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Technology Quarterly
LarsWestergren writes "There is an unusually interesting Technology Quarterly available for free from The Economist where they discuss some of the more interesting new areas in the area of science and technology. Of most interest to Slashdot might be Open source's local heroes, or perhaps playing Pac-Man on thought-controlled computers.
Among the other articles this month: Predicting microweather, transparent magnetic memories, smart robotic transplants, how to bake the perfect chip, and Benoit Mandelbrot - the father of fractals."
One of the Economist's annual prizes for innovation went to Raymond Damadian for his role in creating NMR. But another fascinating article about who was responsible for creating NMR explains how Raymond Damadian missed out on the Nobel prize.
Read Epic the first RPG novel.
In a recent subscriber survey they sent to me, I told them, "Whatever you do, don't follow Time, Newseek, et. al. and dumb yourself down to post-literate status. For the love of God please, please, please, don't ever put one of those ludicrous 'conventional wisdom' boxes in your publication."
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Benoit Mandelbrodt is NOT the father of fractals! Yes, he did coin the term, but his work built on the work of two men who have at least as much claim to the title of "father of fractals" as he does, and did their work before he did. As the article states, his work in the 1970s was based on the earlier work of Gaston Julia, a French-Algerian mathematician who described the fractal sets that now bear his name without the benefit of computers and won the Grand Prix de l'Academie des Sciences for his paper on the subject, entitled "Memoir sur l'iteration des fonctions rationnelles." Julia wrote that paper at age 25. Interesting side note on Julia: he lost his nose as a soldier in World War I and did mathematical research during an extended hospital stay due to that injury. He was eventually forced to wear a leather cover over the place where his nose had been, held in place with straps tied behind his head. Pictures of him are a bit strange because of that. :-b
Mandelbrodt came along in the 1970s, rediscovered the works of Julia, which had been all but forgotten, and used computers to do things like determine which Julia sets are connected and measure the Hausdorff Dimension of some fractal sets. He also coined the term "fractal." Contrary to what the article says, Mandelbrodt did not invent the concept of non-integral dimensions... given that the measure used is called the Hausdorff Dimension, does anyone want to guess who invented it? The answer is here.
Hausdorff, being a Jew, suffered and ultimately died during World War II. His work was deemed "Jewish" and "un-German" by the Nazis, and he lost his professor post at the University of Leipzig. In 1942, he, his wife, and his sister-in-law committed suicide when they couldn't escape being sent to a concentration camp.
Mandelbrodt did make significant contributions, especially to the visualization of fractals and the study of fractals and their properties on computers, but to call him the "father" is to ignore the contributions of the giants on whose shoulders he was standing (to borrow a famous phrase). Mandelbrodt is a good self-promoter, which should be obvious to anyone who RTFA. In the article, the familiarity of his work is compared to that of Newton and Einstein. While it never says his work is as important as the work of those two greats, it doesn't take a big mental leap to get to that idea. When Mandelbrodt discovered the set that now bears his name, he was smart enough not to give it that name himself. Instead he called it the "M set," leaving it to somebody else to add "andebrodt" to the name. Both of these things remind me of Hawking's A Brief History of Time, in which there are brief biographical blurbs of Newton, Einstein, and Hawking, in that order. I'd have loved to see Mandelbrodt and Hawking write a book together. It would be the battle royale for the title of biggest self-promoter in the sciences. I'm not saying they didn't make significant contributions (nor that Hawking's contributions aren't all the more amazing due to his debilitating disease), but this kind of self-promotion shouldn't be necessary. I wouldn't put Hawking or Mandelbrodt on my list of the top ten scientists and mathematicians of the 20th Century, but they would definitely make the list of the top ten best known.
A friend once told me a really nerdy joke that just came back to mind. He asked me if I knew which letter was most used in the English language. I told him I did-- it's "E." My friend said "that's correct, except in the work of Mandelbrodt, where the two most used are "I" and "M" (getting use from "me," "my," and "M," the name he gave the now-famous set).
I'm sad to report that I laughed as much at that one as I did at "assume a spherical cow." Damn, I'm nerdy.
I found the use of the phrase "under our noses" in the article a bit offensive, a slap in the face to Julia. Oops. Now I've done it too.
--Mark
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned this yet, but the OpenEEG project over at:
;).
http://openeeg.sf.net/
is an attempt to give all us geeks the chance to experiment with mind interfaces.
I want my commercial cheap-and-easy-to-use 128 node EEG machine, though. That would rock
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
Experiments on this have been done. People have learned monkeys to control robotic arms with their thoughts. They had the monkeys in a lab with a joystick, a computer screen and a robotic arm. They showed the monkeys that if they used the joystick to steer a dot into a target area, the robotic arm would take a monkey snack and drop it where the monkey could get it. The monkeys had sensors on their heads meanwhile, and they did it for some time until it became routine.
Then the scientists removed the joystick. The monkeys would get frustrated of course, and you could see them look at the screen. They wanted to move the joystick, and thereby activated the same areas of their brain as if they HAD used the joystick. The sensors read this and moved the dot on the screen and the arm took the snack. I'm not sure, but I believe they finally removed the screen, and the monkeys contorolled the robotic arm by thought alone.
If they could carry the arm with them, I assume eventually they would be able to use it just as well as their own biological arms.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die