One of my readers brought James Howard Kunstler to my attention – yet another cranky prophet-wannabe with no credentials in the domains he discusses.  A few years ago, he opined on tattoos thusly: “Tattooing has traditionally been a marginal activity among civilized people, the calling card of cannibals, sailors, and whores. The appropriate place for it is on the margins, in the back alleys, the skid rows. The mainstreaming of tattoos is a harbinger of social dysfunction.”  You see, social collapse has nothing to do with predatory banks, preemptive invasions, punitive theocracies, unequal distribution of wealth.  No sir!  Tattooing is the true cause of the impending apocalypse.  Along with rock music, long-haired men and women in the professional work force.

I have mentioned a few times that my father’s side were seamen – captains and engineers in the merchant marine.  They lived the hard lives of sailors, probably softened by their relative status within the iron hierarchy of ships.  Several died away from home, including my grandfather and two of my father’s brothers who died in their twenties of TB, a perennial scourge of the profession back then.  We don’t even know where some are buried.  In their brief shore leaves, I suspect many of them got tattoos.  I recall seeing a shadow under the thin fabric of my eldest uncle’s summer shirt, but I didn’t get to ask him before death took him.

This August, I got a tattoo.  I asked my friend Heather Oliver (whose artwork graces this site and my stories) to create a design for me.  She rose to the challenge magnificently.  By this act I wanted to honor my father’s line, now going extinct (I’m the sole twig left of that once-great tree); to mark the narrow escape from my first brush with cancer; and to remind myself that I should try to finish and publish my stories before the Hunter stoops on me for the final time.

Tattooing means different things across people and cultures – but it’s interesting to consider that outside the West, tattooing done willingly was often a status symbol, from the Scythians to the Maori.  To a large extent, it is also considered a rite of passage and/or a signal of entry to a soldier-like fraternity, whether this is the army, a criminal organization, a prison group or the Knights of St. John; in this guise, the practice has been associated with masculine “bravery” (since it involves pain) and group identity.

These aspects of the process are highlighted in one of the best SF novels, Donald Kingsbury’s Courtship Rite: an Earth ship has ended up on a planet whose lifeforms are poisonous, forcing the human settlers into carefully regulated cannibalism – although they have retained enough technology to engineer some foodstuffs.  Children are raised communally and watched for signs of a talent.  When one is discerned, they receive their first tattoo, become members of an extended family and acquire human status (aka: they’re no longer potential food).

In my own stories, the Koredháni people, who consciously decided to adapt themselves to their new planetary home, are matrilineal and polyandrous because of a dearth of women (they also hail from the Minoans, who seem to have had at least one of these tendencies).  The second night after a handfasting, the co-husbands give the newcomer a tattoo (using nanotech, which is prominent in their living arrangements).  The design, chosen by the newcomer, almost invariably marks his previous allegiance or provenance, so that memory of his lineage is kept alive even after he is part of his wife’s hearth.

On the individual level, people often get a tattoo to decorate a scar – a gesture of defiance against the ravages of illness.  Also, recent technology advances have made possible the use of tattoos as medical monitors: glucose meters for diabetics, for example, removing the need for constant needle jabs.  The flip side of all this neat stuff, of course, is forcible tattoing, which predated the Nazi concentration camps: slaves and soldiers were routinely tattooed in the Roman empire to prevent them from running off. It was deemed more humane than branding.  Its Hellenic name “stigma” (dotting) led to the term stigmatize, with its known connotations.

For me, it’s interesting to think that tattoos, despite their vaunted “permanence”, are among the first of our parts to disappear when our bodies rest in fire, water or earth – unless we have the luck of the young Pazyryk warrior priestess who merited six horses in her journey to the other world.  Her kurgan was filled with water which then froze.  So when Natalia Polosmak opened the tomb in 1993, its occupant emerged almost entirely intact, from her wild silk blouse to her gold-inlaid felt headdress… and the ravishing soot tattoo on her shoulder.  She was a shaman; and in the end, tattoos are talismans: a way of reconnecting with what we sundered from when we became (perhaps too) self-aware.

Images: 1st, Deena Metzger’s famous self-portrait; 2nd, a recreation of the Pazyryk shaman’s tattoo; 3rd, Candleflame Sprite; design by Heather D. Oliver, execution by Deirdre Doyle.

Habitat loss through development is one of the major causes of biodiversity loss. The increasingly common legal requirement to first avoid, then reduce and, if necessary, offset impacts of plans and projects on biodiversity has however not always been appropriately enforced. The blame lies mainly in bad governance such as patchy monitoring or poorly defined liabilities. Biodiversity offsets also suffer from the lack of formal methods for designing and sizing offset requirements.

In a paper recently published in Biological Conservation, Fabien Quétier (who is involved in this blog) and Sandra Lavorel address this gap by reviewing the different tools, methods and guidelines that have been developed in different regulatory contexts to design and size biodiversity offsets.

They formulated a typology of approaches that variously combine the methods and guidelines reviewed and then discuss how these relate to the objectives of offset policies, the components of biodiversity and ecosystems to which they apply, and the key issues for ecological equivalence.

One of the key messages from the paper might be that when gains are not realistic, e.g. because we do not know how to enhance or restore a habitat or ecosystem function (i.e. they are non renewable), then protection of as-yet unprotected habitats or ecosystems is the only realistic offset option.

This has several consequences, the most notable being that, in effect, using protection as offset means we assign a ratio of acceptable loss to the remaining unprotected habitat or ecosystem. For example, protecting 3 hectares for every unprotected hectare lost actually means that we accept to loose a quarter of the unprotected area. This then means we must think strategically about what we want to do with that quarter… which is then a non renewable resource too!

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awesome! more unexplored frontiers of nature

 

The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m not dead.
The Dead Collector: What?
Large Man with Dead Body: Nothing. There’s your ninepence.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m not dead.
The Dead Collector: ‘Ere, he says he’s not dead.
Large Man with Dead Body: Yes he is.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m not.
The Dead Collector: He isn’t.
Large Man with Dead Body: Well, he will be soon, he’s very ill.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m getting better.
Large Man with Dead Body: No you’re not, you’ll be stone dead in a moment.

– Monty Python and the Holy Grail

So it goes between John Cleese, Eric Idle and John Young.

But there is a sea, or rather lake, that is not dead yet either, feels happy, and is going for a walk on Thursday. The Dead Sea, located in the Judean Desert, roughly divided between Jordan and Israel, has a salinity of 33% – more than eight times that of seawater (3.5%). No animals or plants can survive these conditions, and the lake does look dead to the casual observer. But in the late 1930s Benjamin Elazari Volcani discovered that the Dead Sea does, in fact, support several types of microorganisms. A bit of history: Volcani’s research into microbial life in the Dead Sea led to him being awarded the the first doctoral degree in microbiology by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1943. In 1975, Mullakhanbhai and Larsen named Halobacterium volcanii, a halophilic isolate, after B.E. Volcani. It is now know as the archaean, not bacterium, Haloferax volcanii.

Several other archeael isolates were found, noting that the Dead Sea is not quite dead yet. In fact, the lake sports what might be an underreported biodiversity. In addition to archaea it also has fungi, bacteria, protozoa and mermaids. OK, maybe not mermaids.

Now the Dead Sea has been found to be more alive than ever. A groups of Israeli and German divers have found freshwater springs deep in the Dead Sea. The springs are about 30m deep, and lie in of large craters 30meters in diameter. Look at the video below, taken by the divers. Between 1:54 and 2:10 you can see the freshwater mixing with the saltwater. The stark differences in salinity makes for a surreal underwater smoke effect. And, the real kicker, at 2:26 you can see a thick microbial mat, like gunk all over the rocks near the spring.

It would be very interesting to find out who, exactly, comprises this mat. As far as I know, this analysis has not been published yet. But the initial results are reported in National Geographic:

Preliminary analyses of samples collected in the craters suggest that the springs’ bacterial communities are very diverse—akin to what you’d find living on rocks in a regular saltwater sea, he added.

The top of the springs’ rocks are covered with green biofilms, which use both sunlight and sulfide—naturally occurring chemicals from the springs—to survive. Exclusively sulfide-eating bacteria coat the bottoms of the rocks in a white biofilm.

Not only have the organisms evolved in such a harsh environment, Ionescu speculates that the bacteria can somehow cope with sudden fluxes in fresh water and saltwater that naturally occur as water currents shift around the springs.

All I can say is: wow. Microbial mats in the Dead Sea, which we only find about now. The  Dead Sea thriving with whole carpets of life. Who’d've thunk?

ELAZARI-VOLCANI, B. (1943). Bacteria in the Bottom Sediments of the Dead Sea Nature, 152 (3853), 274-275 DOI: 10.1038/152274c0

Mullakhanbhai, M., & Larsen, H. (1975). Halobacterium volcanii spec. nov., a Dead Sea halobacterium with a moderate salt requirement Archives of Microbiology, 104 (1), 207-214 DOI: 10.1007/BF00447326

Buchalo, A., Nevo, E., Wasser, S., Oren, A., & Molitoris, H. (1998). Fungal life in the extremely hypersaline water of the Dead Sea: first records Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 265 (1404), 1461-1465 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.1998.0458

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More examples of games and social networking making their way into science. Saw a cool critter/plant but don't know what it is? Ask humanity!

Biodiversity offsets are making headlines as a new instrument or tool for biodiversity conservation in the UK. DEFRA defines offsets as actions in favour of biodiversity that are carried-out in compensation for planned impacts (e.g. from development) and provide a measurable outcome. Whenever possible, offsets should target the same biodiversity components (species, habitat types etc.) as those that will be impacted. This raises the question of their “restorability”.

In a recent paper published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, Ben Woodcock, Alison McDonald and Richard Pywell of CEH investigate the restorability of long-term floodplain meadows on agricultural land in South-Eastern England. Using an 22 years old restoration experiment, they show that given the current restoration trajectory, it would take over 150 years for the former arable land to have a species composition close to that of long-term floodplain grasslands. Even when being less restrictive in terms of restoration goals, i.e. focusing on the “types” of species (described using their morphological and reproductive characteristics or “traits”), it would take over 70 years. This is slightly more realistic but still a very long term prospect.

Ecosystems or habitat types for which restoration is a (very) long-term endeavour might fall outside the scope of offset schemes. As the authors say:

any compensation scheme proclaiming they can replace floodplain meadows lost to development (i.e. gravel extraction) is being wholly unrealistic.

As well as actually avoiding the destruction of hard or impossible to replace ecosystems and habitat types, these findings raise two issues:

Hopefully, the pilot scheme launched by the UK government will give the opportunity to test these solutions…

High levels of fats in the snakes' blood balloons their organs after breaking a long fast, experiments show.

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dope

The duo Sepalcure – Praveen Sharma (aka Braille and PRAVEEN) and Travis Stewart (aka Machinedrum) – have already, as solo artists and as a duo, been a big part of the vibrations of so-called Bass Music. Originating from New York, the duo now champion their taste in sounds on two sides of the globe. Travis spends a lot of time in Berlin while Praveen anchors a scene that spans Brooklyn and the Internet in the form of Percussion Lab, with that group’s events, Web downloads, and Monday night live streams. (In fact, if you’re up against some deadlines or feeling blue on some Monday evening slash early morning European time slash Tuesday morning over in Asia and Australia, I highly recommend tuning in. Or go and grab one of the downloads, which cover Bass Music but also ambient, experimental, techno, and other sounds.)

Crisply soulful, “I’m Alright” is a perfect single to introduce you to the upcoming full-length. It represents the comfortable, relaxed collaboration between Travis and Praveen, from its lush production quality to heartwarmingly-grooving rhythms. It speaks to a hunger for danceable music that tracks closer to its history in House and Chicago sounds, to me, a sound that is as much about the roots and tradition of the music as any one place or time.

But I don’t have to really tell you anything; you can grab the single for free and exclaim, yeah, “I’m alright.” And I’m sure we’ve all had days where we were ready for a song to make us feel that way. In fact, I’m fairly surprised this is a b-side; having heard the album, though, the self-titled “Sepalcure” will deliver more of this manner of goodness.

Have a listen, grab the download, via CDM and Hotflush:
02 AA. I’m Alright – Sepalcure (promo) by cdm

Sepalcure promise “extensive touring,” but if you’re around New York, you can watch it all get rolling. After appearances at Unsound Festival Krakow and, this week, MUTEK Mexico City, the duo’s new live AV show will debut November 10th at Le Poisson Rouge. I believe visuals will come by way of another Friend of CDM, the awesomely-talented artist and designer Sougwen Chung. See her design from a previous release below, just because it’s too pretty not to include here. We’ll be due for another catch-up with Sougwen, but read our previous Create Digital Motion profile of her work for US label and tastemaker Ghostly International:

Visuals for Shigeto Full Circle, and Reflections on Drawing by Hand [Create Digital Motion]

Release details:
“I’m Alright” is the B Side for the single “Pencil Pimp,” November 7, Hotflush Recordings
Self-titled full-length, Sepalcure will be released November 22, Hotflush

And let’s give you some more visuals via Sougwen, inspired by the duo’s debut EP, Fleur:

I normally wouldn’t do this, but I know Gamail from Backspin Promotion, and his analysis – clearly written here with the duo – tends to be right on point, so I really like his track-by-track description:

Opening with ‘Me,’ a clear statement of intent that brings to mind early Metalheadz-era Alex Reese and Waxdoctor tunes within a fresh 2011 beat dynamic, the album continues its rhythmic and soulful attack on ‘Pencil Pimp’ which drops abandoned melancholic soul into a burnt out etheral city that isn’t Detroit. The Bronx? Brooklyn? Queens? New York while we waited for Hurricane Irene? No surprise then that this is slated to be the first single from the album. Tribalisms on ‘The One’ echo Zanzibar-era New Jersey Black House before it came over to Madhattan and stormed the world. On ‘See Me Feel Me’ you can hear Sharma’s IDM roots but Stewart has clearly helped him take a trip down to Philly for a bit of what can only be dubbed as an East Coast urban love fest. With Hip Hop mutating towards electronic music it wouldn’t be a surprise to hear a big league rapper biting this soon. ‘Eternally Yrs’ continues what is surely a romantic core in this album – it’s a burbling update of the ravehouse sound, with processed vocals rubbing up against woodblock beats and a relentlessly bouncing bassline. ‘Yuh Nuh See’ takes a bite out of juke’s trademark staccato bass and looping vocals, washing the tension away with lush melodies and dubbed out atmospherics. ‘Breezin’ indicates an ease but is in fact one of the more bass-heavy tunes on the album, bringing to mind a crowded beach in the Bronx where everyone is playing something different on their boombox – it’s Nigeria, Harlem and other undisclosed sources of wonder trapped in summer heat. ‘Hold On’ gets even more Jamaican – did we just enter a Soundclash? if so, this one is especially blissful. ‘Carrot Man’ lets us know Model 500, UR and Carl Craig’s dystopian landscapes still continue to inspire. while the finale ‘Outside’ sounds like the duo captured the elation of finishing the album and walking outside after weeks in a dark and sweaty studio. Sophisticated, yes, but accessible too. Emotional, yes, but fun as well. Simply titled ‘Sepalcure’ this album is a bold statement from two artists rising to the top of their game.

I’ll be interviewing Travis and Praveen, so if you’ve got anything you’d like to know about them, music they like, process, etc., let us know.

http://www.sepalcure.com/
http://percussionlab.com/
http://www.hotflushrecordings.com/

This week, while browsing our Flickr site (which, by the way, has over 15,900 images!), we stumbled across the book Field Book of Giant Fishes (1949), by J.R. Norman and F.C. Fraser, and were intrigued. What exactly was a giant fish by this book's standards, and what would we find when we delved into the pages of this enigmatic title?

To our delight, we found some surprising species featured within this volume. Species that make you think, "Maybe we aren't too far off from the dinosaurs." Some even include creatures that might be responsible for many of the "sea monster" claims sailors have made over the years. Plus, as is always a bonus for us, the descriptions were accompanied by lovely illustrations (by W.P.C. Tenison) of the mighty fish that call our oceans home today. We thought this title offered a great opportunity to showcase some of these aquatic marvels. So, without further ado...


1) Giant Oar-Fish, also known as the King of Herrings. This critter is the world's longest bony fish, reaching up to 17 meters and weighing upwards of 300 kg! Living 300-1000 meters below the ocean's surface, it is a rarely-seen deep sea wonder. Nevertheless, many scientists believe that this colossal beast may be responsible for many of the strange sea monster sightings reported throughout the years.

Despite the scarcity of sightings, there are several documented encounters with this species:

• On Dec. 10, 2010, a live specimen measuring 4 meters was caught off the Sinaloan coast of Mexico. One of the fisherman who caught it cautioned that "it might be the devil" and "feared it might swallow them."
  
• On April 6, 2011, a 3.5 meter Giant Oar-Fish was found off of the east coast of Taiwan. It is believed that the creature surfaced as a result of the tsunami that hit Japan in March. Thus, it was given the nickname "Earthquake Fish."
  
• And finally, in 1996, a 7-meter specimen was caught off of the coast of California. Pictured below is a team of Navy SEALs displaying the beast. (Image from pg. 20, All Hands)

• It's tongue weighs as much as an elephant (which, incidentally, is the largest living land mammal)
• When fully expanded, a Blue Whale's mouth is large enough to hold 90 metrics tons of food and water
• Despite this large mouth, the Whale's throat is so small that it cannot swallow anything larger than a beach ball
• At birth, Blue Whales weigh 6,000 lbs - the weight of a full-grown hippopotamus - and drink an average of 100 gallons of milk every day
• Blue Whale calves gain as much as 200 lbs every day
• A Blue Whale's Heart weighs 1,300 lbs.

• The Narwhal is most closely related to the Beluga Whale, and together they make up the only two living species of the Monodontidae family
• Narwhals are a strictly Arctic species, and rarely venture below 65 degrees North latitude
• The Narwhal's name comes from the Old Norse word "nár," which means "corpse." It was given this name due to its grayish pigmentation, which gave it the appearance of a drowned sailor.
• A male Narwhal's tusk can grow as long as 3 meters and weigh up to 22 lbs. About 1 in 500 male Narwhals grows a second tusk.
• In the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth was given a carved and bejeweled Narwhal tusk worth £10,000 - the cost of, in those times, an entire castle!
• The Narwhal is one of two possible explanations for the "giant sea phenomenon" described by Jules Verne in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. (The other possibility? A man-made vessel. We like the Narwhal option better!)
  

I’m involved in a festival project in my home town of Edmonton, AB, that takes on the colder half of our year.  It’s called Winter Light, cause we light up the long dark days of winter.  At our latitude, we can have as little as 4 hours of daylight in December.  Which is crazy.  Especially if you are stuck in school or work for those 4 hours.  You can see all about Winter Light at our styley website here:  www.winterlight.ca

Last weekend we launched our new Season and our newly founded Non-Profit Society.  Up till now we have been a City of Edmonton created and funded project, that startup situation is now over and we are free to find our own fate as a non profit.  Comes with perks and challenges ;)

I get to be the Lantern Co-Ordinator and Artistic Director of one of our events, which is about the  interesting-est job title I’ve ever had.  And it means I get to build really fun things.  For our launch, I worked on some more vector design + waterjet cut wood construction, and built a really fancy stage.

Best Part was everyone loved everything.   Food, Music, Art, Fires.  Other best part was we got the whole thing installed with time to spare.  Must be practice or something.

so, Pictures! thats what you and me are here for right?  Here’s the pictures:

Thanks to Robin George for taking the pictures.  I think I had the time to take two?  Must have been busy doing art or something.   I’ll be adding descriptions to the gallery as time goes by.

Having been enjoying Arkist’s output over the last few months, I have to say I’m pretty excited about his latest offering. A completely free ?-track download in the form of the “Double Zero EP”. Initially offered through XLR8R, I expect this one will be picked up by a good few blogs.

You can download the EP from Sendspace here

Or preview it in the mix below:

Double Zero Minimix by Arkist

You’ll also probably want to jump over and download his recent Hotflush podcast too. Tracklist for that below.

1. Arkist – The Half Moon Bay (Dub)
2. Mosca – House5 (Hyper-Colour)
3. Hackman – Untitled (Dub)
4. Arkist & KidKut – One Year Later (Hotflush)
5. Mosca – House 14 (Hyper-Colour)
6. Arkist – Rendezvous ( SCB Edit) (Apple Pips)
7. Sonarpilot – Radar (Trevino Remix)(SonarPilotAudio)
8. Lokiboi X Hackman (Dub)
9. Tim Xavier – Stepping Into the Unknown (Clink)
10. XXXXXXX – XXXXXXXXX ( XXXXXX )
11. Dutty Dan – Streefighter Riddim ( Dub)
12. Al Tourettes – Badger (Dub)
13. Komonazmuk – Underground (Hench)
14. Hackman – Agree To Disagree (Pattern)
15. XXXXXXX – XXXXXXXXXX ( XXXXXX)
16. Dutty Dan & MTB – Maximum Battery Boost ( Dub)
17. Blawan – What You Do With What You Have ( R&S)
18. King – Animal Calypso (Dub)
19. Arkist & KidKut – Vanilla Imitate (Hotflush)
20. Arkist – Rendezvous (Apple Pips)
21. Addison Groove – This Is It (Tectonic)
22. Arkist – Rephlex Blast (Dub)
23. Al Tourettes – She Shimmers (Dub)
24. Arkist – Fill Your Coffee (Apple Pips)

Neither of these delights are to be missed!

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viznut strikes again!!

This update I believe is worth a second post, as it makes visible the otherwise-mysterious algorithms producing music in our previous post.

And yes, I believe this is “music,” naysayers aside. Whether it’s good music is in the ears of the listener, but if you can describe this much sound with this little code, imagine what’s really possible in computer music. Whatever it is you want to hear, it’s within the power of your imagination to describe it, on a score or in code, either one.

Thanks to none other than Stephan Schmitt for the tip.

Sic itur ad astra (“Thus you shall go to the stars.”)
– Apollo, in Virgil’s Aeneid

Last Friday, several hundred people from a wide cross-section of the sciences and humanities converged on Orlando, Florida, to participate in the DARPA-sponsored 100-Year Starship symposium.  As the name tells, this was a preliminary gathering to discuss the challenges facing a long-generation starship, from propulsion systems to adapting to extraterrestrial homes.

I was one of the invited speakers.  I won’t have the leeway of long decompression, as I must immediately submerge for a grant.  However, I think it’s important to say a few words about the experience and purpose of that gathering.  Given the current paralysis of NASA, activities like this are sorely needed to keep even a tiny momentum forward on the technologies and mindsets that will make it possible to launch long-term crewed ships.

Open to the public, the event lasted two and a half days, the half being summations.  Content-wise, half was about the usual preoccupations: propulsion systems, starship technologies, habitats.  The other half covered equally important but usually neglected domains: biology, society, ethics, communicating the vision.  The talks were brief – we were each given 20 minutes total – and varied from the very broad to the very specific.  The presentations that I attended were overall high quality (though I personally thought “exotic science” should have been folded into the SF panels); so were the questions and discussions that followed them.  The age distribution was encouraging and there were many women in the audience, of which more anon.

Some aspects of the symposium did dismay me.  Structurally, the six or seven simultaneous tracks (with their inevitable time slippages) not only made it hard to go to specific talks but also pretty much ensured that the engineers would go to the propulsion talks, whereas the historians would attend those about ethics.  The diversity quotient was low, to put it mildly: a sea of pale faces, almost all Anglophones.  Most tracks listed heavily to the XY side.  This was particularly egregious in the two SF author panels, which sported a single woman among nine men – none with a biological background but heavy on physicists and AI gurus.  It was also odd to see long biosketches of the SF authors but none of the presenters in the official brochure.

Most disquieting, I sensed that there is still no firm sense of limits and limitations.  This persistence of triumphalism may doom the effort: if we launch starships, whether of exploration or settlement, they won’t be conquerors; they will be worse off than the Polynesians on their catamarans, the losses will be heavy and their state at planetfall won’t resemble anything depicted in Hollywood SF.  Joanna Russ showed this well in We Who Are About To…  So did Chelsea Quinn Yarbro in Dead in Irons.  But neither story got the fame it deserves.

On the personal side, I had the pleasure of seeing old friends and finally seeing in the flesh friends whom I had only met virtually.  I was gratified to have the room overflow during my talk.  My greatest shock of happiness was to have Jill Tarter, the legend of SETI, the inspiration for Ellie Arroway in Contact, not only attend my talk but also ask me a question afterwards.

I hope there is sustained follow-up to this, because the domain needs it sorely.  Like building a great cathedral, it will take generations of steady yet focused effort to build a functional starship.  It will also require a significant shift of our outlook if we want to have any chance of success.  Both the effort and its outcome will change us irrevocably.  I will leave you with three snippets of my talk (the long version will appear in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society):

“An alternative title to this talk is ‘Distant Campfires’. A Native American myth said that the stars are distant campfires, where our ancestors are waiting for us to join them in storytelling and potlatch feasts.  Reaching and inhabiting other planets is often considered an extension of human exploration and occupation of Earth but the analogy is useful only as a metaphor. To live under strange skies will require courage, ingenuity and stamina – but above all, it will require a hard look at our assumptions, including what it means to be human.”

.

“In effect, by sending out long-term planetary expeditions, we will create aliens more surely than by leaving trash on an uninhabited planet.  Our first alien encounter, beyond Earth just as it was on Earth, may be with ourselves viewed through the distorting mirror of divergent evolution.”

.

“If we seek our future among the stars, we must change for the journey – and for the destination.  Until now, we have participated in our evolution and that of our ecosphere opportunistically, leaving outcomes to chance, whim or short-term expedience.  In our venture outwards, we’ll have to overcome taboos and self-manage this evolution, as we seek to adapt to the new, alien worlds which our descendants will inhabit.

One part of us won’t change, though: if we ever succeed in making our home on earths other than our own, we will still look up and see patterns in the stars of the new night skies.  But we will also know, each time we look up, that we’re looking at distant campfires around which all our relatives are gathered.”

Images: 1st, sunset, September 27, 2011, Sarasota, Florida (photo, Athena Andreadis); 2nd, Spaceborn (artist, Eleni Tsami)

The BBC had a fascinating article the other day running under the unfortunate headline of "Supercomputer Predicts Revolution," about an intriguing effort by Kalev Leetaru to use "tone and location" to forecast political revolutions and uprisings, and otherwise anticipate large-scale social disruptions. As the BBC describes the study:

The study's information was taken from a range of sources including the US government-run Open Source Centre and BBC Monitoring, both of which monitor local media output around the world. News outlets which published online versions were also analysed, as was the New York Times' archive, going back to 1945. In total, Mr Leetaru gathered more than 100 million articles. Reports were analysed for two main types of information: mood - whether the article represented good news or bad news, and location - where events were happening and the location of other participants in the story. Mood detection, or "automated sentiment mining" searched for words such as "terrible", "horrific" or "nice". Location, or "geocoding" took mentions of specific places, such as "Cairo" and converted them in to coordinates that could be plotted on a map. Analysis of story elements was used to create an interconnected web of 100 trillion relationships.

While far from a definitive lock on Bin Laden’s location, global news content would have suggested Northern Pakistan in a 200 km. radius around Islamabad and Peshawar as his most likely location, and that he was nearly twice as likely to be making his residence in Pakistan as Afghanistan.

Guest commentary from Kevin Brown

The curious mismapping of Greenland’s ice sheet cover by the venerable Times Atlas recently has excited a lot of outraged commentary. But few people noted that this follows an old tradition of speculative cartography of the polar regions. ‘Modern’ mapmakers as early as the 16th century combined real facts and scientific knowledge with fundamental misinterpretations of that knowledge to create speculative mappings of the world’s unknown shores – and nowhere was this more prevalent than at the poles.

Early cartographers had a particularly difficult time mapping the Polar Regions. Factually, they based their maps on reports from mariners who dared sail the dangerous waters. This was supplemented by information from earlier maps, speculations based upon their personal theories of geography, religious beliefs, and the fiscal and political ambitions of their patrons.

The earliest specific map of the North Pole is Gerard Mercator’s 1595 Septentrionalium Terrarum Descriptio (‘Northern Lands Described’, shown here is the 1606 edition). Mercator interprets a lost work known as the Inventio Fortunata (“The Fortunate Discovery”), which, though we don’t know for certain, supposedly refers to early journeys to Iceland and the Faeroes in the 14th century. Complementing and interpreting the Inventio, Mercator added real geographic knowledge collected by explorers Martin Frobisher (1535-1594) and John Davis (1550-1605) (amongst others). Mercator used the Inventio description of lands and peoples, Frobisher and Davis’s reports on currents, ice extent, and other elements, to compose this masterpiece of cartographic speculation.

At the North Pole Mercator placed a great mountain, the Rupes Nigra (“Black Rock”) around which flows a mighty whirlpool (hence the strong currents recorded by Davis and Frobisher). From here four powerful rivers flow inward dividing a supposed Arctic continent into four distinct lands. Mercator referenced the Inventio to populate these lands with pygmies, Amazons, and other anomalies. Between Asia and America Mercator added another great sea mountain to which he ascribes magnetic properties. This mountain evolved from a pet theory devised by Mercator to explain magnetic variation. It is also noteworthy that the seas all around the poles are open and navigable – it is very likely Mercator had in mind the interests of royal patrons eager for a Northwest or Northeast Passage.

Two hundred and fifty years later, in 1763, the French geographer Phillipe Buache (1700-1773), issued another wonderful attempt to address the problematic Polar Regions. Buache drew this map to expound upon his own theory of water basins wherein he hypothesized that the Antarctic contained two distinct land masses separated by a frozen sea. From the frequency of icebergs seen by early explorers such as Halley and Bouvet, Buache presumed that there must be a semi-frozen sea at the South Pole. This sea, which he argued (correctly) could only be fed by mountains in the surrounding polar lands, disgorged ice into the southern seas. He thus maps “Land yet undiscovered” and “Frozen Sea as Supposed”, “Supposed Chain of Mountains” as well as other speculations. In order to conform not only to his own theories but to accepted mappings of this region by venerable cartographers of the 16th and 17th centuries such as Kaerius and Orteilus, Buache also joins New Zealand to the Antarctic mainland and adds an expansive reservoir he names “Siberia”. Buache was highly influential in his time and aspects of his geographical speculation found their way into numerous maps of the period.

Maps such as these abound in early cartography and most, no matter how misguided, are genuine attempts to rectify the known and unknown. Some, like the maps above and the more contemporary Times Atlas’ map of Greenland, are derived from real scientific knowledge, but exhibit either a misunderstanding of geography or an erroneous hypothesis. These often lead to fictitious interpretations of factual data. Such errors do have ramifications. In the early days of polar exploration such maps often inspired to ill-fated nautical expeditions in search of pygmies, polar seas, and new lands. In modern times, such speculative mappings, both early and contemporary, have been used by some to disprove global warming, advocate for the continent of Atlantis, and prove that space aliens mapped the earth in antiquity.

It should therefore probably be always borne in mind that cartography has always been a blend of art and science – which of course is one of the reasons why it so fascinates us.

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