Week 14
Penrose notebooks, the number of stories around us, eugenics & its impact on modern day science, some cool projects & experiments and learnings from a CSS course.
[Cool Things on The Internet] Penrose Notebooks
Sir Roger Penrose is an English mathematician, physicist and a Noble Laureate in Physics. Recently, I stumbled upon some of the pages in his journal.
So incredible. He even describes in one of his interviews how he always has a notebook by his side to sketch down all the wacky thoughts he may have and then later sits with them to resolve them further, which of course leads to wonderful new things.
I’ve always found these kinds of notebooks to be so beautiful and meaningful, for how it helps people dive deep into ideas that just exist in their minds. Recently, I had a conversation with someone who was keen to understand how I end up thinking about ideas of @arjunsarchive and the very next instant, I sprinted across the room to show my journals.
What I’ve understood from talking to a lot of people, who struggle to bring their ideas to fruition, is that everyone can think of creative ideas but more often than not they let it die inside their head.
Maybe Michael Ian Black said it correctly when he said, “your harshest critic is always going to be yourself. Don't ignore that critic but don't give it more attention than it deserves.”
I think if you’re looking to experiment with a certain sense of freedom, you might want to put your critical self to rest and explore; like a child might when they find crayons in an empty house.
Who cares about the landlady and her 9000 restrictions? I want a room with some tigers dancing on top of a ship, buried deep in the Atlantic City. And tomorrow, I’ll want a new thing too.
[Thoughts] The sheer number of stories around us
Among the 8 books that I’ve been dabbling in and out of for the past 4 months, I finally managed to reach the end of What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. Along with this, I also delved deeper into the tragic love story between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
You know, sometimes, I look at the diversity of books that pique my interest and even the diversity in conversations that I have with other human beings. So. Many. Stories.
Can you even begin to imagine it? 7 billion people, 7 billion life stories. More than 14 billion love stories. More than 35 billion group stories. About 490 billion years worth of stories, just for the people who are living right now.
It’s interesting to me how books take shape. Some people write about their stories, some about someone else’s stories, some about stories that are built inside their heads, some about the subject matter of their choice, some about their struggles, some about their triumphs, some about the history, some about the future, some about the present, some about how the present will become the future or how the past became the present, some about the trivial things of life, some about the grander schemes in life … man, what a wonderful world to be in.
There are trillions of stories around you. How can this not be enough to remain excited about life? Find the stories that interest you and enjoy travelling down that same path with the author, all at a time when you’re creating stories of your own.
Life’s beautiful.
[Thoughts] How the study of eugenics may have scarred the science world
Recently, I was reading up about how James Lee (a behaviour geneticist based in the US) was recently denied data, to study the relationships among intelligence, education, and health outcomes by the National Institutes of Health on the basis of classifying the study to be “stigmatizing”.
As Stuart Ritchie puts it in his Science Fictions blog post:
So, to summarise: the NIH allows researchers to use the genetic data they host to do research… but not research that might offend people.
When I read this, I couldn’t help but think about one of the proseminars in the Xperimenters programme where we discussed eugenics as a potential case for people becoming “science awry”, as elaborated by Naomi Oreskes in her book: Why Trust Science.
For those who aren’t aware of the term, eugenics was a popular theory of “planned breeding” which was supported by US president Teddy Roosevelt as well. Apparently, many scientists claimed that traits and behaviours were passed down from generation to generation, which simply means that a child of a murderer was more likely to turn out a murderer. This, in the 21st century, was disproven and scientists withdrew their strong claims (which had led to the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of people by this time, just by the way).
This example has popularly been used by climate change deniers to argue against science as well. If they were wrong about eugenics back then, they may be wrong about climate change too.
Anyway, somehow when I read NIH claims on how this kind of genetic research may be “stigmatizing”, it wasn’t much of a leap to think that maybe the science community didn’t want to be led down that path again. Say, for example, Lee’s research proves the existence of certain relationships do among intelligence, education and health outcomes, and if it further takes shape into large-scale policy changes, the impact would be (at the very least) world-changing. And if someone disproves the existence of these relationships in the future, the world gets yet another argument to argue against the credibility of science.
Maybe the NIH does want to play safe but at the cost of what? Not letting people further the knowledge of mankind, to safeguard the interest of science? A rather tricky situation and I wait to see how it all pans out.
[Projects] Flying Pantograph
In yet another dive down a rabbit hole induced by my never-ending fascination with the MIT Media Lab, I came across A Flying Pantograph developed by Sang-won Leigh and Harshit Agrawal.
It’s a pretty cool project which involves a pen and a flying device of sorts that has a marker attached to it. Move the pen, and the device moves accordingly, drawing on the board in front of it.
What’s interesting is that they explore relationships between the speed of the pen and the device’s reaction. Draw fast and the device does not complete the full stroke but moves on to the next one, draw slow and the two move in sync. You can check out a demo here.
[Experiments] Light Painting with colour tracking
I was pretty proud of this experiment.
For a long time, I wanted to “light paint” by using colour-tracking algorithms on JavaScript. About a year ago, I’d actually made a brightest-point tracker that could track a bright light source and draw objects accordingly.
However, there were two problems with this: (a) there was no actual painting being done and (b) there was no method to on/off the object being tracked in order to actually create strokes.
In a previous experiment, I was working with LEDs and learnt how they could have a simple “button” like structure if you tape one end of the bulb to a button cell and press the other one to switch it on. If the other end does not touch, the circuit isn’t complete and the switch is off.
Combining this simple realisation with my better programming skills, I ended up creating an actual “light painting” sketch.
[Learnings] Learning CSS
Some more boring updates from the HTML/CSS/JS course that I’ve been doing. Didn’t make as much progress as I thought I would but then again, some progress is better than none at all.
<button type = "submit">Submit</button> Add the `type` attribute with the value `submit` to the `button` to make it clear that it is a submit button.
Radio is basically to select one option out of many (Google Forms): <input type = "radio">Indoor
Nesting inside <label> helps ensure that when you click corresponding text, the option is also selected (basically it makes a group)
Link CSS to HTML file: <link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css">
Same style on mobile as is on desktop: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
The div element is used mainly for design layout purposes unlike the other content elements you have used so far.
Width, instead of pixels, can also be percentages.
Think of the margin as invisible space around an element. Using these two margin properties.
article elements commonly contain multiple elements that have related information.
Call all <p> elements of a certain item as .item p{}
display:inline-block makes two p items behave as inline blocks.
Sir Roger Penrose is an alumni of my college!! It's so exciting to see stories around us. And even more mind bending to think about the stories before our times, how much of the world we haven't discovered yet and maybe we never will.