Science and technology micro-summaries for July 3, 2019

NASA's greatest moment; Eye focus matters more than multi-tasking for driving safety; The evolutionary roots of a healthy society; Facebook's Libra pushing central banks into cryptocurrency; The origin of the word "OK"

Straight from my RSS feed:

Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

1. An Apollo astronaut says the greatest moment of NASA's program was not the moon landing — it was the 'cosmic birth' of humanity - Apollo 9 astronaut, Rusty Schweickart says that NASA's crowning moment was December 24, 1968, when astronauts watched the Earth rise over the horizon on the moon from the Apollo 8 mission - a point in time which he calls, "the cosmic birth of humanity". According to Schweickart three day flight to the moon led to a paradigm shift, when people could see a photo of the entire Earth from a different perspective.


2. Your eyes are the key to distracted driving, not your brain - Researchers asked study participants to perform tasks while viewing video from the point of view of a driver in Boston traffic, and to report when they observed brake lights. In a series of 3 experiments, it was observed that cognitive load slowed reaction time by about 35 milliseconds, whereas shifting the focus of the gaze slowed it by 458 milliseconds.


3. Nicholas Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society: Half Hour of Heterodoxy #59 - This Heterodox Academy interview with Yale's Nicholas Christakis discusses ideas from his book, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. In pursuing the idea of a good society's evolutionary origins, Christakis points out that the human species has been successful because of our capacity for culture - the ability to teach and learn, and also discusses how the principles of freedom of association and freedom of speech have benefited the American society. A central idea from the book is the contrast between "lumpers" and "splitters", people who seek understanding by creating groups and generalizations or others who seek understanding by decomposing things into their constituent parts. The anthropological form of this is the idea of grouping people into nations, or considering them as individuals. Christakis suggests that both approaches can be useful, and that his book tries to find the universals that lead to flourishing and create common ground by appealing to both our individuality and our shared humanity. If you'd prefer to read, the interview transcript is here.


4. Facebook’s digital currency may force central banks to create their own - Until recently, Augustín Carstens, the general manager for the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) said that he saw no value in cryptocurrencies for the central banks. After the announcement of Facebook's Libra, he's changing his tone. He now says that the BIS is supportive of the many central banks that are researching or developing cryptocurrencies. The article expresses concerns, however, that this may force the central banks to begin serving retail customers, and no one is sure what effect that might have on the economy.


5. The origin of the word "OK" - Strictly speaking, maybe this isn't about science or technology, but I'm going to argue that language is a technology. ; -) @towjam offers two possibilities, both depending on the ideas that the two character word is an acronym, are that (i) it came out of a satirical article about grammar, when Charles Gordon Greene wrote oll korrect in the Boston Morning Post; and (ii) It came from Old Kinderhook, a nickname for the Democratic party president, Martin Van Burn - who came from Kinderhook, NY. (@towjam will receive 5% of the rewards from this post.)

For example, feel free to comment on any or all of these discussion topics:

• Do you agree that Schweickart's cosmic birth of humanity is NASA's crowning moment? If not, what would you say is NASA's biggest achievement?
  
  
• Did you learn to drive be for the ubiquity of cell phones? If so, how do you think driving has changed with the spread of technology?
  
  
• What do you think of Christakis' suggestion that both "lumping" and "splitting" can be good for society?
  
  
• Do you think some sort of FedCoin is coming to the cryptocurrency world? Given the choice, would you rather have that or bitcoin?
  
  
• What other words have interesting origin stories? What other words in the English language have been made in America?
  
  

About this series

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