gominokouhai | Entries tagged with science

Guys. GUYS. They built a robot in Stockholm and they put my voice into it.

You may recall the pajh-inna-box from a couple of years ago. Now my voice is starring at the Science Museum without inconveniently needing my body attached to it.

FurHat speaks with the CereProc William TTS voice. He uses built-in CereVoice vocal gestures to add extra realism (and sarcasm) to his speech. That's right. When they wanted to teach sarcasm to a cold, unfeeling machine, they knew exactly where to turn.

BBC News segment (skip to 02:18 for me). Also: oh ghod, they gave him hubris.

I like the fact that they gave him a hat. It seems to be a truth, universally acknowledged, that a voice this awesome needs to have a hat on top of it.

Well, Phase One of my grand plan to construct an invincible robot body for myself is complete. Now I just to need to work out what Phase Two should be.

Tenuously related: research for this article involved googling for fur hat robot, which turned up—natch—I Am Russian Robot, a rather nice little comedy skit.

Also, please note that guys is gender-neutral. American women with names like Chrystal and Ronnette use it all the time.

ETA

@marksutherland: @gominokouhai I just spent the last half hour pasting GladOS quotes into the box on the Cereproc homepage

@marksutherland: The canonical voice of sarcastic rouge AIs is now @gominokouhai : gominokouhai.dreamwidth.org/246773.html See: free.dom0.org/PajhOS.mp3

Glad to be of service.

Kettling is a tool used solely to stifle dissent. So we now have a handheld Iphone app to avoid kettles.

In Egypt, they shut down the internet. So the Egyptians built their own one.

This is a message to The Man: don't fuck with geeks.

A spectacular new low for The Scotsman today, reporting news 3,000 years old. It's dead-tree only in that illustrious Edinburgh organ, so here's a link to the almost identical online version from the Torygraph, regurgitated no doubt from the same press release.

Dixson found the same formula for what men favoured in women came up every single time—a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7. In other words, a waist measurement exactly 70 per cent of the hip circumference.

[The Torygraph gets a picture of Jessica Alba, but we get a bonus sentence fragment. Good literary device. Will use more later.]

Yes. It's called the Golden Ratio. The ancient Greeks knew about it.

I know that the dead-tree press is struggling to keep up in the Internet Age, but printing a Fascinating New Discovery that was originally published by Euclid is just embarrassing. It's a concept so common that it has its own Greek letter. And this apparently justifies an entire column on page three.

As if that wasn't enough, they got the ratio upside down.

This paper needs a science correspondent so badly I could spit. Or at least someone who finished high school.

Don't get me started on Barnaby Dixson, the alleged anthropologist who apparently got funding for this.

Lovelace and Babbage!

Starring: Ada Lovelace! Lovelace, (CC) Sydney Padua

And Charles Babbage! Babbage, (CC) Sydney Padua

This is quite possibly the best thing ever. And the artist claims that she's not doing a comic. I need all of you to email her and tell her how many copies you'd buy, and convince her otherwise.

( Quite long )

Off to the West Coast for the weekend. I need a holiday.

I never really understood the Higgs Boson. It's supposed to give mass to other particles by dint of its very proximity, in the same manner, it was explained to me once, as you get a cluster of people surrounding Maggie Thatcher at a cocktail party^[0]. But if the Higgs Boson is a boson, then it's a particle with mass, and nobody could ever explain to me where it gets its mass.

(Another thing I never got was the Hubble Constant. Galaxies are expanding faster the farther away from us they are, it is true, but due to the distances involved we're seeing those galaxies farther back in the past. So all it shows you is that the rate of expansion of the Universe is slowing, as one might expect. If anything, it should be called the Hubble Variable.)

Nonetheless, reports are pouring in from all corners of the Empire about the weird alternate universe in which we now live. clanwilliam turned into a beard-toting evil mastermind, but perhaps fortunately, one who couldn't get out of bed; and verdandiweaves missed Christmas.

For myself, the landlord turned up today and actually fixed things. Apparently the long-running problem we'd been having with the plumbing was the result of cast-iron pipes, which had filled with a hundred years of rust. That's why I've had no hot water for the last year. Who has cast-iron pipes? What's the one material most likely to cause problems on contact with water?^[1]

In further news: after a shaky start, work is actually going well, I've fixed all the problems, and $BOSS_1 seems quite calm. I think this new universe and I are going to get on well.

That said, when I get home tonight I'm firing up Rome: Total War and crushing the Gauls under my iron sandal. They've earned it.

--
[0] Presumably, these days it's a crowd of people saying very loud and slowly, Would you like another blanket? No, I'm not your son.

[1] Francium, theoretically, but I don't think they make pipes out of that. The half-life would be an issue. That said, the half-life of a water pipe made of cast iron isn't particularly high, either.

The Large Hadron Collider will generate a tiny black hole tomorrow, and the entire Earth will be consumed and spat out into an alternate universe. The entire process will take less than Planck time and will be undetectable even by specialized instruments.

The new universe in which we find ourselves will be subtly different from the old one. I predict that it will be one in which everyone claims that their fear of the LHC was, in fact, merely ironic, and the media quickly forgets about it and moves on to the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012.

Tomorrow, if anyone's science officer suddenly gets a beard and starts killing people, please let me know.

More impressive even than the Firefox crop circle, reports are flooding in of the discovery of the snappily-monickered G1.9+0.3: an eighty trillion-mile-wide Firefox logo at the centre of the Galaxy.

God Himself uses Firefox. You can, too.

(Phil Plait, as always, has the scoop on the techie stuff.)

A somewhat stressful day off work—would that it ever be otherwise—but there's an impossibly clear sky and, I noticed while performing my carer/PA duties for Jehane, the stars are spectacular tonight. If we'd had weather like this last week, the eclipse would have been incredible.

(I was watching The Sky At Night last night—BBC iPlayer, despite only half-working on Linux, along with a few other things, has forced me to reappraise my opinion of the lamentable state of current television—and, despite already having been spoilered for the outcome of their special Lunar Eclipse Edition, it was marvellous. Sir Patrick Moore, despite being 180 years old and sort of like a lovable cuddly version of Davros, said at the end that he'll see us all for the next eclipse in 2017, and I have no doubt that he will. He's a British institution now, like the Nelson monument or King Arthur, and thus immortal. Also, he plays the xylophone.)

Later, walking home across the Meadows with mp3 player on, I remembered this and looked up just as I moved out of the sphere of influence of a street lamp, and six thousand globes of light came out to play in all their pellucid glory, on cue, as the Allegro from Mozart's 40th came to its first breathtaking crescendo.

I nearly fell over.

Later, up on Bruntsfield Links, all the bloody street lights were out again, which gave me an uninterrupted view of the stars all the way along the path to Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.

It's the little things that make it all worthwhile. I love winter.

Lunar eclipse tonight, entering penumbra at 1.43 am (GMT) with totality from about threeish. The Americans should get a lightshow at a slightly more reasonable time of the evening. I'll get one just before dawn, when I shall most likely still be up anyway. I have Firefly to rewatch.

(I have, it seems, done that joke already, but no eclipse post would be complete without a link.)

EDIT: ...and it's cloudy. Buggeration.

Happy fiftieth anniversary of the dawn of the Space Age!

Half a century since the launch of Sputnik 1. Where's my jetpack already?

Also on 4th October 1957, Aneurin Bevan made that speech about sending a British Foreign Secretary naked into the conference chamber. Interesting that over the course of the subsequent fifty years we have, if anything, just increased the amount of politics by emotional spasm.

The Bomb was on everyone's minds. Which gives me an excuse to quote extensively from John Wyndham, who published The Midwich Cuckoos fifty years ago. What follows is more about the perils of etiquette in the technological age, but that pretty much includes the Bomb as well as everything else.

(On the subject of the new etiquette for the new age: in the following paragraphs I will make extensive use of inline quotation tags (<q>). These won't display in IE because the people who wrote IE considered HTML standards to be more a set of vague suggestions. If you read the following in IE it won't make any bloody sense. Go and get a web browser that isn't shite, then we can talk.)

( John Wyndham on morality in a changing world )

Some things don't change, do they? Much like my non-posession of a jetpack.

(Aside: Jetpack!)

Okay people, Blog Like It's The End Of The World Day was the 13th June. You can all stop now.

I didn't participate, and for this reason: when the real Zombie Apocalypse comes, we're all going to waste the first half hour Googling to find out if it's all some sort of hilarious meme. When the mushroom clouds light up the midnight sky, even as our eyeballs turn to ashes we'll be wondering if it's a new form of advertising. And Rage-infested monkeys are just viral marketing with the dial turned up to 11, right?

(Rage-infested Monkeys wbaenfarb.)

A million years from now, when alien prospectors land on our planet and survey the ruined wastelands of our once-great civilization, they'll find six billion charred skeletons all sat in front of Windows Messenger. Coda to Aristotle, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Amis, the last words ever inscribed by humanity will be HEY YOU GUYZ IS THIS 4 REAL?!!?

You can all stop pretending to be Bruce Campbell now. Some of us did this when we were eight.

Oh, all right then. You can continue saying Groovy for the next couple of days.

And the cricket bats are okay too.

ION: The Shuttle Atlantis delivers a package of new solar panels to the International Space Station. While it's there, a computer systems crash knocks out the guidance and navigation systems. Presumably the solar panels needed Service Pack 1 or something. In any case, Atlantis is required to stay docked to provide the Station with attitude control.

Meanwhile, they have to perform a spacewalk to repair the Shuttle's thermal blankie with a medical stapler borrowed from the first-aid kit and some surgical-steel fishhooks. NASA officials have as yet remained silent on the inclusion of duct tape and string on the Shuttle's standard equipment list, or whether Richard Dean Anderson has been conscripted into astronaut training.

Meanwhile, a woman in Palatine, Illinois, picks up NASA transmissions on her son's baby monitor. Real Life apparently isn't just a bad sitcom, it's a bad sitcom IN SPACE. We've already got nappy-wearing astronauts on improbable road trips to resolve bizarre love triangles. All we need now is for somebody to step on a rake and for two guy astronauts to leave someone's baby on a passing flying saucer, and I think we have a ratings winner.

First possibly Earthlike extrasolar planet found

Orbiting a red dwarf, surface temperature is likely between zero and forty degrees Celsius. It may be rocky, with liquid water.

The link to ESO in the article doesn't work, but Wikipedia is parroting it anyway. Space.com has an article largely in popspeak. Does anyone have any other sources for this?

The molecular biology of protein synthesis, reenacted in interpretive dance by hippies!

God, I love the Internet.

Lunar eclipse tonight: totality between 2244 and 2358 GMT.

The forecast for Edinburgh is cloudy, natch.

See also these awesome pictures from STEREO-B of the Moon's transit across the Sun. The two bodies are different sizes from this distance: no one on Earth has ever seen these pictures before.

(Except for the several million people who linked to this before I did, obviously.)

Government study: Internet 1 percent porn [cnn.com]

If 1% of the Internet is porn, and there are 530,000 terabytes of Internet[0], that's a little over 1x10⁹ reasonably-sized .jpgs. Assuming ten minutes per picture, it would take a little over 20,000 years to masturbate to them all.[1]

Assuming fifty strokes per masturbation, and two calories per stroke, this would require roughly equivalent energy output to the detonation of 100 tons of TNT. This is not counting the additional energy required to power a computer and a high-resolution monitor for twenty thousand years.

Having said that, the study linked to above suggests a far more likely-sounding figure of 28% porn. It also estimates that there are 81 gigabytes of blogosphere. Perhaps we could harness all that angst to provide the power for that one guy doing all the masturbating.

*sings* Dedication's what ya neeeeeed....

ObLink: The Internet Is For Porn, because I can.

--
[0] When I was at University it was thirteen terabytes. How times change.

[1] I am trusting to the mental imagery to distract people from checking my back-of-the-envelope calculations.

Bitch Queen From Hell phoned me this morning. I was icily polite and brusque, and I used the Voice to its full advantage. I said Hello?, then I said What do you want?, then I said Right. Thank you and hung up.

If she still doesn't get the message then I shall go off on a vitriolic diatribe next time. This time it wasn't entirely appropriate to do so, because she was calling to tell me that my grandfather is dying.

The phrase We don't know how long he's got left was used.

What the hell. I'm pissed off with him too.

Until he decided to take sides in the ongoing feud between me and my mother, my grandfather was a wonderful man. Grandpa is a war hero (they are all heroes) and a terribly nice, generous chap with a host of interesting stories and a large stock of terrible, terrible jokes. But he holds some singular ideas about who I should choose to associate with and he lacks the capacity to appreciate my right to make my own decisions. I haven't spoken to him since early last December, and I haven't spoken to my grandmother since the end of February, for similar reasons. In neither case is it because I'm holding an aloof silence or deliberately cutting off contact, it's just so much easier for me not to have to deal with their shit.

I shall continue to get on with my own life, three hundred miles away. None of this is of any concern to me unless my bloody mother tries to call again.

~

I have been subjected to a sooper-sekrit sneak preview of an incomplete version of Bloodspell episode 13.

cairmen is desperate for critical feedback before release, for some reason that hasn't been explained. Some of the sound isn't ready yet and at one point there is a SCENE MISSING placeholder card that simply reads, The Master kicks the living crap out of everyone.

I feel quite strongly that they should just leave the placeholder in there. And I sound awesome.

~

Observe this fantastic image of Saturn eclipsing the Sun, as seen from Cassini (larger version here).

Earth is that little dot just inside the G ring at about 10 o'clock. Everything we've ever known is on that pale speck.

If it were up to me, we'd consume all of Earth's resources so that we could get out into space before I'm too old to appreciate it. Perhaps it's a good thing that it's not up to me. But pictures like this remind me that I can still hear the thin gnat-voices crying.

~

On which note: I'm told it was Rupert Brooke—though I've never found the context, said the Air Marshal in Wyndham's version of the far-future year 1998. A five-second google for brooke thin-gnat-voices provides context in an instant.

Remember when we could go to space but we didn't have computers yet? Whatever happened to the good old days?

Space Hotel USA?

Las Vegas hotelier to test inflatable space motel [The Register]
Inflation Factor: Bigelow Readies Test Module [space.com]

The one-third scale version of a larger Bigelow inflatable module is dubbed Genesis. It will be lofted into space atop a Dnepr booster under contract with ISC Kosmotras, a Russian and Ukrainian rocket-for-hire company. A second Genesis module is also slated to be orbited, perhaps later next year too. Both inflatable structures are to circle Earth for several years and be thoroughly evaluated.

Also see Bigelow Aerospace's own site.

While we're on the subject: Europe's lunar vision blossoms [bbc]. Space is still cool.

Current Mood: whipple-scrumptious

Hopes rise of cure for cancer as cell division reversed [The Scotsman]
Cell division rewind button found [news.bbc]

A team led by Dr Gary Gorbsky at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation were able to interrupt and reverse cell division by manipulating a key protein. They were even able to send duplicate chromosomes, the packages of DNA containing genes, back to the centre of the original cell that gave rise to them - an achievement previously thought to be impossible.

Why is this relagated to a small box on page 11 of the Scotsman and a tiny link on the Health section of BBC News? (Does anyone read the Health section?) This is fucking marvellous. They've essentially reversed aging, on a very small scale. This has potential applications far beyond curing cancer.

More to be done yet, obviously.

Current Mood: there can be only one

Yew. will. be. like. us-ah. Yew. belawng. to. us-ah.

And the artificial muscles are powered by alcohol! Just like my muscles!

Current Mood: Telosian
Current Music: head

I reproduce here, in its entirety, the Scotsman's editorial piece today regarding further evidence for life on Mars. I do so with adequate announcement of fair-use according to copyright laws and the observation that, if they really want to claim ownership of this tiresome crack-addled screed in a court of law, they can go right ahead.

Two questions wrap the planet Mars in deepest mystery. The first is whether there is, or was, life. Professor Colin Pillinger, of the Open University, is excited by the discovery of carbon in a meteorite hurled to Earth nearly 100 years ago. Others remain sceptical.

The second question is really more interesting. It is whether life on Mars is better. This is worth discussing because there is a sizeable body of Scots opinion that asserts it could not possibly be worse. Is there, for example, a football team? And what is the nationality of the manager? Is there a single Mars government? Or are the craters devolved? If so, would they be interested in some spare building designs?

We know that liquid once existed on the surface of Mars. That is not the point. What matters is: was it Buckfast? Or Barr's Irn-Bru? We know there are extremes of temperature. But what we need to know is whether the electricity was supplied by ScottishPower and, if it was, is this why there is no-one left to pay the bills? And how did Mars get rid of its wind farms? The Viking landers didn't crash into any. As for that meteorite, was the carbon content clearly stated in the tin with the calorie count? Any old life just won't do.

Am I missing some kind of hilarious joke?

Fuck it. I think I'm moving back south of the border.

Current Mood: headache
Current Music: the heating and the air-conditioning fighting each other

The moving finger rants

In which pajh is a traitor to all humanity

ETA

``The revolution is not being televized, it's being streamed''

On ratios

Mostly about Babbage

Alternate Universes: plus ça change

In which pajh predicts the future

My god... it's full of .jpgs

On taking life as one finds it

Luna? But I hardly... oh, wait, I've done that one

Beeping three-foot tin ball threatens free world

All Your Braaaiin Are Belong To Us

Round the moons of Nibia and `round the Antares maelstrom and `round Perdition's flames

Bonus points for the gross misappropriation of Carroll

In case anyone's missed it

Why you think the Net was born?

An appeal for the future, to the past

And the carpets are also wall-to-wall, Mr Walter Wall

They called me mad. Mad! But soon they shall see!

(no subject)

We are the masters of Earth. We are the masters of Earth. We are the masters of Earth.

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