Onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the HiRISE camera offers unprecedented image quality, giving us a view of the Red Planet in a way never before seen. It’s the most powerful camera ever to leave Earth’s orbit.

HiRISE | High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment

Offered FYI in response to a recent post.

Freeman admitted he was a skeptic on global warming. His problem was not change in the climate. “In the long view we ARE changing the climate.” He felt that climate was hugely complex, that we understand very little of it and many people are reducing this unknown complexity into one data point — the average temperature somewhere. Until we understand what kind of changes we are making in our “solutions” he says he believes the best action on global climate change right now is inaction.

But I have studied their climate models and know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics and do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields, farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in.

The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That's why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

Besides the general prevalence of fudge-factors, the latest and biggest climate models have other defects that make them unreliable. With one exception, they do not predict the existence of El Niño. Since El Niño is a major feature of the observed climate, any model that fails to predict it is clearly deficient. The bad news does not mean that climate models are worthless. They are, as Manabe said thirty years ago, essential tools for understanding climate. They are not yet adequate tools for predicting climate. If we persevere patiently with observing the real world and improving the models, the time will come when we are able both to understand and to predict. Until then, we must continue to warn the politicians and the public: don't believe the numbers just because they come out of a supercomputer.

Freeman Dyson: I am always happy to be in the minority. Concerning the climate models, I know enough of the details to be sure that they are ... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]

This paper is from 2005. I have only skimmed it. I'm posting in response to the recent thread Political Preference Is Half Genetic.

We test the possibility that political attitudes and behaviors are the result of both environmental and genetic factors. Employing standard methodological approaches in behavioral genetics —– specifically, comparisons of the differential correlations of the attitudes of monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins —– we analyze data drawn from a large sample of twins in the United States, supplemented with findings from twins in Australia.

The results indicate that genetics plays an important role in shaping political attitudes and ideologies but a more modest role in forming party identification; as such, they call for finer distinctions in theorizing about the sources of political attitudes.

We conclude by urging political scientists to incorporate genetic influences, specifically interactions between genetic heritability and social environment, into models of political attitude formation.

Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?

Welcome to Celestia ... The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.

All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit.

Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that's not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.

Celestia

Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goal is to create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike. To transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every living species. And ultimately, to increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity.

See also:

Help build the Encyclopedia of Life | TED Talks

As E.O. Wilson accepts his 2007 TED Prize, he makes a plea on behalf of his constituents, the insects and small creatures, to learn more about our biosphere. We know so little about nature, he says, that we're still discovering tiny organisms indispensable to life; yet we're still steadily destroying nature. Wilson identifies five grave threats to biodiversity (a term he coined), using the acronym HIPPO, and makes his TED wish: that we will work together on the Encyclopedia of Life, a web-based compendium of data from scientists and amateurs on every aspect of the biosphere.

Encyclopedia of Life

The wave-of-advance model was introduced to describe the spread of advantageous genes in a population. It can be adapted to model the uptake of any advantageous technology through a population, such as the arrival of neolithic farmers in Europe, the domestication of the horse, and the development of the wheel, iron tools, political organization, or advanced weaponry.

Any trait that preexists alongside the advantageous one could be carried along with it, such as genetics or language, regardless of any intrinsic superiority. Decoupling of the advantageous trait from other "hitchhiking" traits depends on its adoption by the preexisting population.

Here, we adopt a similar wave-of-advance model based on food production on a heterogeneous landscape with multiple populations. Two key results arise from geographic inhomogeneity: the "subsistence boundary," land so poor that the wave of advance is halted, and the temporary "diffusion boundary" where the wave cannot move into poorer areas until its gradient becomes sufficiently large. At diffusion boundaries, farming technology may pass to indigenous people already in those poorer lands, allowing their population to grow and resist encroachment by farmers.

Ultimately, this adoption of technology leads to the halt in spread of the hitchhiking trait and establishment of a permanent "cultural boundary" between distinct cultures with equivalent technology.

If you don't have access to PNAS, you can download a preprint of the paper.

For a visual demonstration:

This page contains the test site applet for the Neolithic farming simulation in an environment with a Gaussian shaped hill in the middle.

The upper panels show the populations of Farmers, Hunter Gatherers and converts as the wave travels from left to right. Populations are suppressed in the central region.

Lower panels show the integrated fraction of the various populations (white). With the default settings, the wave of advance of the farmers outcompetes the hunter-gatherers, a few converts are formed, but rapidly overwhelmed. The wave is it is slowed by the hills, and Shortly after crossing the hills the converts become the dominant population, with a sharp cultural boundary between them and the original Farmers.

The timestep is hardcoded at 1 year, and the length unit is 1km. For fast moving waves these fixed scales lead to a numerical instability in the diffusion equation, which could be fixed by reducing the timestep (at the expense of slowing the applet)

Cultural hitchhiking on the wave of advance of beneficial technologies

And to think I was just miles from this museum yesterday!

You come upon a pastoral scene undreamt of by any natural history museum. Two prehistoric children play near a burbling waterfall, thoroughly at home in the natural world. Dinosaurs cavort nearby, their animatronic mechanisms turning them into alluring companions, their gaping mouths seeming not threatening, but almost welcoming, as an Apatosaurus munches on leaves a few yards away.

What is this, then? A reproduction of a childhood fantasy in which dinosaurs are friends of inquisitive youngsters? The kind of fantasy that doesn’t care that human beings and these prefossilized thunder-lizards are usually thought to have been separated by millions of years? No, this really is meant to be more like one of those literal dioramas of the traditional natural history museum, an imagining of a real habitat, with plant life and landscape reproduced in meticulous detail.

Adam and Eve in the Land of the Dinosaurs

The central thesis of The Web's Awake is that the phenomenal growth and complexity of the web is beginning to outstrip our capability to control it directly. Many have worked on the concept of emergent properties within highly complex systems, concentrating heavily on the underlying mechanics concerned. Few, however, have studied the fundamentals involved from a sociotechnical perspective. In short, the virtual anatomy of the Web remains relatively uninvestigated. The Web's Awake attempts to seriously explore this gap, citing a number of provocative, yet objective, similarities from studies relating to both real world and digital systems. It presents a collage of interlinked facts, assertions, and coincidences, which boldly point to a Web with powerful potential for life.

The author, Philip Tetlow, is a researcher at IBM.

Read his paper, SOA, Glial and the Autonomic Semantic Web Machine, on developerWorks:

Our industry is drowning in a sea of complexity, with software complexity in particular causing significant complications. The natural sciences have been studying complexity for far longer that we could ever pretend. In many of these chaotic patterns, feedback is an essential component for the supporting mechanisms to be sustained. Such self-organising, or autonomic, systems are relatively commonplace in nature and many of their axiomatic workings have now been captured and formalised using abstract models. This paper therefore presents the proposition that such models may be used to address complexity issues within IT problem spaces. In particular it investigates the use of Semantic Web technologies as a means of reducing ambiguity in the design and implementation of automatic solutions for addressing complexity at a number of points in the Software Life Cycle. Additionally, Glial, an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) based prototype language, is introduced for the implementation of such autonomic solutions, including SOA systems.

Last year, the Web Science collaboration was launched by MIT and U. Southampton.

The Web's Awake: An Introduction to the Field of Web Science and the Concept of Web Life

Welcome to the Darwin Correspondence Project’s new web site. The main feature of the site is an Online Database with the complete, searchable, texts of around 5,000 letters written by and to Charles Darwin up to the year 1865. This includes all the surviving letters from the Beagle voyage - online for the first time - and all the letters from the years around the publication of Origin of species in 1859.

Darwin Correspondence Project

Looks like some good stuff here.

From cell biologists to quantum physicists, researchers are struggling to work out how systems involving large numbers of interacting entities work as a whole. In this collection of Essays, scientists explain how a systems approach, in parallel with the reductionism that dominated twentieth-century science, promises to yield fresh insight, and in some cases, to challenge the most widely held concepts of their field.

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Connections: Essays in Nature