Posts Tagged ‘toys’
“This was not that the subject was simple enough to be explained without mathematics, but rather that it was much too involved to be fully accessible to mathematics.”*…
The idea of ‘biological agency’ — that life devises its own goals and behaves accordingly — complicates our understanding of what it means to be alive. But, Philip Ball asks, does it serve a scientific purpose?…
In 1993, a team led by the planetary scientist Carl Sagan tentatively concluded that there is life on Earth. Not much of a deduction, you might think — except that the researchers confined their evidence to observations made by the Galileo spacecraft, which had flown past our planet three years earlier on a looping journey to Jupiter. So great is the transformative power of life that its presence can be detected just from the light and radio waves our planet emits or reflects into space. Today we scan the cosmos for some of these telltale signatures light-years away.
Life leaves a mark, yet even now there’s no scientific consensus about what makes living things so different from inorganic substances like the rocks, gases, and oceans that are the sole components of dead worlds. Many scientists cite properties such as replication or metabolism. Others speak in more abstract terms about the way life is out of thermodynamic equilibrium with its surroundings. But some give another kind of answer. Living organisms are different because they do stuff for reasons.
It’s not enough to say that life is a nonequilibrium organized state through which there’s a constant flux of matter and energy. That description applies to hurricanes, too. But hurricanes just are. Only living entities have goals: to find food, to reproduce, to survive, sometimes simply to experience good things. (Dog owners will recognize that this is not just a human attribute.)
One way to express this idea is to say that living organisms have “agency.” It’s a hotly contested term. Some biologists reject it outright, at least for any organisms except humans, because we decide on our actions with conscious deliberation. (Whether we’re truly the only species to do so is another issue.) Others think that agency is a fundamental attribute of all life. Since there’s no agreed-upon definition of the term, to some extent it can mean whatever you want it to mean. But the debate about biological agency touches on fundamental issues in our understanding of what it means to be alive, because agency evokes a notion that biologists and philosophers have always wrestled with: teleology, the apparent purposiveness of life. If we admit agency into biology, do we open the floodgates to ideas about design, vitalism, or cosmic meaning? Or is it just a recognition of what makes life such a special state of matter?
To me, the notion of agency indeed speaks to our intuitive sense of what makes living things so special: not mere machines pushed around by environment and circumstance. I suspect that aversion to agency betrays a queasiness about confronting life as something more than some kind of genetic program. But there’s danger in the idea, too: It could so easily derail the work of studying the mechanistic explanations of how life works. I’m not looking to either bury or praise agency, but to explore whether it can be a scientifically productive idea…
[Ball unpacks the idea of agency, then reviews both scientific observations and the theories that they have provoked. He concludes…]
… I’m cautiously optimistic about the prospects of uniting such theoretical ideas with biological mechanisms. It seems unlikely to be coincidental, for example, that organisms that seem to show more agency also have molecular pathways that permit more openness to the influence of context and external information.
If we can get a clearer idea of what makes an agent, this could help us to understand how collective goals arise — as they did when multicellular organisms first arose long ago — and how they can break down, as in cancer. What’s more, a proper theory of agency might give us a clearer idea of what’s needed to make genuine artificial agents, not just computers and machines programmed with our own goals, but ones that can formulate their own. We might then also get a clearer idea of the potential benefits and dangers such truly agential machines might bring. But perhaps the most compelling argument for recognizing agency is that it might help us understand what makes life so different — not just humans, but life — that it is able to shape an entire planet in a manner visible from outer space.
Purpose? Goals? On the idea of “biological agency”: “Is Life Just Different?” from @philipcball.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
* Erwin Schrödinger in What Is Life? (in which he wrestled, in his way, with Ball’s question, contending that life feeds on negative entropy) Full text here.
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As we wonder why, we might send frustrated birthday greetings to Ernő Rubik; he was born on this date in 1944. An architect and inventor, he created the Rubik’s Cube (in 1974), which has become the world’s best-selling puzzle game, with over half a billion sold.
A Rubik’s Cube consists of 26 small cubes that rotate on a central axis; nine colored cube faces, in three rows of three each, form each side of the cube. After the cube arrangement is randomized (the highest level of entropy), the player must restore order (that’s to say, practice “negative entropy”), returning it to the original condition of faces with matching colors on each side — which is one among 43 quintillion possible configurations.
“Seeing comes before words”*…
Five years ago, (R)D featured John Berger’s award-winning– and more to the point, hugely-influential– television series Ways of Seeing (in some ways a response to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation series). The broadcast was followed by an adaptation of Berger’s scripts that became a book of the same name.
Now that hugely influential work is available in a gorgeous web version…
Based on the 1972 BBC series and comprised of 7 essays, 3 of which are entirely pictoral, Ways of Seeing is a seminal work which examines how we view art…
A beautiful new way to enjoy (and learn from) a classic: “Ways of Seeing“
* John Berger (the first line of Ways of Seeing)
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As we ponder perspective, we might pause to celebrate the induction, on this date in 2005, into the the National Toy Hall of Fame of a plaything that invites constant creativity– the cardboard box.
“We won’t really understand the brain until we can make models of it which are analog rather than digital, which nobody seems to be trying very much”*…
… As Max Levy and Michael Moyer argue, perhaps that should change, if only because our climate future might depend on it…
Computing today is almost entirely digital. The vast informational catacombs of the internet, the algorithms that power AI, the screen you’re reading this on — all are powered by electronic circuits manipulating binary digits — 0 and 1, off and on. We live, it has been said, in the digital age.
But it’s not obvious why a system that operates using discrete chunks of information would be good at modeling our continuous, analog world. And indeed, for millennia humans have used analog computing devices to understand and predict the ebbs and flows of nature…
[Levy and Moyer survey the history from analog computing, starting with the ancient Greek Antikythera mechanism…]
… Analog computing reached its apotheosis in the differential analyzer, first built by Vannevar Bush at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1931. The analyzer used a complicated series of gears and shafts driven by electric motors. It could calculate a huge variety of differential equations — the kind of equation used to model physical phenomena. But to modify an equation, the machine had to be laboriously reconfigured by hand.
When modern digital computing began in the late 1930s, it was clunky, expensive and inferior. But digital computation had benefits. Digital computers were easier to program and often more accurate than analog machines. And with the rise of the transistor and the subsequent advances fueled by Moore’s law, digital processing soon took over.
But as our digital world has exploded, its costs have as well. Every switch of a digital bit takes a smidgen of energy. And new artificial intelligence systems require huge amounts of computing power. To take just one example, news reports have revealed that Microsoft and OpenAI are planning a $100 billion data center that would suck about 5 gigawatts of power. That’s roughly the output of five nuclear reactors.
Analog computing offers an alternative. The neural networks that power AI systems make predictions by repeatedly blasting through a sequence of multiplication and addition operations.
In an analog computer that uses electrical signals — not gears and pulleys — a current could pass through a circuit that uses carefully chosen resistors to model those operations, at a significant power savings.
The advantages of digital computing are real, but so are the drawbacks. Perhaps, by reaching back to computing’s past, researchers will be able to steer a sustainable path toward our computational future…
You don’t need 0s and 1s to perform computations, and in some cases it’s better for the climate to avoid them: “What Is Analog Computing?” from @laxmevy and @mmoyr in @QuantaMagazine.
* Freeman Dyson
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As we celebrate the continuous, we might send elastic birthday greetings to Peter Hodgson; he was born on this date in 1912. An advertising and marketing consultant, Hodgson introduced Silly Putty to the world. As The New York Times recounted in his obituary,
The stuff had been developed by General Electric scientists in the company’s New Haven laboratories several years earlier in a search for a viable synthetic rubber. It was obviously not satisfactory, and it found its way instead onto the local cocktail party circuit.
That’s where Mr. Hodgson, who was at the time writing a catalogue of toys for a local store, saw it, and an idea was born.
“Everybody kept saying there was no earthly use for the stuff” he later recalled. “But I watched them as they fooled with it. I couldn’t help noticing how people with busy schedules wasted as much as 15 minutes at a shot just fondling and stretching it”.
“I decided to take a chance and sell some. We put an ad in the catalogue on the adult page, along with such goodies as a spaghetti-making machine. We packaged the goop in a clear compact case and tagged it at $1.00”.
Having borrowed $147 for the venture, Mr. Hodgson ordered a batch from General Electric, hired a Yale student to separate the gob into one ounce dabs and began filling orders. At the same time he hurried to get some trademarks.
Silly Putty was an instant success, and Mr. Hodgson quickly geared up to take advantage of it…
“If you could build a house on a trampoline, that would suit me fine”*…
James Coleman on the next best thing: that staple of kids’ birthday parties, the bouncy castle (and its cousins)…
My son turned 8 years old earlier this month. We decided to host a birthday party in our yard with a bunch of his friends from school. As if creating several hours of entertainment for a crew of rambunctious boys wasn’t stressful enough, a week of heavy rain and an ominous forecast threatened the whole event. I did not want to have that conversation with the excited birthday boy.
Fortunately, the rain subsided just as the primary entertainment was delivered: an inflatable bounce house called The Challenge, which we rented from a local vendor. The kids had a lot of fun, and I did too, eventually, after the stress subsided. Once things wrapped up, I offered to help the vendor go through the labor-intensive process of rolling and storing a 200-kilogram inflatable. I can’t say it was good for my back, but the experience made me curious about the larger industry.
Most sources attribute the invention of the inflatable amusement to John Scurlock in the 1950s. Scurlock, who died in 2008, was an electrical engineer, physics professor, and NASA researcher who specialized in plastics. While designing inflatable covers for tennis courts, he came up with the idea for a “Space Pillow” that children could use for acrobatic play. It was little more than an air-filled bag with protective netting, but later he would use the same basic principle to create safety air cushions for fire-fighters and stunt performers. The Scurlock family still manufactures and rents amusements as Space Walk Inflatables. In 2014, they had two hundred branches and managed roughly 35,000 rentals per year. This would put them on the large end of inflatable amusement rental companies, of which there are thousands in the US.
With $20,000 and a truck, you can start renting inflatables. The low startup costs make it an attractive option for many, and there is no shortage of influencers willing to share basic business plans. But the work is arduous, with most weekends spent in a mad dash to clean and deliver amusements. (Stressed-out parents, like myself, are also no picnic.) Because there are so many small players, it is difficult to get estimates of how much money is being made in the market as a whole. Space Walk officials peg it at around a hundred million dollars annually…
More on how they’re made and how they’re tested at “Notes on Inflatable Amusements,” from @jamestweetz in @the_prepared.
* Alan Rickman
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As we bounce, we might note that this was a momentous date in the history of another celebratory stalwart; it was on this date in 1995 that “Macarena”– more specifically, “Macarena (Bayside Boys Mix)”– hit #1 on Billboard‘s Hot 100 and remained on the chart for 60 weeks.
The original Los Del Rio recording of “Macarena” was a hit in Latin America but would not have gained much attention in North America if it weren’t for John Caride, a DJ at a Miami radio station. Having watched dancers’ enthusiastic reaction to the song at a club at which he was spinning, Caride wanted to add the tune to his radio playlist, but was refused by his program manager on the grounds that the station (WPOW– “Power 96”) didn’t put foreign language songs into rotation. Caride enlisted producers Carols De Yarza and Mike Triay to re-record the song with English-language verses and then remixed to make it (even more) “club-friendly.” It was this version– “Macarena (Bayside Boys Mix)”– that hit the top of the chart… and became the “No. 1 Greatest One-Hit Wonder of All Time” (per VH-1) and a staple of wedding receptions everywhere.
“Start with something simple and small, then expand over time. If people call it a ‘toy’ you’re definitely onto something.”*…
From the always-illuminating Ernie Smith, a survey of 10 portable electronic toys—some well-known, some obscure—that highlighted how creative toy-makers were when the canvas was completely open.
For a moment, consider the evolutionary space between the original Game Boy and the iPad. Both defined the way kids would experience computers in a portable format, but were so defining that they kind of set the template for everyone else. But it was clear that the Game Boy was a mere plateau of technological advancement, which allowed some technological wiggle room. Meanwhile, the iPad was considered such a technological ideal that many companies just copied its basic design, killing off true evolution until, say, the Nintendo Switch. That leaves a gap of about 22 years in which handheld gadgets for kids were really freaking experimental and interesting…
[Ernie reviews ten toys, each of which pushed the envelope; several of which inspired features/interfaces we use use today…]
… Admittedly, most devices on this list highlight the potential positive effects of technology on how we approach life, while others are clearly designed to work against the tension technology was creating.
Your kid may want a laptop, but a laptop is expensive, so get them a VTech device instead. They want a cell phone, but cell phones come with risks and data plans. So, it’s better to give them a walkie-talkie that carries itself like a cell phone, rather than expose them to the real thing, right?
There’s also something to be said about the fact that many of these devices have practical limits. You’re not talking to the open internet with most of these gadgets, and most are designed to only work with a handful of people around you. That limits the addiction factor of these gadgets for the most part.
But these designs are ultimately designed to be outgrown. If you really get into a Barbie digital camera, eventually you’re going to want a real one. And if a kid gets into a PDA-style device or creativity tool, they’re going to pick up a computer and figure out that they can do way more.
Electronic toys still abound, but one gets the feeling that convergence cost us some of the more fascinating ideas on this list. I mean, there’s only so much an iPad can do, right?…
Looking back at a bunch of toy electronics that may have latently inspired the tech that we use today… take the tour: “Digital Training Wheels,” from @ernie@writing.exchange (on Mastodon).
* Aaron Levie (co-founder and CEO of Box) @levie
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As we hook ’em young, we might recall that it was on this date in 1931 that the state legislature in Nevada legalized casino gambling in the state. In fact, gambling had been legal in Nevada until 1909 (by which time it was the only state with legal gambling), when an earlier instantiation of the legislature outlawed it.
Casino revenues– gambling, hospitality, and entertainment– in the U.S. generated nearly $329 billion in economic activity in 2022.
(Coincidentally, it was on this date in 1942 that Alfred G. Vanderbilt and a number of horse racing luminaries established the Thoroughbred Racing Associations of North America.)
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