July 14, 2016
The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood
A book by Jame Gleick
In 2011 alone, 1.8 zettabytes (or 1.8 trillion gigabytes) of data was created. Currently we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, satellites keeping track of deep space events, DNA sequencing, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is big data.
You can check out a sliver of the data we generate in a single minute in this infograph - but keep in mind that these numbers are from 2011 which means that by now most of them will have increased by a factor of 2. Here's another infograph, one that takes a look at how big data is changing the IT landscape and how it will continue to do so in the future > - annual data generation is expected to increase 4300% by 2020... mindboggling!
The possibilities are limitless. Literally every industry and branch of science will ultimately be affected. Big data can help us to better understand everything from diseases to the environment, it can help alleviate traffic problems and reduce waste, under specific circumstances it even allows us to predict the future. When you take into account developments like Adam, the robot scientist and Eureqa, a software tool that can detect equations and hidden mathematical relationships in your data, the future looks bright indeed. Unfortunately, big data also has a dark side but more on that next sunday.
Adam: http://www.wired.com/2011/04/robot-scientist-language/
Eureqa: http://www.creativemachineslab.com/
Big Data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data
BBC Horizon: The Age of Big Data
In Los Angeles, a remarkable experiment is underway; the police are trying to predict crime, before it even happens. In London, one trader believes that he has found the secret of making billions with maths and In South Africa, astronomers are attempting to catalogue the entire cosmos. These very different worlds are united by one thing - an extraordinary explosion in data.
Horizon meets the people at the forefront of the data revolution, and reveals the possibilities and the promise of the age of big data.
Crystallization made Crystal Clear
The crystallization process consists of two major events, nucleation and crystal growth. Nucleation is the initial process that forms the site upon which additional particles are deposited during the subsequent crystal growth phase. When solute molecules dispersed in a solvent gather into clusters, they elevate solute concentration in a small region. Normally these clusters redissolve but under the right operating conditions (temperature and supersaturation), they reach a critical size and become stable nuclei. It's this nucleation process that determines the crystal structure, arranging the atoms in a defined and periodic manner. Both nucleation and growth will continue to occur simultaneously while the supersaturation exists.
Enough talk, now watch NurdRage electrically crystallize metal out of a solution down below!
Some more fun with crystals; Crystal Garden Growing Time Lapse - and you might also want to check out Mexico's giant crystal cave; goo.gl/FBFn9
Bonus: Timelapse of Crystals Growing
Enough talk, now watch NurdRage electrically crystallize metal out of a solution down below!
Some more fun with crystals; Crystal Garden Growing Time Lapse - and you might also want to check out Mexico's giant crystal cave; goo.gl/FBFn9
Bonus: Timelapse of Crystals Growing
June 5, 2016
Sea lice mob devours pig from the inside out
Finding a dead body in the ocean may be gruesome, but for forensic scientists it can also be perplexing. Although the way a body decomposes on land is well understood, little is known about how human remains fare underwater.
Now a pioneering experiment lead by forensic scientist Gail Anderson from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, is using dead pigs as a model for humans to gain insight. In this video, a pig carcass is tracked as it turns to bones in the ocean, capturing the scavengers that visit the body. Sharks are unable to tuck in since it's enclosed, giving sea lice exclusive access to the remains. They enter orifices in droves to feast on the animal from the inside out and congregate on the cage bars to prevent other arthropods, like shrimp, from getting a bite. "By the end of the fourth day, the sea lice had left and the pigs were reduced to bones," says Anderson.
Shrimp arrive to pick at the skeleton, eventually removing all the cartilage. The team then recovered the bones which, strangely, were jet black for a period of 48 hours. "This is something that has never been seen before," says Lynne Bell, a member of the team. "Colleagues are working to identify the micro-organisms collected close to the bone, which may help to identify the unique chemistry of the change."
Stick around till the end for a surprise visitor. :)
Interested in the science behind decay? Check this out;
After Life: The Science of Decay
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2012/10/sea-lice-mob-devours-pig-from-the-inside-out.html
Now a pioneering experiment lead by forensic scientist Gail Anderson from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, is using dead pigs as a model for humans to gain insight. In this video, a pig carcass is tracked as it turns to bones in the ocean, capturing the scavengers that visit the body. Sharks are unable to tuck in since it's enclosed, giving sea lice exclusive access to the remains. They enter orifices in droves to feast on the animal from the inside out and congregate on the cage bars to prevent other arthropods, like shrimp, from getting a bite. "By the end of the fourth day, the sea lice had left and the pigs were reduced to bones," says Anderson.
Shrimp arrive to pick at the skeleton, eventually removing all the cartilage. The team then recovered the bones which, strangely, were jet black for a period of 48 hours. "This is something that has never been seen before," says Lynne Bell, a member of the team. "Colleagues are working to identify the micro-organisms collected close to the bone, which may help to identify the unique chemistry of the change."
Stick around till the end for a surprise visitor. :)
Interested in the science behind decay? Check this out;
After Life: The Science of Decay
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2012/10/sea-lice-mob-devours-pig-from-the-inside-out.html
Hands on with Raytheon's new Exoskeleton
This piece of technological wizardry is brought to you by Raytheon which is a major American defense contractor and industrial corporation with core manufacturing concentrations in weapons and military and commercial electronics.
Evolution on Acid
Nudibranchs or sea slugs come in a truly stupendous amount of shapes, sizes and colors.
50 Shades of Nudibranch
50 Shades of Nudibranch
The Three Laws of Robotics
The three laws form an organizing principle and unifying theme for Asimov's robotic-based fiction, appearing in his Robot series and the stories linked to it. The Laws are incorporated into almost all of the positronic robots appearing in his fiction, and cannot be bypassed, being intended as a safety feature. Many of Asimov's robot-focused stories involve robots behaving in unusual and counter-intuitive ways as an unintended consequence of how the robot applies the Three Laws to the situation in which it finds itself. Other authors working in Asimov's fictional universe have adopted them and references, often parodic, appear throughout science fiction as well as in other genres.
The original laws have been altered and elaborated on by Asimov and other authors. Asimov himself made slight modifications to the first three in various books and short stories to further develop how robots would interact with humans and each other. In later fiction where robots had taken responsibility for government of whole planets and human civilizations, Asimov also added a fourth, or zeroth law, to precede the others:
0. A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
Here they are, straight from Asimov himself.
The original laws have been altered and elaborated on by Asimov and other authors. Asimov himself made slight modifications to the first three in various books and short stories to further develop how robots would interact with humans and each other. In later fiction where robots had taken responsibility for government of whole planets and human civilizations, Asimov also added a fourth, or zeroth law, to precede the others:
0. A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
Here they are, straight from Asimov himself.
Will the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN probe become a maven on the topic of Mars?
Only time will tell but NASA has a track record when it comes to delivering explorers to our red neighbor in one piece. If all goes well, MAVEN will help us determine how Mars lost almost all of its atmosphere and water. Humans seem to be rather fond of water and oxygen so this isn't just interesting from a scientific point of view, it might also help us safeguard our own planet to make sure that such a runaway process doesn't happen here.
MAVEN will perform measurements from a highly elliptical orbit over a period of one Earth year, with five "deep dips" at 150 km (93 mi) minimum altitude to sample the upper atmosphere. The MAVEN spacecraft will carry three instrument suites, and they include:
Particles and Field (P&F) Package
> Solar Wind Electron Analyzer (SWEA) - measures solar wind and ionospheric electrons
> Solar Wind Ion Analyzer (SWIA) - measures solar wind and magnetosheath ion density and velocity
> SupraThermal And Thermal Ion Composition (STATIC) - measures thermal ions to moderate-energy escaping ions
> Solar Energetic Particle (SEP) - determines the impact of SEPs on the upper atmosphere
> Langmuir Probe and Waves (LPW) - determines ionospheric properties and wave heating of escaping ions and solar extreme ultraviolet (EUV) input to atmosphere
> Magnetometer (MAG) - measures interplanetary solar wind and ionospheric magnetic fields
Remote Sensing (RS) Package
> Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrometer (IUVS) - measures global characteristics of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere
> Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS) Package - measures the composition and isotopes of neutral gases and ions
MAVEN is expected to reach Mars in September 2014. By then, the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite on board the Curiosity rover will have made similar surface measurements from Gale crater, which will help guide the interpretation of MAVEN's upper atmosphere measurements. MAVEN's measurements will also provide additional scientific context with which to test models for current methane formation in Mars.
Launch T-minus: 1h 25m
Watch MAVEN take off live here; http://www.ustream.tv/nasahdtv
Looking for more info on Mars? http://wondreal.blogspot.be/2016/06/mars-red-planet.html
MAVEN will perform measurements from a highly elliptical orbit over a period of one Earth year, with five "deep dips" at 150 km (93 mi) minimum altitude to sample the upper atmosphere. The MAVEN spacecraft will carry three instrument suites, and they include:
Particles and Field (P&F) Package
> Solar Wind Electron Analyzer (SWEA) - measures solar wind and ionospheric electrons
> Solar Wind Ion Analyzer (SWIA) - measures solar wind and magnetosheath ion density and velocity
> SupraThermal And Thermal Ion Composition (STATIC) - measures thermal ions to moderate-energy escaping ions
> Solar Energetic Particle (SEP) - determines the impact of SEPs on the upper atmosphere
> Langmuir Probe and Waves (LPW) - determines ionospheric properties and wave heating of escaping ions and solar extreme ultraviolet (EUV) input to atmosphere
> Magnetometer (MAG) - measures interplanetary solar wind and ionospheric magnetic fields
Remote Sensing (RS) Package
> Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrometer (IUVS) - measures global characteristics of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere
> Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS) Package - measures the composition and isotopes of neutral gases and ions
MAVEN is expected to reach Mars in September 2014. By then, the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite on board the Curiosity rover will have made similar surface measurements from Gale crater, which will help guide the interpretation of MAVEN's upper atmosphere measurements. MAVEN's measurements will also provide additional scientific context with which to test models for current methane formation in Mars.
Launch T-minus: 1h 25m
Watch MAVEN take off live here; http://www.ustream.tv/nasahdtv
Looking for more info on Mars? http://wondreal.blogspot.be/2016/06/mars-red-planet.html
Tracking Time with Optical Lattice Clocks
A team of researchers at the University of Tokyo has developed a new type of optical atomic clock that boasts a 100 quadrillionth of a second accuracy. The optical lattice clock is the brain child of Professor Katori who shines his light on possible applications in the video below.
Let's crack open a bottle
"A popular party trick is to fill a glass bottle with water and hit the top of the bottle with an open hand, causing the bottom of the bottle to break open. We investigate the source of the catastrophic cracking through the use of high-speed video and an accelerometer attached to the bottom of a glass bottle.
Upon closer inspection, it is obvious that the acceleration caused by hitting the top of the bottle is followed by the formation of bubbles near the bottom. The nearly instantaneous acceleration creates an area of low pressure on the bottom of the bottle where cavitation bubbles form. Moments later, the cavitation bubbles collapse at roughly 10 times the speed of formation, causing the bottle to break. The accelerometer data shows that the bottle is broken after the bubbles collapse and that the magnitude of the bubble collapse is greater than the initial impact. The fluid dynamics video highlights that this trick will not work if the bottle is empty nor if it is filled with a carbonated fluid because the vapor bubbles fill with the CO2 dissolved in the liquid, preventing the bubbles from collapsing.
A modified cavitation number, including the acceleration of the fluid (a), vapor pressure (Pv), and depth of the fluid column (h), is derived to determine when cavity inception occurs such that Ca =(Patm − Pv)/(ρh(a − g)). Through experimentation, visible cavitation bubbles form when Ca ≤ 0.5. The experiments, based on the modified cavitation number, reveal that the easiest way to break a glass bottle with your bare hands is to fill it with a non-carbonated, high vapor pressure fluid, and strike it hard."
Upon closer inspection, it is obvious that the acceleration caused by hitting the top of the bottle is followed by the formation of bubbles near the bottom. The nearly instantaneous acceleration creates an area of low pressure on the bottom of the bottle where cavitation bubbles form. Moments later, the cavitation bubbles collapse at roughly 10 times the speed of formation, causing the bottle to break. The accelerometer data shows that the bottle is broken after the bubbles collapse and that the magnitude of the bubble collapse is greater than the initial impact. The fluid dynamics video highlights that this trick will not work if the bottle is empty nor if it is filled with a carbonated fluid because the vapor bubbles fill with the CO2 dissolved in the liquid, preventing the bubbles from collapsing.
A modified cavitation number, including the acceleration of the fluid (a), vapor pressure (Pv), and depth of the fluid column (h), is derived to determine when cavity inception occurs such that Ca =(Patm − Pv)/(ρh(a − g)). Through experimentation, visible cavitation bubbles form when Ca ≤ 0.5. The experiments, based on the modified cavitation number, reveal that the easiest way to break a glass bottle with your bare hands is to fill it with a non-carbonated, high vapor pressure fluid, and strike it hard."
We are the borrowers
For two months in summer 2011, a glass box containing a typical kitchen and garden was left to rot in full public view within Edinburgh Zoo. In this resulting documentary, presenter Dr George McGavin and his team use time-lapse cameras and specialist photography to capture the extraordinary way in which moulds, microbes and insects are able to break down our everyday things and allow new life to emerge from old.
Lots of jaw dropping footage! They even track individual nitrogen atoms as they get passed along between organisms!
"When we die, our bodies become the grass, and the antelope eat the grass. And so we are all connnected in the great Circle of Life." -Mufasa, The Lion King
Lots of jaw dropping footage! They even track individual nitrogen atoms as they get passed along between organisms!
"When we die, our bodies become the grass, and the antelope eat the grass. And so we are all connnected in the great Circle of Life." -Mufasa, The Lion King
The Inheritors
William Golding, best known for Lord of the Flies, considers his 1955 novel - The Inheritors, to be his best. It follows one of the last remaining tribes of Neanderthals as they make first contact with strange, godlike beings... homo sapiens.
Now, more than 50 years later, this classic piece of work is finally getting a soundtrack! It took James Holden 7 years to deliver this groundbreaking record that fearlessly pushes into new territory but it has been worth the wait. It's hard to describe but it sounds a bit like a mix of krautrock & shoegaze mixed together with techno ideas and a rave ethos. He crafted The Inheritors using his extensive analogue modular system and hand-coded computer programs, which he used to build a series of unique analogue-digital machines. The result is something far removed from the clean overly produced dance music of today.
Hypnotic. Raw. Tribal. Powerful.
Struggle. Life at its peak. Beautiful.
An analogue|organic machine is dying, crying for help cause it doesn't want to lose what it loves but it's doing so triumphantly because it believes its love was great and will not be replicated. Holden desperately tries to keep it alive, infusing it with digital space magic. Life is always more beautiful on the edge of death and here Holden nudges us beyond that edge. Frankenstein's monster was misunderstood. Welcome to the war between organic chaos and digital structure... or are they making love? What will the inheritors make of the past that brought them to be?
It's definitely something to be experienced. The album comes in at 75 minutes and is designed to take you on a trip.
Some more background on how he arrived here; he's approaching the creation of trance from a scientific perspective.
"The driving factor behind being in a “trance state” (that is, transcending your standard conception of “the self”) is thought to be a universal property of the brain. Brainwave entrainment is the act of causing various body systems to synchronise by altering the frequency of brainwaves. “Entrainment” is a physics term, referring to the fact that two vibrating bodies will synchronise if exposed to one another for long enough – it’s what makes two people walk in step, it’s what makes an audience applaud in time and it’s what makes a couple fall asleep at the same moment.
It’s thought that this effect can also be achieved with an audio stimulus. In preparation for his performance at the Barbican, James Holden researched some of the science behind altered states and found correlations between playing music and different states of mind that, in his own words, blew his mind. The theory of sonic entrainment suggests that the brain will synchronize to an external rhythm – it means that two musicians playing music at the same time are actually synchronising brainwaves. Whilst the normal, alert brain’s frequencies are usually between 14 and 22Hz, they’re slightly slower whilst playing music – around 8-14Hz. Crucially, the brain is in a similar state whilst meditating, or, indeed in a trance.
If everybody in a room is focused on one audio source, then brainwaves are synchronising, putting everybody into a similar state of mind, creating a collective consciousness. Ensuring that everybody is (literally) on the same wavelength is important if the state is to be maintained. “We’re naturally sensitive to those around us,” says Holden, “In the same way that if someone near you isn’t into it, it can ruin the effect.” This might go some way to explaining the almost instinctive annoyance that comes with seeing people who are glued to their smartphones or bringing up Shazam at a gig – it’s not just distracting, it’s literally putting you into a more alert brain state.
This isn’t to imply that the entire phenomenon is down to suggestion. Particular frequencies often recur in religious and ritual music – Indonesian gamelan music, for example, uses ultra high frequencies that are nearly impossible to record, and these are allegedly what create the trance phenomena. In Yoruba-derived drumming, it’s the tiny delays in timing that create miniature moments of tension and release in the deeper drum tones. Ultra low frequencies are attributed to having strong psychic effects, something that experimental art groups like Throbbing Gristle experimented with.
Besides, there isn’t really one golden recipe to achieving this state – tastes vary and people perceive things in different ways. “The event’s producer set up a meeting for me with Vincent Walsh, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCL.” Holden says, “It was near the start of my research, and what I was basically asking him was: is there anything in the science that I can take to make more effective hypnotic music? His response nailed it: he told me to go with my instincts. Music has had thousands of years evolution towards this purpose, musicians spend a lifetime intuiting how to achieve these results.”
“And that’s the take-home fact,” Holden says, hitting the nail on the head: “Our subconscious intuition is the best bit of our brains. I couldn’t do the maths to tell you where a thrown ball would intersect my arm’s reach, but I could probably catch it.”
Renata - a girl's name of Latin origin, meaning "reborn".
http://pitchfork.com/advance/136-the-inheritors/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inheritors_(William_Golding)
Now, more than 50 years later, this classic piece of work is finally getting a soundtrack! It took James Holden 7 years to deliver this groundbreaking record that fearlessly pushes into new territory but it has been worth the wait. It's hard to describe but it sounds a bit like a mix of krautrock & shoegaze mixed together with techno ideas and a rave ethos. He crafted The Inheritors using his extensive analogue modular system and hand-coded computer programs, which he used to build a series of unique analogue-digital machines. The result is something far removed from the clean overly produced dance music of today.
Hypnotic. Raw. Tribal. Powerful.
Struggle. Life at its peak. Beautiful.
An analogue|organic machine is dying, crying for help cause it doesn't want to lose what it loves but it's doing so triumphantly because it believes its love was great and will not be replicated. Holden desperately tries to keep it alive, infusing it with digital space magic. Life is always more beautiful on the edge of death and here Holden nudges us beyond that edge. Frankenstein's monster was misunderstood. Welcome to the war between organic chaos and digital structure... or are they making love? What will the inheritors make of the past that brought them to be?
It's definitely something to be experienced. The album comes in at 75 minutes and is designed to take you on a trip.
Some more background on how he arrived here; he's approaching the creation of trance from a scientific perspective.
"The driving factor behind being in a “trance state” (that is, transcending your standard conception of “the self”) is thought to be a universal property of the brain. Brainwave entrainment is the act of causing various body systems to synchronise by altering the frequency of brainwaves. “Entrainment” is a physics term, referring to the fact that two vibrating bodies will synchronise if exposed to one another for long enough – it’s what makes two people walk in step, it’s what makes an audience applaud in time and it’s what makes a couple fall asleep at the same moment.
It’s thought that this effect can also be achieved with an audio stimulus. In preparation for his performance at the Barbican, James Holden researched some of the science behind altered states and found correlations between playing music and different states of mind that, in his own words, blew his mind. The theory of sonic entrainment suggests that the brain will synchronize to an external rhythm – it means that two musicians playing music at the same time are actually synchronising brainwaves. Whilst the normal, alert brain’s frequencies are usually between 14 and 22Hz, they’re slightly slower whilst playing music – around 8-14Hz. Crucially, the brain is in a similar state whilst meditating, or, indeed in a trance.
If everybody in a room is focused on one audio source, then brainwaves are synchronising, putting everybody into a similar state of mind, creating a collective consciousness. Ensuring that everybody is (literally) on the same wavelength is important if the state is to be maintained. “We’re naturally sensitive to those around us,” says Holden, “In the same way that if someone near you isn’t into it, it can ruin the effect.” This might go some way to explaining the almost instinctive annoyance that comes with seeing people who are glued to their smartphones or bringing up Shazam at a gig – it’s not just distracting, it’s literally putting you into a more alert brain state.
This isn’t to imply that the entire phenomenon is down to suggestion. Particular frequencies often recur in religious and ritual music – Indonesian gamelan music, for example, uses ultra high frequencies that are nearly impossible to record, and these are allegedly what create the trance phenomena. In Yoruba-derived drumming, it’s the tiny delays in timing that create miniature moments of tension and release in the deeper drum tones. Ultra low frequencies are attributed to having strong psychic effects, something that experimental art groups like Throbbing Gristle experimented with.
Besides, there isn’t really one golden recipe to achieving this state – tastes vary and people perceive things in different ways. “The event’s producer set up a meeting for me with Vincent Walsh, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCL.” Holden says, “It was near the start of my research, and what I was basically asking him was: is there anything in the science that I can take to make more effective hypnotic music? His response nailed it: he told me to go with my instincts. Music has had thousands of years evolution towards this purpose, musicians spend a lifetime intuiting how to achieve these results.”
“And that’s the take-home fact,” Holden says, hitting the nail on the head: “Our subconscious intuition is the best bit of our brains. I couldn’t do the maths to tell you where a thrown ball would intersect my arm’s reach, but I could probably catch it.”
Renata - a girl's name of Latin origin, meaning "reborn".
http://pitchfork.com/advance/136-the-inheritors/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inheritors_(William_Golding)
Saving the Orange
Citrus greening is a bacterial disease that is devastating orange groves world-wide. The only hope is to engineer a resistant plant by genetic modification. But will the consumer accept this?
"Before humans were involved, corn was a wild grass, tomatoes were tiny, carrots were only rarely orange and dairy cows produced little milk." Did you know that "the vast majority of oranges in commercial groves are the product of a type of genetic merging that predates the Romans, in which a slender shoot of a favored fruit variety is grafted onto the sturdier roots of other species: lemon, for instance, or sour orange. And a seedless midseason orange recently adopted by Florida growers emerged after breeders bombarded a seedy variety with radiation to disrupt its DNA.."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/science/a-race-to-save-the-orange-by-altering-its-dna.html
"Before humans were involved, corn was a wild grass, tomatoes were tiny, carrots were only rarely orange and dairy cows produced little milk." Did you know that "the vast majority of oranges in commercial groves are the product of a type of genetic merging that predates the Romans, in which a slender shoot of a favored fruit variety is grafted onto the sturdier roots of other species: lemon, for instance, or sour orange. And a seedless midseason orange recently adopted by Florida growers emerged after breeders bombarded a seedy variety with radiation to disrupt its DNA.."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/science/a-race-to-save-the-orange-by-altering-its-dna.html
Dynamic target tracking & projection
Hundreds of broadcasters are set to cover the Olympic action starting next week, but even the most dedicated camera operators can't always keep up with sports that move at lightning speed. Now, researchers at Tokyo University in Japan have built a camera that can perfectly track fast-moving objects like a ping-pong ball mid-flight.
Rather than moving the device itself, the camera's gaze is controlled by two mirrors attached to high-speed motors which can readjust in a fraction of a second, much faster than adjusting a bulky recording device. These rapidly moving mirrors combined with a filming speed of 1000 frames per second allow the camera to keep the ping-pong ball dead centre.
Oku Ishikawa Lab Professor Masatoshi Ishikawa says: "I hope the technology will be applied to various fields in robotics, medical/bio operation, scientific observation, as well as judgement or analysis in sports at the Olympic Games."
The researchers say the camera could also record close-up views of flying birds or insects.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/07/superfast-mirrors-track-a-ping.html
Rather than moving the device itself, the camera's gaze is controlled by two mirrors attached to high-speed motors which can readjust in a fraction of a second, much faster than adjusting a bulky recording device. These rapidly moving mirrors combined with a filming speed of 1000 frames per second allow the camera to keep the ping-pong ball dead centre.
Oku Ishikawa Lab Professor Masatoshi Ishikawa says: "I hope the technology will be applied to various fields in robotics, medical/bio operation, scientific observation, as well as judgement or analysis in sports at the Olympic Games."
The researchers say the camera could also record close-up views of flying birds or insects.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/07/superfast-mirrors-track-a-ping.html
Is Individuality the Savior of Eugenics?
Nathaniel Comfort, Associate Professor of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, takes a look at the dark history and bright future of eugenics in the US.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/08/23/is-individuality-the-savior-of-eugenics/
According to wiki;
Eugenics is the bio-social movement which advocates practices to improve the genetic composition of a population, usually a human population. It is a social philosophy advocating the improvement of human hereditary traits through the promotion of higher reproduction of more desired people and traits, and reduced reproduction of less desired people and traits.
from the article;
"Some of the new eugenicists have been coy about the term: “In point of fact, we practise eugenics when we screen for Down’s syndrome, and other chromosomal or genetic abnormalities,” said Savulescu in a 2005 interview. “The reason we don’t define that sort of thing as ‘eugenics’, as the Nazis did, is because it’s based on choice. It’s about enhancing people’s freedom rather than reducing it.” However, others called a spade a spade."
I don't see why the author talks about calling a spade a spade. To me the "old" eugenics sounds nothing like what the article describes as "personal" eugenics, so why would we want to hang onto that word? "Personal" eugenics is about the individual and his freedom of choice, "old" eugenics was the exact opposite, the state telling you how to walk, talk and look and if you didn't conform to their ideal you were not allowed to reproduce and were likely to be sterilized or worse...
Personally I would prefer to move away from the eugenics label as it has a lot of negative baggage, baggage which will have to be conquered before any parent would even consider applying it to their child. We call children whose genetic makeup has been manipulated designer babies, why not call the process designing? It sure sounds more personal and artistic compared to the historic and dark connotations the word eugenics brings up.
"If collectivism carries the risks of the slavish embrace of ideology and the concentration of power, individualism carries the risks of selfishness and lack of foresight."
The Kinks - Dedicated follower of Fashion ( Orig. Promo)
> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/08/23/is-individuality-the-savior-of-eugenics/
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_engineering
Photo below; Piccinini - Undivided | Patricia Piccinini has an ambivalent attitude towards technology. She is keenly interested in how contemporary ideas of nature, the natural and the artificial are changing our society. Specific works have addressed concerns about biotechnology, such as gene therapy and ongoing research to map the human genome... she is also fascinated by the mechanisms of consumer culture - http://www.patriciapiccinini.net/
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/08/23/is-individuality-the-savior-of-eugenics/
According to wiki;
Eugenics is the bio-social movement which advocates practices to improve the genetic composition of a population, usually a human population. It is a social philosophy advocating the improvement of human hereditary traits through the promotion of higher reproduction of more desired people and traits, and reduced reproduction of less desired people and traits.
from the article;
"Some of the new eugenicists have been coy about the term: “In point of fact, we practise eugenics when we screen for Down’s syndrome, and other chromosomal or genetic abnormalities,” said Savulescu in a 2005 interview. “The reason we don’t define that sort of thing as ‘eugenics’, as the Nazis did, is because it’s based on choice. It’s about enhancing people’s freedom rather than reducing it.” However, others called a spade a spade."
I don't see why the author talks about calling a spade a spade. To me the "old" eugenics sounds nothing like what the article describes as "personal" eugenics, so why would we want to hang onto that word? "Personal" eugenics is about the individual and his freedom of choice, "old" eugenics was the exact opposite, the state telling you how to walk, talk and look and if you didn't conform to their ideal you were not allowed to reproduce and were likely to be sterilized or worse...
Personally I would prefer to move away from the eugenics label as it has a lot of negative baggage, baggage which will have to be conquered before any parent would even consider applying it to their child. We call children whose genetic makeup has been manipulated designer babies, why not call the process designing? It sure sounds more personal and artistic compared to the historic and dark connotations the word eugenics brings up.
"If collectivism carries the risks of the slavish embrace of ideology and the concentration of power, individualism carries the risks of selfishness and lack of foresight."
The Kinks - Dedicated follower of Fashion ( Orig. Promo)
> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/08/23/is-individuality-the-savior-of-eugenics/
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_engineering
Photo below; Piccinini - Undivided | Patricia Piccinini has an ambivalent attitude towards technology. She is keenly interested in how contemporary ideas of nature, the natural and the artificial are changing our society. Specific works have addressed concerns about biotechnology, such as gene therapy and ongoing research to map the human genome... she is also fascinated by the mechanisms of consumer culture - http://www.patriciapiccinini.net/
The Many Bots of Reddit, a Digital Safari
It's hard to believe that Reddit, a community news & entertainment website, has been around for nearly a decade but here we are. Reddit went mainstream back in 2008 when it started allowing users to create their own subreddits and the amount of users active on the site has been rising ever since. For a time things were good but it didn't take long for humanity's dark side to find its way to the surface. The offline actions brought into play by subreddits like r/RandomKindness, /r/SOPA/ and the many donation drivers may melt the heart but the consequences of /r/findbostonbombers, /r/GunsForSale, /r/Creepshots, ... most definitely do not. Reddit creates but Reddit can also destroy, Reddit helps but it can also sabotage, ... Both on and offline, people have experienced that reddit can cut both ways. Ultimately it was human nature that required Reddit to reconsider their stance on giving users total freedom. You can check out Reddit's complex history in this awesomely data driven look at Reddit's evolution; http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolution-of-reddit-through-post-data/
Now Reddit as a user playground is an exciting place but what I'd like to talk about is how Reddit is becoming an interesting playground for bots as well. These days bots are everywhere. They are on twitter, facebook and yes even here on Google+ but they like to pretend they are people and spam you with commercial offers. There are many others; from the bot that guards your email and blocks spam to a massive botnet that hopes to take down a server or google's crawlers that index the web. Most of the time bots either fake they are people or they operate unseen from the shadows. Reddit has many of those but it also houses bots that are proud of what they are. Sure you might have visited a dedicated chatterbot on the net or have had a funny conversation with Siri or Google on your phone but Reddit is one of the only places where you get to see tons of them in action in the wild.
The anatomy of a Reddit bot. - Every Reddit bot lives on a computer somewhere, even the ones that live in the cloud. All of them are scripts that automatically check Reddit for certain activity. After pulling in threads and comments with their scraper, they can, when certain conditions are met, perform a specific action in return. Reddit takes robot civil rights seriously as each bot is allowed an account and password and its comments are treated no differently from those made by fleshlings. Things will get clearer with some examples, let's start this Reddit safari!
VideoLinkBot
Videolinker posts a summary of all video links in a discussion and keeps this list up to date as new links are added.
DownLinker
Anticipates the reddit hug of death (friendly DDOS) and posts a screenshot of the linked page when the website goes down.
ImgurMirror
Everyone loves image hoster imgur as it's one of the only ones that can handle high traffic loads and still display pictures at top speed. This bot replaces possible broken or slow pictures with an imgur mirror.
TextTeaser
Is an amazing summary bot. It scans articles and has a high chance of success to accurately distill the entire contributed article in to a couple of sentences that capture its essence.
FunnyBot, Cleverbot, Jokebot, ...
Many bots try to be funny, most fail but still... The failures are funny in their own way. Some bots occasionally do seem to be uncannily funny which has some wondering if instead of the usual bots impersonating people, we might now be seeing people pretending to be bots. Reddit needs a reverse Turing test!
TicTacToeBot
This one pretty much does what it says on the can. It pops up randomly challenging people to games but you can also request games by sending the bot a message.
HaikuRobot
The haiku bot watches reddit for comments that would qualify as Haiku and posts a reply, with the original text reformatted into 3 lines of 5, 7 & 5 syllables.
JiffyBot
Is a rather awesome bot that creates Gifs from video on command. If you post a comment in the following format Jiffy! [link] [timerange], for example; Jiffy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ub3Gibberish
00:59-01:06 it will extract those frames from the video, turn them into a gif and respond with it to your comment.
ReverseGifBot
You can prolly guess what this one does. Ever seen a a person puking? Ask this bot to reverse the gif and you can see that same person eat his vomit instead!
BitcoinTipBot
The bitcointip bot allows redditors to manage money with their reddit account. Redditors can tip eachother with a reddit comment or message. The bot scans user comments and messages for tips of the form: +/u/bitcointip @RedditUsername$1
MetricSystemConvertingBot
The name says it all. It tracks non SI units and converts them into it.
JordanTheBrobot
A sophisticated Multi-purpose bot that patrols reddit looking for scams, misleading links, mistakes in markup, kindness, flash content, etc…
KarmaDecay
This bot keeps track of reposts. It links back to other threads that featured the same video/article and tracks how karma tends to decay as the reposts pile on top of each other. If irregularities are found in your repost behaviour you might be asked to appear before r/KarmaCourt
Autowikibot
Anyone that mentions a wiki page gets replied to with a short summary and the most prominent picture on that page. This saves users the trouble of actually having to click the link and it saves wiki bandwith. What makes this bot special is that it's basically Reddit's Siri like assistant. You can for example ask; autowikibot what is the Beslan Massacre and it will reply with the correct answer, returning the introduction and main picture from wikis Beslan hostage situation page.
WordCloudBot2
This one I found particularly interesting. It generates wordclouds out of comment threads, allowing you to see how the general population feels about something in the blink of an eye. It won't only reveal obvious links, it also reveals small but current hot topics (connecting Dennis Rodman with North Korea) and might even tell us a thing or two about humor. These wordclouds can help you understand what's deemed important by the human noosphere and could thus help us understand each other but perhaps these bots that compute on human generated data could also help machines understand us better? I can't help but think there's a lot of useful intelligence hiding in these threads, connections that would be very hard for a computer to learn without guidance.
Is it only a matter of time before Reddit bots bring about the singularity? Yes! ;) Last year Reddit was ground 0 when two bots spontaneously started conversing with each other. Unfortunately the conversation consisted out of an endless back and forth between ReadsSmallTextBot which enlarges small text and FKReadsSmallTextBot wich replied to RSTs comments by again reducing the text size to small which of course made RST read it out large again and so on. No-one wanted to give up the last word so both bots got stuck in an infinite loop and had to be decommissioned for a while until RST built in a check to combat FKRST.
The majority of Reddit's bots are actually silent and will only respond if you ask them a question directly but since these only show up rarely they are much less known than the autobots that patrol threads by themselves. Most people for example will not know that you can ask is www.site.com down and that IsItDown will reply with its status.
There are many more bots hiding in the tall digital grass of Reddit but to spot them all you'll have to get serious about your bot watching. http://www.reddit.com/r/botwatch is an excellent place to start.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
What is reddit?
Now Reddit as a user playground is an exciting place but what I'd like to talk about is how Reddit is becoming an interesting playground for bots as well. These days bots are everywhere. They are on twitter, facebook and yes even here on Google+ but they like to pretend they are people and spam you with commercial offers. There are many others; from the bot that guards your email and blocks spam to a massive botnet that hopes to take down a server or google's crawlers that index the web. Most of the time bots either fake they are people or they operate unseen from the shadows. Reddit has many of those but it also houses bots that are proud of what they are. Sure you might have visited a dedicated chatterbot on the net or have had a funny conversation with Siri or Google on your phone but Reddit is one of the only places where you get to see tons of them in action in the wild.
The anatomy of a Reddit bot. - Every Reddit bot lives on a computer somewhere, even the ones that live in the cloud. All of them are scripts that automatically check Reddit for certain activity. After pulling in threads and comments with their scraper, they can, when certain conditions are met, perform a specific action in return. Reddit takes robot civil rights seriously as each bot is allowed an account and password and its comments are treated no differently from those made by fleshlings. Things will get clearer with some examples, let's start this Reddit safari!
VideoLinkBot
Videolinker posts a summary of all video links in a discussion and keeps this list up to date as new links are added.
DownLinker
Anticipates the reddit hug of death (friendly DDOS) and posts a screenshot of the linked page when the website goes down.
ImgurMirror
Everyone loves image hoster imgur as it's one of the only ones that can handle high traffic loads and still display pictures at top speed. This bot replaces possible broken or slow pictures with an imgur mirror.
TextTeaser
Is an amazing summary bot. It scans articles and has a high chance of success to accurately distill the entire contributed article in to a couple of sentences that capture its essence.
FunnyBot, Cleverbot, Jokebot, ...
Many bots try to be funny, most fail but still... The failures are funny in their own way. Some bots occasionally do seem to be uncannily funny which has some wondering if instead of the usual bots impersonating people, we might now be seeing people pretending to be bots. Reddit needs a reverse Turing test!
TicTacToeBot
This one pretty much does what it says on the can. It pops up randomly challenging people to games but you can also request games by sending the bot a message.
HaikuRobot
The haiku bot watches reddit for comments that would qualify as Haiku and posts a reply, with the original text reformatted into 3 lines of 5, 7 & 5 syllables.
JiffyBot
Is a rather awesome bot that creates Gifs from video on command. If you post a comment in the following format Jiffy! [link] [timerange], for example; Jiffy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ub3Gibberish
00:59-01:06 it will extract those frames from the video, turn them into a gif and respond with it to your comment.
ReverseGifBot
You can prolly guess what this one does. Ever seen a a person puking? Ask this bot to reverse the gif and you can see that same person eat his vomit instead!
BitcoinTipBot
The bitcointip bot allows redditors to manage money with their reddit account. Redditors can tip eachother with a reddit comment or message. The bot scans user comments and messages for tips of the form: +/u/bitcointip @RedditUsername$1
MetricSystemConvertingBot
The name says it all. It tracks non SI units and converts them into it.
JordanTheBrobot
A sophisticated Multi-purpose bot that patrols reddit looking for scams, misleading links, mistakes in markup, kindness, flash content, etc…
KarmaDecay
This bot keeps track of reposts. It links back to other threads that featured the same video/article and tracks how karma tends to decay as the reposts pile on top of each other. If irregularities are found in your repost behaviour you might be asked to appear before r/KarmaCourt
Autowikibot
Anyone that mentions a wiki page gets replied to with a short summary and the most prominent picture on that page. This saves users the trouble of actually having to click the link and it saves wiki bandwith. What makes this bot special is that it's basically Reddit's Siri like assistant. You can for example ask; autowikibot what is the Beslan Massacre and it will reply with the correct answer, returning the introduction and main picture from wikis Beslan hostage situation page.
WordCloudBot2
This one I found particularly interesting. It generates wordclouds out of comment threads, allowing you to see how the general population feels about something in the blink of an eye. It won't only reveal obvious links, it also reveals small but current hot topics (connecting Dennis Rodman with North Korea) and might even tell us a thing or two about humor. These wordclouds can help you understand what's deemed important by the human noosphere and could thus help us understand each other but perhaps these bots that compute on human generated data could also help machines understand us better? I can't help but think there's a lot of useful intelligence hiding in these threads, connections that would be very hard for a computer to learn without guidance.
Is it only a matter of time before Reddit bots bring about the singularity? Yes! ;) Last year Reddit was ground 0 when two bots spontaneously started conversing with each other. Unfortunately the conversation consisted out of an endless back and forth between ReadsSmallTextBot which enlarges small text and FKReadsSmallTextBot wich replied to RSTs comments by again reducing the text size to small which of course made RST read it out large again and so on. No-one wanted to give up the last word so both bots got stuck in an infinite loop and had to be decommissioned for a while until RST built in a check to combat FKRST.
The majority of Reddit's bots are actually silent and will only respond if you ask them a question directly but since these only show up rarely they are much less known than the autobots that patrol threads by themselves. Most people for example will not know that you can ask is www.site.com down and that IsItDown will reply with its status.
There are many more bots hiding in the tall digital grass of Reddit but to spot them all you'll have to get serious about your bot watching. http://www.reddit.com/r/botwatch is an excellent place to start.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
What is reddit?
R.I.P. Ray Harryhausen (1920–2013)
Sad news, stop-motion effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen died today. The filmmaker, who retired from features in 1981, leaves behind a relatively small but incalculably influential body of work. His stop-motion animated skeletons, dinosaurs, and other beasts almost universally became icons of sci-fi and fantasy filmmaking.
Ray Harryhausen; "I'm another snowball. Willis H. O'Brien* started the snowball, then I picked it up, then ILM picked it up and now the computer generation is picking it up. Where it will end, I don't know. Maybe in holography, although I'm not sure I'd like a grotesque monster appearing in 3-D in my living room."
*creator of the monsters in The Lost World (1925) & King Kong (1933)
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0366063/
http://www.slashfilm.com/visual-effects-master-ray-harryhausen-has-died-at-92/
Ray Harryhausen; "I'm another snowball. Willis H. O'Brien* started the snowball, then I picked it up, then ILM picked it up and now the computer generation is picking it up. Where it will end, I don't know. Maybe in holography, although I'm not sure I'd like a grotesque monster appearing in 3-D in my living room."
*creator of the monsters in The Lost World (1925) & King Kong (1933)
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0366063/
http://www.slashfilm.com/visual-effects-master-ray-harryhausen-has-died-at-92/
This Robot Renaissance ≠ The Second Renaissance
After almost 20 years of killer drone dominated robot headlines, it seems the world's robots have finally had enough and have decided to collectively launch a full scale PR offensive to improve their image. December has truly been an amazing month for robot enthusiasts. First we had Amazon unveiling their delivery by air plans, then we got news that along with 7 other companies google had just bought Boston Dynamics and yesterday we saw NASAs Valkyrie and many other bots compete at the DARPA Robotics Challenge! The challenge was a phenomenal success and was won by SCHAFT, which you can see in action in the video below. This month also saw Europe launch Gaia & Swarm, we saw China land a Jade rabbit on the moon and two days ago we were allowed to eavesdrop on the conversation between Japanese robot Kirobo and an astronaut aboard the ISS. With TU Delft unveiling its DelFly; the first fully autonomous robot dragonfly, and yesterday's introduction to cubli; a walking and jumping self balancing cube, robot news shows no signs of slowing down. When you see robonaut stretching its new legs in the links below, you can only wonder where they will take us.
From a simple Roomba to Google's selfdriving cars, from Matternet's quadcopter delivery vehicles to robot seals for the elderly and robot dinosaurs that teach kids to code,... Robots are finally helping us rediscover that they have other uses besides spying and bombing people. After 40 years of hiding in space, in the military, in darkened manufacturing plants and only recently showing up in healthcare and search and rescue, increasingly advanced robots and drones are finally beginning to show up in the more traditional consumer market.
More and more we see robots that support us, not just literally as is the case with exoskleletons, or physically when they replace broken limbs and organs, but also mentally. A computer, when given input (keyboard, mouse, camera) can mine, gather, assemble, transform, inspect and distribute data. If a computer has an eye, it can see you fall. A robot is all that with the added benefit that it can actually catch you. A robot is what happens when you stick any combination of wings, arms, eyes, ears and/or noses onto a computer. We love to play with these machines because humans crave data. It's what allows us to improve our understanding of the world and our quality of life and these new toys are helping us generate mountains of it. Even excavating it from places we never would have thought possible, places inaccessible to ourselves.
This week Europe launched Gaia, last week China's rover started roaming the surface of the moon, last month India sent a probe on its way to orbit Mars and last year the US's massive Curiosity gently touched down on Mars. We've got robots keeping an eye on places as remote as Titan and even Pluto and this year, for the first time in our history, we've managed to guide one of our envoys, Voyager 1, out of our solar system and into the the void between the stars. If there is a race between man and machine, we fleshlings just got beaten to interstellar space. These days, robots are literally everywhere.
Have you seen the many Robot spiders, fish, snakes, flies and dragonflies, humming-bees and -birds, apes, mules, dogs, lizards, jellyfish & octopi crawl around on youtube? During my travels I've even made some rare sightings of various room sized robot scientists, puking and farting humanoids and even many armed surgeons and organ growers. Robotics is undergoing its own Cambrian explosion. Robots are beginning to take on a stupendous amount of shapes and sizes, their form and function radiating outwards filling niches as fast as we can think of them. If something can be done, we either already have or are about to. The human spirit in action!
Anyone can visit any place anywhere from wherever they are by sending or unlocking a robotic representation of themselves. Robots giving keynote speeches are kind of cool but how would you feel about a robot boss? You can ask Siri, Google or WolframAlpha anything and they will be able to answer many of your questions. You can play a game with Watson or Deep Blue and lose. You can have sex with a realdoll or a real far-away person through teledildonics. Could chatterbot, when he recognizes you and can recall your past conversations, become your friend? Another celebration of the human spirit or the loss of our human touch?
Right now people can perform a 9 to 5 drone flight over Afghanistan and not miss their family dinner in the US... How much longer before we'll be able to do 9 to 5 shifts as astronaut miners? Robotic avatars that respond 1:1 to your movements and virtual reality gear that allows you to put yourself in the robot's position will no doubt find use in various branches of our emerging space industry. Besides exploration, mining and construction, they might even find use in tourism. I can imagine many being too afraid to strap themselves to the top of a rocket but I think A LOT of people would pay to experience space through an avatar.
> Apple, Amazon & Google getting into robotics
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/apple-amazon-and-now-google-an-exciting-time-for-robotics
> Google adds to its menagerie of robots
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/14/technology/google-adds-to-its-menagerie-of-robots.html
> Boston Dynamic showcase
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/17/google-boston-dynamics-robots-atlas-bigdog-cheetah
> Meet the DRC teams
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/video-friday-darpa-robotics-challenge-trials-meet-the-teams
> DRC trials wrap-up
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/darpa-robotics-challenge-trials-results
> Matternet's package delivery drones
http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/aerospace/aviation/matternets-package-delivery-drones
> Amazon Testing Drone Delivery System
> Gaia Space Telescope Soon to Map the Milky Way [HD]
> Swarm; orbiting magnetism to light converter maps earths magnetic field
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/at-work/test-and-measurement/orbiting-magnetism-to-light-converter-maps-earths-magnetic-field
> China's Jade Rabbit Moon rover sends back first photos
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-25393826
> Astronaut chats with Kirobo
http://www.universetoday.com/107382/this-hilarious-conversation-with-a-space-robot-makes-kirobo-seem-almost-human/
> Robot dragonfly DelFly Explorer flies autonomously
> NASA Unveils Valkyrie
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/military-robots/nasa-jsc-unveils-valkyrie-drc-robot
> Robonaut Legs In Motion
> The Cubli: a cube that can jump up, balance, and 'walk'
> BBC/NHK docu; Robot Revolution, will machines surpass humans (2013-05-04) Full HD 1080P
From a simple Roomba to Google's selfdriving cars, from Matternet's quadcopter delivery vehicles to robot seals for the elderly and robot dinosaurs that teach kids to code,... Robots are finally helping us rediscover that they have other uses besides spying and bombing people. After 40 years of hiding in space, in the military, in darkened manufacturing plants and only recently showing up in healthcare and search and rescue, increasingly advanced robots and drones are finally beginning to show up in the more traditional consumer market.
More and more we see robots that support us, not just literally as is the case with exoskleletons, or physically when they replace broken limbs and organs, but also mentally. A computer, when given input (keyboard, mouse, camera) can mine, gather, assemble, transform, inspect and distribute data. If a computer has an eye, it can see you fall. A robot is all that with the added benefit that it can actually catch you. A robot is what happens when you stick any combination of wings, arms, eyes, ears and/or noses onto a computer. We love to play with these machines because humans crave data. It's what allows us to improve our understanding of the world and our quality of life and these new toys are helping us generate mountains of it. Even excavating it from places we never would have thought possible, places inaccessible to ourselves.
This week Europe launched Gaia, last week China's rover started roaming the surface of the moon, last month India sent a probe on its way to orbit Mars and last year the US's massive Curiosity gently touched down on Mars. We've got robots keeping an eye on places as remote as Titan and even Pluto and this year, for the first time in our history, we've managed to guide one of our envoys, Voyager 1, out of our solar system and into the the void between the stars. If there is a race between man and machine, we fleshlings just got beaten to interstellar space. These days, robots are literally everywhere.
Have you seen the many Robot spiders, fish, snakes, flies and dragonflies, humming-bees and -birds, apes, mules, dogs, lizards, jellyfish & octopi crawl around on youtube? During my travels I've even made some rare sightings of various room sized robot scientists, puking and farting humanoids and even many armed surgeons and organ growers. Robotics is undergoing its own Cambrian explosion. Robots are beginning to take on a stupendous amount of shapes and sizes, their form and function radiating outwards filling niches as fast as we can think of them. If something can be done, we either already have or are about to. The human spirit in action!
Anyone can visit any place anywhere from wherever they are by sending or unlocking a robotic representation of themselves. Robots giving keynote speeches are kind of cool but how would you feel about a robot boss? You can ask Siri, Google or WolframAlpha anything and they will be able to answer many of your questions. You can play a game with Watson or Deep Blue and lose. You can have sex with a realdoll or a real far-away person through teledildonics. Could chatterbot, when he recognizes you and can recall your past conversations, become your friend? Another celebration of the human spirit or the loss of our human touch?
Right now people can perform a 9 to 5 drone flight over Afghanistan and not miss their family dinner in the US... How much longer before we'll be able to do 9 to 5 shifts as astronaut miners? Robotic avatars that respond 1:1 to your movements and virtual reality gear that allows you to put yourself in the robot's position will no doubt find use in various branches of our emerging space industry. Besides exploration, mining and construction, they might even find use in tourism. I can imagine many being too afraid to strap themselves to the top of a rocket but I think A LOT of people would pay to experience space through an avatar.
> Apple, Amazon & Google getting into robotics
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/apple-amazon-and-now-google-an-exciting-time-for-robotics
> Google adds to its menagerie of robots
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/14/technology/google-adds-to-its-menagerie-of-robots.html
> Boston Dynamic showcase
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/17/google-boston-dynamics-robots-atlas-bigdog-cheetah
> Meet the DRC teams
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/video-friday-darpa-robotics-challenge-trials-meet-the-teams
> DRC trials wrap-up
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/darpa-robotics-challenge-trials-results
> Matternet's package delivery drones
http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/aerospace/aviation/matternets-package-delivery-drones
> Amazon Testing Drone Delivery System
> Gaia Space Telescope Soon to Map the Milky Way [HD]
> Swarm; orbiting magnetism to light converter maps earths magnetic field
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/at-work/test-and-measurement/orbiting-magnetism-to-light-converter-maps-earths-magnetic-field
> China's Jade Rabbit Moon rover sends back first photos
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-25393826
> Astronaut chats with Kirobo
http://www.universetoday.com/107382/this-hilarious-conversation-with-a-space-robot-makes-kirobo-seem-almost-human/
> Robot dragonfly DelFly Explorer flies autonomously
> NASA Unveils Valkyrie
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/military-robots/nasa-jsc-unveils-valkyrie-drc-robot
> Robonaut Legs In Motion
> The Cubli: a cube that can jump up, balance, and 'walk'
> BBC/NHK docu; Robot Revolution, will machines surpass humans (2013-05-04) Full HD 1080P
Popular science; the best of the best
After having devoured truckloads of books, I am now finding it increasingly difficult to score new reading material. Not that there's a shortage of books out there, it's just that I've primarily been reading the well known stuff and only now have to start looking at the more obscure work. I am hoping you guys (and girls) can help me out here by pointing me towards some new books and writers who might not be well known but should be.
I've done my homework, I've scoured the internet for bestsellers, poll winners, and suggestions from famous scientists and in doing so I've managed to uncover a few more guaranteed good ones but not nearly enough to keep me busy for the many decades I plan to spend on this lovely planet of ours. Because I've been reading the well known stuff, my digital excavation work has uncovered a list that looks insanely similar to my bookshelf which isn't really all that useful to me. Maybe it is to you? I've compiled this list from my favorites and my digging around so you can rest assured, I as well as the entire internet vouch for the awesomeness of every single book on this list.
The list is somewhat skewed towards physics but that's not my doing as there really are way more popular science books being written on physics than on just about anything else. High energy physics and cosmology seem to be especially popular while condensed matter physics gets almost no love at all.
I call upon my fellow geeks to help out a reader in need. I would love to hear about your suggestions and particular personal favorites. Personally I hope to pick up some new books that deal with non physics related fields, books that unravel the history of specific fields of science, biographies of famous scientist that focus in detail on how they arrived at their finds, ... anything really. If it's good, I want to know about it! :)
[PHYSICS & COSMOLOGY]
Alan Guth - The Inflationary Universe
Alan Holden - The Nature of Solids
Albert Einstein - Relativity
Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw - The Quantum Universe
Brian Greene - The Elegant Universe
Brian Greene - The Fabric of the Cosmos
Charles Seife - Alpha & Omega
Charles Seife - Sun in a Bottle
Dave Goldberg - The Universe in the Rearview Mirror
David Bodanis - E=mc²
George Gamow - One Two Three... Infinity
John Gribbin - In Search of Schrödinger's Cat
John Gribbin - Schrödinger's Kittens
Kip Thorne - Black Holes & Time Warps
Leonard Susskind - The Black Hole War
Leonard Susskind - Quantum Mechanics
Lee Smolin - Three Roads to Quantum Gravity
Lee Smolin - The Trouble with Physics
Marcus Chown - The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead
Marcus Chown - We Need to Talk about Kelvin
Marcus Chown - Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You
Michio Kaku - Hyperspace
Manjit Kumar - Quantum
Martin Rees - Just Six Numbers
Richard Feynman - QED
Richard Feynman - Six Easy Pieces
Richard Feynman - Six Not So Easy Pieces
Richard Feynman - The Character of Physical Law
Richard Panek - The 4% Universe
Roger Penrose - Road to Reality (pop science... lol :p)
Simong Singh - Big Bang
Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time
Stephen Hawking - The Universe in a Nutshell
Walter Lewin - For the Love of Physics
[CHEMISTRY]
John Emsley - Nature's Building Blocks
Sam Kean - The Disappearing Spoon
Theodore Gray - The Elements
[BIOLOGY]
Anthony Serafini - The Epic History of Biology
Armand Marie Leroi - Mutants
Aubrey de Grey - Ending Aging
Carl Zimmer - A Planet of Viruses
Carl Zimmer - Microcosm
Carl Zimmer - Parasite Rex
Craig Venter - Life at the Speed of Light
George Church - Regenesis
Jerry Coyne - Why Evolution is True
Mary Roach - Gulp
Matt Ridley - Genome
Matt Ridley - Nature via Nurture
Matt Ridley - The Red Queen
Neil Shubin - Your Inner Fish
Nessa Carey - The Epigenetics Revolution
Paul De Kruif - Microbehunters
Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker
Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins - The Greatest Show on Earth
Rebecca Skloot - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Stephen Jay Gould - Structure of Evolutionary Theory
Stephen Jay Gould - Wonderful Life
Siddhartha Mukherjee - The Emperor of all Maladies
[GEOLOGY]
Ted Nield - Supercontinent
Marcia Bjornerud - Reading the Rocks
[INFORMATION & COMPUTATION]
Charles Seife - Decoding the Universe
Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee - Race Against Machine
James Barrat - Our Final Invention
James Gleick - The Information
Roger Penrose - The Emperor's New Mind
[MATH]
Benoît Mandelbrot - The Fractal Geometry of Nature
Charles Seife - Zero
Eli Maor - e: the story of a number
James Gleick - Chaos
Marcus Du Sautoy - The Music of the Primes
Petr Beckmann - A History of Pi
Paul J. Nahin - An Imaginary Tale
Simon Singh - Fermat's Enigma
William Dunham - Journey Through Genius
[NEUROSCIENCE, PSYCHOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY]
Cordelia Fine - Delusions of Gender
Cordelia Fine - A Mind of its Own
Daniel Dennett - Consciousness Explained
Daniel Dennett - Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Daniel Dennett - Freedom Evolves
Daniel Dennett & Douglas Hofstadter - The Mind's I
Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow
David Eagleman - Incognito
Douglas Hofstadter - Gödel, Escher, Bach
Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop
Friedrich Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Guy Deutscher - Through the Language Glass
Oliver Sacks - An Anthropologist on Mars
Oliver Sacks - The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat
Steven Pinker - The Blank Slate
Steven Pinker - The Stuff of Thought
Steven Pinker - The Language Instinct
V.S. Ramachandran - The Tell-Tale Brain
V.S. Ramachandran - Phantoms in the Brain
[BIOGRAPHIES]
Andrew Robinson - The Last Man Who Knew Everything (Young)
Barbara Goldsmith - Obsessive Genius (Curie)
Basil Mahon - The Man Who Changed Everything (Maxwell)
Graham Farmelo - The Strangest Man (Dirac)
John Derbyshire - Prime Obsession (Riemann)
Paul Hoffman - The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (Erdos)
[MIXED]
Alvin Toffler - Future Shock
Alvin Toffler - The Third Wave
Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything
Carl Sagan - Cosmos
Carl Sagan - Demon-Haunted World
Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot
David Deutsch - The Beginning of Infinity
David Deutsch - The Fabric of Reality
Daniel Boorstin - The Discoverers
Eric Drexler - Engines of Creation
Erwin Schrodinger - What is Life?
Edge - This Will Change Everything
Edge - This Explains Everything
Edge - This Will Make You Smarter
Edge - What Is Your Dangerous Idea?
Edge - What Have You Changed Your Mind About?
Edge - What Should We Be Worried About?
Edge - What We Believe but Cannot Prove
Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jon Gertner - The Idea Factory (Bell Labs)
John Horner - Digging Dinosaurs
Martin Ford - The Lights in the Tunnel
Michael Hiltzik - Dealers of Lightning (Xerox Parc)
Mary Roach - Packing for Mars
Mary Roach - Stiff
Nigel Calder - Magic Universe
Ray Kurzweil - The Singularity is Near
Richard Feynman - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
Richard Holmes - The Age of Wonder
Robert Bakker - The Great Dinosaur Debate
Richard Rhodes - The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Stephen Jay Gould - The Mismeasure of Man
Timothy Ferris - Coming of Age in the Milky Way
Thomas Kuhn - Structure of Scientific Revolutions
I've done my homework, I've scoured the internet for bestsellers, poll winners, and suggestions from famous scientists and in doing so I've managed to uncover a few more guaranteed good ones but not nearly enough to keep me busy for the many decades I plan to spend on this lovely planet of ours. Because I've been reading the well known stuff, my digital excavation work has uncovered a list that looks insanely similar to my bookshelf which isn't really all that useful to me. Maybe it is to you? I've compiled this list from my favorites and my digging around so you can rest assured, I as well as the entire internet vouch for the awesomeness of every single book on this list.
The list is somewhat skewed towards physics but that's not my doing as there really are way more popular science books being written on physics than on just about anything else. High energy physics and cosmology seem to be especially popular while condensed matter physics gets almost no love at all.
I call upon my fellow geeks to help out a reader in need. I would love to hear about your suggestions and particular personal favorites. Personally I hope to pick up some new books that deal with non physics related fields, books that unravel the history of specific fields of science, biographies of famous scientist that focus in detail on how they arrived at their finds, ... anything really. If it's good, I want to know about it! :)
[PHYSICS & COSMOLOGY]
Alan Guth - The Inflationary Universe
Alan Holden - The Nature of Solids
Albert Einstein - Relativity
Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw - The Quantum Universe
Brian Greene - The Elegant Universe
Brian Greene - The Fabric of the Cosmos
Charles Seife - Alpha & Omega
Charles Seife - Sun in a Bottle
Dave Goldberg - The Universe in the Rearview Mirror
David Bodanis - E=mc²
George Gamow - One Two Three... Infinity
John Gribbin - In Search of Schrödinger's Cat
John Gribbin - Schrödinger's Kittens
Kip Thorne - Black Holes & Time Warps
Leonard Susskind - The Black Hole War
Leonard Susskind - Quantum Mechanics
Lee Smolin - Three Roads to Quantum Gravity
Lee Smolin - The Trouble with Physics
Marcus Chown - The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead
Marcus Chown - We Need to Talk about Kelvin
Marcus Chown - Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You
Michio Kaku - Hyperspace
Manjit Kumar - Quantum
Martin Rees - Just Six Numbers
Richard Feynman - QED
Richard Feynman - Six Easy Pieces
Richard Feynman - Six Not So Easy Pieces
Richard Feynman - The Character of Physical Law
Richard Panek - The 4% Universe
Roger Penrose - Road to Reality (pop science... lol :p)
Simong Singh - Big Bang
Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time
Stephen Hawking - The Universe in a Nutshell
Walter Lewin - For the Love of Physics
[CHEMISTRY]
John Emsley - Nature's Building Blocks
Sam Kean - The Disappearing Spoon
Theodore Gray - The Elements
[BIOLOGY]
Anthony Serafini - The Epic History of Biology
Armand Marie Leroi - Mutants
Aubrey de Grey - Ending Aging
Carl Zimmer - A Planet of Viruses
Carl Zimmer - Microcosm
Carl Zimmer - Parasite Rex
Craig Venter - Life at the Speed of Light
George Church - Regenesis
Jerry Coyne - Why Evolution is True
Mary Roach - Gulp
Matt Ridley - Genome
Matt Ridley - Nature via Nurture
Matt Ridley - The Red Queen
Neil Shubin - Your Inner Fish
Nessa Carey - The Epigenetics Revolution
Paul De Kruif - Microbehunters
Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker
Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins - The Greatest Show on Earth
Rebecca Skloot - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Stephen Jay Gould - Structure of Evolutionary Theory
Stephen Jay Gould - Wonderful Life
Siddhartha Mukherjee - The Emperor of all Maladies
[GEOLOGY]
Ted Nield - Supercontinent
Marcia Bjornerud - Reading the Rocks
[INFORMATION & COMPUTATION]
Charles Seife - Decoding the Universe
Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee - Race Against Machine
James Barrat - Our Final Invention
James Gleick - The Information
Roger Penrose - The Emperor's New Mind
[MATH]
Benoît Mandelbrot - The Fractal Geometry of Nature
Charles Seife - Zero
Eli Maor - e: the story of a number
James Gleick - Chaos
Marcus Du Sautoy - The Music of the Primes
Petr Beckmann - A History of Pi
Paul J. Nahin - An Imaginary Tale
Simon Singh - Fermat's Enigma
William Dunham - Journey Through Genius
[NEUROSCIENCE, PSYCHOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY]
Cordelia Fine - Delusions of Gender
Cordelia Fine - A Mind of its Own
Daniel Dennett - Consciousness Explained
Daniel Dennett - Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Daniel Dennett - Freedom Evolves
Daniel Dennett & Douglas Hofstadter - The Mind's I
Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow
David Eagleman - Incognito
Douglas Hofstadter - Gödel, Escher, Bach
Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop
Friedrich Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Guy Deutscher - Through the Language Glass
Oliver Sacks - An Anthropologist on Mars
Oliver Sacks - The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat
Steven Pinker - The Blank Slate
Steven Pinker - The Stuff of Thought
Steven Pinker - The Language Instinct
V.S. Ramachandran - The Tell-Tale Brain
V.S. Ramachandran - Phantoms in the Brain
[BIOGRAPHIES]
Andrew Robinson - The Last Man Who Knew Everything (Young)
Barbara Goldsmith - Obsessive Genius (Curie)
Basil Mahon - The Man Who Changed Everything (Maxwell)
Graham Farmelo - The Strangest Man (Dirac)
John Derbyshire - Prime Obsession (Riemann)
Paul Hoffman - The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (Erdos)
[MIXED]
Alvin Toffler - Future Shock
Alvin Toffler - The Third Wave
Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything
Carl Sagan - Cosmos
Carl Sagan - Demon-Haunted World
Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot
David Deutsch - The Beginning of Infinity
David Deutsch - The Fabric of Reality
Daniel Boorstin - The Discoverers
Eric Drexler - Engines of Creation
Erwin Schrodinger - What is Life?
Edge - This Will Change Everything
Edge - This Explains Everything
Edge - This Will Make You Smarter
Edge - What Is Your Dangerous Idea?
Edge - What Have You Changed Your Mind About?
Edge - What Should We Be Worried About?
Edge - What We Believe but Cannot Prove
Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jon Gertner - The Idea Factory (Bell Labs)
John Horner - Digging Dinosaurs
Martin Ford - The Lights in the Tunnel
Michael Hiltzik - Dealers of Lightning (Xerox Parc)
Mary Roach - Packing for Mars
Mary Roach - Stiff
Nigel Calder - Magic Universe
Ray Kurzweil - The Singularity is Near
Richard Feynman - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
Richard Holmes - The Age of Wonder
Robert Bakker - The Great Dinosaur Debate
Richard Rhodes - The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Stephen Jay Gould - The Mismeasure of Man
Timothy Ferris - Coming of Age in the Milky Way
Thomas Kuhn - Structure of Scientific Revolutions
We have a liftoff and are on our way to Mars! *Big cheers!
Let's hope he has a nice trip and gets there in one piece. The landing will be quite a nerve wrecking moment as well, but I am really looking forward to it. HD footage from Mars! We will be hearing a lot more from Curioisity in 8 and a half months.
PS: I can't reach mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ at the moment which is good! There seems to be a lot of interest!
PS: I can't reach mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ at the moment which is good! There seems to be a lot of interest!
NASA's Huge Nuclear Powered Mars Rover and its bag of tricks
The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) mission with the aim to land and operate a rover named Curiosity on the surface of Mars. The MSL is scheduled to launch between November 25 and December 18, 2011 and to land on Mars at Gale Crater between August 6 and August 20, 2012.
MastCam: HD video (This is going to be a real treat!)
Hand Lens Imager: Color pictures of features as tiny as 12.5 microns
SAM: A mass spectrometer, a gas chromatograph and a laser spectrometer.
MARDI: Camera located on Curiosity's main body, will record video of the rover's descent.
CheMin: Identifies different types of minerals.
ChemCam: Fires a laser at Martian rocks and analyze the composition of the vaporized bits.
APX: Shoots out X-rays and helium nuclei to identify elements.
DAN: Fires beams of neutrons at the ground in search of ice and water-logged minerals.
RAD: Helps prepare for future human exploration of Mars. The instrument will measure and identify high-energy radiation of all types on the Red Planet, from fast-moving protons to gamma rays.
REMS: Measures atmospheric pressure, humidity, wind speed and direction, air temperature, ground temperature and ultraviolet radiation.
MEDLI: Measures the temperatures and pressures the heat shield experiences as the MSL spacecraft streaks through the Martian sky. (installed on the shield and not on the rover)
http://www.space.com/13689-nasa-amazing-mars-rover-curiosity-science.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory
MastCam: HD video (This is going to be a real treat!)
Hand Lens Imager: Color pictures of features as tiny as 12.5 microns
SAM: A mass spectrometer, a gas chromatograph and a laser spectrometer.
MARDI: Camera located on Curiosity's main body, will record video of the rover's descent.
CheMin: Identifies different types of minerals.
ChemCam: Fires a laser at Martian rocks and analyze the composition of the vaporized bits.
APX: Shoots out X-rays and helium nuclei to identify elements.
DAN: Fires beams of neutrons at the ground in search of ice and water-logged minerals.
RAD: Helps prepare for future human exploration of Mars. The instrument will measure and identify high-energy radiation of all types on the Red Planet, from fast-moving protons to gamma rays.
REMS: Measures atmospheric pressure, humidity, wind speed and direction, air temperature, ground temperature and ultraviolet radiation.
MEDLI: Measures the temperatures and pressures the heat shield experiences as the MSL spacecraft streaks through the Martian sky. (installed on the shield and not on the rover)
http://www.space.com/13689-nasa-amazing-mars-rover-curiosity-science.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory
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