Reality Crowd

See Update to this story Below

Science Educator Roy Gould and Curtis Wong from Microsoft give an amazing preview of the Worldwide Telescope. Think of it as a Google Maps for the entire Universe. Set to debut this spring, the worldwide telescope will take images from many different telescopes and stitch them into one comprehensive view of the universe. This is a revolutionary idea, for the first time normal everyday people will get to see what until now only astronomers and astronauts have had access to. What’s the cost for all this amazingness? Nothing!

Update - Here is another great video from fastcompany.tv

Here are some highlights from the www.worldwidetelescope.org frequently asked questions page (FAQ):

Q. What is WorldWide Telescope?
A. The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground- and space telescopes to enable seamless, guided explorations of the universe. WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft®’s high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience.

Q. What are some of the most compelling features of WWT?
A. WorldWide Telescope is an observatory on your desktop, allowing you to see the sky in a way you have never seen before; individual exploration, multi-wavelength views, stars and planets within context to each other, zoom in/out, and a capability for anyone to create and share a tour of the universe.

The Visual Experience Engine delivers seamless panning zooming around the night sky.

WWT delivers seamless integration of science:-relevant information including multi-wavelength, multiple telescope distributed image and data sets, and one-click contextual access to distributed Web information and data sources.

You can also download this video in High Definition from the TED website (highly recommended).

Here is a 3 year old explaining Star Wars… it’s pretty interesting what she focuses on in her summary of Episode IV (the original Star Wars). Enjoy!

Found on Amber Mac’s Blog

For more than four decades Moore’s Law has been consistently correct, and since 1965 scientists have made silicon chips twice as efficient about every 18 months. We all experience this exponential increase in processing power directly: by the changing tools we use, the increasing capabilities of software and computer hardware, changing physical and social systems, and especially by the way change keeps coming faster. Think about how much technology has changed over your lifetime.

This speeding-up process has become an important part of the way our society functions. As noted by Michael Foster, division director of computing and communication foundations at the National Science Foundation, human and economic progress in the U.S. over the past 20 years has depended on the predictability of this growth.

Silicon chips, however, do have limitations--physical limitations on how small a scale you can actually place transistors on an integrated circuit. When you get down to the atomic scale, there’s not much further you can go, and quantum effects will start to pose serious problems. Moore’s Law will reach an end, predicted to be within the next 10 to 20 years. Will we find new innovations to leave Moore’s Law in the dust? Many hope so.

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Some of the great minds of human history had pretty interesting things to say about religion. Benjamin Franklin is quoted: “Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.” I had to look that up to make sure. View the above video to see quotes of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Homer Simpson, and many other interesting personalities and their takes on religion.

View RealityCrowd’s Quoatable Quotes category to see other posts on influential people and their assertions about religion, faith, reason, and science.

*****Update - See below for an update to this story*****

If you have recently been using the website recommendation site StumbleUpon (like we have), you might have recently stumbled across something like this:

Depending on your point of view, stumblecards are either the latest, greatest craze sweeping the internet or yet another marketing scheme ruining the social media landscape. But what exactly are stumblecards? Lets start from the beginning. The internet recommendation site Stumbleupon.com uses a tool bar that integrates with your browser. There are 3 main buttons on the toolbar, Stumble!, Thumbs Up, and Thumbs Down. Hitting the Stumble! button takes you to a random website that other users who like similar things to you have recommended (by hitting the thumbs up button). The more thumbs up votes a site gets, the more Stumbleupon users it is shown to. Stumbleupon is a great way to discover new articles and websites that you might normally have missed and has gained a huge following. The latest (and most contentious) thing to hit the Stumbleupon network are stumbecards. Rarely has any topic (other than Spam) elicited such a huge response…both positive and negative.

The positive reaction to Stumblecards is baffling at best. They are not actually cards in any meaningful way, just images placed on an image of a card. They appeal to the collector in us (the text above them even asks us to ‘collect them all!’) yet there is no real way to “collect” them. You can thumb them up, which will add them to your Stumbleupon list of ‘liked’ sites, but that seems a rather poor substitute for actual collection. They don’t contain any useful information, nor are they funny. They also don’t take any skill to ‘collect’… you can run across them while hitting the stumble button looking at random websites, but if you actually want to find them you can just search for “stumblecards” in the stumbleupon search engine. There is also no ‘official’ list of cards to collect and anyone can make them. So in other words you have a collectible card game where:

There are no actual cards
There is no discernible game or strategy
There is no fundamental difference between ‘collecting’ the cards and not
There is no use for the cards once you find them
There is no way to know if you ‘have them all’

So in other words we have a ‘game’ that is not a game at all. The interesting part is that for some reason it seems to bypass people’s usual mental filters against promoting stuff like this. Something about them makes people who are otherwise pretty discerning about what they give the mythical ‘thumbs up’ to ignore their inner voice and gleefully promote stumblecards to the masses. While the stumblecard backlash seems to be in full force on StumbleUpon, the phenomenon has yet to show signs of slowing. This raises interesting questions for social media in general. We like to think that social media sites are a way to sort the good sites from the sea of mediocrity that is the internet. But if it is so easy to short circuit our filters for ‘quality’ with a simple psychological trick, how can we trust the wisdom of crowds to filter the internet for us? And this is just the beginning… as marketers infiltrate social networks they bring with them all their psychological tricks. Are we ready for it, or will social media websites become just another marketing channel?

So what do you think? Do stumblecards have any redeeming quality? Are they the ruin of Stumbleupon or just an annoyance? Is there hope for humanity? Let us know in the comments!

****Update - 2/19/08****
Adam Atom, the creator of stumblecards, stopped by this post to give us some information. Apparently there is an official list of stumblecards available. You can find that list at http://www.upnatom.org/ the official site of stumblecards. In addition, Adam did an interview with E3internet where he describes the point of stumblecards. It makes for an interesting read as it turns out Adam is not a marketer at all, he was merely trying to create an interesting new game. From the article:

People seem to be attributing this meme to SEOs or online marketers but from my own investigations, you come from an artistic or web design background. In fact your website doesn’t offer any marketing services at all. Do you find it strange that the first StumbleUpon viral came from a non-marketer?

I don’t think it’s strange at all. I’m a web designer so it’s important that I have at least a basic understanding of viral marketing. However, my intentions were always coming from a desire to inspire, entertain and engage Stumblers in the hope they might participate. I don’t have anything to sell or advertise, only the idea itself.

A couple of interesting points of note from this new information. The official list is interesting in that it doesn’t actually contain some of the cards that most of us think about when we think of stumblecards (the Joker card being a prime example). In fact, most of the postings out there on the internet talking about stumblecards use cards that are not ‘official’ as an example of what they are.

Adam’s interview does shed some light on the origin of the phenomenon as well as the original intent of the game. Adam places the blame on marketers and copycats for a lot of the negative reaction the stumblecards have been getting. However, it seems the goal of the game and the way that StumbleUpon works are almost inherently at odds. The game seems to be about searching out the cards, almost like a treasure hunt. StumbleUpon is designed to serve you random webpages that match your interests. If I was looking for something very specific (such as a specific page) I would never really use StumbleUpon to find it, I would use something like Google. It would seem that the random delivery of StumbleUpon and the specific nature of a stumblecard are somewhat at odds. If I am actually looking for stumblecards I would look some other way, and if I am just using stumbleupon to find useful websites then stumblecards are just an annoyance. This combined with the quick appropriation of the phenomenon by marketers would seem to be at the heart of the stumblecard backlash.

Thanks to Adam for stopping by and adding to the conversation.

*****Update 2*****

Adam has now updated the official site to clear up some confusion about stumblecards

In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.

Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

- Mark Twain

We’ll explore this subject more in depth at a later date, but I thought that this clip from the This American Life TV series is really interesting food for thought about how cameras change things. We act differently when we know we are being filmed. How does that change our society when suddenly we are being filmed all the time? That article is for another day… for now enjoy this clip:

What do you think? Do cameras change people’s behavior?

The show “30 days,” a reality TV show on FX, puts people in an unfamiliar lifestyle or culture for a full 30 days and explores the interactions of those put in this juxtaposition. Through stark contrast viewers are able to more plainly see the perceived reality of the groups involved and possible get a closer idea of the actually reality in which we are all involved.

The episode featured in the below video examines the situation of an atheist who agrees to live in the home of a Christian family for 30 days. She attends church with the Christian family as well as Bible study, and she is involved with her hosts daily as a member of the household. As many atheists do, Brenda describes herself as a free thinker: one who builds beliefs based on evidence and logic. The host family immerses Brenda in the community of the faithful.

Highlights of the video are outlined here in minutes and seconds so you can jump to any part of the video you may enjoy:

1:10 - The family and Brenda visit a Christian theme park, The Holy Land Experience where among other events, there is a reenactment of the crucifixion of Christ.

2:40 - Brenda visits the family’s Church for Sunday service.

4:50 - Brenda attends Bible study and is engaged by the members to discuss her views as an atheist. One member asks Brenda, “What did Christ do that was so bad?”

8:10 - Brenda and her host Tracy find some common ground.

9:10 - This last part of the video is especially interesting reporting on general views and attitudes people have about atheists. They cite a University of Minnesota study that showed atheists as being the least trusted minority group in America.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

~How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later

“So we and our elaborately evolving computers may meet each other halfway. Someday a human being, named perhaps Fred White, may shoot a robot named Pete Something-or-other, which has come out of a General Electric factory, and to his surprise see it weep and bleed. And the dying robot may shoot back and, to its surprise, see a wisp of gray smoke arise from the electric pump that it supposed was Mr. White’s beating heart. It would be rather a great moment of truth for both of them.”

~ The Shifting Realities of Phillip K. Dick

Long the domain of science fiction and futurists, it seems that connecting the human brain to computers is coming sooner than you might think. We recently discussed scientists working on mapping a rat’s brain at the neuron level. They think they will have a working model of a human brain within a decade. On the hardware front, engineer Ted Berger at The University of Southern California has spent the past ten years designing a computer chip that can re-create thoughts. Using a needle hooked into a rat’s brain tissue and attached to a small silicone chip, the team of researchers has been able to send and receive electrical pulses from the brain. The chip is a huge first step toward implantable computers in our brains. Eventually, researchers hope to be able to help patients with all sorts of memory disorders, from Alzheimer’s to absent mindedness.

Some day you should be able to stop forgetting where you put your keys with a simple hardware upgrade. However, don’t get excited quite yet. Berger’s chip currently models about 12,000 neuron connections while the brain has an astounding 100 billion! Not to fear though, Richard H. Granger, Jr., a professor of brain sciences who leads the Neukom Institute for Interdisciplinary Computational Sciences at Dartmouth College states that:

Replicating memory is going to happen in our lifetimes, and that puts us on the edge of being able to understand how thought arises from tissue--in other words, to understand what consciousness really means.

Can’t wait a lifetime? Well, the BrainGate Neural Interface System is currently undergoing clinical FDA trials for approval. The System consists of a sensor that is implanted on the motor cortex of the brain and a device that analyzes brain signals. The principle of operation behind the BrainGate System is that with intact brain function, brain signals are generated even though they are not sent to the arms, hands and legs. The signals are interpreted and translated into cursor movements, offering the user an alternate “BrainGate pathway” to control a computer with thought, just as individuals who have the ability to move their hands use a mouse. Currently aimed at severely disabled people, the product is expected to be quickly ramped up for use on people with lesser disabilities.

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