Archive for the ‘science’ Category
On Finishing Books
March 16th, 2010
I just finished W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, which all things considered is a pretty good book, despite my occasional furious claims to the contrary.1 I started it sometime around October, read most of it, and then put it aside. I just finished the last hundred-odd pages a few minutes ago. This seems to be a pattern — I start a book really enthusiastically, then get a little bored or distracted and put it down for awhile. Eventually I get so tired of seeing it sitting in my queue, shamefully reminding me of my miniscule attention span, that I just plant myself down on the couch and force myself to finish it. The satisfaction of finishing the book outweighs the grueling completion process.
This isn’t usually the case, of course. Only for certain books. I’m pretty sure I’d hate reading if this was the normal situation.
Note that the concept of book-graphing has been explored before, which reminds me: I want the book equivalent of a pedometer, so I can settle this graph thing once and for all. Then I want to correlate information about the structure, genre and subject matter of the book with the pace at which I read it.
If I worked at Amazon, I would be spying on customers’ Kindle usage and mining that data so hard.
1 No chapters? Really? Why would you do that, Sebald? I demand discrete chunks.
Strandbeests
March 13th, 2010
Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist who specializes in building artificial animals.
Hoody-hoo!
March 11th, 2010
So apart from sheer laziness (and the fact that it’s spring break, so I’ve been reading like a book a day, which is awesome) there’s no particular reason that I haven’t been posting for the last couple weeks. I’ve intended to write some stuff about the ways in which English is different in Montreal, or about a certain Dutch artist that builds mechanical animals, and I’m still going to, but that’s kinda been overshadowed by the fact that I HAVE A FUTURE NOW SINCE I JUST GOT INTO GRAD SCHOOL WOOOOO. Specifically, the MS in Computer Science at William & Mary. No news yet on funding/assistantships, though that should be coming in a few weeks, and I still need to wait for any other offers, but damn. Before long, one way or another, I’ll actually have a place in the fabric of society again.
Assuming they didn’t make some sort of clerical error; I’m sure I’ll be neurotically obsessing over that possibility for the next two years.
Memes Can Be Good For You
February 27th, 2010
I stumbled across this nice summation in reading through Dan Dennett’s Breaking the Spell. Leading up to this passage, Dennett argues against the common conception of memes as mental viruses that necessarily do harm to their hosts by specifically describing the ability of religions to organize individuals into cohesive groups.
Memes that foster human group solidarity are particularly fit (as memes) in circumstances in which host survival (and hence host fitness) most directly depends on hosts’ joining forces in groups. The success of such meme-infested groups is itself a potent broadcasting device, enhancing group curiosity (and envy) and thus permitting linguistic, ethnic, and geographic boundaries to be more readily penetrated.
I still haven’t seen any really convincing work demonstrating the predictive capabilities of memetics (though I certainly could have missed something), but the field does provide some really elegant mechanisms for describing certain kinds of phenomena.
d’Alembert’s Dream
February 25th, 2010
I would call Denis Diderot’s essay d’Alembert’s Dream a study in 18th-century cognitive science.
Also it’s my birthday! I’m older now.
books, neuroscience, old dead white guys, science | No Comments »
Artificial Flight and Other Myths
February 16th, 2010
a reasoned examination of A.F. by top birds
Dresden Codak’s written another excellent piece of satire.
Strong A.F., as it is defined by researchers, is any artificial flier that is capable of passing the Tern Test (developed by A.F. pioneer Alan Tern), which involves convincing an average bird that the artificial flier is in fact a flying bird.
Drunken Bats
February 11th, 2010
A team of Canadian researchers got a bunch of Central American fruit bats drunk and measured how often they crashed. I love science.
The flying mammals were placed in a closed obstacle course on the forest floor. “It’s like walking a straight line,” Fenton quipped, referring to a common test given to suspected drunk drivers by police – except to succeed, the bats had to maneuver around hanging plastic chains without crashing.
The team also recorded the bats’ echolocation calls to see if they’d “slur their words,” Fenton said.
The science-y part of this is that despite being colossally sloshed the bats actually displayed almost no impairment. The researchers theorized that this resulted from the bats’ regular ingestion of fermented fruit. However, it’s important to note that other drunk bat studies have yielded different results:
… a previous study in Israel had shown that drunk Egyptian fruit bats crashed more frequently in experiments than the New World bats did, Fenton said.
Iron-plated Snail
February 4th, 2010
In the depths of the Indian Ocean lies some sweet science. The Crysomallon squamiferum snail takes iron sulfide from the water and uses it to build a metal shell. Better yet, it repels intruders with nanotechnology* – apparently the shell fractures in such a way as to grind down the predator’s weapon. Read the full article.
* Well, kinda. It sounds pretty cool, though.