thoughts & queries

science and interdisciplinary studies.

[sugartownunderground]

[girlactionfigure]

NBA Star, Holocaust Educator

Ray Allen is a basketball legend who scored more 3-pointers than any other player in NBA history. He’s also a passionate Holocaust educator who serves on the board of the U.S. Holocaust Museum.

How did Ray become interested in learning and teaching about the Holocaust? Ever since he was an army brat living in Germany where his father was stationed, he was curious about Germany’s dark history. Later, when he was a college student at the University of Connecticut, Ray took a trip to Washington DC and visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which had a deep impact on him. Later, when he was in the NBA and his team would travel to DC to play the Wizards, Ray would make it a point to visit the museum.

In his own words: “I’ll never forget how I felt after those two hours in there - I could have spent two days. My immediate feeling was that everyone needs to go there…. The people of these Jewish communities were pushed to the absolute limits of their human instincts. They just wanted to survive. And from that, the tales of brotherhood and camaraderie are so awe-inspiring. It was a reminder of what the human spirit is capable of - both for good and for evil. Honestly… it made me feel sort of irrelevant. Which was a strange thought to have as a young NBA player who was supposed to be on top of the world. I was realizing there were things outside my bubble that mattered so much more.”

For the rest of Ray’s NBA career, whatever team he was on, when they went to DC to play the Wizards, Ray would make time to take his teammates to the Holocaust Museum. He remembered, “Every visit was different, but each guy came out thanking me for taking us there. I could see in their eyes that they had a different perspective on life after that experience.”

In 2016, President Obama appointed Ray Allen to the board of the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Ray said, “I am proud to serve in this role and to continue to share the important messages and lessons we all need to remember from the Holocaust. I want to inspire people to break down stereotypes, and treat one another - regardless of race, religion or anything else - like family. It’s more important now than ever.”

Ray traveled to Poland in 2017 to visit Auschwitz. Even though he’d read and learned a great deal about the Holocaust, nothing prepared him for the visceral experience of standing in a place where so many people suffered and died. He was deeply inspired by stories of righteous Gentiles, many of whom sacrifice their own lives to help Jews. Ray asked himself a tough question that’s impossible to answer, “Would I have done the same?”

When he returned to the U.S., Ray was surprised to find he was the subject of some controversy: “Some people didn’t like the fact that I was going to Poland to raise awareness for the issues that happened there and not using that time or energy to support people in the black community. I was told my ancestors would be ashamed of me. I know there are trolls online and I shouldn’t even pay attention, but that one sort of got to me. Because I understand where they were coming from. I understand that there are plenty of issues in our own country right now, but they were looking at my trip the wrong way. I didn’t go to Poland as a black person, a white person, a Christian person, or a Jewish person - I went as a human being…. The people who beleive that I am not spending my time the right way… well, they’re missing the entire point. We shouldn’t label people as this thing or that thing. Because by doing so, you create these preconceived notions, which is how we get into these horrible situations in the first place… We have to do a better job breaking through ignorance and the close-mindedness and divisions that are plaguing our society….”

Ray Allen was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2018. He continues to educate Americans about the Holocaust. Ray is Chairman and President of the Ray of Hope Foundation, which he founded in 1996 to help young people realize their full potential through sports and community programs that instill a feeling of self-worth.

For using his platform as a sports hero to promote Holocaust education, and for helping thousands of children through Ray of Hope, we honor Ray Allen as this week’s Thursday Hero.

Accidental Talmudist

[typhlonectes]

Don’t misread Darwin: for humans, ‘survival of the fittest’ means being sympathetic

One of the shockwaves from Charles Darwin’s idea that humans evolved from other animals was moral panic. If our ethics are not guided by an omnipotent and all-knowing god and, instead, life is driven by ‘survival of the fittest’ via natural selection, how could we possibly expect humans to behave with anything other than brash self-interest?

Yet Darwin’s use of the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ was hardly meant to suggest that existence was a knockdown, drag-out fight – he was very clear that generosity, sympathy and all those other traits that give us warm feelings are central to human survival. In this short video, the psychologist

Dacher Keltner at the University of California, Berkeley puts kindness in evolutionary context, connecting his own recent neural-imaging work on compassion with Darwin’s view that sympathy is a cornerstone of human flourishing.

via: Fig. 1 by University of California

[gnostix1]

“May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza’s Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.”

— Albert Einstein

[philosophybits]

“Perhaps it’s inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason

[garadinervi]

Galileo Galilei, February 15, 1564 / 2019

(image: Galileo Galilei, Sidereus nuncius, facsimile of the 1610 edition)

[eartharchives]

The World's Earliest Known Animals May Not Have Looked The Way We Thought

We don't know a lot about the world's earliest animals, but thanks to their 558 million-year-old fossilised remains, we thought we had a hint as to their appearance.

Scientists at the Australian National University (ANU) have discovered that the iconic Dickinsonia fossils are probably not flat sea creatures with ribbed bodies.

[timkappa]

@bunjywunjy

[bunjywunjy]

YO, THIS IS A BIG DEAL!!! 

basically, the Ediacaran was the geologic age that came just before the Cambrian, spanning from 635 to 541 Million years ago. it was though that there wasn’t any complex multicellular life at this point, but now we know that’s WRONG and INCORRECT. The discovery of the Ediacaran Biota fossils have proved there was life of some sort even this early in Earth’s history, but it was… weird.

most of the fossils from this time look more like geometric shapes than anything, uh, alive. and a lot of these weird organisms seem to have grown in mathematically-precise patterns! and more than that, they grew by branching fractally. nothing alive today does that! 

and if that weren’t enough, a lot of these Ediacaran weirdos exhibited tri-radial symmetry, meaning they were symmetrical on three sides instead of just the traditional two used by animals today. again, nothing alive today does that. 

so to be frank, scientists just flat-out thought these organisms weren’t animals at all, but were instead either an animal precursor or some kind of weird stem-animal cousin. (I like the term Mathimals, myself.) 

but, uh, according to the article, scientists are now thinking that the Mathimal fossils aren’t of whole organisms, but only of their supporting structures! IF THIS IS TRUE, IT MEANS THAT THE MATHIMALS WERE FAR MORE COMPLEX THAN WE THOUGHT, AND PROBABLY WERE ACTUALLY ANIMALS. which is a shame because it means I can’t use the term Mathimal anymore, but hey I guess you can’t have everything.

but on the other hand, it means that the great-grandaddy of all animal life on the planet looked something like this

and I think I’m okay with that.

[eartharchives]

These fossils may capture the day the dinosaurs died. Here's what you should know.

Reports about a stunning site in North Dakota are making waves among paleontologists, who are eager to see more.

Handfuls of fossils have been found before at other places that also capture this moment in the geologic record, known as the K-Pg boundary. But the North Dakota site potentially represents an entire ecosystem affected by the catastrophe.

[unexplained-events]

Science & Conservation Intern, at Butterfly Pavilion captures video of octopus changing colors as it sleeps. It raises the question of whether cephalopods can dream/experience REM sleep.

 VIDEO SOURCE

[neurosciencenews]

Blue Brain solves a century-old neuroscience problem

A mathematical algorithm developed by the Blue Brain Project can objectively classify different shapes of neurons in the brain. The algorithm has already helped researchers objectively identify 17 types of pyramidal neurons in the somatosensory cortex of a rat.

https://neurosciencenews.com/blue-brain-cell-types-10929/

(image: Illustration of morphological types of pyramidal cells within the rodent cortical layer The image is credited to EPFL / Blue Brain Project (BBP). )

Original Research is Open access

Lida Kanari, Srikanth Ramaswamy, Ying Shi, Sebastien Morand, Julie Meystre, Rodrigo Perin, Marwan Abdellah, Yun Wang, Kathryn Hess, Henry Markram; “Objective Morphological Classification of Neocortical Pyramidal Cells”, Cerebral Cortex, Volume 29, Issue 4, 1 April 2019, Pages 1719–1735, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhy339

[sixpenceee]

Cartoon by http://www.martin-perscheid.de/

[entheognosis]

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.”

— Max Planck

[senecasredoubt]

“The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.”

— Will Durant (1885-1981) American historian. (via philosophicalconservatism)

[nationalsciencefoundation]

Brain Awareness Week 2019 Learning how an octopus thinks: It’s harder than you’d imagine

The octopus brain may not resemble a human’s in the least, but its nervous system has evolved to solve many of the same problems as our brains do. Looking at the organization and function of this “alien” brain might teach us about universals of neural computation. That’s the driving hunch behind a team of NSF-funded researchers led by Peter Tse at Dartmouth College.

Along with his lab and the labs of Walter Besio from the University of Rhode Island and Gideon Caplovitz from the University of Nevada-Reno, Tse is not only hoping to better understand the octopus’ more distributed nervous system/brain, he and his colleagues are creating the first underwater noise-canceling EEG sensors to do so.  And these sensors must also be able to resist corrosion that would normally occur in salt water and be affixed to an awake and active octopus.

Despite having a less centralized nervous system than humans, the octopus still demonstrates remarkable intelligence and problem-solving capability. Indeed, on some tasks, this mollusk appears to outperform some animals with spinal cords. This might be because the 500 million neurons of an octopus are on par with the number of neurons in the cortex of a bear or a lion. In comparison, a mouse has around 70 million neurons, and a rat around 200 million.

In their research, the team will not only test octopuses’ responses to known stimuli underwater with EEG sensors.  They will also test human brains similarly. If the research proves fruitful, it likely will spark larger-scale investigations of octopus cognition. The researchers aim to explore how octopuses perceive and think by giving them tasks, some of which involve interacting with a “virtual reality” projected onto the walls of their tank.

“Just as wings convergently evolved in three chordate lineages, namely, bats, pterosaurs, and birds, complex nervous systems have evolved three times since diverging from a common worm-like ancestor over half a billion years ago, namely, the arthropods, such as honeybees, the mollusks, especially octopuses, and then in the chordates, including ourselves,” Tse said. “These are natural experiments in nervous system design that science should explore, both in terms of neural circuitry, and in terms of cognitive function. In the case of the octopus, there seems to be a sudden groundswell of interest in their minds, and rightly so. What we learn from octopus brains and minds may teach us things about nervous system design that will help humanity in many future endeavors, from artificial intelligence to chip design. At this early stage of research into octopus cognition, really, the sky is the limit.”

Video credit: Honor Paine

[intelligentliving]

“Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is one country.”

—

David Hilbert

h/t This Brian Green Tweet remembering that Hilbert died this day in 1943.

(via scienceisbeauty)

[finita--la--commedia]

“Sometimes I envy people who don’t believe in God or a future life. What a serene and cynical existence I’d live today; with what sarcasm I’d ridicule the imbecility and dementia of humankind.”

— Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), from “The Portugal Journal” (entry of 30 December, 1942), translated from the Romanian by Mac Linscott Ricketts

[newhistorybooks]

“For decades in the late 1800s, nine scientific luminaries (among them biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker) dined together as members of the ‘X Club’. This socio-economically diverse group, formed in part to promote Charles Darwin’s achievements, is a telling case study in the dynamics of Victorian class and science. Historian Ruth Barton’s magisterial chronicle traces the careers of the “X-men” and their agile promotion of science; Huxley, in particular, emerges vividly as wily, belligerent, and obstructive to women entering science.”