Some transitions are easy, taking us to a better place.
Some transitions are scary, challenging us to enter unfamiliar space.
Some transitions are extraordinary, for the outcome is completely unknown.
In those spaces and times unfold life stories not yet written, not yet told.
What have we done, a species so skilled in creation having fabricated such unnatural settings?
What are we doing, creating discontinuity in the name of modernity?
What will we become if we continue to embrace a life disconnected from what we know is life sustaining?
At midnight, a twelve hours call for the Holy Spirit to rain down on those gathered in a tin-roofed church climaxed in a cacophony of singing, shouting, and crying–a collective, spiritual orgasm.
When those who believe the creator of the universe can hear their plea only with amplified voice finally succumb to sleep, this can be a quiet, peaceful place.
The rain did come, throughout the night and into the early morning. The rising sun warmed a cloud ladened landscape. The subtle bass rhythm of music rose from a distant flat. The voice of an infant oscillated from a low complaint to a full cry of discomfort in a world yet new. Two stories below our shared flat, the muddy streets were transformed into temporary streams which carry plastic bags, wrappers, and packaging through a muddy, gravitational descent.
I find my time in the cities perplexing.
While we move to a greater understanding of how our universe did unfold, deeper insight to what makes us whole, I see a world of increasing disconnection for who we are. A lack of understanding of the complex system of which we are a part. Fear of the environment outside of that which we have built.
Repeat attempts at replacing what makes us human with a technological revolution. Just one more upgrade, just one more download, and finally, we will have arrived to that place where our inherent biological tendency toward the path of least resistance is satisfied, our lives made more easy.
Yet, that place is never found.
Our youth know not what it means to be alone.
Science Cafe Cape Town
29 October 2015
A week ago Thursday, October 29, I was honoured by the opportunity to speak to the Science Cafe Cape Town. Held at Truth Coffee, the Science Cafe offers “monthly meetups for anyone with a curiosity in science, a chance to chat with local experts about cutting-edge research in a relaxed setting.”
Indeed, the unique venue was ideal for an interactive conversation with an audience of more than one hundred. Following a brief introduction, I showed a short film produced while I was working as an embedded filmmaker and technician at the Mars Desert Research Station, Utah, in January 2014 with MarsCrew134. I then moved through two dozen slides in order to bring the audience into an awareness of the many organisations that are now working toward taking humans to Mars, the asteroids, and beyond. I introduced a few of the many technical and financial challenges, and offered topics for consideration, including “Why should we go to Mars?”
For me, as a speaker, it was a most enjoyable event. My thirty minutes presentation was followed by an hour of questions, which is most unusual and incredibly fun. Thanks to all who attended, for such being the most engaging audience I have ever enjoyed.
I opened the evening with full admission that I am a “jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none” and promised to let the audience know if I could not answer a question asked. This kind of presentation is new to me. Informal and wonderfully engaging, it was as much a conversation with new friends as it was a lecture. Yet in that informality, I was not as accurate with some of my answers as I would have liked to have been.
This past week I have conducted a series of fact-checks, to correct some of my answers and to build upon the subjects addressed. What’s more, Kerry Gordon, co-founder of the Science Cafe Cape Town granted me the opportunity to edit and clean the audio recording of my presentation. In so doing, I was able to remove the inaudible questions (too far from the microphone) and tighten a few of my answers in order to be more concise. The total recording is now just under one hour, including the short film.
In this follow-up research process, I have learned a great deal. I hope you will as well.
CAUTION! The proverbial rabbit hole runs deep. Myriad pathways unfold when investigating such a tremendous topic as space exploration. Dive in, but don’t expect to stop … until you walk on the face of Mars or build a future such that your children’s children may climb aboard a massive vessel bound for a neighbouring star.
RESOURCES
CORRECTIONS
ADDITIONS & VALIDATIONS
The above expands upon my answer of spectroscopy and acceleration by the gravitational field (gravimetry). Further conversation with Stephen Potter, Head Astronomer at the South African Astronomical Observatory offers, “Visual size is a first rough guess. Orbital period and distance cannot give you the mass. You can put any mass at a specific period+distance. E.g. replace Earth with Jupiter and it will have the same period and distance. Moon masses can be refined by studying the deviations in their orbits as a result of their interactions with other moons. So this now becomes a more complicated N-body problem, which you refine with more longer term observations. e.g. JPL has one of the best solar system N-body simulations right now. Only once you get close with a flyby can you refine it further. I.e. your spacecraft becomes the test mass.”
“Cosmic rays are immensely high-energy radiation, mainly originating outside the Solar System. They may produce showers of secondary particles that penetrate and impact the Earth’s atmosphere and sometimes even reach the surface. Composed primarily of high-energy protons and atomic nuclei, they are of mysterious origin.”
“The term ray is a historical accident, as cosmic rays were at first, and wrongly, thought to be mostly electromagnetic radiation. In common scientific usage high-energy particles with intrinsic mass are known as “cosmic” rays, and photons, which are quanta of electromagnetic radiation (and so have no intrinsic mass) are known by their common names, such as “gamma rays” or “X-rays”, depending on their origin.”
“Galactic cosmic rays are one of the most important barriers standing in the way of plans for interplanetary travel by crewed spacecraft. Cosmic rays also pose a threat to electronics placed aboard outgoing probes. In 2010, a malfunction aboard the Voyager 2 space probe was credited to a single flipped bit, probably caused by a cosmic ray. Strategies such as physical or magnetic shielding for spacecraft have been considered in order to minimize the damage to electronics and human beings caused by cosmic rays.”—verbatim from source
For me, exercise and breakfast set the day in motion. They determine, in some ways, how successful I will be at accomplishing my goals. Therefore, I look forward to each and embrace them as serious fun.
Today I prepared a fruit smoothie from a half dozen small ice cubes, juice oranges, apple, avocado, handful of dates, ginger and honey. I cook the onions, garlic, and chilli pepper with 4 eggs in a skillet, topped by mushrooms and tomatoes sautéed in unsalted butter and shredded cheese. Prep to consumption: less than thirty minutes including cleaning, doing dishes as I go. If I prep a few items the night before, a quarter of an hour total.
Delicious, nutritious, filling and grounding.
It does not take a scientific research study to draw the connection between how we fuel our bodies and how our bodies and minds function. Rather, we need to be reminded of what not long ago came more naturally, when our lives were not so fast-paced, when food preparation was a time to prepare for our day.
Everything you see came from the Ethical Co-Op. Not as pretty as the greenhouse ripened, chemically treated, and wax coated fruits and veggies found in the super market, but that’s the point—this is food before marketing decided it should be shiny, BIG, sweet and fun. Many of us have forgotten that food grows in soil. It is wrinkled, imperfect, and delicious in ways an entire generation has never enjoyed.
Our bodies are nothing more than an expression of what we put in. If we expect a cardboard box, a shrink-wrapped styrofoam tray, or a heavily processed “healthy-start breakfast bar” to replace the real thing, we are a victims of advertising designed to sell nothing more than a chemically engineered product made to look like food and sit on the shelf without going bad such that neither the distributor nor the retailer will report lost income to food gone bad.
In the past fifty years, in the lifetime of my parents, we have gone from carrying canvas bags to and from a small, locally owned market to the expectation that everything we consume comes in a box, plastic bag, carton, or container whose sole function is catching our attention on the shelf, and subsequent, easy transportation to our homes where we quickly discard the packaging.
I often consider the fossil fuel and raw materials consumed to package modern food. Farmed trees cut, transported, shredded, pulped, bleached, stabilised, rolled into paper and cardboard then trimmed, printed, and glued into a box to hold what may be consumed in a single meal. Every plastic container began as a fossil fuel formed 300-500 million years ago. Carbon, trapped deep in the Earth released and processed through the complex, power consumptive process of refining, manufacturing, and distribution in order that we can have four, maybe five spoonfuls of yoghurt or quickly unwrap a breakfast burrito on our way out the door.
This is nothing less than insane! Yet, it has become the norm.
Surely, there is a means to return to a life in which we are closer to our food, making clear our consumer preferences through how we spend our dollars and rand. We can visit local farms, and learn how modern farmers struggle and succeed. We can join farming cooperatives, tend to a community garden one afternoon each month. We can grow tomatoes, peppers, and herbs on window sills and balconies, in the narrow spaces between our homes.
We can return to a breakfast that is as enjoyable to prepare as it is to consume, and rest assured we have engaged in a practice that supports a sustainable mind, body, environment and soul.
Two hundred meters from shore, the subtle undulation of the swell raises and lowers my board, my body half immersed in the cool embrace of False Bay. In the early morning light filtered by a thin mist, diminishing silhouettes speak excitedly. I hear someone shout. Three dozen surfers to my left and right spin their boards away from shore as sleek, black bodies rise against the horizon, quickly slipping below the surface again. Even at twenty meters distance, the site of dolphins is breathtaking.
Some paddle out further. Other sit tall, watching, waiting … hoping. A few are lucky to come within just a few meters of the passing dolphins, to be in the path of these curious creatures. More than once, the dolphins come up just parallel to a surfer, looking briefly before submerging and passing beneath the board. I was told later that if you jump off your board, and just float in the water, you may be so lucky as to be nudged. A test? An invitation?
One passes a half dozen meters from me, and I am deeply moved.
Both times I have experience this, I find unexpected emotion welling up inside, my breath caught on the verge of tears. I do not hold belief these are super intelligent creatures, for little in our study of them says they are more or less than what is needed to survive in their domain. But raw beauty, even if only an interpretation in the human mind, moves me in a magical way.
The next day there were whales breaching a few kilometers off shore, and the third day, seals riding the waves just to the sides of our boards. What a gift, to share this medium with our distant relatives, mammals in various forms.
(email to my fellow researchers)
This week has come and gone quickly. I have been to SKA four times, including a week ago Friday. The pace of my work differs now, as my data runs are a minimum of 5-6 hours, but more recently 50+ hours as I push GP to 50 generations of 100-200 Trees against 10,000 lines of features.
I arrive. Log on. Run each accomplished tree against the TEST data. Save the results in my diary. Archive the trees. Mod parameters. Start a new run. Two hours in commute for an hour of work. Sounds like living in San Fran, not Muizenberg.
So far, very good! No glitches in my software. Not a single crash (except when Nadeem accidentally killed Karoo GP 35 gens into a 50 gen run, trying to kill zombies at my request. Silly us! You can’t kill zombies, they’re already dead! I know, old UNIX joke, but it’s still funny :) The multi-core is solid and linear scaling on the 40 core box. The server version (configuration file + single line execution) works well for repeat runs.
I have conducted four full runs, with the fifth now in progress. Keeping a diary of the results, including the Precision / Recall against the TREE ID and it’s polynomial expression. What’s more, every tree is saved in a .csv file at the end of each Generation. Even when Karoo was terminated accidentally, nothing lost.
Now, I need to write a script which loads a .csv and runs with it, as a total population seed (common according to the literature). The continue function is already in place, so just need to slip a loaded list of arrays into population_a and cont.
Consistently, I am seeing 82-86% Precision (in a 50/50 dual class feature set) with Recall just a few points below. I need to look at AUC and one other analysis (rcm by Thuso; can’t recall the name) to get a full understanding of how Karoo is doing.
Ok. Back to work …
(photo courtesy of NASA)
The race for space began with fear that one of our kind might leave home before the other and gain a military advantage. It was not an expedition but a political decision to fuel the Saturn V rockets that carried our species further than ever before.
Four decades later, we have advanced our technology such that each of us carries in our pockets more computational power than all of NASA at the time of the Apollo program, yet we remain grounded, the International Space Station the only reminder of a time when we believed we would inherit the stars.
In my lifetime, humans have walked on the moon and orbited the Earth countless thousands of times. But I must ask without confidence, Will I live to see humans walk on the surface of the Moon again? Will we lay hammer to the rocky surface of an asteroid or sample the flowing waters on Mars?
With the British Interplanetary Society, Icarus Interstellar, and the Initiative for Interstellar Studies thought leaders are helping to put words to thought, and designs to words. The Planetary Society continues to lead with real spacecraft moving into interplanetary trajectories, even into interstellar space.
With NASA’s bold declaration of water on the surface of Mars, perhaps, finally, the dead centre will be shifted to an edge over which politicians without the power of imagination but with the power of economic control will be forced to follow.
Maybe then we will be made aware not of what makes us different, but what unites us under a common goal.
Exploration. Discovery. The unknown.
The photographs were obtained between 3:15 and 4:20 am, in Muizenberg, Cape Town, South Africa. The cloud cover came and went, at times totally blocking the view. Unfortunately, as the Moon neared totality, the mist was heavy (thus the soft image). The final shot of the Moon resting on the adjacent building was only seconds after the clouds dissipated one last time. Totality was missed from this vantage point, but the total experience was mesmerising.
Canon 60D
Nikor 80-200mm lens (circa 1980) with Nikon/Canon adapter
ISO: 400 – 1000
Exposure: 1/200 – 2 seconds
(email to my fellow researchers)
Today marked the first official day of Karoo GP processing KAT7 data.
My first run was with depth 5 trees against 10,000 lines of data with 5 features. The multi-core functionality saved my recursive ass as the first 10 generations of 100 trees took just over 5 hours to process.
In the end of this minimisation function, there were 3 trees presented as having the best fitness, 2 of which shared the same polynomial expression. I think that is a good sign, but not certain yet.
Precision was 86% for both. Recall quite a bit less.
I sent the first run back into another 20 generations (a new feature I added to Karoo GP this week which allows you to continue the evolution indefinitely), and started another run with the same settings, to see if it converges on anything close to the first set of equations.
Will find out on Monday …
kai