Thursday, February 28, 2013

Secrets of Pink Elephants Revealed



1. Elephants from Elephants


pink elephants 3 four in one


pink elephants 4 parade from one




pink elephants 8 round it


pink elephants 9 filled

2. An Elephant State of Mind


Chef Watson

IBM's Watson has graduated from Jeopardy. Yes, there's medical diagnostics, business analytics, and the like, but there's also baking.





Sympathy for the Other

Glenn Loury and Harold Pollock discuss the value of literature as a way to understand peoples lives different from your own:

Saturday, February 23, 2013

An acrobatic machine

Here's an amazing video. Two quadracopters toss a pole back and forth:

What's a quadracopter? A small flying vehicle propelled by four spinning propellers. Once one quadracopter has tossed the pole, the other one has 0.65 seconds to calculate the pole's trajectory and get itself in place to make the catch, after which it must, of course, balance the pole.

You can find an explanation HERE.

Friday, February 22, 2013

Physics is in trouble: Restart!

Microelectronics pioneer and Caltech emeritus professor Carver Mead says that physics has failed to deliver on the revolution that started early in the 20th century.
That physics is in trouble has seemed obvious for some time. What to do about it, not so obvious. But more or the same doesn't seem sensible.

Here's the passage that got my attention:

What I'm wondering is this: Is much of the intractable strangeness of contemporary physics an artifact of the process of breaking matter into the smallest possible isolated units, as though any of them ever existed or could exist in isolation?

Music and Movement

A precis of "Music and movement share a dynamic structure that supports universal expressions of emotion" by Beau Sievers, Larry Polansky, Michael Casey, and Thalia Wheatley (PNAS 2013 110 (1) 70-75):
Music and movement have long been linked through metaphor, but whether they share a common structure across disparate cultures remains largely unknown. To determine how music and movement are related, Beau Sievers et al. (pp. 70–75) developed a computer program to generate simple piano melodies and an animated bouncing ball, both controlled by the same statistical model. The authors then recruited 50 US college students, separated them into two equal groups, and asked one group to vary the position of slider bars on a computer screen that controlled five piano melody–related attributes—rate, jitter, direction, step size, and consonance—to reflect different emotions, such as “angry,” “happy,” “peaceful,” “sad,” and ”scared.” The other group performed the same task, but the slider bars varied equivalent attributes of the ball’s movement in relation to the same emotions. By and large, the authors report, individuals who used music to express an emotion set the slider bars to the same positions as those who expressed the same emotion through movement, suggesting that music and movement share an expressive code. When a modified version of the experiment was run among villagers in L’ak, a culturally isolated tribe in northeastern Cambodia, the authors found that the features of emotional expression through music and movement are similar across cultures. According to the authors, unraveling the universal features of music might help researchers uncover why and how music originated. — P.N.
H/t Mark Changizi.

You can find the full article HERE (PDF) at the website for the Wheatley lab.

Friday, February 15, 2013

How It All Works and the Problem of God



Here's the opening paragraphs of Plantinga's review:


Thursday, February 14, 2013

Artificial Retina

From the NY Times:
The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved the first treatment to give limited vision to people who are blind, involving a technology called the “artificial retina.”



Monday, February 4, 2013

Pigeon Navigation: The sound of distant waves

Pigeons live in a different world, from The Economist:
Pigeons form a far richer picture of the world than a person can manage, through three senses unavailable to humans: an instinctive ability to navigate by the sun, an ability to detect magnetic fields that provides them with an inbuilt compass, and an ability to hear infrasound. But if local conditions mean they cannot hear their destination, they are as lost as a driver whose satnav has suddenly failed.
H/t Tyler Cowen.