...
Enjoyed this conversation with Seth Godin around tribes
and why we all need one,
&
how we should be the best in the world
at what we do.
...
-- Seth also answers why he is not on Twitter. --
Wednesday
Monday
Flies Turn in Mid-Air with Shoulder Shrug
A new analysis shows that the flies’ aerial gymnastics are driven by wing joints that act like wind-up toys, letting the bugs whirl around almost automatically.
Insights from the study, which was published online April 5 in Physical Review Letters, could someday help build better flying robots.
Fruit flies beat their wings about once every 4 milliseconds — much faster than their neurons can fire — and can turn 120 degrees in 18 wing beats. This made study co-author Itai Cohen of Cornell University wonder, “How much of the wing motion is being controlled by the insect, and how much is going along for the ride, being controlled by aerodynamics?”To investigate, Cohen and his colleagues set up three high-speed cameras trained at the center of a box holding about 10 flies (see video below). A fly crossing the center of the box triggered the cameras to start rolling at 8,000 frames per second. At the same time, a disk of LED lights projected a rotating striped pattern on the inside of the box to trick the flies into making a U-turn.
“The flies see this, and it makes them dizzy,” says study co-author Attila Bergou of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who helped perform the experiments as a graduate student at Cornell. “It generates very reliable and repeatable turns in these flies.”
The physicists analyzed the videos to extract detailed information on the wings’ positions with respect to the body.
“I was surprised that they were able to get it to work as well as they did,” comments Ty Hedrick of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “Getting the uncertainty of these measurements low enough that you can see what you need to see is difficult.”
The team found that when the fly turns, one wing tilts more than the other, similar to the way a rower pulls one oar harder than the other to make a boat turn. Thanks to aerodynamics, a wing-tilt difference of just 9 degrees is enough to send a fly off in another direction.
“Essentially these insects are swimming through the air, using drag forces to row themselves in whichever direction they want,” Cohen says.
Further analysis using computer models of the fly and aerodynamic simulations showed that the fly’s wing joint acts like a torsional spring, the kind found in wind-up toys or old clocks. To change its wing tilt and set up a turn, all the fly has to do is twitch the muscle that controls the spring.
“The insects don’t have to do any thinking whatsoever,” Cohen says. “They have a natural system that provides just the right amount of torque to the wing.”
The physicists are planning comparative studies in other flying insects, like bees and dragonflies. Cohen hopes the findings could help design more-maneuverable flying robots that take advantage of insect aerodynamics.
“Really the idea is, how do we start to build more efficient and smaller robots that take advantage of aerodynamics to do the things they do, rather than brute force the way we usually do these things?” Cohen says. “We’re in the dark ages as far as building anything like that. We’re nowhere in the ballpark.
Friday
We Forget About Whatever It Is We Wanted to Forget About
“Forget about it.” This is the slogan that made it on to the tee shirts we gave out at our recent Waves of Change Conference. Of course, it took mere minutes for somebody to start reciting the line in his best New York accent a la Joey Tribbiani in the Friends television series. All well and good. The humor is part of the forgetting, since “Forget about it,” more than anything else, reminds us to take our mind’s hands off whatever project concerns us, and give the Field right of way.
Like so much in Field training, this little slogan, taken as instruction, poses the problem of how you deliberately forget about something, but the paradox, as usual, is resolved in practice, since forgetting about something means getting on with other things, those things that are, in the language of the Course, “before us to do,” and as we do this, we forget about whatever it is we wanted to forget about, and we forget that we forgot. Our attention naturally follows the natural course of events as they arise, releasing all agendas, willfulness, and attempts to manage or control outcomes. Forgetting, in this sense, is a by-product of getting on with other things. This is why Field training students who practice what they know come across as people grounded in the living present. They have released themselves from the endless distractions of willful living.
There is more to the story, however, and that is how the Field responds when we “forget about it.” Giving the Field right of way in our affairs does more than return us to a more attentive, mindful, and therefore efficient engagement of the present. It also evokes nonlocal efficiency, for the Field takes up our cause the instant we put it down. In this lies another paradox—that we can have what we want if we can walk away from it. Some may think this means that we have to come to a point where what we want doesn’t matter to us anymore, but this is far from the truth. Rather, we have to come to a point where what we want doesn’t rule us anymore. We have our desires, but they no longer have us. We stop being obsessive, having seen through the Particle assumption, unsupportable on even cursory examination, that nothing will happen if we don’t make it happen. In forgetting about it, we discover the extraordinary efficiency of letting things happen, of getting out of the way so that something greater can come into play in our behalf.
There is a surprising surge of confidence that comes with this getting out of the way, a confidence rooted in delegating to that intelligence that created and sustains the universe each moment, and the sense that the Field is working on whatever we have released. The willingness to have what we want goes hand in hand with the willingness to let it go. To be willing to “forget about” is to take up our authority as co-creators, for what we forget in this way, the Field remembers for us, and remembers with the efficiency that set the stars burning.
http://www.fieldproject.net/realities/?s=field+theory
The More Joyful You Are
The Universe
is not punishing you
or blessing you.
The Universe is responding
to the vibrational attitude
that you are emitting.
The more joyful you are,
the more Well-being
flows to you.
...
And, you get to choose
the details of how it flows.
Abraham-Hicks
Keith Richards: Books, Blues & Screwy Dewey Hooey
>SHHH! Keith Richards, the grizzled veteran of rock’n’roll excess, has confessed to a secret longing: to be a librarian. After decades spent partying in a haze of alcohol and drugs, Richards will tell in his forthcoming autobiography that he has been quietly nurturing his inner bookworm.
He has even considered “professional training” to manage thousands of books at his homes in
The guitarist started to arrange the volumes, including rare histories of early American rock music and the second world war, by the librarian’s standard Dewey Decimal classification system but gave up on that as “too much hassle.” He has opted instead for keeping favoured volumes close to hand and the rest languishing on dusty shelves.
Richards has also acted as a public library, lending out copies of the latest Bernard Cornwell or Len Deighton novels to friends without much hope of getting them back. And, like the Queen at Balmoral, he leaves favoured books by the bedside for guests staying at
In his autobiography, Life, due to be published in October, Richards will reveal how, as a child growing up in the post-war-austerity of 1950s
He has declared: “When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser.”
Richards has signed up to the Little, Brown Book Group and will share writing duties with James Fox, the author of White Mischief, which charted aristocratic excess in pre-war
Keith Richards: Books, Blues & Screwy Dewey Hooey
SHHH! Keith Richards, the grizzled veteran of rock’n’roll excess, has confessed to a secret longing: to be a librarian. After decades spent partying in a haze of alcohol and drugs, Richards will tell in his forthcoming autobiography that he has been quietly nurturing his inner bookworm.
He has even considered “professional training” to manage thousands of books at his homes in
The guitarist started to arrange the volumes, including rare histories of early American rock music and the second world war, by the librarian’s standard Dewey Decimal classification system but gave up on that as “too much hassle.” He has opted instead for keeping favoured volumes close to hand and the rest languishing on dusty shelves.
Richards has also acted as a public library, lending out copies of the latest Bernard Cornwell or Len Deighton novels to friends without much hope of getting them back. And, like the Queen at Balmoral, he leaves favoured books by the bedside for guests staying at
In his autobiography, Life, due to be published in October, Richards will reveal how, as a child growing up in the post-war-austerity of 1950s
He has declared: “When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser.”
Richards has signed up to the Little, Brown Book Group and will share writing duties with James Fox, the author of White Mischief, which charted aristocratic excess in pre-war
Thursday
Nassim Taleb: Climate Change and "Too Big" Polluters
I have been asked frequently on how to deal with climate change in connection with the Black Swan idea and my work on decision-making under opacity. The position I suggest should be based on both ignorance and the delegation to the wisdom of Mother Nature since it is older than us, hence wiser than us, and proven much smarter than scientists.
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We do not understand enough about Mother Nature to mess with her --and I do not trust the models used to forecast climate change.
Simply, we are facing nonlinearities and magnifications of errors coming from the so-called "butterfly effects" we saw in Chapter 11, actually discovered by Lorenz using weather forecasting models. Small changes in input, coming from measurement error, can lead to massively divergent projections --and that, very generously, assumes that we have the right equations.
We have polluted for years, causing much damage to the environment, while the scientists currently making these complicated forecasting models were not sticking their necks out and trying to stop us from building these risks (they resemble those "risk experts" in the economic domain who fight the previous war) --these are the ones now trying to impose the solutions on us.
But the skepticism about models that I propose does not lead to the same conclusions as the ones endorsed by anti-environmentalists, pro-market fundamentalists, quite the contrary: we need to be hyper-conservationists ecologically, super-Green, since we do not know what we are harming with now. That's the sound policy under ignorance and epistemic opacity.
To those who say "we have no proof that we are harming nature", a sound response is "we have no proof that we are not harming nature either" --the burden of the proof is not on the ecological conservationist, but on someone disrupting an old system.
Furthermore we should not "try to correct" the harm done as we may be creating another problem we do not know much about currently.
One practical solution I came up with, based on the nonlinearitities in the damage (under the assumption that harm increases disproportionally with the quantities released), and using the same mathematical reasoning as the one that led to my opposing the "too big" concept, is to spread the damage across pollutants --should we need to pollute, of course. Let us carry a thought experiment.
Case 1: you give the patient a dose of cyanide, hemlock, or some poisonous substance, assuming they are equally harmful (and no synergetic, superadditive effect
Case 2: you give the patient a tenth of a dose of ten such substances, for the same total amount of poison.
Clearly we can see that Case 2, by spreading the poison ingested across substances, is at the worst equally harmful (if all the poisonous substances act in the same way), and at the best close to harmless to the patient.
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