
Heaven and Hell - the socioeconomic divide and psychological impact of living "Down Under"
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| A slightly different perspective |
McArthur's Universal Corrective Map has always been my favourite depiction of Earth. As you can see, the map is oriented "upside-down" compared to what we are used to seeing. While learning about differences between the Mercator projections and equal area projections like the Mollweide projection helped me gain a more accurate understanding of the distribution of land on Earth, McArthur's projection yields a more philosophical insight and raises some interesting questions. Before I talk about the reasons I like this map, I'd like to give a little background information.
You may notice that Australia is at the dead centre of this map. The story goes that when Stuart McArthur was 12 years old he attempted to pass in a map oriented like this as geography homework. Following the rejection of his map by his geography teacher and sick of constantly being referred to as from the country at the "bottom of the world" or (more commonly) "Down Under", McArthur became resolutely determined to publish the world as he saw it.
The main thing that attracted me to this map when I first saw it (which was in the same geography class I previously mentioned) was that up until then, I had never questioned the relation between north-south and up-down. Though I recognize that the desire to separate Earth into two hemispheres is itself quite arbitrary, it has always made some sense to me to designate the north and south as the top and bottom of the globe due to both Earth's rotational axis and the direction of our magnetic field. McArthur's map made me question why we put north on the top of the map and not the bottom.
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| There is a good case for using north and south as points of reference on the globe. Interesting to note that since Earth wobbles on its axis "True North" actually rotates on an arc that takes 25 000 years to complete. |
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| Ptolemy's map spans an area from the Canary islands to China and provides an interesting look at the second-century world view. It's worth noting that while there are obviously huge sections of the world not depicted, Ptolemy's was aware of his ignorance and designed his coordinate system to reflect this. |
It turns out we have two classical-era (first/second centuries) scholars to thank for our now-traditional north-south/up-down map orientation. - a Phoenician named Marinus of Tyre and the more famous Roman-Egyptian Ptolemy. Though both these men (who may have been contemporaries) made revolutionary contributions to geography, their work was largely neglected after the decline of the Roman Empire. Almost none of Marinus' work survived into the present day, but his work served as the source material for much of Ptolemy's celebrated Geographica. Marinus of Tyre is credited as being the first person to divide the earth into a longitudinal and latitudinal coordinate system, a trait carried over by Ptolemy into Geographica. Their work provided the most complete picture of Earth that had ever been produced by the second century.
Sadly, we have no original copies of Ptolemy's world maps. Instead, we have carefully reconstructed maps based on the insane amount of detail of Ptolemy's text. You can see that the maps are really accurate - it boggles the twenty-first century mind that such precision could be achieved using second century technology.
Heaven and Hell - the socioeconomic divide and psychological impact of living "Down Under"
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| Heaven and Hell as depicted in The Last Judgment by Jan van Eyck (15th century) |
While the history behind cartography greatly interests me, the real thing that intrigued me about McArthur's Universal Corrective Map was McArthur's reasoning behind its creation. According to the few references to McArthur's map I have encountered online, 15-year-old McArthur was tired of feeling like a second-class human being on the "bottom of the world". Although we all intellectually understand that the south is no more the "bottom" of the world than any other randomly chosen point, it is easy to see how one might take being labeled a bottom-dweller as an insult. After all, language is filled with metaphors which reinforce the up-good, down-bad associations. such as "bottom feeder" and "bottom of the barrel" to describe an unsavoury character and a low-quality product, or "elated" and "high class" to express joy and status. Besides these figures of speech, we also see this association in religious mythology as in the Judeo-Christian Heaven and Hell or the Greek concepts of Mount Olympus and the Underworld.
The association of the abstract notions of good and bad with north and south have been examined by several teams of psychologists. One interesting article by Meier, Moller, Chen, and Riemer-Peltz called Spatial Metaphor and Real Estate: North–South Location Biases Housing Preference. Social Psychological and Personality Science (PDF) examined people's preconceived notions about the relation between north-south and good-evil using four different psychological tests. The results of these test indicated that not only do people associate north with good and south with bad, but that when given the choice of where they would live in a hypothetical city, most participants chose to live in the north. Additionally, their tests demonstrated that people are more likely to expect a rich person to live in the northern part of a hypothetical city while a poor person was generally assumed to have come from the south.
Meier, Moller et al. conjectured that the association between north and goodness stems from the tradition of depicting north on the top of maps. In order to test this, they modified their test to determine where a test participant would prefer to live in the northern or southern part of a hypothetical city by adding a note which described how in the hypothetical city the normal cardinal directions were reversed so that north was down, south was up, east was left and west was right. When participants were then asked to identify where they would like to live, the preference for north was greatly reduced.
It is easy to see how the results of these tests relate to McArthur's map. Though we generally designate the various nations of Earth as being either first world, second world, third world or fourth world, the fact that we only ever hear about the first and third of these "worlds" reveals Earth's true socioeconomic divide. We could probably more sensibly group all nations into one of two groups, the "Haves" and the "Have Nots", as we like to say in Canada.
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| Haves and Have-Nots |
For me, the effect of encountering McArthur's "corrective" map was that I was shaken from my culturally-induced assumptions about the world and forced to reevaluate my relative geographic importance. Perhaps in a world where McArthur's view was the norm we would all consider Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia to be at the "top" of the world, altering our perceptions of their relative importance.
I think that's the use of these maps. It's all too easy to fall into the psychological trap of associating the top of the map with the "top" of the world. The whole point I'm trying to make is that there is no top or bottom. It is so easy to say "white people come from the top of the world, dark people come from the bottom". While this seems innocent enough (especially the words "top" and "bottom" are simply being used as synonyms for "North" and "South"), pause and think of the actual psychological impact of that kind of statement. North, South. Top, bottom. Head, foot. When do these categories stop being simple descriptors and start being value judgements? What does it feel like for a Australian or African student who learns that he or she is on the botom of the world? What kind of an impact does being from the "top of the world" have for an American or German student? I think the answers to these questions could give us great insight into how the established power structures of the world are psychologically maintained in the cultures which created them.
Final point
Take a look at this photograph:
It's probably the most famous picture of Earth ever taken, called The Blue Marble. It was taken in 1972 by one of the Apollo 17 astronauts on the last trip humans ever took to the moon. If you look at it you'll see that the south pole is at the top and most of the land you can see is Africa, "upside down" from our traditional perspective. Before they could broadcast this image in the USA they had to orient it so that the south pole was at the bottom to meet the expectations of their audience. That is the power of maps - they can affect your worldview to the point that you will actually eschew reality in favour of an incorrect but more familiar perspective.
Anyway, if you've never encountered any of this stuff before, I hope it gave you a slightly different perspective on our world.
Wednesday, 15 June 2011
Strange Projections part 1
I've always liked maps. I can remember being a child and fascinated by the western coast of Africa, the eastern coast of South America and how they seemed to fit together. I used to pick out shapes in the coastlines and borders on the map the way you might find shapes in the clouds. I always thought Newfoundland looked like a thumbs-up sign. In spite of spending lots of time looking at the large, outdated world map on my wall - which still showed the Soviet Union - I never really questioned how it was that the surface of a sphere could be flattened into a rectangle. This question continued to vex me until my first year of university, when I took an introductory geography course. Once the professor explained the mechanism behind this sort of projection, it seemed painfully obvious. It haunts me to think that if I hadn't attended that first lecture (full disclosure - I dropped the course after a week) I might have continued throughout my life with a wholly inaccurate mental image of Earth.
I learned a number of things in my short lived career as a geography student. First of all, I learned that the map I was used to used what's called the Mercator projection, and it dates back to 1569. The principle behind this sort of cylindrical projection is simple: in order to represent the lines of latitude (running east-west) and lines of longitudes (running north-south) as perpendicular to each other (in other words to have the map appear as if it's divided into a grid of squares) certain parts of the world have to be deformed and appear disproportionately large. The parts of the world that will appear the most deformed are the parts furthers away from the equator since lines of longitude seem to converge together at the north and south poles. This is illustrated nicely by Tissot's indicatrix.
Notice how in the above image Africa and Greenland appear the same size. In reality the surface area of Greenland is 2 166 086 km², while Africa has a surface area of 30 200 000 km². Africa is 13.94 times as big as Greenland, and yet you wouldn't know it to look at a map with the Mercator projection.
So what's the point? Why bother to go through so much trouble to point out such a banal fact about the relative sizes of Greenland and Africa? For one, as humans we place importance on the size of objects. The relative importance of an object can sometimes be conflated with its relative physical size. It is no secret that Africa is the one region of the world that has been "left behind" nearly across the board in the race to achieve the same high standards of living we enjoy in the WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) countries (and we really are weird, comparitively speaking). As countries like China and India experience demographic shifts associated with a growing middle class, such as an increased life expectancy, reduced child mortality and fewer children per family, Africa (with some exceptions) has not really changed much since the early to mid-20th century. According to Wikipedia, 94% of child deaths occur in 60 countries and half of all child deaths occur in Africa. It is ridiculous to compartmentalize African social problems as something that only affects the "third world" when Africa represents 14% of the population of all humanity. Africa is all of all of humanity's ancestral home, and I personally feel a sense of moral obligation to help improve the quality of life there. I'm not advocating any particular cause, I only include this hyperlink (which leads to a list of dozens of different charities you could choose from) because it was the first thing served to me by the Goog and I feel like I would be morally bankrupt if I didn't provide at least an easy starting point for someone wants to contribute aid.
I want to make something clear - I don't think that the Mercator projection is purposely deceptive. I don't think there is some grand geographic conspiracy to minimize the psychological impact of the challenges faced in Africa. I simply believe it's time to start including the Mercator projection in the appendix of the geography book instead of presenting it as the default image of our world. Compare the Mercator projection above with the following images of Earth using the Mollweide projection.
I think it's clear how this map gives a more accurate mental image of the world than the Mercator projection. The important thing to remember is that any two-dimensional representation of a sphere is going to be flawed in certain ways. For that reason no particular projection is absolutely superior to another. They all have their uses - as I mentioned, the Mercator projection is particularly good for 16th century navigation.
I have a lot more to say about maps, but I don't have time to go into it tonight. I didn't even get to address the "strange projection" that inspired me to start writing in the first place. For now I will leave you with some more interesting projections of Earth's surface that you may not have seen before. Perspective makes all the difference - some of these look like alien planets or prehistoric supercontinents! Seeing these maps makes me reflect on how the world might have been perceived in worlds where Europe was not considered to be the crux of civilization.
I learned a number of things in my short lived career as a geography student. First of all, I learned that the map I was used to used what's called the Mercator projection, and it dates back to 1569. The principle behind this sort of cylindrical projection is simple: in order to represent the lines of latitude (running east-west) and lines of longitudes (running north-south) as perpendicular to each other (in other words to have the map appear as if it's divided into a grid of squares) certain parts of the world have to be deformed and appear disproportionately large. The parts of the world that will appear the most deformed are the parts furthers away from the equator since lines of longitude seem to converge together at the north and south poles. This is illustrated nicely by Tissot's indicatrix.
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| It is easy to take the relative size of the different landmasses at face value, especially since the Mercator projection seems to correspond nicely with the common piece of trivia that identifies Russia and Canada are the world's two largest countries |
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| Tissot's indicatrix - all the red circles represent equal amount of surface area |
Notice how in the above image Africa and Greenland appear the same size. In reality the surface area of Greenland is 2 166 086 km², while Africa has a surface area of 30 200 000 km². Africa is 13.94 times as big as Greenland, and yet you wouldn't know it to look at a map with the Mercator projection.
So what's the point? Why bother to go through so much trouble to point out such a banal fact about the relative sizes of Greenland and Africa? For one, as humans we place importance on the size of objects. The relative importance of an object can sometimes be conflated with its relative physical size. It is no secret that Africa is the one region of the world that has been "left behind" nearly across the board in the race to achieve the same high standards of living we enjoy in the WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) countries (and we really are weird, comparitively speaking). As countries like China and India experience demographic shifts associated with a growing middle class, such as an increased life expectancy, reduced child mortality and fewer children per family, Africa (with some exceptions) has not really changed much since the early to mid-20th century. According to Wikipedia, 94% of child deaths occur in 60 countries and half of all child deaths occur in Africa. It is ridiculous to compartmentalize African social problems as something that only affects the "third world" when Africa represents 14% of the population of all humanity. Africa is all of all of humanity's ancestral home, and I personally feel a sense of moral obligation to help improve the quality of life there. I'm not advocating any particular cause, I only include this hyperlink (which leads to a list of dozens of different charities you could choose from) because it was the first thing served to me by the Goog and I feel like I would be morally bankrupt if I didn't provide at least an easy starting point for someone wants to contribute aid.
I want to make something clear - I don't think that the Mercator projection is purposely deceptive. I don't think there is some grand geographic conspiracy to minimize the psychological impact of the challenges faced in Africa. I simply believe it's time to start including the Mercator projection in the appendix of the geography book instead of presenting it as the default image of our world. Compare the Mercator projection above with the following images of Earth using the Mollweide projection.
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| Mollweide projection |
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| Tissot's indicatrix of deformation - Mollweide projection |
I have a lot more to say about maps, but I don't have time to go into it tonight. I didn't even get to address the "strange projection" that inspired me to start writing in the first place. For now I will leave you with some more interesting projections of Earth's surface that you may not have seen before. Perspective makes all the difference - some of these look like alien planets or prehistoric supercontinents! Seeing these maps makes me reflect on how the world might have been perceived in worlds where Europe was not considered to be the crux of civilization.
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