Category: goo brain

Old Man Sharkey

Greenland Shark from National GeographicWhile doing some research, I came across a few odd facts regarding the Greenland Shark that I wanted to pass on. For example: no one is really sure of their exact lifespan, but wikipedia presents the general consensus:

The Greenland shark is known to be long-lived, with an estimated maximum life span of over 200 years.

No worries though – this old fellow, despite being nearly blind from a parasite eating its corneas, has a meal plan:

This shark has a bioluminescent ( glowing ) copepods attached to the Greenland shark’s corneas. This may attract curious prey to the shark’s head. – aasharks.com

He’s also a bit of a grump, and doesn’t take guff from any hooligan polar bears who may want to play on his front lawn.

Scientists researching how far sharks hunt seals in the Arctic were stunned in June to find part of the jaw of a young polar bear in the stomach of a Greenland shark, a species that favours polar waters. – dailymail.co.uk

I see a movie deal on SyFy in this guy’s future.Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus

Into The Meat Machine

Meat Lamp by Auger-Loizeau Carnivorous Domestic Robot EntertainmentThere seems to be some growing fear regarding robots that eat flesh. “Robots that eat flesh?” some of you may be asking – this NPR piece provides a great overview:

This carnivorous clock (“8 dead flies makes it work for about 12 days,” says co-designer Professor Chris Melhuish, of Bristol Robotics) is just a prototype. It doesn’t catch enough flies to power the motor on top and the digital clock. But this is just a first step.

The lamp pictured above is something along the same lines; the light attracts flies, which the shade then consumes, and the winged-meal goes on to power the bulb.

These items are really just art pieces – the truth is that microbial fuel cell technology just isn’t advanced enough yet to turn this into a functional item for the home – but people are already feeling a little queasy about the notion.

I understand their trepidation, but I must heartily disagree.

I’ve long argued that battery technology is the next critical area of development in the march of progress, and it seems pretty logical to me that the energy we require might come from the same source as our own bodies. Consider how much we accomplish, and how little, comparatively, we require to achieve those tasks.

How many AA-batteries would we require to power ourselves for a full work day? How many watts does it take to clean a kitchen or vacuum a living room?
iRobot's RoombaPeople are put off by the notion that we might one day be feeding household pests to our Roombas, but consider that this is really just the first step towards a future in which we can toss a Big Mac into the back of our television in exchange for a month’s worth of Dancing With The Stars, at no additional electrical cost.

Power outage? You don’t need to worry about the stuff in your fridge going bad, you’ll be able to dump it directly into your generator.

A final thought:

According to a new policy brief issued by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Stockholm International Water Institute and the International Water Management Institute, huge amounts of food — close to half of all food produced worldwide — are wasted after production. – treehugger.com

Mr Fusion from the film Back To The Future

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(Second hat-tip of the day to BMJ2k, for throwing me the link that inspired this piece.)

Humanity In (and On) Jeopardy

Watson Crushes Jeopardy!There’s a lot of hubbub right now about Watson conquering Jeopardy, and I wanted to step in to help put some of the fire out.

First of all, though, I find it odd that people don’t really understand that the interesting bit about this win isn’t related to the fact that the computer knows the answer to the question – this is no more impressive than discovering a set of paper-based Britannica Encyclopedias contains the approximate population of Malaysia.

The tricky bit for the engineers was in teaching the computer to interpret the format in which Jeopardy presents its questions, (answers, really,) so that it could dig through its on-board memory for the correct nugget. As Barry, over at Mr Blog’s recently mentioned, you can’t stuff any old search term into something like Wikipedia in the hopes of getting the right answer – even Google is just making its best guess when you start looking for “Mexican skull recipe”.

Watson’s creators needed to find a way to take that textual clue, then backtrack it to a reasonable answer – and they did.
Lego Sugar Skull Illustration by Jonathan KoshiSo, now that a self contained search-bot has defeated us in the most critical of arenas, Jeopardy, what do we do? Give up? Start betting on competing trivia-computers? Search for John Connor?

No.

The time has come for humanity to get serious about next steps, and I don’t just mean as it relates to television game shows. Computers have defeated us in chess, Jeopardy, and Street Fighter II, but it isn’t that they’re somehow a malevolent force that’s putting us out to pasture, instead we need to consider how we can use personalized technologies to better augment ourselves.

Could Watson have won so handily if Ken Jennings had been allowed a laptop, with wifi access, on his podium? Probably, because fingers are meaty and slow – but could it have won if Ken Jennings had an interface implanted directly into his brain?

Suddenly it becomes a race related to reasoning, and not simply data correlation.

Are we going to cancel baseball once we discover that wheeled robots – with high-end sensor suites and mechanical reflexes – can out-run, out-bat, and out-catch, a human? Or are we going to slap some pistons into Derek Jeter and move the home-run fence back a bit?
Super Baseball 2020 Ad

Unpacking Peanuts

Peanut Butter and Bacon Sandwich, from wikimedia.org/You can’t swing a fourth-grader these days without being warned about peanut allergies in schools, and I wanted to share a brief thought on the situation.

First, an overview:

New research indicates that early exposure to peanuts—most commonly peanut butter—and increasing consumption of it may be contributing to the prevalence of the allergy. Although there are no hard statistics in Canada, most agree the allergy is on the rise. – calgaryallergy.ca

Now, I don’t mean to be morbid, and I certainly don’t have any hard data to back the wild postulation I’m about to make, but, consider this:

There were 112 deaths associated with the construction of the [Hoover] dam. Included in that total was J. G. Tierney, a surveyor who drowned on December 20, 1922, while looking for an ideal spot for the dam. He is generally counted as the first man to die in the construction of Hoover Dam. His son, Patrick W. Tierney, was the last man to die working on the dam’s construction, 13 years to the day later. – wikipedia

Hoover Dam, from wikimedia.org/That factoid may seem unrelated to peanuts, but I mention it as an example – one of thousands – regarding how cheaply death came, even just 90 years ago.

(These days any construction project that cost the lives of over a hundred workers would be easily spotted from the air, as the lines of approaching lawyers would stretch well over the surrounding horizon.)

What if it’s not the case that peanut allergies are on the rise, but, instead, that better care taking, and science, are simply keeping those at risk alive long enough for us to notice the need to take precautions?

Spirits & Salty Water

Concept art for the Flying Dutchman from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's ChestI assume you’re familiar with the Flying Dutchman, but have you ever heard the legend of the S.S. Ourang Medan?

In June, 1947, supposedly a distress signal was received by two American vessels, from a Dutch cargo-ship.

A radio operator aboard the troubled vessel reported the deaths of the ship’s captain as well as all of its officers, and possibly the entire crew, before sending out further garbled messages and finally declaring himself in dying condition with the words “I die”. – wikipedia

Anywhere we find loneliness, or a long disconnect from humanity, we seem to attribute the supernatural, or the bizarre. Tales of ghost ships stretch through history, (there’s even a handy list on wikipedia,) but they aren’t the only sea-story in which the barrier between reality and folklore grows thin.

A Fata Morgana is an unusual and very complex form of mirage, [which] is seen in a narrow band right above the horizon. It is an Italian phrase derived from the vulgar Latin for “fairy” and the Arthurian sorcerer Morgan le Fay, from a belief that the mirage, often seen in the Strait of Messina, were fairy castles in the air or false land designed to lure sailors to their death created by her witchcraft. – wikipedia

Carl Banks Oil Painting.The legend of the Flying Dutchman may have originated with sailors observing the reflection of an actual ship on the horizon, as projected onto the sky. The Ourang Medan, on the other hand, existed at sea level.

When the Silver Star crew located and boarded the apparently undamaged Ourang Medan in a rescue attempt, the ship was found littered with corpses (including the carcass of a dog) in what appeared to be terrified postures, with no survivors and no visible signs of injuries on the dead bodies. – wikipedia

In an odd way, these types of legends are a little like hearing a ghost transport truck story out of one of the Ice Road Truckers – actually, I suppose Pee Wee’s Big Adventure covered that exact angle.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-Pdlxd_rro]

In the case of the Ourang Medan, however, the truth of the matter is tough to know: as the ship was purportedly being hauled to port, it exploded and sank. While some skeptics doubt the ship ever even existed, another possible theory has been put forth:

Bainton and others hypothesize that the Ourang Medan might have been involved in smuggling operations of chemical substances such as a combination of potassium cyanide and nitroglycerin or even wartime stocks of nerve agents. According to these theories, sea water would have entered the ship’s hold, reacting with the cargo to release toxic gases, which then caused the crew to succumb to asphyxia and/or poisoning. Later, the sea water would have reacted with the nitroglycerin, causing the reported fire and explosion. – wikipedia

The Dutch merchantman Ottoland had almost completed her journey from New Brunswick, Canada when she hit a mine in the North Sea on 5th October 1940. - http://ww2today.com/5th-october-1940-yetanother-merchant-ship-sunk

Confessions of a Paranoid Internet User

Confession by Giuseppe Maria Crespi, 1712Have you heard about the new Roman Catholic confessional iPhone application? It’s creating quite a stir.

From switched.com:

The app, which markets itself to “those who frequent the sacrament and those who wish to return,” offers a guide to the confession, and keeps a password-protected log of users’ sins.

Now, while I’m no longer a practicing Roman Catholic, I’ve long felt that confession was useful as a sort of proto-psychiatrist’s couch – although the confessor may not be getting sound psychological advice, often just the act of talking to someone about the things we keep hidden can be helpful in relieving a burdened mind.

That said, my first response when I heard about this application was to flip into Collective Detective mode.

Let’s say you’re a good RC, and you’re tracking your confessions, saving up those sins for a rainy Sunday. You’re a stiff-collared fellow, but the flesh is weak – you’ve occasionally relieved the supply shelf at work of excess sticky pads, and, in an effort to avoid using contraceptives, you often conduct a little five-finger shuffle after the lady of the house has retired.

Confession App

It’s not like you’ve ever murdered anyone, but you like to keep an honest chronicle of your minor-misdeeds, and you track your habits meticulously.

What you don’t know, however, is that each time you update your log of immorality, your confession goes straight from your fingers to AngryCoder69’s database. One day you get an email: “I know about the stapler you stole. Buy my new game, Mr Muncher’s Mixed Up Mulberries, or I’ll be in touch with your office.”
Milton, with stapler, from Office SpaceSure, that may sound far fetched, but what if we tighten the noose a little? What if it’s “pay $200 to this anonymous paypal account, or I’ll inform your boss about what a fun time you had last Tuesday, while visiting with Ms. Schmackelheimer in the server closet?”

Pigeon Holes

Pigeon PilotLike many people with a recognizable surname, I sometimes get questions from people regarding a non-relative – in my case, B.F. Skinner.

While I do find his work in behavioral conditioning interesting, I’ve always loved another of his inventions, and wish it was the one that had made his (our) name famous.

From the wikipedia:

[During WWII] [t]he US Navy required a weapon effective against the German Bismarck class battleships. Although missile and TV technology existed, the size of the primitive guidance systems available rendered any weapon ineffective.

What does a psychologist best known for working with animals have to do with missiles?

The project centered on dividing the nose cone of a missile into three compartments, and encasing a pigeon in each. Each compartment used a lens to project an image of what was in front of the missile onto a screen. The pigeons would peck toward the object, thereby directing the missile.

Pigeon Missile PrototypeThat’s right, the war could have been won with kamikaze pigeon pilots, if anyone had been able to take the idea seriously. Despite some apparent success in training and testing, the project was canned – but that wasn’t the only animal-weapon the military was dealing with at the time.

Again from the wikipedia:

Bat bombs were bomb-shaped casings with numerous compartments, each containing a Mexican Free-tailed Bat with a small timed incendiary bomb attached. Dropped from a bomber at dawn, the casings would deploy a parachute in mid-flight and open to release the bats which would then roost in eaves and attics. The incendiaries would start fires in inaccessible places in the largely wood and paper construction of the Japanese cities that were the weapon’s intended target.

After some testing, including an accident in which the Auxiliary Army Air Base in Carlsbad, New Mexico, was set on fire, the batbomb was also shelved – in favour of the “simpler” solution of dropping atomic weaponry.Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb!

One Possible Ending

Fussli, Johann Heinrich (Henry Fuseli) - The Night-Hag Visiting the Lapland Witches c. 1796The other day I heard an interesting tale regarding the island of Sardinia, which, frankly, had me thinking of Mother Gran. After doing some poking around, I came across some great information on Andrew Collins’ page on Sardinian Mysteries, from which all of the following quotes are taken.

Have you heard of an Accabadora? After reading this, you may be glad you haven’t – but let me say, the Eskimos have nothing on the Sardinians.

There would only ever be one accabadora in any one generation. Each would serve the local community until their own death, a successor having already been appointed and prepared for the role. Justification for the existence of the accabadora was offered in the fact that only a woman can bring life into the world, so only a woman can take it away.

I’m not sure what the resume for applicants to the role would look like; must have a strong arm, powerful thighs, an iron stomach, and an overwhelming hatred of the aged and sick?

[…] a mature woman who was appointed by a community to apply euthanasia to the old and the infirm. It is something she would carry out with the utmost precision using a cudgel made from a section of a tree branch from which extends another branch, the whole thing cut to form a hammer-like weapon similar in appearance to the Irish shillelagh stick. Another means of inducing death used by the accabadora was strangulation, either by applying pressure to the neck or by placing the victim’s neck between her knees

A Mazzulo, the stick used to end people.