(By KEN BELSON, New York Times) With regular gas in New York City at $4.40 a gallon, station managers are rummaging through their storage closets in search of extra 4s to display on their pumps, and many are coming up short.
This is a blog that covers all the cool new Google Maps mashups, tools and applications being created by people all over the world. Posts also cover features and additions to Google Maps itself such new mapping data being added, new features and so on.
When I was growing up, I came across a British program on my PBS station that had this odd guy talking about science and inventions. There was something about the host and the style of the program that immediately pulled me in. After watching (and re-watching) the series, my view of how things are created or discovered was permanently transformed. The host was science historian, James Burke.Connections explores an "Alternative View of Change" (the subtitle of the series) that rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress. Burke contends that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation. Rather, the entire gestalt of the modern world is the result of a web of interconnected events, each one consisting of a person or group acting for reasons of their own (e.g, profit, curiosity, religious) motivations with no concept of the final, modern result of what either their or their contemporaries' actions finally lead to. The interplay of the results of these isolated events is what drives history and innovation, and is also the main focus of the series and its sequels.Burke also challenged the viewer to the possible practical and ethical impliations of these changes, "the downside of an interconnected history:"
If history progresses because of the synergistic interaction of past events and innovations, then as history does progress, the number of these events and innovations increases. This increase in possible connections causes the process of innovation to not only continue, but to accelerate. Burke poses the question of what happens when this rate of innovation, or more importantly change itself, becomes too much for the average person to handle and what this means for individual power, liberty, and privacy.Following the Connections series was another great one titled The Day the Universe Changed. This series was similar to the first, but it focused on the paradigm shifts of individuals as a result of changes in science and technology. Some discoveries were so significant that they radically altered people's perception of the world. For example, the invention of the printing press or proof that the earth revolved around the sun.
Lastly, if the entire modern world is built from these interconnected innovations, all increasingly maintained and improved by specialists who required years of training to gain their expertise, what chance does the average citizen without this extensive training have in making an informed decision on practical technological issues, such as the building of nuclear power plants...? Furthermore, if the modern world is increasingly interconnected, what happens when one of those nodes collapses? Does the entire system follow suit?
In order to get one of the greatest inventions of the modern age, in other words, we thought we needed the solitary genius. But if Alexander Graham Bell had fallen into the Grand River and drowned that day back in Brantford, the world would still have had the telephone, the only difference being that the telephone company would have been nicknamed Ma Gray, not Ma Bell.
This phenomenon of simultaneous discovery—what science historians call “multiples”—turns out to be extremely common. One of the first comprehensive lists of multiples was put together by William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, in 1922, and they found a hundred and forty-eight major scientific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern. Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France. Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Bürgi in Switzerland.
“There were four independent discoveries of sunspots, all in 1611; namely, by Galileo in Italy, Scheiner in Germany, Fabricius in Holland and Harriott in England,” Ogburn and Thomas note, and they continue:
The law of the conservation of energy, so significant in science and philosophy, was formulated four times independently in 1847, by Joule, Thomson, Colding and Helmholz. They had been anticipated by Robert Mayer in 1842. There seem to have been at least six different inventors of the thermometer and no less than nine claimants of the invention of the telescope. Typewriting machines were invented simultaneously in England and in America by several individuals in these countries. The steamboat is claimed as the “exclusive” discovery of Fulton, Jouffroy, Rumsey, Stevens and Symmington.
For Ogburn and Thomas, the sheer number of multiples could mean only one thing: scientific discoveries must, in some sense, be inevitable. They must be in the air, products of the intellectual climate of a specific time and place. It should not surprise us, then, that calculus was invented by two people at the same moment in history. Pascal and Descartes had already laid the foundations. The Englishman John Wallis had pushed the state of knowledge still further. Newton’s teacher was Isaac Barrow, who had studied in Italy, and knew the critical work of Torricelli and Cavalieri. Leibniz knew Pascal’s and Descartes’s work from his time in Paris. He was close to a German named Henry Oldenburg, who, now living in London, had taken it upon himself to catalogue the latest findings of the English mathematicians. Leibniz and Newton may never have actually sat down together and shared their work in detail. But they occupied a common intellectual milieu. “All the basic work was done—someone just needed to take the next step and put it together,” Jason Bardi writes in “The Calculus Wars,” a history of the idea’s development. “If Newton and Leibniz had not discovered it, someone else would have.” Calculus was in the air.
The camp's success goes beyond just numbers, according to organizers like Claudia Stepnick, who runs some of the sessions.
"I've had parents even stop me in a grocery store and say 'do you know their still building those roller coaster that they were building at camp," Stepnick says. "Or 'they're going through our recycling all the time and our whole basement is full of this city that they've made.' So the kids don't just come to camp and go home and forget about it. They tend to continue to live it.
Posts
All Comments
