Author Archives: dr.hypercube

Various and sundry links

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A few things I’ve run across that I wanted to post…

  • One of my very favorite web cartoonists (graphic web-page-ist?) visits the Google campus. Personally, I would have risked failure and filled my pockets at the hundred dollar bar. Also, Echo and Siouxsie Sioux? Awesome!
  • A brief trip down memory lane courtesy of Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber. The linked post on ’embodied energy’ (and the subsequent link at the Yorkshire Ranter) are interesting in and of themselves, but it’s the reference to Piero Sraffa and theories of value that takes me back. In the mists of prehistory, when I was finishing my BA in Economics and doing an ill-fated year of graduate work on same, the big battle royale among the theory types on campus was Neo-Ricardians versus Marxists (forget the neoclassicists – boooring >grin<). Ah, good times...
  • Inexpensive book scanner. The Plustek Optibook is optimized for scanning bound material – the glass runs right up to the edge, cutting down on shadows and the amount of squashing (grits teeth just thinking about it) one must do to get a good image. Maybe with one of these I could scan some of the books I really ought to cull, making me a little more likely to do so. Haaa, ha, ha, gasp, snort – who am I fooling… h/t BoingBoing
  • Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn! Lot’s ‘o Lovecraftian fun on the interwebs over the past few days – if Darren Naish is going to venture into the biology of Howie’s critters, I can help out with research on the Old Ones – Arkham isn’t too far away and I assume the Miskatonic University archives still have material from the ill fated Pabodie expedition. Semi-seriously, though – I re-read At the Mountains of Madness and The Call of Cthulhu recently – spurred on by Charlie Stross’ A Colder War (you can read it on line by following the link) – and I think that Rucker’s Hollow Earth needs to get queued up on my nightstand. Incidentally – the edition of Mountains of Madness I linked to above is a two-fer – it’s got a great introduction written by China Mieville.

That ought to do it for now…

High Plains Fembot

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Or: Robosex on the Leks

Some very cool research on Sage Grouse is being done by Gail Patricelli and Alan Krakauer out of UC Davis. From Dr. Patricelli’s site:

Using a 24-microphhone recording array as an ADM system, Alan and I plan to examine whether males adjust their acoustic radiation patterns to direct the energy of their displays toward females, and whether variation in directionality affects male courtship success. Since females often move during courtship, we will examine the degree to which males adjust their positions and/or acoustic radiation patterns to track females, and whether the ability to do so affects male courtship success. To examine this experimentally, Alan and I collaborated with Tom Fowler of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to build a robotic female sage-grouse that will allow us to measure each male’s ability to track moving females and respond to female behaviors by adjusting their displays. The robot is equipped with a microphone and video camera, allowing us to quantify the male’s display from the perspective of the receiving female. Using the ADM system to measure the signal that the male radiates in all directions, and the robot to measure the signal received by the target female, we will have a unique ability to quantify how directionality shapes male display behaviors and female choice in sage-grouse.

Be sure to click through and check out the fembot spycam footage (or just click here, you lazy dubba >smile<).

Danger can happen!

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From the sublime (Andy Goldsworthy) to the ridiculous (Kaiju Big Battel) in honor of Darren Naish’s foray into the science of Godzilla.

Nice to see my merely three-dimensional earth relative get some YouTube time, and jeez, that Kung-Fu Chicken Noodle has got some moves!

Later – just in case anyone misinterprets – Kaiju Big Battel = ridiculous (in a good way); Darren’s post = great stuff.
h/t Steve for the Naish link