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Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Friday, September 9, 2011
A Brief Visual History of Robots in a Matrix of Creepiness & Intelligence
Sent to you by Sammy via Google Reader:
via Brain Pickings by Michelle Legro on 8/09/11
What Louis XV has to do with H.G. Wells and the hazards of mechanical animation.
Talos, the automaton forged for King Minos to protect his kingdom from pirates and invaders, may have been the first robot in recorded literature — made of metal, its veins flowed with ichor, the divine blood of the gods. The Golem of Prague was brought to life to protect the city's Jews, but it was rendered lifeless when it threatened innocent lives. These proto-robots provided an assurance that one day in the future, statues would move—whether they would protect us or rise against us, it was hard to tell.
"The Future" issue of Lapham's Quarterly collects more than eight-thousand centuries of forward-looking thought, thanks to the inclusion of both Aeschylus' Cassandra and H.G Wells' time traveler. Also from the issue, this matrix of historical robots organized by their relative intelligence and creepiness.
You'll also find two automatons from eighteenth century Europe: the Digesting Duck, which ate and then defecated its meal, and the Chess-Playing Turk, which once played a game with Napoleon. These mechanical parlor tricks captivated court life and inspired writers with uncanny nightmares of moving statues. (Think of the mechanical beauty Olympia from E.T.A. Hoffmann's early-nineteenth-century horror story "The Sandman.")
One robot unfortunately not included on the matrix was Louis XV's special likeness of his mistress Madame du Barry by wax sculptor Philippe Curtius, better known as the teacher of young Marie Grosholtz, later Madame Tussaud. The wax figure is the oldest in the collection of Tussaud's London museum, surviving both the French Revolution and a devastating 1925 fire. Laid out on a divan, du Barry appears in the throes of a ravishing dream, her eyes are closed but her chest heaves up and down thanks to a mechanical engine devised by Curtius.
This simple device imparted a serene animation to the lifelike wax, an impression not lost on Louis's courtiers, who called the sculpture "The Sleeping Beauty." While her wax-figure has slept quietly for over three hundred years, du Barry herself came to a less quiet end. After her banishment from the court of her lover's grandson Louis XVI, she was captured by the Jacobins and dragged kicking and screaming to the guillotine.
For a complete history of robots, automatons, and moving statues there is no better book than Gaby Wood's Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life.
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September 08, 2011
September 08, 2011: 
Today's comic features SMBC reader/googler Tanya!
It's also loosely based on a conversation I had at the last Beerscussion. Dude I was talking to - I remember everything we talked about, but for some reason at 1:30AM I can't remember your name! If you see this, please send it to me and I'll credit you :)
Today's comic features SMBC reader/googler Tanya!
It's also loosely based on a conversation I had at the last Beerscussion. Dude I was talking to - I remember everything we talked about, but for some reason at 1:30AM I can't remember your name! If you see this, please send it to me and I'll credit you :)
Lesson #1164 - Definitions, Part XVII
Lesson #1164 - Definitions, Part XVII: 
If you've never noticed this threshold before, then you're clearly in the defeated-by-gravity camp. The rest of us will continue to laugh in the face of physics. Or at least our follicles will. - - STW items assembled for SPX this upcoming weekend: pint glasses, mini-books, and 'empty blackboard' prints. And tonight, the one item will arrive that some of you have been asking me about for two years . . . the STW labcoats. Oh man.
If you've never noticed this threshold before, then you're clearly in the defeated-by-gravity camp. The rest of us will continue to laugh in the face of physics. Or at least our follicles will. - - STW items assembled for SPX this upcoming weekend: pint glasses, mini-books, and 'empty blackboard' prints. And tonight, the one item will arrive that some of you have been asking me about for two years . . . the STW labcoats. Oh man.
Weird Quantum Effect Can Make Materials Transparent
Weird Quantum Effect Can Make Materials Transparent:
Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), as it is called, is a bizarre phenomenon all by itself. But there is nothing like taking the bizarre and making it even more so. A group of researchers has shown that, under the right conditions, this second light field doesn’t have to hit the substance to make EIT work—it only has to have the potential to be there. My response: OMFG, that is too cool to be true.
By Chris Lee, Ars Technica
When you shine light on a substance, part of the light is reflected, part is transmitted and part is absorbed. If you choose the color of light and the substance sensibly, you can arrange things so that all the light is absorbed. Nothing special about that, right? OK, but what if you could shine a second light on the substance and make it transparent for the first light field? That would be a bit strange, wouldn’t it?
Warning: here there be quantum mechanics
EIT occurs due to an interaction between two light fields that is mediated via an atom. Atoms absorb light in discrete chunks. Normally, an atom would be sitting in a single ground state, but some atoms have two states that are at about the same energy and are about as stable. In this case, we can think of the atom as having two ground states. Through careful preparation, we can generate a group of these atoms so that they are all in just one of the two ground states. If I turn on a light field (called the probe light) with the right color, it will be absorbed by the atoms, putting them into an excited state.
A light field, called the control light field, that is tuned to match the energy required to move the atom from the other ground state to an excited state, however, will not be absorbed; there are no atoms in that ground state to act as an absorber. But the presence of the control light still sets the electrons around the atom in motion. Provided this motion remains coherent, it changes the energy levels of the atoms slightly. More specifically, the excited state splits into two excited states: one at a slightly higher energy, and one at a slightly lower frequency.
If we turn on the probe light while the control light is on, neither will be absorbed. That’s because the control light has shifted the excited state of the atoms, so that the probe light no longer matches that expectation. Indeed, one can turn off the control light while the probe light is on and trap some of the probe light in the atoms. Turn the probe light off and the control light back on, and the atoms emit a pulse of probe light as if nothing had happened.
An important point is that, when the control field is applied, the energy level of the excited state always splits into two, with one moving up in energy and one moving down in energy. But the distance that they move depends on how bright the control field is. So, if the control field is off, there is no splitting and EIT won’t work, right?
EIT without any control
Not so, according to results published in Science. What we have overlooked is that, when atoms absorb and emit light, they do so from what are called modes. And, because photons are bosons, they like to get together. What this means is that if a mode has a photon in it already, an atom is more likely to emit into the mode of that photon in preference to all the others. Normally, we don’t observe this because atoms are surrounded by empty space—there are a near infinite number of modes and none of them have photons in them.
But we can change that. By putting the atoms between two mirrors, we create an optical cavity. This cavity severely restricts the number of modes available to the atom. Combine that with the fact that the atom is most likely to emit a photon with a particular energy, and it will find that it has just one mode available to it.
How do modes relate to EIT? To explain, let’s jump back to the experiment. The researchers put their cloud of atoms between two very highly reflective mirrors and prodded them until they were all in the first ground state. The probe light field is shone through the sample from the side—this light field doesn’t go anywhere near the mirrors, but it does pass through the atoms. That light is absorbed, and all seems to be lost.
But, once excited, the atoms have a choice: decay back to the first ground state, or decay to the second ground state and emit a photon into the optical cavity. Most respond to the existing light field and decay back to their original ground state.
But a few don’t. These atoms emit photons at the frequency of the control light field. And, thanks to the cavity, these few photons pass back and forth through those atoms a large number of times, making the atoms respond as if it were in a much stronger light field.* As with the normal EIT, once this field is established, the excited state energy level splits, and the cloud of atoms becomes transparent to the probe light. Even though we’ve never exposed the sample to the control light, it ends up behaving as if it were present.
That is pretty cool. But I suspect the pragmatists among you will be asking, “Where’s the application?” To be honest, I doubt if this will ever be directly applied. EIT has the potential to be very useful in terms of light being used to switch light—think optical computers. But no one really wants a cloud of atoms and optical cavities and all that sort of stuff hanging around in their computers: if you think dust is a problem now, imagine getting dust in this system.
The glimmer of utility on the horizon are things called quantum dots. These are little packages of material that behave like artificial atoms. With the right physical structure, EIT should be possible with quantum dots. These could then be combined with integrated optical devices to create optical switches, without needing the vacuum and vast array of instruments. Unfortunately, even with this development, switching times will likely be slower than electronic devices, and individual gates will be much larger than current electronic gates. So, in the end, this is for the pure joy of discovery.
* This is technically incorrect. The light field in the cavity is actually that strong, but if the photons were not bouncing back and forth in a cavity, the light field would be very weak, and that is the comparison I want to make.
Image: Aurich Lawson/Ars Technica
Source: Ars Technica
Citation: “Vacuum-Induced Transparency.” By Haruka Tanji-Suzuki, Wenlan Chen, Renate Landig, Jonathan Simon and Vladan Vuletić. Science, Vol. 333, No. 6047, Pg. 1266-1269, Sept. 2, 2011. DOI: 10.1126/science.1208066
See Also:
Pop Culture Matches
Pop Culture Matches: Dracula
Who knew you could have so much fun with matches? After finding our post on pop culture cash, New Jersey-born and raised artist Mike Bell reached out to us to tell us about a similar project he'd thought we'd enjoy.
Bell memorializes some of our most well-known celebrities or fictional characters, like Elton John and Batman, by drawing their faces inside matchbooks and then arranging the stiff paper sticks inside as if they were the person's hands and fingers.
Take a look inside Bell’s website and you'll find art and illustrations that all have that twinge of nostalgia and humor to them. He cites classic monsters, vintage toys, punk rock, and MAD magazine among other things as cultural forces that have shaped his art.
Elton John
Humphrey Bogart
Jack Nicholson (in the Shining)
Frankenstein
Batman
Jack Sparrow
Freddie Mercury
Jimi Hendrix
KISS
Gene Simmons
Marilyn Monroe
Mike Bell's website
Who knew you could have so much fun with matches? After finding our post on pop culture cash, New Jersey-born and raised artist Mike Bell reached out to us to tell us about a similar project he'd thought we'd enjoy.
Bell memorializes some of our most well-known celebrities or fictional characters, like Elton John and Batman, by drawing their faces inside matchbooks and then arranging the stiff paper sticks inside as if they were the person's hands and fingers.
Take a look inside Bell’s website and you'll find art and illustrations that all have that twinge of nostalgia and humor to them. He cites classic monsters, vintage toys, punk rock, and MAD magazine among other things as cultural forces that have shaped his art.
Elton John
Humphrey Bogart
Jack Nicholson (in the Shining)
Frankenstein
Batman
Jack Sparrow
Freddie Mercury
Jimi Hendrix
KISS
Gene Simmons
Marilyn Monroe
Mike Bell's website
Soft, Strange and Spooky Dreams
via Alice's Posts - My Modern Metropolis by alice on 7/09/11
"You built up a world of magic because your real life is tragic."It would be easy to guess that photographer Gloria Marigo draws inspiration from Tim Walker. Her dream-like photos have that touch of whimsy that feels somewhat familiar. The 22-year-old photographer reached out to us to tell us about your works, and we are more than happy that she did. Using an interesting set of props including animal masks, balloons and plastic toys, she whisks us away to another world filled with mystery and magic.
Gloria Marigo on Flickr
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