Stories across 400 generations

Australian Australians have passed memories of life before, and during, post-glacial shoreline inundations that happened 10,000 years ago or more. Some can still point to islands that no longer exist, and provide their original names.

In one of the stories of the Ngarrindjeri people, the ancestral being Ngurunderi chased his wives until they sought refuge by fleeing to Kangaroo Island—which they could do mostly by foot. Ngurunderi angrily rose the seas, turning the women into rocks that now jut out of the water between the island and the mainland. Assuming this tale is based on true geographical changes, it originated at a time when seas were about 100 feet lower than they are today, which would date the story at 9,800 to 10,650 years ago. 

A story told by the Tiwi people describes the mythological creation of Bathurst and Melville islands off Australia’s northern coastline, where they live. An old woman is said to have crawled between the islands, followed by a flow of water. The story is interpreted as the settling of what now are islands, followed by subsequent flooding around them, which the researchers calculate would have occurred 8,200 to 9,650 years ago. 

An early European settler described Aboriginal stories telling how Rottnest, Carnac and Garden Islands, which can still be viewed from the shores of Perth or Fremantle, “once formed part of the mainland, and that the intervening ground was thickly covered with trees.” According to at least one story, the trees caught fire, burning “with such intensity that the ground split asunder with a great noise, and the sea rushed in between, cutting off these islands from the mainland.” Based on the region’s bathymetry, the researchers dated the story back 7,500 to 8,900 years. 

Stories by the original residents of Australia’s northeastern coastline tell of a time when the shoreline stretched so far out that it abuted the Great Barrier Reef. A river entered the sea at what is now Fitzroy Island. The great gulf between today’s shoreline and the reef suggests that the stories tell of a time when seas were more than 200 feet lower than they are today, placing the story’s roots at as many as 12,600 years ago.

— via Scientific American

Image: Tiwi Islanders by Heide Smith

Internal difference, where the meanings are

The retina is covered in light-sensitive cells which alter the voltage on their membranes according to the brightness that impinges on them. The light-sensitive cells are connected to neurons in their immediate vicinity that perform some local processing before passing them on to the brain. The processing cells each send out an axon that travels directly into the brain. Many go to an area near the back of the head called the superior colliculus in mammals. The axons of the retinal ganglion cells all run parallel to each other as a thick cable — the optic nerve — but when they reach the superior colliculus they disperse and connect to it in a quite remarkable manner; the place to which each one connects to the colliculus depends, in a precise way, on each ganglion cell’s place in the retina. In effect the exact layout of the ganglion cells on the retina is replicated on the colliculus so that it has a fully laid-out image, in electrical activity, of the optical image that is present at the back of the eye.

— from Life Unfolding by Jamie A. Davies (2014)

Image: Wei Li, National Eye Institute, NIH, via Zeiss

Acorn, adder, ash...

acorn    adder    ash
beech    blackberry    bluebell    bramble    brook    buttercup
catkin    clover    conker    cowslip    cygnet
dandelion
fern    fungus
gorse
hazel    hazelnut    heather    heron    holly    horse chestnut
ivy
kingfisher
lark
magpie     minnow
newt
otter
pansy    pasture    poppy    porpoise    primrose
raven
starling    stoat    stork    sycamore
thrush
violet
weasel    willow    wren

— words removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary in 2007 - via Dominick Tyler

See also Light, half-light

Living colour

Our eyes can distinguish between wavelengths that differ by just one nanometer, but only in the green section of the colour palette: human vision can simultaneously detect about fifty different shades of green

The daytime sky is actually violet but our retinas are so insensitive to this hue...that we instead see the next most prevalent color, blue.

— from The Sun's Heartbeat by Bob Berman (2011)

Image: 7 and 12 colour circles from Traité de la peinture en mignature by Claude Boutet (1708) via Wiki

Blazing heart

The fact that fusion can occur in [stars] is in many ways astounding. Fusion is not simply a union of two nuclei. In most stars, hydrogen nuclei can’t get close enough to fuse. The closer a pair of hydrogen nuclei get, the more strongly their positive charges push them apart. But because nuclei are quantum objects, they don’t need to be close enough to fuse, just to be in the same ballpark. From there an effect known as quantum tunneling can do the rest. One moment the two nuclei are almost close enough to fuse, and the next moment they suddenly find themselves bonded together. It is as if the nuclei don’t have enough energy to open the door and walk through, but they occasionally will teleport through walls. 

But even this bit of quantum magic isn’t enough for a star to succeed. Not only does fusion have to occur, it has to produce something stable. When two protons fuse to become helium-2 (containing two protons and no neutrons), it is extremely unstable and usually splits right back into two separate protons. But there is a 1 in 10,000 chance that one of the protons will instead transform into a neutron, and the atom then becomes deuterium, a stable isotope of hydrogen. Deuterium and hydrogen can fuse to make a stable helium, releasing a huge amount of energy and opening up the amazing creative potential of stars.

— from How the universe made the stuff that made us by Brian Koberlein

Image: anonymous portrait of young Romanian girl (via Jane Long)

Machines that think

There are 186 responses to the 2015 Edge question, What do you think about machines that think?

Daniel Dennett says:

The real danger is not machines that are more intelligent than we are usurping our role as captains of our destinies. The real danger is basically clueless machines being ceded authority far beyond their competence.

Daniel Everett writes:

The mind is never more than a placeholder for things we do not understand about how we think. The more we use the solitary term "mind" to refer to human thinking, the more we underscore our lack of understanding. The idea that comes up in discussions about Artificial Intelligence that we should fear that machines will control us is but a continuation of the idea of the religious "soul," cloaked in scientific jargon. It detracts from real understanding.

Ursula Martin asks:

What kind of a thinking machine might find its own place in slow conversations over the centuries, mediated by land and water? What qualities would such a machine need to have? Or what if the thinking machine was not replacing any individual entity, but was used as a concept to help understand the combination of human, natural and technological activities that create the sea’s margin, and our response to it? The term "social machine" is currently used to describe endeavours that are purposeful interaction of people and machines — Wikipedia and the like — so the "landscape machine" perhaps.

Mark Pagel says:

It is not thinking machines or AI per se that we should worry about but people.

Frank Wilczek says:

Without careful restraint and tact, researchers could wake up to discover they've enabled the creation of armies of powerful, clever, vicious paranoiacs.

Image: Sundog, Nuremberg Chronicle (1493) via Wiki

"Such music I never dreamed of"

Breathless and transfixed the Mole stopped rowing as the liquid run of that glad piping broke on him like a wave, caught him up, and possessed him utterly. He saw tears on his comrade's cheeks, and bowed his head and understood. For a space they hung there, brushed by the purple loosestrife that fringed the bank; then the clear imperious summons that marched hand-in-hand with the intoxicating melody imposed its will on Mole, and mechanically he bent his oars again. And the light grew steadily stronger, but no birds sang as they were wont to do at the approach of dawn; and but for the heavenly music all was marvellously still.

— from The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)

Image: Ancient Trees by Samuel Palmer (1828) via wikimedia