This piece of art was created by a sky-writing airplane over New York City. It's a joke, but there's also something thought-provoking about it. Art creates simplified representations of reality. We're willing to accept these in certain contexts. For example, this kind of drawing of a cloud is utterly standard in cartoons: we don't question it there. But putting these representations back into reality lets us see how different they are from the things they represent.
But the really good part is that this way of drawing a cloud on the sky uses a kind of cloud. A strange-shaped, artificial cloud, but still: water vapor in the air.
It's also nice to see the process of skywriting which "draws" the cloud. It's a lot like drawing!
But Vik Muniz shouldn't have called this piece "Clouds". It should be called "Cloud Drawing".
On the other hand, Berndnaut Smilde makes art using indoor clouds that look like normal clouds. They only last a short while.
Early this April, when researchers at Washington University in St. Louis reported that a woman with a host of electrodes temporarily positioned over the speech center of her brain was able to move a computer cursor on a screen simply by thinking but not pronouncing certain sounds, it seemed like the Singularity—the long-standing science fiction dream of melding man and machine to create a better species—might have arrived. At Brown University around the same time, scientists successfully tested a different kind of brain.computer interface (BCI) called BrainGate, which allowed a paralyzed woman to move a cursor, again just by thinking. Meanwhile, at USC, a team of biomedical engineers announced that they had successfully used carbon nanotubes to build a functioning synapse—the junction at which signals pass from one nerve cell to another—which marked the first step in their long march to construct a synthetic brain. On the same campus, Dr. Theodore Berger, who has been on his own path to make a neural prosthetic for more than three decades, has begun to implant a device into rats that bypasses a damaged hippocampus in the brain and works in its place.Also:
Another branch of DARPA is pouring millions of dollars into the development of a battlefield 'thought helmet' that will let soldiers in the field communicate wordlessly by translating brain waves, which will be 'read' by sensors embedded in the helmet and arrayed around the scalp, into audible radio messages. (One researcher called it a 'radio without a microphone'). As early as 2000, Sony began work on a patented way to beam video games directly into the brain using ultrasound pulses to modify and create sensory images for an immersive, thoroughly inescapable gaming experience. More recently, computer scientists at the Freie Universität in Berlin got a jump on Stuart Wolf's vision of a car operated solely by thought. Using commercially available electroencephalogram (EEG) sensors to first decode the brain wave patterns for 'right,' 'left,' 'brake,' and 'accelerate,' they then were able to connect those sensors to a computer-controlled vehicle, so that a driver "was able to control the car with no problem — there was only a slight delay between the envisaged commands and the response of the car," according to one of the lead researchers.Moreover, a group at the University of Southampton in England has developed a BCI—a brain-computer interface—that enables people to communicate with each other brain to brain without thought or, as the developers call it, B2B, again with a kind of EEG cap that lets one person think of 'left' (as represented by a zero) or 'right' (represented by a one), send one of those digits to a second person, also wired with electrodes that are connected as well to a computer that receives the digit, and, once it is understood, allows the second person to flash the digit back to the sender by way of a light-emitting diode (LED), which is 'read' by that person's visual cortex. It's not quite the soundless, wordless, almost thoughtless integration of our thoughts, B2B, but it's a fourth or fifth step toward a future that is becoming increasingly visible.
June 10, 2011
If you want to learn lots of ways that evolution is more complicated
and interesting than you learned in school, this book is great:
June 18, 2011
I'm angry that Obama is continuing the erosion of the US Constitution
by claiming that wars aren't really wars and thus don't need
congressional approval:
2 Top Lawyers Lost to Obama in Libya War Policy Debate
Charlie Savage
New York Times
June 17, 2011
WASHINGTON — President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.
Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military's activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to "hostilities". Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.
But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team—including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh—who argued that the United States military's activities fell short of "hostilities". Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.
This cool-looking house in Wales was built to have minimum environmental impact on the woodland. Click to enlarge; for more details, try:
© 2011 John Baez
baez@math.removethis.ucr.andthis.edu
