Rockin' and Rollin': Tensegrity Locomotion

Rolling is the new walking, judging from publications in tensegrity robotics.

Super Ball Bot by NASA robotics scientists Vytas SunSpiral and Adrian Agogino works in this way. The rolling is enabled by changing the cable lengths, as can be seen in this CAD video:


John Wenz covered the team in Popular Mechanics, and wrote:

The Super Ball Bot by NASA robotics scientists Vytas SunSpiral and Adrian Agogino is capable of going where rovers and stationary probes cannot. Obstacles such as rocks or soft soil, the kind of problems that plague the Mars Spirit rover can't stop the structure. It doesn't have wheels in the traditional sense. Rather, the probe is one giant wheel capable of bounding along the surface, with the added capability of using its rods to push and pull itself out of complex terrain—and even walk as needed. This is all accomplished by controlling the cables to change shape and create motion. 

Super Ball Bot works on a concept known as a tensegrity structure, and SunSpiral and Agogino's design draws a little inspiration from futurist Buckminster Fuller and artist Kenneth Snelson. SunSpiral compares the mechanics of tensegrity to a skeletal structure. Rather than having rigid connections, such as a wheel on an axle, the ball's network of rods and cables is under tension but has no rigid hinges, and the components are free to move relative to each other. "They're under compression, they're being squeezed, they're doing their job as rods, but they don't touch each other, so the way that force propagates through the tensegrity structure is very different," SunSpiral says. "Forces diffuse through it, and they have some very interesting properties, because tension elements behave very differently. You don't have lever arms in them, so you get a lot of neat qualities such as this very inherent compliance and flexibility in the structure that is exactly what you need in a robot that's really going to interact with the real world." 

While Sunspiral has NASA's attention, other teams are working more quietly on prototypes. Mechanical and Computer Engineers at Union College, Schenectady published a paper documenting their success with a vibration powered tensegrity robot. They wrote,

Tensegrities are an appealing platform for modern robotics. They are robust, agile, and can quickly change shape, lending themselves to promising applications ranging from urban search-and-rescue to biomedical devices. However, these properties also make them exceedingly difficult to control through conventional means, particularly as the complexity of the robot increases. We have described a means of actuating and controlling tensegrity robots which treats their dynamical complexity as a feature to be exploited rather than as a liability to be suppressed. By designing the structure in order to maximize resonant possibilities, we can make the robot move simply by vibrating it at specific frequencies. This leads to a tensegrity robot which is much smaller and much simpler than existing designs, and yet outperforms in many regards. 

More valuably, we have demonstrated how we can affect behavioral change merely by changing the frequencies at which our robot vibrates. Achieving behavioral diversity by exploiting mechanical complexity in this manner is a valuable example of morphological computation, in which increasing dynamical coupling can, paradoxically, reduce the cost of control. Given the pervasiveness of both tensegrity and dynamical coupling in biological systems, our hope is that this can lead to a deeper understanding of how mechanically complex living systems at all scales of life move and interact with the world.

Close up the tensegrity robot's body. It is actuated by simple DC vibrating motors attached at the midpoint of three of its six struts. (Photo by Steven Stangle)

Rock and roll!

Links

Tensegrity Wiki on robotics: http://tensegrity.wikispaces.com/Robotics

John Wenz, Popular Mechanics, writing about the robots:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/nasa/cosmic-concepts-space-balls-rolling-across-titan-15943418

Exploiting Dynamical Complexity in a Physical Tensegrity Robot
to Achieve Locomotion,  By Mark Khazanov, Ben Humphreys, Willam Keat and John Rieffel, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7551/978-0-262-31709-2-ch144

Excellent example of the Ponzo Illusion

The above image was created by 'shopping three identical images of a car onto a photograph of a street.  The context of the photo (a receding street) creates in your mind the illusion that the cars are of different sizes - but they are exactly the same. ( I had to measure them to convince myself.)

At Neatorama, Alex Santoso has appended an animated gif to confirm the equality of the car images.

Here's another Ponzo Illusion:

Yes, get out your ruler.  We'll wait...

For a sea burial, the last stitch goes through the nose

A post by John Farrier at Neatorama today made note of a longstanding custom for sea burials by the Royal Navy:

On one of the ships I sailed as a cadet in the Merchant Navy in the early 1960s, there was a death on board off the West African coast. As there were two doctors on the ship to sign the death certificate and no refrigerated space, it was decided to "commit the body to the deep."

The mate sent me down to assist the bo'sun to prepare and stitch up the corpse, as he said I would be unlikely to witness such an occurrence again. The bo'sun, a North Sea Chinaman (ie, he hailed from the Orkney Isles), was in his sixties and had performed the task several times before. He was a deft hand with the palm [leather glove] and needle used to sew the heavy canvas into a shroud around the body, and when he came to the final stitches around the face he pushed the large triangular-shaped needle right through the nose. I winced, and he looked up at me and said, "That's the law of the sea, the last stitch through the nose, if that don't wake him up I know he's dead." 

I found confirmation at Exeter Flotilla, with a notation that the person who sewed up bodies for burial was paid a guinea per body.

I can't help but think of how this custom might have doomed the Count of Monte Cristo.

And btw, the phrase in the citation "He was a deft hand with the palm and needle" is interesting in and of itself.  See Wherein I learn what a collarmaker's palm is.

Photo from a brief instructional on how to make bunny whiskers: "When you have several loops, remove the needle from the thread, even up the length of the loops, then use sharp scissors to cut the loops open and trim the whiskers to the length you prefer."

The Leidenfrost Effect is endlessly fascinating

YouTube link.

I've written about it before (see "How to dip your hand into liquid nitrogen") and was delighted to find at Nothing to do with Arbroath the above video, in which students at the University of Bath used the effect to create directional movement by droplets of water.

Today I also found a description of the effect from 1868:

Mr. Davenport informs us, that he saw one of the workmen in the King’s Dockyard at Chatham immerse his naked hand in tar of that temperature [220°]. He drew up his coat sleeves, dipped in his hand and wrist, bringing out fluid tar, and pouring it off from his hand as from a ladle. The tar remained in complete contact with his skin, and he wiped it off with tow...

Mr. Davenport ascribes this singular effect to the slowness with which the tar communicates its heat, which he conceives to arise from the abundant volatile vapour which is evolved ‘carrying off rapidly the caloric in a latent state, and intervening between the tar and the skin, so as to prevent the more rapid communication of heat.’..

The workmen informed Mr. Davenport, that, if a person put his hand into the cauldron with his glove on, he would be dreadfully burnt, but this extraordinary result was not put to the test of observation. 

And found that the eponym comes from a German physician:

"During his lifetime, Leidenfrost published more than seventy manuscripts, including De Aquae Communis Nonnullis Qualitatibus Tractatus (1756) ("A Tract About Some Qualities of Common Water") in which the Leidenfrost effect was first described (although the phenomenon had been previously observed by Herman Boerhaave in 1732)."

Vivienne Westwood catwalk models, Paris, 2014

I've been accused of being provincial or narrow-minded when I've made snarky comments about modern fashion in dress, so I'll just hush up and let these photos speak for themselves.

From a gallery with dozens of photos at The Telegraph.

"Getting into the weeds"

I heard the phrase this afternoon on an NPR radio program about recent Congressional shenanigans and had to look it up.  The best I could find was a column in The Word Detective from 2011, excerpted herewith:

“[I]nto the weeds” now seems to be very, very popular, to the point where it earned its own article in the Christian Science Monitor in 2008. That article, in turn, heavily relied on an immensely helpful 2006 post on the excellent linguistics blog Language Log by Mark Liberman, who did some solid research on the phrase.

There seem to be two different uses of “getting into the weeds” out there in the wild. One is the “getting into too much (possibly irrelevant) detail” sense that you mention. This is evidently a very popular figure of speech among policy wonks, beltway insiders in Washington, D.C., and savvy observers such as Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, who has frequently used the phrase in his articles. The other sense is a restaurant term invoked when the staff is overworked, everything is going wrong, and total chaos is only a burnt fillet of sole away. Back in 2000 there was actually a Molly Ringwald movie about the staff of a restaurant dealing with a bad night called “In the Weeds.”

Golf, rather than farming, is favored for the etymology (details at the link).

New GSoW Forum - Species - Tyson - Krauss - Scott - Cochrane

The GSoW team is now officially moving from the cramped quarters of Facebook to a spacious custom designed forum.  This will really open up our teams to be able to train, mentor and move from language to language.  Expect to see a lot more from us as we work smarter.

The move of all the editors, files and creating help documents/videos have been keeping my "Away Team" busy for months. They wore their red shirts but we didn't lose a single person.  I want to give special thanks to several people who made this happen.  Our resident vampire, Nathan Miller, Chris Peterson, Bill Grieb, Leon Korteweg, Fred Green, Lei Pinter, Nix "Mini-me" Dorf, Ryan Harding, Zooterkin and Svetlana Bavykina.  But extra special thanks go to Walkiria "Paddling" Nubes and Julie Tominson for their relentless attention to the project.  

Dutch editor Emile Dingemans suggested we start a GSoW fan page on Facebook, and so we have.  It will work a bit like this blog, where you can follow and comment.  Here is the link to the Facebook Fan Page for GSoW, at the moment it appears to be full of photos of guerrillas, just our way of celebrating I guess. Of course the blog you are reading now is superior, as you can search for posts on specific topics of interest. Plus you will find a comment or three from Mabus the Internet troll for your reading pleasure.  I also know that there is at least one comment from the Amazing Randi himself on a post about his dear friend, Jerry Andrus.

                           ---------------------------------------------------

Not everyone has been working on creating the forum, some remained editing Wikipedia as you will see. I should point out that GSoW is constantly editing on WP, small changes make a lot of difference, but to highlight all those changes would be too much to relate here.  I'm only highlighting the more glamorous changes with these our latest updates!  If you have questions or would like to join our team, please write to us at GSoWteam@gmail.com.

Nathan Miller updated the Wikipedia page for the film Species, and I'm sure you are asking yourself, how is that related to scientific skepticism?  Nathan wrote the Wikipedia page for Ben Radford's book "Tracking the Chupacabra", which explains how Radford believes the legend of the Chupacabra started.  Sorry to give away the conclusion but even knowing this, you will still find it a great read.  Just learning how poultry can appear to have all their blood drawn out of their bodies was worth the price of the book.   
Before and After   
The Dutch team seemed to develop a burst of energy this month. The Portuguese team better watch out, they might just loose the title of the most prolific non-English editors.

First up is Gok van Pascal, which in English is known as Pascal's Wager.  Leon Korteweg translated this using Dawkin's "The God Delusion".

Wim Vanderberghe translated the English page for Scotsman Archie Cochrane for Dutch readers.  Very interesting man and I'm glad Wim brought him to my attention, I'm sure you will agree.

Leon also translated the Neil deGrasse Tyson page into Dutch.  We are trying to get ready for the release of Cosmos in 2014 by getting all of the Wikipedia pages that are associated with the series, ready and waiting for the thousands of visitors that will be arriving..  We are making progress, English, Portuguese, German, and now Dutch are finished.

Leon decided that because Lawrence Krauss will be appearing with Richard Dawkins in The Unbelievers his WP page needed some work.  Consequentially Krauss will also be speaking in Amsterdam in October 2014 so even more important that the Dutch page be in great shape.  Look at the difference.   Here is the before link.  And now the after.

The Spanish team is slowing down this month, but still Nix Dorf managed to get another page translated. This time it was for Eugenie Scott, who just announced her retirement from the NCSE by the end of 2013.

That's all the updates I have for the moment.  There are a few that are only a couple days away from finishing, they will just have to wait as we want them completely done before launching them.

      ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In case you have missed GSoW in the news, here are a few links to our more noteworthy shout-outs and interviews.

Two from Scot Bestows's blog Do You Think? This one features a conspiracy theory about the upcoming CFI Summit. Which BTW I've been asked to lecture at, so please try to make it.  His first blog on GSoW was one mainly about me being a Rational Hero for that week.

As usual every episode of Skepticality since January 2013 has had a podlet featuring GSoW.  And most of the Skeptical Connections podcasts have allowed me to record a segment, mostly I talk about how to get the skeptical message beyond the choir but please give them a listen, lots of great content from other people are in these episodes.

This was a blog by Robert Blaskiewicz which talked about what is being done RIGHT in the skeptical movement today and we were on that list.  Really cool.  Skeptical Humanities Blog

From a column I wrote for CFI about some of the pages we have written that concerns the history of scientific skepticism.

Ed Clint writing for the Richard Dawkins blog talks about how to get involved in skeptical activism.  Half the blog is given up to discussing GSoW, and the other half to another project I am active in, the Independent Investigative Group (IIG).

CFI asked me to lecture at their leadership conference this summer in New York.  Here are the videos of that lecture.

Janis Callister gave me a long interview allowing me to explain the GSoW project for the Just Skeptic's podcast.

The French language podcast Scepticisme Scientifique interviewed one of my French team members Christophe Michel about the GSoW project.

Sharon Hill's Doubtful News blog highlighted my JREF award from TAM 2013.

Our very own Chris Pederson was interviewed for Freethought Blog about her involvement with GSoW.

I was listed as one of the inspiring women at TAM 2013 on Ed Clint's blog.

Skeptoid Blog mentions the guest lecture given by Shane Greenup and GSoW Swedish team leader Philip Skogsberg at the European Skeptic Congress, held in Stockholm Sweden this August.  I was supported to be the one giving the lecture, but my oncologist would not allow me to travel from California to Sweden during this time.

Recorded at TAM 2013, I was a guest host for Virtual Skeptics podcast.

                    -------------------------------------------------------------

Upcoming events...

Wednesday October 9th, 2013 I will be lecturing for the Bay Area Skeptics in Berkeley, CA.  Here is more information.

October 24-27, 2013 find me at the CFISummit in Tacoma, WA.  Here is the website.

Saturday, Jan 18th, 2014 I will be lecturing for the Santa Barbara, CA Humanist Society.  (more info to follow)

CCC stonework at Yellowstone Park

Earlier this summer I noted that life is too short for me to personally document all of the CCC projects, and I suggested that readers interested in the subject matter might photograph (or even write up for their own blog) CCC stonework in their community or that which they encounter on their travels.

Today, the first post resulting from that suggestion.  Reader Jan Bussey visited Yellowstone Park, and remembering my request she focused her camera on some of the stonework she encountered.

The Civilian Conservation Corps, а New Deal relief agency fоr young men, played а major role between 1933 аnd 1942 іn developing Yellowstone facilities. CCC projects included reforestation, campground development оf many оf the park's trails аnd campgrounds, trail construction, fire hazard reduction, аnd fire-fighting work. The CCC built the majority оf the early visitor centers, campgrounds аnd the current system оf park roads.

The top embedded photo is of a stone building at Madison Junction within the park.  One problem that Jan noted is that the park is older than the CCC, so that not every structure can be assumed to be the work of the CCC participants. This building clearly has a new roof (right), but the construction style - with the wall entirely made of native stone rather than faced with stone - clearly suggests an earlier date for its creation.  I did find online confirmation that CCC work was done at Madison Junction.

The Old Faithful Lodge (above) has extensive and impressive stonework, but because it was constructed in the 1920s and because the stonework is so integral to the building (fireplace, load-bearing walls), it must predate the CCC program.

Road overlooks are also prime sites for impressive stonework.  Jan photographed this one at Gibbon Falls, where there certainly has been recent restoration and repair -

And this one at Lake Jenny - done in mortarless fashion.  There was no single fashion or style of stonework common to all the CCC projects.  The administration hired local professional stonemasons to instruct the boys who came out of the inner cities and farmsteads, and each stonemason presumably had skills acquired over a lifetime on how to work with local material. 

I'll end with this photo taken at Madison Junction.  I particularly like the way the stone wall of the building was integrated into the massive stone protruding from the ground.

If other readers have photos of CCC stonework in Yellowstone, I can append them here later.  Jan Bussey's other photographs are displayed in galleries at her Cascade Exposures website.

I believe two readers (Flask and Christy) are currently compiling  photos of CCC stonework at Watkins Glen.  Stay tuned.

An extremely clean harvestman

As reported by Susannah Anderson in her delightful blog Wanderin' Weeta (With Waterfowl and Weeds):

I took a blouse out of the washer and hung it to dry. This daddy-long-legs came running out of a fold. Good thing I used cold water and the gentle cycle.

I saw him last night, roaming placidly around the bathroom; he looked duller then. Today, the first thing I saw was the flash of brick red. And he was panicking; I don't think I've ever seen a harvestman run as fast as he was before.

More photos at the link, along with this interesting question: "I wonder: does he run faster with shorter legs? Do those long, wobbly legs slow down his brothers?"

I don't have an answer, but I did find this interesting tidbit:

The legs continue to twitch after they are detached. This is because there are 'pacemakers' located in the ends of the first long segment (femur) of their legs. These pacemakers send signals via the nerves to the muscles to extend the leg and then the leg relaxes between signals. While some harvestman's legs will twitch for a minute, other kinds have been recorded to twitch for up to an hour. The twitching has been hypothesized as a means to keep the attention of a predator while the harvestman escapes.

Just like a skink's tail.  Cool.

Adrian's bookcase

YouTube link.

"Just showing what's on my main bookshelf at the end of 2012. Not every title is legible, but it's the best of several takes. There's one more shelf underneath (containing textbooks and magazines) which I chose not to include.

Happy to answer any questions."

Readers who would like to submit material for this feature will find guidelines here.

p.s. - a video like this is a quick way to create documentation for insurance purposes in case of fire, flood, tornado, or other biblioholocaust.

Professor Batty's bookcase

"This is my personal shelf, my wife has her own. The top row are all Icelandic books, with many of the sagas and all of the translated work of Halldór Laxness. This is an active reference for my Laxness in Translation site. There is a fair amount of modern Icelandic fiction on the second row as well; the Arnaldur Indriason mysteries, Sjón's strange novels, along with the late Minnesota author Bill Holm's evocative essay collections. The rest of the case holds music-related books (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Björk), mythology (Robert Graves, Joesph Campbell), folktales, some modern fiction (Douglas Coupland, Jeffery Eugenides, Charles Portis), a variety of art books and some miscellany. Some of the more interesting titles:

Songs of a Sourdough, by Robert W. Service (1907)
The San Francisco Calamity by Earthquake and Fire, by Charles Morris
The Art Journal Volume XVIII, (1879)
After 1903—What?, by Robert Benchley (1938)
California and the West, by Edward Weston (1940)
Growing Pains, by Wanda Gág (1939) 

Most of these books I look at or read fairly often, I don't keep books I won't read again."

Readers who would like to submit material for this feature will find guidelines here. 

The value of a dashcam

YouTube link.

Dashcams are very popular in Russia because they provide documentation of faked accidents and injuries - as for example those created by the pedestrians in this supercut.

One note from the BoingBoing via: "Unfortunately someone really does get run over, so don't watch this if you think you might be disturbed."

Projecting without a projector: sharing your smartphone content onto an arbitrary display

Posted by Yang Li, Research Scientist, Google Research

Previously, we presented Deep Shot, a system that allows a user to “capture” an application (such as Google Maps) running on a remote computer monitor via a smartphone camera and bring the application on the go. Today, we’d like to discuss how we support the opposite process, i.e., transferring mobile content to a remote display, again using the smartphone camera.

Although the computing power of today’s mobile devices grows at an accelerated rate, the form factor of these devices remains small, which constrains both the input and output bandwidth for mobile interaction. To address this issue, we investigated how to enable users to leverage nearby IO resources to operate their mobile devices. As part of the effort, we developed Open Project, an end-to-end framework that allows a user to “project” a native mobile application onto an arbitrary display using a smartphone camera, leveraging interaction spaces and input modality of the display. The display can range from a PC or laptop monitor, to a home Internet TV and to a public wall-sized display. Via an intuitive, projection-based metaphor, a user can easily share a mobile application by projecting it onto a target display.

Open Project is an open, scalable, web-based framework for enabling mobile sharing and collaboration. It can turn any computer display projectable instantaneously and without deployment. Developers can add support for Open Project in native mobile apps by simply linking a library, requiring no additional hardware or sensors. Our user participants responded highly positively to Open Project-enabled applications for mobile sharing and collaboration.

Using polio virus to treat brain tumors

This MRI depicts a sagittal view of the head of a 15-year-old boy with GBM.

My wife forwarded to me an article in the Washington Post that is absolutely fascinating. 
Glioblastoma multiforme is a particularly vicious type of brain cancer.  It arises from neural tissue and is extremely aggressive, infiltrating in a fashion that makes surgical excision virtually impossible, and is resistant to radiation therapy and chemotherapy (because drugs have difficulty penetrating the blood/brain barrier).

Enter the poliovirus, which has evolved over millenia to target neural tissue:

The Preston Robert Tisch Brain Cancer Center at Duke University has the largest experience on the East Coast with my sort of tumor, so I went there for further consultation and treatment.

As doctors there examined me, it was obvious that my tumor had already grown again; in fact, it had quadrupled in size since my initial chemo and radiation. I was offered several treatments and experimental protocols, one of which involved implanting a modified polio virus into my brain. (This had been very successful in treating GBMs in mice.) Duke researchers had been working on this for 10 years and had just received permission from the FDA to treat 10 patients, but for only one a month. (A Duke press release last May explained that the treatment was designed to capitalize “on the discovery that cancer cells have an abundance of receptors that work like magnets in drawing the poliovirus, which then infects and kills the cells. The investigational therapy . . . uses an engineered form of the virus that is lethal to cancer cells, while harmless to normal cells. The therapy is infused directly into a patient’s tumor. The virus-based therapy also triggers the body’s immune system to attack the infected tumor cells.”)...

I returned to Duke a month after the infusion, and though an MRI showed some expected swelling, the more significant fact was that the tumor had stopped growing. I have gone back to Duke every two months since then, and the tumor, initially the size of a grape, is now a scar, the size of a small pea. It’s been two years since the initial biopsy and radiation, and one year since the experimental polio viral treatment, and I have no evidence of recurrence nor tumor regrowth.

With a "smart rifle" anyone can be a sniper

YouTube link.

Excerpts from a fascinating article at Vice's Motherboard:

[TalkingPoint Solutions] made headlines in early 2013 when it unveiled the precision guided firearm (PGF). Think of it as a long-range, laser-guided robo rifle—as much Linux-based computer as traditional firearm. The PGF's closed-loop system comprises not just the gun itself, a custom Surgeon rifle, but also custom ammunition and, notably, a proprietary (and WiFi-enabled) scope. The technology packed into TrackingPoint's initial PGF package is so advanced that we'd heard it could have an inexperienced shooter, maybe even someone who hasn't ever fired a gun, putting lead on targets at over 1,000 away in mere minutes. Not lifetimes. Not years. Minutes...

The art of sniping has traditionally been one of complex ballistics. A long-distance shot must be aimed above a target due to the bullet's drop (gravity) and a slew of other ambient factors that play with projectiles—wind, incline, cant, humidity, temperature, the coriolis effect. TrackingPoint's system does the exact same real-time ballistics calculation, only it does it for you. This is what the company means when it says it's "democratizing accuracy"...

The scope records video every time the system tags, tracks, and fires. Being WiFi enabled, users can immediately upload videos of their kills from the scope directly to social media. Shared killing—it's part of a broader push to target digital natives. "If there's one thing we've got, it's 12-year-olds on the Internet," said TrackingPoint's marketing director Oren Schauble, who is Jason's younger brother.

The PGF is by no means perfect, at least not yet.  But that doesn't mean it's not really, really good at doing precisely what it's designed to do. It took all but five minutes for me to put that one together. That's how long I waited, in another stuffy blind on the opposite side of the ranch, for a 250-pound hog to saunter out of the brush and into a clearing, a black blob in the HUD's reticle. It was a big thing, the sort of critter that my guide, a leather-skinned ranch hand named Chris, referred to as a "fuckin' toad." I dropped my tag, aligned the pip and reticle, and just when I thought the PGF would fire, it did. It was a 200 yard shot to the neck. I was told if it had been just fractions of an inch further to the left I would've blown the thing's head clean off.

To think, even experienced snipers "have difficulty making first-round hits at long range," as TrackingPoint claims. But there I was, just some dude who only 48 hours prior had neither fired nor held a gun. One shot, one kill...

TrackingPoint doesn't want to wait around. To hear Jason Schauble tell it, they'll do it better and faster, and sell it to the public all the while. The company tells me they're on pace to sell 500 PGFs by the end of 2013, which would double initial projections. As of this writing, the startup has sold $250,000 worth of its custom ammo alone.

Much more at the link.  Interesting reading.

"Telephone Line" (ELO, 1976)

YouTube link.

Hello, how are you? Have you been alright?
Through all those lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely nights
That's what I'd say, I'd tell you everything
If you'd pick up that telephone, yeah yeah yeah.

Hey, how you feelin'? Are you still the same?
Don't you realize the things we did, we did
Were all for real, not a dream? And I just can't believe
They've all faded out of view, yeah yeah yeah...

Re "Telephone Line":

The song is track two on their 1976 album, A New World Record... It became their biggest single success in the US and was their first UK gold award for a single. With ELO's continuing success in America it seemed obvious to Lynne to use an American ring tone during the songWriter/guitarist, Lynne explained:

To get the sound on the beginning, you know, the American telephone sound, we phoned from England to America to a number that we know nobody would be at, to just listen to it for a while. On the Moog we recreated the sound exactly by tuning the oscillators to the same notes as the ringing of the phone.

And re the group:

Electric Light Orchestra (ELO) are a British rock group from Birmingham, England, who released eleven studio albums between 1971 and 1986 and another album in 2001. ELO were formed to accommodate Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne's desire to create modern rock and pop songs with classical overtones...

The band also holds the record for having the most Billboard Hot 100 Top 40 hits of any group in US chart history without ever having a number one single...

The group's name is an intended pun based not only on electric light (as in a light bulb as seen on early album covers) but also using "electric" rock instruments combined with a "light orchestra" (orchestras with only a few cellos and violins that were popular in Britain during the 1960s).

The official band logo... is based on a 1946 Wurlitzer jukebox model 4008 speaker... For instance, on 1977's Out of the Blue, the logo was turned into a huge flying saucer space station, an enduring image now synonymous with the band.

Crank it up!!

Lake Bondhus, Norway

The Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year for 2011 (click image for fullscreen).

Winning (and runner-up) photos dating back to 2006 are available at the link.

The slaughter of rhinoceros

I've written five posts about the ongoing worldwide slaughter of rhinoceros.  I hate to keep harping on the subject, but it keeps happening:

Nearly 700 rhinos have been killed in South Africa in 2013, making it the bloodiest year yet for rhino poaching. Last year, a record 668 rhinos were poached for their horns, but that figure has already been eclipsed with the deaths of 688 rhinos with three months left of the year, figures from the South African government show. There are around 18,000 white and 4,000 black rhinos in the country.

The dramatic growth in rhino poaching in South Africa, up from just 13 in 2007, has largely been driven by demand in Asia, in particular Vietnam, where rhino horn is seen as a status symbol. A survey of 720 people in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, published earlier this month, found that typical buyers were "educated, successful and powerful individuals" and use rhino horn as currency in networking.

A bleak future for the wife of a rapist

Excerpts from a grim story in the Wall Street Journal:

Akshay Kumar Singh and three other men were convicted this month of a crime that focused the world's attention on violence against women in India: the gang rape and killing of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student on a bus in December.

For the parents of the woman who died, the sentencing brought a measure of closure. For Ms. Devi, who is in her 20s, and her 2-year-old son, her husband's crime and punishment have opened up a chapter of profound uncertainty.

Ms. Devi expects to be cast out by her in-laws and face ostracism and destitution here in India's conservative hinterland—not because she is married to a convicted murderer, but because she is a woman without a husband. "As a widow, my honor will be lost forever," she says.

Her husband's relatives say they can't afford to feed her. Her parents say they are too poor to take her back. The customs of purdah practiced in the region make it almost impossible for her to work outside the home.

"I am not educated. Our traditions are such that I cannot even step out of the house," Ms. Devi said. "Who will earn money to feed me and my son?"...

Ms. Devi says she can write her name and a few Hindi words, and read a bit. She knew from an early age, she says, what was expected of a woman: to raise children and take care of household tasks...

Since Mr. Singh's December arrest, his family has been thrown into upheaval. His brothers, Vinay and Abhay, who had also been working around Delhi, left their jobs for three months to help out at home, straining household finances. The family's reputation has been damaged.

"They treat us as untouchables," says Abhay Singh, who works in a paint factory in a Delhi suburb...

Ms. Devi doesn't know where to turn. "Is there anyone who is thinking of me?" she asked, crying after learning of the death sentence. "I am alive and I have a small child who is still breathing."

Elite fundraiser for Obama nominated for Canadian ambassadorship

Every president does this, and I'm frankly tired of it.

A veteran Goldman Sachs & Co. executive and major fundraiser for President Barack Obama has been nominated as the next ambassador to Canada — the latest in a parade of big-dollar campaign backers slated to represent U.S. interests abroad.

Chicago-based Bruce Heyman raised more than $750,000 for Obama’s committees since 2007, along with his wife, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of records.

Heyman’s nomination is a sort of milestone for the White House: During his second term, Obama has now tapped 20 campaign bundlers for ambassadorships. Together, these moneymen and women raised at least $13.8 million — and likely much more — for Obama’s political committees since 2007, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s research.

I was delighted in 2009 when he chose John Huntsman (fluent in Mandarin Chinese) to the diplomatic post in China.  But by 2011 the stream of patronage was obvious -

More than two years after President Obama took office vowing to banish “special interests” from his administration, nearly 200 of his biggest donors have landed plum government jobs and advisory posts, won federal contracts worth millions of dollars for their business interests or attended numerous elite White House meetings and social events...

As a candidate, Obama spoke passionately about diminishing the clout of moneyed interests and making the White House more accessible to everyday Americans. In kicking off his presidential run on Feb. 10, 2007, he blasted “the cynics, the lobbyists, the special interests,” who he said had “turned our government into a game only they can afford to play.”

And now it continues during the second term.  Please someone tell me this Heyman at least speaks French.

Clever Halloween costumes

It's a bit early for Halloween-themed posts, but I wanted to break a series of rather serious topics.  When I'm giving out treats to the neighbor kids, I much prefer to see home-made outfits rather than plastic store-bought Spiderman or Power Ranger costumes.

The soda-bottles-with-crepe-paper-flames comes from Been There, Pinned That (via Neatorama); the wheelchair adaptation (which seems more appropriate for a parade than for door-to-door trick-or-treating and may not have originally been for Halloween) was at imgur, via Reddit.

A vibration-cancelling spoon for persons with tremors

The device is described at Fast Company Design:

At first glimpse, the Liftware almost seems like a novelty gadget: an electronic spoon stuffed full of smartphone motion sensors and accelerometers. But the problem that the Liftware is trying to solve is far from trivial. Across the country, there are over 10 million people suffering from essential tremor; there are an additional 2 million people suffering from Parkinson's disease. For these 12 million Americans, the Liftware isn't just an electronic spoon; it's a tool that could give them their dignity and self-respect back...

Here's how it works. Inside every Liftware handle is a number of common motion sensors, the type that you might find in your iPhone or digital camera. Each of these sensors measures motion, then passes it through a small microcontroller that uses custom algorithms to analyze the signal and identify the type of tremor being detected. If the motion has the frequency and amplitude of a large human tremor, the Liftware microprocessor will tell actuators in the handle to adjust the handle's attachment in the opposite direction of the tremor, hopefully canceling it out.

Anyone who has had a family member with Parkinson's will appreciate the potential value of such a device.

Teaser for "Hug an Atheist"

YouTube link.

Excerpts from an article at Sojourners:

Some outside the atheist community — and even many inside it — would argue that atheism has an image problem. Every challenge to the First Amendment seems to bring to the airwaves some version of an angry atheist versus a sputtering religious pundit. Cooler, calmer heads seldom make an appearance.

Now, a new feature-length documentary from a first-time filmmaker hopes to put a more human, middle-of-the-road face on American atheism... The 90-minute film is the project of Sylvia Broeckx, a 35-year-old Belgian who lives in England and has been an atheist and humanist since her teens. She became interested in America’s perception of nonbelievers when some American friends and fellow atheists shared their own stories of feeling marginalized.

“I always assumed America was founded on freedom of religion and was very much like Europe where if you are an atheist it is no big deal,” she said. “When I discovered that in America being an atheist could be a big problem, that was really a shock to me.”

She was especially upset by the stories of Jessica Ahlquist and Damon Fowler, two teenage atheists who challenged prayer in their public schools. Ahlquist, a Rhode Island high schooler, received death threats and was belittled by local government officials, and Fowler’s family kicked him out of their Louisiana home before his high school graduation...

What is not included is any sort of diatribe or argument against religious belief or believers that’s become the common currency of the most visible atheist activists.

“I really wanted to make sure it was as upbeat as possible and that it really wasn’t a case of ‘us’ against ‘them,’” Broeckx said.

Phytophotodermatitis

It's exactly what the word says - skin (derma) inflammation (itis) caused by exposure to plants (phyto) and sunlight (photo).  My wife has experienced it after brusing against rue in our garden (which we raise for the Black Swallowtails).  Other plants capable of photosensitizing human skin are listed in the Wikipedia entry, and include wild parsnip (which we encounter frequently while hiking in our part of the Midwest), parsley, celery, lemon, and lime.

The photos above are from a report on a group of children burned after playing with lime juice.

What at first seemed to be overexposure to the sun blossomed into softball-sized blisters and second-degree burns. Her girls, Jewels, 12, and Jazmyn, 9, wound up spending several days in an intensive care unit, hooked up to morphine to manage the pain...

A neighbor had a large lime tree that grew over the fence into the backyard where the girls went swimming. They had picked some of the fruits and squeezed them out into imaginary tea cups in their play lemonade stand... She remembered the girls crushing the fruits, juice sliding down their arms, splashing their legs, hitting their faces. 

The tricky part is that even after initial clinical resolution, the victim has to minimize exposure to sunlight because the light can cause recrudescence of the lesions even without reexposure to the sensitizer.

Via Nothing to do with Arbroath.

See if you could pass this "literacy" test

In the 1960s literacy tests were used in some states in the United States to suppress voting.  The Civil Rights Movement Veterans website has collected a number of these.

In addition to completing the application and swearing the oaths, you had to pass the actual "Literacy Test" itself. Because the Freedom Movement was running "Citizenship Schools" to help people learn how to fill out the forms and pass the test, Alabama changed the test 4 times in less than two years (1964-1965). At the time of the Selma Voting Rights campaign there were actually 100 different tests in use across the state...

Most of the tests collected here are a battery of trivia questions related to civic procedure and citizenship. (Two from the Alabama test: “Name the attorney general of the United States” and “Can you be imprisoned, under Alabama law, for a debt?”).

But this Louisiana “literacy” test, singular among its fellows, has nothing to do with citizenship. Designed to put the applicant through mental contortions, the test's questions are often confusingly worded. If some of them seem unanswerable, that effect was intentional. The (white) registrar would be the ultimate judge of whether an answer was correct.

Try this one: “Write every other word in this first line and print every third word in same line (original type smaller and first line ended at comma) but capitalize the fifth word that you write.” 

Done with page one (above)?  Here are pages 2 and 3:

  

Oh, BTW...

The test was to be taken in 10 minutes flat, and a single wrong answer meant a failing grade.

Did you fail?  You can't vote.

Via Slate and BoingBoing.

Advances in logrolling

YouTube link.

Meet Wisconsinite Abby Hoeschler, who is the boom running world record holder.

“I’m the current boom running world champion and world record holder. There are two events: In logrolling, you’re trying to dislodge your competitor from the log (or just be the last one on the log) in a three-out-of-five-round match. In boom running, a course of eight logs tied end to end is attached to two docks, and you sprint across and back. The fastest time wins.”

“It uses a lot of core ... and a lot of butt, because you’re in the squat position — really digging in. It’s kind of like chair pose in yoga. You keep your shoulders up, with a strong core. It’s an all-body workout."

More about her and the sport in the StarTribune.  In the video she is promoting a synthetic log she developed and is marketing to help popularize (and standardize) the sport.  To overcome the logistic problem of transporting 500-pound logs, the synthetic ones are hollow, made of polyethylene, then filled with water at the site of use to bring them up to mass.

Here's a video of the women's  boom-running competition at the Lumberjack World Championships. And this one of the finals of the men's logrolling competition in 2011:

YouTube link.

"Mountain Dew mouth"

From a story at NPR:

[O]ver in Appalachia, the region that stretches roughly from southern New York state to Alabama, the fight against soda is targeting an altogether different concern: rotted teeth. Public health advocates say soft drinks are driving the region's alarmingly high incidence of eroded brown teeth — a phenomenon dubbed "Mountain Dew mouth," after the region's favorite drink...

Dentists have also found that the effects of soda on teeth are strikingly similar to the effects of methamphetamine or crack on teeth... Drinking more than a soda a day raises the risk that found in many soft and energy drinks will eat away at your tooth enamel and its pearly white color...

Harris says that dental problems are especially bad because dental care is harder to get in Appalachia, which includes many of the poorest and most remote communities in the country. Many people don't trust the well water in their homes because of pollution concerns and probably drink more soda because of it...

More information at the link.  Photo from a related article at First Choice Dental.

Dinosaur feathers

Preserved in amber.

The researchers combed through thousands of minuscule amber nuggets from nearly 80 million years ago. Among them they found 11 M&M-sized globules with traces of ancient feathers and fuzz. A number resembled modern feathers—some fit for flying and others designed to dive. And unlike fossils, the amber preserved colors too: white, gray, red and brown.

The unusual find suggests a wide array of plumed creatures populated the time period—sporting everything from seemingly modern feathers to their filament-like forebears—and that even by this early date, feathers had become specialized, for example, for diving underwater... 

The research was published in Science back in 2011:

The currently accepted evolutionary-developmental model for feathers consists of a stage I morphology characterized by a single filament: This unfurls into a tuft of filaments (barbs) in stage II. In stage III, either some tufted barbs coalesce to form a rachis (central shaft) (IIIa), or barbules (segmented secondary branches) stem from the barbs (IIIb); then, these features combine to produce tertiary branching (IIIa+b). Barbules later differentiate along the length of each barb, producing distal barbules with hooklets at each node to interlock adjacent barbs and form a closed pennaceous (vaned) feather (stage IV). Stage V encompasses a wide range of additional vane and subcomponent specializations. Most modern birds possess stage IV or V feathers or secondary reductions from these stages...

The snapshot of Campanian feather diversity from Canadian amber is biased toward smaller feathers, subcomponents of feathers, feathers that are molted frequently, and feathers in body positions that increase their likelihood of contacting resin on tree trunks. Despite these limitations, the assemblage demonstrates that numerous evolutionary stages were present in the Late Cretaceous, and that plumage already served a range of functions in both dinosaurs and birds. 

Red-feathered underwater dinosaurs.  I love it.

Via Discover Magazine and Neatorama.

Video of the moon rotating

YouTube link.

The technology is explained at NASA's Astronomy Photo of the Day:

No one, presently, sees the Moon rotate like this. That's because the Earth's moon is tidally locked to the Earth, showing us only one side. Given modern digital technology, however, combined with many detailed images returned by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a high resolution virtual Moon rotation movie has now been composed. The above time-lapse video starts with the standard Earth view of the Moon. Quickly, though, Mare Orientale, a large crater with a dark center that is difficult to see from the Earth, rotates into view just below the equator. From an entire lunar month condensed into 24 seconds, the video clearly shows that the Earth side of the Moon contains an abundance of dark lunar maria, while the lunar far side is dominated by bright lunar highlands.

Where are they now? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"After the expiry of his second term he decided to withdraw from political life and started working again as a professor and teaches at the University of Science and Technology.

A situation where the highest state official and a man who wielded enormous power subsequently returns to his  humble position as a university professor job is hard to imagine.

However, the former Iranian president now takes the a bus to work every day and, judging by the photo, looks content."

Photo credit RTS, via In Serbia.  Discussed at Reddit.

One-man band

Slightly modified from the original, via Alabaster.

Rob's bookcase in Amersfoort

"I didn't do any tidying up, it's always a bit messy. A bookcase is a window in one's soul - I always look at them when I visit somebody. You can spot lots of atlases and historical books, a.o. about NY, Berlin. There are some photo books, books about science, travel, etymology, and even the Von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu I still have to read.

At the top there are two dinosaurs I made when I was (very) young."

Readers who would like to submit material for this feature will find guidelines here.  

Dora's rainbow bookcase

"This picture was taken a couple of years ago when my husband and I had just moved into our first home together and merged our books collections. Not knowing how best to organize them, I went for visual appeal. So it ends up being a mix of my favorite novels (best is the Dark Tower series), his technical and 'geek' reads (tons of Make magazines on lower shelves not shown because it didn't fit the rainbow effect I was going for), and baby books since we were new parents. As you said in your post, the rest of our lives are delineated by other bookshelves in other rooms."

Readers who would like to submit material for this feature will find guidelines here. 

San Francisco Zoo advertisement

Agency: BBDO West, San Francisco, USA.  Creative Director: Jim Lesser

Image cropped from original at Ads of the World, via Neatorama.

Images from The Getty's Open Content Program

Alexander the Great in the Air; Unknown; Regensburg, Bavaria, Germany, Europe; about 1400 – 1410 with addition in 1487; Tempera colors, gold, silver paint, and ink on parchment.

In a scene representing one of the stories from the legend of Alexander the Great most popular in the Middle Ages, the world conqueror, dressed as a European monarch might be, is pulled aloft by a pair of griffins and an angel. They hover precariously over a sea filled with an entertaining variety of fish and other creatures. The artist emphasizes the strange chair's upward movement as it carries the group out of the square framework of the miniature and takes off into the text. 

A Harvest of Death; Timothy H. O’Sullivan, American, about 1840 – 1882, Print by Alexander Gardner, American, born Scotland, 1821 – 1882; negative July 4, 1863; print 1866; Albumen silver print.

Although Gardner's caption identifies the men in the photograph as "rebels represented...without shoes," they are probably Union dead. During the Civil War, shoes were routinely removed from corpses because supplies were scarce and surviving troops needed them. 

The two images I've embedded are from a selection of about twenty assembled at Public Domain Review.

In August of this year The Getty announced the launch of their Open Content Program which sees more than 4500 images from their collection made available under an open license, meaning anyone can share the images freely and without restriction.

A wonderful resource for bloggers and the intellectually curious.

The disappearing "middle class"

Excerpts from an essay at Salon:

When I was growing up, it was assumed that America’s shared prosperity was the natural endpoint of our economy’s development, that capitalism had produced the workers paradise to which Communism unsuccessfully aspired. Now, with the perspective of 40 years, it’s obvious that the nonstop economic expansion that lasted from the end of World War II to the Arab oil embargo of 1973 was a historical fluke, made possible by the fact that the United States was the only country to emerge from that war with its industrial

capacity intact. Unfortunately, the middle class – especially the blue-collar middle class – is also starting to look like a fluke, an interlude between Gilded Ages that more closely reflects the way most societies structure themselves economically. For the majority of human history – and in the majority of countries today – there have been only two classes: aristocracy and peasantry. It’s an order in which the many toil for subsistence wages to provide luxuries for the few. Twentieth century America temporarily escaped this stratification, but now, as statistics on economic inequality demonstrate, we’re slipping back in that direction. Between 1970 and today, the share of the nation’s income that went to the middle class – households earning two-thirds to double the national median – fell from 62 percent to 45 percent. Last year, the wealthiest 1 percent took in 19 percent of America’s income – their highest share since 1928.

Capitalism has been doing exactly what it was designed to do: concentrating wealth in the ownership class, while providing the mass of workers with just enough wages to feed, house and clothe themselves.

The United States will never again be as wealthy as it was in the 1950s and ’60s. Never again will 18-year-olds graduate directly from high school to jobs that pay well enough to buy a house and support a family.

More at the link.