Happy Birthday, Sir Charles Darwin

 

Today is Charles Darwin's 209th birthday. Next year, 2010. Amazing ! The man was clearly ahead of his time. He is actually head of our time. Because two centuries later, there are still people who are not convinced by his ideas. They want to teach and learn evolution as simply a theory. Its a case of reverse Darwinism, survival of the dumbest.

I was expecting a few science articles , and a Google doodle in his honor today. But the current winter Olympics currently underway in South Korea has hijacked the media attention. More for political reasons than sporting. History’s most famous biologist will have to wait, maybe one more year.  He is celebrated as one the greatest British scientists who ever lived, but in his time his radical theories brought him into conflict with members of the Church of England. But right now, he is facing criticism from Indian politicians, of all places. 

But scientists, true scientists, are not giving up. The February 12 to 18 'Darwin Week' is being organised by The India March for Science Organising Committee and the Breakthrough Science Society. To this day the theory of evolution by natural selection is accepted by the scientific community as the best evidence-based explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on Earth. The human race has, by and large, embraced Darwin’s postulate and we have had no reason to question its soundness. No rebel has come forward with an equivalent of the laughable Flat Earth Society to refute Darwin’s views. Even at the most basic level of thinking, monkeys look like us (more or less), and pretty much behave like us, and are only handicapped by not being biped like us, and not gifted with the power of speech — thank goodness !

Something else I came across recently. Darwin documented his findings on the HMS Beagle journey in his notebooks. He was astounded by the colors of these forms of life in the Galapagos islands. But two hundred years ago, he did not have the simple smartphone or even a portable camera to capture a form. All he could do was write, and so he described the colors of the creatures and plants meticulously in his books. During the voyage he drew many of his words from a slim volume called “Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours,” published in 1814 by the Scottish artist Patrick Syme.

“I had been struck by the beautiful colour of the sea when seen through the chinks of a straw hat,” Charles Darwin wrote, in late March, 1832, as H.M.S. Beagle threaded its way through the Abrolhos Shoals, off the Brazilian coast. The water, he wrote, was “Indigo with a little Azure blue,” while the sky above was “Berlin with [a] little Ultra marine.”

Read about how a little known book served as the basis of color description in Darwin’s notes.

Other trivia: There is a place here in Australia, named after Charles Darwin. I plan on visiting it some day. The city was named Darwin by an explorer who had travelled with Darwin on the HMS Beagle. And heres another. Abraham Lincoln was born on this exact same day and year, in 1809. Two different pioneers in such vastly different fields, born on the same day in history.

The reason we can’t see evolution at work is because our human lives take up only the tiniest fraction on the scale of cosmic time We are but one iteration in billions of years of evolution.

That gives us a point to contemplate: wether we believe in god or science we are fortunate to be alive and self aware.

Our comfort is ruining the planet

 

We keep reading about how humans are slowly destroying the planet. We also keep reading about how a few try to do some good and negate the effect. Turns out, the amount of bad greatly outnumbers the good being done. The more we try to live comfortably on earth, the more we ruin the planet. There are now so many of us on Earth that the planet just doesn't have enough resources for us all to live comfortably, which means we require a radical rethink of how we could start living within our means.

A new study by researchers at University of Leeds looked at 151 nations and found not a single one was running itself in a sustainable way – ensuring a decent life for its inhabitants without taking more than it gives back in terms of natural resources. Even the most developed countries are using up natural resources at rates unheard of before, to maintain their high standard of living. While the other countries score far worse on both scales. As can be seen in this graph, the sweet spot quadrant, the top left, is wide empty.

The researchers used 11 different indicators to measure the quality of life in a country: life satisfaction, healthy life expectancy, nutrition, sanitation, income, access to energy, education, social support, democratic quality, equality, and employment.

That was then measured against 7 biophysical indicators, including the ones we've already mentioned, along with material footprint, nitrogen use, and blue water use. Each country's allotted share of these resources was based on its global population.

No country performed well on both scales. In general, the more social thresholds a country achieves, the more planetary boundaries it exceeds, and vice versa.

Although wealthy nations like the US and UK satisfy the basic needs of their citizens, they do so at a level of resource use that is far beyond what is globally sustainable. In contrast, countries that are using resources at a sustainable level, such as Sri Lanka, fail to meet the basic needs of their people.

Among the countries doing the best job are Vietnam, with 6 social thresholds achieved and only 1 biophysical boundary transgressed, and Germany, which hits all 11 social thresholds but has exceeded 5 of the 7 biophysical boundaries.

So thats the future for us, we are slowly eating into the planet. Developing nations, like India, languishing in the bottom, follow the blueprint set forth already by developed nations, with neither the funds or the inclination for alternatives. Almost everything we do, from having dinner to surfing the internet, uses resources in some way, but the connections between resource use and human well-being are not always visible to us.

Theres now a car in space !!

 

Nowadays there is a crazy amount of non-sensical news out there, that sometimes the really awesome stuff gets skipped over.  Somebody might have dared Elon Musk way back in high school, and I think he did this just to get back. SpaceX, his private aerospace company, this week launched their heaviest rocket yet, in what is any company’s coolest PR stunt , ever. They actually launched a Tesla Roadster car in space ! Complete with a dummy driver, named Starman. How cool is that ?

But the real accomplishment of this event was how the two boosters of the rocket returned, and landed back on earth. Two of the boosters were recycled and programmed to return for a simultaneous touchdown at Cape Canaveral, while the third, brand new, set its sights on an ocean platform almost 500 kilometres offshore. This is the technology they are trying to advertise, the cost savings when re-usable engines are used. Its sticker price is $US90 million, less than one-tenth the estimated cost of NASA's Space Launch System megarocket in development for Moon and Mars expeditions.

The car could be traveling between Earth and Mars' neighbourhoods for a billion years, because it did miss its target of going to Mars.

Thank you, Mr Musk. This video of starman in space is ultimate food for Nerds !

Bitcoin’s freefall

 

Billions have been lost. Its a strange feeling of indifference.

The universe moves on , like clockwork

 

The much hyped celestial event, the super blue blood moon, occurred precisely at the time astronomers predicted. The moon was cutoff a little, then glowed an eerie orangish-red. It was weird watching it personally, this is only the first time in my life I have seen this kind of a lunar eclipse. And perhaps the last time too.

It was nice reading about the enthusiasm with which people looked forward to viewing this spectacle, inspite of superstitions around the world.Of course there are superstitious idiots in even the most advanced of places. And last year there was a similar hype for the solar eclipse. Today we understand the movement of the stars with precision, imagine what the earliest humans would have thought when they saw the moon turn red. In ancient Amazon , they would have sacrificed a few dudes to the event. Or some 'homam's and 'puja's would be conducted with large amounts of ghee burn for nothing. We need a scientific approach to universal phenomenon. Questions need to be asked, and answered. Even after all the data, nobody could predict who would win the  2016 election accurately. But eclipses can. We seem to understand more about our universe than about our own minds.

And it is events like these which remind me that despite all the chaos on earth, the universe moves on without unchallenged. Its as if nobody up there cares about the stupid things we do down here. And rightly so. Events like these re-reinforce my belief in science, nature; and the truth that ultimately ,we humans are powerless against the forces of nature.

Reminds of that great quote by Carl Sagan.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.