Silver Jacket

Category: Technology

  • Mirror Mirror

    MirrorDiscovery News reported last month on a Japanese robot that’s been designed to recognize itself in a mirror and to imitate other robots. I had to blink a couple times when the reporter threw in this WTF comment from the researcher (emphasis mine):

    "Imitation, said Takeno, is an act that requires both seeing a behavior in another and instantly transferring it to oneself and is the best evidence of consciousness."

    Well, um, apparently not.

    Okay, presumably Junichi Takeno doesn’t believe his aping Aibo is conscious. But one of the aims of his group’s research is to model and understand human consciousness by developing self-aware robots. The article says the Roomba reproduction has "artificial nerve cell groups built into the robot’s computer brain." Whatever that means.

    (more…)

  • Bootstraps or Leather Straps? Your Call.

    BouncerDo people with better memories store more information in their brains? Maybe not. Last month a cognitive neuroscientist (Edward Vogel at the University of Oregon) published a paper in Nature showing that certain types of memory capacity may have less to do with how much raw data you can store than with how selective you are at letting in relevant information. (Here‘s a press release describing the experiment.)

    Notably, Vogel describes the brain filter that keeps the bad stuff out as a nightclub bouncer. Regrettably, I think my brain hires bouncers from a temp service. Sometimes I get the "come one, come all" circus caller who will let in hobos, Hiltons, and stray cats ("Hey look at that piece of lint! Oh, wow, tin foil!") and sometimes I get the off-duty SWAT team member ("I’m sorry, did you just say something?").

    (more…)

  • Worlds of Possibility

    TnlaptopcrankI nearly shed a tear today reading a brief quote by Nicholas Negroponte about his effort to provide $100-laptops to every child in the developing world, whether they want one or not. (They may not even know they want one.) The part that misted my eyes I’ve put in bold.

    Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it’s a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way — and I mean that in the most generous sense of the word, that is, playing with and building things — is one of the best ways to learn. Particularly to learn about thinking and algorithms and problem solving and so forth.

    As mental prosthetics, computers are literally mind-bending, mind-expanding tools. Giving naive, undereducated children, presumably bubbling with glorious potential, their own personal computers will explode their universes. I’m talking new dimensions. Now imagine giving them the freedom to PLAY in that space, to BE CHILDISH and create things from scratch. That’s an experience perhaps as powerfully transformative as learning to read and write.

    I can only compare it to my own bursts of self-realization within the worlds of LEGO, HyperCard, and LSD. But next to those, this is like handing a kid a fucking magic wand.

  • Watching TV Makes You Better at Watching TV

    Cathtub2Steven Johnson wrote recently in the New York Times Magazine that "Watching TV Makes You Smarter." Oh, how I would love to believe that. Even if it’s true, Johnson makes the claim only about recent television programming, not what I watched during my long school vacations. Zero mention of Punky Brewster, MacGyver, or Yo! MTV Raps.

    You see, I used to watch up to 12 hours of television a day. I often wonder how much more I could achieve with my mind if I had spent that time reading or, heck, watching paint dry. I sometimes console myself by saying that it didn’t rot my brain–there are many types of literacy, and watching so much TV just made me learn to think in a particular way. Maybe not a way useful to the classroom, but a way that will make me wildly suited to some fabulously constructive endeavor someday. For a while I was very interested in going to grad school for media studies. Finally, a way to turn my years of experience with TV into an asset!

    (more…)

  • Square and Spreading

    Wacky Weblink Wednesday…

    Completely reasonable science, but the video is still wacky. I mean, robotic cubes? Whoda thunkit? And why are they so creepy?

    Check today’s New Scientist article on the self-replicating robots from Cornell.

  • Not Sold in Stores

    Wacky Weblink Wednesday…
    Ever wonder what would happen if you turned a 1982 Toyota Camry into an RC car and then took it off some sweet jumps? Wonder no further.

  • Artificial High

    EverestRecently William Saletan wrote a well-researched article in Slate ("The Beam in Your Eye") that "If steroids are cheating, why isn’t LASIK?":

    A month ago, Mark McGwire was hauled before a congressional hearing and lambasted as a cheater for using a legal, performance-enhancing steroid precursor when he broke baseball’s single-season home run record.

    A week ago, Tiger Woods was celebrated for winning golf’s biggest tournament, the Masters, with the help of superior vision he acquired through laser surgery.

    What’s the difference?

    It reminded me of the use of "artificial aids" in mountain climbing. In 1978, Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler received wide praise for the first ascent of Everest without oxygen tanks. That’s definitely an athletic feat worthy of high praise, but the classification of oxygen tanks as "artificial aids" always confused me. It seems that if carrying oxygen with you is artificial, so is carrying food and water.

    Here is partial list of equipment needed to scale Everest. Wouldn’t ice axes, crampons, and ladders better fit the bill of "artificial aid."

  • Ligers, Tigons, and Genomes, Oh My!

    Dyson_supermanLegendary physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson wrote recently in Technology Review about evolution. Based on a 2004 article by microbiologist Carl Woese, he refers to a pre-Darwinian era as the age before species, when organisms traded genes freely. According to Dyson, genetic evolution will soon piggyback on cultural evolution, leading to a post-Darwinian era that will resemble the pre-Darwinian era in one important way: the prominence of horizontal gene transfer. As culture makes the distribution of ideas (in particular those underpinning genetic engineering) more fluid, biology will follow. Species will no longer exist, as ligers and tigons and tomacco-ti-ligers rule the earth and reproduce in orgiastic laboratory love puddles. Kids can even get in on the action (no not that way):

    (more…)

  • Cyborgs “R” Us

    LensIn the early hours of April 14, 1978, a 9-pound baby popped out of a 5’2” woman, 20 minutes after she arrived at a hospital in Bloomington, Indiana. Today I turn 27. Happy Labor Day, Mom!

    Hard to believe I have lived exactly one third of my life (9 years) with my tongue pierced. I have also taken antidepressants for 11 years, and used Macs for exactly 16 years (2^4/3^3 of my life). They have each become a part of me.

    Three (well, two, ignoring the jewelry) giant leaps for a human, one small step toward our posthuman future.

  • The “Experts” Agree…

    RomSomeone sent me to this website recently. It’s a marketing site for a $14,615 exercise machine called "ROM The Time Machine," with the tag line: "Exercise in exactly 4 minutes per day!" They begin their pitch with: "OUR EXCELLENT ROM MACHINE HAS THREE BIG MARKETING PROBLEMS". They are:

    1.)"4 minutes sounds too good to be true." They label this "just one of the annoying arguments we have had to listen to".

    2.)"The very high selling price." Remarkably, this machine remains "the absolute least expensive method of exercise available for all income groups above the poverty line."

    3.)Ridicule by "’experts’."

    If they think there are only three big marketing problems, they are sadly mistaken. Let’s catalogue a few more.

    (more…)