The Art of Science

I know I promised you my predictions for the future this week, but I have really been tied up with this major writing project I have been working on. I will let everyone in on it when I am done and have it published to the web, but for now (since I have been on such a science kick lately) I thought I would share with a great YouTube artist, MelodySheep aka John D. Boswell.

If you have never heard of MelodySheep I suggest checking him out. He does some different remixes, including some funny little remixes for some small pop culture clips, but where he really shines is in his series: Symphony of Science. Basically, he remixes the words and images of famous scientists including, Stephen Hawkins, Carl Sagan, Bill Nye, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Michu Kaku and many more. They range from subject areas of Evolution to Space Exploration to Molecules to Dinosaurs. Not only are the movies informative but they are beautiful and it reminds us all how amazing science is and how amazing it is to be a human being living in an age of scientific exploration and knowledge. Some of the better ones almost feel religious in nature and why not? After all, why does science and spiritual beliefs have to be separate? Why can't God exist in the nucleus of an atom or at the center of a black hole.

I have included some of my favorite. Enjoy them and check out more here.

A Glorious Dawn - Symphony of Science	Children of Africa -Symphony of Science
Poetry of Reality - Symphony of Science	The Quantum World - Symphony of Science

As always when I feature artists I ask that you support them and enjoy their work, and MelodySheep is no exception. His work is not only entertaining, but informative. Science is one of the greatest endeavours humanity has ever embarked on, it might as well have a good soundtrack.

All pictures used are meant only to promote the work of MelodySheep. I do not own or claim ownership of any images used in this blog entry.

Flying Car Insurance

BEHOLD THE FUTURE... where for some reason the only
person who has access to a flying car is this gray-haired
woman in a burka, and everyone else is still left to traveling
by conventional cars in the background. It is more likely that
this picture is telling us that in the future old people will be
given flying cars because it will be less dangerous than
having them on the road with the rest of us.

Did you ever think it is weird that we do not have flying cars, or moon cities, or robot butlers? I mean it is 2012. In 3 years on October 21, 2015, Marty McFly is supposed to arrive from 1985 to find a future full of hoverboards, rooms filled with fax machines, and self-fitting clothing, and yet I still can't find a suit-jacket that fits me properly. Heck, according to Star Trek by 1993 genetic superman were supposed to seize control of more than 40 nations on the planet Earth, and yet in reality steroids are still outlawed by Major League Baseball. I will not even go into the disappointment of 2001: A Space Odyssey. (I mean Pan-Am running a space tourism company?) So what happened?

In a nutshell, culture happened. Ironically, we have discovered that it is easier for us to predict how science and technology will advance rather than how culture will advance (and trust me we have tried.) Technology is created by humans so we can sort-of predict how it will progress, after all as as long as we can imagine it we can conceivable achieve it. However, culture changes so rapidly that there is no telling if the technology we want today will even be desirable in the future. For instance, in the 1950's people had all these grand ideas about the technology and appliances that would come available for the busy housewife in the future. Now technologically speaking household appliances have come a long way, but what those past futurists never really understood is that by the time those technologies existed Mom would no longer be in the kitchen, but in the workplace. The same is true of the flying car.

When talking about flying cars our ancestors never took into account some of the cultural and world imperatives that would arise in the last half-decade to make that dream somewhat improbably. For instance, even if the obvious safety problems of giving normal everyday people access to a flying hunk of metal, accelerants, and exotic plastics could be overcome, no one seemed to be able to predict the culture of litigation and frivolous lawsuits that would try to use the courts to sue over everything from hot coffee to video game violence. No car company in their right mind would assume the legal responsibility that would accompany the mass production of a machine with more litigation-related earning potential than a toy box full of rusty nails. Even more daunting is that by the end of summer gas prices will hover somewhere around $4.00 a gallon. I have a 12 gallon tank in my little Saturn, and yet I still wince when the pump ticks past $35.00. A flying car would not only consume more fuel and cost more to refill, but would probably also cause greater damage to the environment. No one thought of environment or gas  issues in the 1950's when cars were made of steel and American pie.

Basically, thanks to the intervening years and the changing priorities of our culture, often even when we have the technology to finally accomplish the things we thought we wanted, it turns out we do not want them any more. Its like being a kid and wishing you had enough money to get the GI Joe Battle Tank toy, and ten years later when you finally have a job and the money to afford that toy you find out you have other priorities in life. Hmm... spend money on a toy or dinner with a pretty lady... (duh... toy.)

Left: What people in 1952 thought the future would look like.
Right: Some hellish future-vision where women can vote.

The real problem with a lot of these past future-predictions is that when making assumptions about the future our ancestors thought technology would continue to grow and become more obvious, like robot butlers. However, what we have seen of technology over the past several decades is that technology does not become more obtrusive, instead it becomes more subtle and seems to disappear from plain view. Your cell phone has more computing power than biggest super computer of the 1970's. It has more technology and memory space than all the crafts that ever landed human beings on the moon combined, yet it is small enough to fit in your pocket. Wires are disappearing as everything goes wireless, microchips are shrinking to microscopic proportions, and soon even something as subtle as the home computer may disappear forever as its functionality just becomes incorporated into everyday life.

To complicate the matters, culture and technology have an almost symbiotic relationship with one another, (much like art and culture, but that is a whole other discussion.) As culture influences what technology is created, that technology then influences how culture develops. The most classic example of this is, the Internet. The world wide web was created by the US Government as a way to communicate and store records in a non-central location in case of a Soviet nuclear strike. Thus, its creation was influenced by the culture and times it was created in. Over thirty years later, the Internet has become the biggest driving force behind culture in the history of humanity. People live their lives on the Internet, children are growing up never having known anything other than Facebook, Twitter, or Google. For better and worse it has become one of the biggest factors in our lives, and because of that it is not only influencing things like our humor, our art, our porn accessibility, but it is legitimately creating a new global culture. I will not go into the impacts of the Internet on culture, since the list is incredibly longer than I could even begin to list, but it is worth mentioning that any visions of the future we now have, will always incorporate a network of information that allows for the rapid exchange of thoughts, ideas, and pictures of cats.

So where does all this leave us? Well initially, it means we will probably not have flying cars anytime in the near future or jet-packs or underwater cities, or etc. It is more likely cars will become smarter and cleaner first, and maybe even disappear altogether. However, it also means that any well-meaning prediction about the future will need to take into account the coming cultural shifts that will not only influence technology but be influenced by that technology, but those are no small predictions. Only a fool would really try to make any meaningful predictions about future-tech based solely upon his own hopes and ideas... So stay tuned for my next blog entry when I do just that.

A Thought for Your Penny

Probably the only real use anyone has ever found for
a penny.

Now if you are like me I know most of you are wondering, "When is the last time Canada ever did anything that I actually cared about?" The answer is: August 18, 2004 when Bryan Lee O'Malley released the first Scott Pilgrim graphic novel, but that is besides the point. We now have another reason to pay attention to Canada besides its maple syrup, red-coated mounties, and endless string of aging comedians. That reason is pennies.

If you have not heard, last week Canada decided to do away with the Canadian Penny. Yes, that means that Canada will no longer be minting anymore pennies. The Canadian Penny will still have legal monetary value (Making it approximately equal to 0.00998 American dollars), and can still be used in Canadian transactions by intention (and in American transactions by accident). The only difference is that our neighbors to the north will no longer be making new pennies, and as old pennies are collected  they will be melted down and taken out of circulation. As far as consumers purchases, items in the store will continue to cost the usual amount, but when paying with money (not credit cards,) prices will be rounded up or down to the nearest 5-cents. Thus, .01, .02, .06, and .07 will be rounded down, while .03, .04, .08, and .09 cents will be rounded up. This means that sometimes the consumer will lose on the transaction but sometimes they will also win, and really is losing 2 cents of money worth the effort of having to carry around 2 pennies? More importantly, this move will save the Canadian government anywhere between 11 and 20 million (Canadian) dollars a year.

This leads me to an amazing revelation, We need to follow the example of Canada. (I know those words were probably as bitter for you to hear as they were for me to say, but it had to be said.) We need to get rid of the American Penny. I was first turned onto this issue after watching John Green (one of my favorite Youtube vloggers) who has been advocating the demise of pennies for years, and as the eldest Green brother usually is, he was right. Pennies do nothing to help the American economy. In fact, they are costing us money and time.

Last year, The United States minted 4.9 billion pennies, but the cost of minting a penny is 2.4 cents. (that's amazingly ridiculous!) Which means in order to mint 4.9 billion pennies (if your an economics major you would know that equals 49 million dollars) we had to spend 118 million dollars to do it. So every year America throws roughly 69 million dollars right down the drain. That's more convoluted than the plotline to Pirates of the Caribbean 3 (and just as much of a waste of money.) I will not even go into the nickle which costs roughly 11.5 cents to mint, but understand that it should be the next to go. However, in modern times the penny has also proved tremendously unnecessary. You cannot buy anything with a penny, nor can you do anything with a penny. Machines that were purposely designed to use coins (vending machines, parking meters, etc) do not even accept pennies. These small worthless pieces of copper only exist to jingle around in my pocket and be thrown into fountains.

There is also a standing theory that the penny is actually costing America much more than the few millions dollars it takes to subsidize their costs. According to theories of opportunity cost (The idea that time is money) time spent fooling around with pennies costs America over a billion dollars a year. In other words if your time is worth roughly $10.00 an hour and you spend two seconds sorting through pennies that means you have lost roughly 0.0056 dollars in the time it took you to find those pennies you needed. Now imagine you had ten people in  front of you who had to get pennies or have pennies returned to them and it costs you 20 seconds, which would be 0.056 dollars wasted. Now imagine there was a little old lady who was paying only in pennies, and instead of making 10 dollars an hour you were a high-powered executive making $100  an hour or even $1,000 an hour. You can start to understand where the time loss adds up and the annoyance factor accumulates.

If we are keeping it we might as well change the penny to
better match the lunacy it represents... because with
pennies we're all 'winning.'

This brings me to my second point, I do not own a purse or wear a pocketbook. I am a man who is forced to keep all his change in his pockets. That means not only do I jingle when I walk, but there is a possibility I could exceed my encumbrance limit for my size category, (but who pays attention to those rules anyway?) Pennies cost us money, time, and effort. The only way pennies can be legitimately used to make money is if you fill a sock with them and mug a pedestrian while he is walking down the street. There is no logical argument to make in favor of pennies. Now lets examine the illogical argument that people make in favor of pennies.

The big group in support of our useless copper disks is the ironically named Americans for Common Cents. They have several arguments but the biggest come from their fear that doing away with the penny will mean all transactions will be rounded up, prices will skyrocket, and charities that depend on coin donations will suffer. The other reason people argue against doing away with the penny is mostly due to sentimentality and some kind of irrational belief that if we no longer have the penny everyone will forget who Abraham Lincoln is.

I understand that people grew up with the penny and you like it, and whatever, but that's the same rationale I use to stop myself from throwing away old shirts that are obviously past their prime. "Hey not my Incredible Hulk shirt! Sure the sleeve is ripped and its two sizes too small for me, but I like it, and maybe I'll use it again someday." We cannot be bogged down by sentimentality if it is costing us millions of dollars and thousands of collective hours a year. Additionally, all the economic based fear is nothing more than unfounded paranoia. There are a lot of countries that have done away with their pennies, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Netherlands, Singapore, Brazil, Argentina, and (oh yeah) US Military bases overseas who also no longer use pennies. Personally, I spent almost a year living and working in Australia, and I can testify that the economy worked just fine. Prices were rounded up or down and everyone went on with their lives. People still gave money to charities, the economy still remained stable, and I had one less coin to worry about in my pocket.

As far as Abraham Lincoln is concerned, he is our greatest President and Vampire Slayer. There is a lot of things named after him. (Oh and he is on that other thing... what do you call it... a 5 dollar bill.) If Lincoln were alive today I think he would be more insulted by the fact that his head is imprinted on a coin that only has a relative monetary value equal to about 1/26th of what it was worth in his day. "Forsooth, why is thine visage memorialized upon coinage that is of less worth than a flea's arse?" (I am also aware that I made  Lincoln sound Shakespearean, but I'm the writer and that is just something you will have to learn to live with.) Truthfully, it would be cheaper if we did away with pennies and honored Lincoln by just building him a huge monument or carving his face into the side of a mountain... oh wait we already did both those things.

The real fact of the matter is that I do not see the American penny disappearing anytime in the near future. Despite that fact that revamping the American currency system is a logical and easy way for the government to save money, increase efficiency, and prove to the American people that congress can work toward positive and modern change, I still do not see it happening. After all when has the American government ever enacted a change that made sense. Unfortunately as humans, and as a nation, I am afraid we are too stuck in our ways to really make a shift of policy and thought on this large of a scale. I suppose it is just human nature to be afraid of change. (Get it?)

Space Chronicles II: The Wrath of Khan

This is a scene from the Star Trek movie where Shatner and
crew must go back in time to save NASA from budget cuts
by using a whale to help a Klingon recite Shakespeare.

There is a myth that pervades American thought, and it generally goes something like this, "NASA gets too much damn money to study rocks on Mars when we can use that money to [insert cause here,] (i.e. feed the homeless, cloth the starving, give houses to puppies, stop the bleeding of hearts, etc.)." The basic tenement of this myth comes down to the belief that America is spending billions of dollars in space exploration when we could be using that money to solve problems at home. It is a myth that is not only stupid but dangerous, and it is a myth that people like Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson are trying very hard to put to rest.

First off, America does give NASA billions of dollars. For the fiscal year of 2012 NASA requested around 18.7 billions dollars in funding, in actuality it will probably only get around 17 billion. Now I know what your thinking, "Oh my Science! 17 BILLION, that's a lot of money!" and as usual (when I ask these hypothetical questions) you are wrong. It is not a lot of money, only about 0.48% of America's budget for 2012. That means, this year America will be spending the lowest amount of money (comparatively) on NASA spending since 1959 (one year after NASA was founded.) Back then the space program only received 0.2% of the federal budget (that year they got a whopping 145 million dollars in federal money). At most NASA has ever received 4.41% of the federal budget in 1966 at the height of the Apollo Program.

In other words, NASA is broke, and it is the aforementioned myth that is helping to kill it. Think about it as a politician would. When it comes down to cutting money from Medicare, Social Security, or NASA, which do you think the public would object to more? (As a side note: in 2011 20% of the US budget was dedicated to Medicare and 23% was dedicated to Social Security spending.) Thus, in financial terms, NASA has become the red-headed step-child of the US Government. This a precarious position for NASA to be in, and more to the point it is a dangerous position for America to be... more than I think you might realize.

That bring us to our second reason of why this myth of NASA spending is disastrous, and it is a reason explained in Neil DeGrasse Tyson's new book: Space Chronicles, (which is an awesome name.) In it Dr. Tyson (who is the head of the Natural History Museum's Hayden Planetarium in New York City, and charismatic contributor to almost any science show you will ever see on TV) explains the case for space. He makes the argument that by slowly starving NASA the US is slowly starving our own imaginations, not to mention our ability to protect the human race as a whole.

In the 1960's the Space Race started in response to America's fear that Russia would conquer space, spread Communism to the Moon (which is way above the 38th parallel), and invade America with flying saucers (or something like that.) This fear prompted us to go to the moon, which in turn prompted a generation of baby boomers to sit transfixed in front of their TV's as America clawed its way to the surface of our nearest natural satellite. This pivotal moment changed the lives of millions of children who suddenly became fascinated with the idea that human beings could walk on the moon. It sparked the hope and the idea that we as humans could become something more than we are. This fueled the ambition and imagination of a generation and helped to create some of the best scientists America has ever known. Many people may not see the value in the sense of wonder and imagination sparked in the children of the 60's as an asset to America, but it very much is. Of all the exports and trade commodities that the United States has ever had to offer the world, innovation and scientific discovery have always been among the most important and the most profitable.

Setting aside even the obvious benefits of the products which are mere by-products of space exploration, (Velcro, tang, MRI machines), space exploration, and specifically manned space exploration, has fueled the American drive of science for decades. From those children who sat enraptured by the grainy images of Neil Armstrong on the moon came the people who helped invent the computer, the Internet, the cell phone, and hundreds of other products which America pioneered and which helped make America one of the richest countries in the world. We cannot tangibly measure the fiscal income of imagination, but rest assured it is as real as the first quarter gross income figures of American pig farmers. Dr. Tyson argues (reasonably) that a new manned push to space (most notably a call for a return to the moon and even the gold-ring of all space exploration, Mars) would not only help spark the imagination of the next generation of scientists and explorers, but also create a deluge of "spin-off" products that would benefit us in our everyday life in the same way that the "spin-off" products of space exploration in the 1960's helped benefit that generation of people (tang and spam aside). In the next decade, America will find itself trailing the rest of the world in fields of science and technology. Among the last generation of students, admission and interest in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) has fallen across the boards, and with it the technological prowess of the USA. We have a chance to fix that for the next generation, and  in the present create jobs and new opportunities not only for the best and brightest Americans, but others from around the world. Anyway you slice it, excitement over space exploration is an investment in our future.

I do apologize as I know I am getting a little forceful and preachy in this topic, but it is one I tend to be more passionate about because I see space exploration as being closely tied with the fate of humanity, and for one simple fact. The planet Earth is on a timer. No matter what you believe or how you think it will happen, it is generally accepted that Earth will one day die. It does not matter if it dies because we drain it of resources, or because it gets taken out by an errant solar flare, or even some sort of cataclysmic climate event, or even of old age, Earth will one day cease to exist and when that day comes if all of humanity still remains on its surface we will die with it. I am not just talking about the physical deaths of all the living people, but the death of everything that we are. We will not just die but so will Abraham Lincoln, Marylin Monroe, the 1986 Mets, Darth Vader, Beethoven, Da Vinci, and everything that we are or ever could be. It will be like the human race never existed and on some distant planet they will watch our star wink out and never know that the light they were seeing was home to the human race, home to our culture, our thoughts, our dreams, and everything. We will just be gone, and that is what scares me the most.

However, if we reach out into the stars and spread humanity across different planets and even different solar systems our culture, our memories, and everything we are can never truly be extinguished. This is, admittedly, an extreme example, but ultimately a true one. In the more immediate future space exploration can help to teach us how to defend ourselves against asteroids and other NEO objects (Near Earth Orbit, though I also would not mind learning how to protect ourselves from more bad Keanu Reeve movies.) We could begin to develop plans for diverting asteroids and comets that do not include Bruce Willis and Aerosmith. This is no joke, because in 2029 the (appropriately named) asteroid Apophis is due to pass so close to Earth that it will dip below our satellites in geosynchronous orbit. The worst part is that means that the asteroid could then be set up for a collision course with Earth when it returns in April of 2036. The impact would be the equivalent of anywhere between a 500 and 900 megaton explosion. Comparatively, the biggest bomb ever created by humans was the Russian Tsar Bomba which only clocked in at 50 megatons. 

Yes we KHAAAAN!!!

Here is the real kicker. We could accomplish all of this with just two critical changes to American policy. 1) We need to start making Space exploration a cultural and politcal priority in the same way that it was in the 60's. The Senate and the government need to speak of missions to Mars in the same way Kennedy spoke of going to the moon, 2) the (easier of the two): double NASA's budget. That means instead of only spending 0.48% of the USA's yearly budget on NASA we need to commit giving them an incredible 0.96% of the budget or even 1% if we are feeling generous. But with the money and (more importantly) the cultural  and political endorsement, Dr. Tyson argues that we would go a long way to restoring America's place in the world of technology and science. We would also be inspiring the imagination of all of humanity for years to come. 

The frustrating part is that it would take so little on our part as Americans to really help get these dreams accomplished. We have become such a nation of cynics that most people usually just balk at the idea of manned space exploration. Newt Gingrich was made the butt of jokes because he dared suggest that American space wxploration should be a priority (granted Newt may not be the best spokesperson for that particular campaign,) but he is not wrong. Maybe that is why we need a candidate for this election that can make the argument more convincingly and with less wives. We need someone charismatic, yet knowledgeable. We need someone who can make the case and yet still be likable on a camera. That is why the 2N2P would like to announce that is it officially endorsing Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson as our candidate for President.