peer-review oder lügensteine

There was something vaguely familiar among this list of the most infamous scientific hoaxes that prescribe a preventative dose of healthy skepticism that the Presurfer shared. One of the pranks was perpetrated in my old town of Würzburg, just around the corner, at the prestigious university, where among other things, x-rays were discovered, probably began innocently enough but soon became a ruinous scandal.
Rock-hound, early fossil-prospector (though there were collections, at the time in 1725, people didn’t understand how fossils were formed and preserved) and dean of the School of Medicine Johann Bartholomeus Adam Beringer was known to hunt for specimens in the vineyards of Eibelstadt on the outskirts of the city, and some of the professor’s colleagues thought it would be a hoot if they planted some stones there for their cantankerous and rather arrogant co-worker to find. They etched into pieces of limestone impressions of bugs and frogs, which Beringer theorised were either fossils from before the Great Flood or were the artifice of prehistoric tribes. On later expeditions, Beringer also found fragments that bore the name of God in Hebrew characters, and with the evidence of the Tetragrammaton, Beringer decided that these could be no human artefacts but rather “capricious fabrications of God Himself.” Beringer commissioned a lithographer and began publishing volumes of his amazing findings. Even though disliked by the university staff, the hoaxers realised that they had gone too far and admitted to the fraud, discrediting not only Beringer academically but all involved as well. Some of Beringer’s so called Lügensteine (lying stones) are on display at the regional museum housed in Fortress Marienberg, and perhaps that’s where I was introduced to these eighteenth century pranksters.  Be sure to check out the link up top for more scandalous episodes of deception and duping.

dark dorkingtons

There were quite a few hen-fanciers during the Victorian Era, producing quite a few distinctive show-breeds, popularised by the Queen herself having received a pair of exotic chickens from China. I first recall seeing these chicks with their hair did on Bibliodyssey’s former web-presence, since migrated to the socials but still a wonderous visual and literary archive worth the visit. The heights of the craze, hen-fever, were captured in the definitive volume “The Illustrated Book of Poultry” by Lewis Wright—first published in 1870 and periodically reissued over the next several decades. Check out the appreciation and gallery from Kottke at the link above to learn more and see who else is in the hen-house.

overt and covert

Beginning with some lines of haiku lifted from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Hyperallergic explores how the battery of diagnostic tests that psychologists use or purport to use (recalling that for the Rorschach ink blots and the like, there are no wrong answers—just crazy ones) taken out of the clinical-setting and context become accidental-art. I especially enjoyed the primer on the now discredited narrative-type or storytelling exams, like the Thematic Apperception Test or Make a Picture Story that operated on the principle that the subject’s motives and character would be revealed by his or her projections, since our veiled self-indictments must mean that we are repressed or vicarious ourselves.

cognitive inference

Perhaps avert your eyes if you find such optical effects to be headache or vertigo inducing, but Jacques Ninio’s classic Extinction Illusion has twelve fleeting dots on the grid that dash away when you try to focus on them is really worth a spare moment or two. Hardly anyone can see all the dots at once due to poor peripheral vision and the mind’s eye tends to generate solid crossings over the scintillating, contrasting gaps. I wonder how someone manages to design an optical illusion that’s meant to be evasive and dazzling in the first place.

beautifish or rub-a-dub

The UK government made a laudable decision last week, in favour of the environment, mostly unnoticed and quite unilaterally (which kind of makes me wonder if Britain were still in the EU if it could have done so without extensive consultation—and regardless, it would surely be better if the whole bloc enacted this ban) pledging to prohibit the use of plastic microbeads in cosmetics.
In response to a petition championed by several environmental organisations and voluntary-industry action, the tiny plastic beads which for whatever reason were introduced to toothpaste, soaps and facial scrubs (instead of salt or diatoms, I suppose—microscopic fossils of plankton that used to do the scrubbing) will be totally phased out by next year. Although it is disturbing enough that one’s morning shower eventually floods the oceans with billions of tiny particles that enter into the food-chain and never go away, there’s an even more dismaying aspect to consider: though far from inconsequential, the plastic beads are rather harmless in themselves (at least relatively less so for marine life that macro-sized plastic pollution) being inert. That characteristic makes the beads a magnet for the other nasty things that man puts in the seas. Most artificial toxins are hydrophobic and could latch on to the beads and bring more chemicals into the ecosystem. I hope Britain’s stance goes global.

the league of extravagant grannies

Via the fabulous Messy Nessy Chic, we learn about the design duo of Osbourne Macharia and Kevin Abraham who invent, lavishly embellished, and then document fictional scenes and sub-cultures in their native Kenya. Check out more of their uplifting and fun work here.

a halo darkly

Via the always interesting Kottke (who’s sporting a spiffy new look) we learn that tiny, dwarf galaxies as they age can attain a higher concentration of dark matter than the apparent universal constant of one part to five (in favour of the weakly reacting sort of matter rather than the one, baryonic, that we experience) because normal matter is much more flightly and prone to erosion by more massive galactic neighbours.
As counterintuitive as it seems, that much was at least expected and could be a sort of lens for getting to better understand the unidentified nature of dark matter, but astronomers were astounded to detect a wholly new class of galaxies—first spotted in the faint and shy wall-flower called Dragonfly 44. The galaxy appears to be almost entirely composed of dark matter (whether there’s a totality of dark energy as well in the mix is not mentioned) but it’s roughly the same size as the Milky Way. Imagine a galaxy our size but instead of four-hundred billion, there’s only a paltry four to eight billion stars knocking together out there—suggesting that there is something very flawed in the way we think galaxies coalesce and evolve, since those lonely stars ought to be pulled apart and absorbed into other star systems. Researchers are hoping to find more of these big, “empty” galaxies looming closer to home and perhaps observe dark matter and its properties directly.

arraignment or computer says no

Thanks to the discerning eye of Nag on the Lake, we are directed to very important back-pocket thought that’s really in the forefront of things, presented in a quite clever and accessible way. First reading the title of this offensive called “Weapons of Math Destruction,” I took it initially as a needed critique on the poor state of mathematical literacy and how easily people can be manipulated by bald statistics that someone along the telephone-tree didn’t understand or made up altogether—which was not the thesis—but I think a part of it does fall to us as the creators of, contributors to Big Data to take a responsibility for our own leavings and to try to dispel confirmation-bias (which comes honesty to machines by end-users’ trust in incomplete scenarios). The responsibility is ours no matter how powerless and misused we might feel since it is our measureable actions and reactions that school our trial by algorithm.  Naturally, as we feel the stare of prying eyes that have reduced privacy and disengagement as a potential customer to a rare commodity, we can anticipate the next level when we potential face condemnation and punishment for our actions before we do them. 
While it is certainly a mixed-bag of results and hard to gauge the true benefits we’ve gotten by bearing our souls and movements and preferences to a human moderated internet, there is good to be had out there, not forgetting we are responsible and heir to any and all outcome.  As machines learn at a rate that outstrips our ability to react, the formulæ that govern our credit-worthiness and interest will unfold into something larger to affect notions of free-will and executive-agency. It is unacceptable surely that anyone is judged and sentenced for pre-crime, but it may come in forms more unintentionally insidious than that, if we’re not careful. Without ill-will, the Internet of Things may conspire against you to discourage you from pursing that job-application, ballot or travel plans, thinking it is doing you a favour by sparing you the disappointment. What sort of strength of character does it take to survive in a world where not only that corrects one’s spelling or makes recommendations based on one’s purchasing history but to face a systematic and coordinated battery of disengagement and discouragement?  Or alternately, support and cheerleading?  One’s history could just as easily suggest that one is not worth the effort medically or won’t be buying anything anyway and ought to be banned transit as facilitating pathways to success, and I think that that takes a critical eye, just like dharma and motivation in the real-cum-virtual world. Are we prepared to have that built into our infrastructure, as we might experience the Universe as sending us messages? What do you think?