Month: February 2011

Human-Cyborg Relations

I’ve long thought that with all the things we can do with personal, handheld technology that we’re acceleratingly becoming cyborgs. And I don’t think it a bad thing. Consider how much cell phones and the internet helped in the Egyptian protests. Consider being able to look up maps and definitions when you need them, and being able to share them live in the classroom.

Garry Kasparov, the chess grandmaster who was the first to be defeated by a computer in 1998, adds another useful datapoint in an article on the human-machine partnerships in chess competitions:

The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.
–Kasparov (2010): The Chess Master and the Computer

but also fascinating is this, after a tournament:

The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants.

The take home message is worth pondering:

Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.
–Kasparov (2010): The Chess Master and the Computer

Jackalopes

“It’s like finding out Santa Claus doesn’t exist.”

That was my student’s response on discovering that jacklopes do not actually exist.

She’d been planning on doing her Independent Research Project on jacklopes. She’d already invested some time in doing some internet research, and this morning she came up to me and asked, “Are jacklopes real?”

A jackalope on the wall of a restaurant near the west entrance to Death Valley (image by SedesGobhani via Wikimedia Commons).

I told her they weren’t, but she had to go look them up herself in actual hardcopy, the Wildlife Fact-file binders that we keep on the reference shelf. They weren’t in there.

I offered that she could still do her IRP on jackalopes, just focusing on the cultural meanings and reasons behind the phenomenon. Also she could discuss the potentials for genetically engineered organisms.

She’s still considering it.

iPod stands

Red paperclip iPhone stand.

I’ve been hoping for a wireless keyboard for the iPhone for quite a while, and Apple has finally produced one. As far as my students are concerned, with a full keyboard to write useful amounts of text, the iPhone is almost as good as having a “normal” computer. And the same applies to the iPad as well.

Once you have the keyboard, however, he next question is, how do you get the iPhone to sit at the correct angle for you to do your work. My students have dug up a couple solutions, starting with the paperclip version you see above. Simple, cheap, and elegant; I really like it.

Lego iPhone stand. The bright sparkles are purely a function of unapologetic awesomeness.

A couple days after seeing the paperclip stand in action, I came across the Lego stand.

“Why,” I asked.

“Because it’s awesome.”

“Oh,” I replied.

And it is.

Seismic vibrations of the heart

You should be able to see three heartbeats on the bottom line (labled Z), though the Z obscures part of one of the waves.

We were working on plate tectonics last week, and the conversation went from earthquakes to heartbeats.

I think it started with the question of, “How do we know what the inside of the Earth is like if no one’s been down to see it?”

I agreed that we’ve not even been down to the bottom of the crust because the heat and pressure would collapse any hole we tried to drill. I did not mention that terrible movie, “The Core”, because beyond maybe the first ten minutes where there is some actual speculative science fiction, it’s really not worth seeing.

But beneath the crust, how do we know how thick the mantle is? How do we know that the inner core is solid metal (mostly iron) while the outer core is liquid metal?

Not wanting to go into too much detail I tried to explain about seismic waves. Different types can go through different materials and if you monitor their reflections off different parts of the Earth’s interior you can puzzle out the layering and composition. I just gave the simplest demonstration: if you tap a piece of wood with you knuckle, could you tell that it was wood and not metal? What if you tapped a bucket, could you tell if it was full of water or not? Well seismic tomography work in much the same way, except that you’re usually picking up the reverberations from the earthquake rather than making it yourself by hitting the bucket. There’s also a bit more math involved.

But tapping the bucket gives a quick easy feel (pun intended) for the process. My students at least seemed satisfied.

So then I pointed out that you could use an app called iSeismo, to detect seismic waves. Both the iPhone (and its variants) and the iPad have accelerometers that can be used to pick up motion in all three dimensions. My students from last year remembered it, and at least one already had it loaded on his phone.

A quick test showed that the phone’s pretty sensitive. You can pick up two people jumping together all the way across the room. This part of the demo is nice because it helps prove that seismic waves from earthquakes can go very far. You can also see the little squiggles as the waves are picked up.

I did not try it this time, and I’ll need to confirm if it will work, but since the time on the phones should be well synchronized over the network, and iSeismo can output the actual data, we should be able to use three iPhones to triangulate the location of the jumpers. This might work in nicely with geometry now that I think about it.

Checking for a heartbeat using iSeismo.

Anyway, finally, a student asked if the phone might be able to pick up his heartbeat if he lay on his back.

We tried it. Lying on his back on the floor while holding his breath, we could see his heartbeat quite clearly.

The Economy and Revolution

Vali Nasr’s interview on NPR’s Morning Edition talks about what it takes to make a successful revolution. Particularly, they focus on the need for a vibrant, educated, middle-class for a successful transition to democracy.

Another key, and I think essential point, is that the Egyptian protesters share the same global-citizenship values that Brazilians, South Koreans, and even Europeans and American, share. That they have these values, from years of communication with the outside world, offers the best chance that this revolution will be successful.

Edmund Burke supported the American Revolution, but opposed the French Revolution because the former was a conservative revolution, the colonists were fighting to regain rights that had lost, while the latter were trying to impose an ideal of democracy and equality that they had no experience with. He was right; the French revolution lead to the Terror then eventually to Napoleon and the restoration of the aristocracy.

Haiku by an economist

Economist Stephen T. Ziliak’s reflections on poetry are quite appropriate for the moment, since we’re doing both poetry and economics this cycle.

Invisible hand;
Mother of inflated hope,
Mistress of despair!
–Stephen T. Ziliak: Haiku Economics

Zilak says that, “Poetry can fill the gap between reason and emotion, adding feelings to economics.”

He particularly loves the haiku, because it is such a wonderful metaphor for economics: “less is more, and more is better.”

Each poem is the length of about one human breath. This constraint, though severe, is more than offset by a boundless freedom to feel.
–Stephen T. Ziliak: Haiku Economics

Creativity is said to lie at the intersection on disciplines. This is an excellent example of it.

Global Warming Refugees

NPR’s Brian Reed has an excellent two-part series on the small island nation of Kiribati‘s preparations to adapt to global warming.

Kiribati. (Map from the U.S. Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

Small island nations are the most sensitive to the effects of global warming. Rising sea levels will substantially affect places where the land is just a few meters above sea level. But small islands also have limited capacity to adapt to significant changes.

These articles tie in to our questions of modern migration, which we discussed last cycle (C3) and environmental change.

[googleMap name=”Tarawa Island, Kiribati” description=”Tarawa is the capital of the Kiribati Islands” width=”480″ height=”480″ mapzoom=”10″ mousewheel=”false” directions_to=”false”]Tarawa Island, Kiribati[/googleMap]

Counting syllables

If you need a little help finding how many syllables are in a word so you can use it in your haiku, there’s the How Many Syl.la.bles website.

Screen capture from the How Many Syl.la.bles website (Grade Level Technology, 2009).

It also suggests related words if you need a differently-syllabic synonym.

Where disciplines meet
creativity emerges
from the shaking chrysalis