Posts Tagged ‘integrated curcuit’
“Life is more fun if you play games”*…
David Freidman ponders scientific satire…
I first encountered the scientific paper simply titled “Strapless Evening Gowns” four years ago, when I was flipping through a collection of magazines that once belonged to the cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener.
Among his magazines was the May 1960 issue of Voo Doo magazine, which was MIT’s “only intentionally humorous campus publication” going all the way back to 1919.
I got a chuckle out of this article, which attempted to semi-seriously analyze what exactly keeps a strapless dress from falling down:
Scientists have a long history of amusing themselves with humor. In addition to Voo Doo, other science humor magazines include the Annals of Improbable Research, the Journal of Irreproducible Results, and the Worm Runner’s Digest which included both satirical and serious scientific papers, much to the confusion of their readers – a problem eventually solved by printing the satirical articles upside down.
And then there are the quasi-serious scientific studies meant to be amusing, such as this study on the effectiveness of tin foil hats in protecting you from government surveillance (spoiler: tin foil hats can actually amplify certain radio frequencies, so the authors speculate that the government has been behind promotion of tin foil hats all along).
And back in 1974, the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis published a paper by clinical psychologist Dennis Upper called “The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment Of A Case Of Writer’s Block” [pictured at the top]. And lest you question the veracity of the author’s finding, I should note that the author’s failure to treat his writer’s block has been successfully replicated…
Read on for more on the engineering of the formal dress, both the social (largely sexist) context and the (interestingly meaninful) scientific content– and the art it has inspired: “Science And The Strapless Evening Gown” from @ironicsans.com.
More seriously: “a Nature analysis signals the beginnings of a US science brain drain“: “Researchers in the United States are seeking career opportunities abroad as President Donald Trump’s administration slashes science funding and workforce numbers, finds an analysis of Nature’s jobs-board data…”
* Roald Dahl
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As we play, we might recall that it was on this date in 1961 that Robert Noyce was issued patent number 2981877 for his “semiconductor device-and-lead structure,” the first patent for what would come to be known as the integrated circuit. In fact another engineer, Jack Kilby, had separately and essentially simultaneously developed the same technology. Ineligible (as a new Texas Instruments empoyee) for a vacation over the summer of 1959, he gave himself the “assignment” of creating “a body of semiconductor material … wherein all the components of the electronic circuit are completely integrated.”
Kilby’s design was rooted in germanium; Noyce’s in silicon and had filed a few months earlier than Noyce. But Kilby’s invention was not a true monolithic integrated circuit chip since it had external gold-wire connections, which would have made it difficult to mass-produce– an obstacle Noyce overcame. Still, Kilby’s contribution was recognized in 2000 when he was Awarded the Nobel Prize– in which Noyce, who had died in 1990, did not share.
“Do you think that the soul first shows itself by a gnashing of teeth?”*…
In January 2020, as a new plague began to upend life on Earth, a small research team from Tufts, the University of Vermont, and Harvard announced that they, too, had turned life on Earth upside-down. Their discovery wasn’t quite so dramatic at first glance. Any regular person peering through a microscope at their creation would see little more than a few globs of dirty pond water in a petri dish. But those globs were alive; in fact, they were alive in a way that nothing has ever been alive before, in an uncharted space between biology and technology. They called them Xenobots, the world’s first living robot—the world’s first programmable organism.
Xenobot: Xeno as in Xenopus laevis, a voracious frog native to the wetlands of Sub-Saharan Africa; bot, of course, as in robot. It’s an unconventional name for an unconventional organism, so novel that even its makers struggle to conceptualize it. “The terminology that has served us well for many years is just not any good anymore,” concedes Michael Levin, the team’s iconoclastic biologist. His collaborator Josh Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert, has called Xenobots “novel living machines.” Sam Kriegman—the team’s postdoc—prefers the term “Computer Designed Organism,” although he’s been trying on “living deepfake” for size recently.
And they’re all right, in a way. Xenobots are deepfakes in the sense that they aren’t what they seem. They’re robots in the sense that they’re autonomous, programmable agents. They’re Computer Designed in the sense that their morphology—the form their tiny bodies take—was designed by an evolutionary computer algorithm in Bongard’s UVM lab. They’re living in the sense that they’re made of embryonic frog cells, and they’re machines in the sense that humans are machines: biological mechanisms made up of constituent parts.
…
Xenobots are the first living creatures whose immediate evolution occurred inside a computer and not in the biosphere. The result is a simple organism. Xenobots have no brains; the shape of their bodies is what determines how they behave. And yet, Levin and Bongard do not fully understand why Xenobots behave the way they do. “What you’re seeing de novois a completely novel creature with new proto-cognitive capacities, preferences, capabilities, IQ,” Levin explains. “All of those things appear out of nowhere.” Sometimes a Xenobot will head in one direction and then abruptly double back, as though changing its mind. What force guides such behaviors? Can a frog’s cells, in some way, think? Xenobots seem to have “nano free-will,” Levin jokes.
And this is where the can of worms—or tadpoles, maybe—pops open…
The word “robot” recently celebrated its centennial. It comes from the Czech playwright Karel Čapek’s 1920 play “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” about a worker uprising in a robot factory. Čapek’s robots are biological, the result of a vaguely alchemical process involving “albumen” with a “raging thirst for life.” Our conception of a robot as being something metallic, with clanging gears and servo-motors, is more recent baggage, a consequence of the science-fiction stories and films of the mid-twentieth century. In order to understand what Xenobots might mean for our future, we’ll have to divest ourselves from the idea that a robot—or any kind of autonomous being—can be wholly defined by its materiality…
As Norbert Weiner, the father of cybernetics, observed: “Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.”
Claire Evans (@TheUniverse) explains how “Xenobots may change how we think about intelligence.”
For apposite background, see also “The Link Between Bioelectricity and Consciousness.”
* Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti, or in English, Rossum’s Universal Robots)
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As we ponder life itself, we might recall (with, perhaps, a touch of nostalgia) that it was on this date in 1959 that Texas Instruments (TI) demonstrated the first working integrated circuit (IC), which had been invented by Jack Kilby. Kilby created the device to prove that resistors and capacitors could exist on the same piece of semiconductor material. His circuit consisted of a sliver of germanium with five components linked by wires. It was Fairchild’s Robert Noyce, however, who filed for a patent within months of Kilby and who made the IC a commercially-viable technology. Both men are credited as co-inventors of the IC. (Kilby won the Nobel Prize for his work in 2000; Noyce, who died in 1990, did not share.)
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