Waw this is mind disco. Apparently 1000 galaxy clusters are travelling further and further away from us, at blistering speeds, and all heading in one single direction. A real mass migration of galaxy nations. Do you see those star families travelling, all packed, ready and raring to go? Scientists think there must be something very tempting out there. They see this so-called ‘dark flow’ as a sign that an other universe is calling at the other side. Another universe! As if I hadn’t enough things to fret about yet! Thanks a lot telescopes.

Source: New Scientist

In these average times, full of mediocre products, mediocre media and mediocre mediocrity, there are still lights in the dark. These lights push their fields forward, by inventing a new way of thinking, doing and presenting. By being bold and inventive, rising all hopes for humanity again. And NO, I’m not exaggerating, the world would be double doomed without these people.

Well then. The first light in the dark is ‘Logicomix‘. This graphic novel tells the quest for the true face of mathematics, which sounds boring but isn’t since the quest is conducted by the overwhelming charming English professor Bertrand Russell. As a philosopher, logicus, and notorious pacifist, he uses logic to try to save mathematics, and humanity. His adventure is portrayed as if the fate of the world depends on it, a long and intense journey during which Russell must battle his inner demons to achieve the task.

His most famous contribution to the logic field is known as Russell’s paradox: imagine there is a town with one barber, and where the law states that everyone who doesn’t shave himself is shaved by the barber. Who shaves the barber? If he doesn’t shave himself he shaves himself, and if he shaves himself he doesn’t shave himself. We are led into a contradiction. It may seem funny (and it is), but its effect on the philosophy of mathematics was devastating. Contradiction is a fatal bullet wound for any logical system, and it seemed to kill off hope for a watertight foundation for mathematics. With his next book, the Principia Mathematica, Russell tried to repair the damage he had inflicted on his own dream. This book is probably the most impenetrable one ever written by a winner of the Nobel prize for literature. In it, he and the co-author Alfred North Whitehead, famously take 362 pages to prove 1 + 1 = 2. Yes, Logicomix also deals with the border between logic and madness.

What I like about ‘Logicomix’, is that the authors tell the story with humour and a lightness of touch that pokes fun at the philosophers and mathematicians involved, but never trivialises the philosophy or the mathematics. The novel is both tongue-in-cheek and profound. Also smart is the fact that the authors let Russell interact with figures he never met, but whose ideas influenced his theories. The novel is loaded with these and other mental interactions. A nice autumn present for anyone who has ever been passionate about something.

And the second light, speaks for itself.

VIDEOGIOCO by Donato Sansone from Enrico Ascoli – Sound Design

I have never known a woman who gets so little media attention in her own country, while thrilling the rest of the world. Pattie Maes is a Belgian tech expert, already living in the US for years. She is one of the leading researchers at the brilliant MIT Media lab. In Maes’ world, the computer is no longer a distinct object, but a source of intelligence that’s embedded in our environment.

At her newly founded Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT, Patti Maes and her student Pranav Mistry developed a real ‘Sixth Sense‘. It is a wearable device which enables you to interact between the real world and the world of data, in a very intuitive way. For example when you want to know the time, just draw a watch on your wrist and you’ll see the time appearing. Or in case you forgot your cell phone, just aim the device at your handpalm and you’ll be able to form a number on your hand and do that call. The audience obviously went wild while watching her TED talk.

(drawing by Suzy Creamcheese, evolutionary study by Julia Barr and published in JBScience 2007)

Gini Rose Choupay evolved excruciatingly slowly from a strange mammalian rabbitish fish into a much stranger mammalian bird. Her genes differ from what most scientists expect to be typical of a human being. Her brain-genes, for example, seem to burden her with a lot of strange quirks. One of these is her urge to endlessly compare human beings with animals, appearance- and behavior-wise. Likely, it has to do with the fact she replaces her parents – who she never knew – by dogs. You can read Gini Rose’s full fizzy story here.

Gini Rose also wants to congratulate Charles Darwin with his bicentennial anniversary today. She likes the way Darwin’s controversial theory of human evolution from an ape-like ancestor, inspired many artists (like Odilon Redon), often in dark and fantastic ways.

Vrij Nederland (Week 6 -2009) published an interesting article about why Darwin was less Darwinist than most people assume. In his ‘Decent of Man’, he allayed our fears for being pinned down to our genes only. It’s not all in the genes, even Darwin said. There is some play area too. Human beings for example, are a lot more altruistic than animals, even if that’s not always a good thing for the evolution of the human species. Nature shakes the cards and makes it all thrilling, but nurture is the crucial player when it comes down to shaping a person. Phew.

I took these images in 2005 while doing the research for a documentary on the demolition of an old cokes factory in Seabruges. Although heavily polluted, the site was very beautiful. It seemed as if the rigid industrial installations finally had admitted that nature, after all, has got the last word. Seeing the wheat and sea-gulls overtaking the site with the old buildings silently giving in to it, ‘Carcoke Zeebrugge’ turned into a darling grandpa with darkbrown teeth and polluted lungs. Heavily polluted lungs, that is. This is also the reason why the whole site had to be demolished urgently (the heavy metals and petrochemicals were contaminating the surrounding water aquifers), and cautiously (in order not to release even more soot and asbestos into the surrounding atmosphere). A great documentary topic..

I also visited Sidmar, a working cokes factory in the industrial zone of Ghent, Belgium. Pretty impressive. And don’t start phoning the greenies now, the heavy clouds are just water vapour. Also, soot filters (on some installations) are compulsory nowadays. We needed a couple of decades to become aware of that, but hey.

More images here.

About the documentary..

During the first half of the 20th century, Carcoke Zeebrugge used to be the nerve centre of the Belgian steel industry. Tons of coal were imported to produce cokes, the ideal fuel for the production of steel. At that time, nobody worried. Business went fine, workers got good wages, neighbours didn’t complain.

This documentary shows the story of the demolition of Carcoke Zeebrugge, from the start till the very end.

(‘Giftige sloop’ OverLeven CANVAS – 2005) (40min.)

More documentaries here.

Between 2002 and 2007, I made 15 scientific documentaries for Canvas, the second chain of the Belgian national television. The main goal of the documentaries was not to serve viewers with all kinds of petty scientific facts. Rather, we tried to ‘translate’ what goes on in scientists’ brains and to tell the story behind scientific discoveries.

The programme was called ‘overleven’, and doesn’t exist anymore. Here you find some colourful intriguing scientific stories broadcast on Canvas in that period. I remember I loved reading New Scientist during that period. So if you’re after scientific articles which are well written and inspiring, give it a try, for the sake of science!

Julia B.