Automata: machines that imitate the behavior of living things. From Automatoi, the animated statues of animals and men created by the smith god Hephaestus. These examples reflect how, in some cases, people have been thinking about robotics as far back as 8 or 9th century BC.

Khalkotauroi (Bronze-footed Bulls) were two fire-breathing bull-shaped automata forged out of bronze by the smith-god Hephaestos as a gift for Aeetes, king of Kolkhis. When Jason and the Argonauts came to Kolkhis in searh of the Golden Fleece, Aeetes demanded the hero Yoke the bulls and plow field with dragon’s teeth before he would hand over the fleece.

The Khryseiai Keledones or Celedones (Golden Charmers) were beautiful women-shaped automata. Crafted out of gold, they adorned the first temple of Apollo at Delphi.

Kuonkhryseos and Kuonargyreos were a pair of watchdogs, "deathless for ever and unchanging," one of gold, the other of silver, made for the palace of King Alkinous of the Phaiakians, visited by Odysseus (Ody. 7.87).

Kaukasian Eagle was a giant bronze robot, constructed by Hephaestus for the daily task of pecking out chained Titan Prometheus’ regenerating liver, who is punished for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to mankind.

Talos was a giant bronze robot which Hephaestos presented to Europa, Queen of Crete, on her wedding to Minos. The automaton would run around the entire island three times a day, patrolling for pirates whom he would drive off by throwing stones. Some claim that he was actually a bronze man from the bronze generation (mentioned by Plato in his Laws) , for he had one blood vessel that extended from his neck down to his ankles, where it was kept in place by a bronze bolt (Apollodorus 1.140). He was destroyed by Medea from Jason’s ship. Out of range of Telos’ rocks, she invoked the Keres (spirits of death), three times in song, three times in spoken prayer, and then focused her "malignity" on the robot. Then as Telos was picking up a big stone, he grazed his ankle on a sharp rock, "ichor ran from him like molten lead", he stood for a second, "high on the jutting cliff" and then "came down with a resounding crash" (Argonautica 4.1638).

The Tripodes Khryseoi were a set of twenty golden tripods on wheels made by Hephaestos for the Olympian feasts. They were endowed with self-animation and wheeled themselves in and out of the halls as they were required (Iliad 18.371).

The Hippoi Kabeiroi were a pair of fire-breathing horses which Hephaestos cast out of bronze for his sons (the Kabeiroi). Wonder if they could beat Achilles’ immortal horses Balius and Xanthus in a fight. 

The Kourai Khryseai were a two lifelike golden maiden automata. They were said to possess intelligence, strength and the gift of speech. They would help Hephaestus with his household.

A national survey of the general adult population and of adults who have needed or received some form of mental health treatment find that more than a quarter (27%) of all adults have received some form of mental health treatment over a two-year period.

Among those patients who have received treatment in the past two years:
1/3 (34%) received both therapy and drugs.
1/2 (47%) of patients used prescription drugs but did not receive therapy.
1/5 (19%) of patients received therapy but did not use prescription drugs.

A modest majority of those who received treatment were extremely (15%) or very (39%) satisfied with their care, with a much larger share (85%) at least somewhat satisfied. There was little difference in levels of satisfaction among patients who received drugs and therapy, therapy only, or drugs only.

Quarter of US Adults Have Received Mental Health Treatment Over Two-Year Period, MedicalNewsToday.com

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT, in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo) is developing an innovative Human Area Networking (HAN) technology called RedTacton (touch + action = tacton) that safely turns the surface of the human body into a data transmission path at speeds up to 10 Mbps between any two points on the body, giving peer-2-peer a whole new meaning. Using a novel electro-optic sensor (that bounces a laser beam off of an electro-optionc crystal and measures the reflected beam), NTT has already developed a small PCMCIA card-sized prototype RedTacton transceiver. RedTacton enables the first practical Human Area Network between body-centered electronic devices and PCs or other network devices embedded in the environment through a new generation of user interface based on natural human actions such as touching, walking, or stepping on a particular spot. RedTacton can be used for intuitive operation of computer-based systems in daily life, temporary one-to-one private networks based on personal handshaking, device personalization, security, and a host of other applications based on new behavior patterns enabled by RedTacton.

NTT News Release 050218, NTT.
RedTacton.com

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights.
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause.
4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism.
5. Rampant sexism.
6. A controlled mass media.
7. Obsession with national security.
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together.
9. Power of corporations protected.
10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated.
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.
12. Obsession with crime and punishment.
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption.
14. Fraudulent elections.

Fascism Anyone? Laurence W Britt

"I saw few die of hunger; of eating, a hundred thousand."
Benjamin Franklin

Studies over the past 70 years have established that substantial calorie reduction - up to 50 percent in some studies - not only can reduce the rate of cell proliferation, it can extend the maximum life span of a variety of organisms, including rats, flies, worms and yeast. The results can be dramatic, with 30 to 70 percent increases in life span reported in the studies.

"Significant caloric restriction is the one and only thing that has been scientifically proven to extend life span," said Hellerstein, who has a joint appointment at UC San Francisco. He noted that while exercise and good nutrition can prevent premature death by disease, they have not been shown to extend a maximum life span.

Meanwhile, a staggering 67% of America is obese (30% over their ideal body weight). Although, the proportion of overweight people in parts of Europe has surpassed US. The portlier countries include Finland, Germany, Greece, the Chech Republic, Slovakia and Malta, as identified by the International Obesity Task Force.

Fasting every other day, while cutting few calories, may lower cancer risk, UC Newswire
A Hunger Artist, Franz Kafka

"Louis’s mad behaviour… I think it must be the ergotine that effects his brain at such time."
Letter from Fanny Stevenson to William Henley.

A new theory suggests that Jekyll and Hyde creator Robert Louis Stevenson tripped on LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide aka acid) as a side effect of his tuberculosis treatment, ergotine (a derivetive of the fungus). Ergot, which grows on rye and wheat, has caused mass poisonings throughout history. Because of the accompanying hallucinations and paranoia, ergot poisoning was occasionally mistaken for demonic possession. Many witch trials including those in Salem, MA, in 1692, are believed to be tied to ergotism. Professor Robert Winston, the chair of the House of Lords select committee on science and technology, believes that Stevenson had an ergotine overdose that may have inspired him to write The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde two weeks later. Winston’s argument’s pretty tight, mainly because Stevenson always claimed that the plot for Jekyll and Hyde came to him in a fevered dream while he was seriously ill, it was just a matter of checking what drugs he was taking.

Drug took Stevenson face to face with Hyde, Times Online

"We aimed to create a robot that could live and co-exist with people," Toshihiko Horiuchi, Hitachi’s Mechanical Research Lab. Excellent Mobility and Interactive Existenceas Workmate - or Emiew, is the new robot for Hitachi, to be showcased at this month’s World Fair. As you can see from prototypes Pal and Chum, the Emiew is a hybrid of a Star Wars storm trooper and a Segway scooter, some sort of storm scooter. It’s 4.2 ft (1.3 m) tall, can move at 3.7 miles (6 km)/hour, has sensors on the head, waist and near the wheels, responds to commands from a vocabulary of about 100 words, and can be "trained" for practical use in 5-6 years. Sony and Honda have also made humanoid robots to showcase their engineering, in a recent robot race of one-upmanhip. I like Toyota’s, because it plays trumpet. By 2007, it is predicted there will be c. 2.5 mil "entertainment and leisure" robots in homes (137,000 today), with c. 4.1 mil doing house work, according to the UNECE (UN Economic Commission for Europe) and the International Federation of Robotics.

Hitachi unveils ‘fastest robot’, BBC News.

The maximum # of variables a person can keep track of at a time is four, as mentioned in R A Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy. In a new study by Graeme S. Halford, U of Queensland, 30 academics were given incomplete verbal descriptions of statistical interactions between fictitious variables, with graphs that represented the interactions. Participants had to complete given sentences to describe the interactions in the graphs, interactions involving 2-5 variables. After each problem, they also expressed how confident they were of their solutions. Needless to say, performance and confidence dropped as complexity grew until accuracy was no better than chance with five-way interactions. After the four- and five-way interactions, participants said things like, "I kept losing information," and "I just lost track."

How much can your mind keep track of? PhysOrg.com

There’s a neat timeline on Nathan.com tracing the development of communication through history, starting with the first paleolithic "writings" in the 36th century BC (though I suspect he may be using the word loosely, with liberal dating). The chronology is broken up by age: Nomadic, Agricultural, AD, [Scientific Revolution], Industrial, Steam, Electricity, Atomic, Data, Service, and Light Age, leaving off in 1998 with Motorola’s Iridium global sattelite system beginning operation, termed the Eleventh Information Revolution. The history can also be broken down by area of communication: Language, Mathematics, Writing/Print, Broadcasting, or Computing. Still a work in progress, but worth a gander.

The History of Communications Timeline, Nathan.com

Alice began with a little scream of laughing, which she turned into a cough as well as she could. At last she managed to say gravely, "I can bite anything I want,"
"Not with a mouth as small as that," the Wasp persisted. "If you was a-fighting, now - could you get hold of the other one by the back of the neck?"
"I’m afraid not," said Alice.
"Well, that’s because your jaws are too short," the Wasp went on: "but the top of your head is nice and round." He took off his own wig as he spoke, and stretched out one claw towards Alice, as if he wished to do the same for her, but she kept out of reach, and would not take the hint. So he went on with his criticisms…

Read the whole of A Wasp in a Wig, the lost chapter that was to follow the White Knight in Lewis Carroll’s "Through the Looking Glass."

A recent post on Global Guerrillas outlines a potential development in eco-terrorism.
If activists adopt global guerrilla tactics, they could coerce a rapid move to clean energy alternatives. Small but effective attacks on major energy pipelines would quickly increase the costs of conventional energy such that clean power alternatives would become extremely attractive. This would be dictated by a direct economic comparison (costs) as well as indirect factors such as reliability of delivery. The "systems sabotage tax" would induce a tipping point in energy market equilibria towards green alternatives if it is extended over a long period (longer than one season) and is of a sufficient level. Moreover, green guerrilla activity would have few (if any) casualties and would probably be lost in the midst of the Islamic terror threat. Wonder if this is connected to the big NE blackout back August 14, 2003.

"I think we are poised at a wonderful time in our history to be able to explore religion and spirituality in a way which was never thought possible," told Andrew Newberg, a radiologist at UPenn, to BBC’s Discovery program. Using brain imaging, Newberg and friends studied a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks as they meditated for about an hour. When the monks attained concentration they were asked to pull a string that released an injection of radioactive tracer into their blood. The small amount of radioactive marker would be used to see how the die moved to active parts of the brain (this process was repeated in a normal waking state).

"There was an increase in activity in the front part of the brain, the area that is activated when anyone focuses attention on a particular task," Dr Newberg explained. Furthermore, a decrease in activity in the back part of the brain - the parietal lobe - responsible for orientation, reinforced the general suggestion that meditation leads to a lack of spatial awareness. "During meditation, people have a loss of the sense of self and frequently experience a sense of no space and time and that was exactly what we saw."

In an earlier study, Dr Newberg looked at the brain activity of Franciscan nuns during "centering" prayer. Though because of the verbal element additional parts of the brain were used, prayer also "activated the attention area of the brain, and diminished activity in the orientation area," supporting the theory that meditation and prayer have similar effects on the mind. "When someone has a mystical experience, they perceive that sense of reality to be far greater and far clearer than our usual everyday sense of reality. Since the sense of spiritual reality is more powerful and clear, perhaps that sense of reality is more accurate than our scientific everyday sense of reality."

Meditation mapped in monks, BBCNews.com. Listen
Related:
Meditation gives brain a charge, WashingtonPost.com
Meditation changes temperatures, Harvard Gazette

Caligula Becomes Emperor, 37 AD

Brittleness, in a robot or program, is an inability to deal with unexpected developments, an important problem in AI. For examples of brittleness see the DARPA Grand Challange, $1 million competition for racing a robot across 142 miles of Mojave Desert in under 10 hours, which not one robot came close to doing, with some running into obstacles, others having navigation problems, and with one which couldn’t start itself. Th solution proposed by Michael L Anderson and Donald R Perlis is a metacognitive loop, a mechanism whereby the robot or program can notice whether or not it is achieving its goals, and if not, it can then try something else or just perform random variations in behavior until it gets better results. No one wants a brittle robot.

Logic, self awareness and self-improvment; The metacognitive loop and the problem of brittleness, Michael L Anderson and Donald R Perlis, Journal of Logic and Computation 14, 2004

Dr Charles Townes, a physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for helping to invent the laser (not to mention the maser), was announced as the winner of the $1.5 million Templeton Prize, awarded annually for progress or research in spiritual matters. Keep in mind that currently the Nobel Prize is $1.3 million, making Templeton the world’s biggest score. Past recipients of the prize include Mother Teresa, former Indian president Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Princeton’s Dr Freeman J Dyson and Rev James McCord, and Seton Hall University’s Benedictine monk astrophysicist Rev Stanley L. Jaki (NJ represent).

Dr Townes, 89, a longtime professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has long argued that science and religion are more alike than different and are destined to merge. In his seminal paper titled "The Convergence of Science and Religion", published in 1966 in the IBM journal "Think", he wrote: "Understanding the order in the universe and understanding the purpose in the universe are not identical, but they are also not very far apart."

Physicist is Awarded Templeton Prize in Spiritual Matters, New York Times
TempletonPrize.org

Embryonic stem cells - primal, undifferentiated cells which have the unique potential to produce any kind of cell in the body - have been mass produced using bioreactors. A bioreactor is a tissue-growing device, it has a chamber for holding polymer threads on which stem cells grow and another chamber for fluid that delivers chemical messengers (cytokines) to stem cells to keep them undifferentiated. It’s better than a flask because it allows stem cells to grow in three dimensions, as cells normally do inside the body.

Shang-Tian Yang of Ohio State grew mouse embryonic stem cells on strands of polymer threads inside a bioreactor as well as in a flask for comparison. The bioreactor cell growth increased 193-fold in 15 days, with cell density anywhere from 10- to 100-fold higher than for conventional laboratory methods, yielding several hundreds of millions more stem cells. This is good since mouse embryonic stem cells are very similar to human stem cells and because, as Yang remarks: "There’s more of a demand for an unlimited supply of embryonic stem cells." Ain’t that the truth? The people need more stem cells!

The research was reported in San Diego, California at the 2005 national meeting of the American Chemical Society

At Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, researchers headed by John Cass report eliciting complex behavior e.g. hand-to-mouth movements, by stimulating specific areas in the brain of a Galago, a small nocturnal primate. This challanges the theory that there are few hardwired complex behaviors in the primate brain because most of the behavior is learned or volitional. These findings follow in the steps of Michael Graziano of Princeton University, New Jersey, who used long electical pulses in the motor cortex to stimulate complex behaviors in macaques. However, Kaas an co. were able to stimulate a greater number of complex movements, including aggresive facial patterns and defensive forelimb movements, in the simpler brain of the Galago. Further, they found that besides the motor cortex they could cause behavior by stimulating the nearby posterior parietal cortex. And to think only a few months ago I was freaking out that they had remote controlled rats.

Monkey behavior controlled through brain stimulation, Betterhumans.com
Microstimulation reveals specialized subregions for different complex movements in posterior parietal cortex of prosimian galagos, Abstract from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

March 15, the LHC Computing Grid (LCG) project announced that its grid no includes over 100 sites in 31 countries. The project was created to process the massive data expected from the the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s biggest particle physics experiment, in CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), Switzerland. When LHC boots in 2007, it will produce petabytes, millions of gigabytes, of data. The grid will distribute the processing and storage of data to the 100+ sites aroundly the world, mainly universities and research labs, together uniting over 10,000 CPUs. The mission of the grid project is "to build and maintain a data storage and analysis infrastructure for the entire high energy physics community that will use the LHC."

World’s Largest Computer Grid Surpasses 100 Sites, PPARK.ac.uk

Well, duh! Karen Grimmer and collegues from Women’s and Children’s Hospital, Adelaide, Australia, recently conducted a study in which seven children (ages 7-18) treated for severe burns were given videogames in addition to painkillers, to see if it would further reduce their pain during wound treatment. On a 10 scale, they found the average score for drugs alone was 4.1, while drugs and videogames scored 1.3. All but one child lost 2+ points when playing the game. The researchers are eager to continue virtual reality study on more subjects.

Virtual Reality Kills Kids’ Pain, Betterhumans.com.
The efficacy of playing a virtual reality game in modulating pain for children with acute burn injuries: A randomized controlled trial, Debashish A Das, Karen A Grimmer, Anthony J Sparnon, Sarah J McRae and Bruce A Thomas.

1 The placebo effect
2 The horizon problem
3 Ultra-energetic cosmic rays
4 Belfast homeopathy results
5 Dark matter
6 Viking’s methane
7 Tetraneutrons
8 The Pioneer anomaly
9 Dark energy
10 The Kuiper cliff
11 The Wow signal
12 Not-so-constant constants
13 Cold fusion

NewScientist story here

Sartre once remarked that "smoking is the symbolic equivalent of destructively appropriating the entire world." But that did not stop France’s National Library from airbrushing Jean-Paul Sartre’s Gauloise cigarette out of a poster of the chain-smoking philosopher (who smoked two packs + several pipes a day) to avoid prosecution under the 1991 loi Evin, a law banning tobacco advertising. Fittingly, the doctoring of the photo was first detected by Liberation, the left-wing newspaper founded by Sartre. The poster is for an exhibition marking the centennial of Sartre’s birth. It features previously unseen letters and manuscript, on display through August 21.

Hell is other people removing your cigarette, Telegraph.co.uk

Guosong Liu, a neuroscientist at the Picower Center for Learning and Memory at MIT, has discovered that neurons communicate their electrical signals in trinary code - using zeros, ones and minus ones. This allows additional interactions to occur during processing; two signals can add together or cancel each other out, or different pieces of information can link up or try to override one another. Whereas computers running on a binary system don’t ignore information, trinary "is an evolutionary advantage that’s unique to the brain." Some analysts predict that future hard/soft-ware will function using trinary systems, making everything known today obsolete within the next ten years.

Brain circuitry findings could shape computer design, MIT News Office.

A series of anomalous radiowave bursts, dubbed GCRTJ1745-3009, has been detected coming from the direction of our galaxy’s center (26,000 light-years away). "The most spectacular aspect of this is that five bursts occurred at regular intervals of about an hour and a quarter [77 minutes]," said Scott Hyman of Sweet Briar College, Virginia. "They were at a constant intensity … and each burst had basically the same time profile." Each burst lasted about ten minutes. Since the source is of an unknown type and the bursts are highly unusual, some believe that the origin of the radiowaves may be intelligent. Hyman’s response: "There’s no reason to expect anything but a natural cause. There are so many classes of objects we don’t know about out there."

Radio image of the central region of the Milky Way galaxy. The arrow points to the source of the radio waves. Above it is a large expanding ring of debris from a supernova remnant.

Radio Waves Detected Coming From Center of Galaxy, National Geographics.