Daily Archives: January 27, 2012

Friday Science…. thingy

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OK, OK, I admit it… whatever strange impulse compelled me to start up the whole Friday Science Roundup thing before seems to be reasserting itself. Dammit, just when I think I have gotten out, it keeps pulling me back in, with its siren song of there being one day a week on which I do not have to think up something to write about for that day.

But it’s not a roundup, dammit! It’s something else. Something less cowboy.

A Friday Science… salon? Kaffeklatch? Update? Bacchanal? I will work out the details later.

But I can’t guarantee that I won’t start resenting it and give it all up again.

Being a writer means never saying you’re sure. At least, for me, it does.

Anyhow, on with the science.

Here’s a story that combines two interesting things : theoretical data processing questions, and large birds of prey. It’s about just how fast a flying object (be it an unmanned drone or a Northern Goshawk) go and still be able to dodge around obstacles in an environment of a given density.

The Northern Goshawk enters into the equation because it hunts on the wing, and must pursue its flying prey through the tops of trees at heart pounding speeds in order to get a meal.

At the speeds it hunts at, the Northern Goshawk can’t possibly actually see all the tree tops around it. Instead, it moves at a certain speed at which it will be sure to always be able to find an opening in the green tunnels around it in order to continue its pursuit.

Researchers are studying how it does this in order to be able to build drones that can go faster. Right now, drones tend to be slow, especially when there’s stuff they might crash into.

It’s hoped that the Northern Goshawk might just teach them a thing or two about flying faster than you can see.

This really is the dawn of the Age of the Drone, isn’t it? From the United States using armed drones to take out hundreds of terrorist leaders in Afghanistan to something as absurdly mundane as Los Angeles real estate developers using drones to scout houses .

This strikes me as yet another example of something that was theoretically possible for years but nobody was able to get it to work (and hence it remain strictly science fiction) that finally emerges into reality in this modern era. Like nanotech, and cybernetics.

Of course, science fiction has also conditioned me to think of drones as evil spybots sent by oppressive governments to make sure you are not committing thought crime and/or assassinating people, so I can’t help but be a little freaked out by it all, as well.

Moving on, we have people trying to turn an old meat packing plant into a vertical farm.

Well, they call it a vertical farm, anyhow. It’s nowhere near the sci-fi ideal of a zero-G aeroponics farm with enormous clouds of wheat, rice, and corn floating in the air, roots, stalks, and all, and little robots coming along to mist the vegetation with nutrients now and then.

It’s not even, from the sound of the story, a properly planned out and executed vertically integrated farm, but they are moving in the right direction, anyhow : building a closed ecosystem, where the waste from one process is used as fuel for another process.

Of course, to be a farm and not just a highly sustainable garden, it can’t be a closed loop because some part of the process has to end up inside people in the form of food we eat. So there will therefore need to be some kind of constant input to balance out the output, no matter how finely balanced and efficient the ecosystems inside the process might be.

But then again, if you integrated the human beings themselves into the process, using their waste products as fertilizer in order to compensate for their consumption…. after all, urine is sterile and feces might be the most disgusting thing in the universe to us, but it’s just a lot of yummy fixed nitrogen to our plant friends…. hmmmm…

Of course, then nobody could leave the system once they entered it, but that would hardly be a problem compared to the efficiency benefits alone…

Of course, those Monicans would probably try to ruin everything...

Finally, a bit of random news from the world of big league psychiatry : they are thinking of deleting half the personality disorders from the DSM-IV when they (finally!) make the DSM-V.

For your information : the DSM is the standard for making diagnoses of psychiatric conditions in the world of psychology. It’s quite extensive and rigorous, which is especially important in the vague and misty world of the science of the human mind.

I had just been wondering lately whether they were even close to issuing a DSM-V yet when the article popped up before my eyes, almost as if StumbleUpon can read my mind.

Or the Universe conforms to my wishes, but only in ways I don’t expect. Take your pick.

Anyhow, what bugs me in the article is that they never actually give a decent explanation for why they would want to reduce the number of personality disorders.

It says it would be to “reduce comorbidity”, which I take to mean that it would reduce the number of people with multiple and overlapping diagnoses. And I suppose that would make the paperwork easier.

But that doesn’t mean those five personality disorders do not exist or are not therapeutically useful. You can’t make those problems go away just by taking them out of the DSM.

And what happens to single-diagnosis mental health patients who suddenly find their illness no longer exists and is therefore not covered by their health system? Do they just wander back into society, unmedicated and untreated and unhappy, and end up showing up in a less favorable part of the system, like the hospital, or jail?

It just strikes me as wrong.

Well, that’s it for now. Seeya next week folks!

And so on

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Couldn’t come up with a title for today’s blog entry, and so I basically just filled in the blank.

You might be surprised at how many higher mental functions are involved with the simple decision to just put down what seems to fit. It is something we modern human beings do automatically, because our societies demand a lot of our higher cognitive functions, but it’s actually a highly refined skill that calls into play higher functions like pattern recognition, cultural background, inference via history, and the kind of deep intuition that uses all of the above in a single flash of understanding.

This was a revelation to me : Paris has a very different kind of underground art movement.

They are known as UX, they are highly secretive, they have an unrivaled knowledge of all the underground tunnels and catacombs under Paris, and they act in steal, darkness, and mystery.

But they are no vandals or thieves. Their aim is not destruction or gain, but to get access to priceless objects of art that the French government has decided are not worth maintaining or restoring, and fix them up so they will last the ages.

They are fiercely romantic, extremely exclusive, and entirely content in the company of themselves, which makes them extremely arrogant by most people’s definitions.

They do things like hold private art showings for UX people only, create secret underground movie theaters for viewing old movies, and break into museums to restore paintings.

I consider that last items to be absolutely beautiful. What better statement could you make against government neglect of art than by breaking in and doing their work for them by stealth? It is satire on a deep and very satisfying level.

Imagine the museum officials coming to work one morning and finding that one of their paintings has been restored. What are they going to do, call the police and complain that someone broke in and made things better? Sure, that’s still illegal…. but don’t expect your case to be a high priority.

And I admire their “peers only” art world. After all, in a “true art” sense, the only people qualified to judge art is your fellow artists. It makes sense, then, to create a community where only those you have already agreed to accept as peers even get to see your art. Why subject your work to the judge of the unwashed masses and the professional eunuchs of art known as critics at all? They are not qualified to even have an opinion. Just keep it to yourselves.

Sure, that is arrogant as hell, but come on, they are French. Arrogance is de rigeur. I admire it, but I couldn’t share it in it. I really want to be rich and famous, and I figure my art (writing) more or less selects its own audience anyhow. If you can read it and get it, you are my audience. I could never be happy writing just for a group of peers. I have too much of the attention-seeking hammy youngest child in me. I want everybody to love me!

Plus, you know, financial security. And by security, I mean, scads of cash that I can invest in a nice fat safe secure annuity.

Those three little words that mean so much : “set for life”.

Now, a couple of gems from a recent Splitsider article about forgotten 90’s sketch comedy shows.

But for the record, as a comedy geek, I have to rate myself : I had seen two of the nine(House of Buggin’ and SheTV), and heard of three more (Exit 57, Saturday Night Special, and The Vacant Lot) before I read the article. Not bad.

One I had never heard of before, however, was an extremely 90’s “sketch comedy by and for kids” show called The Roundhouse which was on SNICK, Nickelodeon’s prime time slot.

Here is an example of their work. Remember, this is done by kids.

OK, so it’s not exactly Mister Show, but for something written and performed by kids, I think it’s pretty darn good.

I mean, it can’t possibly compare with the sophistication and wit of its Canadian competition and Alanis Morrisette springboard, You Can’t Do That On Television…

But still, not bad for a pale imitator that just happened to have a way bigger budget.

They paid those YCDTOT kids in hot dogs and sawdust, if I recall correctly.

And then there’s this lovely bit of surreal work from the amazing number of people who went on to be super famous that started out on Exit 57.

Now remember, this was 1995.

You can totally tell by how everyone was dressed.

I ask you to remember the year of production because I know what you are thinking. That whole repeating over and over thing is SO cliche now. But at the time, that would have been quite radically different and very fresh and inventive.

It relies on playing with the audience’s expectations, and requires an audience who can’t quite believe they are seeing the same thing happen over and over, with just a few variations, like how long the fake “coming down the stairs” at the beginning of the loops is, or the depth and passion of that sexy, sexy man on man kiss.

Modern audiences would see it coming, but at the time, that must have been pure magic. Makes me sorry I never saw the show when it was on. Seems like it was a lot of fun.

It helps, also that the loop itself is funny on the first time through. That makes us more willing to sit through it again. I love the line “I couldn’t find the cat so I dressed like a scarecrow. ”

Also, we get to see Stephen Colbert exercising the “America’s 50’s dad” muscles he would later go on to use so well in creating and hosting The Colbert show.

It reminds me of this infamous sketch which invokes a similar type of repetition :

Sometimes, being surreal purely for its own sake can be a beautiful, beautiful thing.