Tiny Techs

Science Fridays

      I was going to write about globular clusters today, particularly the largest, most compact one known to astronomers.  This one is called Omega Centauri, and is in a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, the Large Magellanic Cloud.  However, the tech reports for this week are too good to pass up.  Omega Centauri will have to wait a week.  No problem, because this is freaking amazing.

      We are talking about nanotechnology.  About fifteen or so years ago (maybe longer) we got introduced to futuristic nanotechnology in science fiction programs such as the Twilight Zone.  Nano-robots were injected into a man and they began to direct the molecules of his body in order to transform it according to what the little computers (working as a collective) perceived as a need for the man's survival.  The first thing they did was attack the man's cancer cells and rebuild them right.  He eventually had gills so he could swim better, and all kinds of other weird and creepy things.
      Then a few years later nanobots were a semi-regular recurring cast member on Stargate SG1.  The Goa'uld Nirrti was using them all the time.  She was injecting them into humans, trying to improve on the design, and create a better host for the race of "snake heads," As Col. O'Neil would say.  The nanobots were used in one episode to speed up human development so that their entire life span was 100 days.  Nirrti used them to create a deadly disease that wiped out an entire planet, to turn a little girl into a human bomb, and to create a bunch of ugly mutants with telekinetic powers who finally turned on her and killed her with the powers her nanobots gave them.  And then of course there were the replicators.  The ones in the Asgards' galaxy that moved into the Milky Way were actually kind of huge, but the ones in the Pegasus Galaxy were the size of a cell.

                                 Nirrti, Long time user of Nanobots

      Well folks, that day has arrived.  Little computerized robots smaller than the size of a blood cell have been created already.  These real life nanobots can be injected into a person's body and directed to deliver medicine to a specific set of cells.  Using nanobots in this way means a person can get cell specific Chemotherapy without losing all their hair, their immune system, and most of what they eat.  Nanobots can also be used to intercept electrochemical signals from the brain to do everything from easing pain to preventing seizures.  I suppose that this application in the wrong hands could be used to actually control a person's actions against their will.  Maybe they already have.  I'm sure that the conspiracy theorists think so anyway.  Weirdos.
      The next tech story is even more amazing.  There are people who think that nanobots are so last month, too huge and bulky.  IBM is playing with single atoms.  Yes, you read that right.  To prove their point they made a movie using five thousand carbon monoxide molecules.  The animation is actually quite cheesy, and has the entertainment value of a quartet of a calliope, accordion, harmonica, and a didgeridoo (shudder).  But what would you expect?  This was created by geeks, very smart geeks, however.  Seriously, what kind of movie would you expect from people like the cast of the Big Bang Theory?  Nevertheless, I must be just geeky enough to think that just the fact that they did this is absolutely awesomely cool.  

                                  A still from the movie "A Boy and His Atom"

      In the picture above what you re seeing are actual, individual atoms.  In each pair, the larger dots are the oxygen atoms and the smaller ones are the carbon atoms (outer shell of six versus an outer shell of four).  The movie is called "A Boy and His Atom."  The boy is appropriately called Adam.  Adam and His Atom (this of course also increases the geek factor by a hundredfold).

Look Who's Talking

      I think it's time to discuss language a bit.  I find the concept of languages fascinating.  It is actually just plain odd - seriously.
      When you observes the animals, you can not deny that they communicate with each other, and quite well too.  They don't just use their voices as we mostly do.  Their languages use sniffing, a certain type of walk, and sometimes even peeing along with an array of snorting, whining, barking, and so forth.  Rabbits communicate with each other without ever making a sound.  One thing is clear though, and that is the fact that they perfectly understand each other.  They can even insult one another.  Dogs can be going about their combination language of sign and voice, when suddenly one of the dogs will get all peed off at the other one.  "Was it something I said?" 
      What is also interesting is that you can take a dog from the heartland of mid-west America or Canada, and put him together with a dog from Beijing, and another one from Germany, and they will have no problem speaking to each other.  All dogs in the world speak dog, no matter where they are from.  You can do the same thing with horses.  Granted, they don't have as big of a working vocabulary as a dog, but they can still communicate with each other, no mater where they are from.  A horses speak horse.  Cows - it's the same thing.  Pigs, goats, monkeys - they all speak their own language.  Each species has its own language that is spoken/communicated all around the world.
      That's what makes humans odd - oddly unique.  We can't automatically communicate with people.  The people we talk to must also know our particular idiomatic version of speech in order to successfully communicate.  The fact that we actually have such a concept as foreign language is very odd indeed, since the animals don't have such a thing.  Of all the created beings, only humans have separate languages within their species.  You can't say that's because animals don't talk, because indeed they do.  Just something to think about.
      Anyway - within human languages, there are language families.  These are groups of languages that are all related one to another, and came from some parent language.  Languages within a family have similarities, and even cognates, and they continually, dynamically evolve - first into what are called dialects, and eventually into what are called separate languages.  There is even history to back up the changes.  I will use the Germanic languages as an example.  When I learned German, after a while I stopped seeing German as a "foreign language", but instead as just a dialect with a funny accent (actually the accent sounds more British to me - when I catch it on the radio or something, at first it sounds like a broadcast from the BBC, until I listen to the words).  And in reality, they are just dialects - dialects that separated a long time ago (Dr. Johnathon B. Conant - 1990).  The dialects are just farther apart than Northern Minnesota Finnish-American is from Deep South Mississippi.
      While getting a degree in German (one of my degrees - I decided to get another major rather than get a minor), I also took classes in various historical stages of German.  Among those was Anglo Saxon.  There are many words that are cognate to modern German and modern English.  But of course there are - back then they were the same language.  After college I went on to learn Swedish, and again, there were cognates to both languages, as well as forms of words that weren't seen since the Anglo-Saxon times.  They are all just dialects.  When I went on to one day learn Greek what did I see?  Cognates - not as many as there were among the Germanic languages, but there were still lots of them.  Polish and Russian have a lot of cognates between them, and they also have some cognates with the Germanic languages, and some with Greek.  When I see things written in Latin, as I look up their meaning, I see how many of those words are also cognates.  When I learned some Ghaidhlig, again I saw the same thing. 
      Outside of a language family though, there is absolutely no connection.  There is no "macro-parent" language to all people.   The language families are 100% different from each other.  When I learned some languages from outside of the Indo-European language family though, the cognates were missing entirely. When I learned some Hebrew there were zero cognates.
      I have been devoting the last twelve years to finally learning a language that is NOT a foreign language.  That language is Ojibwe.  Ojibwe came from the Algonquin branch of the Algonkian language family (also known as the Annishinaabe language family).  Other branches of the family are Lenape (Delaware)-Central East Coast, High Plains Annishinaabe, and Southern Great Lakes Annishinaabe.  And there are more.  Because of the relatedness of the languages, I can understand a lot of what Chingachgook is saying in the 1991 movie of "Last of the Mohicans."  This is because what he is really speaking is Lenape (Delaware).  There are many cognates between the two languages.  Annishinaabe is not related in the slightest to either Siouxan, or to Iroquoian.  Those are separate families.
      What has taken me twelve years and counting is the fact that I don't have enough people I can speak it with, and the fact that there is not one single cognate to anything at all resembling an Indo-European word.
      Below is a short list of some Ojibwe words. 

Makwa - Bear
Ma'ingan - wolf
Megizi - bald eagle
Gegoo - fish
Waawaashkeshi - deer
Omashkooz - Elk
Mooz - Moose (the only reason that is a cognate is because English borrowed the word from Ojibwe)
Shib - duck
Mashkode Bezhiki - buffalo (lit. wild cow)
Ishkode waboo - beer or booze (lit. fire water)
Makade mashkiki waboo - coffee (lit. black medicine water)
Manoomin - wild rice
Zinziibakwaad - maple sugar
Wiigwaaswi 'gaming - birch bark wigwam 
Wiigwaaswi jiiman - birch bark canoe
Giziz - sun
Misko - red
Ozaawi - yellow
Ozhawaashko - blue
Makade - black
Waabi - white

Just a Few Snippets 

    For the tech side of things, automakers have been working overtime to try and figure out a way out of all the congestion on the inter-city freeways.  They state the statistic that only 25% of the freeway is being used, even during traffic jams.  I've been stuck in those, and I don't even live in the city, but have experienced them while visiting Minneapolis-St. Paul.  I don't have to deal with them on a regular basis, but only a few times a year and I find it frustrating.  I can't imagine going through it on a daily basis.  During a traffic jam, you get some people who are trying to go faster than the cars in front of them, and then thye have to hit the brakes.  This in turn causes the other people behind Mr. Leadfoot to have to brake too, until you have that going on for two or three miles behind him.  Now the So. Cal. freeways are 100's of times more crowded thatn whimpy little Mpls-St. Paul, and the freeways around Bombay are even more of a parking lot.  
    It was while considering these facts concerning Bombay's freeway congestion, that researchers came up with a solution.  Stop letting humans with poor driving habits drive their cars.  Yes.  Let the cars drive themselves.  Just like the cars that will park themselves so people who can't do it well will stop crunching the fenders of other parked cars, use the same sensor and driving program, but in a more enhanced way.  Besides this, the developers say, the cars can communicate with each other so that they won't get all bunched up, and the traffic will flow smoothly.  Mr. Leadfoot will be out of a job.  He won't be able to cause backups anymore.  With that, there will be one more responsibility that people won't have anymore.  They can just plug in the address to where they are going, and get in the back seat and text all they want.  Maybe the more geeky of them can even play World of Warcraft on their laptops during their daily commute.  

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      In St. Cloud, Minnesota a man was apprehended by the law, after he went to the hospital for treatment of some kind.  He didn't have any insurance or money on his person, but convinced the hospital staff there that he was good for it, because he convinced them that he was David Gilmore from Pink Floyd.  Wow, can you say gullible?  
      St. Cloud has an interesting reputation.  It is a college town, but not for the serious kinds of students.  They have some great schools there and some great programs, but by and large it is a town for intense college partying.  They attract students from smaller towns (the 600 or so population kinds of towns) who want to party day in and day out, they attract drug dealers from those same towns who want to sell the "stuff" to the kinds of kids that were always a lot smarter than they were, and they also have a reputation for attracting weirdos.  
      Through the 2000's they had the "St. Cloud Superman."  Actually he's still around there, but isn't the sensation he once was.  The guy actually is fairly harmless.  He stands out in front of a Dairy Queen there in costume and waves at traffic and talks about truth, Justice, and the American way to whoever will listen.  He has a Facebook page, and if you look it up there are a few videos of him on Youtube.  The people of St. Cloud either love him or hate him )it seems that more of them hate him.  He was arrested for disturbing the peace, and was actually asked in court if he used his X-ray vision to look at women's underwear (some women complained to police that he had been doing that - seriously).  Way to go St. Cloud justice system.  For a while he had attracted others to him like bugs to a light.  For instance there was a Spiderman that hung out with him for a while.  Amazing, DC and Marvel getting together in a cross franchise Justice League (or is it S.H.I.E.L.D?).  

      If your kids tell you they want to go to college in St. Cloud, check their bedrooms for pot pipes and booze bottles. 
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      I also heard a story today about one of the victims of the Boston Bombing.  They were interviewing one woman who ended up losing both of her legs (like so many there that day - I don't have words to describe the tragedy of that day).  Her daughter ended up in the same hospital, and the staff let them recover in the same room.  While the woman was feeling especially despondent, they were visited by a pair of Iraqi War vets, one of whom himself is a double amputee.  He showed here that she can still live a normal and fulfilling life.  She was cheered by this.  The two vets have continued to visit daily.  
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That's all the snippets for today. 

Don't Jump to Unfounded Conclusions - Know All Your Facts First

      Due to the length of yesterday's post, and the fact that it will actually take several viewing sessions to go through all the videos (which are a must, because they are awesome), I will attempt to have much shorter posts for a few days.  Unless something comes up that requires that I do otherwise, that will be the plan for most of this coming week. 

      I feel I need to say a few things again about the Solutreans.  If you remember, they are the people who lived on the shores of western France in the Gascone Region, and sailed out along the ice flows to hunt seals.  Many of them ended up going to North America, and there is the possibility that eventually they were crossing back and forth across the Atlantic.  These were the first Americans; the original ancestors of all the Native Americans. 
      I have seen some things written by some people concerning this subject, and I find what they write as quite disturbing.  White supremacists and other racists love this information, and they run their mouths off without even considering some very key and obvious facts.   They say stupid things like, "See, the first people in America were white."  They feel this information makes the takeover of North America, and the subsequent poisoning, and germ warfare with infected blankets and other acts of genocide were justified.  In their wee little brains they think they didn't steal the land, but that they were just taking back what was stolen by the Indians first.
      Those who think like this are so wrong - they are ninety kinds of wrong.  I combat this moronity with several facts.
      The first fact is that the Native Americans were a combination of the Solutreans and the Asians who crossed over from Beringia about five thousand years later.  I'm sure that the influx of new genetic material helped this isolated race, and probably even saved it.  With the small numbers they began with after five thousand years they were genetically hurtin' for certain.  Genetic degradation and corruption would have been inevitable.
      Asians grow facial hair, not much but they do grow it.  A Native American (full blood) is absolutely devoid of facial and body hair (except for those in the Northwest who have a much higher Asian content to their bloodline - and there are many reasons for that, but that is a different post).  Where did this trait come from then?  From the Solutreans.  These were the same people who made the cave paintings in Lascaux and Altamira.  Their depictions of animals show great detail, including the hair patterns of the animals, such as the wooly mammoths, rhinoceri, shaggy wild horses, and the aurochs.  In their depictions of themselves, curiously, they did not show any facial hair.  Why would they skip this if they were into the details?  Because they had no facial hair, that's why.  The Solutreans were not "white."  They would have looked just like your average Native American.  They weren't blonde haired with blue eyes, and didn't look like the poster child for the Hitler Youth.

       Solutrean painting - note hair on the Aurochs, but none on the man being gored by it

                                              Asians with beards

                                Salish man from the west coast - with facial hair

                                      Another west coast, bearded Native

             Typical Native from central to eastern North America - devoid of facial hair

      "If that's true," the racist might ask, "then why aren't there any 'Indians' running around Europe today?"  Because the same thing that happened to them in North America about 10,000 years later also happened to them in Europe during the late Mesolithic.  They got overrun by settlers from another continent - specifically by the Natufians.  The first Europeans were hunter-gatherers and remained that way until they virtually disappeared.  The Natufians were originally hunter-gatherers too, but after they started gathering wild grains they went through a transformation.  This is all in one of the video series from yesterday so I won't elaborate much on that here.  I'll just simply say that due to a climate catastrophe, and their new addiction to grain they became farmers.  Their success at this eventually caused overcrowding in their homeland, and they traveled off to find new places to farm.  They went east across the Steppes, and they went into Europe.  As they settled and spread out there was less room for the original hunter-gatherers.   Physical evidence shows that the hunter-gatherers didn't adopt the farming ways of the invaders, nor was there much mingling between them.  They basically just vanished, and their specific gene types are only found among individuals in the far west, and are very diluted.
      The Natufians inherited Europe.  Every European carries their bloodline.  They came from Israel (long before Abraham and his descendants lived there).  They were Palestinians, or would have been called Canaanites in a later period.  They are related genetically to the Egyptians, and originally came out of south-east Africa (chromosomal hap-halo group E1b1b with the African group VI mutations M172 and M201).  So they weren't what you would call "white" either.  They were Afro-Semitic.  Take that news you racist bast freaks!
      As long as I'm destroying your white bread, purist fantasies, remember that even the Indo-Europeans were originally Asians.  They didn't turn "white" until some genetic mutation caused a loss of skin, hair, and eye pigment in some individuals (again, theories on how or why that happened are for another post someday).
      So the conclusion is that Europeans aren't really "white" after all.  They are Africans, Semites, and Asians, with a little bit of Native American thrown in, and the Native Americans are definitely not white.  Hah!