Digesting Duck
The Canard Digérateur, or Digesting Duck, was an automaton in the form of a duck, created by Jacques de Vaucanson in 1739. The mechanical duck appeared to have the ability to eat kernels of grain, and to metabolize and defecate them. While the duck did not actually have the ability to do this – the food was collected in one inner container, and the feces being ‘produced’ from a second, so that no actual digestion took place – Vaucanson hoped that a truly digesting automaton could one day be designed.
A Castle In The Making
Deep in secluded woodland, an abandoned quarry reveals a landscape, seemingly untouched since the dawn of the last millennium. Out of this wood and stone, using 13th century building techniques, a castle is being created.
The Ashley Book of Knots
The Ashley Book of Knots is an encyclopedia of knots first published in 1944 by Clifford Ashley. The culmination of over 11 years of work, it contains some 7000 illustrations and more than 3854 entries covering over 2000 different knots.
People of the screen
The book is modernity’s quintessential technology—“a means of transportation through the space of experience, at the speed of a turning page,” as the poet Joseph Brodsky put it. But now that the rustle of the book’s turning page competes with the flicker of the screen’s twitching pixel, we must consider the possibility that the book may not be around much longer. If it isn’t—if we choose to replace the book—what will become of reading and the print culture it fostered? And what does it tell us about ourselves that we may soon retire this most remarkable, five-hundred-year-old technology? Continue reading…
– Chirstine Rosen in the New Atlantic.
Ancient Greek Science and Technology
List of links to Ancient Greek Science and Technology
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
What the Internet is doing to our brains by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic Monthly.
The Turing Test
The Turing test (another good article at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) is a proposal for a test of a machine’s capability to demonstrate intelligence. Described by Alan Turing in the 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test.
I understand that CAPTCHAS (= Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) are reverse Turing tests (because it is administered by a machine and targeted to a human, in contrast to the standard Turing test that is typically administered by a human and targeted to a machine). Before being allowed to do some action on a website, the user is presented with a alphanumerical characters in a distorted graphic image and asked to recognise it. This is intended to prevent automated systems from abusing the site. The assumption is that software sufficiently sophisticated to read the distorted image accurately does not exist (or is not available to the average user), so any system able to do so must be a human being.
Who invented radio ?
A vivid debate between Tesla and Marconi. More on the invention of radio controversy.
Orville Wright
Orville Wright died 60 years ago. He and his brother Wilbur are generally credited with inventing and building the world’s first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight on December 17, 1903.
Of yesterday
A few miscellaneus history links :
The First Edition of the Atlas of Canada was published as a bound volume in 1906. It consisted of 65 plates, 37 of which were maps, and 28 of which consisted entirely of graphs and tables. The maps covered a relatively narrow range of subjects, with coverage being essentially Canadian resources, the distribution of population, and the communications networks. The Atlas also had street maps of the major cities. There was a strong emphasis on tabular material, both on the map plates and on those plates containing exclusively graphical material.
Apollo 13, We Have a Solution. Rather than hurried improvisation, saving the crew of Apollo 13 took years of preparation.
The Doctor Who theme (composed by Ron Grainer, published by Erle Music/Warner Chappell) is one of the most recognisable pieces of television music ever written.
Hedy Lamarr
Calling Hedy Lamarr. Arte TV, 17 décembre 2007 à 23:20.
Why is it that every time you see a mobile phone or log onto the Internet, you should automatically begin to dream of the most beautiful woman in the world. And why does a certain goddess of the silver screen should make you think of something called spread spectrum technology? I can assure you that there is a simple explanation. The concept of the spread spectrum forms the basis of mobile phone and WiFi Internet technology, and its godmother was a certain Hollywood icon: Hedy Lamarr.
How to cut quill pens
A practical guide to making feathers into something that writes. A nice project to try out with my son during the upcoming holidays.
Articles of interest
Santiago Sierra is the king of shock art. But Adrian Searle wonders if his new show, featuring slabs made of human faeces, really hits its target (yes, this is the same guy of the homemade gas chamber set up in a former synagogue).
In other news a bear man walks away with Turner prize.
David Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises” opens with a throat- slashing and a young woman collapsing in blood in a drugstore, and connects these events with a descent into an underground of Russians who have immigrated to London and brought their crime family with them. Like the Corleone family, but with a less wise and more fearsome patriarch, the Vory V Zakone family of the Russian mafia operates in the shadows of legitimate business — in this case, a popular restaurant. Reviews here and here. Official site. One of the best movies of 2007 !
Or may I advise you to watch Persepolis. Based on the graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, it tells the story of a young girl in Iran during the Iranian Revolution. Through the eyes of the nine-year-old Marjane it shows how people’s hopes were dashed as the fundamentalists took power, forced the veil on women and imprisoned thousands. The title is a reference to the historical town of Persepolis. The film won the Prize of the Jury at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. Reviews here and here. Official site. Another highlight for 2007.
A reason to visit Paris again ? A secret archive of erotic art is exposed for the first time by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (French link). No entry if you are not at least 16 years of age…
Italians offer saints for download. Devout Italians will no longer have to carry around worn and tattered images of their favorite saints. A new service is launching on Wednesday that offers downloads of the holy images to mobile phones. The Catholic Church has reacted with horror.
Construisons Demain
Construisons demain (French link) premiered at Batimat in Paris earlier this month. This House of the Future, built of wood and covering nearly 200 sq. m., is a project by Eric Wuilmot, one of the architects of “Maison A” (French link) assisted by Domoconsulting for the home automation design.The system showcases low-energy living with three prefabricated wooden modules, resource and energy efficient systems, healthy finish materials, and inviting living spaces. The house was constructed by Construction Millet Bois. The house is not a finished product as such, but more a concept to show what the possibilities are to construct an ecological house that is close to being a passive house (which I find a very interesting idea).
Weekend Reading List
Why is Joseph Heller’s famous ‘Catch’ called ‘22′? Why is Bertie’s manservant called Jeeves? And why does the postman always ring twice (in a book that has no postman)? In these fascinating extracts from his new book, Gary Dexter reveals the story behind the stories.
Querty.08, an article on technology convergence.
Two teams of scientists have given human skin cells many of the properties of embryonic stem cells—a development that could ease political, ethical, and medical concerns over the highly controversial research topic. Report by NG and SCIAM.
Not really something to read, but to try out : SAGE, Open Source Mathematics Software.
Browse Dream Anatomy at the U.S. National Library of Medicine. A fantastic site.
And yet another one : Bodies of Knowledge. Our bodies are incredibly complex machines. Every second of every day we are powered by beating hearts, and carried around by intricate skeletons. Pipes, organs, hormones and brain cells keep us eating, breathing, growing and thinking. And yet few of us ever get to see the amazing mechanisms hidden beneath our own skin. For thousands of years the inner workings of the body have provoked fascination, confusion, amazement and even disgust. This site looks at the way different cultures, at various points in history, have looked at the body, and how these ideas have been translated into pictures.
Wanted
I have a nice wifi network installed at home and 2 desktops and a laptop connected to the network. On top of that I have a PS3 connected as well. What I really need now is a central storage unit for my files (the typical documents, images, movies, music files) with an automatic back-up. I could of course use one of the desktops to act as, but I prefer to have an independent unit. The question is now what is the ideal hardware to do this ?
Something like this ? (via). Or this ?
Update: note to myself – go next weekend to Digame (Dutch link) in Leuven
Matchbox (2)
Matchbox is not only a toy, but also a 12-bar blues by Blind Lemon Jefferson, a British rock and roll band formed in 1971 (the homepage of Matchbox, the Rockabilly rebels), and an independent record label based in England (Matchbox Recordings UK).
Matchbox is also an open source window manager (Mathbox Project site)for the X Window System (NOT Windows). It’s e.g. used on the One Laptop per Child (OLPC).
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