Truth, Exploration and Open Science

What is Open Science. What is science? How is it related to the truth of what is and ethics? Here’s a little bit of thought for you:

Open Science seems to be a return to fundamental principles of forces and possibility, and in the human domain – ethics. A mote of dust in the breeze knows precisely every force acting on it and thus dances in the light coming from an open window. For humanity, knowledge increases the range of possibilities and leads to new options of action. The truth of reality constrains all possibilities; this is vast, limited access to knowledge of fundamental truths of possibility constrains our available actions. Our ethical systems determine what of these possible actions to take. By expanding options, we can respond with more of our ethics intact – a proxy for a sort of wisdom.
Science creates knowledge of the space of possibility of action. We derive this knowledge by taking an empirical view of the world or an experiment and concluding causation through a series of logical steps. This abbreviated version of the scientific method is cut off from the initiating force, the hypothesis. A hypothesis brings human motive to expand the realm of the true possibilities and may derive from self-satisfaction through closing gaps in knowledge or hypotheses that the hypothesizer believes will be “useful,” sometimes split into fundamental and applied sciences.
Adding to the knowledge space of humanity, we create a more significant number of options for action in our reality bounded universe. Now that we know the relationship between matter and energy, we have the option to build nuclear reactors to solve the energy needs of humanity. Once we observed that putting seeds into the earth and watering them caused them to grow we were enabled the deductive observation of farming.
Open Science is the process where these hypotheses, observations as data, the process to derive them (by code or by convention) is easily accessible to others to replicate, review the methodology and conclusions. Open science brings the ethics of beauty into our world. Like observing the dance of thousands of dust motes in a beam of light, or a balanced ecosystem with all the forces at play bringing about an orchestra of action and reaction. Open Science can bring a faster and more accurate mapping of truth for anyone willing to participate. This expanded realm of possibility means we can act on our ethics with more dimensions of freedom. We may have kept the benefits of increased food production, energy production, highrises, antibiotics for the elite. It seems logical that experiments are being conducted today that only benefit the elite. Closed access / secret science goes against the desire of truth. What does truth desire? If we accept things are, and that truth is, then truth is truth and truth “desires” to be known, to fill its total shape as it does everywhere else. Consciousness (that which conducts science) seems to be a rare force in the universe in its ability to hide and lie. Open Science is not an ethic; it is an enabler of ethical actions through access to knowledge and options for behaviors.
Open Science puts consciousness into the service of beauty by theorizing, exploring, deducing, and sharing – creating space for ethics – creating space to dance.

Two Inspirations At Odds

Seth Godin has been blogging every day for the last who knows how many years.

Derek Sivers has a (new) rule to write daily and to publish only when he believes that what he has written is worth the readers time.

Should I share the process and write daily, get to the point where I’m constantly putting myself out there? Or should I only post when I think what I have to say is worth your attention.

Right now this content is for me, it’s a chronicle, a blog, a log of my thinking (hardly my life). It has projects alongside ramblings like this.

I think that until I figure out what this space will be for, I will post daily. Not as personal as my morning pages, not as refined as an article. I do know I want to write more and to do it publicly.

See you soon.
+BG

What if

What if I paid more attention to what I shared online

What if what we shared created knowledge and built connections between people?

What if I could decide if there will be any advertisements?

What if I could make my website look ugly, if I wanted?

What if this content wasn’t for sale?

What if influence was a matter of creating real value?

What if we could curate the weird and the wonderful without a top 10 list of amazing javascript visualizations you don’t want to miss post from fuzzdeed?

What if we hosted out own websites and created webrings?

What’s Tim Burners Lee up to these days anyway?

So that’s about it for today. Day zero. What if?

what if I could blink

Thanks for reading, if you want to comment, I’m sorry you cant. You can email me though by putting my initials before the url here. Hugs!

Colorshifting Biofeedback Glasses – Representing Stress Responses Visually

 

After hearing about the Iowa Gambling Task experiment in which subjects are given decks of cards and are asked to pick between them. Each choice either wins them money or loses them a certain amount depending on the value of the card. A healthy individual will begin picking the deck that offers him the highest running values after picking approximately 50 choices. But amazingly after 10 choices the individual’s galvanic skin response jumps. Here’s a Google Books link to the paper by Dr. Damásio: Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex.

It seemed likely that by getting closer insight into our emotional states we could make better decisions. So I made these glasses that tinted your peripheral vision depending on your galvanic skin response. Using a simple voltage divider circuit, an arduino, RGB LED’s, safety glasses and diffusers I was able to make glasses that related information from my subconcious and displayed it to a sense that I was very aware of… vision. Here’s a video me and a friend Anand Atreya going through some GSR tests and the goggles in action:

Ann Arbor Hackerspace

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Coming back from PS1 in Chicago on the long drive back to Cambridge I’ve been doing some serious thinking. I believe that Michigan needs a hackerspace with a unique perspective, a job generating outlook. I’ll be back in Michigan – Ann Arbor – to start discussions on planning and organizing a new hackerspace next friday July 31st. Anyone who believes should be there.

_let’s go.

Jordan Bunker, Eric Michaud, Bilal Ghalib, and Amar Ghalib