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“Why Can’t We Make Them Very Small, Make Them Of Little Wires, Little Elements”

February 5, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Richard Feynman’s landmark 1960 lecture on nanotechnology, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom“:

“Miniaturizing the computer

I don’t know how to do this on a small scale in a practical way, but I do know that computing machines are very large; they fill rooms. Why can’t we make them very small, make them of little wires, little elements—and by little, I mean little. For instance, the wires should be 10 or 100 atoms in diameter, and the circuits should be a few thousand angstroms across. Everybody who has analyzed the logical theory of computers has come to the conclusion that the possibilities of computers are very interesting—if they could be made to be more complicated by several orders of magnitude. If they had millions of times as many elements, they could make judgments. They would have time to calculate what is the best way to make the calculation that they are about to make. They could select the method of analysis which, from their experience, is better than the one that we would give to them. And in many other ways, they would have new qualitative features.

If I look at your face I immediately recognize that I have seen it before. (Actually, my friends will say I have chosen an unfortunate example here for the subject of this illustration. At least I recognize that it is a man and not an apple.) Yet there is no machine which, with that speed, can take a picture of a face and say even that it is a man; and much less that it is the same man that you showed it before—unless it is exactly the same picture. If the face is changed; if I am closer to the face; if I am further from the face; if the light changes—I recognize it anyway. Now, this little computer I carry in my head is easily able to do that. The computers that we build are not able to do that. The number of elements in this bone box of mine are enormously greater than the number of elements in our “wonderful” computers. But our mechanical computers are too big; the elements in this box are microscopic. I want to make some that are submicroscopic. If we wanted to make a computer that had all these marvelous extra qualitative abilities, we would have to make it, perhaps, the size of the Pentagon. This has several disadvantages. First, it requires too much material; there may not be enough germanium in the world for all the transistors which would have to be put into this enormous thing. There is also the problem of heat generation and power consumption; TVA would be needed to run the computer. But an even more practical difficulty is that the computer would be limited to a certain speed. Because of its large size, there is finite time required to get the information from one place to another. The information cannot go any faster than the speed of light—so, ultimately, when our computers get faster and faster and more and more elaborate, we will have to make them smaller and smaller. 

But there is plenty of room to make them smaller. There is nothing that I can see in the physical laws that says the computer elements cannot be made enormously smaller than they are now. In fact, there may be certain advantages.”

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“Play Your 45RPM Records Anyplace”

February 3, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The music wanted to be portable, 1967.

“What Did We Ever Do Before GPS?”

February 2, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It makes sense that we use our brains to lay tracks in front of us as we encounter the unknown, a sort of superhighway of our own making, and one that we can call upon again and again in life. But what if such construction isn’t required of us? The opening of Julia Frankenstein’s New York Times Opinion piece, “Is GPS All in Our Head?“:

“It’s a question that probably every driver with a Garmin navigation device on her dashboard has asked herself at least once: What did we ever do before GPS? How did people find their way around, especially in places they’d never been before?

Like most questions asked in our tech-dependent era, these underestimate the power of the human mind. It is surprisingly good at developing ‘mental maps’ of an area, a skill new research shows can grow stronger with use. The question is, with disuse — say, by relying on a GPS device — can we lose the skill too?

The notion of a mental map isn’t new. In the 1940s, the psychologist Edward C. Tolman used rats in mazes to demonstrate that ‘learning consists not in stimulus-response connections but in the building up in the nervous system of sets which function like cognitive maps.’

This concept is widely accepted today. When exploring a new territory, we perceive landmarks along a route. By remembering their position and the spatial relations between the streets, locations and landmarks we pass, we are able to develop survey knowledge (stored in the mind like a mental map), which enables us to indicate directions, find shortcuts or detours — in short, to react and navigate comfortably.”

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Mousebot navigates maze:

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“Multiple Vehicles Can Fly As A Formation”

February 2, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

“Nano-quadrotors”–or tiny drones–operating within a swarm, at the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. (Thanks Physorg.)

“How A Thing Looks Today Is As Important As It How It Works”

February 2, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

“Design” is a fun 1969 pitch film that the legendary designer Saul Bass made for Bell Telephone when he was reimagining the company’s logo.

The great Kurtis Blow, 1980, Soul Train: “And Ma Bell sends you a whopping bill / With eighteen phone calls to Brazil.”

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“There Are Social Pressures And Brain Chemicals That Encourage Us To Stay Connected”

February 1, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I disagree with many of Nick Carr’s concerns about the Internet, though I always find him a really smart and lively thinker. I don’t believe new media will necessarily make us a lot smarter–at least not in the short term–but I don’t think it’s turned us from a contemplative nation of readers of thick Russian novels into pinheads. I mean, when did that earlier nation even exist? When was it ever going to exist? An excerpt from “We Turn Ourselves Into Media Creations,” a new inteview by Lars Mensel in The European in which Carr makes some points about social networking:

“Carr: There are social pressures and brain chemicals that encourage us to stay connected: It becomes very difficult to cut ourselves off from the flow of information. As technology becomes ever more deeply woven into our social processes and expectations, it becomes something more than just a matter of personal discipline. In their jobs, many people face the expectation to always monitor messages and emails coming from colleagues or clients. That pressure goes on even when they leave work and go home; they are still constantly checking information. Thanks to Facebook, social networking and other communication tools, there is now a situation where similar pressures are arising in our social lives: People you know are using online tools to plot their social lives and exchange information – it makes you feel compelled to also always be monitoring information. Obviously that doesn’t mean we don’t have free will or the choice to disconnect, we shouldn’t miss the fact that it is – like earlier technology such as the automobile – being woven so deeply into society that it is not just a matter of personal discipline to decide how to use it.

The European: A study has shown that using Facebook causes people to romanticize other peoples’ lives whilst seeing their own in a negative light: It is because people share predominately good news of flattering photos…

Carr: I saw a study that examined how people regard their Facebook friends and when somebody admired the exciting life of a friend, this friend often said exactly the same about them. It shows you how we turn ourselves and each other into media creations through social networks. As with celebrities and other media personalities, the reality can be very different from how we present ourselves online.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“This Particular Operation Requires Removal Of The Top Of The Patient’s Skull”

February 1, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Tiffany Kaiser’s DailyTech piece about Berkeley researchers making a breakthrough in the translation of brainwaves into words, which could create communication possibilities for those unable to speak–and all sorts of ethical quandaries:

“At some point in the near future, mind-reading could be a power possessed not only by fictional characters like Professor Charles Xavier (Professor X), but also real-life researchers who are searching for ways to help individuals who have lost their ability to speak.

Robert Knight, of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California – Berkeley, and Brian Pasley, a scientist in Knight’s lab at UC Berkeley, have successfully translated brain activity into words.

The team was able to do this by recruiting the cooperation of 15 patients, who were already in the hospital for intractable epilepsy treatment. This particular operation requires removal of the top of the patient’s skull, where a net of electrodes are then placed along the surface of the brain. Theelectrodes identify the origin areas of the patient’s fit, and that particular tissue is eliminated.”

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“Here An Avalanche Of News Is Shaped”

February 1, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Alistair Cook brought his Omnibus TV show into the New York Times newsroom in 1954 to see how men–and only men–published news in that era. Listen to those clunky typewriter keys tapping. Notice the lack of a healthy blue glow on the faces of the editors.

A piece of this Cook clip was included in the excellent doc about the latter-day Gray Lady, Page One:

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Breathing At The Battle Creek Sanitarium

January 31, 2012 in Excerpts, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

This classic photograph from the early 1900s captures a group breathing activity at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, which became one of the most famous health resorts in the world under the stewardship of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a brilliant if eccentric doctor, a holistic enthusiast and an enterprising Adventist. Originally established in 1866 as the Western Health Reform Institute, Kellogg’s spa offered restorative hydrotherapy, diet, exercise, enemas and vibratory chairs. The good doctor also was co-inventor of the cornflake with his brother, Will Keith Kellogg. The sanitarium remained open until the 1940s when it was purchased by the U.S. government and converted into an Army hospital. An excerpt from the 1943 New York Times obituary for Kellogg, who lived until 91:

“A determined practitioner of the rules for simple eating and living he preached for all humanity, Dr. Kellogg was perhaps the best example of the truth of his own dogmas.

When he became a physician Dr. Kellogg determined to devote himself to the problems of health, and after taking over the sanitarium he put into effect his own ideas. Soon he had developed the sanitarium to an unprecedented degree, and he launched the business of manufacturing health foods. He gained recognition as the originator of health foods and coffee and tea substitutes, ideas which led to the establishment of huge cereal companies besides his own, in which his brother, W. K. Kellogg, produced the cornflakes he invented. His name became a household word.

Dr. Kellogg’s youth was one of hard work. Born in Tyrone, N. Y., on Feb. 26, 1852, he moved to Battle Creek with his parents, John Preston and Ann Jeanette Kellogg, at an early age. He worked in his father’s broom factory and also served as a ‘printer’s devil’ in Battle Creek publishing houses.”

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Anthony Hopkins as Kellogg in the 1994 film adaptation of T.C. Boyle’s novel, The Road to Wellville:

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“Hello, Chad. Let’s Chat.”

January 31, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Conversational bot with a brain that’s a mesh of wires. Just like you and I.

“I Can Spill Water On It And It Would Still Work!”

January 31, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A paperback is still my favorite medium for reading. Don’t care for cloth books because I’m a reader, not a collector. Don’t like trade paper because those were made oversized just to jack up the price, and they can’t slide into a pocket. But while I do not own an e-reader yet, I can’t say I have any major problem with them. Jonathan Franzen, however, does. From Anita Singh’s Telegraph piece about Franzen’s criticism of e-books:

“The author of Freedom and The Corrections, regarded as one of America’s greatest living novelists, said consumers had been conned into thinking that they need the latest technology.

‘The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it’s pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model,’ said Franzen, who famously cuts off all connection to the internet when he is writing.

‘I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change.'”

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“Do You Investigate?”

January 31, 2012 in Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Jacques Cousteau, surfacing briefly in 1956 to appear on What’s My Line? Just-retired Yankee Phil Rizzuto on the panel.

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Old Print Article: “Size And Brains,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1901)

January 30, 2012 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

"There is absolutely no relation between intelligence and stature."

While it’s true that taller people aren’t necessarily smarter than shorter people, that would seem to be the only correct scientific fact presented by Dr. Charles E. Woodruff in this January 6, 1901 article from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. An excerpt:

“From investigations among soldiers and from the literature on the subject, there is no doubt in my own mind that if a man’s development is so unstable that he has physical stigmata, he is invariably of bad physical development also. As far as I know, there are few, if any, cases of abnormal minds in average bodies devoid of stigmata. It is a fair inference, then, that if a man’s body is nearly an average in all respects–height, weight, proportions, etc.–there must also be an average brain, and, therefore, a normal mind–excluding. of course, normal men who have acquired insanity. Beyond this we dare not go, for there is absolutely no relation between intelligence and stature. Men of genius may be big, like Bismarck, or little, like Napoleon or Da Costa, and the same may be said of the feeble-minded as well as those of average intelligence. George Washington’s physical measurements are said to have been identical with those of Jeffries, the giant pugilist. Other illustrations might be given indefinitely.

It is true that the human brain weight depends upon the body weight, for the muscles require many brain cells. In like manner the sparrow needs but a few grains of brain, while the whale and the elephant must have more than man. Yet the indescribable and immeasurable variable called intelligence depends upon other things in addition to weight of brain, and the increased stature consists of tissue which may not and probably does not, have any bearing on intelligence.

A big physique, with immense reserve power and endurance, is a decided element in forcing men to the front in the struggle of life. This is in accordance with recent investigations among Chicago school children, which are said to show that the best scholars in any class are apparently bigger than the rest. Hence, other things being equal, the big men, having an advantage, should have a larger percentage of their number successful than the little men. Yet, statistics show the very opposite, for Lambroso mentions (“Man of Genius,” page 6) but twenty-six great men of tall stature, while he names fifty-nine who are short, some of them being even dwarfish or less than five feet in height. As the anomalies of height are equally distributed to each side of the mean, there must be some tremendously active cause to make the little men more than twice as brilliant as the big. The two classes, being equally removed from the average, should be equally abnormal mentally.”

“We’re Going To Put This One Back To Life”

January 29, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

As Kevin Kelly is wont to say, no tool or technology we’ve ever created has become completely extinct. The following reports concern the “last” typewriter repairman. After they’re all gone, there will still somehow be a few typewriters and a few people who can fix them. Likely, someone will continue manufacturing typewriters for a niche market. They will exist in the margins, but they will never end.

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Jacksonville:

Chicago:

Houston:

Read also:

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“I Can See A Time When People Plug A Simple Device Into An iPad So That Their Brain Is Stimulated”

January 29, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Provided it’s done in a safe and healthy way, I’m in favor of all sorts of performance enhancement. The idea of human “purity” is a lie that we tell ourselves while behaving counter to it. In his post, “The Ethics of Brain Boosting,” Jonathan Wood examines the ramifications of transcranial direct current stimulation or TDCS, which seems to enhance brain function. An excerpt:

“Dr Roi Cohen Kadosh, who has carried out brain stimulation studies at the Department of Experimental Psychology, very definitely has a vision for how TDCS could be used in the future: ‘I can see a time when people plug a simple device into an iPad so that their brain is stimulated when they are doing their homework, learning French or taking up the piano,’ he says.

The growing number of positive results in early-stage studies, led the neuroscientists Dr Cohen Kadosh and Dr Jacinta O’Shea to talk to Professor Neil Levy, Dr Nick Shea and Professor Julian Savulescu in the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics about what ethical issues there may be in future widespread use of TDCS to boost abilities in healthy people.

The researchers outline the issues in a short paper in the journal Current Biology, and indicate the research that is now necessary to address some of the potential concerns.

‘We ask: should we use brain stimulation to enhance cognition, and what are the risks?’ explains Roi. ‘Our aim was to look at whether it gives rise to new ethical issues, issues that will increasingly need to be thought about in our field but also by policymakers and the public.’” (Thanks Browser.)

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“Tests Show No Evidence Of Any Environmental Factors”

January 29, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Industry has poisoned the environment in the past, so it’s possible mysterious illnesses can arise from chemical dumping or such behaviors. But more often we simply want to believe that the cause of our trouble is outside of ourselves, that there is a culprit somewhere else. And clusters can form. We saw it just recently with the nonsense about immunizations supposedly causing autism. The brain is mysterious and we’re often at the mercy of it, to its demands and delusions.

“It Will Become A Vietnam Of Transportation”

January 29, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Stanford history professor Richard White’s answer to the question, “Does California need a high-speed rail line, ultimately connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles?” in the New York Times:

“We shouldn’t build it. At best it will not solve any problems for decades to come, and at worst it will become an expensive problem itself. It will become a Vietnam of transportation: easy to begin and difficult and expensive to stop.

In a state dismantling its education system and watching its existing infrastructure collapse, it is criminally profligate to build a system that will drain revenue from more-needed projects. This is like building a state-of-the-art driveway while your house collapses.

Highway 5 between Los Angeles and San Francisco is miserable, but it is not the key transportation problem in California. For high-speed rail to work, it needs to get people out of cars, but the project doesn’t touch the huge mass of traffic, which swirls daily in the Los Angeles and San Francisco metropolitan areas. High-speed rail between Boston and Washington, D.C., connects trains with functioning public transportation systems. This is not true in Los Angeles nor in large parts of the Bay area.”

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“The Most Innovative Companies Are Doing Things They Never Could Before”

January 29, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

“Here in my car / You know I’ve started to think / About leaving tonight / Although nothing seems right.” Created by OgilvyWest for Cisco Systems.

Just A Couple Of Bots Playing Catch

January 27, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

At the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics of the German Aerospace Center.

“Writing Itself Was A Technology Of Information”

January 27, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

James Gleick, author of The Information; A History, a Theory, a Flood, explaining how the shift from oral communications to the written word impacted humanity.

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“This Versatile Machine Makes Us Laugh”

January 26, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Chris Elliott as a robot designed to be slenderer than Shelley Winters, 1986.

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“We Are Driving Close To 70 MPH With No Human Involvement”

January 26, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From “Let the Robot Drive: The Autonomous Car of the Future Is Here,” Tom Vanderbilt’s new Wired piece about humans on the verge of relinquishing control of the wheel:

“[Chris] Urmson, with the soft-spoken, intense mien of a roboticist who has debugged a Martian rover in the deserts of Chile, occupies the nominal ‘driver’s seat’—just one of the entities open to ontological inquiry this morning.

The last time I was in a self-driving car—Stanford University’s ‘Junior,’ at the 2008 World Congress on Intelligent Transportation Systems—the VW Passat went 25 miles per hour down two closed-off blocks. Its signal achievement seemed to be stopping for a stop sign at an otherwise unoccupied intersection. Now, just a few years later, we are driving close to 70 mph with no human involvement on a busy public highway—a stunning demonstration of just how quickly, and dramatically, the horizon of possibility is expanding. ‘This car can do 75 mph,’ Urmson says. ‘It can track pedestrians and cyclists. It understands traffic lights. It can merge at highway speeds.’ In short, after almost a hundred years in which driving has remained essentially unchanged, it has been completely transformed in just the past half decade.”

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Kraftwerk, “Autobahn,” 1975:

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“It Would Be Foolhardy To Ignore The One Man Who Is Building Human Qualities Into Robots”

January 26, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “The Machine-Tooled Happyland,” Ray Bradbury’s 1965 Holiday analysis of the robot-centric Disneyland:

“We live in an age of one billion robot devices that surround, bully, change and sometimes destroy us. The metal-and-plastic machines are all amoral. But by their design and function they lure us to be better or worse than we might otherwise be.

In such an age it would be foolhardy to ignore the one man who is building human qualities into robots—robots whose influence will be ricocheting off social and political institutions ten thousand afternoons from today.

Snobbery now could cripple our intellectual development. After I had heard too many people sneer at Disney and his audio-animatronic Abraham Lincoln in the Illinois exhibit at the New York World’s Fair, I went to the Disney robot factory in Glendale. I watched the finishing touches being put on a second computerized, electric- and air-pressure-driven humanoid that will “live” at Disneyland from this summer on. I saw this new effigy of Mr. Lincoln sit, stand, shift his arms, turn his wrists, twitch his fingers, put his hands behind his back, turn his head, look at me, blink and prepare to speak. In those few moments I was filled with an awe I have rarely felt in my life.

Giovanni Battista Bracelli's robot drawings, 1624.

Only a few hundred years ago all this would have been considered blasphemous, I thought. To create man is not man’s business, but God’s, it would have been said. Disney and every technician with him would have been bundled and burned at the stake in 1600.

And again, I thought, all of this was dreamed before. From the fantastic geometric robot drawings of Bracelli in 1624 to the mechanical people in Capek’s R.U.R. in 1925, others have conceived and drawn metallic extensions of man and his senses, or played at it in theater.

But the fact remains that Disney is the first to make a robot that is convincingly real, that looks, speaks and acts like a man. Disney has set the history of humanized robots on its way toward wider, more fantastic excur­sions into the needs of civilization.” (Thanks Longform.)

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“We also accompanied him on a trip to Disneyland,” 1968:

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“Enter A Word As It Sounds–And Get The Correct Spelling”

January 26, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

It’s difficult to fathom that just about 20 years ago, the spellcheck function wasn’t ubiquitous–even intrusive–and there was actually a market for a product like this one.

“At Times Like These, Survival Is The Most Important Thing”

January 25, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

George Soros, opportunist turned alarmist, frets in a Newsweek article that the whole damn world might go bust. An excerpt:

“Sitting in his 33rd-floor corner office high above Seventh Avenue in New York, preparing for his trip to Davos, he is more concerned with surviving than staying rich. ‘At times like these, survival is the most important thing,’ he says, peering through his owlish glasses and brushing wisps of gray hair off his forehead. He doesn’t just mean it’s time to protect your assets. He means it’s time to stave off disaster. As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of ‘evil.’ Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether.

‘I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,’ Soros tells Newsweek. ‘We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.'”

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