Wired’s Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast features Skeptic magazine’s editor Michael Shermer this week. You can hear the entire podcast, but Wired has plucked out a few interesting tidbits to whet your appetite:

Recent studies suggest that those who read fiction become better at understanding and empathizing with others, particularly when those stories involve characters and cultures that are different or unfamiliar.

“That’s what science fiction does,” says Shermer. “Pretty much every novel is transporting you to another world. And so I think all of that adds up—in addition to all these political and economic factors—to making us more moral.”

He also points to Star Trek as an example of how science fiction can promote moral progress. Creator Gene Roddenberry’s show frequently questioned war and bigotry, and also championed reason and logic through beloved characters like Mr. Spock.

“Roddenberry was a humanist,” says Shermer. “He believed we get our morals from reason, and from that you can expand the moral sphere, which he did in his vehicle, the magnificent starship Enterprise.”

Physics arXiv Blog:

Yihao and co take a different approach using two different techniques. The first involves the kind of warping already tried but on a local scale rather than an entirely global one.

The algorithm divides the face into regions such as the eyes, mouth, nose etc and measures the distortion in each of these areas independently. In particular, it measures any change in the height-to-width ratio of each facial feature.

It then applies the same warping to each part of the target face. And to ensure that this warping is realistic, it constrains the changes using the measured height-to-width ratio. That ensures that the facial feature never becomes too large or small in relation to the rest of the face.

The second technique produces accurate shadows on the distorted face. To do this, Yihao and co have created a computer model of the facial muscle groups involved in different expressions and the way these change the topology of the face. The algorithm works out which groups have been used to create a certain expression and then adjusts the shadows in the distorted face accordingly.

While there will surely be valuable uses for this technology, I can guarantee that it will devolve into silliness 90% of the time.

As a designer, lorem ipsum — and its variants — is everywhere. There’s even a “Paste Lorem Ipsum” feature in Photoshop.

Rosie Cima, for Priceonomics:

In the first Century BC, there was a man named Marcus Tullius Cicero. He was a lawyer, statesman, and philosopher, and he was very good at oratory. In fact he might have been the best orator who has ever lived, and the most influential. … Among his works was the De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (“On the Extremes of Good and Evil”), which includes an excerpt believed to be the source for Lorem Ipsum.

But I like this bit:

The passage, in its entirety, relates to hedonism, and how sometimes we do unpleasant things to reach pleasurable goals, and sometimes indulgence in pleasure can incur painful consequences. The passage concludes, “The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.”

Even though the lorem ipsum passage we use today has been highly bastardized, I have to say that I like having some insight into the meaning behind the original text.

Nicholas St. Fleur, in The Atlantic:

To demonstrate his methods, Taylor and his colleagues planned to use the unique signatures they found to make a Jackson Pollock fake good enough to dupe art experts. “However, we concluded that to generate this work would represent the dawn of a new and unwanted era,” Taylor told me in an email. “So we shelved the plan.”

As robots increasingly work (and play) in ways that once seemed fundamentally human, Taylor believes the art world is headed toward a turbulent time filled with difficult questions: If a computer can fake a painting, can it also fool the computers designed to detect the fakes? How can the programs designed to spot fakes stay a step ahead of the programs designed to generate them? The idea, he said, could trigger a particularly ominous cycle, considering the millions of dollars that could be made from forgeries.

It’s important to be able to show authorship and legitimacy. That being said, technology marches in one direction, and computer-derived forgery is inevitable. As for original art, the more the merrier — I only wonder who owns a computer-generated piece of art. Does the art belong to the software, the hardware, or the wetware?

From Phys.org:

While the distance was not huge, the technology could pave the way for mankind to eventually tap the vast amount of solar energy available in space and use it here on Earth, a spokesman for The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said.

“This was the first time anyone has managed to send a high output of nearly two kilowatts of electric power via microwaves to a small target, using a delicate directivity control device,” he said.

Mike Fleming Jr, for Deadline:

Expect good things to happen fast on this one. As is his usual practice, King grants a 90-day option period for $1, contingent on a writer being set, and concrete moves made in development at a pace that shows the author knows the film company is serious.

I’m glad that’s the case. Wouldn’t want this project hanging around in limbo forever.

John Timmer, for ArsTechnica:

The discovery is a masterpiece of indirect detection, using Hubble Space Telescopes observations of the aurora that lights up above the moon, then using that data to work out its magnetic properties and in turn using those measurements to work out its interior structure.

Ganymede is a very large moon, bigger than the planet Mercury. It has a magnetic field, which indicates that the moon hosts a magnetic core. Like the other large moons of Jupiter, it is subjected to tidal forces from the giant planet and its other moons; these forces heat the interior of the moon sufficiently to melt enough of its iron core to generate a magnetic field.

To me, NASA’s method of discovery is nearly as interesting as the discovery itself. I can’t wait to meet the Ganymates.

A great in-depth piece on Baker, by Megan Farokhmanesh, in Polygon:

Baker says his process is to not have a process when it comes to acting. As soon as he starts to think about it too much, he’s doing a disservice to the character.

“A really great director told me one time, ‘That moment that you’re about to go into exists there,” Baker says. “‘It doesn’t exist anywhere else. It doesn’t exist in the parking lot, or in your car as you’re driving to set. It doesn’t exist in makeup or hair. It doesn’t exist over by craft services. It exists at that exact moment.’

“When you are trying to be in the moment, and you’re walking around the stage or the set and you’re thinking about how your character feels about this moment and everything, you come in so full of your own shit that you’re not open to anything that’s actually happening in the scene. Because you’re expecting your other actors to respond the same way that you are.”

While I remain a bit hesitant to see a classic universe transmogrified into a Marvel-like franchise, look how much good came out of the various guises of Star Trek. Not all of it was good — oh no — but so much of it was. And I’ve always been more of a Star Wars fan, so I say let’s go far, far away. Besides, I believe we’ve already seen the very worst that the Star Wars universe has to offer.

Oh, also this little tidbit, courtesy of StarWars.com:

The idea for the story of Rogue One came from John Knoll, an Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisor and chief creative officer at Industrial Light & Magic.

Yeah, that John Knoll.

Dave Tach, for Polygon:

A single painting by Olly Moss, an artist perhaps most famous for his gorgeous Star Wars trilogy posters, set the visual tone that you can see above. An FAQ on the budding developer’s official site revealed that former Double Fine Productions environmental artist Jane Ng was also at work on Firewatch.

At a 2015 Game Developers Conference session, Ng took the stage to chronicle her work on a game that she’s still building. It’s the story of constructing a fully 3D world for a “narrative exploration game,” as she calls it. But before she could build anything, Ng had to study Moss’ painting.

I loved those Olly Moss concept posters, but I think it’s especially cool that they helped to inspire the look of this game. I can’t wait to dive in.

Nathan Grayson, for Kotaku:

The fantasy RPG plops specially selected players onto a single server and divides them into two teams of four. This means only eight players will ever be playing Upsilon Circuit at any given moment, and their adventures will likely come to swift, brutal ends. Sounds terrifying, right? Every move you make can literally be your last.

On top of that, the game will have a participatory audience watching live, something nearly as cool as the “one death ever” conceit.

Spectating (possibly from beyond the grave) is just as much a part of the game as playing. It’s a fascinating social experiment, and it sounds like the developers are just as interested to see what happens as the mortals who jump into the ring.

William Herkewitz, for Popular Mechanics:

Astrophysicists working with NASA’s Saturn sweeping Cassini spacecraft have just announced that Enceladus has a warm ocean at its southern pole with ongoing hydrothermal activity—the first ever discovered outside of Earth. This new research, published in the journal Nature, builds upon last year’s discovery of the moon’s 6-mile-deep ocean, which is also believed to contain many of the chemicals commonly associated with life.

“We now have very strong evidence that there is a hot hydrothermal environment at the base of Enceladus’s ocean, perhaps like those where we believe life began on Earth,” says Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at Cornell University who works with the Cassini spacecraft but was not involved in the new research. “This is yet another discovery in a series of really remarkable findings that have come one by one, to tell us that this may be the place to go look for life in the outer solar system.”

My fingers remain tightly crossed. The real question is when we’ll be able to examine Enceladus more closely. Cassini has provided us with a first glance, but this moon needs to be bumped up a few notches on the exploration queue.

Jacob Kastrenakes, for The Verge:

The show focuses on Tudyk’s character as he attends conventions and other events. It’s supposed to be based in part on the experiences — strange, funny, or otherwise — that he’s had over the years while interacting with fans and others in the convention world. “If you’ve gone to a sci-fi convention, you’ve only seen half of it,” Tudyk says in a statement. “Con Man delivers what convention ‘all-access’ passes have only promised in the past.”

Tudyk and Fillion went to Indiegogo to raise money for Con Man and quickly exceeded their goal of $425,000. At press time, the campaign is sitting closer to $650,000 with a month to go.

Well that’s not surprising in the least. The Firefly cast was pretty magical together, and we’ll clamor for more, in whatever form it takes. This one sounds like a winner.

Matt Simon, for Wired:

Ever since Darwin and his famous finches, biologists have thought that in order for a species to diverge into two new species, the two populations had to be physically isolated. Those finches, for instance, each live on a different Galapagos island, where their special circumstances have resulted in specialized bill shapes. Yet the two varieties of island scrub jay (they haven’t technically speciated—yet) live on the same tiny island. If they wanted to meet each other for a brunch of acorns and/or pine nuts and perhaps later some mating, they could just fly right over.

This is very, very weird. It’s an affront to a sacred tenet of evolution you probably learned in school: Isolation drives speciation. Well, speciation can also come about in a broadly distributed population, with individuals at one end evolving differently than individuals at the other, but nothing kicks evolution into overdrive quite like separation. Without it, two varieties should regularly breed and homogenize, canceling out something like different bill shapes (though rarely the two types of island scrub jay will in fact interbreed). And the island scrub jay isn’t alone in its evolutionary bizarreness. In the past decade, scientists have found more and more species that have diverged without isolation. Langin’s discovery with island scrub jays, published last week in the journal Evolution, is perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this yet.

So isolation may drive speciation, but strong preferences, over time, may also get you there.

University of Cambridge release:

The newly discovered objects are a billion times dimmer than the Milky Way, and a million times less massive. The closest is about 95,000 light years away, while the most distant is more than a million light years away.

According to the Cambridge team, three of the discovered objects are definite dwarf galaxies, while others could be either dwarf galaxies or globular clusters – objects with similar visible properties to dwarf galaxies, but not held together with dark matter.

 

Jada Yuan, for Vulture:

Broad City is often compared to Girls because both depict early-20s female friendships in New York, but tonally it’s much sweeter, more like the exhibitionist little sister of Seinfeld and Laverne & Shirley. The characters are fun and fresh: horny, sometimes bi-curious young ladies, rolling joints and scraping by, keeping it casual with the men in their lives (“I’m a Vulvarine!” Ilana shouts, aghast, when Abbi suggests she might be in an actual relationship with Lincoln, her dentist beau) while reserving their most raging affection for each other. The show’s architecture is classic buddy sitcom, albeit with lots of boob flashing (behind blur bars, because Comedy Central isn’t HBO) and real talk on important matters like what to do when it seems like you may have peed out a condom. This raunchiness is not the only reason the show seems so contemporary. It’s also just crazy-liberal enough to reflect the way millennials view the world, with no presiding sexual norms, no judgment on experimentation, and with diversity among friends and in the city at large that doesn’t feel like a quota — presented in a way that acknowledges the heroines’ skewed perspective without trivializing the greater difficulties of others. When the gang goes to celebrate the naturalization ceremony for Ilana’s immigrant roommate, Ilana exclaims, “Isn’t it great to live in a country where our ancestors passed through Ellis Island?” “Uh, mine didn’t,” says Lincoln, played by Hannibal Buress, who is black.

Such an excruciatingly funny show. It’s satisfying to see these two launch straight though the indie stratosphere from their humble YouTube beginnings.

Michael Cavna, for the Washington Post:

The occasion for this interview is linked to the Bill Watterson retrospectivecurated by Robb and exhibited last year at the Billy Ireland galleries (in a dual show with a Richard Thompson retrospective) and this year at Angouleme. Tomorrow, Andrews McMeel, the parent company of Watterson’s syndicate, is publishing “Exploring Calvin and Hobbes,” the ravishing exhibition catalogue from that retrospective — a 152-page beauty that, like the show itself, is organized around such themes as the seasons that rippled through “Calvin and Hobbes” like supporting characters.

And “Exploring Calvin and Hobbes” the Book, arriving 20 years after the adored strip sledded away for the final time, finds Watterson in the late-summer of his content.

Calvin and Hobbes occupied a sweet spot in history, when newspapers were still physical things that gave you colorful fingerprints. But, for me, the comic was also published in a time between adolescence and adulthood, which seems appropriate. As for Watterson, it seems to me that he hasn’t so much settled into his superstardom as he has outlived the most oppressive aspects of it.

Kristyn Bates, for The Conversation:

The latest advance in human BBIs represents another leap forward. This is where transmission of conscious thought was achieved between two human beings in August last year.

Using a combination of technologies – including EEG, the Internet and TMS – the team of researchers was able to transmit a thought all the way from India to France.

Words were first coded into binary notation (i.e. 1 = “hola”; 0 = “ciao”). Then the resulting EEG signal from the person thinking the 1 or the 0 was transmitted to a robot-driven TMS device positioned over the visual cortex of the receiver’s brain.

The upcoming Apple Watch features something they’ve dubbed “Digital Touch.” Says Apple:

Let friends or loved ones know you’re thinking of them with silent, gentle tap patterns they’ll feel on the wrist.

To me these two concepts feel like advancements along the same continuum.

Clive Thompson, on Medium:

What’s happening now is different. Now we’re messing around with syntax — the structure of sentences, the order in which the various parts go and how they relate to one another. This stuff people are doing with the subordinate clause, it’s pretty sophisticated, and oddly deep. We’re not just inventing catchy new words. We’re mucking around with what makes a sentence a sentence.

“Playing with syntax seems to be the broad meta trend behind a whole bunch of stuff that’s going on these days,” McCulloch tells me. And it goes beyond this subordinate-clause trend. Many of the biggest recent language memes were about syntax experimentation, such as the “i’ve lost the ability to can” gambit (which I wrote about a few months ago), or the gnarly elocution of doge, or the “because” meme. (Indeed, Zimmer points out, the American Dialect Society proclaimed “Because” the Word of the Year for 2013, largely because it had been revitalized by this syntax play.)

This sort of thing fascinates me. Sure, it can get old fast, as with anything that gets overexposed, just as “dogespeak” did. But this is how the language evolves. The difference is that we’ve moved beyond mere word of mouth.

brian wang, for Next Big Future:

General Fusion is nearing significant milestones. General Fusion’s Approach is Magnetized target fusion (MTF). Magnetized target fusion is a hybrid between magnetic fusion and inertial confinement fusion. In MTF, a compact toroid, or donut-shaped magnetized plasma, is compressed mechanically by an imploding conductive shell, heating the plasma to fusion conditions.

General Fusion has a full-scale prototype [of the injectors and other subsystems], twin plasma injectors resembling five-metre-long cones, each attached to opposite ends of a three-metre-diameter sphere, would pulse a few milligrams of hydrogen gas, heat it until it becomes a plasma, and inject it into a vortex of swirling liquid metal. Electricity circulating in the plasma would create magnetic fields that bind the plasma together and confine the heat.

From there, an array of as many as 300 huge pistons attached to the sphere’s shell would act like synchronized jackhammers, ramming it at 200 km/hr. This would send shockwaves into the very centre of the chamber, compressing the hydrogen isotopes to 100 million degrees celsius — hot enough for fusion to occur, and good enough to generate clean electricity from steam turbines.

General Fusion reached its milestones on the piston timing about two years ago. Technicians are now perfecting functionality of the plasma injectors.

A well-sourced update.

ustwo studio:

Over the last year we’ve seen a lot of new thought about in-car HMI. We’ve seen considered critique about the elements and design considerations (especially in the centre console), with safety rightly at the forefront. There were 10 automakers at CES this year, with 50 products designed to reduce accidents.

In the course of our research and partnership with CDR (Car Design Research), we identified one fundamental and ubiquitous element in cars which has lacked an effective redesign over the last few decades.

This element is the humble instrument cluster, with its speedometer and fuel gauge and so on. We’ve looked into how we can and why we should enrich this space. We want to present the results of this, not as a complete solution, but as a viewpoint and approach to be tested, debated and improved with your feedback.

I love this kind of thinking aloud. Here we have an in-depth exploration of a specialized UI, which relies on adaptive hierarchy to display the most important information in the appropriate context. The results are thoughtful, and aesthetically pleasing as well.

Joshua Rothman, for the New Yorker:

American science fiction draws heavily on American culture, of course—the war for independence, the Wild West, film noir, sixties psychedelia—and so humanity’s imagined future often looks a lot like America’s past. For an American reader, one of the pleasures of reading Liu is that his stories draw on entirely different resources. Much of “The Three-Body Problem” is set during the Cultural Revolution. In “The Wages of Humanity,” visitors from space demand the redistribution of Earth’s wealth, and explain that runaway capitalism almost destroyed their civilization. In “Taking Care of Gods,” the hyper-advanced aliens who, billions of years ago, engineered life on Earth descend from their spaceships; they turn out to be little old men with canes and long, white beards. “We hope that you will feel a sense of filial duty towards your creators and take us in,” they say. I doubt that any Western sci-fi writer has so thoroughly explored the theme of filial piety.

Intriguing! I’d be curious to read his work.

Natalie Wolchover, for Quanta Magazine:

The future of RHIC, which employs 850 people and costs the Department of Energy about $160 million annually, is uncertain. In a 2012 white paper making the case for continued operations, scientists argued that “RHIC is in its prime” with new upgrades poised to answer key questions in nuclear physics. Yet a panel of scientists recommended shuttering the collider in the stead of two other nuclear physics facilities vying for the same funding. So far, all three laboratories have made the cut, yet every run of RHIC could be its last.

Composer Jonathan Berger, for Nautilus:

In recent years, numerous studies have shown how music hijacks our relationship with everyday time. For instance, more drinks are sold in bars when with slow-tempo music, which seems to make the bar a more enjoyable environment, one in which patrons want to linger—and order another round. Similarly, consumers spend 38 percent more time in the grocery store when the background music is slow. Familiarity is also a factor. Shoppers perceive longer shopping times when they are familiar with the background music in the store, but actually spend more time shopping when the music is novel. Novel music is perceived as more pleasurable, making the time seem to pass quicker, and so shoppers stay in the stores longer than they may imagine.

Perhaps the clearest evidence of musical hijacking is this: In 2004, the Royal Automobile Club Foundation for Motoring deemed Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyrie the most dangerous music to listen to while driving. It is not so much the distraction, but the substitution of the frenzied tempo of the music that challenges drivers’ normal sense of speed—and the objective cue of the speedometer—and causes them to speed.

I often disappear into music. I was one of those people who sat there in front of the speaker, listening to a new album as if I were trying to figure something out. Not to say that my appreciation was purely technical, but I’m fascinated by the tactical use of music to alter behaviors. It’s repellant in a way — using something beautiful for business ends. But it just shows how deeply ingrained music is to who and what we are.

John Brownlee for Fast Company:

Many of her designs proved so universal that they have established a sort of universal grammar for computer GUIs. Although the cut-and-paste icon, the save icon, and the volume icon on your devices are probably a lot more colorful and higher resolution than the monochrome, 8-bit icons Kare designed during her time at Apple, they’re still probably very similar to what she originally came up with: a pair of scissors, a floppy disc, and a speaker.

Those original icons are still so minimalist and evocative. A big part of their charm is what they represented in the earliest days of the GUI — the promise of something magical and different.