Morgan Freeman and the universe

I love these scale-of-the-universe videos. The most impressive, to me, is this one, from the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History:

It’s a six-minute condensed version of their incredible planetarium software, the Digital Universe Atlas — which is, amazingly, downloadable for personal use. I’ve had the privilege of attending one of the planetarium’s public tours, where they project the atlas onto the huge dome and demonstrate exactly what it can do: zoom in for close-up views of stars and planets as desired, show the current and projected trajectories of human-made satellites, switch on the thousands of labels for all the named stars, and more. A humbling experience.

Then again, it’s hard to resist a version narrated by Morgan Freeman, that takes you down into microscopic levels as well:

Update: How could I forget? The opening zoom-out from Contact is a classic:

I especially like the audio track of Earth’s radio transmissions, running in reverse as we pull back, and dwindling down to the very earliest signals, furthest out from home. Then — silence, and vastness. And eventually, the known universe morphs into a reflection in a young girl’s eye: we are in the universe, as Neil DeGrasse Tyson says, but the universe is also in us.

(h/t Atheist Planet)

Playing God?

Looks like Andrew Revkin has written about some of the same points I’ve made about the intersection of science and ethics, in the wake of J. Craig Venter’s feat:

The latest achievement of J. Craig Venter — rebooting a bacterial cell as a different species by giving it a man-made genetic instruction manual — is just one step on the long inevitable path into synthetic biology.

Humans have modified organisms for ages, making the dog species as variegated as Chihuahuas and mastiffs, transforming corn from a slender grass into a stalk studded with cobs of nutritious grain. But now we’re writing the software from scratch (Venter even included a “watermark” in the million-letter code inserted into the re-purposed bacterium).

Bacteria long ago were engineered to churn out insulin. Now science is poised to tell a bacterium what it is. Listening to talk radio this morning, I heard Glenn Beck railing about the research as it if had been some classified project that was suddenly revealed.

And so, right on schedule, here come the voices railing against the mad scientists who dare to play God. Interestingly, Revkin cites Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics, who argues that the perception that ethics always lags behind science is false. I’ll try to find a video of Caplan’s presentation, but for now his Powerpoint document (warning: pdf) outlines his argument: that the complaints surrounding scientific advances more often than not revolve around policy and politics, not ethics (as when we talk about the malicious misuse of technology, or the impact of technology on health and the environment). When the complaints are about ethics, they usually center on two points: that life cannot be reduced to genetics, and that we’re playing God. Caplan’s document outlines a debunking of these claims, and I wish I could have heard him flesh his argument out.

In any case, he points out that explorations of the ethical implications of new technologies are often carried out before these new technologies are perfected or implemented. It’s the media that needs to do a better job of bringing the public up to speed on ethical arguments that scientists have already been wrestling with in the course of their work.

Caplan further explores the “playing God” accusation and the ethics of synthetic life here and here. A point that resonates with me:

Scientists, theologians and philosophers have been wrangling over this issue for eons. For many, the wondrous nature of what permits something to be alive has been a mystery that science never, ever could penetrate. Life is sacred, special, ineffable and beyond human understanding. Except it isn’t. [...]

The deeper question: is the dignity of life imperiled by showing that human beings can create a novel living thing? I think not. There are those who are enthralled by the idea that life is a riddle beyond solution. However, the value of life is not imperiled or cheapened by coming to understand how it works.

As I’ve argued before, in debates about whether or not morality has biological roots, and whether or not discovering such roots would be a good thing: To understand something completely is not to devalue it. To grasp the biological origins of love, kindness, honor, courage, and altruism is not to feel those things any less deeply or powerfully. To know the universe is to wonder at it even more.

Knowledge — coupled with wisdom — is a good thing. Ignorance never is.

(Image via Syntheticlifeforms.org)

Make a joyful godless noise

Here’s the multi-talented Steve Martin with the Steep Canyon Rangers, at the 2010 New Orleans Jazz Fest. Brilliant:

They’re wrong, of course; there are plenty of awesome atheist songs to go around. XTC, natch:

And as always — and more joyfully — Tim Minchin:

(h/t Unreasonable Faith)

The thrill of the new, the fear of the new

It seems that we’re getting better at manipulating life, and perhaps eventually at creating new forms of it. From the NY Times:

The genome pioneer J. Craig Venter has taken another step in his quest to create synthetic life, by synthesizing an entire bacterial genome and using it to take over a cell.

Dr. Venter calls the result a “synthetic cell” and is presenting the research as a landmark achievement that will open the way to creating useful microbes from scratch to make products like vaccines and biofuels. At a press conference Thursday, Dr. Venter described the converted cell as “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.”

“This is a philosophical advance as much as a technical advance,” he said, suggesting that the “synthetic cell” raised new questions about the nature of life.

Essentially, as I understand it, Venter’s team invented an artificial genome via a computer program, assembled it with chemical components, and injected it into living bacterial cells — at which point the artificial genome overrode the cells’ original DNA and the bacteria became, in effect, organisms doing the bidding of human-made instructions.

Wow.

There is, quite understandably, a lot of excitement about this. As Andrew Revkin writes, one of Venter’s goals has been “to program organisms that, at large scale, could harvest carbon dioxide and generate hydrocarbons, replacing oil as a fuel and feedstock.” And there’s no limit to what we can wildly imagine human-designed microorganisms (and eventually larger life-forms?) accomplishing: Nanomachines in the blood, perhaps, to repair cell damage, arrest the aging process, and enhance human abilities, like the technology that sustains the immortal cyborgs in Kage Baker’s Company novels. Or microbes sweeping through the atmosphere, sucking up excess greenhouse gases. (I’m reminded of the monoliths in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010 — are they synthetic? are they alive? — multiplying on the surface of Jupiter and converting its gases into heavier elements, triggering its transformation into a second sun. Could such feats of engineering be in the distant human future?)

Also understandably, there are objections and concerns — some, unsurprisingly, from within the scientific community itself, because criticism and dissent are just part of how science rolls. Freeman Dyson offers a backhanded compliment:

Why libraries matter, cont’d. (“Who you gonna call?”)

Because when you need to do some research without being bothered by pesky ectoplasmic entities, you can depend on libraries to hire professionals to keep their reading rooms ghost-free.

See Improv Everywhere’s blog post for the inside story.

And click here to learn more about New York libraries’ unprecedented budget crisis, and how you (yes, you!) can help.

(h/t FlickFilosopher)

Why libraries matter, cont’d.

Because the greatness of libraries doesn’t exist only in encomiums from famous authors. Libraries visibly change people’s lives today — and their impact is real. From the NY Times:

Manga clubs have coalesced in libraries in various Queens neighborhoods — Flushing, Jamaica, Long Island City — and the genre has colonized young-adult rooms in libraries around the country.

At least half a dozen Queens teenagers have seriously studied Japanese after getting interested in manga — some making sure to choose colleges that teach it, others using library books like “Japanese in Mangaland” and “Japanese the Manga Way,” said Christian Zabriskie, who as youth librarian at the Queens Library’s central branch in Jamaica drew up to 40 students to its weekly manga club meetings. One young woman discovered a love of languages and now studies Russian in college, Mr. Zabriskie said. [...]

Mr. Zabriskie, 39, now assistant coordinator for youth services at Queens Library, says manga is for these teenagers what punk rock, New Wave, and Dungeons and Dragons were for his generation: a world of specialized knowledge that excludes adults and opens a private creative space for young people.

“This kind of secret, hidden knowledge gives them a power and an empowerment,” he said. “It’s this generation’s esoterica.”

But, he said, unlike other teenage rituals like graffiti or, at the extremes, gang membership, manga fandom increasingly happens at one of the safest places around — the library.

“Rather than seeking out things that may be harmful, having your secret coding be foreign literature that you read in the library is pretty great,” said Mr. Zabriskie [...]

The Queens Library, the country’s largest by circulation, stocks thousands of manga volumes. At least 40 percent are checked out at any given time, and the most popular are taken out 60 times in two years before they fell apart, Mr. Zabriskie recently found by examining circulation records. That popularity rivals the blockbuster Harry Potter books. Mr. Zabriskie estimates that a third of the books left on library tables at the day’s end — the ones teenagers have pulled off the shelf to read for fun — are manga.

The manga mania, like so much else in the city during the recession, is threatened by budget cuts. Beginning in July, proposed cuts would reduce library staff by more than one-third and opening hours by nearly half, library officials say. Thirty-four community libraries would be open only two or three days a week. Mr. Zabriskie’s manga club, the borough’s largest, no longer formally meets; budget strains prevented filling his job after his promotion.

All of New York’s public libraries are imperiled by these unprecedented and potentially devastating budget cuts. Whether or not you live in New York, you can help. Here’s how.

(Photo credit: Sage Ross)

Why libraries matter, cont’d.

“Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission. No committee decides who may enter, no crisis of body or spirit must accompany the entrant. No tuition is charged, no oath sworn, no visa demanded. Of the monuments humans build for themselves, very few say ‘touch me, use me, my hush is not indifference, my space is not barrier. If I inspire awe, it is because I am in awe of you and the possibilities that dwell in you.’” — Toni Morrison

New York’s public libraries are facing an unprecedented and potentially devastating budget crisis. Whether or not you live in New York, you can help. Here’s how.

(Image via Bluesman of the Mind)

Why libraries matter, cont’d.

“I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t be the person that I am, I’m very very certain that without libraries I wouldn’t have the career that I have.

…For most of the human race, pretty much all of the lifespan of the human race, information was currency. Information was like gold. It was rare, it was hard to find, it was expensive. You could get your information, but you had to know where to go, you had to know what you were looking at, you had to know how to find your information. It was hard. And librarians were the key players in the battle for information, because they could go and get and bring back this golden nugget for you, the thing that you needed.

Over the last decade, which is less than a blink of an eye in the history of the human race, it’s all changed. And we’ve gone from a world in which there is too little information, in which information is scarce, to a world in which there is too much information, and most of it is untrue or irrelevant. You know, the world of the Internet is the world of information that is not actually so. It’s a world of information that just isn’t actually true, or if it is true, it’s not what you needed, or it doesn’t actually apply like that, or whatever. And you suddenly move into a world in which librarians fulfill this completely different function.

We’ve gone from looking at a desert, in which a librarian had to walk into the desert for you and come back with a lump of gold, to a forest, to this huge jungle in which what you want is one apple. And at that point, the librarian can walk into the jungle and come back with the apple. So I think from that point of view, the time of librarians, and the time of libraries — they definitely haven’t gone anywhere.

In other ways, we’re in a time of economic difficulty. Libraries are the best place to go to start getting information. They’re the place where most Americans who do not have Internet access go to get Internet access. And we’re in a world now in which jobs are applied for online, jobs are advertised online. You need to be able to know which social services to connect to, you need to know how to retrain, you need information, and all of that information — the focal point for it is your library. So from my perspective, libraries are as important as they have ever been, and they may be more important than they have ever been.” — Neil Gaiman

New York’s public libraries are facing an unprecedented and potentially devastating budget crisis. Whether or not you live in New York, you can help. Here’s how.

(h/t The Book Case. Photo credit: Steve Mullis for MPR.)

Why libraries matter

“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. Public libraries depend on voluntary contributions. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.” — Carl Sagan

New York’s public libraries are facing an unprecedented and potentially devastating budget crisis. Whether or not you live in New York, you can help. Here’s how.

(Image via Paper Castle Press)

Save the libraries!

New York’s public libraries are facing an unprecedented and potentially devastating budget crisis. Whether or not you live in New York, you can help. To skip this post and take action, click here, here, and here.

WHAT’S HAPPENING

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed executive budget for the upcoming fiscal year drastically slashes public funding for the city’s three library systems — the largest cuts in the libraries’ history. The budget reduces funding for the Queens Library by $16.9 million (bringing total reductions to $28.3 million since 2008). The Brooklyn Public Library faces a $20.6 million cut. And the New York Public Library stands to lose a staggering $37 million. If approved by the City Council, these devastating budget cuts would take effect as soon as the beginning of July.

HOW IT AFFECTS LIBRARIES

The New York Public Library would close 10 branches, reduce 6-day service to just 4, circulate 6 million fewer items, and cut back on essential (and free) programs and services — including Internet access, voter registration, job search assistance, tax form assistance, and classes on literacy, entrepreneurship, retirement planning, and English for non-native speakers — as well as lay off nearly a quarter of its staff. (See NYPL president Paul LeClerc’s article in the Huffington Post for details, including a filmed testimonial from Patti Smith and other video tributes.)

The Brooklyn Public Library would close 16 libraries, severely limit weekend hours, lay off hundreds of staff workers, and cut funding for essential materials and services — resulting in 6 million fewer library materials, 15,000 fewer public programs, and 725,000 fewer free public computer sessions.

The Queens Library would lay off over 400 employees (with a total reduction of nearly half its workforce over the last 18 months). 14 library branches would close completely. 34 branches would be closed 4 or 5 days a week. The staff and funding for an about-to-be-opened Children’s Library Discovery Center would have to be drawn from the Library’s already thin resources, further reducing service in other locations. And of course, dramatic reductions to desperately needed materials and public programs are to be expected. (Details here.)

WHY THIS MATTERS

Because — as should be evident to anyone who’s actually set foot in one — libraries are not just warehouses for dusty and irrelevant old books. They’re living spaces, full of people perusing everything from the latest bestsellers to newspapers to classics to obscure titles unlikely to be carried by Barnes & Noble. They’re reading The Hungry Little Caterpillar or Harry Potter to their wide-eyed kids. They’re getting expert help from librarians with their research for school or work. They’re holding neighborhood association meetings to discuss local problems. And they’re attending free public events of all kinds, from children’s story hour to adult literacy classes to resume-writing workshops to conversations with famous authors and artists in packed auditoriums. The libraries are centers of community. To hobble them, or shut them down completely, is to impoverish the life of the city.

Because libraries are one of the great social equalizers. Not everyone has an iPad or Kindle; not everyone has the spare cash to buy all the books and DVDs they desire; not everyone has Internet access at home; and not everyone can afford to go to college, and enjoy the intellectual environment that higher education makes easily available. But the public libraries stand open to all, offering the accumulated information of the world to all, and saying to minds great and small (as well as small minds that may yet be great): Here is an open door to knowledge — and therefore to opportunity, and to power. All you need is a desire to enter.

Because, as even Google’s director of technology admits, a chat with a reference librarian — whether in person or by phone or online, 24/7 — is still better than a Google search.

Because chances are good that the novel or biography or history you’ve just read was written with the help of libraries and librarians. And even if you’ve never used a library in your life, many of the world’s great leaders, thinkers, activists, authors, scientists, artists, and entertainers have. They were inspired to pursue their professions partly because of something they read during childhood afternoons spent in libraries. They used information from libraries in the course of their work to produce the books, films, scientific advances, and social and political movements that have undeniably enriched our lives. And the people who will transform our lives yet again, the ones who’ll solve the energy crisis or find the cure for cancer, may well be in your local library at this very moment — reading, thinking, and open to epiphany.

Because as Archibald MacLeish said, “What is more important in a library than anything else — than everything else — is the fact that it exists.” Libraries, which ensure free and universal access to information more than any other public institution, are at the very heart of a democracy. As such, their funding and continued existence should be absolutely non-negotiable. Along with public schools, libraries should be held up as the embodiment of some of our core democratic ideals — the ideals that we honor, as President Obama has said, “by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard.” Libraries connect us to the great minds of the past and nourish the great minds of the future. They supply the intellectual oxygen to a democratic society. Needless to say, cutting off that supply when it’s needed most is short-sighted in the extreme.

As a recent Internet meme started by Eleanor Crumblehulme declares: “Cutting libraries in a recession is like cutting hospitals in a plague.” I can’t really put it much better than that.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

If you’re a New Yorker, click on the links below to send an email to your elected officials. If you’re an out-of-towner, your messages will still be sent to Mayor Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. The Queens Library page also has a petition that anyone can sign. And of course, wherever you are in the world, you can donate.

New York Public Library
Brooklyn Public Library
Queens Library

Update: According to a librarian at BPL, New Yorkers should also call 311 and file a complaint about the proposed budget, and ask that funding for libraries be restored. The more phone calls flood the system, the more the powers that be will sit up and take notice. So go call!

Update 2: You can also text NYPL to 27722 to give $10. A $10 donation will be added to your mobile phone bill. Go to mGive.com/A for details. Message and data rates may apply.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for helping out. Please spread the word.

(Image credits: Lars Klove for the NY Times; Daniel Solis)