TOP 100 SCIENCE SITES
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| Observatory: Fun With Nicknames for Ancient Crocodiles A paleontologist at the University of Chicago has fun naming the fossil crocodiles he has dug up from the Sahara. feeds.nytimes.com |
Bell Labs' latest Nobel laureates, creators of 4bn images and counting Willard Boyle and George Smith invented the CCD and we saw the world as never beforeFOR MUCH OF the 20th century, the world's premier industrial research facility was Bell Labs, research wing of the giant AT&T telephone corporation, in Murray Hill, New Jersey. From it came many key technologies which define the contemporary world. All of modern electronics, for example, stems from the invention of the transistor by three Bell scientists, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley.Bell scientists also were responsible for the laser, many of the technologies used in radio astronomy and mobile phones, wireless local area networking, information theory, the Unix operating system and the C programming language. Seven Nobel prizes have been awarded for work done at Murray Hill.The latest of these (for physics) was presented in Oslo last week to Willard Boyle and George Smith, who on 17 October 1969 were trying to come up with an idea that would stop their boss's boss switching resources from their work to another department working on sexy new kinds of computer memory. In a discussion that lasted "not more than an hour" (as Smith later recalled) they came up with a device that changed the way we see the world. They called it a charge-coupled device or CCD, and it developed into the sensor at the heart of most digital cameras in use today.If you want to see the fruits of their work, log on to Flickr.com, the world's leading image-hosting site. Launched in 2004, it was bought by Yahoo in 2005 and now holds more than 4bn images. Since you began reading this column, more than 600 pictures have been uploaded to it, automatically resized and each assigned a unique URL. It is one of the wonders of the modern world.Of course you could view Flickr as a giant shoebox, in the sense that shoeboxes were traditionally the place where analogue photographs were stored. But that would be to underestimate its significance. For one thing, most images on Flickr are tagged by their owners, and one can then search for pictures tagged with a given word. A search for "Ireland", for example, brings up more than 2m images.Most, as you would expect, are pretty banal – holiday snapshots, stag nights in Dublin, beach scenes, photographs of grandma with the statutory telegraph pole growing out of her head, family groups cut off at the knees and so on. But the search also reveals hundreds of terrific pictures, and a few images of staggering originality or beauty. And all are available for viewing by anyone, anywhere, with an internet connection.To appreciate what this means, you have to think back to film photography. Then, most of us took a camera on holidays and came back with a half-exposed roll of film which languished in the camera until Christmas, when it would be finished off with a dozen festive pictures of family, friends and uncles befuddled by drink. The film would then be taken into Jessops for processing, after which the resulting prints would be handed round whatever social circle was present – after which they would find their way into a shoebox and thence to the attic. Compared to Flickr, this wasn't just a different world: it was a different universe.Our present universe was made possible by what Boyle and Smith cooked up in that magical hour in October 1969. Of course it took a great deal of technical and manufacturing ingenuity to get the CCD from the crude prototypes knocked up in Bell Labs to the mass-produced sensors that now record the images that feed Flickr's insatiable appetite. But it happened, and cameras went from being expensive, delicate pieces of equipment to cheap add-on facilities for virtually every consumer device. We've moved from when you only carried a camera when you intended to take photographs to an era in which almost anyone with mobile phone also carries a camera.The big question, of course, is whether this is improving our general level of photographic skill. One would expect that it is, given that craft skills are acquired by trial and error, and digital photography enables one immediately to spot – and correct – errors. The evidence of Flickr is that the general standard of photography is improving, even when one discounts the fact that digital cameras make it difficult to take badly exposed or out-of-focus pictures. The world may be going to the dogs – but at least we are taking better photographs.FlickrDigital mediaInternetNobel prizesJohn Naughtonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Clarification: Gore misspoke on polar ice data COPENHAGEN (AP) -- In an early version of a Dec. 14 story, Al Gore told the U.N. climate conference that new data suggested the Arctic polar ice cap may disappear in the summertime within five to seven years. Gore's office later clarified his statement and said he meant the cap would be nearly ice-free.... hosted.ap.org |
Letters: Another Look at F.D.R. (2 Letters) To the Editor:. feeds.nytimes.com |
This column will change your life: To be or not to be… It's 45 years since David Bourland suggested doing away with the verb "to be". A silly suggestion, one might think, but look a little closer and it makes a weird kind of senseForty-five years ago, the author David Bourland published an essay proposing a radical overhaul of English based on eliminating all forms of the verb "to be". In a world where we all spoke E-Prime, as Bourland called this new language, you couldn't say "Sandra Bullock's latest film is shockingly mediocre"; you'd have to say it "seems mediocre to me". Shakespeare productions would need retooling ("To live or not to live, I ask this question"), as would the Bible ("The Lord functions as my shepherd"). The world, in short, would feel very different – though in E-Prime you couldn't actually say it "was" very different. Unsurprisingly, it proved even less popular than Esperanto, and in fairness Bourland never meant it as a serious replaceÂment for English. But in this anniversary year, his eccentric vision deserves celebrating. Because in theory at least, E-Prime aimed at nothing less than using language to make our insane lives a little more sane.Bourland studied under Alfred Korzybski, a Polish aristocrat émigré who founded the philosophy of General Semantics, made famous by his slogan, "The map is not the territory." To think about and function in the world, Korzybski said, we rely on systems of abstract concepts, most obviously language. But those concepts don't reflect the world in a straightforward way; instead, they contain hidden traps that distort reality, causing confusion and angst. And the verb "to be", he argued, contains the most traps of all.Take the phrase, "My brother is lazy." It seems clear, but Korzybski and Bourland would say it deceives: it implies certainty and objectivity, when in reality it expresses an opinion. Even, "The sky is blue" papers over the details: I really mean, "The sky appears blue to me." "Our judgments can only be probaÂbiÂlistic," wrote Allen Walker Read, a Korzybski follower. "Therefore we would do well to avoid finalistic, absolutistic terms. Can we ever find 'perfection' or 'certainty' or 'truth'? No! Then let us stop using such words in our formulations." E-Prime provided an easy way to do this: simply stop using "to be".All this might seem maniacally pointless pedantry. But as cognitive therapists note, thoughts trigger emotions, and "finalistic, absolutistic" thoughts trigger stressful emotions. "I am a failure" feels permanent, all-encompassing, hopeless. Restating it in E-Prime – "I feel like a failure" or "I have failed at this task" – makes it limited, temporary, addressable."I have found repeatedly," wrote the novelist Robert Anton Wilson, an E-Prime advocate, "that when baffled by a problem in science, in philosophy, or in daily life, I gain immediate insight by writing down what I know about the enigma in strict E-Prime." Political debates might benefit, too, since E-Prime renders unyielding dogmatism – "All immigrants are scroungers!", "Taxation is theft!" etcetera – essentially impossible. As George Santayana put it, "The little word 'is' has its tragedies."E-Prime never really caught on; General Semantics fell out of fashion. (It can't have helped that Korzybski's fans included that high-priest of poppycock, L Ron Hubbard.) Even so, trying to express one's thoughts without using "to be" can have a curiously salutary, bracing effect. In this column, with the obvious exception of the quoted examples, I have attempted to do this.oliver.burkeman@guardian.co.ukPsychologyHealth & wellbeingOliver Burkemanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |