Author: gulley

BotJunkie and BigDog

I’ve started following the BotJunkie blog for fun stories and videos about robots. It reminds me how close I came to a career in robotics. I like the blog’s tag line: “From the folks who brought you OhGizmo.com, BotJunkie obsessively chronicles Man’s inevitable descent into cybernetic slavery.”

BotJunkie has plenty of weird stuff like snake-like locomotion (“Robot Snakes Crawl Up Your Pants”) and a robotic tennis ball slingshot for your pet dachshund, but every now and then I see a video that really knocks me flat. Look at the latest video from Boston Dynamics of the packbot BigDog.

Gott im Himmel! Did you see that great beast slip on the ice? What a piece of work! You can’t help but feel sympathy for the thing.

Robots really have turned the corner in the last few years. You can, for example, watch that dandified piece of clockwork, QRIO, mincing around on rollerskates. That was impressive, but it was really just a tarted-up excerpt from the film version of the Future. QRIO wouldn’t last five minutes in the real future, the one where you and I are headed. But BigDog… BigDog is from the future. The real future where he might have to kick ass in a Klondike barroom after humping over the Chilkoot Pass.

I don’t need a little Roomba with a vacuum attachment. I want a BigDog with a stick.

Evolution and geology

I just finished reading Sean Carroll’s book The Making of the Fittest. Subtitled “DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution”, it’s the follow-on book to Endless Forms Most Beautiful. In this book Carroll devotes several chapters to demonstrating how, against our natural intuition, there really is enough time (given a few hundred million years) for DNA to mutate bit by bit and still make amazing new structures like eyeballs, wings, and that pink dangly thing that hangs at the back of your mouth.

Carroll also points out that while almost everything is in flux, genetically speaking, there are some stretches of DNA so crucial to life that they never change. Which is to say, they can’t change because any variation would be fatal. Here, for example, is a six amino acid stretch that has been found in every single living thing: KNMITG. It’s an immortal sequence, unvarying across more than a billion years.

The last chapter deals with the controversies associated with teaching evolutionary theory in public schools. This is well-traveled ground, but it got me thinking about how much the opponents of evolution focus on man, monkeys, and biology class. But shouldn’t they be attacking geology too? Some of them do, insisting, for example, that the Grand Canyon formed during Noah’s flood. But it seems that a serious and consistent creationist ought to stick those little “this is only a theory” labels in every science book on the shelf. The astronomy book, the geology book, the physics book, they should all be thrown out the window along with The Origin of Species. Why is poor old Darwin always taking the heat?

Need your comics restored?

Got a 1938 Action Comics #1 sitting in a box in the attic? It might be worth half a million dollars. I learned that last Saturday.

My son recently turned nine, and at his birthday party I happened to be talking to another parent, talking the party talk, as one does. Talkety-talk-talk. What sort of work do you do? I inquired blithely. I am the pre-eminent restorer of high-value comics on the planet she replied serenely. NOTE: She didn’t actually say this. She was very casual and modest about it. But in fact she is the pre-eminent restorer of high-value comics on the planet. Her name is Susan Cicconi, and her site is called The Restoration Lab.com. If you have a weatherbeaten comic book that needs sprucing up, she is the person you need to talk to. Trained in Paris as a restorer specializing in high art, she eventually made the shift into pop culture, and business has been good.

I love having interesting neighbors.

More and more money has been pouring into comics collecting. Susan was the one who told me about the current price being fetched by Action Comics #1 (she has restored several of them over the years). Interestingly, she said that a recent trend may start to impact her business: you get more money for a valuable old comic that has never been restored. It reminds me of those appraisers on Antiques Roadshow: “If you hadn’t just scrubbed the filth off of this ugly-ass chair, it would be worth $1.4 million. But now all I can offer you is $3.50 and a couple of scratch tickets.”

Now that I think about it, there would be a big market for a new show called Antique Comics Roadshow.

The pestilence

No blogging last week because the pestilence, by which I mean the dread stomach bug, went through my house last week like a big stinky freight train.

As it happens, my four year old daughter and I have been watching (and re-watching) a DVD of Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, which is just about the ideal movie for a father and daughter to watch together, let me tell you. It’s also given us an opportunity to talk about other cultures, how they write in Japan, and what life is like there. Pursuant to this last, we took in a few YouTube videos, and as you can imagine, there is no shortage of weird Japanese YouTube videos, even among those that specialize in teaching basic Japanese.

I mention all this because we happened across this video that combined the two recent trends sweeping through our household: intestinal distress and Japanese cultural studies. For the record, this is a real video for teaching Japanese travelers useful phrases in English.

Don’t skip out before you see the aerobics section in the second half. If you’re anything like me, you’ll soon have new song to sing to yourself throughout the day.

Hum it a few times. It’s catchy.

Next: Print your furniture

In the latest issue of Dwell magazine I saw a short article on how a Dutch design firm called Freedom Of Creation is making furniture by printing it out. Three-dimensional printing is increasingly common as a tool for prototyping and design assessment, but that doesn’t go far enough to suit the folks at Freedom of Creation. They are actually printing out the final piece that gets delivered to the customer using a great big EOSINT polyamide laser sintering machine (a.k.a. the magic 3-d printer). Since the design goes directly from computer to product, no paper sketches or printouts are involved at any point. That’s just as well, because what they’re printing out, the Trabecula Table, is so complex (being modeled on the fine bone structure of bird bones) that drawing it wouldn’t be worth the trouble.

This is a good example of the future that is here but not yet widespread. At 12,500 euros, you might not jump at the chance to buy yourself a Trabecula Table. But other products, cheaper products, like this will follow soon enough.

Johnny Lee’s Wiimote magic

Via O’Reilly Radar I came across this video by Johnny Lee on DIY Multitouch with the Wiimote.

Johnny Chung Lee is a graduate student at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He’s a gifted hacker who realized that you can do a lot more with the Nintendo Wii remote than play games with it. The Wii remote is a cheap, well-engineered widget for accurately tracking up to four infrared light sources. That’s the short technical description, but I love the fact that guys like Johnny Lee can take that description and then say “Hey, I can take this and make a cheap electronic white board.”

Watch the video, and then look at the rest of his stuff on YouTube. The Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays is particularly impressive.

Meat shooting and Google baiting

If you don’t read the comments here, you may have missed the wonderful thing that Mary Beth did last week. After a brief discussion here about how all knowledge is a web search away once you remember to formulate the question, she went out and researched a topic that had mystified her for many years: the Meat Shoot.

Suppose you see a sign in front of a VFW hall that says “Meat Shoot, March 21st.” Here’s what I want to know: is that effective advertising or not? Is the VFW hall making a fair assumption that anyone who wants to come to a meat shoot already knows what one is? The good news is that it hardly matters anymore, because Mary Beth went and made a Meat Shoot entry in the Wikipedia, thereby making it that much easier for the casual meat shoot passerby to become informed. And just to show how much Google loves Wikipedia, as of this writing (and less than a week after the article was created), Mary Beth’s meat shoot article is in sixth place on the Google search for meat shoot.

Can you feel the Great Brain getting smarter? The synapses at the meat shoot neuron just got a little stronger, and gosh darn it, it makes me proud to be alive.

Sea songs and semantic distance

Here’s another one of those semantic distance stories: how long does it take to formulate the right question when you just know the answer is out there somewhere?

One of the various obscure records* in my house when I was growing up was Songs & Sounds of the Sea. It was a collection of sea chanteys recorded by National Geographic. I’d been looking for it over the years online and never had any luck. Because of its sentimental value, this recording is in the category of things I’d be happy to pay real money for if I could just find someone to sell it to me.

My web searches were thwarted partially because I had misremembered the name of the album as Men, Ships, and the Sea. This is in fact a book by Alan Villiers which we also had in the house when I was growing up. But there is no recording by this name, so I would curse and assume that no one had bothered to index this obscure album. I should have suspected that no recording is so obscure that nobody so much as mentions it once on the web. But then when I searched for individual songs I remembered, I sailed into another kind of semantic fog: there are lots and lots of sea chantey sites and recordings that masked the instance I was looking for.

Misremembered labels, over-rich results field… it made me wonder how many kinds of semantic fog there are. Or rather, what factors contribute to semantic distance?

At any rate, eventually I got lucky and found all the MP3s in the clear on this web page for Radio KRUD: Songs & Sounds of the Sea / Star Wars / Fresh KRUD. Enjoy. It may not be your cup of tea, but I know at least some family members out there who will be happy to rediscover this old friend.

* What do you even call these things anymore? LPs? Vinyl? Half the online population has never seen them.

Funny gene names

Do you suppose, if your house was knocked over by Hurricane Fifi, that you might feel more slighted than if the same damage had been done by a storm with a more muscular name? Generals have long understood the value of giving their military operations intimidating names like Rolling Thunder and Urgent Fury. If you have a rare disease, it can be a source of perverse comfort to know that it is named after a pair of stern and bespectacled Old World doctors like Creutzfeldt and Jakob or Kugelberger and Welander.

But geneticists and molecular biologists have a couple of strikes against them when it comes to naming genes. First of all, they tend to name genes for what happens when the gene doesn’t work, which ends up making a critical functionality sound like a problem. Thus eyeless helps make eyes. The other problem is that it never occurred to them that the silly inside-joke names they gave to their fruitfly genes would have such straightforward parallels in humans. As it says in the NY Times article ‘Sonic Hedgehog’ Sounded Funny, at First:

It’s a cute name when you have stupid flies and you call it a ‘turnip.’ … When it’s linked to development in humans, it’s not so cute any more.

I came across a link to the Times article because of an entertaining blog post from the bioinformaticist Nick Saunders: What’s in a (gene) name? . You never know when a name is going to matter.

Tom Lehrer, lost and found

On the subject of libraries, Boswell quotes Samuel Johnson thus: “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.”

What would Johnson make of the web? I think about this quote whenever I reflect on the fact that, to a fair approximation, all human knowledge is one Google search away. In other words, knowledge is of two kinds: that which we know, and that which we have the good sense to ask Google for. More succinctly, obscurity ain’t what it used to be. Obscurity is not the obscurity of the dusty book lost in the shadowy stacks. Obscurity is the obscurity of your inability to formulate a question in the first place. Once you can do that, there is no question about where to look.

befuddlement.png

This leads to a surprising conclusion. The more convenient the search, the more valuable the intrinsic knowledge. The distance between forming the question and finding the answer is vanishing. So relatively speaking, packing a lot of information into your head still pays. Take heart… that liberal arts education may pay off yet!

This all came to mind because of Tom Lehrer and my brother-in-law Joe. Joe sent me a link to some YouTube videos of Tom Lehrer performing songs of his that I know far too well. Did I want to see them? Of course I wanted to see them! I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to go looking for them before. Joe’s email nudged them “closer” to me, but really they were the same distance from me all along. Everything I want to know is right there, only I don’t yet know that I want to know it yet.

Enough. Now go watch Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.

Thanks Joe!