R E C K O N

Robot Cook

nobody@vox.com(Reckon) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 02:13:01 -0600

The multi-talented Motoman SDA10, a dexterous dual-arm industrial robot manufactured by Yaskawa Electric, is demonstrating its ability to cook okonomiyaki at the International Next-Generation Robot Fair now underway in Osaka.

Designed to operate independently alongside humans in the workplace, the 135-centimeter (4.5 ft) tall, 220-kilogram (480 lb) industrial robot has 15 joints — 7 in each arm and one in the torso — allowing a wide range of motion for the job, whether it be on the factory floor or behind the kitchen counter.

Motoman assembles camera

For a peek at Motoman’s dexterity, check out this video (from Fuji TV’s “The Best House 1-2-3″) of the robot delicately assembling a disposable camera from two dozen parts. The robot completes the complicated series of tasks in two minutes.

This high degree of manual precision comes in handy when grilling up okonomiyaki.

Motoman_2

As a chef, the Motoman relies on speech recognition technology to take verbal orders from customers. Using standard kitchen utensils, the robot mixes the okonomiyaki batter, pours it onto the iron grill, forms it into a round pancake-like disk, flips it, puts it on a plate when done, and applies condiments.

No word yet on the taste.

[Photos: AFP]

Reblog via Pink Tentacle

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Large Hadron Collider: Public chooses 'Halo' as its new name

nobody@vox.com(Reckon) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:03:57 -0500

Large Hadron Collider: Public chooses 'Halo' as its new name

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main...

The name "Halo" sounds much catchier and should adorn the £4.4 billion experiment, according to a poll organised by the Royal Society of Chemistry in London The public have decided the Large Hadron Collider should have the catchier name Halo The Large Hadron Collider does what it says on the tin, since hadron refers to the subatomic particles that the giant machine smashes together at a shade below the speed of light. But this "fails to reflect the drama of its mission, or the inspiration it should be conveying to the wider public," says Dr Richard Pike, chief executive of the Society. The Society launched a competition to suggest an inspiring name for the 17 mile circumference machine, which is going to smash its first particles next week at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva, known by its French acronym Cern. After sifting more than 2,500 responses, ranging from The Big Banger to Infinite Devil Machine and The Matter Splatterer, it has now selected a winner to rechristen the vast enterprise. Fed up with "the contrived acronyms that plague the world of science," the RSC says it "picked a suggestion which is simple, memorable, and brings to mind the deserved grandeur of perhaps the most important experiment ever built." "Halo conjures visions of radiant beauty, power and wisdom. The circle of light reflects the collider's form; it is a crowning achievement of science and engineering. It also gives more than a nod to the experiment's importance to religious debate.

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Flying Saucer Power Source Discovered: Ionized Air

nobody@vox.com(Reckon) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:31:28 -0500

Flying Saucer Power Source Discovered: Ionized Air

http://io9.com/5023170/flying-saucer-...

Those strange lights in the sky seem to move with unnatural precision, making turns and accelerations no human-made aircraft could possibly match. What ultra-advanced anti-gravity system allows UFOs to fly in such a bizarre way? Apparently it's ionized air. An engineering professor at the University of Florida has it all figured out, and he's going to build his own flying saucer. Professor Subrata Roy started working on his "wingless electromagnetic air vehicle" (WEAV) for NASA. The surface of the saucer-shaped craft will be covered with electrodes that, when powered by a battery or other power source, will ionize the surrounding air to create plasma. When charged with an electric current, the polarized plasma will repel the non-polarized air, creating lift and thrust. Such an aircraft would have very stable flight characteristics, with the pilot controlling it by diverting the electrical charge to different parts of the surface. Professor Roy thinks it could be scaled up to useful dimensions (his prototype will be about six inches across). I'd check out the professor's work while you still can. He's scheduled for a visit from a couple of guys in black suits tomorrow, after which his research will be republished in a heavily redacted form. Image by: Scientific American.

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Thought Experiments on the Soul

nobody@vox.com(Reckon) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:13:46 -0500

Contagion by Eva Eun-Sil Han

Thought Experiments on the Soul

Could I be replaced with such a complete duplicate-every atom,
not just genetically identical -- it would think that it was me.
But clearly it would not be me, especially if I were not destroyed in the replacement
and continued to exist off somewhere else. We can imagine that such complete identity
might produce a being that would simply see itself as existing in two places at once,
but this would require some kind of communication; and that would require the existence
of some kind of extrasensory or paranormal connection between the two bodies, which is not now part of established science. Without such paranormal communication,
the identical individuals would each think of themselves as the original individual,
although only one of them would be right; and they would immediately begin to diverge
as individuals because of differing experiences.

- Thought Experiments on the Soul by Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D.

Collage by Eva Eun-Sil Han | hat tip Paintalicious

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Art on the Moon

nobody@vox.com(Reckon) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 13:44:20 -0600

Kalpakjian_moonworks-3

In 2003, Craig Kalpakjian proposed a series of Earthworks-style drawings that would be executed on the surface of the moon, like the Nazca Lines or 60's bad boys Michael Heizer and Dennis Oppenheim's desert drawings. He called them Moonworks.

Now I find out there was already an entire Moon Museum, with drawings by six leading contemporary artists of the day: Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, Forrest "Frosty" Myers, Claes Oldenburg, and John Chamberlain. The Moon Museum was supposedly installed on the moon in 1969 as part of the Apollo 12 mission.

I say supposedly, because NASA has no official record of it; according to Frosty Myers, the artist who initiated the project, the Moon Museum was secretly installed on a hatch on a leg of the Intrepid landing module with the help of an unnamed engineer at the Grumman Corporation after attempts to move the project forward through NASA's official channels were unsuccessful.

Myers revealed the exhibition's existence to the New York Times, which published the story Nov. 22, 1969, two days after the Apollo 12 crew had left the moon--and the Intrepid--and two days before they arrived back on earth.

Moon_museum_nyt

According to Myers, who was involved with E.A.T. on the Pepsi Pavilion project at the time, the six drawings were miniaturized and baked onto an iridium-plated ceramic wafer measuring just 3/4" x 1/2" x 1/40", with the assistance of engineers at Bell Labs.

According to the Times, the artworks are, clockwise from the top center: Rauschenberg's wavy line; Novros' black square bisected by thin white lines [in 1969, Novros also created the incredibly rich, minimalist fresco on the second floor of Judd's 101 Spring St]; a computer-generated drawing by Myers; a geometric mouse by Oldenburg, "the subject of a sculpture in his current show at the Museum of Modern Art" [a sculpture which is in MoMA's permanent collection, btw]; and a template pattern by Chamberlain, "similar to one he used to produce paintings done with automobile lacquer." Warhol's contribution, which is obscured by the thumb above, is described as "a calligraphic squiggle made up of the initials of his signature."

Actually, it's a drawing of a penis. Here are some other photos by Frosty Myers, published, I believe, with a 1985 Omni Magazine article by the arts writer Phoebe Hoban. That would be the Warhol Penis there in the upper right.

MoonMuseum

As the NASA spokesman told the Times when asked about the Museum infiltration, "I don't know about it. If we had been asked, it sounds like something we'd have very much interested in [sic]. If it is true that they've succeeded in doing it by some clandestine means, I hope that the work represents the best in contemporary American art."
[emphasis added for ironic amusement, though to Myers' credit, it turned out to be a pretty good grouping of artists to have involved.]

But is it conceivable that someone could have smuggled dirty pictures onto a mission to the moon? Actually, yes. Even if Warhol hadn't sent that penis to the moon, Apollo 12 would still have achieved the first known incident of lunar nudity.

The back-up crew for the A12 mission surreptitiously inserted reduced photos of Playboy centerfolds into the flight crew's fireproof plastic cuff checklists which were only discovered about 2.5 hours into their first moon walk.

via greg.org | hat tip kottke.org | Michael Heizer Earth Art | Dennis Oppenheim Art & Sculpture | Craig Kalpakjian

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Total Eclipse Time Lapse and Leap

nobody@vox.com(Reckon) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 17:30:13 -0600

Total Lunar Eclipse - February 20, 2008

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Vote for Google Who Promises the Moon

nobody@vox.com(Reckon) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 03:04:29 -0600

Google Space Time (holiday party 07)

Google Shoots for the Moon

by Wendy Tanaka
First it conquered cyberspace. Now, Google is setting its sights on outer space.
The company on Thursday announced the first 10 teams of competitors in its $30 million contest to send a spacecraft back to the moon to gain greater insights into the solar system and to find new sources of clean energy.
The Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) Lunar X Prize contest requires each team--largely composed of scientists and businesspeople--to build a robotic craft that can roam across the moon's surface, beam video, images and data back to Earth and even tap into natural resources.
One bold ambition of the project: using lunar materials to make solar power collectors that can generate carbon-free energy, which is then transmitted to the Earth. This, of course, would fit in nicely with the Mountain View, Calif., company's plan to develop alternative energy sources that are cheaper than coal and far less polluting. (See: " Google Goes Green") At least no one can accuse Google of thinking small.
Google isn't paying the costs for the teams to develop the rockets; it's simply holding out the carrot of a top prize of $20 million to the team that builds a vessel that can land on the moon and accomplish its mission. Each team has to raise the money to construct a spacecraft on its own. (Continue reading)

via Forbes
Photo: gpshead on Flickr

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Inverted Commas: C.P. Snow

nobody@vox.com(Reckon) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 02:21:39 -0600

Snow

"When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion."

* C.P. Snow

Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow, of the City of Leicester CBE (15 October 1905–1 July 1980) was an English physicist and novelist, who also served several important positions in the UK government.^[1] He is perhaps best known for a series of novels known collectively as Strangers and Brothers, and for "The Two Cultures", a 1959 lecture in which he laments the gulf between scientists and "literary intellectuals".

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Electron caught on film for the first time

nobody@vox.com(Reckon) — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 15:44:37 -0600

It has always been impossible to clearly photograph electrons since their extremely high velocities have produced blurry pictures. In order to capture these rapid events, extremely short flashes of light are necessary, but such flashes were not previously available.

With the use of a newly developed technology for generating short pulses from intense laser light, so-called attosecond pulses, scientists at the Lund University Faculty of Engineering in Sweden have managed to capture the electron motion for the first time.

The movie shows how an electron rides on a light wave after just having been pulled away from an atom. This is the first time an electron has ever been filmed, and the results are presented in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters.

Electron film first time

“It takes about 150 attoseconds for an electron to circle the nucleus of an atom. An attosecond is 10^-18 seconds long, or, expressed in another way: an attosecond is related to a second as a second is related to the age of the universe,” says Johan Mauritsson, an assistant professor in atomic physics at the Faculty of Engineering, Lund University. He is one of seven researchers behind the study, which was directed by him and Professor Anne L’Huillier.

With the aid of another laser these scientists have moreover succeeded in guiding the motion of the electron so that they can capture a collision between an electron and an atom on film.

“We have long been promising the research community that we will be able to use attosecond pulses to film electron motion. Now that we have succeeded, we can study how electrons behave when they collide with various objects, for example. The images can function as corroboration of our theories,” explains Johan Mauritsson.

Electron via Science on Vimeo

These scientists also hope to find out more about what happens with the rest of the atom when an inner electron leaves it, for instance how and when the other electrons fill in the gap that is created.

“What we are doing is pure basic research. If there happen to be future applications, they will have to be seen as a bonus,” adds Johan Mauritsson.

The length of the film corresponds to a single oscillation of the light, but the speed has then been ratcheted down considerably so that we can watch it. The filmed sequence shows the energy distribution of the electron and is therefore not a film in the usual sense.

Previously scientists have studied the movements of electrons using indirect methods, such as by metering their spectrum. With these methods it has only been possible to measure the result of an electron’s movement, whereas now we have the opportunity to monitor the entire event.

via Scientific Blogging | Link to the video

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Hidden art could be revealed by new terahertz device

nobody@vox.com(Reckon) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:50:55 -0600

Hidden art could be revealed by new terahertz device

http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releas...

Like X-rays let doctors see the bones beneath our skin, "T-rays" could let art historians see murals hidden beneath coats of plaster or paint in centuries-old buildings, University of Michigan engineering researchers say. T-rays, pulses of terahertz radiation, could also illuminate penciled sketches under paintings on canvas without harming the artwork, the researchers say.

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