Monkey Glands

"The physiologist Serge Voronoff, a Russian working in Paris, was one of the most infamous of the gland doctors. He thought that the lazy, mentally disabled, run-down, and aged could be revitalized by testicular transplants. Many wealthy men underwent the costly surgery; Voronoff transplanted the testes of executed criminals into millionaires. Legal contracts were drawn up with prospective donors, but apparently willing individuals were in such short supply that what one scientist called a "despicable trade in organs" began to develop. According to one newspaper, men were even being mugged for their testicles, "knocked unconscious and then robbed of the long-sought-for organs."

Voronoff solved this crisis by slicing and grafting the testicles of monkeys onto those of the men who sought his treatment. In his book, Rejuvenation by Grafting (1925), Voronoff promised the patients who acquired his monkey glands that they’d be able to work longer, and that they would be blessed with improved memories, eyesight, and sex drives. He set up a special breeding center on the Italian Riviera for chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans that was run by a former circus-animal keeper. ..."

I really think this magazine is really, really great (but not so great that I'd pay for it...).

from Vasectomania and Other Cures for Sloth, Christopher Turner

www.cabinetmagazine.org (again)

Visual Cognition Experiment

Today I took part in a visual cognition experiment. It involved putting my gulliver in the above padded frame and watching tv for an hour; the worst of which was 10 minutes of two students playing table tennis. There was no Ludwig Van. I was paid six pounds for my time though, and when the hour was up I was deemed fit to rejoin society.

Man Machine

The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program was established at Princeton University in 1979 by Robert G. Jahn, then Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, to pursue rigorous scientific study of the interaction of human consciousness with physical devices, systems, and processes common to contemporary engineering practice. Since that time, an interdisciplinary staff of engineers, physicists, psychologists, and humanists has been conducting a comprehensive agenda of experiments and developing complementary theoretical models to enable better understanding of the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality. Though the research of PEAR does state statistical significance, there exist critics who wish to further examine PEAR methodologies and may question their interpretation of the collected data.

"In the end, it took the better part of a year (and something close to $100,000) to realize the handsome device that adorned the wall of the PEAR laboratory for some twenty years, and that clattered through more than ten thousand cycles under the watchful eye of hundreds of experimenters who sat on the plush couch before it and thought “go right” or “go left” for hours on end. The total tally and final configuration of each run (a full cycle took about fifteen minutes) were meticulously recorded in dozens of laboratory notebooks, which amount to the archival residue of the most sustained effort ever undertaken to test whether, in fact, faith can move a mountain—a small, controlled mountain of polystyrene balls. "

"Human minds can affect random physical processes, to a minor but statistically detectable degree..."

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/34/burnett.php

sounds of space

http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/space-audio/

I recently heard some "solar music" on a scientific radio show. Scientists specialising in the sun were saying the inside of the sun vibrates like a goddamn guitar! The sound waves coming from the core, although unrecordable as such because of the burning hellfire, reverberate to the surface and their frequencies would translate into melodic, harmonious sounds.

Not so easy to find this stuff but I'll keep looking

Set the controls for the heart of the sun

Jodrell Bank

From the original 1951 proposal for the worlds biggest steerable telescope at Jodrell Bank. The document, which is a hand bound blue book, has been scanned and posted on the Jodrell Bank website. It's not much of page-turner, but the presentation is quite pleasing in its lack of polish.

I don't know whether the place is particularly significant today. I used to visit here quite a lot as a child. Big stuff.

Haüy

Mineralogist Rene Just Häuy stumbled upon christal structure by accident, and basically went on to lay some foundations for modern christallography. He was very impressed by the geometric, symetric structure of christals, and so created laws, categories and so forth.

"roots that twist together"

Here's a short article which touches upon establishing a common source for both artistic and scientific inspiration and presents a slightly loopy etymology of ideas as a decoding of the formal similarities between William Blake and James Clerk Maxwell's drawings,

"An archeologist of ideas would trace the roots of Maxwell's field drawings back through Faraday to Faraday's mentor Humphry Davy to Davy's friend the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (and the idea of the universe as a "cosmic web") to... Somewhere in the subterranean passages of Europe's psyche, from which sprang Revolution and Romanticism, somewhere in the murky subconsciousness of the race, an archeologist following the thread of Maxwell's thought would encounter Blake's Tyger, burning bright in the forest of the night, physical force poised to spring, fearfully symmetric."

http://www.sciencemusings.com/musingsarchive/2005_05_22_musings.html

...more Flat Earth

The new president of the Flat Earth Society is interviewed in today's Guardian,

Inevitably, Shenton's argument forces him down all kinds of logical blind alleys – the non-existence of gravity, and his argument that most space exploration, and so the moon landings, are faked. But, while many flat Earthers have problems with the idea of orbiting satellites, Shenton navigates the London streets using GPS. He was also happy to fly from the US to Britain, but says an aircraft that flew over the Antarctic barrier would drop from the sky, and from the planet.

The Flat Earth Society was originally formed as the Universal Zetetic Society in 1884, after the Greek word zeteo, "to seek". Zeteticism, Shenton says, emphasises experience and reason over the "trusting acceptance of dogma" – or, it seems, overwhelming evidence. Only a personal trip into space to see the world as it is for himself would ­persuade him. "But even then, in seeing it, I would have to be convinced there weren't any tricks involved."

"Look at what special effects are capable of: you can produce any photograph, any video. I don't think there is solid proof. I'm not intentionally being stubborn about it, but I feel our senses tell us these things, and it would take an extraordinarily level of evidence to counteract those. How many people have actually investigated it? Have you?"

"I haven't taken this position just to be difficult. To look around, the world does appear to be flat, so I think it is incumbent on others to prove ­decisively that it isn't. And I don't think that burden of proof has been met yet."

...I like this guy!

Society for Psychical Research

http://www.spr.ac.uk/main/

Sounding Space

I have loads to write about Keppler, and will do so in a separate post but for now I'll just post this film as there's a fair bit of explanation in there. He found harmony within geometry in all sorts of other natural structures and systems. The Harmonices Mundi derives from Kepplers assertion that the orbits are musically harmonius as well as mathematically. Music is maths is space, 1619.

The second film has a selection of recordings of low frequency, electromagnetic radiation emitted

by several different planets and moons passed by the voyager spacecraft as they zoom away

from earth, for ever.

I'm Very Excited about Very Low Frequency recordings at the moment. I'm just starting a project

based on these signals and the structures necessary to 'capture' them, (off to Maplins tomorrow

to buy loads of copper wire), so expect frequent dullard posts.

Also some pretty pictures on here too.

"This image represents the first view of another planet from a vantage point in space. It was taken on July 15th, 1965, when the space probe Mariner 4 flew by only 6,118 miles from the surface of Mars.

After the flyby of the planet it would take several hours for computers to process a real image. So while they were waiting, the engineers thought of different ways of taking the 1’s and 0’s from the actual data and create an image. After a few variations, it seemed most efficient to print out the digits and color over them based upon how bright each pixel was. So Mr. Grumm went to a local art store and asked for a set of chalk with different shades of gray. The art store replied that they “did not sell chalk” (as that was apparently too low for them, only convenience stores sold “chalk”), but they did have colored pastels. Richard did not want to spend a lot of time arguing with them, so he bought the pastels (actual pastels seen below), had the 1’s and 0’s printed out on ticker tape about 3in wide, and his team colored them by their brightness level (color key seen below).

Though he used a brown/red color scheme, the thought that Mars was red did not enter his mind. He really was looking for the colors that best represented a grey scale, since that was what they were going to get anway. It is uncanny how close his color scheme is to the actual colors of Mars. It's as if they came right out of current images of the planet. I’ve seen some of the other color schemes he tried and it could have been green or purple!"

All of this is shamelessly lifted from directedplay.com/first_ tv_image_of_mars.html, so thanks for that.

I recently became aware of this through a bbc documentary, I defy you to find a better coming together (unfortunately I used the word synthesis in my last post...it was wasted) of art and science.

Space Rock(s)

Folie

It reminds of this a bit, as a synthesis of both elements.

Galileo beam stress theory

This guy might have had it going on regarding the planets, but as far as strength of material was concerned, he was way off!
It looks like he was too busy thinking about sculpture.

Clinamen

Lucretius wrote :

The atoms, as their own weight bears them down
Plumb through the void, at scarce determined times,
In scarce determined places, from their course
Decline a little - call it, so to speak,
Mere changed trend. For were it not their wont
Thuswise to swerve, down would they fall, each one,
Like drops of rain, through the unbottomed void;
And then collisions ne'er could be nor blows
Among the primal elements; and thus
Nature would never have created aught.

This text regards the concept of the "Clinamen", which represents a certain idea of indetermination or determination (depending on how you view it) in the existence of things.
Plenty of people have their take on it, and it generally appears to be rather a pseudoscientific and philosophical source of speculation on the origin of life than a hard edge scientific concept.
The fact that it represents a notion of movement in the course of gravity seems particularly interesting. We do fall constantly, but in our fall we will bump into something which will prevent there being absolutely nothing.

New Guns for Human Bullets

Flicking through these old issues of Popular Science (available on google books) you can really get a sense of how immediate and vital the beginning of the space race was following the end of WW2. Unsurprisingly, every single cover during the war is dedicated to morale-boosting coverage of advances in military technology, quickly ceeding to the potential new world of space travel at the end of the conflict, yet with some of the same language trailing through.

Flat Earth

"We maintain that what is called 'Science' today and 'scientists' consist of the same old gang of witch doctors, sorcerers, tellers of tales, the 'Priest-Entertainers' for the common people. 'Science' consists of a weird, way-out occult concoction of gibberish theory-theology...unrelated to the real world of facts, technology and inventions."

Flat Earth Society newsletter

Space Balloon

Really interesting documentation of an amateur, 'near space' balloon experiment here

http://www.natrium42.com/halo/flight2/

And making an appearance in art here

Slime Mold Network

A Japan-based research team found that if they placed bits of food (oat flakes) around a central Physarum in the same location as 36 outlying cities around Tokyo, the mold created a network connecting the food sources that looked rather like the existing rail system.

"Self-organization, self-optimization and self-repair as it naturally occurs in the slime mold Physarum polycephalum are capabilities that may be required for technological systems such as mobile communication networks or networks of dynamically connected computational devices"

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=what-we-can-learn-from-slime-mold-h-2010-01-21

Trinitite

Trinitite is the name given to deposits left behind after nulcear testing. It's composed of silica and quartz from sand sucked up into the centre of the explosion, where it fuses together to form a kind of man made pseudo-mineral.

A number of different types of Trinitite have been identified. Green is the most common form. Black contains iron from the tower structure. Red contains copper from the 'gadget' itself or from the communications cables that led away from the site. Both black and red specimens are extremely rare. Rounded pearls are also found which come from melted silica that returned to solid form before hitting the ground.

Philip K Dick

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.

We can’t talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and

unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful. A few years ago, no college

or university would ever have considered inviting one of us to speak.

We were mercifully confined to lurid pulp magazines, impressing no

one. In those days, friends would say me, “But are you writing

anything serious?” meaning “Are you writing anything other than

science fiction?” We longed to be accepted. We yearned to be noticed.

Then, suddenly, the academic world noticed us, we were invited to give

speeches and appear on panels — and immediately we made idiots of

ourselves.

Fake Space

'Mars', looks like an episode of the Banana Splits....

THE BIOSPHERE

I vaguely remember this being publicised when it opened, now it's all rubbish inside.

By 2006, the property, which is in exurban Tucson, was slated to be redeveloped for a planned community.^[4] As of June 5, 2007, the property including surrounding land, totaling 1,650 acres (6.7 km²), had been sold to a residential home developer for US$50 million.

In the 1960s, the Astrogeology branch of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in Flagstaff created an artificial crater field at Cinder Lake in order to train astronauts as well as test equipment and techniques for lunar exploration. They used a Lunar Orbiter image to re-create an actual lunar landscape by setting off charges of the right size to make craters of the right size, as well as setting them off in the proper sequence to get the overlaying ejecta layed out in the same order as seen in the lunar image.

Holograms