The revolution *will* be googled

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised“, Gil Scott-Heron sang to my generation in 1970.  According to internet pioneer and Google Veep, Vint Cerf, a contemporary of Heron’s, it’ll be on internet and cellphone and it’s already under way.

“There are more than three billion mobiles in use today and more than 80 per cent of the world’s population live within range of a network. In areas where wireline or WiFi access barely exists, many new users will first experience the internet through a mobile phone. In developing economies, people are already finding innovative ways to use mobile technology. Grameen’s micro-finance and village phone programmes in Bangladesh and elsewhere are known and respected around the world, but there are many less famous examples. During the Kenyan elections, Mobile Planet provided its subscribers with up-to-the-minute results by text message. As the cost of mobile technologies fall, the opportunities for such innovation will continue to grow.

“We’re nearing the tipping point for mobile computing to deliver timely, geographically and socially relevant information. Researchers in Japan recently proposed using data from vehicles’ windscreen wipers and embedded GPS receivers to track the movement of weather systems through towns and cities with a precision never before possible. It may seem academic, but understanding the way severe weather, such as a typhoon, moves through a city could save lives. Further exploration can shed light on demographic, intellectual and epidemiological phenomena, to name just a few areas.”

The internet has revolutionized the way we work and communicate.  If Cerf is right, that revolution is about to go global and become so pervasive as to change the fabric of people’s lives all over the world in a way that can only be matched by modern sanitation, drugs and perhaps radio.

Larry Moran’s belief charts: rationalism wins over superstition

Larry Moran is a longtime net user, a veteran of the talk.origins Usenet newsgroup, and a professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto.  His blog “Sandwalk” is named after the path along which Charles Darwin used to walk every day at noon behind Down House in Kent after a morning working on his revolutionary theories.

A recent posting by Larry showed some striking and entertaining graphics showing the contrast between the diversity of “Beliefs held as a result of the accident of where an individual was born” and the coherence of “Beliefs based on logic, reason and critical thinking”.

Sandwalk: Superstition vs rationalism charts

There is a strong tendency to buy the fiction that religion has a strong hold over human thought.  I think that’s exaggerated both by atheists and believers, and these charts present an alternative view in an attractive, amusing, and thought-provoking way.

The Genius of Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin was born 200 years ago next year, on February 12, 1809.

150 years ago, on July 1, 1858, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace gave a joint presentation to the Linnaean Society entitled “On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection”.  It must have been a quiet occasion; the society’s President remarked in May 1859 that the year had not been marked by any revolutionary discoveries.

Thus the most revolutionary theory in biology crept into the light of day.

Darwin finished the manuscript of “On the Origin of Species” the following year and it went on sale on November 22, 1859.  The first run of 1,250 copies sold out.  It has never been out of print since.

Famous biologist Richard Dawkins celebrates Darwin’s revolutionary idea in a new three-part UK documentary for Channel 4, “The Genius of Charles Darwin”.  Parts 1 and 2 have already been shown August 4 and August 11, and the last part will be shown this Monday, August 18 at 20:00 on Channel 4.

In the first episode, Dawkins gives a biography of Darwin and an account of his observations and how they led to the theory of natural selection with common descent, and introduces evolution to a class of skeptical London schoolchildren, visits his native Kenya where he shows the brutal struggle for existence on the Veldt and interviews a Nariobi prostitute who has survived for 25 years in the occupation due to her resistance to HIV.  He also visits Craig Venter whose computers and automated systems have mapped much of the human genome and that of other organisms, finding striking genetic homologies that overwhelmingly support the common descent of organisms as diverse as bacteria, plants, and animals including humans.

In the UK, the programmes can be viewed on a PC (not a MAC) with Windows using 4od.

The Channel 4 website also has accompanying coverage, here.