Archive for February 2012
What a way to go…
Euthanasia Coaster
“Euthanasia Coaster” is a hypothetic euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely – with elegance and euphoria – take the life of a human being. Riding the coaster’s track, the rider is subjected to a series of intensive motion elements that induce various unique experiences: from euphoria to thrill, and from tunnel vision to loss of consciousness, and, eventually, death. Thanks to the marriage of the advanced cross-disciplinary research in space medicine, mechanical engineering, material technologies and, of course, gravity, the fatal journey is made pleasing, elegant and meaningful…
Julijonas Urbonas is a designer, artist, writer, engineer and PhD student in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art.
Since childhood, I have worked in amusement park development. In 2004, I became a managing director of an amusement park in Klaipeda, Lithuania, and ran it for three years. Having worked in this field – as an architect and engineer but also in ways that are artistic and philosophical – I became fascinated by what in my research I am calling the bodily-perceived aesthetics of “gravitational theatre”…
More on the Euthanasia Coaster here. Background on gravitational theatre and Gravitational Aesthetics here (and even more here).
As we buckle our seat belts, we might spare a memorial thought for Fifth-Century resister of the Roman Empire (and Caesaropapism) and reformer of the Catholic liturgy, Pope Hilarius; he died on this date in 468… presumably laughing.
Thought Experiment: what if the Beatles had played punk?…
From the ever-illuminating Dangerous Minds:
If The Beatles had been Glaswegian and played Punk they may have sounded a bit like The New Piccadillys, a fab four of respected musicians: George Miller (Lead guitar), Keith Warwick (Rhythm guitar), Mark Ferrie (Bass guitar), and Michael Goodwin (Drums), who have variously worked with Sharleen Spiteri, The Kaisers, The Thanes, Ray Gunn and The Rockets and The Scottish Sex Pistols. This is their toe-taping version of The Ramones’ “Judy is a Punk.” European tours, world domination and Piccadillymania beckon…
“The Nobs,” February 28, 1970, KB Hallen, Copenhagen, Denmark (source)From the Department of Stating the Obvious…
From AAAS’ Science, “It’s Official: Physics is Hard“:
Students and researchers alike have long understood that physics is challenging. But only now have scientists managed to prove it. It turns out that one of the most common goals in physics—finding an equation that describes how a system changes over time—is defined as “hard” by computer theory. That’s bad news for physics students who hope that a machine can solve all their homework problems, but at least their future jobs in the field are safe from automation.
Physicists are often interested in mathematically describing how a system behaves: for instance, a formula tracks the motions of the planets and their moons in their complicated dance around the sun. Researchers work out these equations by measuring the objects at various points in time and then developing a formula that links all of those points together, such as filling in a video from a set of snapshots.
With each new variable, however, it becomes tougher to find the right equation. Computers can speed things up by sifting through potential solutions at breakneck speed, but even the world’s top supercomputers meet their match with a certain class of problems, known as “hard” problems. These problems take exponentially more time to solve with every additional variable that is thrown into the mix—an extra planet’s motion, for instance…
[Full article here]
Problems like these, known in complexity theory as NP-hard, may be discouraging of the prospect of quick solutions; but at least they seem to offer physicists some measure of job security. Still, if a bankable short-cut could be found, it would have profound implications for math and it applications. So the Clay Mathematics Institute has chosen the challenge as one of its Millennium Problems: the scientist who comes up with a universal “problem tenderizer” wins $1 million.
As we remember that pie are square, we might spare a memorial thought for the polymathic John Arbuthnot; he died on this date in 1735. The mathematician, essayist, and physician published his translation of Huygens’ Of the Laws of Chance (1692), to which Arbuthnot added further games of chance– the first work on probability published in English. He wrote a series of satirical pamphlets introducing “john Bull” (the now-iconic “Englishman”), and co-founded Scriblerus Club, where he inspired co-founders Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels book III) and Alexander Pope (Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus, and The Dunciad). And from 1705, he was physician to Queen Anne until her death in 1714.
Examining the text closely. Very closely…
From “Ryan,” B to the F, a Tumbler in which he examines– very closely examines– the novelization of the first of the three Back to the Future films, which was published in advance of the release of the movie…
PAGE ONE
If you were writing the first words of a novel version of Back to the Future, how would you do it? Maybe you’d introduce the concept of time being important, like the film did with all them crazy clocks. Maybe instead you’d introduce Marty and Doc, show who they are and what their relationship is. Well, anyway, you’re totally wrong!
The correct answer is to KILL EVERYBODY…
Read along– it gets even better– at B to the F… [TotH to the always-illuminating Pop Loser]
As we explore the frontiers of editorial license, we might recall that it was on this date in 1956, at a party in Cambridge, England, that Fulbright Scholar Sylvia Plath met poet Ted Hughes.
…the one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge… I screamed in myself, thinking, Oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you.
Her wish was granted; they were married later that same year. Plath killed herself, in London, in 1963, several weeks after The Bell Jar came out; in 1981 her Collected Poems (edited by Hughes, who oversaw her posthumous publications) won the Pulitzer Prize.
Feeling blue?…
Your correspondent recently received an email from a genealogically-inclined first cousin concerning a possible common ancestor, one Martin Fugate, who, it appears, may be our great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. Grandpa Martin was an orphan, an immigrant from France to Kentucky in the late 18th Century– unremarkable for the time in any way, but one: he seems to have introduced into his bloodline a rare condition called “methemoglobinemia“… that’s to say, for generations to come many offspring were (and are) born with blue skin coloring…
Benjamin “Benjy” Stacy so frightened maternity doctors with the color of his skin — “as Blue as Lake Louise” — that he was rushed just hours after his birth in 1975 to University of Kentucky Medical Center.
As a transfusion was being readied, the baby’s grandmother suggested to doctors that he looked like the “blue Fugates of Troublesome Creek.” Relatives described the boy’s great-grandmother Luna Fugate as “blue all over,” and “the bluest woman I ever saw.”
In an unusual story that involves both genetics and geography, an entire family from isolated Appalachia was tinged blue. Their ancestral line began six generations earlier with a French orphan, Martin Fugate, who settled in Eastern Kentucky.
Doctors don’t see much of the rare blood disorder today, because mountain people have dispersed and the family gene pool is much more diverse. But the Fugates’ story still offers a window into a medical mystery that was solved through modern genetics and the sleuth-like energy of Dr. Madison Cawein III, a hematologist at the University of Kentucky’s Lexington Medical Clinic…
Read the rest of this ABC News story here. And find a more complete version of the history in the Science 82 report here.
As we remind ourselves that in-breeding isn’t restricted to the South, we might recall that it was on this date in 1828 that John Adams II, son of then-President John Quincey Adams, married his first cousin, Mary Catherine Hellen, in a White House ceremony. John II’s grandfather, President John Adams, had married his third cousin, Abigail Smith. Intermarriage skipped a generation with John Quincy Adams, who married a non-relative.
Then, in 1853, John II’s and Mary’s daughter, Mary Louisa Adams, also married a family member–her second cousin, William Clarkson Johnson, the son of her first cousin, Abigail Louisa Smith Adams– President John Adams’ great-grandson… notable for two reasons: both bride and groom were descended from President John Adams, and at the same time, it was the first marriage between descendants of two different presidents.
John Adams II (source)
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