McbrCrtn

Vannevar Bush (1890-1974), unrelated to W., was an American engineer, science administrator, and advisor to President F. D. Roosevelt, mostly known for his role in the creation of the atomic bomb. In the 1930’s he developed the concept of what he called the memex (portmanteau of "memory extender"), a microfilm-based "device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility… It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory." The memex is considered by many to be the precursor of the internet, hypertext and general intellect augmenting computer systems. He understood the difficulty involved in predicting the technology of the future, in the July 1945 article in the Atlantic Monthly ‘As We May Think’ Bush wrote: "It is a far cry from the abacus to the modern keyboard accounting machine, it will be an equal step to the arithmetical machine of the future." There, he also predicted Wikipedia, saying that "wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified." Moreover, he foretold the development of speech-recognition in the same article. Despite this, Bush earned an unfair eponym: a vannevar is a bogus technological prediction or a foredoomed engineering concept. This may have been largely because of his strong opposition to sending people into space, which he considered too expensive and risky. When the Apollo Program and the two before went off without problem, Bush was labelled a bad prophet, and by the time of the Shuttle Challenger and Shuttle Columbia disasters, his warning have been forgotten. Note also that NASA has long since realized it is far more frugal to send robots into space.

As We May Think, TheAtlantic.com
Vannevar Bush, Wikipedia.org
MemexSim, SourceForge.net

The second annual Art of Science exchibit opened recently in the Friend Center of Princeton University. The juried show features paintings, sculptures, videos and poetry, a total of 55 works produced in the course of scientific research. The top three winners were:

1) Jennifer Rea, "Mitosis," which depicts cell division superimposed on a floral fabric
2) Melissa Green, "Isolated Hairpin," a computer simulation of turbulent air flow
3) Qiangfei Xia, "Easter Bonnet," a photograph taken with an electron scanning microscope of a tiny piece of metal melted by a laser onto a silicon chip

Admission is free and open to the public from 9 am to 6 pm, Monday through Friday.

Art of Science Competition, Princeton.edu

A new study by Michael A. Cant, University of Cambridge, UK, and others suggests that differences in aggressive behavior in cooperative insect societies are related to "inheritence rank", the chance of successful mating, which increases with higher placement within the social hierarchy. Everyone has to work their way up and can reach the top only when those ahead in rank have died, thereby inheriting from them the right to reproduce. By testing colonies of paper wasps Polistes dominulus, recording aggression and repeatedly removing dominant wasps, they "found that rates of both aggressive ‘displays’ (aimed at individuals of lower rank) and aggressive ‘tests’ (aimed at individuals of higher rank) decreased down the hierarchy." The inheritence rank is the hidden variable that may explain the difference in aggression among seemingly equal individuals. So, even in wasps, the essence of the desire to work up the social ladder is really just a need to get laid. No real surprise there.

The higher the hierarch, the greater the aggression, EurekAlert.org