Cetacean intelligence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dolphins are known to engage in complex play behaviour, which includes such things as producing stable underwater toroidal air-core vortex rings or “bubble rings”. There are two main methods of bubble ring production: rapid puffing of a burst of air into the water and allowing it to rise to the surface, forming a ring; or swimming repeatedly in a circle and then stopping to inject air into the helical vortex currents thus formed. The dolphin will often then examine its creation visually and with sonar. They also appear to enjoy biting the vortex-rings they’ve created, so that they burst into many separate normal bubbles and then rise quickly to the surface. Certain whales are also known to produce bubble rings, or even bubble-nets for the purpose of foraging. Many dolphin species are also known for playing by riding in waves, whether natural waves near the shoreline in a method akin to human “body-surfing”, or within the waves induced by the bow of a moving boat in a behavior known as bow-riding.
The wikipedia article about the intelligence of dolphins and whales is a fascinating read. While sleeping, dolphins appear to rest only one side of the brain at a time. This is sometimes given as an explanation to their exceptionally large brain size. Their brains (1500-1700 grams) are actually heavier than human brains (1300-1400 grams) and the wrinkles in them are of near equivalent complexity.
I’ve seen dolphins underwater once near the Eilat Dolphin Reed in the Red Sea. One of them came all the way to a nearby sandy tourist beach obviously seeking human contact for his or her amusement only. A delighted child ran to the dolphin and whatever they were doing, it was most obviously some sort of playful social interaction for both parties.
Here’s another interesting experiment that is being conducted on captive dolphins:
More recently, researchers at the Sea Life Park in Hawaii have been testing dolphins through an underwater touchscreen attached to a computer. There are no food rewards, so the dolphins use the touchscreen solely for intellectual stimulation. The scientists found that the dolphins weren’t particularly interested in abstractions, such as geometric patterns or artificial sounds. But they were very excited about touching the screen if it resulted in their seeing videos of other dolphins or hearing dolphin sounds. The next step will be to let dolphins choose video or audio sequences and then try to analyze why they’re making those decisions.
I can confirm this behaviour in humans as well. Even without any experiments, I know that people are much more interested in seeing other people and hearing human sounds compared to seeing geometric patterns or artificial sounds.
Posted by api at 20:50 - No Comments »
As a follow-up to the article below about “low” and “high” culture, I decided to write a few words about the relationship between fashion and art. I visited the Espoo Museum of Modern Art last Sunday. The main reason for the visit was the Claude Monet exhibition which is on show over there, but I did take a good, long look at some of the more contemporary stuff that was on show over there. Although some of it was thought-provoking and interesting, I sometimes can’t help but wonder if some of the most creative people are not working as artists after all. There is a huge amount of creativity and depth in modern advertising landscape. Diesel is one of the big brands that has a long tradition of mixing art and fashion in their advertising, but after seeing a blog post about this Viktor & Rolf store in Milan, one can hardly blame them for lack of courage either. Sure, it’s a gimmick, but you have to give them props for actually building that space with that degree of accuracy and commitment. But.. just to put my personal view of art in perspective and for the record, I thought that the Borat movie was a great piece of concept art as well.
Posted by api at 14:37 - 1 Comment »
Palast der Republik
Construction
The Palast was constructed from 1973 to 1976 in the prevailing architectural style for East German buildings, with bronze mirrored windows. The grand opening ceremony was held on 23 April 1976, and the building was opened to the public on 25 April 1976. It was built on the site of the old Berliner Stadtschloss (Berlin City Palace), which was damaged during World War II but finally demolished by the GDR authorities in 1950, as they regarded it a symbol of Prussian imperialism. It was sometimes nicknamed “Ballast der Republik” (”Ballast of the Republic”), “Erichs Lampenladen” (”Erich’s Lamp Shop”, referring to Erich Honecker and the 1001 lamps hanging in the foyer), or “Palazzo Prozzo.”
Demolition
In November 2003, the German parliament decided to demolish the building and leave the area as parkland until funding for the reconstruction of the Berliner Stadtschloss (Berlin City Palace) could be found. Demolition started on February 6, 2006 and was scheduled to last about 15 months. The demolition was to be carried out as a careful and slow process in order not to endanger neighbouring historical buildings such as the Berliner Dom. The cost of the demolition was estimated at 12 million euro. Dismantling of the structure was seriously delayed after more asbestos was found in various locations, and the estimated completion date was pushed back to the end of 2008.
New Music House in Helsinki
In addition to the appointment of a new DG for the public broadcaster, the Administrative Council of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) also voted 15-5 in favour of the company’s participation in the Music Centre planned for downtown Helsinki. The project has an estimated price-tag of around EUR 112 million, of which YLE is expected to find 26%. The remainder of the money will come from the state and from the City of Helsinki, but it was widely acknowledged that had the broadcaster opted out of the venture it would not have got off the ground.
The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra will make its home in the building, hopefully relieving the musicians from the acoustic doldrums of Alvar Aalto’s lovely but musically-unsuitable Finlandia Hall. The new music complex will also become home to the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. Both ensembles will undoubtedly welcome the change.
The building will be completed by 2008 or 2009 at the earliest and will occupy a prime location in the centre of Helsinki, opposite Parliament and on the site of the former railway freight warehouses dating back to the Tsarist period.
In an ironic twist, Eastern european workers also laid the foundation for the new Music House at a less than 2 euro hourly wage. In an epic battle between “high” and “low” culture, the Music House is being erected in midst of great controversy regarding it’s appearance, purpose, financing and location.
I agree that Helsinki needs a acoustically worthy venue for classical music, but trying to wrap this whole thing under the generic term “Music House” is almost an insult to the wealth of other music styles that do not necessarily resonate well within this 1970’s style structure.
Now that the budget is being cut even further down from the estimate mentioned above, I find it almost impossible to believe that the acoustical design of the building will overcome the difficulties that the nearby heavy tram and car traffic present.
In my opinion, this spitting image of Palast der Republik is overpriced, overhyped and an overkill. If the gargantuan “Central Library” will be built next to it, the whole Töölönlahti area will become a sad monument to the idea that culture can be created and maintained by building huge cubes with the proper titles to accompany them.
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Modern Plasztikai Sebészet
The philosophy and technics of the operative procedure was developed only a few years ago, but our experiences on more than one thousand ears revealed the fact, that the operation is safe and well-tolerated by patients. We perform the operation as a one-day-surgery, mostly under local anaesthesia.
The procedure itself means a very careful dissection of the structures at the upper pole of the earlobe. The required reshaping is achieved by modellation of a specially designed chondro-cutaneous flap (a flap containing the own cartilage and skin of the patient). The new shape is fixed by means of absorbable sutures, skin closure is made with unabsorbable uninterrupted sutures.
Postoperative care is very important. The bandage protects the new ear for one week. Suture removal is performed after the second postoperative week. The result is seen immediately after the removal of the bandage, but total resoption of the soft tissue swelling and appearance of the very final shape usually needs three or four weeks.
I’ll be participating in a LARP conference this weekend. Upon researching the subject I found out that some people have actually commissioned pointy elf-style ears as a cosmetic surgery. This is a totally novel and exciting genre of body modification.
My own personal experiences with larping are limited to a few games of Steve Jackson’s Killer in the 1980’s. At the kick-off party I learned that there are still groups actively playing it.
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As computer games get increasingly photorealistic, it is sometimes difficult to discern between screenshots of modern games and actual photographs. Well, we are not there quite yet, but it is a fun conceptual idea to play around with. I formed a Flickr Group called Real Life Computer Game Scenery to have a little archive of images for “Real or Not?” comparison in the future.
While exploring photographs that might suit this definition, I quickly noticed that in real photographs there are often little “mistakes” that wouldn’t make it to a computer model. The random decay and debris is often almost too perfect in computer modelled scenes.
Please join and add a photograph or two if you happen to have anything in your archives that would be relevant to this group.
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Every once in a while, while reading any random newspaper, one stumbles across a story about an expedition to the North Pole or some other extremely remote location. The stories usually make the international news treshold if a) an expedition has just started or b) they have just succesfully made it to the destination or c) someone gets lost or dies in the process. I just spotted a story in Helsingin Sanomat about a solo expedition to the North Pole. After a quick look at the website of Hannah McKeand it became obvious that she is one of the professional adventurers who make a living by planning, organizing and realizing expeditions. When she is not on the road, so to speak, she is available for motivational and public speaking engagements.
Adventurers like this usually have an extensive roster of corporate sponsors. On this particular expedition she has a separate shotgun sponsor and even a chocolate sponsor!
There is at least one professional adventurer, or “explorer” in Finland. The profession has a relatively high fatality rate. A highly controversial incident that many people still remember is the North Pole attempt by Dominick Arduin. She died while pursuing her dream. I tend to agree with the people who say it was mostly due to arrogance and lack of preparation. In the words of Benjamin Franklin: “Failing to Prepare is preparing to fail”.
If you are interested in the subject of people who venture out to the wilderness to find fulfillment in life, I highly recommend two films: Walking alone across Australia and the Oscar nominated film adaptation of Jon Kraukauer’s Into The Wild by Sean Penn. Into the Wild is not really about a professional explorer, but about a student who just wanted to get away from it all and find his inner self.
For a more technical overview of the field of adventuring around in the modern world, browse Explorersweb.com.
I wish fair weather and all the best to Hannah with her expedition. It is always inspiring to see people who have the guts, dedication and energy to get up and actually do this sort of stuff. I have nothing but utmost respect for people like her.
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Occasionally I do redesigns of existing websites. This one was for a small association that promotes networking between executive business women. It was a demanding project which involved a lot of integration and consolidation of various data sources. Membership information is synchronized to an external database via a XML/SSH pipe cronjob. Most of the legacy content had to be imported by hand, because it was originally entered into an unwieldy behemoth of a CMS called Midgard. I still don’t know what was wrong with it, but to give you an idea, load times of simple pages occasionally exceeded 20 seconds.
After tweaking the code and parameters for a month or two, I was happy that the fresh, new site was finally launched last week. The most interesting parts of the site are confidential and members only, but feel free to take a peek at the public side of the site… it’s all in finnish though. Props to Toni for his mad jedi skills and indispensable help. The ladies at Gaia are also a really nice and friendly bunch of people. I hope they like their new virtual home.
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When general Yi Song-Gye overthrew the Goryeo (Koryö) dynasty in 1392, he transferred the capital from Gaeseong to Hanyang (Seoul) and had a defensive wall built around the city. It was finished in 1398 after three years of work. In keeping with East Asian precedent there was a gate at each of the four approaches to the city: north, south, east, and west. Of the original four, the south gate is the best preserved, dating from 1447. Since goods used to flow into the city through here, a bustling market grew up along the adjacent street. Though the walls have vanished, the market remains, and is larger than ever.
The wooden part of the gate was destroyed by fire on February 10, 2008. According to some witnesses, the fire was incendiary. The identity of the arsonist is not yet known, but a taxi driver in the area observed a male approximately 50 years of age climb to the second floor with a lighted bag and run from the area.
Stonehenge, Statue of Liberty, the pyramids of Gaza… national monuments around the world have incredibly powerful symbolic value. That’s why they are often blown up in epic action movies.
My condolences to the Korean people. This was indeed a very regrettable incident.
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Switchback is a rather appealing product if your work involves performing tasks with a computer in adverse weather conditions. It’s water and dust resistant and can operate at -10 degrees celsius with the solid state hard drive option. You can also get an optional wireless package that includes a civilian GPS module. The display is a touchscreen enable 5.6″ LCD screen which is sunlight viewable.
The processor is a 1 Ghz Intel Celeron© M and if I understand correctly, the device can run multiple operating systems such as Windows XP and Linux simultaniously.
I have no idea how much it costs, but my estimate would be somewhere between 4000-6000 euros per unit.
If you already own a Hummer H2, this is the computer to get further enhance your ruggerized look and feel 
Posted by api at 10:27 - No Comments »
Музей советских игровых автоматов
There are moments when you want to come back in the childhood for a short while, because there were so many interesting things that remember cordially till now. From our Soviet childhood they are Souzmultfilm’s cartoons, Olympic Bear, planetarium, Sportloto lottery, football at the yard. They are pioneer camps at the Black Sea, horn sounds, walking-tours and songs near the campfire. They are walks with parents and friends at the Parks of Culture with ice-cream, fizzy drink and candy floss, and more — Arcade Games.
Arcade Games were a part of childhood and youth of soviet people. They were made at the secret military factories from the seventies up to the Perestroika. Forgotten and broken down Soviet-era arcade games are being restored for Moscow’s newest museum and now it is possible to play and feel atmosphere of the passed epoch.
Around 20 of the 37 different kinds of machines are now in working order. They operate with old Soviet 15 kopek coins, the hammer-and-sickle emblem of which itself conjures up a bygone time. Visitors can try their luck with games like ’Sea Battle’, where the player looks through a periscope and pretends to be a submarine commander, attempting to torpedo passing ships. In ’Tankodrom’ the player tries to knock out rocket launchers and jeeps with a small plastic tank. The museum also features Soviet pinball tables, ice-hockey games for two and four players, a target shooting game called ’Sniper’ and early video games with titles like ’Gorodki’ and ’Skachki’ (’horse race’).
Welcome to play, discover and enjoy!
Address of the Museum: 7-aya Parkovaya street, 9/26, Moscow State Technical University “MAMI”, el metro Pervomayskaya
This is like an alternate universe of video game history. One in which Space Invaders, Pacman and Donkey Kong didn’t exist.
Comrades, take good care of those treasures… I’ll come over and visit you one day.
Posted by api at 18:33 - Comments Off
I was seriously considering to build a charger like this myself. After googling around a bit, I found a company (Thermo-Gen) that has already designed a commercial product that allows you to keep low power mobile electronics charged up in the wilderness. It works with water, a heat source and the Peltier effect to generate electricity.
The mobile Thermoelectric Generator / charger (TEG) is based on a Trangia stormproof stove. The TEG can be used with all types of heat sources: LPG, alcohol, kerosene, open log fire, log fired stoves…
- Electric power output: 9W with cool water and 4W with boiling water in the
kettle.
- Kettle diameter: 160mm
- The “all in one” packs into a compact unit
- Electric connection: DC plug connector
- Optional adapter: DC-plug to car cigarette lighter socket
- Cellular phones and other units are charged via a cigarette lighter charger
adapter connected to the TEG output
As long as you have firewood and water, you could easily keep a GPS, a digital camera and a Nokia communicator infinitely charged with this ingenious device. I wrote about portable power sources some time ago, but unfortunately solar power is not a realistic option here in Finland.
Posted by api at 08:02 - 2 Comments »
Sir Edmund was apparently so shy that he even proposed to his wife with a message via her mother.
In the years that followed his famous ascent, he shunned the celebrity that had become his overnight.
On the 50th anniversary of his achievement, he even turned down an invitation from the Queen, so that he could instead travel to Kathmandu to be with lifelong Sherpa friends.
He was made an honorary Nepalese citizen in 2003.
Sir Edmund was far happier exploring.
During the next two decades, he led expeditions to the South Pole, searched for the fabled Yeti, and completed six Himalayan ascents.
And he became increasingly concerned by the plight of the Sherpa people he had met on his expeditions.
He spent two years as New Zealand’s High Commissioner to India, and founded the Himalayan Trust in 1964, which helped establish clinics, hospitals and nearly 30 schools.
It also supported the construction of two airstrips, bringing in more tourists than Sir Edmund liked.
He continued this work after personal tragedy in 1975, when his wife and daughter died in a plane crash on their way to meet him at a construction site.
Although the explorer was inconsolable for a long time, he found solace in the Nepal landscape and its people.
A man of great virtue… may he rest in peace.
Posted by api at 09:47 - No Comments »
During my last hike in Lappland I realized what a difference a little bonfire can make to a camp site. It immediately increases the general comfort level of a wilderness camp. You can cook food, dry your gear and stay warm much more easily when you are staying next to a fire. Unfortunately modern ultralight tent and clothing materials are usually very sensitive to heat. When placed next to fire, a typical tent or synthetic clothing can catch fire in no time.
Many Finnish hikers use a traditional lean-to shelter made of aluminium coated nylon such as the one pictured above. What I cannot understand is why hasn’t anyone made one out of Nomex. Nomex is a type of aramid fibre that is used in textile products used by the military, fire fighters and car racers. It is patented by DuPont and various fabrics based on it seem to be readily available from manufacturers such as Warwick.
A company called Massif even produces fire-resistant, waterproof, breathable outdoor clothing. I’d be interested in sewing a traditional lean-to shelter out of waterproof Nomex derivative. Please drop me a line on the comment section of this post if you know of a supplier that could sell a short roll or a leftover piece of suitable fabric.
EDIT: I’ve learned that Nomex is also used in hot air balloons in the part that is closest to the burner. I’ll contact a balloon pilot tomorrow to ask for more details. All I really need is an approximately 2 x 5 meter piece or 10 square meters… I can’t afford to buy a 500 meter roll.
Posted by api at 09:20 - No Comments »
I usually don’t write negative reviews, but either it was the brain washing of the Vatican or perhaps Golden Compass is just a bad movie. The plot keywords made me salivate in anticipation, but as soon as the lights went out and the endless trailers and commercials had ended, I quickly found out that this particular film wasn’t my cup of tea. While Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra wasn’t exactly an untalented actress, she failed to breathe life to the synthetic, blue screened scenes. Nicole Kidman herself had slight troubles orientating to the invisible daemon friends who were all digitally added to the frames in the post, no doubt.
This is a problem I’ve seen in many, many films. I, Robot suffered from the same blue screen syndrome. So did Mirrormask by the way. (On the other hand, I did like Beowulf quite a bit… perhaps it was because it didn’t mix live action with CGI, who knows)
It is hard for an actor or an actress to imagine that they are talking to a 4 meter tall polar bear when they are actually just talking to a giant chroma key wall or, even worse, to the microphone in a tiny little voiceover booth.
Before I forget it, let me just mention that my favorite performance in Golden Compass was Sam Elliot as Mr. Scoresby.
Technology aside, I wasn’t swept away by the plot either. It felt very much like a made-to-order saga with a little bit of myths and scandinavian names thrown in for good measure. The film is based on a book by Philip Pullman, one of England’s most outspoken atheists. There is a strong anti-christian (or anti-dogmatic, to be more precise) undertone in Pullman’s script. On the other hand the fascination with the ancient mythology seems very shallow and gimmicky in this context.
I’ll give Golden Compass two stars out of five. Ahh, I’m looking forward to I am Legend to also give two stars only. This will equalize my ratings scale nicely and make it look more like a gaussian curve instead of a baseball cap with every other movie getting three and a half or four stars…
I’ll be back
Posted by api at 23:04 - 2 Comments »
It is that special time of year again. Here’s a collection of images from my archives to enhance your holiday spirit.
If that didn’t help, try one of the Christmas radios
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