Left field

[Mark]

This kind of makes the previous post pale by comparison. Page 6,7, and 8.
http://www.petaliterature.com/VEG297.pdf

"However, even less publicly discussed or understood is the psychological trauma inflicted on slaughterhouse workers. Not only do the employees face serious physical health hazards, but they also view, on a daily basis, large-scale violence and death that most of the American population will never have to encounter. This Note will discuss the psychological harm caused by slaughterhouse work and will propose several methods, including OSHA reforms, workers' compensation, and expansion of tort doctrine, by which the legal regime can prevent the harm from occurring and can compensate the employees for their psychological injuries."
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? ... id=1016401

"Nor could the US afford its own meat habit if it enforces its own laws."
http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Like ... 18-69.html

What a funny world. This is an old post, but a good one for being "bizarre" I guess.
{In California, mice peer from their cages with human brain cells firing inside their skulls.
And it becomes especially sensitive when it deals in brain cells, the building blocks of the organ credited with making humans human. In experiments like those, Greely told the academy last month, "there is a nontrivial risk of conferring some significant aspects of humanity" on the animal.}
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6534243/

[Mark]

http://abstrusegoose.com/46
http://abstrusegoose.com/47

[Mark]

http://turbulence.org/spotlight/thinking/chess.html

A tidbit out of the book "Physics of the Impossible".
"Scientists began to realize that playing chess or mutiplying huge numbers required only a tiny, narrow sliver of human intelligence. When the IBM computer Deep Blue beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov in a six-game match in 1997, it was a victory of raw computer power, but the experiment told us nothing about intelligence or consciousness, although the game made plenty of headlines. As Douglas Hofstadter, a computer scientist at Indiana University, said, "My God, I used to think chess required thought. Now I realize it doesn't. It doesn't mean Kasparov insn't a deep thinker, just that you can bypass deep thinking in playing chess, the way you can fly without flapping your wings."

I am reminded of an old book I read entitled "Mind Children".
"Doubtless many readers who turn regularly to the best science popularizers -- to authors like Loren Eiseley and Stephen Jay Gould and Paul Colinvaux and Douglas Hofstadter -- do so to combat the numbness ..."
"We are about to enter a "postbiological" world. Imminently -- perhaps within the lifetimes of our children -- robots of such advanced capabilities will emerge that "our DNA will find itself out of a job, having lost the evolutionary race to a new kind of competition."
"Hans Moravec, who is director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory of Carnegie Mellon University, possesses a lucid, reassuringly commonsensical style and a flair for analogical simplification which together make the recondite seem approachable and the revolutionary plausible."
"As Moravec points out, there are evolutionary reasons for the higher being more accessible than the lower: "Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much more powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge."
http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book88/r ... orker.html

[Mark]

This reminded me of pulsejets for some reason/in some abstract way.
[Once upon a time, the most complex jet was a pipe.] ha

"Once upon a time, the most complex animal was a worm. The stick-like shape was poorly adapted for manipulation and even locomotion. Then these stick-like animals grew smaller sticks, called legs, and locomotion was much improved, although they were still poor at manipulating. Then the smaller sticks grew yet smaller sticks, and hands, with manipulating fingers were invented and precise manipulation of the environment became possible."
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/HansMoravecRobotBush.html

References

[The idea of tree-structured (dendritic) robots is unexplored. Some lessons can be learned from other configurations with many actuators, especially tentacle or snake-like robots. An excellent reference is:
Shigeo Hirose, Biologically Inspired Robots: snake-like locomotors and manipulators, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993.
Qualitative descriptions of the bush robot idea are found in:
Hans Moravec, Mind Children: the future of robot and human intelligence, Harvard University Press, 1988.
Marvin Minsky, Will Robots Inherit the Earth?, Scientific American, v271n4, October 1994, pp. 108-113.
Fictional portrayals of bush robots are found in
Robert L. Forward, Flight of the Dragonfly, Timescape Books, 1984.
Robert L. Forward, Rocheworld, Baen Books, 1985.
Robert L. Forward and Julie Forward Fuller, Return to Rocheworld, Baen Books, 1990.
Robert L. Forward and Martha D. Forward, Ocean Under the Ice, Baen Books, 1994.
Robert L. Forward and Martha D. Forward, Marooned on Eden, Baen Books, 1995.
Robert L. Forward and Martha D. Forward, Rescued from Paradise, Baen Books, 1995.
Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky, The Turing Option, Warner Books, 1992.
a very attenuated form of bush robot is seen in the two-level branching of the manipulators on the EVA pods in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, 1967. ]

Humble robot bush. ha
http://blogstersguild.blogspot.com/2008 ... vered.html

[Mark]

One time I went out on a pier at Ft. Pickens just to see if anyone was catching any fish. I didn't plan on fishing and didn't bring any ice in my ice chest. But since they were catching fish, I got my rod out of my trunk and tried a few casts. I caught a good sized flounder about 18 inches long and quickly ran back to my car and got the ice chest and put some water in it along with the floulder and quickly left for home so as to keep the fish fresh.
I got down the road about a half mile and a park ranger pulls up behind me as I'm driving 25 mph through the park. He hits the siren, turns on his blue lights AND gets on the speaker horn and proclaims Pull over! Pull over! I about had a heart attack. He asked me if I did any fishing and I said yes and he asked to see the fish so I got out, opened my trunk and lifted the lid on the ice chest. He then said, "Oh, that's a nice flounder", and quickly left. I guess they were watching the pier for people catching illegal sized fish and thought since I was rushing, I was up to something. ha
I once had a job where I had to collect data on the genus and species of fish for the National Marines Fisheries. I would go to Destin and state parks and fishing piers up and down the coast and weigh and measure fish that charter boats and such would catch. This was all for the Dept. of Commerce to set limits on fish. One thing I recall was having to identify left and right-eyed flounder, I carried a few manuals for reference as well.
http://www.pensacolasgreatest.com/FortPickens.html There are a lot of places to explore and it's much prettier than these pictures. Now it is rather remote because the road was taken out by a hurricane. ha

Anyway, here's a few tidbit on flounders.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bldN-lby ... re=related

Lefteye flounders are a family, Bothidae, of flounders. They are called "lefteye flounders" because most species lie on the sea bottom on their right side, with both eyes on the left side. A helpful reminder when trying to recall the family name for this fish is that "Bothidae eyes are on the same side o' dey head."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bothidae

A lot of pressure.
"Among other sea creatures, Flounders were found at the bottom of Mariana trench, the deepest location on the earth's crust. Swiss scientist Jacques Piccard and US Navy Lt. Don Walsh reached a depth of 10,900 meters (35,810 ft) and were surprised to discover soles or flounder about 30 cm (1 ft) long, as well as shrimp there."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flounder

[larry cottrill]

A lot of pressure.
"Among other sea creatures, Flounders were found at the bottom of Mariana trench, the deepest location on the earth's crust. Swiss scientist Jacques Piccard and US Navy Lt. Don Walsh reached a depth of 10,900 meters (35,810 ft) and were surprised to discover soles or flounder about 30 cm (1 ft) long, as well as shrimp there."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flounder

As an old amateur diver, I have always been surprised by people's amazement at how creatures of the sea can survive at great depths. To a fish (well, at least a fish without an internal air bladder), internal pressures are totally self-adjusting, because the creature contains nothing but solid bones (or outer carapace) and liquid-filled cells. It is true, of course, that absolute pressure affects absorption of oxygen and other dissolved gases. But in terms of both structural integrity and physical perception, depth pressure means nothing to such an animal. Such creatures will often die if taken up to shallow depths, because of the boiling out of gases dissolved in the tissues at high partial pressures (exactly like 'bends' in human divers).

It is air breathers that have the pressure-induced problems: squeeze, bends, nitrogen narcosis, etc. Whales are utterly amazing, because they can grab a lungful of air in a split second and then plunge a thousand feet or more without apparent discomfort. They can stay fairly long, too -- but of course for a big whale, a lungful is a LOT of air! Back in the 1960s there was a US Navy man who could do the same by rapidly pulling himself hand-over-hand down a weighted line and back up again. He was an amazing guy, with about twice the lung capacity of a "normal" man his size, and was used by the Navy for research on the physiological effects of depth pressure. I don't know what his ultimate depth record was, but it was many hundreds of feet at the time I read an article about him. What surprised me is that he claimed to suffer absolutely no nitrogen narcosis effects, which hit normal air-breathing divers at depths of (as little as) only a couple of hundred feet. Of course, he couldn't stay long at such great depths, and that alone could be the answer to that particular mystery.

L Cottrill

[Mark]

"Gasoline was chosen as the float fluid because it was lighter than water, yet relatively incompressible even at extreme pressure, thus retaining its buoyant properties.
Nine tons of iron pellet shot were taken on the craft as ballast, both to speed the descent and allow ascent, since the extreme pressures would not have permitted air-ballast tanks to be refilled with gas at depth. This additional weight was held actively in place at the throats of two hopper-like ballast silos by electromagnets, so that in case of an electric failure the craft would immediately rise to the surface.
To withstand the high pressure of 1.25 metric tons per cm² (110 MPa) at the bottom of Challenger Deep, the sphere's walls were 12.7 centimetres (5.0 in) thick (it was overdesigned to withstand considerably more than the rated pressure)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathyscaphe_Trieste

I often think of a sheet of paper, 8 1/2 by 11 which has 93.5 square inches. At 14.7 psi on a sheet of paper and if you could put a vacuum on the opposite side, there would be 1,374 pounds of force on it.
At the depth of 35,000 feet there would be over 2 million pounds per square foot, but as you say it all equals out. The other day I was reading about bacteria and odd life forms using weird chemicals such as hydrogen sulfide, to create/sustain life, (not using the sun to drive reactions), near volcanic vents, but that they needed the heat and pressure to catalyze reactions for synthesis. Imagine all the neat things yet to be learned from the deep "down there." I was reading cell walls are built a little differently to function at great depths, that yet some other catalysts, these molecules bend in funny shapes and don't function as well.
I recall some TV show where a scientist/collector of deep-sea bioluminescent jellyfish finally got some jellies to the surface without them turning to mush, and he kept them alive in pressurized aquariums. Also some chemistry doesn't work the same at surface pressures, it was mentioned here too.

You talked about fish with bladders, awhile back I caught some local fishing show and they were stabbing red snapper in their stomachs with a long thin needle to deflate their bladders so as to release them without harm. Unfortunately, the dolphins here have learned to hang out near any fishing boat and wait for you to release your fish. One time I let go a red snapper without bladder problems, he flew straight down to the bottom like a bullet as fast as his little tail could go, but there were dark shadows after him and I doubt he made it. My brother then said that he wanted to move, that he didn't want to feed the dolphins. Dolphins are everywhere it seems, even very far out they often find you. And they are really big creatures, it's kind of haunting to see how huge some bottlenose dolphins can get, looming around your boat. I love how the water looks when you go out to sea into the really deep water, it turns a strange, almost purple color.
Here's some other method for saving a fish, I don't know how well it works. I wonder if/what other effects rapid decompression has, what other non-obvious deleterious effects it might have on Mr. Fish that we might not be aware of?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDml16UvWog

[Mark]

Sorry, that previous video probably put you to sleep. ha

This was more scientific and rewarding/insightful to read.

"New strategies being developed for releasing rockfish suffering from pressure damage need to be tested to determine long-term survival. You should not assume that a fish survives simply because it swims off on its own after being vented or recompressed and does not return to the surface.
Recompression methods involve assisting the fish back down to a depth where it can descend the rest of the way to the bottom on its own. The greatest relative pressure change occurs in the top 33 feet. Recompression, if done quickly, can reverse some of the damage done by the expanding gas. Even rockfish with severely bulging eyes may survive when recompressed quickly. Different methods have been devel-oped to recompress fish and assist their return to the bottom. One method involves using a weight and a large, inverted, barbless hook. Fish should be hooked from outside to inside through the membrane on the upper lip so that the hook releases effectively (figure 2). The weight must lead the fish into the water and be heavy enough to sink the fish to the desired depth (over three pounds for a large yelloweye)."

"Do not vent a fish by piercing the stomach, which is often what you see sticking out of the mouth of the fish. To prop-erly vent a fish, use a hollow venting tool. This can be an 18- gauge needle or a hollow, sharpened, steel cannula mounted on a wooden dowel. Cannulas (16-gauge recommended) can be obtained from farm supply and feed stores."

http://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/sgpubs/ ... 05001.html

[Mark]

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008 ... _is_it.php

And some viewer comments.

"Lovely watch, but to be truly great it needs a trilobite on there somewhere (OK, OK I'm a trilo-fangirl - sue me)."

"Isn't it running a bit too fast? "

"Look at all those gaps!"

[Mike Everman]

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008 ... _is_it.php

And some viewer comments.

"Lovely watch, but to be truly great it needs a trilobite on there somewhere (OK, OK I'm a trilo-fangirl - sue me)."

"Isn't it running a bit too fast? "

"Look at all those gaps!"

That was hilarious. Quite a good crowd making comments. "Half past a monkey's ass"

[Mark]

"Wood rubbed warm cools down"

"Like passengers in a rising elevator, those riding a developmental curve may be unaware of the altitude already reached -- until a passing window shows a glimpse of the ground. In 1930 an Australian gold-prospecting party flew into a supposedly uninhabited area deep in the New Guinea highlands and encountered a human culture separated fifty thousand years from their own. The naked inhabitants, some with stone spears, were driven into paroxysms of confusion and religious fear and awe by the giant roaring silver birds that alighted near their mud-thatch villages to release droopy-skinned white men without genitals who, among too many wonders, captured their souls in small black boxes labeled Kodak."

"In 1991 Davi Kopenawa took the giant step of being the first to leave the jungle to speak for his people, the Amazonian Yanomami. The Yanomami, with a population of about twenty thousand the largest remaining stone-age tribe, were isolated from the rest of the world for ten thousand years until this century, when missionaries, anthropologists, and, more recently, highway workers and gold miners, began to invade their homeland. Accompanied by a translator, wearing his only possessions, sneakers, jeans, and a sweater given to him for the trip, he visited New York, Washington, and Pittsburgh, to beg to be left alone: foreign diseases, especially malaria, had killed one-fifth of the Brazilian Yanomami in five years."
"What he saw in the cities horrified him: crazy ant-people crawling in sky-high huts thinking about cars, money, and possessions instead of relatives and nature. In a zoo he identified with the listless animals among plastic plants, steel vines, and bad air. "If I had to live in your cities for a month, I'd die. There's no forest here."

Strange Ducks, Out of Water
"Today, as our machines approach human competence across the board, our stone-age biology and our information-age lives grow ever more mismatched. Work in the developed countries has become increasingly specialized and esoteric, and it now often takes a graduate degree, representing half a working lifetime of sustained learning, to master the necessary unnatural skills. As societal roles become yet more complex, specialized, and far removed from our inborn predispositions, they require increasing years of rehearsal to master, while providing fewer visceral rewards. The essential functions of a technical society elude the understanding of an increasing fraction of the population. Even the most successful individuals often find their work boring, difficult, unnatural, and unsatisfying, more like a sustained circus performance than a real life. Caffeine substitutes for natural adrenaline. Those original activities that do remain -- eating and child raising, for instance -- are often squeezed by the strange new tasks. The mismatch between instinct and necessity induces alienation in the midst of unprecedented physical plenty."

"There is an analogy between the evolution of the first living organisms from simpler chemical processes several billion years ago and the development of technical civilization from human manipulative and learning skills. Technical civilization, and the human minds that support it, are the first feeble stirrings of a radically new form of existence, one as different from life as life is from simple chemistry. Call the new arrangement Mind. Unlike Life alone, which learns from its past, but is blind to its future, Mind can choose among alternatives to imperfectly select its own destiny -- even to amplify that very ability."

"It is the "wild" intelligences, however, those beyond our constraints, to whom the future belongs. The available tools for peeking into that strange future -- extrapolation, analogy, abstraction, and reason -- are, of course, totally inadequate. Yet, even they suggest surreal happenings. Chapter 6's robots sweep into space in a wave of colonization, but their wake converts everything into increasingly pure thinking stuff. A "Mind Fire" will burn across the universe. Inside the Mind, considered in Chapter 7, physical law loses its primacy to purposes, goals, interpretations, and God knows what else."
http://www.cnn.com/books/beginnings/990 ... index.html
http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/

[Mark]

"Several key technologies must be much advanced to make possible practical, high-dexterity bush robots."

"Computational power increased at least a millionfold in density . A bush robot, with thousands or millions of fingers or more, is much too complex to be controlled by a human being, so must have autonomous control. Even our simplest configuration algorithms running on good workstations take minutes to pose modest bush robots with fewer than a million fingers. Yet the natural frequency of motion of the smallest fingers in such a bush is in the kilohertz, about a million times faster than we could control. Higher degree bushes require disproportionally more control power, and more interesting grips or poses demand some degree of combinatorial search to find, boosting the requirements even further. Ideally computational units would be small enough to be distributed throughout the bush, down to into the individual twiglets at least a thousandfold smaller than existing chips."

"Our most promising fabrication used the "rapid prototyping" method called stereolithography. Using it, we were able to construct a solid static model of a high-degree bush with little more difficulty than it took to generate a graphic rendition. Stereolithography is a 3D printing process, that forms solid models as a computer-directed laser selectively cross-links and thus solidifies portions of a liquid polymer bath. With this approach we could construct assemblies with huge numbers of parts in exact sizes from 50 cm in down to the 50 micron resolution limit of the printer. We managed to produce bush robot models with 9 levels of three-way branching, far exceeding any other alternative. The printing hardware, in principle, might have produced even 10 or 11 levels of branching, but several tries at making a degree 10 bush failed, apparently due to memory limitations in the stereolithography machine's controlling computer. Very advanced future rapid prototyping machines, which could "print" in arbitrary materials, might allow working bush robots to be generated in this way. Once they exist, myriad-fingered bush robots, able to grasp and rapidly place tiny specks of matter into arbitrary configurations, could themselves become the ultimate rapid prototyping machines, able to assemble copies of themselves as well as virtually anything else."
http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/users/hpm/pro ... mmary.html

A few life forms in nature that come to mind when thinking of robot bushes. I suppose nature has already started the march towards bush robots.
http://images.google.com/images?um=1&hl ... rch+Images
http://images.google.com/images?um=1&hl ... anish+moss
http://www.hse.gov.uk/asthma/images/lungs.jpg
http://www.andreaharner.com/banyan-tree-aerial-root.jpg
http://www.livescience.com/images/051102_fingers_03.jpg

[Mark]

Just a book review.

"Paul and Cox are more on target in their discussion of the perverse backwardness of traditional religious worldviews in response to current and foreseeable progress. Christians should realize that something is wrong with their story when virgins can now routinely give birth via modern reproductive medicine, and soon without even genetic contributions from men. When Rush Limbaugh went deaf, he didn't pray to some deity to restore his hearing -- he got a cochlear implant, which seems to be working well enough to save his radio career. Advocates of the creationist "Intelligent Design" theory have a problem they don't even realize yet: Humans are intelligently designing and producing things of ever greater complexity, especially computers, yet they are totally unlike things found in nature. No theist ever thought of attributing to his deity the ability to create a computer, which suggests that humans are able to do things that the postulated deity can't! (That's why bio-engineering is denounced as "playing god," while computer engineering isn't.) As the authors say on page 410, "As much as they may hate to admit it, the religious and the mystical know that science and technology do not just make promises that never quite seem to come to pass, or claim miracles that cannot be separated from illusion. They deliver the goods. They make pretend magic real." When "SciTech" gets to the point where it can reverse human aging and resuscitate "dead" people from cryonic suspension, the whole rationale for religion will be thrown into question. Paul and Cox are a little too hard on Buddhism, however, for Buddhists were way ahead of the curve when they developed the insight centuries ago, now substantiated by modern cognitive neuroscience, that the perception of selfhood is illusory. (However I find it ironic that certain Transhumanists want to deny selfhood to people while attributing it to "spiritual machines"!)"
http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Humanity-C ... 681&sr=8-6

[Mark]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o2_U0gg ... haryngula/

[Mark]

"But other factors may be in play. On one end of the spectrum of American religion are the analytical churches, on both the right and the left theologically and politically, which are primarily concerned with establishing Biblical principles to live by — and are suspicious of any modern-day irruption of the supernatural into religious life. Their miracles all took place in the Bible. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the more experiential churches, like many African-American denominations and those in the Pentecostal movement, that lay heavy emphasis on the workings of the Holy Spirit, where the supernatural, through gifts like healing, prophesying and speaking in tongues, makes regular visits in the pews. In the middle are sacramental faiths like Roman Catholicism, where the supernatural has a regular place on the altar (after all, the Eucharist is said to be the literal body and blood of Christ) but one that occurs only within the restrictions of very specific ritual."
"Americans live in an enchanted world,"
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article ... ml?cnn=yes