Mental calculators were in great demand in research centers such as CERN before the advent of modern electronic calculators and computers... The world's best mental calculators are invited every two years to compete for the Mental Calculation World Cup... These math prodigies achieve blood flow to parts of the brain responsible for mathematical operations at six to seven times the typical flow... In Frank Herbert's novel Dune, specially trained mental calculators known as Mentats have replaced mechanical computers completely...More at Wikipedia, including a list of famous human calculators.
Showing posts with label TED talk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TED talk. Show all posts
A "lightning calculator"
The "globe skimmer" dragonfly crosses oceans
This dragonfly has the longest migratory journey of any insect in the world (twice the distance covered by the runnerup Monarch butterfly). Like all the TED talks, this one is quite interesting (though it could have been delivered in half the time).
TED talk about Mars
"Planetary scientist Joel Levine shows some intriguing -- and puzzling -- new discoveries about Mars: craters full of ice, traces of ancient oceans, and compelling hints at the presence, sometime in the past, of life. He makes the case for going back to Mars to find out more."
A lecture by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran discusses the Capgras Delusion, phantom limbs, and synesthesia (including the bouba/kiki effect). This is a very technical TED talk, but excellent if you are interested in human biology.
The astrolabe - a 13th century computer
An explanation in nine minutes of how the astrolabe worked. The earliest devices date from about 200 BC, but by medieval times they became sophisticated mechanical computers.
The convergence of tissue engineering and robotics
TED talks are invariable thought-provoking. This 18-minute presentation by Juan Enriquez begins with commentary on the state of the economy, but then shifts to the true topic, which is how the dovetailing of cellular engineering, tissue engineering, and robotics presages a remarkable future for mankind (if we can get past the economics hurdle).
Some of the topics covered: the use of skin cells as a virtually unlimited source for stem cells, the use of the stem cells to produce artificial teeth and bladders, then hearts and tracheas and bladders, and finally artificial eyes and ears, the enhancement of those organs to "better than human" performance, and ultimately the combination with robotics such as the "big dog" pictured below for the creation of humans (or cyborgs) with much greater capabilities than we have (hearing ultrasound, viewing ultraviolet.
Perhaps "homo sapiens" is not the ultimate goal for God and evolutionary processes. If homo erectus thought he/she was God's ultimate goal and the perfect hominid, then he/she was wrong, because erectus was supplanted by Neanderthals. And if the Neanderthals thought they were the best that humans could be, then they were wrong too. Why should we have the hubris to think that we are the best possible creation of God and evolutionary processes?
Very thought-provoking.
I've now created a separate label for TED talks. And I would add that the TED talk I blogged long ago about crows learning to put money in vending machines to get peanut rewards has now been called into question.
TED talk - How bacteria communicate - Bonnie Bassler
Are there any bad TED talks? I haven't encountered any so far. In this one Bonnie Bassler, professor of molecular biology at Princeton, explains how bacteria communicate with one another.
She begins with bioluminescence, and why it only occurs after bacteria have multiplied to a critical mass/concentration. She then extends the concept to virulence in human infections; the bacteria actually control their pathogenicity. Fascinating.
Equally fascinating is the closing concept that multicellular creatures (humans, etc) evolved [or were created, depending on your cosmic view] using an extension of the same principle of quorum sensing that bacteria use to distinguish "self" from "other."
This video is 19 minutes long - very long in the short-attention-span world of websurfing, but worthwhile if you want to be impressed by how the world works, and by how the principles elucidated in this talk might be used to overcome antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
If you watch and enjoy this talk, try one of these that I blogged earlier:
I hope you weren't planning on getting any work done today...
Close-up card tricks
It doesn't matter how many card tricks you've seen or how jaded you are; these will knock your socks off.
Performed by Lennart Green, world champion magician, here performing at a TED conference in 2005. The resolution is good enough to permit full-screen viewing (click the small icon in the upper right corner).
Training crows... to help mankind?
When I posted an item two days ago about starlings removing quarters from car wash machines, I was reminded of something I had seen long ago, but I couldn't locate it. Finally located it this morning.
The ten-minute video above is a presentation at the remarkable TED conference about how crows can be trained to perform tasks. The initial success was training the crows to find money lost by people (estimated at $200 million per year) and turn it in to a vending machine, which in turn dispenses peanuts to them.
This is the link for the website documenting the project.
The extrapolation is that crows might be trained to pick up litter and trash, or to perform other useful tasks.
The video has a number of interesting and sometimes humorous anecdotes and observations. This is an interesting tidbit: crows are distributed worldwide on all continents, but do not live "in the wild." They almost never nest more than a few km from humans...
This video (like most of the TED talks, incidentally) is worth watching...
Update April 2009: Mr. Klein's project was also written up in the New York Times in December of 2008, but after further investigation, the paper has published a "correction" indicating that the experiments he describes with crows may not have been conducted in a properly scientific fashion.
The Times has since learned that Klein was never at the Binghamton Zoo, and there were no crows on display there in June 2008. He performed these experiments with captive crows in a Brooklyn apartment; he told the reporter about the Brooklyn crows but implied that his work with them was preliminary to the work at the zoo. Asked to explain these discrepancies, Klein now says he and the reporter had a misunderstanding about the zoo.So, the above talk, while thought-provoking, should be taken with a (large) grain of salt.
Fertility and longevity correlate with income
There is a tendency on TYWKIWDBI (and most other blogs) to lean toward "lightweight" topics - funny pictures, brief stories, and other interesting ephemera that can be enjoyed and then forgotten. One reason is that such items require little work on the part of the blogger - just copying and pasting for the most part. They also require little "work" on the part of the visitor.
There is a lot of material that requires more work for both of us. War, economics, ethics, history, hard science, and many other subjects are best served with thoughtful entries that consider multiple viewpoints, and are best appreciated by visitors with time to devote to the subject and an open, informed mind.
The graphs above are in this category. Each of them shows average personal income (on the hnorizontal axis) versus another variable (children per women in the top graph, life expectancy in the bottom graph). The images shown would be predictable by many or most of the more widely-read and well-educated readers of TYWKIWDBI.
But there's more than that. Those graphs come from a website called Gapminder. They were created by Hans Rosling, a Swede who used publicly available statistics, and then "crunched" the data using a computer algorithm called "Trendalyzer" (since acquired by Google).
The images above are static screencaps, but the original data MOVES. Each colored dot represents a different country (color corresponds to continents as per map at right), and the size of the dot reflects the number of people in the country. You can hover your mouse over a dot to see which country it is, or find your country from the list at right. The complete database includes all the data from 1950 to 2005. I took a screencap of the image from 2005, but at the Gapminder website you can take the slider at the bottom of the screen, move it to the left to 1950, and then start it moving. The countries move on the graph - the dots get bigger as the population grows, and the dots move up and down, right and left as birth rates and longevity and personal income change. There's a MASSIVE amount of data compressed here into an incredibly viewer-friendly format.
Try it. Go to THIS LINK for the fertility vs. income graph, move the slider left, click PLAY, and see what has happened in the world in the last 50 years.
HERE is the graph for longevity vs. income.
If you find this at all interesting, go to THIS LINK for a "TED talk" (more on TED talks later) by Hans Rosling. I spent my professional career in education and have heard probably thousands of lectures in 40 years. This is one of the best talks I have seen, partly for the topic and partly for the Trendalyzer method of presenting data. Just try 5 minutes (trust me); once he starts the data "moving" you'll probably continue watching to the end.
The face of Leonardo DaVinci
This is one of the TED talks - a remarkable collection of educational lectures. This one is just four minutes long and worth viewing.
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