All posts by Tom James

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Danes create walking house

More fantastic innovation from those amazing Danes – this time Danish art collective N55 have, with the help of MIT, created a walking house, from The Telegraph:

The prototype cost £30,000 to build, including materials and time, but the designers believe it could be constructed for a lot less.

The artists in the N55 collective are Ion Sørvin, and Øivind Slaatto. Sam Kronick, from MIT designed the legs.

Mr Slaatto plans to live in the house when it returns to Copenhagen. He has been working on his pet project for two years and was inspired by his meetings with Romani travellers in Cambridgeshire.

He said: “This house is not just for travellers but also for anyone interested in a more general way of nomadic living.

Each leg is powered and works independently and is designed to always have three on the ground at any one time to ensure stability.

For an historical perspective: this project has strong overtones of the SFnal Archigram design movement of the 1960s.

[image and news from Slashdot]

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Danes hope to launch rocket man

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Danish researchers at the Copenhagen Suborbitals project seek to launch a one-man rocket projectile into space, from their mission statement:

This is a privately funded suborbital space endeavor.
Our mission is to launch a human being into space.

We are currently developing a series of suborbital space vehicles – designed to pave the way for manned space flight on a micro size spacecraft.

Two rocket vehicles are under development. A small unmanned sounding rocket, named Hybrid Atmospheric Test Vehicle or HATV and a larger booster rocket named Hybrid Exo Atmospheric Transporter or HEAT, designed to carry a micro spacecraft into a suborbital trajectory in space.

What fun! The thought of riding into the sky inside a rocket!

Apparently the idea is for the astronaut to be situated in a standing position beneath the transparent, polymer-plexiglass nose-cap!

Their candour is to be saluted, as is the bravery of the prospective astronaut. I wonder if the project will ever come to fruition?

[via Boing Boing][image from the Copenhagen Suborbital website]

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American lifestyle must change, says neuroscientist

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According to neuroscientist Peter Whybrow, head honcho of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Behavior at UCLA the concept of the American DreamTM is a “biological impossibility.” From the Wired article:

“We’ve been taught, especially in America, that happiness will be at the end of some sort of material road, where we have lots and lots of things that we want,” said Whybrow

…

Our built-in dopamine-reward system makes instant gratification highly desirable, and the future difficult to balance with the present. This worked fine on the savanna, said Whybrow, but not the suburbs: We gorge on fatty foods and use credit cards to buy luxuries we can’t actually afford. And then, overworked, underslept and overdrawn, we find ourselves anxious and depressed.

This seems to be related to the newly-emerging discipline of behavioural economics, as pioneered by Richard Thaler and others. Here is a good introduction to behavioural economics on Edge.org.

Behavioural economics seem to reflect the fact that economists are coming round to the intuitively obvious idea that human beings really are not super-intelligent, near-psychopathic, wholly self-interested beings like homo economicus.

[image from Orin Optiglot on flickr]

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Boffin reckons there could be 37, 964 advanced civilizations in the galaxy

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Here we have a new treatment of the Drake Equation in this paper: A Numerical Testbed for Hypotheses of Extraterrestrial Life and Intelligence. From the preamble:

This paper outlines a means for applying Monte Carlo Realisation techniques to investigate the parameter space of intelligent civilisations more rigorously, and to help assign errors to the resulting distributions of life and intelligence.

The Monte Carlo method, from what I can gather from Wikipedia, involves:

…a large and widely-used class of approaches. However, these approaches tend to follow a particular pattern:

  1. Define a domain of possible inputs.
  2. Generate inputs randomly from the domain, and perform a deterministic computation on them.
  3. Aggregate the results of the individual computations into the final result.

There’s a lot of complex maths in the paper, and author Duncan H. Forgan says that when it comes to biological parameters the figures are basically guesswork, given that there is only one known biosphere.

Forgan applies his methods to different theories concerning the likelihood of life, including Panspermia, the Rare Life Hypothesis (life is rare, but life is likely to become intelligent), and the Tortoise and Hare Hypothesis (we assume civilizations that develop rapidly are more likely to destroy themselves) with the following scores:

  • Rare life: 361 advanced civilizations
  • Tortoise and Hare: 31,573 advanced civilizations
  • Panspermia: 37, 964 advanced civilizations

Read the paper – if it demonstrates anything it is how much more there is to find out about our galaxy.

[via Slashdot][image from on flickr][image from Kevin on flickr]

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Antimatter in fiction

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An intriguing essay on the treatment and development of antimatter (or “contraterrene” matter) in science fiction from physicist William S. Higgins:

In 1940, Rojansky speculated that some objects in our solar system might consist of contraterrene matter. Certainly, some do not; fallen meteorites contain the same elements as terrestrial materials. If, however, a contraterrene object were orbiting the sun or passing through the solar system, it would be steadily bombarded by ordinary dust and gas. The resulting annihilation would gradually heat and erode its surface, causing volatile materials to escape and surrounding the object with a cloud of debris. In other words, it would look very much like a comet. Were some comets contraterrene?

…

This sparked John Campbell’s restless imagination. He imagined that space-going miners might pursue contraterrene asteroids as a rich source of energy, despite the deadly radiation risks in handling untouchable material. After author Robert Heinlein turned down the idea, Campbell offered it to veteran writer Jack Williamson. Williamson set to work.

His story, “Collision Orbit,” appeared in the July 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction under the pen name Will Stewart. In it, engineer Jim Drake struggles to exploit the energy of contraterrene asteroids by finding a way to manipulate them without touching them, using magnetic fields. (Read the logbook from this issue for more information.)

Ooh yes do check it out.

[via Boing Boing, as ever][image from Don Fulano on flickr]