Blog archive
June 2023
Communications Project with Cal State LA
06/02/2023
Creative Aging
06/01/2023
May 2023
One Villager's Story
05/31/2023
Pasadena Area Literary Arts Center
05/31/2023
Pasadena Village Responds to Rainbow Flag Burning at Pasadena Buddhist Temple
05/31/2023
Plan Ahead - And Be Prepared
05/31/2023
Tuesday, May 23 Pasadena Celebrated Older Americans
05/31/2023
Rumor of Humor #15
05/28/2023
Reparations, Social Justice Activity
05/24/2023
Rumor of Humor #14
05/19/2023
Rumor of Humor #13
05/12/2023
Issue #12
05/09/2023
Science Monday - Review of Meeting on April 10, 2023
05/09/2023
Conversations Re African American Artists Before 1920
05/08/2023
Beyond the Village – Suzi and Phil Hoge
05/01/2023
Congratulations Wayne April! Honored at UNH
05/01/2023
Table Topics
05/01/2023
Volunteer Appreciation at the Village
05/01/2023
“ACCIDENTAL HOST—The Story of Rat Lungworm Disease”
05/01/2023
April 2023
Jumbo Joy
04/24/2023
Pasadenans Recent Experience With Racism
04/23/2023
Recent Events Reflecting Racism
04/23/2023
Fig and Goat Cheese Bruschetta
04/18/2023
Photography for Social Justice
04/11/2023
Issue #8
04/07/2023
BEYOND THE VILLAGE - Catherine Deely
04/06/2023
Creative Writing in Older Adults
04/06/2023
Gifts of Love
04/06/2023
March 2023
Issue #7
03/31/2023
Issue #6
03/26/2023
Great Decisions update
03/14/2023
Dominion Lawsuit, South Africa and 710 Stub
03/08/2023
February 2023
2023 DEI Progress
02/27/2023
BEYOND THE VILLAGE - Doug Colliflower
02/26/2023
CONVERSATIONS WITH ART
02/26/2023
GREAT DECISIONS
02/26/2023
OLDER ADULTS RESOURCE FAIR
02/26/2023
The Important, Influential Books in our Lives - Revisited
02/26/2023
History, Resolution of the 710 Freeway
02/19/2023
Eminent Domain, 710 Highway
02/13/2023
Bernard Garrett, 710 Freeway
02/06/2023
Men's Times Gatherings
02/03/2023
January 2023
Pasadena's Senior Commission
01/30/2023
BEYOND THE VILLAGE - JIM HENDRICK
01/27/2023
GRATITUDE - IT'S GOOD FOR YOU!
01/27/2023
JEFF GUTSTADT - FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST
01/27/2023
Bernard Garrett, Incredible Black Entrepreneur
01/17/2023
What is the "Spirit Talk" Group About?
01/16/2023
Same Ol’ New Year, Brand New Me
01/12/2023
Review of 2022, Consideration of 2023
01/06/2023
BEYOND THE VILLAGE - PATTI LA MARR
01/03/2023
FROM THE CHAIR
01/03/2023
WALK WITH EASE
01/03/2023
Science: Muon, Neanderthals, IBM Project Debater
By Bob SnodgrassPosted: 04/12/2021
This was a disturbingly small meeting, although no one was to blame. I believe that we all
enjoyed ourselves; and we had time to discuss scientific issues in depth. Because of the
small attendance, this a shorter summary than usual. At least the Ingenuity helicopter lived
up to expectations.
Barbara spoke first and showed material from two Scientific American papers. The first
concerned the inner ears of Neanderthals, which can be studied in detail by CT scans of
skulls, even those thousands of years old. From such scans, it is possible to construct
educated guesses about the hearing range of any animal. Those scans showed no similarity
of the inner ears of chimpanzees and ancient hominids to those of Neanderthals and
modern humans, which are close together. This makes it likely that Neanderthals soke,
even though presumed differences in the larynx suggested in the past that Neanderthals
didn’t speak, consistent with a general tendency to underestimate Neanderthal function.
Her second paper concerned brain organoids formed in culture from human stem cells
compared with organoids grown from other stem cells in which the important brain gene
NOVA1, which differs by one base pair between humans and Neanderthals, is replaced by
the Neanderthal form of NOVA1, using CRISPR techniques. It takes months to grow the pea-
sized organoids in culture, Those with the Neanderthal form of NOVA1 differ in appearance
and electrical behavior. It’s very difficult to know what to make of this. Many genes differ
between modern humans and Neanderthals, and we know that sensory input has a
profound effect on the organization of the growing mammalian brain. Organoids are
deprived of all sensory input from the beginning.
Howard then spoke of the much publicized aberrations found in detailed studies of the
behavior of muons in two major centers. As he stressed, that these detailed studies of such
a transient particle are done and agree in different labs is amazing, because the average
half-life of the muon is only 2.2 useconds (millionths of a second) and yet FermiLab now
and the Brookhaven National laboratory in 2001 both obtained similar anomalous
magnetic moments for the muon, anomalous because significantly different than predicted
by the standard model. Muons are elementary particles similar to the electron, with an
electric charge of −1 e and a spin of 1/2, but with a much greater mass , Muons, electrons
and the tau particle make up the family of leptons, which are not known to contain smaller
particles. Some subatomic particles have even shorter lives, the top quark being the
shortest. We’ll have to wait for a third lab to conform this anomalous behavior; if confirmed
it will not mean that the whole realm of subatomic particles is turned upside down,
important though it is.
Bob then spoke about the IBM Project Debater, begun in 2012, which has debated 5
premier human debaters in the last 2 ½ years. Conceived as a sequel to Deep Blue amd
Watson, machines that convincingly defeated the best humans at chess and Jeopardy,
Project Debater faced a more open ended challenge. The four main modules are: argument
mining, an argument knowledge base (AKB), argument rebuttal and debate construction. The
system has not been able to beat a human debater so far, but has performed surprisingly well.
Because of the open-ended nature of debates- debaters can’t invent words, but they may combine words and emotion in unusual ways, I expect human debaters to remain supreme for many years.
You can access one debate on YouTube and see what you make of it,
Our next meeting will be Monday, May 10, at 4 PM. Here are two scary stories, at least scary for
me:
Story 1
Story 2