Patterns emerging from granular matter

Patterns emerge from a rotating tube filled with colored balls of different sizes. Very cool that there are still mysterious things happening with simple objects at the macroscopic scale.

It's just a coincidence, because they used white and orange balls in the video, but it reminded me of the Turing patterns [below] in this post [which is mostly Rudy Rucker].


I've been sick a few days and even slower / more stupid than usual, sweating heavily and dragging myself through dull files. But today the recovery is taking hold, and with the gathering strength other patterns are also emerging in my life, but that's all stuff for another time.

More from Wired on the above

Waves trapped in maze-like grooves

The icons depict the shape of the energy-trapping ridges on the disc at the center and the edges - via arXiv.org

It's not really a pocket black hole, despite the headlines- it doesn't attract mass, and when it says light in the following quote what it really means is microwave frequencies of electromagnetic radiation, not actual visible light:

....this simple metal disc uses the geometry of 60 concentric rings of meta-materials to lock up light for good. The meta-material "resonators" that make up the rings affect the magnetic properties of passing light, bending the beams into the center of the disc, and trapping them in the etched maze-like grooves.

PopSci

It is made of 60 annular strips of so-called "meta-materials", which have previously been used to make invisibility cloaks. Each strip takes the form of a circuit board etched with intricate structures whose characteristics change progressively from one strip to the next, so that the permittivity varies smoothly. The outer 40 strips make up the shell and the inner 20 strips make up the absorber.
...
Fabricating a device that captures optical wavelengths in the same way will not be easy, as visible light has a wavelength orders of magnitude smaller than that of microwave radiation. This will require the etched structures to be correspondingly smaller

Cui is confident that they can do it. "I expect that our demonstration of the optical black hole will be available by the end of 2009," he says.

Such a device could be used to harvest solar energy in places where the light is too diffuse for mirrors to concentrate it onto a solar cell. An optical black hole would suck it all in and direct it at a solar cell sitting at the core. "If that works, you will no longer require these huge parabolic mirrors to collect light," says Evgenii Narimanov [who, with Alexander Kildishev, both of Purdue University, came up with the idea behind the design].

New Scientist

It was made in China and looks like an old coin, nothing special, but to someone like me, who doesn't quite get the device or it's implications, it's full of ancient cool. Exactly what you'd want from a piece of alien tech.

Jamming skin enabled locomotion

No robot posts in a while.

Here's one called the first steps of a robot based on jamming skin enabled locomotion, with the tech clearly explained. It's a flexible shape-shifting robot.



A few more details / links here.

Team DNA

Image of a fractal globule by Leonid A. Mirny and Maxim Imakaev

"We've long known that on a small scale, DNA is a double helix," says co-first author Erez Lieberman-Aiden, a graduate student in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology and a researcher at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and in the laboratory of Eric Lander at the Broad Institute. "But if the double helix didn't fold further, the genome in each cell would be two meters long. Scientists have not really understood how the double helix folds to fit into the nucleus of a human cell, which is only about a hundredth of a millimeter in diameter. This new approach enabled us to probe exactly that question."

3-D Structure Of Human Genome: Fractal Globule Architecture Packs Two Meters Of DNA Into Each Cell, ScienceDaily

Life is awesome.

Computing on the backs of beetles

For decades, scientists have dreamed of computer chips that manipulate light rather than electricity. [...] For now, though, optical computing remains a dream.

Enter a beetle known as Lamprocyphus augustus. In a study published this week in Physical Review E, researchers at the University of Utah describe how the inch-long Brazilian beetle's iridescent green scales are composed of chitin arranged by evolution in precisely the molecular configuration that has confounded the would-be fabricators of optical computers. [...]

"Optical computers could do in a second what now takes days or weeks," said Bartl. "And we're providing the materials."

Full story at Wired.com

Related post:

"...there are certain problems, such as folding proteins, that for humans [and their computers] seem to be intractable, but for nature are easy, instantly done..." Intractability vs Evolution

Theory / practice

Busy and tired, but want to post something, and this idea came to surface in a lull during class, when I was feeling particularly 'on' about my ability to teach a certain thing, a skill that I never got from reading books but had to learn, like a craftsman, by doing again and again, (and failing - I'm not a natural teacher).

The idea was that however foolish people are in vast areas of their lives, everyone has an area of expertise, something that they know way more about than they should and from which something useful can be extracted. Although, of course, like craftsmen, not all knowledge can be easily codified, and most of what is important remains tacit - things that can't be learned from books.

Anyway, as with everything, it's been expressed better elsewhere before, and this time it's from Geoffrey Miller's answer to The Edge question for 2008 [What have you changed your mind about? - many interesting answers, worth a download / print]. Excerpts follow:

I used to think ... that the intricacies of human nature were not just dark, but depopulated — that a few exploratory novelists and artists had sought the sources of our cognitive Amazons and emotional Niles, but that nobody actually lived there.

Now, I've changed my mind — there are local experts about almost all aspects of human nature, and the human sciences should find their way by asking them for directions. These 'locals' are the thousands or millions of bright professionals and practitioners in each of thousands of different occupations. They are the people who went to our high schools and colleges, but who found careers with higher pay and shorter hours than academic science. Almost all of them know important things about human nature that behavioral scientists have not yet described, much less understood. Marine drill sergeants know a lot about aggression and dominance. Master chess players know a lot about if-then reasoning. Prostitutes know a lot about male sexual psychology. School teachers know a lot about child development. Trial lawyers know a lot about social influence. The dark continent of human nature is already richly populated with autochthonous tribes, but we scientists don't bother to talk to these experts.

[...]

For example, suppose a psychology Ph.D. student wants to study emotional adaptations such as fear and panic, that evolved for avoiding predators. She learns about the existing research (mostly by Clark Barrett at UCLA), but doesn't have any great ideas for her dissertation research. The usual response is three years of depressed soul-searching, random speculation, and fruitless literature reviews. This phase of idea-generation could progress much more happily if she just picked up the telephone and called some of the people who spend their whole professional lives thinking about how to induce fear and panic. Anyone involved in horror movie production would be a good start: script-writers, monster designers, special effects technicians, directors, and editors. Other possibilities would include talking with:

• Halloween mask designers,
• horror genre novelists,
• designers of 'first person shooter' computer games,
• clinicians specializing in animal phobias and panic attacks,
• Kruger Park safari guides,
• circus lion-tamers,
• dog-catchers,
• bull-fighters,
• survivors of wild animal attacks, and
• zoo-keepers who interact with big cats, snakes, and raptors.

A few hours of chatting with such folks would probably be more valuable in sparking some dissertation ideas than months of library research.

Awareness of ignorance

A series of three lectures from David Gross called "The Search for a Fundamental Theory of Reality" [scroll down, April 2006], each about 1hr 40min. There's no math, the guy speaks well, and he won a Nobel prize in physics - three things that rarely come together on the topic.

In the third lecture [1hr 15min in], Gross dismisses the idea of progress in science being like peeling an onion, getting closer and closer to the truth. Instead he sees knowledge as expanding outward, like a growing sphere.

Since ignorance exists at the boundary of knowledge, more knowledge = greater awareness of ignorance. But, thinking in terms of the sphere, we can see that the volume is knowledge and the surface is ignorance, which means there is a net gain, even as ignorance increases. He ends the idea with this formula:

wisdom = knowledge / ignorance.

Now, I have no idea what Gross means by wisdom, but I like that image of learning. It reminds me of Nassim Taleb's point about Umberto Eco's library, which runs like this [lifted from a pdf accompanying a Taleb talk]:

..the interesting thing about Umberto Eco is that he has a library, and he has two kind of visitors. His library has 30,000 books, so two kinds of people come to pay homage to Professor Eco. The first category is people who tell him, "Oh wow, how many of these beautiful books have you read"? And you have a second category of people who realize that the value of a library does not lie in the books you've read, but in the books that you haven't read.

So really there's some people who use a library as a tool for self promotion or to convince themselves that they're very smart and look how much I've read. Basically people focus on what they know. Or, you can use it to humble yourself. Every morning you wake up you go down to your library, you have your cup of coffee and look at it and it reminds you how ignorant you are. So this is the idea of a library.

If it's important, you'll hear about it [maybe]

There's a pleasure in following the slow leak of [mostly wrong] information, but it's one I ought to wean myself from.

From The Edge 2007 questions, Kai Krause, billed as a software and design pioneer, writes:

...if you have very large [software] task at hand, one that you calculate might take two years or three...it has actually become cheaper to wait for a couple of generation changes in the hardware and do the whole thing then - ten times faster. In other words: sit by the beach with umbrella drinks for 15 months and then finish it all at once with some weird machinery and still beat the original team by leaps and bounds.

This came together with some other thoughts. I have an old paperback of Buckminster Fuller essays, my only introduction into his work. The stuff in the book is from the 50s and 60s, and although I understand he was advanced for his time, and a remarkable man, what hit home was however much you think and keep up with things it goes out of date fast, and this must be true in every field where real advances are possible, i.e. in the sciences.

From one angle, keeping up as a layman is like following pop culture - there's always something new, too much to take in, and the best stuff will still be around ten, twenty years later. What's the benefit of working so hard to keep up? The idea is that you could sit on a beach and not read for 15 months, and then get all the facts in a day or so when you moved back to the city.

This links to the idea of not reading newspapers, not keeping up with the times, because if it's really important you'll hear about it.

Robots inspired by animals

Here's a New Scientist report.



If you want to read more about the last one [M-Tran], and you will, then you can here, with more movies here.

Big dog robot

Somewhat further to the last post, here's a cool video of the BigDog [sic] robot, with some other machines that learn from animals tacked on at the end.

Venter at the Long Now

It's almost redundant to express amazement at another talk from the Long Now Foundation. Hardly any of them, amassing here, are duds.

This is the first time I've heard Craig Venter speak, and he's great, perhaps the best talk I've heard since...well, probably only since Vernor Vinge, but then he set a high standard. Venter will make your head glow, there's so much cool stuff. Listened to it while cycling out to the country, with the picture of the fractal / broken wall, above, and the network of roots, below, two of the sights, but some notes on the talk from a 7/11 stop:

- Using genes as software for cell's hardware - software that can produce its own hardware.
- The huge variety of undiscovered (microscopic) lifeforms in the oceans and deep (1km +) underground.
- Life in the Sargasso Sea feeding on sunlight, but not by photosynthesis.
- Lifeforms that can be dried out, cut up, hit with high radiation for tens of thousands / millions of years and then recombine and live again when put in water - your basic panspermia seed.

Blackest black

From the Washington Post, heavily edited by me:

Researchers in New York reported this month that they have created a paper-thin material that absorbs 99.955 percent of the light that hits it, making it by far the darkest substance ever made......It is made of carbon nanotubes: microscopic, hollow fibers whose walls are just one atom thick. Importantly, the fibers are widely spaced, providing plenty of space to allow light in and almost no surfaces to bounce it back out....By voraciously sucking up all surrounding illumination, it can give those who gaze on it a dizzying sensation of nothingness.

[In addition a] nascent invisibility cloak now being tested is made of a material that bends light rays "backward," a weird phenomenon thought to be impossible just a few years ago.

Known as transformation optics, the phenomenon compels some wavelengths of light to flow around an object like water around a stone. As a result, things behind the object become visible while the object itself disappears from view.

Professor Pendry pioneered much of modern thinking about how to attain full invisibility using "metamaterials" -- substances engineered to manhandle light. Ordinary matter, such as glass or water, slows and bends light as it passes through. Metamaterials contain bits of metal or other substances embedded in precise patterns to make the light bend in an opposite direction from normal paths.

"In a sense you have some negative space," Pendry said. "The light appears to go backward."