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Amateur Hackers of Astronomy
eaglemoon writes "I have often wondered if Hackers and the Hacker culture is unique to software or can it be extended to other domains? This article in the NY Review of Books examines how amateurs are performing as well as professionals in the field of astronomy. The clash between the Baconian view of science and the Cartesian perspective is very interesting to reflect on and should be compared with community based software development and the traditional cathedrals built by firms." And it's from Freeman Dyson, always worth reading.
Of course hackers are not only in software developement! People who tune their cars are hackers, people who hack on electronic circuitry are hackers, people who roll on their own boats, gliders, bicycles and so on, are hackers too.
Why does this remind me of some college lecture I woke up in the middle of?
Nice try, but you can't interest me in tedious stars, planets, and far-off galaxies just by comparison to exciting alternative development models of personal computer software!
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
Unabashed Plug:
And... you have to admit... they had an earlier
world-wide digital data network (carrying eMail
& bulletins) than our present wireless LANs...
They continue to innovate (lookup APRS & its
popular incarnation UI_View), enjoy space-
communications, and -still- manage to keep
in-touch via voice (as well as eMail, et al.)
Like working on your car with your mates,
& sailing around the world with your team,
Ham Radio is one of the more humane hobbies
that's high-tech in orientation...
Just imagine: In-touch by voice, without pay-
ing a bandwidth hit, while surfing, hacking
or (together) trying to design up the next
killer app (or debug the previous one...
Check it out.
[Info available from:
- ARRL in USA,
- RSGB in UK, &/or
- WIA in Austraila]
i read that as "people who roll their own" are hackers...
Free as in mason.
Some of you may be aware that the "largest" telescopes on Earth are "virtual telescopes", where many telescopes are set to view the same area of the sky at the same time and their images are later co-ordinated resulting in what is effectually a HUGE telescope.
Although the technology is not quite there yet, it will be cool if one day the amateur telescopes will be given the ability to co-ordinate with other telescopes around the world using the internet for post image processing and communication and hooking into an Atomic clock for time-coordination to create even larger telescopes then we have today.
Groups of amateur astronomer friends would be able to have virtual viewing parties and many new discoveries of deep space would await us.
I suggested this to a well-known astronomer once and he told me the technology is far off. I'd love to hear what telescope manufacturers have to say about the idea too though!
"Before the amateur use of genetic engineering becomes widespread, numerous political and legal obstacles will have to be overcome."
I think it is naive to believe that politics and legality will have much effect on curbing the amateur genetic engineers. It is no more difficult than building your own computer, or building a decent telescope, and it gets easier every day, as used equipment from all the gene companies here in Silicon Valley is making its way into the local surplus market.
Politics and lawyers don't stop people from growing hemp or building methamphetamine labs. Someone is going to figure out that splicing the gene for cocaine into radishes is a way to avoid cartel prices.
And who wants to bet that politics and lawyers could stop an "open source" gene splicing movement once it got started?
Free book: Science Toys You Can Make
Anyhow, i like the rarticle until it got into the genetic stuff. Ah well.
I picked up "Seeing in the Dark" (the subject of the book review in the article) from a local bookshop a few months ago on a whim, since I dabble in astronomy, and recently built my first telescope.
I _loved_ this book. Reading it was all I wanted to do until I finished it. I heartily recommend it to people who are like-minded (interested in amateur astronomy). Timothy Ferris is a superb writer. He interviews very interesting astronomers for this book, and visits some great observatories, and has a lot of inspiring stories and interesting facts. I learned a lot.
And that's all I have to say about that. Read it for yourself, and enjoy.
when I was looking into fitting a webcam to a microscope I own (proper CCD cameras being expensive and requiring an additional frame grabber):
http://www.astrabio.demon.co.uk/QCUIAG/
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Oh, absolutely. You can hack anything if the phrase means to study a system or tool and develop its less-known capabilities. I guess even socialites are hackers of human interaction (for good or ill, depending on their personal qualities). I think of hacking as poking around in the substrate of whatever it is and learning what's there, finding shortcuts and odd combinations of features that produce amazing results. You use whatever tools you've got: telescopes for the moon, microscopes for microbes, general observation for reality. (Any hacker can surprise you when they say "Watch this" but those reality hackers can really surprise you.)
I think hackers are more noticable in computers because it's so much newer, the gearheads of the car world have sucked all of the easy additional performance out of cars, but Linux shows how a kid can rival the biggest companies in the production of software. In a few decades when we have gathered the "low hanging fruit" there will still be a few hackers in computing, but most will have moved onto nanotech or biology or something completely not even imagined yet.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
And, of course, there's the knowledge issue. Genetic engineering, or any other kind of serious molecular biology, is hard -- we're not going to be seeing Gene Splicing In A Nutshell on the shelves any time soon. As a Comp. Bio. student, one of the few in the program with a serious background in both CS and biology, I see the problems that the students (and, for that matter, the professors) who are strictly from the CS side have in understanding the biology. These are smart, hard-working people, but the fact is it takes years of experience to really "get" molecular biology in any useful fashion.
(Note that I'm not denigrating CS -- a bio PhD and a CS PhD are about equally well-educated, IMO. But at the amateur level, it's a hell of a lot easier to get started hacking code than hacking genes.)
In the long run, I think you're right. The knowledge and the equipment are out there, and will become steadily more available, and a generation or two down the line we will almost certainly see teenagers pounding out real viruses in their parents' basements (and won't that be fun) -- hopefully, those same teenagers, once they're grown up a bit, will be the ones who go on to make real and lasting contributions to biology and medicine, just like teenage hackers often grow up to be the best programmers and CS researchers. But right now we're at the "mainframe" stage of biology, where the genome -- like the computer a couple of generations ago -- is a rather arcane piece of machinery with high barriers to entry.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
We are in complete agreement.
When I built my first computer back in the very early 1970's, the computer I used while pursuing a PhD in biochemistry was a mainframe. It cost me six or seven thousand dollars to build my tiny computer, and a lot of soldering and research.
It is now a "generation" later. We have tools to let novices write programs that would have astounded teams of programmers back then. We have script kiddies attacking government and industry computers. Things move quickly, and ever more so.
One of the reasons that a small lab costs $50,000 (small change to a drug dealer) is that the goals are different. An amateur would not be as interested in careful controls, and could simply buy viruses that insert transposons and freely mix two genomes, and test any viable result for the expression of the cocaine gene. Perhaps a radish was the wrong thing to pick -- a yeast is easier to culture and grow (ask an amateur beer maker).
But some labs are cheaper than others. A suicide terrorist could take blood samples containing several deadly human diseases, and inoculate a pig with those and a virulent flu virus, and hope for a deadly contagious recombination to occur, perhaps aided by some drugs or viruses that make recombinations more likely. He doesn't care about isolation procedures -- he is hoping it will kill him.
But I am expecting science fair projects that insert new genes into yeast to be in high schools in my lifetime. The same high schools that produce kids that build bombs and shoot automatic weapons in cafeterias.
I am in the business of teaching kids how to do science on a shoestring. I get mail from frightened parents who think my Plastic Hydrogen Bomb project is really teaching kids how to make thermonuclear weapons (it is really just a high-tech squirt gun). I also get a lot of mail from people interested in scaling up my Gauss Rifle to lethal energies.
I am very careful how I answer these people.
I like to think that by channelling their energy into building toys, I am refocussing their aims to less destructive pursuits. But as much as I would love to help the next Einstein or Edison, I am careful not to help create the next Bin Laden.
Free book: Science Toys You Can Make
Amateur genetic engineering? Why that's my favorite subject! I like making babies!
Politics and lawyers don't stop people from growing hemp or building methamphetamine labs. ...
but they do stop you from building a rsa cracker in silicon a La men in black show up at your door, you stop showing up anywhere else, ever.
sure no one will stop you from making your pupkin turn blue but just try to generate a genitic mutation that lets you get around government bioIdent systems.
In his article he wrote: "No twentieth-century amateur could stand like Darwin in the front rank with Hubble and Einstein."
But calling Einstein a professional is not quite true: when he made his firsts famous publications (in 1906 if memory serves), he was employed as an expert in Berne's patent application office.
So at this time Einstein was an amateur..
Of course, when he discovered the general relativity, he was a professional, but calling Einstein a professional is a bit misleading:
he could have keep his job as patent examiner for all his life, if he hadn't made all these groundbreaking discoveries when he was an amateur..
More importantly, it's just really fun to say 'Baconian'.
Somehow you have completely missed the point.
The same governments that try to stop hemp growers and meth labs are the ones you think would be showing up at your door if you built a homebrew RSA cracker.
If there were open source RSA crackers floating around, I suspect they would have no easier time arresting all of the users of those than they have had arresting all pot smokers.
But don't worry -- they only catch the paranoids.
Free book: Science Toys You Can Make
High-end astronomy tools aren't very dangerous.
After the first few home-brew ebola knock-off viruses get loose, the surviving politicians & lawyers may clamp down pretty effectively on basement genetic engineering. How many amateur home nuclear reactor operators do you know?
(Keeping the toys away from larger criminal organizations, governments, etc. is a seperate subject. Volunteer your kids-to-be for genetic experiments to harden humans against bioweapons & hope that some will survive.)-:
It's easy to make up & spread cool- and credible-sounding stuff. Finding & checking hard facts is hard work.
what about cooking?
-v
PLease god tell me you cut and paste. Anyone who spent that much time typing that crap...
The more I learn in my field, the more I realize I don't know anything. Even our "world experts" don't know much. It's just that they (generally) know exactly what it is that they don't know. And they know at least some ways to use what they DO know.
It scares me a little. I mean, growing up, I always perceived science as being this big field where enormous amounts of knowledge float around, and anything that we need to know is already known by somebody and we just have to ask about it. Since then, I've come to realize that we're surrounded by hackers. Those who are "experts" are considered experts because they know enough to DO some things with their knowledge, and creatively put pieces together to form new ideas and new ways of doing things.
Being a professional doesn't mean somebody actually knows anything. It's entirely immaterial.
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
HOly shit... do you think it could have been cut+paste, find+replace???/?
I wonder...