If climate change or swine flu doesn’t get us, the machines definitely will. I came across BigDog via this talk on TED, where Juan Enriquez talks wonders aloud about a version of the Turing test. On the basis of this video, we’re not far from the point where we can’t immediately tell the difference between a machine and an animal.
If genuinely want to have your mind blown, check out the kick at ~35 seconds in. I was pretty much ready for it to turn around and charge at the guy.
It turns out that the monkeys “partially destroyed the machine, used it as a lavatory, and mostly typed the letter ‘s’”.
The study: A single computer was placed in a monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo to monitor the literary output of six primates.
Who and when: Students at University of Plymouth, 2003, paid for from a £2,000 Arts Council grant
The aim: To test the “infinite monkey theory”, which states that if a monkey hits keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time, it will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.
What was learnt: The theory is flawed. After one month – admittedly not an “infinite” amount of time – the monkeys had partially destroyed the machine, used it as a lavatory, and mostly typed the letter “s”.
For his piece Steak Filter, Noah Feehan ran a video signal of a steak cooking through the actual steak. The deterioration of the video signal becomes a sign of how done the steak is.
Quite literally, I am plugging composite video into a big steak, which is then cooked. The video signal going through the steak is the image of the steak cooking. Gradually, the steak loses moisture and signal can no longer pass.
The videos don’t really show too much, but I love the idea. (via eat me daily)
The fantastic lady behind Not So Humble Pie has been doing a series of cookies and cakes with a sciency twist. This one is my favourites. Check out the link for more.
I came across this video via kottke.org today, which is a fantastic excuse to tell you all about the wonderfully awful Leucochloridium paradoxum parasite, also known as the green-banded broodsac.
L. paradoxum is an absolute little shit of a creature, and it goes about its business in a way that would make even the brashest chestbursters from Aliens blush. Snails accidentally eat L. paradoxum eggs, which hatch and grow into huge worms while still inside the snail.
Fair enough, you might say. Even we get tapeworms.
But the broodsac doesn’t stop there. It burrows its way through the snail and up into its tentacles, where it starts pulsating its green-banded head (see video – it’s amazing). Passing birds look down, think they’ve spotted a tasty caterpillar, and the snail is toast. Once eaten by the bird along with the snail, the parasite then deposits its eggs in the bird’s droppings, and the whole sorry affair starts all over again.
If that wasn’t devious enough, the parasite also buggers up the snail’s light perception – snails normally hide out in the dark, safely out of the way of predators. L. paradoxum makes sure they can’t do that. Double trouble.
Intuitively, the reason for it happening might seem obvious. Sending bits of dead trees to each other is a bit antiquated next to the wonders of email and social networking, which is quicker, cheaper, and even better for the environment. Inevitably, dead-tree-couriers get less business, fewer profits, and are therefore forced to cut costs and modernise – leading to howls of complaint from the layabout workers who’ve got used to their cushy jobs…
But before you walk that path of derision, have a read of this blogpost, written by a postman. Not only does he a shed a bit of light on working practices – for instance, the weight limit for a bag is meant to be 16kg, presumably for health and safety reasons, but postmen routinely carry more than that because they would never get through their work otherwise – it also debunks some of the popular perceptions which surround Royal Mail.
A bit of preamble, inviting your increasing ire at the ‘lazy posties’;
According to Royal Mail figures published in May, mail volume declined by 5.5 per cent over the preceding 12 months, and is predicted to fall by a further 10 per cent this year ‘due to the recession and the continuing growth of electronic communications such as email’. Every postman knows these figures are false. If the figures are down, how come I can’t get my round done in under four hours any more?
One thing you probably don’t know, for instance, is that the Royal Mail is already part-privatised. It goes under the euphemism of ‘deregulation’ [...] It means that any private mail company – or, indeed, any of the state-owned, subsidised European mail companies – is able to bid for Royal Mail contracts.
But the best bit is here. Postmen say their workload is up. Royal Mail say their figures are down. It’s difficult to see how they can both be right. Something must be wrong…
“Mail is delivered to the offices in grey boxes [...] In the past, the volume of mail was estimated by weighing the boxes. These days it is done by averages. There is an estimate for the number of letters that each box contains [...] That number is 208. This is how the volume of mail passing through each office is worked out: 208 letters per box times the number of boxes. However, within the last year Royal Mail has arbitrarily, and without consultation, reduced the estimate for the number of letters in each box. It was 208: now they say it is 150.”
“Doubting the accuracy of these numbers, the union ordered a random manual count to be undertaken over a two-week period in a number of offices across the region. Our office was one of them. On average, those boxes which the Royal Mail claims contain only 150 letters, actually carry 267 items of mail.”
Interesting, I hope you’ll agree.
I have to admit, this does play into my standard left-leaning corporations-are-evil worldview slightly too easily. But if the numbers are correct, it’s difficult not to agree with the Communication Workers Union when they say that Royal Mail “are not engaged in modernisation … [they're] managing the decline of Royal Mail”.
Without being too patronising, I doubt that postmen are stupid. I think they understand the need for modernisation in a changing world, but it seems to me they’re being treated like idiots by Royal Mail. I’d strike if I were them.
Right, this is totally off the scale. Fox News is now reporting that state-funded healthcare can lead to terrorism. I literally don’t know where to begin.
Next time you go for an operation, make sure you ask for the one where they don’t stitch a massive suicide bomb onto your liver or turn your willy into a remote-controlled surface-to-air missile.
The “Evil and Orwellian” NHS has come in for a bit of a battering in the last few days from rightwing nutjobs in the USA who are opposed to Obama’s health reforms. They’ve been citing our healthcare system’s shortcomings, as well as inventing failures. That includes – bizarrely and hilariously – one (now corrected) editorial which claimed that ALS-sufferer Professor Stephen Hawking would have been left to die if he lived in the UK. In case there is any confusion, Prof. Hawking is both British, and alive. Presumably this is despite the best efforts of the NHS, rather than because of them.
In response, Brits on twitter (shush) have been tweeting about why they love the NHS – so much that it’s now the top trending topic on the site. More people are talking about it than any other single topic anywhere in the world.
Science can be innaccessible. It can be seen as a series of facts and theories about the world, results of experiments, and an attempt to distil the beauty of nature down into a series of numbers.
But in Life Ascending, Nick Lane reminds us that it doesn’t need to be that way. Life Ascending is a really quite brilliant book about evolution, which has two major things going for it. Firstly, evolution is in itself a story. Secondly, the author knows that science is only accidentally about numbers and facts and figures – it’s really the way that humans try to understand the world.
Lane makes his book a zippy sightseeing tour through ten of the greatest inventions in evolution, and as much a narrative of how the ideas themselves evolved (that includes the story of some of the people behind them) as anything else. It has to be said that there’s a good smattering of biochemistry in there, but if you have vague memories of ATP from GCSE science, it’s worth persisting with it – the payback’s good.
His first chapter, on how life first coalesced out of the primordial muck nearly 4 billion years ago, gives you a bit of existential vertigo. The step-by-step delve into how minerals and chemicals (when you add a bit of heat) might have become the very earliest living cells, almost by chance but almost inevitably, puts the arguments over the rest of evolution into perspective.
If he can persuade you that the very first jump – that big leap from chemistry to biology – was no epic shift at all, but a series of completely believable small steps somewhere in the limbo between life and death, then the other big questions in evolution don’t seem quite so intimidating.
But, of course, Lane gives you a brief intro to them. His chapter on photosynthesis explains how the planet’s then-dominant lifeform did its inadvertant best to kill off the rest of them with a poisonous gas – oxygen. He talks you through how animals first chanced upon the equipment they needed to move and see – already present in their own array of proteins, because their algae-like ancestors used them to photosynthesise and put their cells together.
There’s an intriguing chapter about the latest thinking on how the first complex cells – like the ones that we, plants and fungi have, containing a nucleus and various organelles – might actually have been a mashup of cells from the two other great lineages of life which predate us, the bacteria and the archaea. We don’t seem to have conclusively evolved from one or the other, and there’s evidence to show that we’re a weird hybrid of the two.
Lane takes in DNA, sex, and warm blood along the way, even having a go at explaining consciousness before ending – appropriately enough – with the evolution of death, and how we might work around it.
But all the way through – and emphasised in the epilogue – the author makes clear that the science he has covered is humanity’s best guess so far. Borrowing from Jacob Bronowski’s haunting treatise from Auschwitz, he reminds us that science is a very human form of knowledge; “We are always at the brink of the known… Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible”.
And thanks to one of humanity’s great inventions, the internet, here’s that short Bronowski clip. In a dirty pond he stands, literally, in the ashes of his ancestors, before pulling up a handful of mud. Science doesn’t destroy beauty and humanity – it’s misplaced certainty which does that.
Bloody hell. When’s the last time you saw Gordon talking like this? Why can’t he get half as excited as this about social policy in the UK? I’m not even so much thinking about the content of the presentation – but he actually looks like he’s interested in what he’s saying…
According to the BBC article ‘Glass hold’ reveals personality, “The way you hold your glass can reveal much more than you might realise”, including how you interact with fellow members of the drinking classes. I know, I know – sounds like bollocks, right?
That’s what I thought! But then I kept reading, and found out that not only was the article the product of a study by “consultant psychologist Dr Glenn Wilson”, but that he examined the ‘body language’ of 500 drinkers and found that they fell into eight very scientific-sounding categories, such as “The Gossip”, “The Ice-Queen”, “The Brow-Beater” and “The Jack-the-Lad”.
With findings so plausible, I can only assume that this study is available for me to download and take a look at, if only to marvel at its brilliance. Especially given that the news report is peppered with quotes from Dr Wilson such as, “When you’re in a crowded bar, often all you have to go on is body language”.
But oddly, I can’t find a version of the story anywhere on the web which includes references to the study as being published in a psychological journal. Except… oh. It does say that Wilson “carried out the work for the Walkabout bar chain” right at the very top of the BBC page, and ‘Walkabout bars’ is also watermarked in the prominent graphic that goes with the story.
Wilson’s staff page at KCL just says “Sorry, this staff profile either does not exist or access to it has been restricted”.
Dr Wilson. Imagine him 'studying' you in a bar.
His intriguingly complimentary Wikipedia page claims he “is a psychologist best known for his work on attitude and personality measurement, sexual attraction, deviation and dysfunction, partner compatibility”, etc.
It also has what seems to be a fairly comprehensive list of his work, including “developing the compatibility quotient (CQ) as a predictor of relationship success”, resulting in “his characterization as ‘the father of modern compatibility testing’”, as well as papers including “Vital statistics, perceived sexual attractiveness and response to risque humor”, “Measurement of sex fantasy”, and “Finger length as an index of assertiveness in women”.
Not having read any of these papers, I’m clearly not in a position to comment on Wilson’s qualifications as a psychologist – but I am left surprised that someone of such obvious academic success wouldn’t publish such a groundbreaking study in a reputable journal.
I’d be pretty concered if what has instead happened is that Wilson had sent his ‘findings’ only to the people who paid him to do the ‘study’ – Walkabout Bars – so that the results couldn’t be peer-reviewed by other psychologists (or anyone, for that matter). And for Walkabout to then press release it, for outlets such as the BBC and The Telegraph to uncritically publish it as ‘news’, thereby giving Walkabout untold ££££s worth of free advertising.
But hey, I’m just speculating. Catch me in the bar – the way I hold my glass probably gives me away as a cynic.
Daniel Kish was born blind, but he can slalom on a bike, play tag, and climb trees – a range of things I would like an idiot trying to do even as a sighted person, basically.
He can use ‘passive’ sonar, which relies on listening to the echoes of sounds like footsteps, and ‘active’ sonar, where he produces a sound (such as clicking his tongue) deliberately to generate more precise echoes. He calls the latter ‘flash sonar’, “because for [him], each click is similar to the brief glimpse of the surrounds sighted people get when a camera flash goes off in the dark”.
What I find most interesting is that he’s not the only one to have taught it to himself. Apparently lots of blind kids do it. He thinks that “the readiness with which people learn sonar suggests to me it may be an inbuilt skill”. Kish hypothesis that
“Humans probably used to rely on echolocation far more in the days before artificial lighting, when we had to find our way round in the dark.”
In pitch black, Kish can tell the front of a car from the back, an SUV from a pick-up truck, a bush from a fence, and even identify a credit card. Which is pretty damn cool.
When I first found out about platypus electrolocation, whereby the monotremes use their bill to electrically sense prey in the water, it made me wonder whether it’s possible to even imagine what it’s like to have an extra sense. So for instance, if you had no sense of smell, would you be able to imagine what scents are like?
After reading about Kish, that seems like an even more interesting question. There are people, almost indistinguishable from me in the grand scheme of things, who perceive the world in a way I can’t imagine – and yet go about their lives just as I do.
Watch the aporkalypse spread. Purple spots are confirmed cases, pink are suspected.
Note: this map may become out of date as everyone dies and there is nobody left to update it, so bear that in mind if you want to use it to plan holidays.
