Alexander Hamilton house is moved

I hadn't heard about this before, but Alexander Hamilton's house was just moved down the street into Harlem's St. Nicholas Park. Back in the day, it was a quiet country home. Now ... seems Harlem has changed a little over the years. Moving the house to the park will restore a little hint of its original character.

The article mentions the project being fought in court. This article explains that it's just a dispute over which way the house should face, not an attempt to halt the move altogether. This NYT article also contains more information.

Surveillance

Who's afraid of a verdant Mars?

I'd never heard of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, but my first encounter was none too encouraging. The Institute's director, Nick Bostrom, in this article, hopes that the Phoenix lander doesn't find any signs of life on Mars. Because if it does, our chances of making it to Talos IV just took a big hit.

The article works by turning a small observation into the foundation of a huge conclusion that the observation just can't support. It goes like this: star trekking civilizations appear to be rare - in fact, we don't know of even one. So there is a Something that makes it hard for creatures to evolve to Star Trek levels of civilization. This Something goes by the name of the Great Filter.* What is it that makes it so hard to develop that far? We don't know - small sample size and all. If we're lucky, it's just that life itself is so darned hard to evolve, because then we can look at ourselves and say, "Hard part's over."

On the other hand, if it turns out that microbes are a dime a dozen, then maybe the big challenge - the Great Filter - still lies ahead of us. Yike! The end is near! Or there's a good chance that it's nearer than we hoped.

Given that examining Mars won't increase our sample size very much, and given that the extreme distances in space make it plausible that civilizations might never contact one another, that's way too much to conclude. In this case, Bostrom's entire argument hinges on absence of evidence, but that absence is rather easily explained. I think I'll root for those microbes anyway.


*which, paradoxically, arises in any swamp patch that is not sufficiently sincere.

Why I love PZ Meyers

Because the guy keys in on just the right word or image:

Even worse, how can we sense this evidence? We need to use a special instrument.

That instrument is the heart. "It is the heart which perceives God, and not the reason". "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know". Pascal's reasons of the heart are meant to take over from an intellect that operates on hard evidence but has run out of it. "The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which uses principles and demonstrations. The heart has a different one".

It's all fluff and nonsense. Tingley doesn't have a skeptical or scientific neuron in his head, and it shows that he's trying to think with a muscle.

Identified photographs

I might have mentioned, while discussing who bears responsibility for ensuring the accurate identification of photographs in a repository, that the Library of Congress created a Flickr account which, when I checked today, had 3715 digitized photos. That's not so many, since LOC is trying to publish only the ones that are in the public domain. But they're also hoping that the general public can provide more information on the content of the pictures, too. In most cases, LOC already knows a lot, but they never know everything about even their own collection.