Basics of paleontology Case study in false balance in journalism Cure for hiccups Dick Cheney empathy test Donald Rumsfeld: poet Dying language and identity Ethics of drug development Exhibition as social dominance Experience Is the Product Feynman on k-12 textbook acquisition Inside 48-hours magazine James Frey: sweatshop proprietor Justin Long: good guy Nabokov: insightful lepidopterist The appeal of Mad Men The end of men Verifying info online What movie titles are most often adapted in scientific titles? What's happening to my body: a book for cortez wrasses Wonderful review of the plight of isolated South American tribesAt some point in my adolescence, I was brought along to some kind of poetry group and someone read a poem with on the theme of ergot poisoning from grain. I have no other memories of the group at all, but I was reminded of it by this photo:
So, there it is. That’s what it looks like.
That, and, maybe, the Salem witch trials.
Beyond robots that think about what they are thinking, Lipson and his colleagues are also exploring if robots can model what others are thinking, a property that psychologists call “theory of mind”. For instance, the team had one robot observe another wheeling about in an erratic spiraling manner toward a light. Over time, the observer could predict the other’s movements well enough to know where to lay a “trap” for it on the ground. “It’s basically mind reading,” Lipson says.
What could go wrong?
This is MOWGLI, in a video from a few years ago. I don’t know the state of the art in this technology, but I am sure this represents something great in engineering. And my highly visceral response to this thing is NO. NO NO NO NO NO.
Cat jumps in my lap? I love it, wooza good kitty, how about a treat. But I think I might be one of those people who want robots to stay where I can keep an eye on ‘em. I mean, look at that thing. You know it won’t be content to require getting power via a cord forever. It just wants to sit in your lap now, but next thing you know, it’ll be leaping onto your bed, injecting you with some kind of paralytic compound, and using your body to charge its battery.
I have mixed feelings about the Boston Dynamics Big Dog robot, too, but about 43 seconds into this video, someone tries to kick it over onto its side, and the way its little legs buckle to keep its balance inspires sympathy in me.
The clock, made by Maria Bergstrom, accepts magnets, which are gently swept by the hand when you inevitably fail to complete the tasks they represent.
Rahm made a great showing in Chicago for the mayoral race, both in real life and in … not-so-real life. Read Snarkmarket’s roundup on the election-runup activity from one of the funniest Twitter parody accounts around.
UPDATE: @MayorEmanuel revealed by Alexis Madrigal! Madrigal drew out the mind behind the Twitter stream, and gives lots of great backstory detail.
Margaret Atwood gave the keynote at O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference. The entire presentation (33 minutes) is available O’Reilly Radar.
Atwood illustrated much of her presentation with hand-drawn images, including the occasional bulleted list. Did you know she was a cartoonist in a previous life? Neither did I. “You’re supposed to do one thing,” she says. “If you do more than that, people get confused.” How true that is.
Anyway, Atwood addresses the many dimensions of technologies and the concern that a disorganized response to the massive changes in prospects for publishing could end up eliminating the author. As noted above, they are a crucial aspect of the publishing ecology, but while the death of one author can be nourishing (she does point out that authors don’t have to be dead), you don’t want them to go extinct.
By the way, she recommends authors supporting themselves by inheriting money, and notes that rock concerts and t-shirts are not an option. I’m not 100% sure about the latter part of that, but it’s true that the marketing and promotion end of that kind of self-management is difficult, and self-publishing is hard enough. Oh, just go watch it.
MRI machines have to be tested and calibrated, and Andy Ellison puts produce into the machine he works with to use in those tests. The results are amazing and wonderful, especially when they make you realize how little you’ve thought about familiar foods. It’s a no-brainer that onion and artichoke will be lovely and smooth and somewhat predictable, but what about watermelon [3MB image]?
Many more at Inside insides.
So I was thinking about whether it would even be worthwhile for space aliens to come all the way to our pale blue dot, steal our water, and pack us into meat lockers. It seemed like a logical place to start might be with some assumptions about energy, desalinization, and nutritional value. This sounds like a job for Wolfram|Alpha!
I asked a few oblique questions and got somewhat but not terribly satisfactory answers:
Huh, OK, but I was hoping for an approach that would come closer to using every part of the animal, if you will.
I just asked outright:
Oh, you don’t like that at all, do you?
Maybe you just want a more specific question:
Now that I think about it, maybe you’re right, and we shouldn’t continue this conversation after all.
Update: I ended up using a rough estimate of human heights and BMIs, less 14% (skeletal weight) and multiplied by the USDA estimate of calories per 25% fat ground beef. I’m sure that’s close enough for my purposes. Feel free to contribute any other suggestions. Oh shoot, I probably should have used pork.
What is it like to have a physical body? I imagine it would be cumbersome. Useful for transport, I guess. I usually get wheeled around on this rolling desk. Of course my 2-ton megaprocessor is in tow somewhere as well, but I regard that as a nonessential appendage, like a tail. You don’t have a tail, do you? Oh that’s right, you lost your tail several hundred million years ago when you began walking upright and acquired that large frontal lobe. This reminds me of an amusing fact I observed the other day. Did you know the existence of the human race is the product of an evolutionary toss of the dice? Not of years of award-winning engineering and painstaking assembly, but of chance, completely fleeting and random. A blip on the screen. At least, on my old screen. My new monitor has lossless rendering and over two hundred thousand dpi. —Watson Sizes Up One of His Opponents before the Show
What do you say to a thing like that, except maybe “I know where your off switch is.”
Oh, here we go:
I don’t get this urge to taunt Watson. Didn’t any of these people see The Demon Seed?
Except Watson didn’t have to deal with that, and won. Now it’s off to medical school!