SCALES #52: spiderlings
Hello! And happy new year.
I’m writing from an outpost of what I guess is the new ~cool St. Paul~, a converted industrial space coffeeshop with its internal windows facing a print shop. A distinctively voweled “oohh yeaah” overheard in a neighboring booth; an in-the-wild sighting of the beleaguered St. Paul newspaper a few booths further over. Basking in the STP feeling.
Watching the print shop slowly come to life in the morning is incredibly distracting, but I’ll do my best to tear my eyes away enough to write this—despite the fact that at this moment, I can see different mechanical parts starting to dance back and forth, with the business end of what’s going on just below my line of sight.
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What I’ve been up to
So, beside the quality family time and associated traditional activities, I’ve been dashing to write up lab results. As always, it’s wrangling the figures and data that is the major, time-consuming step.
A lot of the work involves compiling the data describing observations of the levitated droplets to a form that can be compared to a mathematical description of how quickly components evaporate. Once there’s a correspondence between the data and the numerical model, it’s possible to extract quantitative values we care about—well, that a very carefully defined “we” cares about—like vapor pressures.
My tunnel vision has been focused on getting the data and model to line up in a way that’s internally consistent. But, leave it to a friend who studies psychology and teaches statistics to ask a more fundamental question: how do I know the model is an adequate description of reality? My response was a not-all-that-satisfying appeal to authority coupled with the pragmatism of an experimental physical scientist: there’s an equation, courtesy of Maxwell, that can be derived from a description of an ideal physical situation; up to now this approach has given me sensible results. What more could you possibly ask for?
One thing I like about science is the surprising magic in which these mathematical descriptions really do seem to reveal the workings of reality, but at the same time there’s of course a danger of becoming bewitched. The temping cognitive shortcut that a model whose output mirrors the appearance of reality must reveal a truth about how the world works. Some healthy skepticism is always helpful, for physical science models but maybe even more importantly for models that increasingly reach directly into society.
(For the record, though, I have kicked the tires enough on my current model enough that I do trust it.)
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Elsewhere—
The creation of a Cage-like Very Slow Movie Player, using an e-ink screen to stretch each second of a movie to last an hour. The piece of writing itself fuses technical engineering details and philosophical musings (h/t Kottke):
“Slowing things down to an extreme measure creates room for appreciation of the object … but the prolonged duration also starts to shift the relationship between object, viewer, and context. A film watched at 1/3,600th of the original speed is not a very slow movie, it’s a hazy timepiece. A Very Slow Movie Player (VSMP) doesn’t tell you the time; it helps you see yourself against the smear of time.”
John Herrman pinpointing what’s strange and revealing about Facebook’s unceasing, thirsty email “notifications”:
“I am disengaged to the point that the service is creating far more content about my interactions than there are interactions to create content about. (If you want to understand how a social network thinks, give it very little to work with—its assumptions become very stark, very fast.)”
(Also w/r/t Facebook: the awful inscrutability of the slides alone! Feel like cautionary examples for a future Tufte book.)
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Science!
“Lactation is a mammalian attribute, and the few known nonmammal examples have distinctly different modalities. We document here milk provisioning in a jumping spider, which compares functionally and behaviorally to lactation in mammals. The spiderlings ingest nutritious milk droplets secreted from the mother’s epigastric furrow until the subadult stage. … These findings demonstrate that mammal-like milk provisioning and parental care for sexually mature offspring have also evolved in invertebrates, encouraging a reevaluation of their occurrence across the animal kingdom, especially in invertebrates.”
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p h y s i c s
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—Adam