Today's science videos: Nao

If you were looking for a personal robot, we've got one for you. They're about $15000, but there is a discount if you purchase in bulk.

We were originally intrigued by this first video, where each dancing Nao (pronounced "now") is responding to a central computer. This article explains how; it's something called quorum sensing, which is how many bacteria coordinate. (You learn something every day.)



After watching this, via Mental Floss, I got curious about these little suckers, and went to the Nao website. This is their promotional video:



Apparently it does not come with rocket launchers to get revenge on the dolt who knocked it over without so much as a "Pardonnez-moi." I would suggest such weaponry as a future enhancement.

There are other videos out there on various versions of Nao and the different things it can do. After watching them, all you'll need to do to get one for yourself is to dig up that spare $15000.
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Today's science video

We will now demonstrate and explain the Meissner effect:



And now for the explanation:

WTF?

Okay, we looked this up, and we really tried to understand it. It has something to do with superconductors starting to superconduct, but come to think of it, we really don't understand superconductors either, aside from a basic belief that they're more super than normalconductors. As a rule, people coming to Grinwout's for science training are going to go away about as trained as when they arrived.

Cool stuff, though. [Via Web Urbanist.]
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Museum viewing

As a museum goer, I wouldn't necessarily say that I have a set pattern of approach. Much depends on the museum itself. Is it big or small? New to me or an old standby? Is there something I particularly want to see or am I just browsing through? These factors all must be taken into consideration. Still, I think I do have some repeated characteristics.

First, I try to figure out how a gallery is designed. Should I start on the left or right side? Since someone gave some thought to hanging those pictures (for argument's sake we'll assume we're looking at paintings, but a museum is a museum is a museum), I want to follow that thought. Probably things will be arranged chronologically. That makes sense, and I'll want to follow that chronology. Then there's the reading of the overall gallery tag, if any, the big set of text that our gallery has written to explain this particular room. I don't want to guess what the room is about. And I want whatever information is being given out beforehand. I could easily see someone wanting it the other way around. Look first to get a sense of the work, then read the explanation.

Next comes the hard part. Look at the damned picture. At the individual picture level, look at the thing first before reading the tag. I find that I can easily walk up to a picture and read the tag to find out what the picture is about, then I glance at the picture and go on to the next tag, and repeat the process, hardly spending any time at all considering the art. My problem is, I tend to be word-oriented. Although I came to the museum to see the pictures, not to read the tags, I could easily spend 90% of my time reading and only 10% looking. Obviously this is something to avoid, and I make a conscious effort to do so.

I've got a two-hour span of art attention. Doesn't matter what the art is, two hours later and I'm in the gift shop. Some museums are two-hour museums. Others are two-year museums that I approach two hours at a time. I have on occasion taken a lunch break after my two hours and been able to go back for more, stretching beyond my two hours, but as time goes by my brain fills up and I'm not really looking anymore. I'm not even reading the tags!

The last step is to discuss. I will compare notes with my wife on what we saw, especially if it was something new to us. Actually, sometimes this is the penultimate step, because I'll go on to do some back reading and maybe even write something up after the fact. The thing is, I consider art to be of paramount importance, so I don't just drop in on it once in a while and that's the end of it. But still, I have my two-hour limit. If I were being paid to look at art, in other words, at best I would be a part-timer.

There are numerous studies on how exhibitors should most effectively ply their trade. Anyone who goes to museums over a space of time will see fashions in how things are presented. We are in a period now where interactivity is considered very valuable, and where exhibits and sometimes entire museums are, as some would put it, Disneyfied. The idea that works can stand alone in their presentation to the general public has long gone. Compare the old galleries of the 19th century (like in Morse's famous painting above) to present galleries. In the old galleries, painting was piled on painting and the eye went where the eye went. Now the eye probably goes where the curator wants it to go.

What a Physics Student Can Teach Us About How Visitors Walk Through a Museum is an article from the Smithsonian that covers some of this. Apparently no one has scientifically looked at how people approach museums, and while this article isn't definitive by any means, it is thoughtful.
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The Bug Man

If you can't break into movies (or painting) any other way, try entomology.



[Via Underwire]
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The Mouse in the lab

Disney Research is exactly what it sounds like, a branch of the company dedicated to research. Areas covered include computer graphics, wireless and mobile computing, robotics, behavioral sciences—everything you'd think a company like Disney might be interested in, and some things that sound a little bit out there. Of course, the basic Disney corporation has been innovative since Walt was sitting around in Kansas City trying to come up with cartoon ideas for Laugh-O-Gram, so an arm of the company dedicated to pure research (it was launched in 2008) makes sense, especially a big company like Disney.

Okay, that's the background. Get a load of this. (That breakfast-eating training system: is that the scariest thing you've seen in a while?):



Impressive, eh. We caught it via Wired, which started us looking into what, exactly, Disney was up to when it wasn't counting its money from the release of The Avengers (they own Marvel Studios). Now we know.
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The latest on the moon

We could argue till the cows come home that we need to explore space. Or we could post this video.



Via Open Culture.

On being first

In science, if one discovers, say, the force of gravity, the important thing is not so much the discovery as the fact that we now know the force of gravity, and our knowledge about the universe can proceed accordingly. Nevertheless, from the discoverer's point of view, nobody wants to be second. In science, being second means that someone else discovered or invented it first. Their name will go down in history. Yours will not.

Contrast this to art. With art, if you paint the Sistine chapel, well, you painted the Sistine Chapel. If you wrote War and Peace, you wrote War and Peace. There's no such thing as coming in second, because works of art are unique (or at least, have been unique up until the contemporary period, thanks to folks like Andy Warhol). Then again, all works of art flow historically from all previous works of art. Individual achievement incorporates prior achievements by others. Nowadays it's as simple as sampling a riff from a Beatle song, but for the Beatles, it was the absorption of the music that preceded them, the blues and skiffle and swing, and transforming it into Beatle music. Of course, samplers will insist that they are part of this tradition, and they may be right!

Creativity is a wondrous subject.

Ian McEwan compares scientific creativity with artistic creativity in an article for The Guardian. He begins by telling the story of Darwin and Wallace. They had both been working on the subject of evolution, but Darwin hadn't published (although he had begun his work prior to Wallace), and then he received Wallace's papers, to make them public. Darwin was put in the position of having been the first, but making himself look like the second. Fired up by a sense of purpose, he wrote The Origin of Species. And that sense of purpose was informed by one thing:

The Origin, written in 13 months, represents an extraordinary intellectual feat: mature insight, deep knowledge and observational powers, the marshalling of facts, the elucidation of near-irrefutable arguments in the service of a profound insight into natural processes. The reluctance to upset his wife Emma's religious devotion, or to contradict the theological certainties of his scientific colleagues, or to find himself in the unlikely role of iconoclast, a radical dissenter in Victorian society, all were swept aside for fear of another man taking possession of and getting credit for the ideas he believed to be his.

In a word, Darwin couldn't abide not being the first.

McEwan's article covers a lot of philosophic, scientific, artistic and humanistic ground. It's called The originality of the species. It's worth a look.

Falling cats

There is, at Grinwout's headquarters, a cat that flies around from surface to surface as if living in an endless feline Cirque de Soleil. You can't walk across the kitchen without him leaping in front of you from counter to counter, making any attempts at food preparation something less than pacific. You get used to this after a while, but you have to wonder: what is going on in that devious little mind of his: Why must he always climb up on things? And what will happen if he falls?



The answer to that last question is, probably, not much. Cats are very good at falling. We know this because, when cats fall, they don't get all damaged, or at least as damaged as you might predict. As Daniel Nasaw writes in the BBC Magazine:

With scientists unwilling to toss cats off buildings for experimental observation, science has been unable systematically to study the rate at which they live after crashing to the ground. In a 1987 study of 132 cats brought to a New York City emergency veterinary clinic after falls from high-rise buildings, 90% of treated cats survived and only 37% needed emergency treatment to keep them alive. One that fell 32 stories onto concrete suffered only a chipped tooth and a collapsed lung and was released after 48 hours.

Well that's the problem, isn't it? To test the hypotheses on plunging cats, scientists would have to keep tossing them off of extreme heights, and even the most resilient cat will eventually tire of such treatment. But still, the evidence is clear that cats do well in falls, and this article explains why. In a nutshell, it's because cats are arboreal, and like all arboreal animals, they've evolved ways of handling the inevitable unexpected trips to the ground.

This is interesting science: Who, What, Why: How do cats survive falls from great heights?

Via.

How Simple Ideas Lead to Scientific Discoveries

Ah, TED. And Adam Savage isn't so bad either.



Via.

The sewers of London

This is not about a new musical group. It is literally about the sewers of London, into which journalist Rose George traveled with a group of what are known as wastewater operatives, i.e., sewer workers.

Here's how the adventure begins:

I am presented with the things that will protect me in the hours to come: a white paper overall suit; crotch-high waders with tungsten-studded soles that will grip but won’t spark; a hard hat with a miner’s light; heavy rubber gloves, oversized; a ‘turtle’, a curved metal box that holds emergency breathing apparatus, to strap around my waist, along with a back-up battery; a harness to loop through my legs in case I need to be dragged out.

Being dragged out? That's a heartening thought.

What is found below the streets of London, running out into the Thames, is some of what you might expect, and some things you might find surprising. No alligators, alas. Not much wildlife at all, come to think of it. The good news is, you can read about it without any protective gear: Travels in London’s sewers. (Via.)

Muppets in Space, for real

Given the opportunity, who wouldn't end the week with a Muppets post?

There's been all sorts of news on the Muppets front lately, the most important of which is that there will be another Muppet movie. Last fall's film was a success, giving the franchise a much needed shot in the arm. (In the lead-up to the movie's release, it seemed as if there were Muppets everywhere; when I would go home at night, I was afraid to open the door of my house for fear I'd be attacked by woolly creatures looking for yet another venue to invade). Much has been made that Jason Segel won't be part of the next package, but although one thanks him for helping get the francise back on its feet, it's not as if he is absolutely essential to its continuation. If he were to be in it, good. Not in it? Okay, whatever. Then again, I'm not his agent, so I may not have the correct vantage point here.

Back in 2004, it was not the Muppets in the news, though. NASA had just landed on Mars, which was a pretty big deal. But as it turns out, it almost was the Muppets in the news, with their own Mars launch. They were beaten by NASA by "a mere three weeks—give or take a 20 year margin of error." But they were big about it, as this letter from Muppet Labs demonstrates.

(See you Monday!)

People aren't smart enough for democracy

The thing is, when we don't know something, we don't recognize that other people don't know it either. "To the extent that you are incompetent, you are a worse judge of incompetence in other people." Great. Assuming that the great unwashed don't know much about, say, fixing the economy, how can they pick someone to fix the economy? Link: People Aren't Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say.