this is pretty (and so small)

Courtesy of Scientific American: a robot dragonfly that flies for 3 minutes at about 5m/second and carries an onboard camera. someday soon it will be able to hover like a hummingbird and fly backwards. in the movies, robotic insects that have cameras are usually sort of sinister and creepy and climbing all over things to expose the hero to his nemesis - but this one seems so delicate and elegant that surely it will come solely to its programmer to put it to evil ends... sigh.

wholly to be a fool

i'm a bit jetlagged. i'm in mexico city today, and just arrived from shanghai last night. i'm doing a really mediocre job of listening to an english translation of a spanish conversation, with the spanish conversation at full volume in the background. i tripped on steps right in front of me. i struggled to order breakfast off the hang tag card. why?

well first, it's my job :)

second, i'm tired - and when you're tired your ability to see things properly, to process information, can be affected. you struggle to find the word to describe a thing; you speak more slowly and with greater hesitation; your depth perception might be affected and you reach for something far away that's actually close.

we have complex systems for categorizing and naming things - for recognizing stuff. we have multiple words for an object - i'm wearing a shirt, blouse, top with pants, slacks, trousers, chinos and a pair of shoes, flats. i'm adorning myself with jewelry, ring. this assumes i'm thinking in nouns - identifying an object by its essential thing-ness. what if i look down and see gold with white with gold and more gold? would that tell you what i'm wearing? think about something round: it could be a ball, it could be a globe, or an orb. it could be a balloon, a sculpture, a bubble, a sphere; it could contain something or be empty; it could be solid; it could be made of nearly anything; it could float in the air or on the water or it could sink; it might roll or sit still. something round could be an infinite number of things. how do we decide if it's a golf ball or a balance ball or a mylar balloon or a snow globe?

on the one hand, this confusion is terrific - it's how we can achieve lateral thinking. what is this thing like? what can we learn from those other, like things? what can be borrowed or stolen or given back? we reason by analogy, by the familiar, we distinguish based on particulars, we limit the scope of what we think about to the context unless we are given permission or instruction to do otherwise. my mother used to say that she could hand an infant a purple clock and tell her it's a green toaster and how would the infant know? part of our ability to identify something is in our acquisition of language, our social negotiations over the names and provinces of things.

robots, on the other hand, live in a constant state of abstract, lateral thinking, when it comes to identifying objects. looked at from multiple angles, one object could be another. a tray could be a table; a book could be a shield; a couch could be a cow. so what's a young robot about town to do? or worse, what's a young soldier robot to do? via Wired and the DoD:

Recognizing and identifying an object from a video input turns out to be a very difficult problem. The problem stems from the fact that a single object can be viewed from an infinite number of ways. By rotating, obscuring, or scaling a single object, one can create multiple representations of an object - which makes the problem of matching the object to a database of objects very difficult. The problem expands exponentially when objects that need to be identified have never been viewed before. Combine these limitations with the wide variety of objects which might be identified, and the problem becomes intractable.

what will the military do with these shoddy, lateral thinking 'bots? apparently they take forever to identify objects and don't even do so accurately most of the time. they want to detonate your cat and pet your C4. which in some circles is perfectly acceptable; but in the don't ask, don't tell American military - we don't want to see too much creativity, it's sloppy. precision, march! the objective of the DoD project is thus:

To create an object recognition system based on the newer psychological models of object recognition by using a series of different algorithms to identify a variety of objects in different orientations. Such a system would be extremely beneficial for robotic control/intelligence and would allow for an exponential expansion of robotic capabilities and intelligence

and the next thing you know, they become self-aware and stuff. the most critical identification of an object any being can make is when they see their reflection, point, and say, "me."

the mccain campaign's robot reporter pool

I was catching up with my Daily Show episodes on iTunes last night and noticed this image...

Robots March on Brooklyn

I live in Brooklyn. Carroll Gardens. Previously known simply as South Brooklyn. A neighborhood known for longshoremen, Italians, bakeries, soppresatta, lawn chairs and funeral homes. Or at least, known to me for these qualities. Actually, the neighborhood is known for having both front and back gardens for each brownstone. The Los Angeles Times (via Gothamist) did a nice little video ... here it is:



Brooklyn used to be a place to get more square footage for less money. Manhattanites moved out to the 718 and brought their Maclaren strollers, enrolled in prenatal yoga at Area, overwhelmed the farmers market in Grand Army Plaza and generally overpopulated the place to the extent that the F train is always crowded and usually painfully late. I'm one of them, sans stroller or prenatal anything. I've been to the farmer's market once. It was nice.

The emblem of all that is yuppie reprehensible in Brooklyn is Park Slope. There's a whole 'thing' brewing over the rising cost of real estate pushing out even the nice folks making a meager six figures. Blog comments are racist and rude, obscenities fly, even those who got off the boat from the East Village three months ago are rallying to the cry of 'there goes the neighborhood.' I like to think that these neighborhoods can be reclaimed by nature (or economics) - grass, trees, weeds all grow up through the cracks in the cement, ivy overtakes mortar and slowly destroys a brick building, and a few well-timed stabbings and shootings on the hipster circuit can reclaim Williamsburg, Fort Greene, Park Slope, and South Brooklyn, rendering it safe only for those brave enough to get off the subway at night. Frankly, it's a bunch of shite. Neighborhoods change - the people who owned those lots and buildings since converted to condos and co-ops made a pretty penny in the process and should take some responsibility for the changes in that neighborhood. They could have kept their Italian longshoremen's families in the nabe, but they wanted to sell out and move out just as much as the yuppies and hipsters were willing to buy in and move in. If they don't stay forever - well, blame the permalancer economy.

I digress. It's also possible that my jet lag is getting the better of my reasoning and sentence construction. So I'll cut to the robot chase - or rather, the robot parade. Some Park Slopians held a robot parade awhile back...



They weren't selling anything. There was no particular purpose to it. It was fun - I'm sorry I missed it. To check out the flickr feed, go here.

Mea Culpa in Miami

Sorry, have not been blogging responsibly.

I was in Miami for a few days for a conference. Some interesting topics, some terrific speakers. Some real duds, as all conferences have, of course. Maybe the thing that stood out most to me was how much we have known for years but we willfully ignore because it seems that there MUST be something new out there. The truth seems to be - there just isn't.

The thing that stood out a little bit, too, was how much people want to talk about 'the business.' Some may take the point of view of insiders and pros, others the perspective of rebels and outsiders. But we all want to talk about our jobs, our companies, our skills, our clients, our experiences. The after-parties were people talking about the job, bitching about the job, looking for a new job, proclaiming what they know about the job that others do not. How I longed for a conversation about robots.

In fairness, I did have a very interesting conversation with a friend in which we - slightly buzzed, in party attire, and under the stars - took each other through a laddering exercise that takes you to your personal, persistent 'theme' - usually a falsehood - that gets in the way of being a whole person. It turns out I think I'm a fraud and this is the source of my writer's block, dissatisfaction, fear, and anger. We then practiced saying our little themes in funny voices until you got a good belly laugh going. Hearing how ridiculous the notion that I'm a fraud, say, or you're unloveable, or he's too much, is incredibly useful in parking it and moving on. I suspect that this is a 'lather, rinse, repeat' exercise - one time is not enough, because the lies we've been telling ourselves the longest, the ones we really believe, are hard to untell ourselves, to take back, to erase.

Levity was in order. I could tell you about the Furries conversation - but that's not really my story to tell. Instead, I'll tell you what happened when I told my dinner companions that I blog about robots. It seemed like a safe space for such things, as half the table were obsessively fondling their iPhones and Blackjacks. I'm not exempt - my iPhone is my personal assistant, my font of knowledge, my sherpa. Oh, iPhone... (soaring romantic music as we pan away)

My friend John suggested that his partner, Rault, would perhaps know a thing or two about robots. Rault demurred. He wasn't in to robots, but had I seen the video of the robotic jellyfish, or the robot baby white tiger? I hadn't. They're fascinating. And here they are:

Jellyfish, via New Scientist These apparently have no use at the moment - they're just cool and stuff.




White Tiger Cub, courtesy of Gizmodo


I think the White Tiger Cub begins to tip into the Uncanny Valley. Maybe if after years of docile obedience the White Tiger Cub eventually mauls you, ending your Vegas career, then it will hit the proper level of realism. Let's wait and see, shall we?

wascally wobots

a few robots from natasha

these robots seem a bit lost. don't you worry - they'll figure out where to go, as long as they don't make that left turn at albuquerque.


oh, but these robots are celebrating a very happy christmas.


and this robot dog is gonna kick dr. who's arse at chess, yo!

Gentleman's Agreement

I just watched a film classic - one I'd been meaning to watch for some time but had sat on the shelf, still wrapped in cellophane and three sides of tape, ever since Christmas when my dad got it for me. Dad and I always liked to watch movies together, could spend whole days watching movies and talking about them and then deciding what to watch next. We weren't particular - any movie would do. One of the last times I spent with him, we watched a sort of triple feature, beginning with Pitch Black and ending with The Chronicles of Riddick. If it was loud and fun and had special effects and great one-liners, we were happy. Even Vin Diesel couldn't ruin our good time. But we also liked those Great Films, the ones that Say Something.

Dad loved science fiction. He grew up on the greats - on radio with Flash Gordon and the Avenger, and then on television Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, and of course comic books and sci-fi novels. He taught a course on Ethics at Lewis & Clark College using sci-fi novels. He loved Star Trek and Star Wars; he even seemed to believe in The Force, and didn't let George Lucas's silly blood tests for Jedis get in his way. A lot of times, it was these sorts of movies that Said Something. It seemed easier to explore interracial relationships and nuclear war and racism and sexism and anti-semitism and hunger and disease and fear on a spaceship or in the future. Science fiction is about allegories. It's about exploring our many demons and our better angels and prompting us all to think about what we really believe, and what we really believe in.

I felt, still feel, like he and I were the same person. I wish I knew more about him - it might help me understand myself better. But I think that's the trouble with death. Someone goes and you suddenly can think of all the things you wish you'd asked, but never thought of as urgent or pressing. Everything is urgent now. So today, I opened the wrapper on that film classic, and I popped it into the DVD player and I watched. Gentleman's Agreement is about a journalist who poses as a Jew in order to write about anti-semitism. It attempts to tackle, through only one of our many societal diseases, what it really means to be human - or at least it endeavors to show that flesh is flesh, after all. And it shows that we all begin to buy in to notions of good and bad, same and different, right and wrong - as though they were ideas made concrete, something you can sink someone's feet into before you toss them off the bridge. But it also demonstrates how much we accept the worst of the world around us. We let the tasteless joke go by. We believe that others are better than we are. We cut ourselves off from what life is, after all - messy and imperfect and dirty and often simply amoral. We so often want to be 'better' that we invent degrees of betterness and then include ourselves or exclude ourselves based on our own ideas of our self-worth.

And it's all a bunch of nonsense anyway. Not everything can or should be explained. Sometimes you hurt because you simply do. Because all this is hard. Because we're doing this instead of something we want to do more, because we don't know ourselves very well and we think we know what we want until it's right on top of us and we want it to go away. Because we know we want something but don't know how badly we really need it until it's slipping away from us.

In many ways, then, this whole thing is for my Dad, about whom I can't stop crying.

So I leave you with this - it's a lovely little story, and yes, it involves a robot. Unfortunately, it's an ad for detergent.