Tag: science

Single Camera SLAM

This is technology that could provide cheap real-time localisation for domestic robots, humanoid robots, wearable sensors, game interfaces or other devices.

My research has been on SLAM, with a particular emphasis on Single Camera SLAM. This is technology that could provide cheap real-time localisation for domestic robots, humanoid robots, wearable sensors, game interfaces or other devices.

Neutrino Communication

Jolting the star with neutrinos could advance the pulsation by causing it to heat up and expand. Information could thus be shuttled around our galaxy’s network of 500 or so Cepheids – and out as far as the Virgo cluster of galaxies.

does this mean we’ll finally have internet in the subway?

Beams of neutrinos have been proposed as a vehicle for communications under unusual circumstances, such as direct point-to-point global communication, communication with submarines, secure communications and interstellar communication. We report on the performance of a low-rate communications link established using the NuMI beam line and the MINERvA detector at Fermilab. The link achieved a decoded data rate of 0.1 bits/sec with a bit error rate of 1% over a distance of 1.035 km, including 240 m of earth.

To make use of neutrinos an advanced civilization can use a gravitational lens as a focus and amplifier. The lens can be a neutron star or a black hole. Using wave optics one can calculate the advantage of gravitational lensing for amplification of a beam and along the optical axis it is exceptionally large. Even though the amplification is very large the diameter of the beam is quite small, less that 1 cm. This implies that a large constellation of neutrino transmitters would have to enclose the local neutron star or black hole to cover the sky. This means that such a beacon would have to be built by a Kardashev Type II civilization.

Consanguinity

Royal inbreeding

From 1516 to 1700, it has been estimated that over 80% of marriages within the Spanish branch of the Habsburg dynasty were consanguineous.

2013-04-26: Cousin Marriage and Democracy. I had no idea this was so common in some parts of the world.

Approximately 0.2% of all marriages are consanguineous in the United States but in India 26.6% marriages are consanguineous, in Saudi Arabia the figure is 38.4% and in Niger, Pakistan and Sudan a majority of marriages are consanguineous. A recent paper finds that consanguinity is strongly negatively correlated with democracy.

2016-03-07: Middle east Cousin marriage. This explains a lot of problems.

Once common practice in Western societies, estimates suggest the Middle East, along with Africa, continue to have the highest levels in the world. In Egypt, around 40% of the population marry a cousin; the last survey in Jordan, admittedly way back in 1992, found that 32% were married to a first cousin; a further 17.3% were married to more distant relatives. Rates are thought to be even higher in tribal countries such as Iraq and the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Kuwait.

2018-03-03: US Cousin Marriage

Taken together, the data show a 50-year lag between the advent of increased familial dispersion and the decline of genetic relatedness between couples. During this time, individuals continued to marry relatives despite the increased distance. From these results, we hypothesize that changes in 19th-century transportation were not the primary cause for decreased consanguinity. Rather, our results suggest that shifting cultural factors played a more important role in the recent reduction of genetic relatedness of couples in Western societies.

2022-12-06: The MFP may have been a big part of why Europe developed differently

the Church’s “Marriage and Family Plan” (MFP), which included features like monogamy in addition to an obsession with preventing broadly-defined incest, had important downstream consequences in practically every aspect of life. Young men would be more likely to find marriage partners since a few high-status leaders could not claim a disproportionate share of women, creating incentives for individuals to be more hard-working and less violent. The power of elders was further reduced by an inability to arrange marriages in ways that would keep wealth and resources within the same family, unlike in Muslim societies where the son of one brother would often be wedded to the daughter of another. When incest taboos extended to 6th cousins, an individual may have had 10k relatives that were off limits in the marriage market. This wouldn’t be a big deal in a modern city, but when most people lived in small villages it would have created major difficulties for anyone trying to find a spouse. This led to a population that was more mobile, less embedded in kinship networks, and ultimately more individualistic.

What is sure to be one of the most surprising findings discussed in the book relates to how rare the individual components of the MFP have been throughout history. According to one database looking at 1200 societies before industrialization, only 5% had newlywed couples start their own households, 8% organized domestic life around nuclear families, 15% had only monogamous marriages, 25% had little or no cousin marriage, and 28% had bilateral descent, meaning that lineages are traced through both the mother and father. Christian Europe under the MFP had all five, which wasn’t true for over 99% of other societies. Today, after the rest of the world has been heavily influenced by Western culture, given its success, it’s easy to lose sight of how unique its mating and familial practices have been in the larger historical context.

People prone to individualism would go on to achieve high rates of urbanization and form guilds, universities, marketplaces, and other voluntary institutions that were based on principles of mutual self-interest and competed with one another. Ultimately, Western Europe would conquer the world on the back of the strengths of these institutions, with democracy and capitalism being arguably the most important among them.

Cell communication

Bacteria use quorum sensing via standardized molecules to communicate, both intra and inter species. New medicine could target this communication to shut down pathogenicity.

2012-06-24: The Social Lives of Microbes

It used to be assumed that bacteria lived relatively independent unicellular lives, without the cooperative behaviors that have provoked so much interest in mammals, birds, and insects. However, research has completely overturned this idea, showing that microbes indulge in a variety of social behaviors involving complex systems of cooperation, communication, and synchronization. Work in this area has already provided some elegant experimental tests of social evolutionary theory, demonstrating the importance of factors such as relatedness, kin discrimination, competition between relatives, and enforcement of cooperation.

2021-07-09: Social Mitochondria

Mitochondria divide up tasks, form groups, synchronize activities and respond to both their environment and each other. The sociability of mitochondria facilitates the cooperation of cells, which in turn allows the formation of organs that depend on one another and the creation of complex organisms. The social nature of animals is an extension of the sociality seen at lower rungs of the ladder. Network approaches could yield clues about new treatments, such as improving mitochondrial communication. Part of what makes exercise healthy is that it promotes communication between mitochondria. “It makes them more social”