- Email: [email protected]
Kepler's memory writ large in the sky
EDITORIAL
LOCATIONS UK Lacon House, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1200 Fax +44 (0) 20 7611 1250 Australia Tower 2, 475 Victoria Avenue, Chatswood, NSW 2067 Tel +61 2 9422 8559 Fax +61 2 9422 8552 USA 225 Wyman Street, Waltham, MA 02451 Tel +1 781 734 8770 Fax +1 720 356 9217 201 Mission Street, 26th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105 Tel +1 415 908 3348 Fax +1 415 704 3125 Subscription Service For our latest subscription offers, visit newscientist.com/subscribe Customer and subscription services are also available by: Telephone +44 (0) 844 543 80 70 Email [email protected] Web newscientist.com/subscribe Post New Scientist, Rockwood House, Perrymount Road, Haywards Heath, West Sussex RH16 3DH One year subscription (51 issues) UK £150 cONTACTS Contact us newscientist.com/contact Who’s who newscientist.com/people General & media enquiries Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1202 [email protected] Editorial Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1202 [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Picture desk Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1268 Display Advertising Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1291 [email protected] Recruitment Advertising UK Tel +44 (0) 20 8652 4444 [email protected] UK Newsstand Tel +44 (0) 20 3148 3333 Newstrade distributed by Marketforce UK Ltd, The Blue Fin Building, 110 Southwark St, London SE1 OSU Syndication Tribune Media Services International Tel +44 (0) 20 7588 7588
© 2013 Reed Business Information Ltd, England New Scientist is published weekly by Reed Business Information Ltd. ISSN 0262 4079. Registered at the Post Office as a newspaper and printed in England by Polestar (Colchester)
Unwearable computing? Unobtrusive computers pose social, not technological, challenges WHEN did you last look at your That’s not to say the transition phone? If you own a smartphone, will go smoothly. Doubts have it was probably just a short been raised about Glass’s time ago. A glance around any implications for privacy, its less commuter train will confirm than handsome looks, hefty price how captivated many of us are tag and restricted functionality. by our digital companions. Glass may turn out to be too So much so that it’s supposedly bleeding-edge for any but the taking a toll on our bodies: all earliest of early adopters. That this looking down is causing has happened to Google before: our jowls to grow flabby and our jawlines to droop – what cosmetic “Google Glass may turn out to be too bleeding-edge surgeons have opportunistically for any but the earliest of dubbed “smartphone face”. early adopters” You could hardly ask for a better incentive to adopt Google’s hands-free computer, Glass. Its its now-defunct messaging tool smart-specs design lets you keep Wave was so revolutionary that up to date – and update others – hardly anyone understood how without glancing at your phone. it was supposed to work. Glass is just one of several Neither cost nor design factors technologies that will allow us will stop the march of wearable to interact with computers more computing for long. The naturally in the near future. emergence of apps from thirdMachines that can understand party developers should help allay our speech and gestures are also concerns about Glass’s limited becoming an everyday reality feature set (see page 19), just as the (see page 40). Rather than proliferation of apps drove the checking in with our phones, uptake of smartphones. If Google omnipresent computers will doesn’t crack it first time round, check in on us. This is the next step it may get there on its second in the evolution that has already try – as it did with the smartphone taken us from mainframes to market. And if Google can’t make desktops to tablets. It seems the an appealing device, someone age of ubiquitous computing, or else probably will – albeit perhaps “ubicomp”, is upon us. taking a very different approach.
The social concerns are harder to overcome. Wearable computers can interfere with human interactions in unsettling ways. Your companion may not like the idea that you’re surreptitiously checking your messages – or their background – over lunch. This might be considered impolite, or even illegal: covertly recording a conversation, for example, may fall foul of European privacy laws. It’s easy to overstate such objections, however. We already have social codes governing the use of both sunglasses and smartphones, as well as ingrained attitudes towards those who flout such rules – like the mild scorn directed at celebrities who keep their dark glasses on at all times. It is easy to imagine using your wearable computer while working, but ostentatiously removing it as a mark of civility when socialising. Ubicomp may let us interact more naturally with technology, but it can’t fix everything. (Its developers are already warning that gestural computing has its own physical cost: “gorilla arm”.) Careful design will be critical. Otherwise, ironically, the more invisible computers get, the more intrusive they may become. n
Scribbling on the sky “KEPLER was my North, my South, my East and West… I thought Kepler would last forever: I was wrong.” So lamented astronomer Geoff Marcy on discovering that the space telescope might have spotted its last exoplanet. Marcy’s impassioned pastiche of W. H. Auden’s Funeral Blues was much remarked on after NASA’s announcement of Kepler’s abrupt demise. It is unusual, after all, for
a piece of orbital machinery to be commemorated in verse – even a telescope whose legacy promises huge advances in answering one of the most important questions of our time (see page 6). But perhaps it should be. Poets have often taken inspiration from their contemplation of the universe, after all, and Kepler is just a particularly sophisticated form of such contemplation.
Scientists, too, have turned to poetry before – not least the human Johannes Kepler. The Rudolphine Tables, a groundbreaking astronomical catalogue prepared by Kepler from data gathered by the deceased Tycho Brahe, begins with a fine illustration – and a lengthy poem. So Marcy’s poem actually respects a venerable tradition. Long may it continue. n 25 May 2013 | NewScientist | 3
LOCATIONS UK Lacon House, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1200 Fax +44 (0) 20 7611 1250 Australia Tower 2, 475 Victoria Avenue, Chatswood, NSW 2067 Tel +61 2 9422 8559 Fax +61 2 9422 8552 USA 225 Wyman Street, Waltham, MA 02451 Tel +1 781 734 8770 Fax +1 720 356 9217 201 Mission Street, 26th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105 Tel +1 415 908 3348 Fax +1 415 704 3125 Subscription Service For our latest subscription offers, visit newscientist.com/subscribe Customer and subscription services are also available by: Telephone +44 (0) 844 543 80 70 Email [email protected] Web newscientist.com/subscribe Post New Scientist, Rockwood House, Perrymount Road, Haywards Heath, West Sussex RH16 3DH One year subscription (51 issues) UK £150 cONTACTS Contact us newscientist.com/contact Who’s who newscientist.com/people General & media enquiries Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1202 [email protected] Editorial Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1202 [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Picture desk Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1268 Display Advertising Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1291 [email protected] Recruitment Advertising UK Tel +44 (0) 20 8652 4444 [email protected] UK Newsstand Tel +44 (0) 20 3148 3333 Newstrade distributed by Marketforce UK Ltd, The Blue Fin Building, 110 Southwark St, London SE1 OSU Syndication Tribune Media Services International Tel +44 (0) 20 7588 7588
© 2013 Reed Business Information Ltd, England New Scientist is published weekly by Reed Business Information Ltd. ISSN 0262 4079. Registered at the Post Office as a newspaper and printed in England by Polestar (Colchester)
Unwearable computing? Unobtrusive computers pose social, not technological, challenges WHEN did you last look at your That’s not to say the transition phone? If you own a smartphone, will go smoothly. Doubts have it was probably just a short been raised about Glass’s time ago. A glance around any implications for privacy, its less commuter train will confirm than handsome looks, hefty price how captivated many of us are tag and restricted functionality. by our digital companions. Glass may turn out to be too So much so that it’s supposedly bleeding-edge for any but the taking a toll on our bodies: all earliest of early adopters. That this looking down is causing has happened to Google before: our jowls to grow flabby and our jawlines to droop – what cosmetic “Google Glass may turn out to be too bleeding-edge surgeons have opportunistically for any but the earliest of dubbed “smartphone face”. early adopters” You could hardly ask for a better incentive to adopt Google’s hands-free computer, Glass. Its its now-defunct messaging tool smart-specs design lets you keep Wave was so revolutionary that up to date – and update others – hardly anyone understood how without glancing at your phone. it was supposed to work. Glass is just one of several Neither cost nor design factors technologies that will allow us will stop the march of wearable to interact with computers more computing for long. The naturally in the near future. emergence of apps from thirdMachines that can understand party developers should help allay our speech and gestures are also concerns about Glass’s limited becoming an everyday reality feature set (see page 19), just as the (see page 40). Rather than proliferation of apps drove the checking in with our phones, uptake of smartphones. If Google omnipresent computers will doesn’t crack it first time round, check in on us. This is the next step it may get there on its second in the evolution that has already try – as it did with the smartphone taken us from mainframes to market. And if Google can’t make desktops to tablets. It seems the an appealing device, someone age of ubiquitous computing, or else probably will – albeit perhaps “ubicomp”, is upon us. taking a very different approach.
The social concerns are harder to overcome. Wearable computers can interfere with human interactions in unsettling ways. Your companion may not like the idea that you’re surreptitiously checking your messages – or their background – over lunch. This might be considered impolite, or even illegal: covertly recording a conversation, for example, may fall foul of European privacy laws. It’s easy to overstate such objections, however. We already have social codes governing the use of both sunglasses and smartphones, as well as ingrained attitudes towards those who flout such rules – like the mild scorn directed at celebrities who keep their dark glasses on at all times. It is easy to imagine using your wearable computer while working, but ostentatiously removing it as a mark of civility when socialising. Ubicomp may let us interact more naturally with technology, but it can’t fix everything. (Its developers are already warning that gestural computing has its own physical cost: “gorilla arm”.) Careful design will be critical. Otherwise, ironically, the more invisible computers get, the more intrusive they may become. n
Scribbling on the sky “KEPLER was my North, my South, my East and West… I thought Kepler would last forever: I was wrong.” So lamented astronomer Geoff Marcy on discovering that the space telescope might have spotted its last exoplanet. Marcy’s impassioned pastiche of W. H. Auden’s Funeral Blues was much remarked on after NASA’s announcement of Kepler’s abrupt demise. It is unusual, after all, for
a piece of orbital machinery to be commemorated in verse – even a telescope whose legacy promises huge advances in answering one of the most important questions of our time (see page 6). But perhaps it should be. Poets have often taken inspiration from their contemplation of the universe, after all, and Kepler is just a particularly sophisticated form of such contemplation.
Scientists, too, have turned to poetry before – not least the human Johannes Kepler. The Rudolphine Tables, a groundbreaking astronomical catalogue prepared by Kepler from data gathered by the deceased Tycho Brahe, begins with a fine illustration – and a lengthy poem. So Marcy’s poem actually respects a venerable tradition. Long may it continue. n 25 May 2013 | NewScientist | 3