Science Corner - This Recording

Friday

Feb062009

SCIENCE CORNER

In Which They Are So Simple Yet So Complex

Friday, February 6, 2009 at 12:00PM

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Ernst Haeckel's Radiolaria

by Melanie Strong

German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) is not considered a household name by any means. His varied and extensive work gave rise to the terms ecology and First World War, the rise of Darwinism as a valid theory and the discovery and proposal of the Protista kingdom of organisms within biology.

Perhaps his greatest and most enduring work is found in his artistic endeavors, in which he sought to combine his creative vision with his desire for scientific accuracy.

firstone

Haeckel's focus for many years was an intricate, single-celled organism known as a Radiolarian. In his initial work with them, he found, named and depicted over 150 diverse species. He would go on to document thousands more.

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Radiolarian are single-celled, oceanic organisms. Their cell is separated by a tiny central capsule into endo- and ectoplasm and it is on this endoplasmic exterior that amazingly intricate mineral skeletons are composed. Their remains comprise the majority of the ocean's worldwide fossil record, especially in shallow coastal waters.

haeckel_cyrtoidea

Explanations for this organism's intricately patterned silica skeleton are disputed. Most believe that it allows for feeding and buoyancy.

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The perpetually symmetrically patterned perforations form gradually as the organism feeds and the leftover skeleton is extracted from a build up of minerals and silica.

The radiolarians' inherent two-dimensional nature is directly altered by the effect of this process and it becomes an elaborate three-dimensional, microscopic structure.

haeckel_phaeodaria_61

While Ernst Haeckel was not the first or last scientist to work with radiolarian, his art and his work remain today as a testament to the marriage that can exist between the two. Haeckel believed that all shapes found in nature exist in radiolaria and wondered if God did not use these tiny creatures as a drawing board for further design.

haeckel_spumellaria

Haeckel's work, life and the science of the times is outlined extensively in Icarus' Films award winning Proteus: A Nineteen Century Vision. Drawing on the apparent dichotomy in Haeckel's life (art versus science and then the twinning of the two), Proteus explores the complex simplicity in radiolarians and in science itself.

Melanie Strong is the senior contributor to This Recording. She also is an asshole on tumblr!

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"Öngyilkos Vasárnap" - Venetian Snares (mp3)

"Strange Love (Don't Be Lazy)" - Brent Randall & His Pinecones (mp3)

"Ping Pong" - Stereolab (mp3)

meowfic

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2 Comments |

7 References |

The Early History Of Robots

Wednesday

Jan072009

In Which We Promise Not To Apophallate You

Wednesday, January 7, 2009 at 6:38AM

SCIENCE CORNER '09: Hey, Space Brother

by Molly Lambert

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Paleontologists claim they have unearthed a new type of pterosaur and a previously unknown sauropod dinosaur in the Sahara Desert.

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The banana slug, beloved mascot of UC Santa Cruz, has a weird mating habit. First of all, they have an enormous penis. (In fact, their latin name dolichyphallus translates to "giant penis.") The average size of a banana slug penis is 6 to 8 inches. This is incredibly impressive, considering their entire body length is 6 to 8 inches as well! Banana slugs are hermaphrodites, so two slugs will try to fertilize each other.

bananaslug

To mate properly, a slug must choose a mate roughly its own size - if it miscalculates, its penis will get stuck during copulation. This isn’t just an embarrassing faux pas, the other slug will actually bite off the stuck penis, a term scientists euphemistically called "apophallation."

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wats ur fave color of am appy neon techno mice powder?

Psychedelic Mice Reveal Clues to Disease Transmission

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the rare pink iguana

An extinct phylum that made pearls, Conularids.

Gremlins, thought extinct, found after 82 years.

Giant Marine Life Found In Antarctica, including jellyfish with 12-foot tentacles and 2-foot-wide starfish. Learn more about how Jellyfish are going to take over the world and enslave us all Cthulhu style.

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Salt Deposits a good indicator of Ancient Life On Mars

Frozen Semen Works in Rhinoceros Artificial Insemination

Yum, nootropics.

Some of the chemical pathways for physical pain and pain from social exclusion overlap. The physical pain system may have been co-opted to motivate social animals to respond to threats to their inclusion in the group. The physical-social pain overlap helps to explain the paradox that people who are threatened with social exclusion sometimes react with physical violence.

All octopuses are venomous but only a few species pose a significant threat to humans, such as octopuses in the genus Hapalochlaena which have a very poisonous bite.

blue_ringed_octopus_465x310

A few of the larger tropical cone snail species have a very poisonous sting. These bites and stings can sometimes be fatal.

Ouroboros researches aging.

Maximum Life Span.

Identical twins tend to die within 3 years of each other, whereas fraternal twins tend to die within 6 years. Aging theories associated with DNA include programmed aging (or programmed aging-resistance) and theories that link aging with DNA damage/mutation or DNA repair capability.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording

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090106-pink-mouse-ff

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4 References |

Historical Gallery Of Automatons

Thursday

Oct162008

In Which Robots Are Your Homies

Thursday, October 16, 2008 at 10:00AM

Scarier than E.T.A. Hoffman's The Sandman, more terrifying than Fritz Lang's Metropolis, realer than Blade Runner, the complete horrific history of Robots and Replicants, courtesy of Molly Lambert's Science Corner at This Recording.

SCIENCE CORNER

Special Edition: History Of Humanoids

by Molly Lambert

A.E. reborn as a HUBO in A.I.

PART ONE: The Uncanny Valley

Since 30 Rock is throwing out references to The Uncanny Valley and in preparation for WALL•E, I thought I'd take some time to discuss one of my all-time favorite subjects. Androids, Gynoids, and all kinds of robotic horrors to give you a Frankenstein complex. Step into my Wunderkammern...

The Uncanny Valley is a hypothetical concept introduced by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, and has been linked to Ernst Jentsch's concept of "the uncanny" as first identified in his 1906 essay, "On the Psychology of the Uncanny." Jentsch's conception was famously elaborated on by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay "The Uncanny" ("Das Unheimliche").

The Uncanny Valley

The Uncanny Valley is the hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not entirely, like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion in human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's lifelikeness.

"Please don't make me go to Auschwitz Mr. CGI Tom Hanks"

A similar problem arises in 3D computer animation that attempts realism, especially with motion capture methods as used in Final Fantasy, The Polar Express and Beowulf. Most CGI suffers from this to some extent. For my money nobody (including, especially, Peter Jackson and LOThR) has surpassed the realism of fifteen year old movie Jurassic Park, which heavily augmented computer graphics with traditional animatronics.

T-REX SAYS "ALL YOUR HOBBITS ARE BELONG TO US!!!!!"

Some theorists and scientists (and Tess) think crossing the Uncanny Valley will lead to accepting the possibilities of Transhumanism. These are the folks who think that steroids aren't necessarily bad for sports, that nootropics aren't cheating nature but enhancing it, and that the fear of post-humans is just alarmism about the future and what is as yet unfamiliar or unknown.

The Second Uncanny Valley

Transhumanists support the use of new sciences and technologies to enhance human mental and physical abilities and aptitudes, and fix what it regards as undesirable or unnecessary aspects of the human condition, such as stupidity, suffering, disease, aging and involuntary death.

Transhumanist thinkers predict that human beings will eventually be able to transform themselves into beings with such greatly expanded abilities as to merit the label "posthuman." It recalls eugenics with a modern technological twist, the racism against mutants in the Uncanny X-Men, and the Mecha suit of Iron Man.

PART TWO: Early Innovations In Automatons

I. Al-Jazari

Abū al-'Iz Ibn Ismā'īl ibn al-Razāz al-Jazarī (1136-1206) (Arabic: أَبُو اَلْعِزِ بْنُ إسْماعِيلِ بْنُ الرِّزاز الجزري) was an important Iraqi Artuqid Muslim scholar, artist, astronomer, craftsman, inventor and mechanical engineer from al-Jazira, Mesopotamia who flourished during the Islamic Golden Age (Middle Ages).

Al-Jaziri’s Elephant Clock replicated in Dubai's Ibn Battuta Mall

He is best known for writing the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices in 1206, where he described fifty mechanical devices. Al-Jazari invented automated moving peacocks driven by hydropower, the earliest known automatic gates, which were driven by hydropower, and created automatic doors as part of one of his elaborate water clocks.

Al-Jazari's musical automatons

Al-Jazari created a musical automaton, which was a boat with four automatic musicians that floated on a lake to entertain guests at royal drinking parties. Professor Noel Sharkey has argued that it is quite likely that it was an early programmable automata and has produced a possible reconstruction of the mechanism.

Diagram Of The Floating Musical Automatons

It has a programmable drum machine with pegs (cams) that bump into little levers that operated the percussion. The drummer could be made to play different rhythms and different drum patterns if the pegs were moved around. According to Charles B. Fowler, the automata were a "robot band" which performed "more than fifty facial and body actions during each musical selection."

II. Pierre Jaquet-Droz

Pierre Jaquet-Droz (1721-1790) was a Swiss-born watchmaker of the late eighteenth century. He lived in Paris, London, and Geneva, where he designed and built animated dolls, or automata, to help his firm sell watches and mechanical birds.

I know why the caged bird sings. It's a robot.

Constructed by Pierre Jaquet-Droz and his son were The Writer (made of 6000 pieces), The Musician (2500 pieces) and The Draughtsman (2000 pieces). His astonishing mechanisms fascinated the world's most important people: the kings and emperors of Europe, China, India and Japan.

Some consider these devices to be the oldest examples of the computer. The Writer has an input device to set tabs that form a programmable memory, 40 cams that represents the read only program, and a quill pen for output. The work of Pierre Jaquet-Droz predates that of Charles Babbage by decades.

The automata of Jaquet-Droz are also considered to be some of the finest examples of human mechanical problem solving. Three particularly complex, and still working and functional dolls are housed at the art and history museum in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, now known as the Jaquet-Droz automata. There's a scene in (one of my favorite movies) The Thief Of Baghdad referencing this anecdote, which I'd never heard until now:

Droz built a clock which was capable of movement: when the clock struck, a shepherd played six tunes on his flute, and a dog approached and fawned upon him. This clock was exhibited to the King of Spain, who was delighted with it. "If your Majesty touch one of the apples," said Droz "which you see in the shepherd's basket, you will admire the fidelity of this animal."

The King took an apple, and the mechanical dog flew at his hand and barked so loudly that the King's real dog began also to bark; at this the Courtiers, hastily left the room crossing themselves, believing it to be witchcraft. The minister of Marine was the only one that ventured to stay.

III. Jacques de Vaucanson

Jacques de Vaucanson gained his interest in mechanical devices after meeting the surgeon Le Cat, from whom he would learn the details of anatomy. This new knowledge allowed him to develop his first mechanical devices that mimicked biological vital functions such as circulation, respiration, and digestion.

In 1737, he built his first automaton, The Flute Player, a life-size figure of a shepherd that played the tabor and the pipe and had a repertoire of twelve songs. The figure's fingers were not pliable enough to play the flute correctly, so Vaucanson had to glove the creation in skin.

The following year, in early 1738, he presented his creation to the Académie des Sciences. At the time, mechanical creatures were somewhat a fad in Europe, but most could be classified as toys, and de Vaucanson's creations were recognized as being revolutionary in their mechanical life-like sophistication.

Later that year, he created two additional automatons, The Tambourine Player and The Digesting Duck, which is considered his masterpiece. The duck had over 400 moving parts, and could flap its wings, drink water, digest grain, and defecate. Although the duck supposedly demonstration digestion accurately, it actually contained a hidden compartment of "digested food," so that what the duck shat out was not the same as what it ate.

While such "frauds" were sometimes controversial, they were common because scientific demonstrations needed to entertain the wealthy and powerful to attract their patronage. The Digesting Duck followed the principles of Descartes’s mechanistic universe, and bolstered the Enlightenment-era belief that animals were just meat machines, but automatons nonetheless.

The ability to create life no longer was the domain of God and of living organisms, but was now captive in the hands of man’s genius. These ideas terrified and excited many people, but were one of the major ideological changes from a natural to a mechanistic world view.

IV. Von Kemeplen's Hoax

The Turk or Automaton Chess Player was a chess-playing machine of the late 18th century, exhibited from 1770 for over 84 years, by various owners, as an automaton but later explained in January 1857 as an elaborate hoax.

Constructed and unveiled in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734–1804) to impress the Empress Maria Theresa, the mechanism appeared to be able to play a strong game of chess against a human opponent, as well as perform the knight's tour, a puzzle that requires the player to move a knight to occupy every square of a chessboard once and only once.

Publicly promoted as an automaton and given its common name based on its appearance, the Turk was in fact a mechanical illusion that allowed a human chess master hiding inside to operate the machine. With a skilled operator, the Turk won most of the games played during its demonstrations around Europe and the Americas for nearly 84 years until its destruction by fire in 1854, playing and defeating many challengers including statesmen such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Although many had suspected the hidden human operator, the hoax was formally revealed in a series of articles in The Chess Monthly in 1857.

The Turk was visited in London by Rev. Edmund Cartwright in 1784. He was so intrigued by the Turk that he would later question whether "it is more difficult to construct a machine that shall weave than one which shall make all the variety of moves required in that complicated game." Cartwright would patent the prototype for a power loom within the year.

Sir Charles Wheatstone, an inventor, saw a later appearance of the Turk while it was owned by Mälzel. He also saw some of Mälzel's speaking machines, and Mälzel later presented a demonstration of speaking machines to Alexander Melville Bell and his teenage son. Wheatstone lent a book by Kempelen about the speaking machines to the son, Alexander Graham Bell; Bell would go on to invent the telephone.

Ajeeb, another chess playing automaton hoax

In Richmond, Virginia, the Turk was observed by Edgar Allan Poe, who was writing for the Southern Literary Messenger. Poe's famous essay "Maelzel's Chess Player" was published in April 1836 and is the most well-known analysis of the Turk, even though many of Poe's hypotheses were incorrect.

In 1849, just several years before the Turk was destroyed, Edgar Allan Poe published a tale "Von Kempelen and His Discovery". It also inspired "Moxon's Master", a morbid tale by Ambrose Bierce about a chess-playing automaton that resembles the Turk.

V. The Golden Age Of Automatons

a. Vichy

Vichy was known for the subtlety of motion their automata possessed. Vichy showed several automata at Paris Universal Exposition of 1878. One observer noted that, "...Vichy's automata are distinguished by the flexibility and precision of their gestures...". One hundred and thirty years later, they are still horrifically lifelike.

b. Leopold Lambert

Léopold Lambert, was born on October 8, 1854 in Aix-en-Provence (France). His parents were inn keepers. He worked some time in the Vichy society, where his competence and the quality of his work earned him the post of foreman. In 1886, Lambert formed his own company and sold musical mechanical toys and luxurious articles.

Toward 1876, he married a young parisian dressmaker who dressed the automata created by her husband. The Lambert pieces were of two kinds: those manufactured with few specimens, even single, and others, made in series; these last are, generally, of small girls with porcelain heads. They are in general equipped with three or four movements: they turned the head and greet, raise and lower the arms, and differ from each other mainly by their costumes and their accessories.

Lambert was rewarded with diplomas of honor in Liege in 1904, and Milan in 1905, then abruptly, his name ceases to appear among the participants in the international demonstrations. From 1910 the society started a slow but final decline. During the epoch of electric and advertising automata, Lambert had remained faithful to the mechanical automata. The sales slowed down and had difficulty earning a living at his trade. His automata survived him.

c. Roullet & Decamps

Roullet et Decamps, one of the most versatile and creative of all the Paris automaton makers, was in business for more than 120 years. Its remarkable accomplishments began in 1866 with mechanical toys, then musical automatons, and finally, in the first years of the twentieth century, electric automated displays for store windows.

O God help us they are self-replicating!

By 1995, when the firm closed its doors for the last time, the craft of the automaton maker was recognized as a cultural asset worthy of preservation. The French government established a state-of-the-art museum in the village of Souillac, a popular tourist destination in France's scenic Dordogne Valley. The Roullet and Decamps collection of antique automatons and electrically-operated automated displays was saved, along with tools, machinery, molds, parts, and materials that were used in the workshops.

d. Phalibois

Jean Marie Phalibois was born on October 29, 1835 in Paris. In 1871 he set up his shop and devoted himself to the production of scenes mecaniques, which were little scenes placed on wooden bases featuring monkeys, tightrope walkers, conjurers, etc.

Phalibois took part in the Paris Exhibition of 1878. This year also marked a turning point in his firm's orientation, for he began to produce more and more mechanical toys with music. In 1893, Phalibois retired from his business and turned control of the firm to his son Henry. In 1925, the family firm came to an end when Henry's son, Raymond, sold off the firm.

VI. Leonardo Torres y Quevedo

El Ajedrecista ("The Chess Player") was an automaton built in 1912 by Leonardo Torres y Quevedo. El Ajedrecista made a public debut during the Paris World Fair of 1914, creating great excitement at the time. It was first widely mentioned in Scientific American as "Torres and His Remarkable Automatic Devices" in November 6th, 1915.

Quevedo's Niagara Falls Whirlpool Aero Car

Using electromagnets under the board, it automatically played a three chesspiece endgame moving a King and a Rook against a human opponent King. By today's engineering standards, the automata built by Quevedo would not be viewed as remarkable. However, they were considered revolutionary in their day. If an illegal move were made by the opposite player the automaton would signal it. As opposed to The Turk and Ajeeb, El Ajedrecista was a true automaton built to play chess without human guidance.

LINKS TO LEARN EVEN MORE ABOUT AUTOMATONS

Timeline Of Automatons

The Murtogh D Guinness Collection At The Morris Museum

Da Vinci Automata

Time To Get Transhumanist

Robot Fetishism

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording

Cabinet Of Wonders

La Cité De L'Automate

Automata/Automaton Blog

SONGS SO YOU CAN CRANK THAT

Many Moons (Trackademics Remix) - Janelle Monae: (mp3)

Violet Stars Happy Hunting! - Janelle Monae: (mp3)

Call The Law - Outkast ft. Janelle Monae: (mp3)

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30 References |