"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." -The Red Queen

Chess is beautifully and almost infinitely complex.  When you play, you have to visualize where the pieces on the board can move and then extrapolate out, imagining where they might move one, two, three, or more moves down the line.  You have to anticipate where your opponent might move and how you can react.

Usually, this all happens in your head.  But now there's a chess program, Thinking Machine 4, that allows you to see the strength of different moves and the lines of attack and defense as the game unfolds.  It's designed as an art project, but I think it has a lot of potential as a chess training tool.  At the moment, the computer isn't a terribly good player and the abstract pieces are simply annoying.  Still, if you combined the idea with a decent chess program like Shredder you could have a powerful learning tool.

"Thinking Machine 4 explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought. Play chess against a transparent intelligence, its evolving thought process visible on the board before you.

The artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the viewer. If the viewer confronts the program, the computer's thought process is sketched on screen as it plays. A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine."

Latitude and Longitude

Google Latitude

New Google mobile app lets you track yourself and your friends with a GPS enabled phone.  My phone is about 10 years old, so I can't say whether I like it or not, but I can see how it'd be handy, especially as Wi-Fi and GPS/Skyhook coverage expands.

Privacy issues will always plague this sort of application, but it's voluntary, so I really don't see the problem.  If I want to broadcast my location, that's up to me.

Total Recall

Body Armor Recalled by Army

"Army Secretary Pete Geren has ordered the recall of more than 16,000 sets of body armor following an audit that concluded the bullet-blocking plates in the vests failed testing and may not provide Soldiers with adequate protection."

We've come a long way from Ned Kelly's improvised body armor (in the picture above), but it's disgraceful that we'd send soldiers into the field with poorly tested armor.

Black Sheep

Borrowed Gene Blackens Wolves -- Pennisi 2009 (205): 4 -- ScienceNOW

Turns out North American wolves interbred with domestic dogs thousands of years ago:

"Black wolves are quite rare outside North America. So Barsh and his colleagues think that more than 10,000 years ago, black dogs migrating with people heading across the Bering Strait into North American interbred with wolves, introducing the K locus variant. "Typically, hybridization is thought to retard adaptation. However, every once in a while, [a variant] is introduced from one species into a second and is advantageous," says Hopi Hoekstra, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University. "This is really an exceptional finding.""

Ferrofluids

A lot of people are familar with these already, but the Creative Commons photos on Wikipedia are just too impressive not to share.  The ability to visualize the otherwise invisible:

"Ferrofluids are tiny iron particles covered with a liquid coating, also surfactant that are then added to water or oil, which gives them their liquid properties. Ferrofluids are colloidal suspensions -- materials with properties of more than one state of matter. In this case, the two states of matter are the solid metal and liquid it is in."

Ooblek 2.0

LiveLeak.com - Cornstarch Monster on a Speaker

Non-Newtonian fluids are a staple in elementary (and high-shool) science classrooms.  I think one of the driving forces behind good science is a child-like (but not childish) wonder at the world.  It's a desire to tinker and experiment and get your hands dirty.  And it's an appreciation of counter-intuitive things that just look cool.

Also worth taking a look at ferrofluids. You can see a video here.

And at surface tension in oil streams.

"Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made."

1-Ton Snakes Once Slithered In The Tropics : NPR

The loss of megafauna weighs heavy on my heart.  The world would be a more exciting and interesting place with wooly mammoths, giant sloths, saber-tooth tigers, and 1-ton snakes.

Having owned and travelled in a school bus for a time, it's especially evocative to hear that Titanoboa cerrejonensis grew as long as a school bus and ate crocodiles whole.  Of course, this doesn't always end well for the snake.

The Internet

Visualizing data and mapping the internet.  Take a look here for more.

"Partial map of the Internet based on the January 15, 2005 data found on opte.org. Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses. The length of the lines are indicative of the delay between those two nodes. This graph represents less than 30% of the Class C networks reachable by the data collection program in early 2005. Lines are color-coded according to their corresponding RFC 1918 allocation as follows:

• Dark blue: net, ca, us
• Green: com, org
• Red: mil, gov, edu
• Yellow: jp, cn, tw, au, de
• Magenta: uk, it, pl, fr
• Gold: br, kr, nl
• White: unknown"

The biggest event you've never heard of

TED: Ideas worth spreading

The TED conference slides under the mainstream radar every year.  I honestly can't understand why, because it brings together some of the more brilliant people alive today and gives them a chance to say something interesting in a short presentation. 

Note of caution: you can easily get drawn into watching one video after another and find yourself half way through next week, unable to decide whether to spend your life pursuing statistics, development work, fine art, or engineering.

I wrote a short piece about the conference last year for NPR's Intern Edition.

Skyhook or Skynet?

Skyhook Wireless - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Researching digital media and came across an MIT paper about innovation that describes the development of GPS (hard to believe the final Air Force GPS satellite went into orbit in 1993).  Skyhook has received plenty of publicity and it's a great idea, but I can't help but laugh at the name and the story.

"As long as most Wi-Fi users haven't turned off their access points (or moved, or bought new ones), Skyhook delivers an address more reliably than the Pentagon, and with more precision."

We've gone from guiding ICBMs to Moscow to BMWs to Starbucks in 10 years.

The Economist-- "Insert witty title here"

Air force one | The Economist

America overtakes Germany as the world's biggest wind-power market |

First off, good pun.  Don't know that The Economist gets quite enough credit for their consistent wit.

Second, it's good to see that wind power keeps growing despite (or perhaps along with) the recession.  Each time I drive through the American West, I'm blown away (Is the Economist hiring?) by the long lines of wind turbines.  They're majestic and elegant and would drive Don Quixote wild.

Evidence of Combat in Triceratops

"Evidence of Combat in Triceratops," PLoS ONE

Combine this with the possibility of cloning extinct creatures and life gets more interesting all the time:

"This pattern is consistent with Triceratops using its horns in combat and the frill being adapted as a protective structure for this taxon. Lower pathology rates in Centrosaurus may indicate visual rather than physical use of cranial ornamentation in this genus, or a form of combat focused on the body rather than the head."

"He therefore found his father alone, hoeing a vine."

Gardening gives older adults benefits like hand strength and self esteem

In The Odyssey, Odysseus finds his father Laertes alone in the garden when he returns to Ithaca:

""I see, sir," said [Odysseus], "that you are an excellent gardener- what pains you take with it, to be sure. There is not a single plant, not a fig tree, vine, olive, pear, nor flower bed, but bears the trace of your attention."

-Book XXIV

It's good to see there's some scientific evidence backing up the health benefits of gardening.  The allotment gardens in England are a particularly impressive example.  It's not surprising that the same holds true for young kids:

"Shoemaker, who also researches gardening as a prevention strategy to childhood obesity, said that studying the physical benefits of gardening is important for older adults because gardening is a physically active hobby that provides an alternative to sports or other exercise."

"There's a lot of natural motivation in gardening," Shoemaker said. "For one thing, you know there's a plant you've got to go out and water and weed to keep alive. If we get the message out there that older adults can get health benefits from gardening, they'll realize that they don't have to walk around the mall to get exercise.""

Slate on vultures

The life story of a vulture. - By Constance Casey - Slate Magazine

Counterintuitive stories appear to be Slate's speciality.  Take a common belief or perception, flip it on its head, and you've got your piece.  Good formula.

"Unjust though this is, it's understandable that we find the carrion-eating birds gruesome. Most of us would rather not think of ourselves as meat, and the details of vulture dining are hard to get comfortable with. Vultures, whose name comes from vellere, Latin for to tear, begin their eating at vulnerable spots on the carcass—the anus and eyes."

If wishes were fishes

Doodle 4 Google

I enjoy Google's side projects.  This one is a bit soppy, but since I enjoy the logo artwork on the search engine page so much, this seemed like it was worth sharing.

Wreck of HMS Victory Found in English Channel - NYTimes.com

Wreck of HMS Victory Found in English Channel - NYTimes.com

I love shipwrecks.  Add in "possibly four tons of gold coins valued at $1 billion."  Maybe this could be part of the economic stimulus package?  Federally funded treasure hunts.  Not so different from what we're doing now really....

Extinct ibex is resurrected by cloning - Telegraph

Extinct ibex is resurrected by cloning - Telegraph

(via Geekologie)

Dinosaurs.  That's right:

"It has also increased the possibility that it will one day be possible to reproduce long-dead species such as woolly mammoths and even dinosaurs."

1950- The Turing Test

Computing Machinery and Intelligence, By A. M. Turing


"I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?""

I've read about this article in science fiction and so on for years, but never came across the original article until now. It's dated, but more relevant all the time. A friend of mine suggested an alternative test for machine intelligence-- intentional creation of art.

Google-- "To organize the [world]... and make it universally accessible and useful."

Google Earth, Google Ocean

The Guardian breaks the news that Google will add the ocean surface and seabed to Google Earth.

"It's a really useful tool for scientists, to [be able to] share data on the oceans," said David Sandwell, professor of geophysics at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, at the University of San Diego.. "For me, it's the detailed global tectonic structure of the sea floor … if you're a physical oceanographer, the important thing is that the currents and tides are affected by things that stick up from the sea floor."

I'm just hoping they'll integrate Google Earth with handheld GPS and cellphones.  Distributed geographic information gathering seems like it could be incredibly powerful.

Nice threads

Better spider silk | Does even more than a spider can | The Economist

Combine with the spider-goat, and we could be onto something...

I've always loved the stories of attempted spider-farming:

"Compared with silkworms, spiders are aggressive and will eat one another, making it inadvisable to keep many spiders together in the same space." (Wikipedia)

I'll have to track down the historical account I came across a few years ago, but the idea of frustrated scientists watching their spider herds consume each other is priceless.  It's like farming tigers.

Drake [revised]

Broadcasting but not receiving: density dependence considerations for SETI signals

The Drake equation is an attempt to estimate how many extraterrestrial civiliations exist in our galaxy and how many of those we might eventually contact.  It's an interesting idea, and gets a lot of coverage in astrobiology and skeptic publications, but it's essentially pure speculation:

The Drake equation states that:

where:

N is the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;

and

R^* is the average rate of star formation in our galaxy

f_p is the fraction of those stars that have planets

n_e is the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets

f_ℓ is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point

f_i is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life

f_c is the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space

L is the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

This paper proposes a change in one of the variables, which is interseting, but still doesn't really lead us anywhere.

"Results show that under certain assumptions, a galaxy can be teeming with civilizations yet not have a guarantee of communication between any of them given either short lifetimes or small maximum distances for communication."