Valleys and Troughs

Bear Gryllls raw animal medley, including the infamous goat testicle.

One of our favorite aspects of Man vs. Wild, and the reason we'd pick Bear Grylls above Survivorman Les Stroud any day of the week has always been the stiff-upper-lip British pluck with which he will eat literally anything he finds, be it living, dead or of indeterminate status. Stroud's greatest claim to glory is that unlike Bear, he allegedly does all his own camerawork. Which does impress. But would he give himself a fetid-water enema if trapped on a raft in the ocean? We can't say for sure. But Bear Grylls would. The best part of the above video is the glimpse of the crew's perspective - "definitely needs... more garlic." If we ever find ourselves trapped in a remote wilderness, we will only momentarily hesitate before chomping down on some goat balls. Oh, and the fetid-water enema, just in case:

VALLEY?

And just to make you feel bad about yourself: bottled water will destroy the earth.

From the folks who brought the internet infographic:

TROUGH

via onlineeducation

Morning Marginalia: Sarah Palin enters rarified breast-signing air.

That's Sarah Palin's signature on the chest of the unfortunate little creature above, which signing occurred at a Costco in Utah, which certainly make sense. We imagine it was part of Palin's publicity/book tour, but can't be bothered to confirm this. Normally we'd applaud this sort of thing on general principle, but nothing about Sarah Palin and her status as some kind of celebrity amuses us. Some things are just too depressing.

TROUGH, for obvious reasons.

via gawker

MIT to rework robot apocalypse from the ground up.

We can't stress enough how frustrated we are that the future is taking so long to get here. So we tend to applaud the efforts of pretty much anyone working to realize the visions we were promised in our youth, which have largely existed only fictionally to date. And yet we are not without scruple; we understand that certain pursuits are almost destined to bring about our own destruction. Turns out MIT, which heads the Mind Machine Project, has no such reservations:

After 50 years and countless dead ends, incremental progress, and modest breakthroughs, artificial intelligence researchers are asking for a do-over. The $5 million Mind Machine Project (MMP), a patchwork team of two dozen academics, students and researchers, intends to go back to the discipline's beginnings, rebuilding the field from the ground up. With 20/20 hindsight, a few generations worth of experience, and better, faster technology, this time researchers in AI -- an ambiguous field to begin with -- plan to get things right.

They plan to get things right. Awesome. Sounds bulletproof to us. We can't manufacture a printer that consistently just works and these clowns are giving themselves five years to build a robot that can read children's books. What could possibly go wrong? At least President Obama, for one, is prepared to do what is necessary. Man, we love that guy.

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via popsci

Morning Marginalia: Robots that smile at you.

The above is a "receptionist robot" on display at Japan's International Robot Exhibition 2009. It requires human direction to operate, but is designed to accurately portray emotions via facial expressions. For Christ's sake. Japan will ruin us all.

TROUGH

via popsci

End of the world to occur in 2020, not 2012.

Intel scientists are hellbent on integrating the human mind with computer chips, and they plan to do it by 2020. While we long for a world more akin to the one we were promised in our youth (ie: flying cars, jet packs, pretty much anything revolving around personal flight) we are still pretty unsettled by this. Seems like there's potential for a lot to go wrong. And Intel isn't the only group pursuing this avenue:

Plenty of other researchers have also tinkered in this area. Toyota recently demoed a wheelchair controlled with brainwaves, and University of Utah researchers have created a wireless brain transmitter that allows monkeys to control robotic arms.

There are still more implications to creating a seamless brain interface, besides having more cyborgs running around. If scientists can translate brain waves into specific actions, there's no reason they could not create a virtual world with a full spectrum of activity tied to those brain waves. That's right -- we're seeing Matrix creep.

Let us reiterate that we fully support mankind's efforts to realize a world in which, for starters, we're not driving cars that operate on the same basic principle on which the Model T was conceived. But monkeys controlling robotic arms? Have we lost all sense of perspective regarding our own self-preservation? We hate to sound like alarmists, but this is disconcerting at best. We are essentially ensuring that the advent of an apocalyptic future be a self-fulfilling prophecy. It would be great to do away with the tedium of actually having to move one's hand in order to waste time on the internet, but this smacks of flying too close to the sun. We, at least, will spend the next decade stocking up on canned foods and small-arms ordnance.

TROUGH

via popsci

IBM digitizes cat mind, for whatever reason.

For a purpose which we find it difficult to discern, and using a supercomputer which frankly looks like it's quite a bit larger than it probably needs to be, researchers at IBM have simulated the pathways of a domestic cat's brain:

IBM and Stanford University researchers modeled a cat's cerebral cortex using the Blue Gene/IP supercomputer, which currently ranks as the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world. They had simulated a full rat brain in 2007, and 1 percent of the human cerebral cortex this year.

This is all well and good, and we applaud IBM for their pursuit of knowledge, however seemingly aimless. Perhaps we will be more impressed when we see some real-life applications of this research, ie: explaining the neural processes that cause our cat to knock a full 24 oz. cup of icewater onto our DVR box, rendering same into an obviously pretty useless mess emitting a sad little whir, all the while making calculating eye contact with us as we watch across the room, powerless to intercede. Science, man.

TROUGH

via popsci

Morning marginalia.

Yes, that is a bear ice-skating. Playing hockey, more to the point. Part of a Russian Ice Circus performing in the Czech Republic, the bear is one of a number trained to ice skate, play hockey, and be awesome.

via DailyNews

Large Hadron Collider fully armed and operational.

After laying dormant for 14 months due to the necessity for major repairs, researchers are prepared to once again fire up the Death Star reactor core Large Hadron Collider. Buried 100 meters beneath the French-Swiss border, it is hoped that the massive collider will allow researchers to study as-yet unobserved phenomena associated with particle physics, specifically the rumored Higgs boson, or "God" particle:

One of the primary reasons for the urgency is that physicists at Fermilab's Tevatron collider in the US have been boasting that they may beat the LHC in the race to find the Higgs boson, the Holy Grail of particle physics. When disaster struck at the LHC, the PopSci Predictions Exchange (which runs a stock market based on scientific predictions) suggested that it was equally likely that the Tevatron or the LHC would discover the Higgs. However, the Exchange is gradually beginning to favour the LHC as the European collider gets closer to starting up again – at the moment the odds are 60:40 in favour of the LHC.

So the most conspicuous advancement in particle physics is now being staked? Bear in mind that when this whole thing began, voices were raised in opposition to the effort on the grounds that there was a chance - albeit a small one - that the collider could inadvertently create a black hole, destroying the earth and probably the entire solar system. So let us hope they get this thing ironed out properly. At the end of the day, nobody is going to remember who destroyed the galaxy first.

via Guardian.co.uk

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