Ted Talk: American Journal of Bioethics, Neuroscience Editor, Paul Root Wolpe, says it’s time to question the bioengineering of animals, our brains and more.
I found this presentation frustratingly manipulating, but am pleased that I saw it. It brought my attention to the reality of genetic engineering. As I watched I found myself asking how genetic engineering works, but my desire for this knowledge battled with my own Nnormalcy Bias*, triggered by the continuous stream of cute animals. I wanted a more objective, balanced point of view. I wanted to see positive examples (if there are any) of positive of genetic engineering.
In order to make ethical decisions about how to regulate our behaviour, ways need to be found to communicate accurate information that do not trigger the Normalcy Bias. We face the same challenge when communicating climate change information. Because we each participate in shaping ourselves and our environment, it makes sense that we work together to decide what is good and what is bad.
*Wikipedia explains that:
The normalcy bias refers to a mental state people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of the government to include the populace in its disaster preparations. The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred that it never will occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation.[1]
New drawings are inspired by Barbara Cuckson, director of the Rozelle School of Visual Arts in Sydney. Barbara’s training was with the legendary Gertrud Bodenwiesser, who was in turn a student of Rudolf Laban.
In Barbara’s classes I learn to dance with primal forms that were used to develop The New Dance.
At last I try the ‘bones’ tool in Flash CS4 and am animating a crinoid like the one filmed by Torvaansar (Uploaded to U-tube 28 sec – 22 Mar 2008):
What are crinoids?
Crinoids, also known as sea lilies or feather-stars, are marine animals that make up the class Crinoidea of the echinoderms (phylum Echinodermata). Crinoidea comes from the Greek word krinon, “a lily”, and eidos, “form”. [1] They live both in shallow water and in depths as great as 6,000 meters.[citation needed]
Crinoids are characterized by a mouth on the top surface that is surrounded by feeding arms. They have a U-shaped gut, and their anus is located next to the mouth. Although the basic echinoderm pattern of fivefold symmetry can be recognized, most crinoids have many more than five arms. Crinoids usually have a stem used to attach themselves to a substrate, but many live attached only as juveniles and become free-swimming as adults.
There are only a few hundred known modern forms, but crinoids were much more numerous both in species and numbers in the past. Some thick limestone beds dating to the mid- to late-Paleozoic are almost entirely made up of disarticulated crinoid fragments. (Wikipedia)
Just to let you know that Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon will held a cicle of Conferences under the general theme «Image in Science and Art», starting with a conference by Martin Kemp (full program down in this message).
Martin Kemp has written and broadcast extensively on imagery in art and science from the Renaissance to the present day. Leonardo da Vinci has been at the centre of this endeavour, and has been the subject of a number of his books and exhibitions, including Leonardo (Oxford University Press, 2004). His wider research has involved the sciences of optics, anatomy and natural history in various key episodes in the history of naturalism. In 1989 he published The Science of Art. Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (Yale University Press). Increasingly, he has focused on issues of visualization, modeling and representation. The broad thrust of more recent work is devoted to a “New History of the Visual,” which embraces the wide range of artefacts from science, technology, and the fine, applied and popular arts that have been devised to create models of nature and to articulate human relationships with the physical world. A scientific diagram or computer graphic model of a molecule is as relevant to this new history as a painting by Michelangelo. He writes a regular column on ‘Science in Culture’ in the science journal
Nature, an early selection of which has been published as Visualisations (OUP, 2000). Many of the themes of the Nature essays are developed in Seen and Unseen (OUP 2006), in which his concept of
’structural intuitions’ is explored. Forthcoming books include The Human Animal (Chicago).
Ciclo de Conferências Image in Science and Art
FUNDAÇÃO CALOUSTE GULBENKIAN |AUDITÓRIO 2 | 18.00
CONFERÊNCIA INAUGURAL
17 Novembro 2010 | 18.00
?Taking it on Trust? in Images of Nature
Martin Kemp
PRÓXIMAS CONFERÊNCIAS:
15 Dezembro 2010 | 18.00
The Problem of a Picture of an Atom
Christopher Toumey
19 Janeiro 2011| 18.00
Visiting Time: The Renegotiation of Time through Time-Based Art
Boris Groys
2 Fevereiro 2011 | 18.00
Functional Images of the Brain: Beauty, Bounty, and Beyond
Judy Illes
INFORMAÇÕES:
Rita Rebelo de Andrade | SERVIÇO DE CIÊNCIA | FUNDAÇÃO CALOUSTE GULBENKIAN
Av. de Berna, 45 A ? 1067-001 LISBOA
T. 21 782 35 25 | E. scienceandart@gulbenkian.pt | www.gulbenkian.pt
A tree near my home provides shade from the sun as it rises in the mornings from the east.
This is perfect ground for Tai Chi that may attract more people than me.
I agree with Tim Flannery who writes,
I believe in the sacredness, if you like, of other people. I’m not arrogant enough to be an atheist because we know so little about the world … As we come to know ourselves and our planet, we will be moved to act [on climate change].
Blob Motility is an early phase of a new “actuated shape display using programmable matter.” With it, A gel substance can be programmed to a specific geometry and topology, resulting in organic shape-changing in real space—not unlike a “metaball” in computer graphics, as the lab points out.
The hardware is composed of electromagnets arranged in a honeycomb structure underneath, with control circuits that create a dynamic magnetic field. The blob, a magnetic fluid known as “pBlob,” responds to this field, changing shape in response.
For a demo of the magnetic non-organism that will one day float you to work, see the video above. They explain a little bit there as well, but to get the full story, including the method of blob creation, mechanism details, the language of transformation control, and proposed application, you’ll have to wait until the International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction in 2011, where the design team will present their work.
Andrea Juan’s exhibition of Antarctic art coincides with international recognition of China’s first Nobel Peace prize winner. Will China recognise the need for continuing peace in Antarctica?
WHEN Julian Assange’s mother agreed to our request for an interview, she set very strict parameters: “I will talk about Mr Squiggle and only Mr Squiggle.”
Christine Assange is a puppeteer, and she is very worried about the decline of her artform.
Her phone has been running hot, however, with national and international media seeking comment on arguably a more pressing matter: the arrest in England of her son, the editor-in-chief of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, who has been accused of rape in Sweden.
When contacted by The Sun-Herald on the Sunshine Coast last week, Ms Assange had nothing to say – until the subject turned to Mr Squiggle, the moon-dwelling marionette with a pencil for a nose who entertained generations of Australians on ABC television for 40 years. Mr Squiggle was back in the news because his creator, Norman Hetherington, had died, aged 89, in a Sydney hospital.
“I absolutely adored Mr Squiggle and so did the kids,” Ms Assange said. ”I still adore him.”
She added: “I was designing and making puppets for theatres when my children were growing up. They were immersed in puppetry from their early years and loved watching the show then playing with their own puppets.”
Ms Assange moved about six weeks ago from Melbourne to the Sunshine Coast, where she runs the Fairytale Puppet Theatre. She entertains at schools, libraries and parties. “Unfortunately, traditional puppetry is a dying art in Australia and children these days have too much TV and not enough reading and things to engage their imaginations.”
Asked whether the media had offered her money for her son’s life story, she said: “That’s not about Mr Squiggle.”
The art of crochet is used to represent hyperbolic geometry.
Daina Taimina, a mathematician at Cornell University, made the first useable physical model of the hyperbolic—a feat many mathematicians had believed was impossible—using, of all things, crochet. Taimina and her husband, David Henderson, a geometer at Cornell, are the co-authors of Experiencing Geometry, a widely used textbook on both Euclidean and non-Euclidean spaces. Margaret Wertheim, founder of the Institute for Figuring and a new regular contributor to Cabinet, spoke to them about crocheting and non-Euclidean geometry.
