ferkeltongs

Here's a graph I hadn't seen before. Browser usage from 1996-2009:

source

Just look at all those people! (Still only a sixth of the world is online though...)

I'm old enough to remember using CompuServe in the early 90's before the web came along, dialling into its proprietary 'forums' which looked much like the web does now but had to be accessed through their own software. Thank god html and www came along, else we might still be stuck using different software for different websites. Hooray for open standards.

There's something melancholy about this robot trying to find a place to plug itself in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S2dc_B-6Kg

The humans applaud at the end but I don't think the robot is happy. He just looks exhausted.

Notice the bits on plaster on the floor below plug 9, where the robot's febrile stabbing has chipped away at the wall.

The project is from WillowGarage who are the current sponsors of the amazing OpenCV.

(via DVICE)

These are some thoughts about The Fountain. If you haven't seen it yet then please stop reading.



We re-watched it two nights ago. I think it is my favourite film. Certainly in my top 3. Everyone seems to disagree on what it is about, which is a good thing.

It's a sci-fi film (unless you view certain scenes as allegorical) about a tormented man who discovers the fountain of youth (a tree) in South America and thus lives into the far future, forever haunted by memories. Filmed almost entirely without computer graphics, the space scenes (as in the poster above) are astonishingly beautiful. It is Darren Aronofsky's third film, after Pi and Requiem for a Dream.

Hugh Jackman (in the DVD extras interview) said he thought it was about the resolution (on a personal level) of yin-yang dichotomies such as between the Christian Bible's Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge.

For me the film (much like The Matrix) is Buddhist in nature, and captures the ultimate realization that the state of being alive and of being conscious are both merely rearrangements of the atoms of the world, and thus illusory. The main character conquers death both on a personal level and in the real world.

Mnki suggested that the film represents what is common to all religions: the need for a comforting explanation of death. We talked about how religions have evolved with the times and adapted to keep their explanations relevant. Maybe Christianity, as one of the newer religions, has one of the least convincing explanations because it is so obviously a product of modern (two-thousand year old) thinking. She then said: "nobody fully accepts their religion intellectually" which is quite shocking and probably true.

I got a lot more out a second viewing. Much of the photography is heavily coded with colour: gold and white. Other imagery that appears throughout includes a star field (the hanging candles in Spain, the glass of the hospital door) and two lights on either side of the main character that mirror the film's Mayan nebula Xibalba. All of these visual references (and I really don't think I'm over-interpreting this) add to the film's growing sense of impending doom. It's one of those films where knowing what's going to happen can actually enhance its power.

I don't know what I came here to say, other than that I had to write this down. Hello.

Q: How many fingers does an alien have?
A: Ten

I bet this has been asked as an awkward interview question.

Hey wow! Steve Grand has read my cells paper. See the comments at the bottom here:
http://stevegrand.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/where-do-those-damn-atoms-go/

His book "Creation: Life and How to Make It" is a really good overview of what artificial life might mean, I've read it several times.

Here's hoping Simbiosis (if it ever gets made) has a decent low-level approach. It could be awesome.

I'm rubbish at typing. My index fingers look like the contestants in the Crystal Maze, frantically grabbing at the shiny bits of paper falling around them.

Here's what my overcaffeinated fingers decided to write today:

GetFukebane

Yes, my right hand was one key to the left of where it should have been. You should be able to work out what I had hoped to type.

Being a parent drives you mad sometimes, but in a good way.

Watching children's TV will do it, for example. I find that I love the lyrics to the 'springtime' ident on CBeebies. It has the most ridiculous rhymes:

Birds get busy. 
   Bees get buzzy
Bushes and the hedgerows.
   Start to get all fuzzy

More lyrics, and the video, here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/presenters/music/spring.shtml

(WARNING! Video contains small children dressed as adults.)

In tribute to J. G. Ballard I'd like to share this story of his.

It's called 'The Index', and you can read it online:



(This loads Amazon's `look inside' feature (needs javascript). Click on the link on the left: 'Index'.)

The story takes the form of an index of a (non-existent) book. You can work out what happens to the main character (HRH) through the references listed. Fortunately he lives his life in a remarkably alphabetical order.

There's a review and explanation of the story here:
http://www.ballardian.com/indexed-out-of-existence

The amusing thing is that Amazon don't seem to have realised that they've actually made one of his stories available - they think they've uploaded the actual index of 'War Fever', the volume in which the story appears. This mistake is itself a tribute to Ballard, in a way.

Without any meaning
We're just skin and bone
Like beautiful robots dancing alone

Girls Aloud - Untouchable

I think I must confess that for a while now I have secretly been a fan of Girls Aloud. They've done some great songs. (I mean OK it's meaningless pop but that's what pop should be.)

I thought this was some sci-fi concept image when I first saw it.

But it's real and working! Here's the video:

(source article, via DVICE)

The article says it will operate for 50% of the time (presumably they're a bit noisy for daytime office workers?) and will generate 11-15% of the building's electricity needs.

(source)

Chris Carlson explores the design space of a simple graphical ruleset in an excellent post on the Wolfram Blog (which spends most of its time advertising Mathematica but occasionally gives us gems like this).

He has discovered a system that resonates well with the human imagination, like Richard Dawkins' Biomorphs do.

He rounds it off with an awesome Picasso quote: "Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can’t even imagine in advance."

G-Force:


(I work for Eurocom. This game comes out in July, along with the Disney film of the same name.)

So we managed to leave the car with just the marmot. A few steps later though she asked for turtle, so we had to go back for it. She can't be fooled so easily.

Off we go again but then she remembers her dog, so I give her her dog and her lion and of course I have to carry them for her because four animals is really too many for anyone to carry.

She couldn't have been happier going into nursery. She walked over to the sand table where the other toddlers were playing and by the time she got there the marmot and turtle were on the floor behind her, forgotten.



(Our own baby Turtle likes to take her toy animals to work with her.)

Pamela's back and she's angry:

"TomTom will get the community's support. It has mine. I came out of my semi-retirement, so to speak, where I was basically closing Groklaw down, thinking it wasn't needed any more. Now I'm here, and we'll be covering this case a la our coverage of SCO v. the World. TomTom will not be standing alone."

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090304114657350

(an actual photo)

(Microsoft are suing TomTom, and many people see this as an attack on Linux. SCO was a long-running anti-Linux court case that recently finished.)

Molecular biology is amazing, and clathrin is a fascinating example. It's a molecule with a very peculiar shape.

Here it is: (at the bottom of the image)

It has three legs with little feet, so it gets called a triskelion, like the symbol of the Isle of Man.

When lots of clathrin molecules get together they lock into each other, eventually constructing the polyhedral cage shown at the top of the image above. It's highly evolved, an exquisite piece of engineering: the shape of the clathrin is precisely specified by the genes that make it for a very specific purpose.

There are simpler ways of making balls and simpler ways of making polyhedra. But clathrin polyhedra can be made to assemble and then disassemble, depending on the chemicals around them. The cell uses clathrin for pulling on its own membrane, for example in the animation below where a cell is shown 'drinking' from its surrounding fluid by first making a dimple in its membrane and then digesting the resulting vesicle:

(from http://student.ccbcmd.edu/~gkaiser/biotutorials/eustruct/pinocyt.html)

A brilliant video, looking from the inside of the cell, shows how clathrin is used for this purpose, gripping onto the membrane with its little feet as the polyhedron assembles and pulling it into shape:

(click for video)

This process is going on all the time, inside you right now.

Here are some electron micrograph images of clathrin in real life, showing the dimples coated in meshes of clathrin: [1]

"Hey! Upstratum your own fabricants. Abolitionist."

Soundsalike randomized dictionary search-replace (e.g.) when quoted out of context but makes perfect sense at the time.

Yes, I'm halfway through David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and it's very entertaining. No spoilers please.

(Although it must be annoying to have a contemporary famous person with the same name.)

The guardian today bemoans the lack of good science tv but completely fails to mention Nina and the Neurons [1] [2] - an excellent show that Turtle enjoys.

Recently we learnt that with smelly feet it's not the sweat itself that smells. This was rigorously confirmed through a simple experiment where the Dad of the subject family was persuaded to exercise wearing plastic bags inside his shoes. A randomly-selected panel of experts (the children of the family) were then asked if the sweat collected in the plastic bags was smelly, and 100% of respondents stated that it was not. And also the program made clear that the data from the experiment didn't support any further conclusion about where the smell actually comes from. It was excellent science. Well kind of. It's a start. It was genuinely more scientific than Horizon has been recently.

And children get the best news too. Newsround is brilliant for animal news in particular (e.g. [3]). It's far more factual than Newsnight, say, which is always droning on about 'politics' or something dull.

"In his autobiography Oliver Postgate declares that he does not exist - that he is a means, not an end. To a cat of my intellectual prowess it is clear that this is philosophically unsound, because he obviously must be there in order to say that he is not. And anyway, if he were, or rather weren't, where would that leave us, his figments? . . . "

Chairman Bagpuss (an orthodox Miaoist)

Oliver Postgate has died, aged 83.

Here's a 2005 interview with him, where we discover why Bagpuss is pink: http://www.clivebanks.co.uk/Oliverpostgateinterview.htm

"Maybe memories are like karaoke - where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen's bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn't know even half the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning - and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it's better to not know the lyrics to your life."

from The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland

In other Coupland news: Wikipedia reveals the binary-encoded message in Microserfs: "... I must outcompute him before he outcomputes me. ..."

I seem to spend a lot of my spare time playing with cellular automata. Here's a simple model of gases:

image:

video:

Squares move around on a grid, bouncing off each other and the walls.

The amazing thing about this model is this: run it on a bigger grid and you get an accurate simulation of flow patterns. And that means turbulence and swirling eddies and wisps of smoke and things like that:

image:

video:

All we've done is run it on a larger grid (3000x1000) and to show the direction of the local flow with lines. We make the fluid flow from left to right by simply overwriting the left-hand column with particles moving to the right. An obstacle disrupts the flow, shedding eddies in its wake.

The question asks itself: Why does this work? Why does such a simple model of bouncing particles yield a good model of flow? The key is that the particles conserve momentum: they keep moving until they collide, and the particles after a collision have the same total momentum as the particles before the collision. And so over a larger area you get two things happening: a) the fluid will tend to move into areas of lower pressure (particles get bounced out of higher density areas), and b) if an area of fluid has an overall momentum it will get carried forward, pushing against whatever it encounters. It's a delightful system and makes pretty pictures.

Further reading:

• This pattern of vortices behind an obstacle is called a von Karman vortex street. The wikipedia page has some nice photos of real examples, and also tells me that bees use these vortices to fly.
• The C++ source code and executables are available here: http://code.google.com/p/latticegas
• Here we're using a 'pair interaction lattice gas' but there are many others. All things lattice gas are explained here: PDF (2.4MB)

Notes:

• In the particles images, the colour shows which direction they are moving in: grey particles jiggle on the spot, green ones move south-west, turquoise particles move west (sometimes jiggling up and down as they go), etc.
• In the particles images, the top and bottom walls are fixed boundaries - the particles bounce off them. The left and right walls wrap around, so a particle leaving stage right immediately enters stage left. The same thing is true in the bigger grid, except that particles are pumped-in on the left.
• In the eddies video we have subtracted the constant left-to-right flow from each flow vector, to better show the flow patterns. In the eddies image we've subtracted the long-term average flow at each point, which shows the vortices clearly.
• Lattice gases are pretty much obsolete now, there are better models to use if you're a hydrodynamicist. But they're still cute.