Off-topic and unclassifiable stuff of interest
A riddle: what’s rectangular and flat, can fit in your pocket, and can calculate six-variable functions?
No, not a pocket calculator; I forgot to mention – it has no electronic components whatsoever.
Here, check it out in the latest addition to the HOC collection on my Possibly Interesting web site.
I discussed a while ago how Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems are being designed to be more human like. Well, the reverse is also sometimes true, with human operators becoming more and more computer-like. Consider:
Our car lighted up a “service required” lamp, so I called the 24×7 number provided by our garage, to ask whether the car was due for maintenance. A polite young lady answered:
Young Lady: How may I help you?
Me: Hi. My car claims it needs maintenance but has only 5500 Km on it. I want to know whether this model requires maintenance at 5000 Km?
YL: what is your name please?
Me: Zeldes. [I was assuming she plans to look up my car in some customer database]
YL: Is that your first name?
Me: No, it’s my last name. [Duh!…]
YL: What is your first name?
Me: Nathan. [Strange question: the database would be indexed by last name!]
YL: May I have your phone number? Someone will call you.
Me: [gave my cellular number].
YL: May I have your home number?
Me: No, use my cellular, it’s what I can be reached at.
YL: May I have your home number?
At this point it hit me: I was talking to a computer program! It was implemented in wetware, but the girl was following a preset routine and had no independent thought: a living computer. So I gave her my home number, and she exited that particular program loop and eventually hung up.
And it struck me that the moment she repeated the home number question is when I achieved certainty that there was no sense talking her out of the routine she was bound to; in essence, she had passed at that moment a reverse version of the Turing Test. A human would’ve said “OK, that’ll do then”.
Incidentally, the term “Reverse Turing Test” can be intepreted in many ways – here’s another, more often seen interpretation of this.
The wonders of the natural world are many, and the living body includes countless amazing features (and, admittedly, some not-so-amazing ones as well). Today I give due homage to a piece of truly elegant design: the perfect match of the outer ear to the iPod’s earphones!
The earphones’ convenient usage stems from the presence of those details of ear anatomy that form a perfect keyhole structure to hold the earbud in place just against the opening of the ear canal. The structure echoes (after a 180 degree turn) that seen on the backs of many wall-mounted household objects, like the fan seen in the photo below.
In case you wondered, the small folds in the outer ear’s convolutions that make this possible are called the Tragus and Anti-Tragus, as seen in this detailed illustration from Gray’s Anatomy. They hold the earphone’s round body in a snug fit against the suitably sized Concha.
We humans may not have the most impressive ears (just ask a bat, or a rabbit, or an elephant) but we certainly come pre-customized to hear our favorite music on the go!
I was putting in order our bookcase of Science Fiction, and noticed an interesting fact best illustrated by the two piles of books in the photo.
One pile has three books, all written after 1980. The other has eight books written in the fifties, the later part of the “Golden Age” of Science Fiction. And the two piles are the same height.
Fact is, most paperbacks published recently tend to be much longer than the “Pocket books” of the fifties. They can easily exceed 400 pages, where their predecessors ran happily to 200 or so. And the sad thing is, this does not make them better. The three fat books in the pile at left are certainly good – but the other pile contains absolute classics like Bradbury’s The illustrated man, Clarke’s Childhood’s end, and Asimov’s I, Robot (the wonderful short story collection, not the silly movie); the others, by such masters as Sturgeon, Heinlein, Blish and Wyndham were likewise influential and a joy to read.
Here, go read Footfall (1985), all 700 pages of it, and Wolfbane (1959), with a mere 160; both are wildly imaginative works, good SciFi indeed, but the GPP (goodness density per page) is on the skinny tome’s side. In fact, it makes me wonder, why did authors become so much more verbose of late? Any ideas?
Greg Bear’s hyper-imaginative Sci Fi novel “Eon” brings its protagonists to a parallel reality whose highly advanced post-humans use Picting to communicate; that is, they project in mid-air sequences of holographic icons to convey their thoughts.
This may work for post-humans… but can become a problem when mere mortals try it with excessive zeal. I refer to the increasingly common practice of using pictures and icons in signage and instruction manuals, even when written text would be far better. The notion that pictures are easier to grasp works fine for signs like “left turn” on a road, or “Danger – High Voltage” on a transformer, which are reasonably self-explanatory. And they are invaluable in instruction manuals when they illustrate some technical complexity explained in the text. The problem begins when those manuals start conveying complex concepts like “Don’t drop this camera on a hard floor”, which they might do by showing a person weeping as the camera smashes to pieces… 
Take this picture, from a Konica camera manual. Can you decipher its meaning? Fortunately the text on the same page explains: it means “The battery should be replaced when the flash takes more than eight seconds to charge”. That’s 15 words, and they are far better than the picture. And from the same manual (this time without a Rosetta stone in the text), the “Don’ts” in this mosaic:
The Thermometer I can get, and maybe the “Don’t take a screwdriver to this camera” (or is it, “Don’t stick a screwdriver in the lens?)… but the one in the center eludes me (“Don’t take photos on windy days”??) and the one to its right is a total mystery (“Beware radiation emanating from TV sets and refrigerators”? Or is that a Microwave oven? And since when do fridges emit anything?)
But no manual beats the one we have for our Electrolux dishwasher, which has a pull-out card that starts with exhorting its own virtues (top row, which merely illustrates one word, “RTFM”); then goes on to totally confuse us (is this filter cleanup due daily? Weekly? Daily, but only during the first week of each month?)
And then it shows this masterly rendition of “Help the environment by only using as much detergent as needed”:
Sometimes, I guess, a word (wisely selected) is worth a thousand pictures!
With the wonders of Google Maps at our service, we can get some interesting insights. Take the photo below, also viewable here. This is the older part of the Microsoft campus at Redmond, where much of the software in the computer I’m writing this on was developed.
Notice how the buildings all have cross shapes visible in their plans. This is not because of a religious bias in the company’s management. It is, I was told when I visited there, because Bill Gates had decided when he started the company that an effective software engineer needs the peace and quiet made possible by an office with a door. Indeed, while myriads of hi-tech engineers (yours truly included) work in cubicles in the noisy open space made famous by the Dilbert comic strip, Microsoft coders all have their own individual offices with real doors to block out the world when they need to concentrate. Of course such an office requires a window too, or it gets claustrophobic… which explains the shape of the buildings – with a need for so many windows, they had to be made with a convoluted outline, to maximize surface-to-bulk ratio.
For my part, I admire the tenacity – Microsoft moved to Redmond in 1986, and 22 years later they still resist the temptation to compress their engineers into cubes. They have a good thing, and they stick to it!
Reuse is good, right? And the notion conjures in most of us an image of linking code modules. Which is why I was astounded to run into the following case, while touring the beautiful island of Sicily.
Here you see your intrepid tourist in front of the Duomo (cathedral) of Siracusa, the city where Archimedes lived, engineered, and famously died defending his sand drawings. The baroque facade is a late addition (18th century) and nothing to write home about; but to its left there’s something unique and bizarre…
Below, left, is a close-up of the left wall of the Duomo. Note the embedded Doric columns, visible with their abaci and architrave (don’t worry, I had to look that up myself). These are also visible on the inside of the church, as seen in the photo at right.
So what’s going on? Well, the church was built in the 7th century AD. The columns, however, predate it by more than a millennium; they are what’s left of a Greek temple dedicated to Athena, which was built in the 5th century BC. Rather than follow the destroy-and-recycle method often applied to preceding cultures, the Christians reused the framework of the temple as is, filling in the spaces between the columns!
Technology innovation often happens serendipitously, and the kind I like best is when something from one knowledge domain triggers an analogous design in a completely different field. I mean, inventing a plane with wings because you notice that birds have wings is OK, but not a huge leap (the real leap of the early aviation pioneers was ignoring the flapping of bird wings). It’s more interesting if you observe how fish swim and end up inventing sliced bread!
So, here’s one that really crosses domains. My friend Ronny – Prof. Aharon Agranat of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem – and his colleague Prof. Yuri Feldman have just made headlines with the discovery that you can read the state of sweating on human skin at a distance by beaming Sub-Terahertz waves at it and analyzing the reflected waves. This could have useful applications in a variety of fields, from medicine to security, given that sweating patterns correlate to various biomedical conditions. But the part I like is how they arrived at this development…
Ronny and Yuri were looking at new imaging data that showed that the sweat pores in the skin are not straight tubes but helical. Weird design choice??? but some antennas used for communications are also helical. So, click! – as Ronny says in an interview, “When you look at this through the eyes of an electrical engineer, it is very familiar… it immediately ignited the thinking that perhaps they also behave as helical antennas”.
Immediately, that is, if you have that innovative talent to generalize across domains boundaries!
See the book on the left. It’s been around for centuries, issued by countless publishers, translated into many tongues… and no one ever doubted what it was, because it has a name: Macbeth.
Now see the book on the right. This is Edison’s Eve: a magical history of the quest for mechanical life, by Gaby Wood, published in New York by Alfred A. Knopf. An interesting book, actually; but it has one strange aspect: the first half of the book is about the history of lifelike automata – Vaucanson’s duck, the Turk chess player, Edison’s speaking dolls and so on; just as the title promises. The second half is all about little people who appeared in circuses and sideshows in times past, such as the Doll family in the 1920s, which seems rather off-topic. The incongruity was resolved for me abruptly when I noticed a line on the copyright and catalog info page at the back of the frontispiece: “Originally published in Great Britain as Living Dolls by Faber and Faber limited, London”. Now that title makes sense and links the two parts of the book correctly.
So, we have the same book sold in two countries under different names: the original name sensible, the later poorly thought out and confusing (amazingly, the Amazon site says people who bought one also bought the other…) Nor is this a unique case: I’ve seen this with non-fiction a number of times.
I’m sure the publishers had weighty reasons for this mutilation of the book’s name: one can envision considerations of marketing, or potential lawsuits, the usual corporate stuff. But these are books; books deserve respect. You don’t rename Macbeth to “Scandal in Dunsinane”, nor to “Blood, sex and sorcery”, just because it may sell more in some country. Leave our books alone!
Off-topic it may be, but I had a delightful experience last week judging in a round of the FameLab competition
organized by the British Council in the Jerusalem Science Museum. This international event strives to encourage scientists to communicate their work and their excitement about it to the public; young scientists (mainly graduate students) were invited to present a scientific subject of their choice – in three minutes sharp.
So, I was treated to two dozen fantastic presentations on subjects as diverse as celestial mechanics, protein reactions in cells and the lifestyles of dinosaurs; delivered by talented young people just as diverse in their styles and approaches to communicating their knowledge. Winners will get to compete at the next level, and will be treated to a communication skills workshop that will help them develop their skills.
What a wonderful way to promote science!
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