Author: gulley

Wave propagation in a Japanese medium

The summer is winding down, and it’s time for a nice relaxing visit to an uncrowded pool before the September stress sets in. Of course, if you live in Tokyo, it might be a little difficult to find an uncrowded swimming pool. You might end up at a place like this.

As it says on the Trends in Japan site that first posted this video, “If you get motion sickness easily, please do not watch this video.” Watching this video makes me queasy and claustrophobic. Imagine being in the middle of that.

And I can’t help but wonder about the physics of wave propagation through this flesh-and-floaties coagulation. It looks like some kind of slow motion earthquake on Coney Island. One question for you physicists: are Japanese swimmers an isotropic or anisotropic medium?

[seen on BoingBoing]

Python-Lehrer Tourette syndrome

Earlier this summer I attended my twentieth college reunion. I had a good time. I always have a good time at reunions. Earlier in my reunion-attending career, I had some misgivings, but over time it’s gotten much easier to simply visit with friends and remember the good times. The people I remember as jerks, they keep coming to reunions too, but they get fatter and fainter and more forgettable with each year. Eventually I expect them to disappear altogether.

With age comes perspective. One thing I finally came to terms with at this reunion was my longtime affliction with a social disease. The disease, Python-Lehrer Tourette syndrome, is common among a certain male-dominated geek population. It involves having quasi-appropriate phrases from various Monty Python skits and movies spring to mind throughout the day. During quiescent phases, these phrases can be suppressed. But when surrounded by those sharing the diagnosis (as at my recent reunion), the urge to utter all manner of Pythonesque non sequiturs can be overwhelming. Python-Lehrer sufferers, incidentally, are differentiated from their Python Tourette cousins by their interstitial allusions to the Tom Lehrer musical canon. There is also a notable subset of this malady (as yet without official diagnostic designation) known as Grailolalia, in which the victim specializes only in phrases from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Grailians are fine people, but not terribly nuanced.

I don’t worry much about this problem, and I’ve long since given up apologizing for it. But it is impressive to consider the degree to which this particular comedy troupe dominates the brain space of people like me. I’ve known a few people with Firesign Theater disease, but it’s nothing like the vast spawn of Python-quoters. Why is that? I believe there is a Shakespearean completeness to the Python repertoire. All the comical-tragical-historical varieties of silliness are there. They were around for so long, and they brought such disciplined seriousness to their absurdity, that there truly is something quotable for almost every situation. Furthermore, their absurdity sometimes touches on the profound. To my mind, King Arthur’s argument with a peasant about the origins of Excalibur is the last word on confusing mythology with journalism and the sacred with the profane: “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.” Petty literalism contending with religious mania. That, in a nutshell, is the drama of our age.

Of course, none of this stops Python-Lehrer Tourette syndrome from being intensely irritating to friends and family.

To which I say: Nih!

Desktop Factory: the latest word in 3-D printing

I like Desktop Engineering magazine because it covers the rapid prototyping and 3-D printing business. Printing in 3-D is every bit as magical as it sounds: you tell the machine what you want to make, and it comes out as a brand new three-dimensional solid object.

It sounds like some kind of Forbidden Planet science fiction, but there are still some significant limitations. For instance, you print using a single material (typically plastic or metal), so there’s no possibility of xeroxing your iPod. And whatever you print can be no larger than the print volume of the machine, which rules out printing yourself a new house. And until recently, the price was prohibitive. At just less than $40,000, ZCorp’s ZPrinter 450 was a relatively cheap new entrant. Nifty, but not the kind of thing to drop your spare change on.

But now along comes the Desktop Factory. They claim to be able to sell you a 3-D printer for $5000. That’s not lunch money, but it’s astonishingly cheap. The quality is predictably low, but it’s amazing the thing works at all at that price point. This is the laser printer of our age. What happens when it becomes easy and cheap to print novel 3-D objects?

Good stuff. I bet.

Biofuels are coming your way

When people hear about biofuels, they typically think of ethanol brewed from corn. That’s a reasonable association: this year the American corn crop is up nearly 20% from last year for this very reason. On the other hand, you might have also seen articles about the problems with the corn-to-ethanol process. Growing corn is, for example, so energy-intensive that it’s not clear you’re saving any greenhouse gas emissions or money by the time you’re done. It’s easy enough to see how the tractors and trucks required to harvest and transport corn use a lot of fuel, but many people don’t realize that the nitrogen-based fertilizer that gets dumped on cornfields by the ton is itself the product of a hot, expensive industrial process.

If that were where the story ended, it would all be quite sad. But there’s good news too. Life gets a lot better if you can make fuel out of stuff that we don’t eat, stuff like cornstalks, corncobs, cut grass, and wood chips. Life gets better still if the fuel you make isn’t ethanol, but something an awful lot like kerosene. This is exactly what a company called LS9 is doing. In fact there are several companies in this space: Amyris, Codon Devices, and Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics are all in the game.

As you can guess by the names, they’re not just using brewer’s yeast to do this. They’re doing serious microbial genetic manipulation. The results are very promising, and this will no doubt lead to some fascinating Green on Green violence. Quick: which is worse? Global warming or the widespread use of genetically modified organisms? Weeee’ll seeeee…

My source for this information is Rob Carlson’s excellent synthetic biology blog Synthesis. Here’s his latest post on LS9: LS9 – “The Renewable Petroleum Company”. Here’s a general one about synthetic biofuels: The Need for Fuels Produced Using Synthetic Biology.

Chester A. Who? The Presidents Quiz Game

Here is a diversion that is quick, fun, and educational, even if you’re a smarty-pants who can do the whole thing without a mistake: Can you name all the U.S. Presidents?

The interface is very pleasing. You just type in last names, one after another, and as soon as it recognizes one, it puts it in the right place quick as a wink. Once you’ve played the game to completion, they have another feature that shows who the most forgotten presidents are. I was correct in guessing that Chester A. Arthur was at the bottom of the barrel, being forgotten by more than half of the contestants, but Chester has company. Rutherford B. Hayes, that other middle-initial-totin’ Gilded Age cipher, scored equally poorly. And for persistent obscurity, it’s hard to beat the Run of the Antebellum Unknowns between Andrew Jackson and Abraham What’s-His-Name. The vacant Warren Gamaliel Harding was our most obscure 20th Century Chief Executive.

I can picture them there, all hanging out in the Dead Presidents’ Lounge. Naturally they are curious about the results of this contest. James Polk didn’t expect to do well, so he’s pleased to have Chester and Rutherford to pick on. But over at the cool kids’ table, you can just imagine how Teddy Roosevelt is giving Tommy Jefferson hell about coming in last in the Rushmore gang. Meanwhile, “Big George” Washington, who’s been at the brandy again, is re-telling the same old war stories while Abe rolls his eyes and tries to read his Harry Potter book.

Now you try the presidential challenge. Or just describe another scene from the Dead Presidents’ Lounge. What would Lyndon Johnson have to say to Andrew Johnson?

What’s happening to the sharks?

In the continuing series of strange animal vs. animal YouTube videos, here is one from the Seattle Aquarium. Poor little octopus. Sitting defenseless in a tank full of sharks. Poor little guy.

I suppose that if sharks made their own version of a movie like Jaws, it would be called Eight Legs. “Just when you thought it was safe to swim close to the coral…”

Heat map mashups: how do you feel about the rent?

I happened to spot these items in the same week, and it seemed a fairly obvious leap to mash them even further. Item number one is a heat map of rent and room availability in San Francisco: CraigStats. This is something that Zillow has been doing for a while, but CraigStats contains detailed information about renting (as opposed to buying with Zillow). So that’s all relatively interesting, but not exactly new.

But then I came across item number two: the BioMapping Project. What they’re doing is measuring your galvanic skin response, which is to say how sweaty you are, along with your GPS coordinates, all while you’re strolling around a neighborhood. It’s more art than science, but the intriguing premise is that you can generate some sort of aggregate emotion map of a neighborhood. Where do people get stressed out? Where are they relaxed? Here’s the data for the San Francisco emotion map.

Now you can imagine throwing these two maps together and you might get a sense for how the rent correlates with the stress level. It’s easy to guess that low-rent areas might give you the heebie-jeebies, but there might be some kind of bimodal distribution… I don’t know about you, but super-wealthy areas give me the creeps. Throw in a crime map and an ambient display on the end of your GPS-enabled walking stick, and you’ve built yourself an automatic Spidey-Sense. “On second thought, my dear, let us not stroll slowly through the Tenderloin District. I sense there’s mischief afoot.”

(via O’Reilly Radar)

Freeman Dyson’s biotech future

Freeman Dyson, the physicist, provocateur, and one-time colleague of Richard Feynman, has written a piece for the New York Review of Books called Our Biotech Future, and boy is it a doozy. This is no timid prediction about curing the common cold or even avoiding the next plague. It’s a full-on embrace of a bio-kaleidoscopic future. I’m not sure if he’s playing the I’m-old-and-I’ll-say-whatever-I-want card or if he’s always been this wild-eyed, but here’s a good sample quote:

The final step in the domestication of biotechnology will be biotech games, designed like computer games for children down to kindergarten age but played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen. Playing such games, kids will acquire an intimate feeling for the organisms that they are growing. The winner could be the kid whose seed grows the prickliest cactus, or the kid whose egg hatches the cutest dinosaur. These games will be messy and possibly dangerous.

You bet they will, Freeman! But that won’t stop us, right? Hey Mrs. Patterson! Billy’s cheating off my Ornithopsis genome!

Honestly, I admire him for writing this, and I admire the New York Review of Books for printing it. They must be taking bets in the editorial offices on how many letters this is going to draw. Someone needs to be talking like this, because the future of biotech is going to be a lot weirder than most people realize.

Things get really interesting when Dyson starts to compare the last few billion years of genomic evolution to evil proprietary software practices, as contrasted with a pre-Darwinian (and upcoming post-Darwinian) era of open-source horizontal gene transfer. For this last reference, he cites some fascinating papers by biologist Carl Woese. It’s wacky at times, but thoroughly thought provoking.

Unfortunately I don’t have time for further speculation… I’ve got to go tune the thagomizer on my dwarf stegosaur.