I’m sure it’s clever, but ….

Pastimes are just that. Things to do to pass the time. In addition some pastimes require some thinking skills, with the added attraction of exercising your brain and maybe giving you a sense of satisfaction in achieving something. That is why I do cryptic crosswords and hard sudokus.  Although I failed to get any satisfaction from the Rubik Cube (as I was never much good at solving it), I did enjoy the challenge. There is less fun in doing these things if you have to seek external help. Particularly if that help is mechanical. Yes you can use various software to solve sudoku or help with crosswords, but the pleasure is much reduced.

So what to make of these two little devices from a boffin in Sweden – Hans Andersson?  

Using Lego Mindstorms, he has designed and built robots for solving Sudoku and Rubik’s Cube. There are videos and building instructions (including the software) on his website. And whilst I think it all very clever, I wonder what the point is. I don’t get much satisfaction from watching other people solve sudoku or crosswords or play patience, if I am not contributing myself. So why this?

Don’t answer that. It is not a serious question. A disclaimer here. When I first decided to teach myself to program in Basic, I wrote a noughts-and-crosses solving program. Of course I understand that the exercise in designing and building these is the point. Nonetheless, I do wonder. Perhaps Hans Andersson should be turning his mind to solving bigger problems. He clearly is capable.

Maybe someone said that of Edwin Votey when he demonstrated the first player piano in 1895? What pleasure is there in having a machine play your music for you? Don’t answer that either.

I love a good hoax

Last year, there were reports of a man giving birth to a healthy female child.

  (Kristian Dowling/Getty Images)

Except that the story wasn’t completely true. The man concerned was in fact a transgender person who still retained his/her female reproductive organs.

More interesting were reports of a man, Lee Mingwei who was carrying a child despite having no female organs.

This one really was a hoax. Going to the website www.malepregnancy.com leads you to the elaborate world of the fictional RYT Hospital and the Dwayne Medical Centre at the non-existent Dwayne University.

Here you have links to a wonderful selection of medical research marvels – nanotechnology robots which operate within blood and tissue.

Genochoice, which enabled prospective parents to create their own genetically healthy child online

Clyven, the mouse engineered with the same intelligence as a human by implanting human brain cells

And of course the pregnant man.

This very professionally produced site is full of pseudo-science and appears very credible. Except it is not. It is a wonderfully carried off hoax.

Two questions remains though. Why and who is paying? Unlike the April Fool’s jokes I wrote about in April (when else?) which were advertising stunts, there seems no obvious commercial return for the RYT pages. Perhaps I have become cynical and assume that there must be a financial component for everything on the web. Clearly that is not true. I do this for the fun of it. But the RYT site is so elaborate and clearly a great deal of time went into it. It is reasonable to ask why.  

Incidentally, UK Internet consultant Phil Bradley has a wonderful list of other hoaxes on his website.

Polymath

Now we are getting somewhere! Having looked at music and maths, art and food, art and science I have finally found a trio – art, maths and food.

George W Hart is a sculptor and mathematician with a special interest in geometric scupltues. He is the author of the online Encyclopaedia of Polyhedra, in case you are interested in exploring the exciting field of Stellations of the Rhombic Triacontahedron and other such delights, and is a research professor in a computer science department.

So, art and maths. But what about the food?

Although it is hard to see in this picture of a mobile entitled  ‘No Picnic’ , these three pieces are made of plastic knives, forks and spoons

Cute huh?

How do we manage without these?

Yes I love ridiculous devices. Last year I was captivated by the stupid products at Archie McPhee. My new delights can be found at Stupididiotic which describes itself as “a trademark brand of unusual and peculiar products”. Many of the products for sale here are totally useless. For example, for $24 you can buy a DVD rewinder.

Of course it has no function, but then neither does the $5 tin of dehydrated water.

On the other hand, there could be some use in the underwear repair kit.

or the Viaga carrying ring  

How about tattooed sleeves?

or a crime scene scarf 

On the subject of useful gadgets, there are the various pizza cutters you didn’t know you needed. These thanks to design blog Toxtel.

But wait there’s more. Thanks to Trendhunter magazine, we have some wonderfully weird food to go with the gadgets.

Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers in sushi

A house made of breadsticks

A chocolate foot

And many more.

Synchrotron

I have driven past the synchrotron next to Monash University many times and have wondered what marvelous atom-smashing experiments are going on there. I have been half expecting to hear that someone has successfully collided matter and anti-matter and the whole thing has vanished in a puff of sub-atomic smoke. What I hadn’t imagined is the sort of thing which has been reported from ESRF, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble.

 

Malvina Lak and team from the University of Rennes and Paul Tafforeau of ESRF have been using the synchrotron to examine lumps of amber to reveal the fossils of 100 million year old insects and other tiny living things and then used micro-tomography to produce 3 dimensional models. Wonderful to look at and wonderful to consider that the familiar looking organisms we are seeing lived such a long time ago.

 

Via BBC news

Who says scientists have no sense of humour?

What do physicists do in their spare time? If they are Randall Munroe they have a website – xkcd – where they post their cartoons and comics. Most are too weird or esoteric for me, but a few made me laugh.

In case you are wondering the Wikipedia says -”The Bellman–Ford algorithm computes single-source shortest paths in a weighted digraph (where some of the edge weights may be negative)”. Got it?

Wolfgang Sievers

Like many others I was familiar with this photograph entitled Gears for Mining Industry 1967, an iconic Australian industrial record. What I didn’t realise was how prolific the photographer was, nor much about his life and politics. Wolfgang Sievers who was born in Berlin but lived in Australia from1938 has just died at the age of 93. He spent his life recording industrial and architectural scenes, often employed by the companies whose works he photographed. There are tens of thousands of Sievers photographs in the Digital Collection of the National Library of Australia. They cover a huge range from mining, office building, scientific processes, schools and both light and heavy industries. Most are in black and White, though he was also a very fine colour photographer.

In the 19050’s he was hired by the Australian Government to help change the image of Australia from rural and agricultural to industrial and manufacturing .

Unexpectedly, as well as his many industrial and architectural pictures there are also many lovely people pictures, including some from Colombia.

One of the companies who employed Sievers was the now defunct Vickers Ruwolt (sited at what is now my local shopping centre!). A former employee of that company maintains a website that records the company’s history. The site features Wolfgang Sievers photographs and contains this quote about him – “Often controversial, his strong beliefs, intolerance of racism and increasing concern at the destructive practices of capitalism also led him to question the morality behind many corporate entities, in many cases his clients.”

Wolfgang Sievers donated $1 million worth of photographs to raise money for justice and humanitarian causes and was strongly opposed to the Australian Government’s treatment of asylum seekers.

An interesting man.

Nikola Tesla

Seeing David Bowie playing Nikola Tesla in The Prestige reminded me what an interesting character Tesla was. Outside of the scientific community his great rival, Thomas Edison is probably better known though a quick study of his work shows what a genius Tesla was – particularly in the fields of electricity and magnetism. He carried out experiments in alternating current generation, wireless telegraphy, x-rays, radio, lighting and many others. Although Guglielmo Marconi was awarded the Nobel Prize for the invention of radio, Tesla’s patent for the invention of the radio was subsequently upheld.

He even experimented with lightning and wireless power transmission similar to the fictional version in The Prestige (though without the magic element used in the film!)

Tesla died a pauper and in debt at 86 having been a millionaire at 40, largely because he was poor businessmen and failed to secure his rights over his royalties. By comparison, Edison seems to have patented everything that moved and has managed to leave his name etched on the popular consciousness far more than Tesla. A lesson for all in the importance of controlling your copyright.

In a small way, Nikola Tesla has at least had a small recognition of his genius. The Tesla is the SI unit of magnetic flux, while as far as I know there is no scientific unit called the Edison!

An Idle Speculation

I have just read a report on an Ancient Greek machine – The Antikythera Mechanism – thought to have been an astronomical calculator made around the first or second century BC. Although this brass device was first discovered in 1902, it took until the 1950’s before it was surmised by Derek de Solla Price that this find was an early analogue calculator, and then it wasn’t until the 1970’s that Price was able to suggest how it worked. The device is in the news again because a new team in Greece and the UK is studying it again using newer x-ray tomography and other technologies and have questioned some of Price’s explanations.

Further reading on the subject has been very instructive for me on how the Wikipedia works and in some way has provided a validation of its usefulness. The section dealing with the Antikythera Mechanism recognises that Price’s work has been called into question and suggests that it needs to be rewritten. It also has a talk forum attached to it, with many interesting discussions on various Wiki projects such as the History of Science and Classical Greece and Rome and how they should be handled by the Wikipedia. For the casual user of the Wikipedia, it is worth taking a moment to look at the complexity of the operation. I am also pleased to see a note that the section headed ‘Possible Uses’ has no references or sources cited for the claims there, suggesting that pure speculation has no place in an encyclopaedia that wishes to be regarded as an authority.

Reading about this early calculator reminded me of an idle speculation of mine many years ago. On a visit to a Roman amphitheatre in Arles, I was struck by how modern the ancient Roman central heating was. It got me thinking about how much science and technology the ancients possessed and led me to speculate on the possibility of the Romans building a steam railway to China to open up the silk trade. Why not? They had wheeled vehicles that could run on iron-banded, spoked wheels with suspension. They understood the piston which they used in water pumps. They had the road technology to make straight roads. And so on. Surely the railway was possible?

At War With Machinery

I often joke that my excuse for jay-walking, rather than crossing the road at the lights, is because I hate to be told what to do by inanimate objects. Although I am an enthusiastic technophile and a reasonably early adopter of both soft and hardware, I feel strongly that I should be in control of the technology. I have no tolerance for so called user friendly technology that does not let me operate it as I think it should.

So yesterday’s experience with Nokia and its software has left me fuming. Actually my frustration with the Nokia software goes back a lot further than that. I had some communication with the company a couple of years ago when I first got my present phone and discovered that there was no control over the start-up tune or the beep that the phone makes (even when the phone is off) when the battery charging is finished. The first is a problem because you can’t subtly turn the phone on in a meeting to use the calendar or contact list without the welcome music playing and the second is a problem when you are staying in a hotel and need to charge the phone at night in your room and are woken by the beeps telling you that the phone is fully charged. Phone calls to the Nokia techs elicited the simple response – it can’t be done.

Earlier this year I started regularly synchronising my Outlook calendar with the calendar on the mobile phone. All was fine until recently, when I discovered that all the times of events that I had transferred from the computer were wrong. I realised eventually that the issue was daylight saving. I won’t go into all the to-ing and fro-ing that involved download and installing new operating software for the phone and new phone software for the computer and many iterations of changing time settings on the phone and computer and several phone calls to some unknown Asian country via Nokia’s 1300 help line – but the upshot seems to be that in order to sync my phone to my computer, I have to disable the automatic daylight saving function in both Windows and on the phone.

That I have to disable a perfectly useful function on my computer because Nokia can’t write software correctly is bad enough in itself, but the phone conversation with the helpline was even more ridiculous. Not only could they not solve this problem, but when I asked where I could find the changelog for the phone software so I would know what had been fixed, changed or added, I was told that it didn’t exist and that I would find the changes when I discovered them.

Grrr.