Wired News: Wild Things Are on the Beach

Monday, January 24th, 2005

Wild Things Are on the Beach presents the work of Theo Jansen: “immense multi-legged walking critters designed to roam the Dutch coastline, feeding on gusts of wind,” and built from cheap plastic tubes:

“I was making animals with just the tubes because they were cheap but later on they turned out to be very helpful in making artificial life because they are very flexible and multifunctional as well. I see it now as a sort of protein — in nature, everything is almost made of protein and you have various uses of protein; you can make nails, hair, skin and bones. There’s a lot of variety in what you can do with just one material and this is what I try to do as well.”

The “animals” are enthralling:

“I think they are absolutely beautiful,” said Bruce Shapiro, robotic artist. “He has figured out a way to use inexpensive materials to construct wind-powered walking machines. What makes them so compelling is the wave of actuators, like the motion of a centipede’s legs. I suspect that, as humans, we recognize this action as specific to living things, hence our fascination with Jansen’s ‘organisms.’”

You can see this in the videos, especially Animaris Geneticus and Animaris Currens Ventosa walking.

He keeps improving his animals:

Currently Jansen is working on giving the seventh generation of these creatures, comprising a herd of seven animals, the ability to move even in the wind’s absence. His latest creations contain lemonade bottles in their body structure into which the wind is slowly pumped, enabling the creature to walk for a couple of minutes afterwards. Eventually he plans to increase the efficiency so that they can go on for days or even years.

“They have a food source in the wind so they can store energy and use it later on,” said Jansen. “The downside is that they might have to wait for days, for the wind hopper to move on and on and then be able to move for maybe five minutes. They are just like snakes. Snakes also lie in the sun for days digesting their food. On the beach the animals have to catch the wind and wait for a long time before they have enough wind in their stomach to go for a walk.”

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Yingzi

Sunday, January 23rd, 2005

Mark Rosenfelder’s Yingzi attempts “to lay out, by analogy, the nature and structure of the Chinese writing system.” He sketches out an English-based alternative to Chinese characters (hanzi), applying the same concepts:

  • the limited role of pictograms
  • the clever compound pictures (indeed all three examples are from Chinese)
  • the phonetic-and-radical system (97% of Chinese characters work this way)
  • the inclusion of radicals as part of the character (rather than as separate symbols, as in cuneiform or hieroglyphic writing)
  • the relative information content of radicals and phonetics
  • compounds used as secondary phonetics
  • the handling of multisyllabic and foreign words
  • the handling of subsyllabic morphemes (the model here is Mandarin -r, represented by ér)
  • the organization of dictionaries (in fact, the graphic at the top of the page shows part of the radical index for a Chinese dictionary, organized by stroke count)
  • the psychological effects.

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New Scientist Gladiators fought for thrills, not kills

Sunday, January 23rd, 2005

Only academics would find this conclusion controversial. From Gladiators fought for thrills, not kills:

Gladiators’ combat had become a martial art by the beginning of the first millennium, according to a controversial theory based on reconstructing the fighters’ tactics from Roman artefacts and medieval fight books.

In fact, it should be obvious that the ancient gladiator was only a step away from the modern pro wrestler:

To amuse the crowds around the arena the gladiators would display broad fighting skills rather than fight for their lives, argues archaeologist Steve Tuck of the University of Miami. “Gladiatorial combat is seen as being related to killing and shedding blood,” he says. “But I think that what we are seeing is an entertaining martial art that was spectator-oriented.”

In the past couple decades, the western martial arts have been rediscovered:

To try to better understand what these scenes show, he turned to the pages of fighting and martial arts manuals produced in Germany and northern Italy in medieval and Renaissance times. These manuals provided instruction in everything from sword-fighting to wrestling. They are a good parallel for gladiatorial combat, Tuck argues, in part because opponents were professionals who used similar arms and armour. “And they’re incredibly important because they show sequences of moves, and have accompanying descriptions,” he says.

Most people see a fight as an exchange of blows, but a trained fighter sees closing, disengaging, and grappling:

From the manuals and art, Tuck infers that there were often three critical moments in the course of a gladiatorial bout. The first was initial contact, with both gladiators, fully armed, moving forwards and going for a body shot. The second was when one gladiator is wounded and seeks to distance himself from his opponent. In the third both gladiators drop their shields, seemingly undamaged, before grappling with each other, he says.

In the fight books, this act of throwing down weapons and shields to grapple was a common way to conclude a fight, without necessarily intending to finish off an opponent. Judging from the Roman art, the same happened during gladiatorial bouts, says Tuck.

(Hat tip to Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.)

Posted in Economics, Martial Arts, War | No Comments »

Going with the Crowd

Sunday, January 23rd, 2005

Going with the Crowd introduces a familiar scenario:

A few weeks ago, my family and I were wandering about in an unfamiliar part of the city where we live. We were getting hungry, so we started looking for a place to eat. We happened upon a block that had three restaurants in a row.

All three restaurants served types of food that we enjoy. Although it was early in the evening, one was already quite crowded. Another had a couple at one table near the window. The third appeared to have no customers.

In such a situation, many people might think that there must be some reason why no one is at the third restaurant. Maybe there’s something wrong with it. The restaurant with just one couple might also appear questionable for the same reason.

I think you see where this is going:

So, in the absence of any additional information, the natural thing to do would be to join the crowd in the first restaurant. It must be a good, well-known restaurant. Higher quality brings more customers. Right?

Suppose that the likelihood of someone choosing a restaurant is proportional to the number of people already in the restaurant. Given that all the restaurants are initially empty and that the first customer chooses randomly, what happens to the number of people that end up in the different restaurants?

Statistician Susan Holmes of Stanford University has created a Java applet that allows you to simulate such a situation.

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Attack of the Machines – Is your stockbroker a robot?

Sunday, January 23rd, 2005

Attack of the Machines – Is your stockbroker a robot? opens with an observation my brother pointed out to me years ago:

Every day, hundreds of reporters from CNBC, Bloomberg, Dow Jones, and other outlets concoct a story about the stock market. From the chaos of the New York Stock Exchange, they discern rational human behavior to explain why the S&P 500 rose precisely 11.46 points today.

Tech stocks up? Why, it’s because Intel’s CEO made positive comments. Oil stocks down? A respected analyst issued a bearish forecast. When stocks fall across the board, it is frequently attributed to investors ‘taking profits.’ (Strangely, in the zero-sum game of investing, stocks never seem to rise due to investors ‘taking losses.’)

Choose a phenomenon that’s supposed to affect the market (either up or down), then choose either “because of” or “despite” to describe the market’s behavior that day.

The article’s focus is on how human decisions are being slowly replaced by computer-based decision-making, but those narrative rationalizations about the market are meaningless even if human’s are in charge; the market’s a complex system with many, many actors.

Anyway, program trading has increased in volume over the years (as you’d have to expect):

According to the New York Stock Exchange, program trading for all of 2004 was a record 50.6 percent of volume, up sharply from 37.5 percent in 2003.

This all sounds vaguely familiar…

Then there are the trading geeks, guys with black boxes in Lower Manhattan and Greenwich, Conn., who have written ultra-secret algorithms that dictate the purchase or sale of stocks whenever prices hit certain tripwires. In the past few years, quantitatively driven hedge funds have proliferated. And every day, the code on which they rely can trigger a buy and a sell on the same groups of stocks?sometimes several times a day. Thanks to program trading, a relatively small quantitative firm with only several hundred million dollars in capital can nonetheless account for a big chunk of the NYSE’s daily volume on a given day.

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Circadiana: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)

Sunday, January 23rd, 2005

Circadiana: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask) opens with this summary of human sleep (and sleep research):

Until not long ago, just about until electricity became ubiquitous, humans used to have a sleep pattern quite different from what we consider “normal” today. At dusk you go to sleep, at some point in the middle of the night you wake up for an hour or two, then fall asleep again until dawn. Thus there are two events of falling asleep and two events of waking up every night (plus, perhaps, a short nap in the afternoon). As indigenous people today, as well as people in non-electrified rural areas of the world, still follow this pattern, it is likely that our ancestors did, too.The bimodal sleep pattern was first seen in laboratory animals (various birds, lizards and mammals) in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, i.e, before everyone moved their research to mice and rats who have erratic (un-consolidated) sleep patterns. The research on humans kept in constant conditions, as well as field work in primitive communities (including non-electrified rural places in what is otherwise considered the First World) confirmed the bimodality of sleep in humans, particularly in winter.An excellent quote from Robert Heinlein:
Waking a person unnecessarily should not be considered a capital crime. For a first offense, that is.

This is so true:

The “owls” are constantly being treated as lazy, though they are more likely to be sleep-deprived (cannot fall asleep until the wee hours, then being rudely awoken by the alarm clock after just a couple of hours) and spend more hours awake (and presumably productive) than “larks” do. If you are asleep, this means you need it.

I didn’t realize these accidents were sleep-related:

People have always tried to self-select for various schedules, yet it has recently started to enter the corporate consciousness that forcing employees into unwanted shifts has negative effects on productivity and safety, thus bottom line. See Chernobyl, Bhopal, Exxon Valdese and Three Mile Island accidents — all caused by sober but sleepy people at about 3am, just like thousands of traffic accidents every year.

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Evidence May Back Human Sacrifice Claims

Sunday, January 23rd, 2005

From Evidence May Back Human Sacrifice Claims:

Indian pictorial texts known as “codices,” as well as Spanish accounts from the time, quote Indians as describing multiple forms of human sacrifice.

Victims had their hearts cut out or were decapitated, shot full of arrows, clawed, sliced to death, stoned, crushed, skinned, buried alive or tossed from the tops of temples.

Children were said to be frequent victims, in part because they were considered pure and unspoiled.

“Many people said, ‘We can’t trust these codices because the Spaniards were describing all these horrible things,’ which in the long run we are confirming,” said Carmen Pijoan, a forensic anthropologist who found some of the first direct evidence of cannibalism in a pre-Aztec culture over a decade ago: bones with butcher-like cut marks.

There’s more:

“The sacrifice involved burning or partially burning victims,” Velez Saldana said. “We found a burial pit with the skeletal remains of four children who were partially burned, and the remains of four other children that were completely carbonized.”

While the remains don’t show whether the victims were burned alive, there are depictions of people — apparently alive — being held down as they were burned.

The dig turned up other clues to support descriptions of sacrifices in the Magliabecchi codex, a pictorial account painted between 1600 and 1650 that includes human body parts stuffed into cooking dishes, and people sitting around eating, as the god of death looks on.

“We have found cooking dishes just like that,” said archaeologist Luis Manuel Gamboa. “And, next to some full skeletons, we found some incomplete, segmented human bones.” However, researchers don’t know whether those remains were cannibalized.

In 2002, government archaeologist Juan Alberto Roman Berrelleza announced the results of forensic testing on the bones of 42 children, mostly boys around age 6, sacrificed at Mexico City’s Templo Mayor, the Aztec’s main religious site, during a drought.

All shared one feature: serious cavities, abscesses or bone infections painful enough to make them cry.

“It was considered a good omen if they cried a lot at the time of sacrifice,” which was probably done by slitting their throats, Roman Berrelleza said.

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Untangling ultrawideband

Saturday, January 22nd, 2005

Untangling ultrawideband describes a technology that could make even video cables unnecessary:

The two incarnations of UWB are variations on the same highly unusual technological theme. Unlike conventional radio transmitters, which transmit on a particular frequency and which cannot be picked up if the receiver is slightly mistuned, UWB devices broadcast at very low power over an extremely wide band of frequencies. This has the advantage that UWB signals can be picked up by suitably designed receivers, but resemble background noise to conventional radio receivers, which are listening on one particular frequency. Conventional and UWB radios can therefore coexist. And that is why America’s telecoms regulator, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), ruled in February 2002 that UWB devices could operate across a broad swathe of the radio spectrum, from 3.1GHz to 10.6GHz, without requiring spectrum licences.

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Move over, Big Brother

Saturday, January 22nd, 2005

Move over, Big Brother looks at the democratization of surveillance:

The speed and ubiquity of digital cameras lets them do things that film-based cameras could not. In October, for example, the victim of a robbery in Nashville, Tennessee, used his camera-phone to take pictures of the thief and his getaway vehicle. The images were shown to the police, who broadcast descriptions of the man and his truck, leading to his arrest ten minutes later. Other similar stories abound: in Italy, a shopkeeper sent a picture of two men who were acting suspiciously to the police, who identified them as wanted men and arrested them soon afterwards, while in Sweden, a teenager was photographed while holding up a corner shop, and was apprehended within an hour.

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Playing to win

Saturday, January 22nd, 2005

Playing to win looks at video games as training tools, and, as an aside, looks at (American) football as a training tool for war:

Other sports, especially baseball, offer a greater wealth of data. However, no other sport seems to match the set of psychological and physical skills needed on a battlefield so well. Vince Lombardi, probably the most famous coach in American football’s history, enjoyed comparing the football field to a battlefield. But the more important comparison is the converse — that a battlefield can seem like a football field, according to Lieutenant-Colonel James Riley, chief of tactics at the Army Infantry School in Fort Benning, Georgia. Indeed, Colonel Riley says his commanding general makes this very analogy constantly. In football, as in infantry combat, a player must be aware of both the wider situation on the field, and the area immediately surrounding him. The situation changes rapidly and the enemy is always adapting his tactics. Physical injuries abound in both places. Football is as close to fighting a war as one can come without guns and explosives.

Football is as close to fighting a war as one can come without guns and explosives. I love the smell of pigskin in the morning!

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Supercharging the brain

Saturday, January 22nd, 2005

Supercharging the brain looks at cognitive enhancers:

For an indication of what might happen if a safe and effective cognitive enhancer were to reach the market, consider the example of modafinil. Manufactured by Cephalon, a biotech company based in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and sold under the names Provigil and Alertec, the drug is a stimulant that vastly improves alertness in patients with narcolepsy, shift-work sleep disorder and sleep apnea. Since it first reached the market in America in 1999, sales have shot through the roof, reaching $290m in 2003 and expected to grow by at least 30% this year.

Much of the sales growth of modafinil has been driven by its off-label use, which accounts for as much as 90% of consumption. With its amazing safety profile — the side-effects generally do not go beyond mild headache or nausea — the drug is increasingly used to alleviate sleepiness resulting from all sorts of causes, including depression, jet lag or simply working long hours with too little sleep.
[...]
Modafinil has already surfaced in doping scandals. Kelli White, an American sprinter who took first place in the 100-metre and 200-metre competitions at last year’s World Championships in Paris, later tested positive for the drug. Initially she insisted that it had been prescribed to treat narcolepsy, but subsequently admitted to using other banned substances as well. As a result, she was forced to return the medals she won last year and, along with a handful of other American athletes, was barred from competitions for two years.

Brain-boosting drugs are hardly new though; in fact, they can be so commonplace we don’t even think of them as brain-boosting drugs:

“It’s human nature to find things to improve ourselves,” he says. Indeed, for thousands of years, people have chewed, brewed or smoked substances in the hopes of boosting their mental abilities as well as their stamina. Since coffee first became popular in the Arab world during the 16th century, the drink has become a widely and cheaply available cognitive enhancer. The average American coffee drinker sips more than three cups a day (and may also consume caffeine-laced soft drinks).

How do Provigil, amphetamines, and caffeine stack up?

Last year, Nancy Jo Wesensten, a research psychologist at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, compared the effects of three popular alertness drugs — modafinil, dextroamphetamine and caffeine — head to head, using equally potent doses. Forty-eight subjects received one of the drugs, or a placebo, after being awake for 65 hours. The researchers then administered a battery of tests. All of the drugs did a good job restoring wakefulness for six to eight hours. After that, says Dr Wesensten, the performance of the subjects on caffeine declined because of its short half-life (a fact that could be easily remedied by consuming another dose, she points out). The other two groups reached their operational limit after 20 hours — staying awake for a total of 85 hours.

When the researchers looked at the drugs’ effects on higher cognitive functions, such as planning and decision-making, they found each drug showed strengths and weaknesses in different areas. Caffeine was particularly effective in boosting a person’s ability to estimate unknown quantities. When asked 20 questions that required a specific numeric answer — such as “how high off a trampoline can a person jump?” — 92% of volunteers on caffeine and 75% on modafinil showed good estimation skills. But only 42% on dextroamphetamine did so — the same proportion as the sleep-deprived subjects who had received a placebo.

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Why the future is hybrid

Saturday, January 22nd, 2005

Why the future is hybrid describes the different kinds of hybrid “petrol-electric” car:

The simplest kind is the “stop-start” or “micro” hybrid, which is not generally regarded as a true hybrid because it relies solely on an internal-combustion engine for propulsion. As the “stop-start” name implies, the engine shuts off when the vehicle comes to a halt. An integrated starter-generator restarts the engine instantly when the driver steps on the accelerator. All of this increases fuel efficiency only slightly, typically by around 10%. But few modifications to a conventional design are required, so it costs very little. In Europe, PSA Peugeot Citroën has just introduced a stop-start version of the Citroën C3, which sells for roughly the same price as a similarly equipped conventional C3.

Next come so-called “mild” hybrid designs, such as Honda’s Integrated Motor Assist (IMA) — the hybrid configuration found in the Insight, the Civic and the new Accord. In addition to a stop-start function, an electric motor gives the engine a boost during acceleration. During braking, the same motor doubles up as a generator, capturing energy that would otherwise be lost as heat and using it to recharge the car’s batteries. Since the electric motor is coupled to the engine, it never drives the wheels by itself. That is why this system is called a mild hybrid, much to Honda’s dismay. The design is less expensive than Toyota’s more elaborate approach, but can provide many of the same benefits, says Dan Benjamin of ABI Research, a consultancy based in Oyster Bay, New York. The hybrid version of the Civic achieves 48 miles per gallon, a 37% improvement over a comparable conventional Civic.

Toyota’s Hybrid Synergy Drive, a “full” hybrid system, is much more complex. (The Ford Escape hybrid uses a similar system; Ford licenses a number of patents from Toyota.) Using a ?power split? device, the output from the petrol engine is divided and used both to drive the wheels directly and to turn the generator, which in turn drives the electric motor and also drives the wheels. The distribution of power is continuously variable, explains David Hermance of Toyota, allowing the engine to run efficiently at all times. When its full power is not needed to drive the wheels, it can spin the generator to recharge the batteries. The batteries also get replenished when the car is coasting or braking. During stop-and-go traffic and at low speeds, when the petrol engine would be most inefficient, it shuts off and the electric motor, powered by the battery, takes over. That explains why the Prius has a better fuel economy rating for urban driving (60 miles per gallon) than for motorway driving (51 miles per gallon) — the opposite of a conventional vehicle.

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Gadgets with a sporting chance

Friday, January 21st, 2005

Gadgets with a sporting chance reports on some new, high-tech sporting equipment:

Victor Petrenko, an engineer at Dartmouth College’s Ice Research Lab in New Hampshire, has invented some smart ski-brakes that, he believes, will increase the popularity of cross-country skiing by making the sport less challenging for beginners. The brakes, currently being tested by a ski manufacturer in the Alps, offer the necessary friction for a bigger “kick-off force” and make the skis less likely to slide backwards in their tracks. To make this happen, an electric current from the bottom of the skis pulses through the ice, melting a thin layer of snow that instantly refreezes and acts as a sort of glue.

Posted in Fitness, Technology | No Comments »

Facial Action Coding System (FACS)

Friday, January 21st, 2005

Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink cites Paul Ekman’s work on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS):

Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is the most widely used and versatile method for measuring and describing facial behaviors. Paul Ekman and W.V. Friesen developed the original FACS in the 1970s by determining how the contraction of each facial muscle (singly and in combination with other muscles) changes the appearance of the face. They examined videotapes of facial behavior to identify the specific changes that occurred with muscular contractions and how best to differentiate one from another. They associated the appearance changes with the action of muscles that produced them by studying anatomy, reproducing the appearances, and palpating their faces. Their goal was to create a reliable means for skilled human scorers to determine the category or categories in which to fit each facial behavior. The FACS Manual was first published in a loose-leaf version with video or film supplements in 1978.

A sample page from the manual describes Action Unit 1, the Inner Brow Raiser:

One large muscle in the scalp and forehead raises the eyebrows. It runs vertically from the top of the head to the eyebrows and covers virtually the entire forehead. The medial (or central) portion of this muscle (AU 1) can act separately from the lateral portion of this muscle (AU 2). Figure 2-1 shows that the movement of AU 1 is to pull the medial part of the brow and center of the forehead upwards.

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Overcoming the Constraints of Sovereignty

Friday, January 21st, 2005

In Overcoming the Constraints of Sovereignty, Sidney Goldberg illustrates the ethical issues involved in sovereignty with a metaphor:

Remember the movies in which a gang of criminals would rob a bank and then outrace the county police to the border of another county, cross the border, and leave the county police fuming in frustration because their authority prevailed only in their own county? I used to think this was the most stupid situation from an ethical point of view, even though the law was being upheld.

Take this hypothetical case: You’re walking along the border of a neighboring country and there’s nobody in sight on either side, except for a guy who’s beating up an old lady in the neighboring country. You’re bigger and stronger than that guy and you know you could stop him, but to do so you would have to illegally cross the border. What to do? It’s a no-brainer because saving the woman’s life is on a much higher ethical plane than abiding by the laws of sovereignty. So you chase off the perpetrator and save the woman’s life.

What if two guys with baseball bats are beating up the old lady, who certainly will die from the blows? In this case, you don’t go to her help, because they will kill you, too, and there will be two deaths instead of one.

Extrapolating to the big picture, where the United States finds a people who are suffering under the yoke of a tyrant, and it is a tyrant that we can eliminate and thereby ease the suffering, we should go ahead and do it. This would violate the laws of sovereignty in favor of the obligations of ethics. This action should be taken unless it causes even more deaths and suffering than the existing tyranny. In that case we have to put it on a back burner until a better opportunity for change occurs.

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