Nov 15 2022 - Talking a Lot

 

We humans talk a lot - really a lot.  Sometimes I think there are some people that are always talking. But I am not going to look up Guinness Records on the big talkers.  Who else talks this much?  Or are we at the top of the food chain with all our talking?  I found an article that described S four animals that could really talk:  Hoover the Seal, Blackie the Cat, Alex the Parrot and Lucy the Chimp. There are other similar articles about Orca whales, elephants and beluga whales.  In terms of wo talks the most, dolphins are considered to be the contenders for the title.  "It's almost never quiet - they are always, always vocalizing. " But they are below water, so we don't think about it much. Writing on the subject differentiates humans from the rest of the animals - I didn't find one article that compared human talking to other animals - just whether other animals could talk human, and then of those animals who talked the most.  This seems a bit off to me - that even scientists consider humans superior and the "animal kingdom" inferior.   There's an article that asks if humans are animals.  That's a BBC Science article asking about whether our brains are different from other animals.  And questioning that Anthropocentrism. That's the belief that human beings are the central or most important entity in the universe.  In 2012, a series of leading scientists published the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, in which they claimed that consciousness of some imaginable kind is likely to be widespread, especially among mammals, birds, and cephalopods. It's a train day today. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

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Nov 26 2021 - Humans are Square, Nature is ...

 

Are there squares in nature? Not very many. Salt crystals would be the recognizable with the human eye.  Pyrite has amazing cubic crystal shapes that are very visible.  It is an abundant crystal and was produced in Italy in Elba. The Greek called it "fire" or pry.  Was it inspirational? The Egyptians calculated square roots using an inverse proportion method as far back as 1650BC.  Chinese mathematical writings from around 200BC show that square roots were being approximated using an excess and deficiency method.  I assume they were figuring out the volume of a pyramid.  They used a lot of mathematics for calculating distance as well, also for taxes and wages, things often paid in volumes of beer and wheat..  What was the interest in developing squares and square roots?   It is thought that the knowledge of square roots originally came from dividing areas of land into equal parts so that the length of the side of a square became the square root of its area. The Babylonians and Greeks have been credited with the discovery of Heron’s method, the precursor of Newton’s iterative method, although Indian mathematicians are thought to have used a similar system around 800BC. In relation to nature, I wondered what the most common shape might be.  The Hexagon!  A hexagon is the shape that best fills a plane with equal size units and leaves no wasted space. Hexagonal packing also minimizes the perimeter for a given area because of its 120-degree angles. With this structure, the pull of surface tension in each direction is most mechanically stable, which is why even though bees make their honey combs with circular units, the end result when the wax hardens into place is hexagonal.  So it isn't that far off from a square.  Can you imagine our neighbourhoods where we have hexagonal properties forming a community shaped in a hexagon? I found lots on google.   Here's a wonderful joke to conclude: The guru was happily teaching math to the students at his home. He said "5 sides --> pentagon" "6 sides -->hexagon" "8 sides -->octagon" ...then suddenly, the guru got a sudden heart attack, he fell onto the ground making a loud "thud" sound and died on the spot. Hearing the sound, his wife came running from the other room and asked "what happened ?" and the students replied:  "--> gurugon" Today's image is a little fun with Flexifly, the Flaming Pear software that returns square things into naturally shaped things.  The original image was a windshield that was smashed.  If this was an object of nature, I wonder what it might be.

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Humans will be Hybrids

Ray Kurzweil, Director of engineering at Google, spoke those words in 2015.  I heard them quoted by T Bone Burnett in a CBC interview yesterday.  He is a legendary American record producer, musician  and songwriter.  He says he had a recurring dream in his youth

"When I was a kid I had a recurring nightmare from the time I was five until I was fifteen that these stormtroopers dressed all in black, looking kind of like Darth Vader really, came into our church and would start cutting each person's right hand off and replacing it with a new hand that would be their memory and their guide and their communication system, and it was this amazing new thing. But it was a nightmare - I would wake up from it every night in a cold sweat, that they're doing this. Then the other day, I picked up my iPhone and I realised, oh, they didn't have to cut off our hands. They just put it in our hands, you know? This is what they're doing – we're living in a surveillance state. This beautiful communication system that we developed, that was supposed to destroy all of these old, archaic structures, and a lot of them needed to be destroyed to be sure. It's funny because my empathies are so with the anarchists on one hand, but on the other hand, there is this deep history and it's the only way we remember who we are."  This quote is from a quietus interview HERE. 

Back to Kurzweil: what he predicted is that humans will be hybrids in the 2030s - our brains will be able to connect directly to the cloud, where computers will augment our existing intelligence. It will happen via nanobots - tiny robots made from DNA strands.  

The Globe and Mail story yesterday has a story about brain augmentation:  "For the past four years, Morgan Barense and her research team have been developing a virtual hippocampus, using digital technology to mimic a brain structure that is critical for consolidating memories. Their result is a phone-based app, called the Hippocamera, designed to allow Alzheimer’s patients to compensate for damage to this area of the brain.

A core function of the hippocampus is something called “hippocampal replay,” she explains. That is, the hippocampus acts like a movie projector, replaying memories over and over in high speed. Over time, with repeated broadcasts, the cortex, or the large outer portion of the brain, learns these memories, she says.

The Hippocamera, then, is like an external movie projector, designed with only two modes: record and replay. It allows users to record short video clips of daily events they wish to remember, prompting them to first give a brief verbal description. In the replay mode, the videos are shown in high-speed with audio of the user’s verbal description played over top."  There we are - a step in the journey to human hybridization.  

In just over a month from now early spring flowers will be blooming. Victoria being well ahead of us starts its Victoria's Flower Count tomorrow.  

 

Primed for Faces

The BBC covered the topic of finding faces in the most unexpected places:  "It's not often that you look at your meal to find it staring back at you.  But when Diane Duyser picked up her cheese toastie, she was in for a shock. “I went to take a bite out of it, and then I saw this lady looking back at me,” she told the Chicago Tribune. “It scared me at first.”  As word got around, it soon began to spark more attention, and eventually a casino paid Duyser $28,000 to exhibit the toasted sandwich. For many, the woman’s soft, full features and serene expression recalls famous depictions of the Virgin Mary."  The 2014 BBC article is here.  I don't know if the sandwich is still preserved.  I find human depictions in various places.  Today's are relics of the water - crackled buoys and prove the BBC statement that we are primed to see faces in every corner of the visual world.