Posts Tagged ‘Higinbotham’
“Everything is designed. Few things are designed well.”*…
Those of us in the U.S. are used to molded plastic seating on public transport. Not so in the U.K, where moquette, a velvet-like material, is favored by upholsterers for its durability. Artists like Paul Nash and Enid Marx were commissioned to create intricate designs that gave trains and buses a modish visual identity. And the tradition continues: new moquette can still be found on the seats that zoom beneath the city….
Moquette is the durable, woolen seating material that is used in upholstery on public transport all over the world.
Coming from the French word for carpet, moquette has been seen and sat upon by millions of commuters on buses, trains, trams and trolleybuses for over 100 years.
It is produced on looms using the Jacquard weaving technique, with a pile usually made up of 85% wool mixed with 15% nylon.
Moquette was chosen for public transport for two reasons. First, because it is hard wearing and durable. Second, because its colour and patterns disguise signs of dirt, wear and tear. On top of this moquette had the advantage of being easy and cheap to mass-produce.
Moquette was first applied to public transport seating in London in the 1920s when the patterns were designed by the manufacturers…
“A history of moquette“
Riding in style on the upholstery that gives London Transport its unique look and feel: “A history of Moquette,” from @ltmuseum and @TheBrowser.
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As we settle in, we might spare a thought for William “Willy” A. Higinbotham; he died on this date in 1994. A physicist who was a member of the team that developed the first atomic bomb, he later became a leader in the nuclear non-proliferation movement.
But Higinbotham may be better remembered as the creator of Tennis for Two— the first interactive analog computer game, one of the first electronic games to use a graphical display, and the first to be created as entertainment (as opposed to as a demonstration of a computer’s capabilities). He built it for the 1958 visitor day at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
It used a small analogue computer with ten direct-connected operational amplifiers and output a side view of the curved flight of the tennis ball on an oscilloscope only five inches in diameter. Each player had a control knob and a button.
“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind”*…
Imagine that a person’s brain could be scanned in great detail and recreated in a computer simulation. The person’s mind and memories, emotions and personality would be duplicated. In effect, a new and equally valid version of that person would now exist, in a potentially immortal, digital form. This futuristic possibility is called mind uploading. The science of the brain and of consciousness increasingly suggests that mind uploading is possible – there are no laws of physics to prevent it. The technology is likely to be far in our future; it may be centuries before the details are fully worked out – and yet given how much interest and effort is already directed towards that goal, mind uploading seems inevitable. Of course we can’t be certain how it might affect our culture but as the technology of simulation and artificial neural networks shapes up, we can guess what that mind uploading future might be like.
Suppose one day you go into an uploading clinic to have your brain scanned. Let’s be generous and pretend the technology works perfectly. It’s been tested and debugged. It captures all your synapses in sufficient detail to recreate your unique mind. It gives that mind a standard-issue, virtual body that’s reasonably comfortable, with your face and voice attached, in a virtual environment like a high-quality video game. Let’s pretend all of this has come true.
Who is that second you?
Princeton neuroscientist, psychologist, and philosopher Michael Graziano explores: “What happens if your mind lives forever on the internet?”
* Self-Reliance
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As we ponder presence, we might spare a thought for William “Willy” A. Higinbotham; he died on this date in 1994. A physicist who was a member of the team that developed the first atomic bomb, he later became a leader in the nuclear non-proliferation movement.
But Higinbotham may be better remembered as the creator of Tennis for Two— the first interactive analog computer game, one of the first electronic games to use a graphical display, and the first to be created as entertainment (as opposed to as a demonstration of a computer’s capabilities). He built it for the 1958 visitor day at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
It used a small analogue computer with ten direct-connected operational amplifiers and output a side view of the curved flight of the tennis ball on an oscilloscope only five inches in diameter. Each player had a control knob and a button.
The 1958 Tennis for Two exhibit
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known”*…
Astrobiology – the study of life on other planets – has grown from a fringe sub-discipline of biology, chemistry and astronomy to a leading interdisciplinary field, attracting researchers from top institutions across the globe, and large sums of money from both NASA and private funders. But what exactly is it that astrobiologists are looking for? How will we know when it’s time to pop the Champagne?…
Find out at “Proof of life: how would we recognize an alien if we saw one?”
[Image above from NASA’s Astrobiology Institute]
* Carl Sagan
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As we look for life, we might send inventive birthday greetings to William “Willy” A. Higinbotham; he was born on this date in 1910. A physicist who was a member of the team that developed the first atomic bomb, he later became a leader in the nuclear non-proliferation movement.
But Higinbotham may be better remembered as the creator of Tennis for Two, the first interactive analog computer game and one of the first electronic games to use a graphical display, which he built for the 1958 visitor day at Brookhaven National Laboratory. It used a small analogue computer with ten direct-connected operational amplifiers and output a side view of the curved flight of the tennis ball on an oscilloscope only five inches in diameter. Each player had a control knob and a button.
The 1958 Tennis for Two exhibit
“Nature is objective, and nature is knowable, but we can only view her through a glass darkly–and many clouds upon our vision are of our own making”*…
Sometimes it seems surprising that science functions at all. In 2005, medical science was shaken by a paper with the provocative title “Why most published research findings are false.” Written by John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University [see here and here], it didn’t actually show that any particular result was wrong. Instead, it showed that the statistics of reported positive findings was not consistent with how often one should expect to find them. As Ioannidis concluded more recently, “many published research findings are false or exaggerated, and an estimated 85 percent of research resources are wasted.”
It’s likely that some researchers are consciously cherry-picking data to get their work published. And some of the problems surely lie with journal publication policies. But the problems of false findings often begin with researchers unwittingly fooling themselves: they fall prey to cognitive biases, common modes of thinking that lure us toward wrong but convenient or attractive conclusions. “Seeing the reproducibility rates in psychology and other empirical science, we can safely say that something is not working out the way it should,” says Susann Fiedler, a behavioral economist at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, Germany. “Cognitive biases might be one reason for that.”
Psychologist Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia says that the most common and problematic bias in science is “motivated reasoning”: We interpret observations to fit a particular idea…
How the co-founder of the Open Science Framework and the Center for Open Science is tackling human biases in science: “The Trouble With Scientists.”
* “Nature is objective, and nature is knowable, but we can only view her through a glass darkly–and many clouds upon our vision are of our own making: social and cultural biases, psychological preferences, and mental limitations (in universal modes of thought, not just individualized stupidity)” – Stephen Jay Gould
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As we share and share alike, we might spare a thought for William “Willy” A. Higinbotham; he died on this date in 1994. A physicist who was a member of the team that developed the first atomic bomb, he later became a leader in the nuclear non-proliferation movement.
But Higinbotham may be better remembered as the creator of Tennis for Two, the first interactive analog computer game and one of the first electronic games to use a graphical display, which he built for the 1958 visitor day at Brookhaven National Laboratory. It used a small analogue computer with ten direct-connected operational amplifiers and output a side view of the curved flight of the tennis ball on an oscilloscope only five inches in diameter. Each player had a control knob and a button.
The 1958 Tennis for Two exhibit
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