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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.
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.
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