Coke Machine

Somewhere there's an engineer who can look at this and name the sensor that's broken.

(flikr: metak)

Fruitflies, humans ... cocaine doesn't care.

As recently BoingBoinged, the navigational instincts of fruitflies and humans flake out in similar ways when hammered by cocaine. Does this mean that the motor-skill mapping humans make for driving a car is isomorphic in some way to the way fruitflies fly?

Proto-Language?

In the Amazon jungle, there's a small tribe that speaks a language isolate that seems to expose some holes in modern linguistic theory. It is a tenet of linguistics that there are no "primitive languages" -- all languages are equally expressive, and while some languages may have specialzed vocabulary in some areas, overall you can explain pretty much anything in any language.

But it looks like the Pirahã language just can't handle some things. Like recursion. Or numbers. The Pirahã tribespeople even recognize the utilty of arithmetic and counting, but they just can't learn to do it. Does this validate the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that langauge shapes thought? Or is it evidence of what proto-languages were like? Are the Pirahã -- Homo sapiens without a doubt -- stuck with a Homo erectus language? There is no art in Pirahã culture, no literature, no notion of extended family; large chunks of the cognitive space that most humans take for granted seem simply not to be present for these people. Perhaps these cultural and cognitive constructs depend on a minimal level of linguistic sophistication that Pirahã lacks.

Is the failure of the Pirahã language to serve its speakers in a world dominated by other tongues evidence of the structure of language evolution?

Decomposing Leaf

[flickr/alykat]
>> Wikipedia:Leaf

Genbaku Dome, Hiroshima

Genbaku dome in 1945 (via Wikipedia). Architectural structure revealed on 6 August 1945. The building was almost directly below the Little Boy explosion: vertical walls survive, everything else destroyed. Now a monument.

Out of the Cave

At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision,--what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them,--will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?

(Plato, Republic, Book XII)
>> Plato's Cave

Blue Screen of Death on a petrol pump

Machines with opinions: this petrol pump provides subtle peak-oil commentary while revealing its underlying operating system. (Via flickr)

Oh, the Humanity

Internal structure of the LZ 129 Hindenberg revealed as it burns on May 6, 1937.

All aeronautical aesthetes long for the return of the dirigible. What a magnificent creation: 245m long, and capable of 135km/h, ‘the duralumin frame was covered by cotton varnished with iron oxide and cellulose acetate butyrate impregnated with aluminium powder’. Incredibly, given that it contained seven million cubic feet of hydrogen, it had a smoking lounge.

If peak oil and global warming have an upside, it is that the grounding of those nasty sardine-tin airliners, for enviromental and cost reasons, will allow the dirigible, the apogee of humanity’s flying aspirations, to take its rightful place once more as the preferred mode of intercontinental transport.

“Do it to Julia!”

From George Orwell's 1984 [spoiler warning]:

‘By itself,’ he said, ‘pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable — something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand. even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you.’

Winston Smith has been tortured and humiliated, he has lost his dignity, he will believe that 2+2=5, but has not betrayed Julia – until O'Brien exploits his ineradicable, instinctive weakness.

The Flammarion Woodcut

Not medieval, as commonly supposed, but from Camille Flammarion's 1888 L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire: a missionary pokes his head through the celestial sphere and beholds the machineries of heaven.

Imagine that, o thou pre-Copernican itinerant friar: to walk, trusty staff in hand, the the very edge of the world, to thrust one's head through the firmament, which once had looked so far away but now is revealed to be but a membrane betwixt this quotidian world and the numinous realm beyond; and then to gaze directly on the celestial Ptolemaic epicycles, to hear the music of the spheres, to which all creation dances.

Links: Heliocentrism, epicycles