ncubeeight

Growing up in Oregon, where there are many volcanoes, my family would often go spelunking in the lava tubes left over from past eruptions. These caves formed where the outside of a river of lava cooled, letting the inside of the lava flow further downhill, leaving a hollow husk of the river's rock shape to climb in. Caves always invoke a kind of supernatural sense of awe for me. The sensory deprivation of the darkness gives a sense of humility we feel when we take ourselves out of societal context, bringing about a sense of ascending out of our ordinary self-awareness. When I travel abroad, I enjoy exploring caves and seeing the lore that has sprung up about them. In Bali, Indonesia are a series of caves that one can explore at the basin of rivers flowing down the sides of the volcanic island. However, the caves of Bali are man-made. Many centuries prior, people used tools to carve out the caves at the base of the river into a series of sheltered rooms. When the monsoo...

A French postal worker, who used to fly the coast of Africa delivering postal dispatches, wrote a delightfully witty book I read long ago. In the story of Le Petit Prince , the author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, talks about how his plane broke down in the desert one time. He narrates the tale as his pilot self, recounting the story of a small person who approached him while trying to repair the plane. This character claimed to be an alien who had been hopping planets prior to landing on Earth, which had such tremendous gravity that it couldn't be escaped. Being stuck on Earth didn't seem to be a particular bother other than the fact that it meant he could never return to his origin planet, where his favorite flower lived. The story turns into a narrative on the nature of love and loss as the alien prince tries to adapt to the ways of Earth and comments on all the strange characters he'd met on the various planets prior to getting marooned in the desert with the pilot. I reco...

I remember my first experience visiting the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland when I was a teenager. I had always been fascinated with sciences. So a playground of interactive exhibits with hands-on experiments was just my kind of thing. I particularly recall my first meeting a conversational chat-bot that they had installed which could output considerate responses to questions the user typed in. Dr. Know, as it was affectionately named, was an instantiation of the Eliza program from MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was an example of a Turing test, an idea put forward by Alan Turing , an early pioneer in computer programming. He theorized that computers would eventually be indistinguishable from humans once their logic structures matched those we form through socialization processes. The Turing test is a process of inquiry followed between a human and a robot that would be used to figure out if the robot was sentient or not. (Ironically, on the internet, se...

In 1978, BBC radio ran a satirical exposé about a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings who were trying to get inside the brain of a human named Arthur Dent, who was a fugitive from the planet Earth. The radio show was so popular that it went on to become a book, a TV series, a movie and recently has been re-released on CD for future generations in its original audio format.  The story, called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was told from the perspective of Arthur, who had no idea the importance of his former home, Earth, which had been destroyed shortly after he escaped. Neither did Arthur have an understanding of the tremendous significance of his own brain. The pan-dimensional beings, which appeared to him as mice, were actually the administrators of a massive planet-sized computer. They regarded Arthur as just a circuit in the computer that they managed. The mice had been conducting experiments on humans from inside Skinner boxes in the laboratories of human p...

Over the past few decades, the concepts of quantum mechanics have been sprinkled into our common lingo and news headlines in a gradual crescendo. Concepts that were mere theories at the beginning of the last century are now demonstrable facts. As uneasily as we sit with their implications, we carry about their applied technologies daily in our pockets. These concepts have been fascinating for me to study. Though they may seem a bit esoteric to most people, they are becoming ever more personally relevant to our common experiences.  Some concepts that are astounding, but that are increasingly ordinary in our daily lives: We control the quantum jumps of electrons to emit photons of the exact spectrum we want to light our living rooms with. Vice-versa, we use photons of specific spectra to control where we want electrons to go and how we want them to behave. (Photovoltaic effects, common in our technology as the light-emitting diode, also used to detect perturbations caused by the pres...