Krulwich Wonders...

 

Look at this animal. ... What do you see? Or more importantly, what don't you see?

16-week-old giant panda cub, Hua Mei, at the San Diego Zoo.
Enlarge Ron Garrison/Associated Press

16-week-old giant panda cub, Hua Mei, at the San Diego Zoo.
Ron Garrison/Associated Press

Every giant panda, said evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould, is a riddle. A contradiction. Each one is, first, a soft, furry ball of adorableness "with a large, round head and clumsy, cuddly body" that we all want to hug. That panda, said Gould, "exists in our mind."

Then there's the hidden panda, the real one that isn't as we imagine, that lives in the wild — and that panda, Gould wrote, "has remained essentially a mystery."

Thirty years ago, scientists knew next to nothing about pandas. Because the animals live in dense forests thick with bamboo, in 1980, when George Schaller from the Bronx Zoo and a team of Chinese scientists spent four years searching in Sichuan, they saw pandas rarely, only 16 times in the first two years. Most viewings, they wrote later, "were brief — a glimpse as an animal crossed an opening or ambled up a trail."

Panda in a bambo forrest.
Allison Steinfeld for NPR

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Uh Oh. Construction workers please note: Somebody just built a 20-foot tower using flying robots. No people involved.

The demo took place in a warehouse-like art gallery called FRAC, just outside Paris.

As humans (none of them, I presume, in the construction trades) applauded and gaped, four helicopterish thingies swooped through the air, somehow avoiding each other, and one by one, settled on some "brick dispensers." Using small plungers they then plucked one brick at a time, carried each to the "building site" and slowly created a wall. It took a few days, but what emerged is a twisting, undulating tower, designed by Swiss architects Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler.

The tower created by the Flight Assembled Architecture project.
Francois Lauginie/Gramazio & Kohler and Raffaello D'Andrea in cooperation with ETH Zurich

As best I can tell, though the air was buzzing with brick-bearing bots, there were no unhappy accidents (the bricks weren't heavy anyway, they were polystyrene foam). Whenever a robot's batteries ran low, it would automatically plug itself into a charger, while other bots took its place.

"This," said roboticist Raffaello D'Andrea, is the "first installation to be built by flying machines." The whole scene was pretty surreal. Here's what it looked like.

YouTube

Humans, of course, helped. Erico Guizo, reporting for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers' blog, Spectrum says:

The ceiling of the room where the assembly is taking place was equipped with a motion-capture system. A computer uses the vision data to keep track of the quadcopters and tell them where to go — the same approach used at ETH's Flying Machine Arena

If you want to know how the robots avoided collisions, how the bricks got glued together, how the design was transmitted to the bots, details can be found here, but what got to me is how astonishing, beautiful technologies keep arriving with the promise of doing things differently, and increasingly, without us.

Maybe (probably?) robots will create new job opportunities in computing, repair, policing and who knows what else, and of course it will be years, maybe generations before they can do what high-rise construction workers do. Still, something I would have called outlandish just ten years ago, (maybe even 10 minutes ago) is suddenly, demonstrably possible.

Don't Stop. It Gets Crazier

And, of course, as soon as I got interested in "brick swarming", (as this technology is called by architects), something even more outlandish and even more beautiful popped up.

Yoon H. Kim and Yang-Kyu Han, two architects in Seoul, Korea have proposed a high-rise construction project to be built by "bees". Not ordinary bees. That would be too tame. They think they could do it with robot bees, like this guy:

How would this work? Writing in eVolo, an architecture magazine, Danielle Del Sol says, "These bees aren't interested in honey: these workers will actually build a structure. Each robot is capable of using cartridges filled with agents that enable them to construct literal physical material, which the designers dub "augmented synthetic material."

I have no idea what that means. Maybe a cloud of bees will swarm into the sky and squirt a building into being. That can't be. More likely, these bees will create subtle textures on a building's surface that regulate heat, transmit information. They will build these systems in small dabs, requiring hundreds of thousands of construction bees. This sounds like crazy-talk, but then I saw the Korean version of what a construction site would look like and I thought, "Oh my god!"

Imagine walking down a street and seeing something like this on a city lot, or looking out from your high rise window into a cloud of swarming bots, what a sight!

Flying robotic construction clouds are increasingly being discussed in academia, so who knows, maybe one day all of us will have the "benefit" of high tech helpers and this blog will be typed by flying fingerbots, sent to a keyboard by pulses from my brain.

I'm OK with that, but my fingers, I don't think they'll be happy. What are they supposed to do when I'm writing in my head? For years and years, they've had all this exercise, writing, erasing, writing, erasing. The day they invent a thumbot will be a sad, sad day for my thumb.

I'm just sayin.


For a darker view of robotic construction clouds, see Geoff Manaugh's essays on his brilliant BLDGBLOG where he asks:

...who might first pick up on and directly invest in this construction process (the field exploration wings of transnational oil-services firms? forward-operating base commanders of the 22nd-century U.S. military? rogue GSD students self-supported by a family trust fund?)

The New Year comes, of course, at midnight. But because we have different time zones, we have many different midnights and some are much more crowded than others.

This morning I asked myself: who's got the biggest New Year's Eve on earth? By which I mean: which time zone has the most people in it. And the answer is clear.

If you look at this world time zone map, one zone, which we've highlighted it in yellow has, as you can see, all of China, all 1.3 billion of 'em, plus a hunk of Siberia, plus Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, a chunk of Indonesia, Timor and a cut of Australia. Altogether, that's got to be at least 1.5 billion people who will greet 2012 at the very same moment.

Time Zone Map

Party-wise (assuming Confucian cultures pay our New Year's eve any mind, and I think they do), this is the hot and poppin' New Year's Eve Zone on our planet, bigger than the zone that transects Western Europe and Africa, bigger than anything in the Americas.

For Those Who Don't Go Out on New Year's...

But maybe you're the quiet type. Maybe you don't like a lot of noise and merry making on what is a purely odometer-like occasion. And maybe you are looking for a time zone that is next to empty where there's nobody around to irritate you. Well, I think we've got a zone for you.

This zone is two zones west of the Greenwich meridian. It is mostly empty ocean.

Time Zone Map

Yes, it does contain a hunk of Greenland, a bit of Brazil, and a few Atlantic islands (the Azores) but all those places have chosen — and passed laws, attaching themselves to other time zones. They've opted out. So not a lot of people live in this zone's time. It's a vast stretch of uninhabited Atlantic, populated only by fish and whales who don't have, I presume, a special feel for Decembers or Januaries or clocks or midnights. It does, down near Antarctica, include two little dots of land: the South Georgia and the South Sandwich islands, but they don't, either of them, have many inhabitants. One website I looked at estimates a research population of about 24 people, in the summer months (which is around now).

No Need For Velvet Ropes

Meaning, if you invited everybody in this time zone (not including transient boat traffic, penguins or seals), the biggest crowd you could hope for is two dozen people.

So there you have it, two very different zones for different temperaments. And the differences aren't trivial: 1.5 billion people here, 24 people there.

That's the Chinese advantage over South Sandwich Island. Their zone has 62.5 million times more people. But here's the South Sandwich advantage (for shy people): their zone is 62.5 million times less crowded. Whichever way you like it, happy New Year!

Homer Simpson knows the problem. What do you give to someone who lives abnormally? Outside ordinary categories?

Well, English muffins are always welcome, but since we're about to hit the weekend (and I'm permitted to play) I've come up with a short list of gifts that would satisfy somebody like...oh...me.

1. A Paleolithic Telephone

It doesn't ring, doesn't answer, and never needs recharging. Of course, it doesn't do anything, either, but it's oh so elegant. Created by graphic designer Jennifer Daniel and her mom.

A caveman phone.
Jennifer Daniel, Sandi Daniel/Flickr

2. A Perfect Hideaway

Who wouldn't want to live in a cozy, teeny weeny, grass-roofed Hobbit Home? This one (which we've gift wrapped so you can open it yourself), was built by Simon Dale in Wales for about $5,200 (he did it himself). It would be like living in a dream.

Click to unwrap.

3. Wheeeee! Without Worries

Speaking of staircases, here's an attachment for people have always wanted to slide down banisters, but worry about ... umm ... collateral damage. This is the perfect gift for a wuss.

A staircase slide.
Cheezburger Network

4. A Hang Drum

I don't know how they work, but musician Daniel Waples, plopped on a sidewalk in Oslo, Norway, makes it look so easy I want to try. Wikipedia says there's nothing inside a "hang" (they don't call it a drum,) but air; those knobs and bumps give it resonance, and all you have to do is remember to play the right side, as Daniel will demonstrate. ...

YouTube

5. Bacon Aroma In The Morning

There's something about the sizzle and smell of bacon in the morning that makes some people instantly happy. (I'm not a bacon eater, but I know people who wiggle with pleasure when they catch a whiff from the kitchen.) Well, here's an alarm clock that wakes you up, not with a buzz, but with the wafting smell of bacon. It's the Wake N' Bacon, from designer Matty Sallin and friends.

So, if any of you out there have a hobbit-house loving, banister sliding, bacon-sniffing, telephone using, bowl-tapping friend on your shopping list ... you're all set.

It's an odd question, but the answer is startling.

A few years ago, a physicist named Russell Seitz asked himself, "How much does the Internet weigh?" By which he meant, how much does the whole thing, this vast interlocking web of content pulsing through 75 to 100 million servers staggered all over the world, what's its total weight?

The Internet is not something I would ever think to weigh. It's like weighing a radio program. Why bother?

But Seitz did the math, and discovered that while the Internet sucks up gobs and gobs of energy, something like "50,000,000 horsepower," if you put it on a scale, it does have a weight. The whole thing, he says, weighs "two ounces."

Yup. That's all.

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Me: Manu, you're a bubble man, no?
Manu: I'm all about bubbles. I study soft matter physics.
Me: Just the guy I was looking for. I've got some soap bubbles to show you.
Manu: OK, show me. Where are they?
Me: Well, I found them in a video, a beautiful, but slightly troubling video, shot by photographer Kim Pimmel.
Manu: What do you mean, "troubling"?
Me: Well, look first, then we'll talk.


Manu: So?
Me: So the guy who made this video injected dye into the clump of soap bubbles so we can see each bubble's shape...
Manu: And...?
Me: Well, look! Don't you see something wrong?
Manu: No...

A screen grab from Kim Pimmel's video, Compress 02.
Kim Pimmel/Vimeo


Me: Aren't soap bubbles supposed to be round?
Manu: Often, they are...
Me: No, I mean when I blow chewing gum bubbles, or bubble-blowing bubbles, they're always round-ish...
Manu: Your point?
Me: Well, the bubbles in this video aren't round at all! When the dye comes in, it turns out they've got sides, five, six, sides; they're very polygonish. Why aren't they round?
Manu: The bubbles you've been dreaming of are single bubbles. What you have here are a bunch of bubbles from hand soap, all clumped together...
Me: OK...
Manu: And as the water drains off, they squeeze so close, they can't be round any more. There's no room.

Why Angles?
Me: But why do they form angles? Why don't they just get squished, like balloons mushed together?
Manu: Well, to make this extra simple...
Me: Feel free.
Manu: ...If you're a bubble, the next best thing to being round is being a trio.
Me: A what?
Manu: A trio. A group of three. Three bubbles intersecting at a common point can persist, can stay bubbles.
Me: Really?
Manu: Yup. And here's the fascinating part. Look at this freeze frame. Do you see something strangely beautiful here?

Angles forme when bubbles intersect.
Kim Pimmel/Vimeo


Me: Ummmm, no.
Manu: Well, look again, at the angles formed where the bubbles intersect. Over and over and over again, it's the same angle! Roughly (in the natural soapsud world, there are variations around the mean) 120 degrees. A slice of soapsuds, in turns out, is a carnival of 120 degree angles!

When three bubbles intersect they make a 120º angle.
Enlarge Kim Pimmel/Vimeo

When three bubbles intersect they make a 120º angle.
Kim Pimmel/Vimeo

Me: Why 120 degrees?
Manu: Well, again, to simplify...
Me: Do it, I'm not proud.
Manu: A round bubble is 360 degrees, right?
Me: Right.
Manu: So if we ask three circles to share an intersection, equally, what's 1/3rd of 360 degrees?
Me: 120.
Manu: Yup.
Me: Did the three musketeers know about this?
Manu: They weren't bubbles.


Kim Pimmel is a designer at Adobe in San Francisco. His "love for old cameras, stop motion and time-lapse" is obvious when you check out his video explorations of motion, soapsuds and small structures, at his website. He is looking, he says, for "the little jewels of perfection nestled in the mundane." The bubbles in his video, he tells me, come from hand-soap mixed with tap water. He added corn syrup to stabilize the bubble structure. The black dye is ferrofluid, the red dye is red food coloring, that big black circular thing is not a drain, it's a magnet, which helps draw the black dye to the surface so we can better see the bubble structures.

Manu Prakash is an Assistant Professor at Stanford University's Bioengineering Department. He just opened his lab and will be studying fluid mechanics in biology, algorithmic self assembly, nonlinear droplet microfluidics, and design for development. In his spare time, he hides from me while I email him, call him and pester him 8th grade physics questions.

The other day, a book arrived here called The Tiny Book Of Tiny Stories and I thought, "Oooh, how tiny will they be?" Very short stories can get very, very short and still be good. The most famous example (supposedly written by Ernest Hemingway) draws a little sigh with only six words; it's a sales ad.

For sale:
baby shoes,
never worn.

Nobody has been able to beat that one, at least nobody I've read, so I quickly opened this new collection and found an anthology of teeny tales. They come from people all over the world, who sent them to a website created by Jared Geller and actor Joseph Gordon Levitt (who you may remember dragging bodies through a corridor in the movie "Inception").

Their book has some beauties. My favorite, which made me laugh, goes like this:

King Midas often
Wondered what would happen
If he touched himself.

At eleven words (and slightly R-rated at that) it's a cliffhanger. Carbon based life forms don't do well as precious metal.

But I've seen stories that are way richer, and much, much shorter, if we're counting words. They use no words at all.

You know these stories. They are photographs, made to be seen. Take, for example, this famous and glorious tale of bravery, where the hero steps into the scene from where, no one knows, intending what, we can only imagine, with consequences we will never know.

A Chinese protestor blocks a line of tanks June 5, 1989. The man, calling for an end to the violence and bloodshed against pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square.
Enlarge Jeff Widner/AP

A Chinese protestor blocks a line of tanks June 5, 1989. The man, calling for an end to the violence and bloodshed against pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square.
Jeff Widner/AP

Or how about this? A magical moment, where you learn something new about the universe, something small but wonderful.

Pickles the fox smelling the daffodil.
Enlarge Sweetmart/via Flickr

Pickles the fox smelling the daffodil.
Sweetmart/via Flickr

But if I had to choose, this one, which has nobody in it, only a bicycle and the trace of somebody missing, is the one that surpasses Hemingway for simple eloquence. It is titled, "Sarajevo," and it was shot by the American photographer Annie Leibovitz. There's a story behind it, and I'll tell it in a footnote below, but when you look, you don't have to know the details to sense the scream that still hangs in the air.

 Sarajevo: The fallen bicycle of a teenage boy killed by a sniper in 1994.
Enlarge Annie Leibovitz

 Sarajevo: The fallen bicycle of a teenage boy killed by a sniper in 1994.
Annie Leibovitz

Would you call this a short story? It was created in one glance, one snap. Yes, it seeps backwards (what happened?) and forwards (where is the child?) in time, but the tale, if you hold it in your hand, is very simple. All it says is... "Look at this."

Or maybe just: "This."


Joseph Gordon-Levitt has already published two Tiny Books of Tiny Stories (It Books, Harper Collins, 2011). The story of King Midas comes from Volume 1. If you want to see or send in a story, their website is here.

Here's the back story on Annie Leibovitz's photo. Annie was in Yugoslavia on her way back from photographing the just-crowned "Miss Besieged Sarajevo" in 1993 when someone fired a mortar not too far ahead of her car. "It hit a teenage boy on a bike," she wrote in her memoir At Work (Random House, 2008) "and ripped a big hole in his back. We put him in the car and rushed him to the hospital, but he died on the way."


This week, physicists in Geneva say they turned up evidence that something that they imagine exists might actually exist. It's called a Higgs boson, and for the moment it's a hypothetical particle. No one has ever seen one, but this week the scientists suggested, "We're not sure, but maybe we caught a glimpse."

Welcome to the wonderful world of theoretical science.

Fifty years ago, Peter Higgs (among others) conjured up a particle to explain how things "get their mass." (What? We don't know this? We don't know why a big thing has more heft than a little thing? Isn't this kind of fundamental? How could we not know this?)

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Here's the thing about mountains: You can, if you are totally insane, jump off them. Or, under the right circumstances, they — the mountains — can jump off you.

I've got pictures of both happening.

First, the jumper. His name is Espen Fadnes. He's Norwegian. Last Sept. 16, he climbed up a gorge in Stryn, Norway, zipped himself into what's known as a "wing suit," peered down a harrowingly high edge, and leapt off.

What you see — and boy, can you see this, because he's wearing a camera and is being tracked by multiple video photographers from below — is him dropping, gliding, soaring at speeds up to 155 miles an hour, all the while steering with his sail-like arms dangerously close to rock faces and tree tops. I don't think I blinked while watching this. While there's a lake at the bottom, he doesn't land in the water. His landing is as astonishing as the jump. (Don't watch if plunging through the air like a falcon makes you wince.)

So that's my man downing a mountain.

Next comes a mountain gliding past men, in this case, a group of screaming Italian guys in the southern Italian town of Maierato. Last February, after a heavy rainfall, a big chunk of mountain in Calabria, carrying boulders, trees and shrubs, all unhinged by water, began a stately slide downward to a valley. It's operatic in scale. You can literally watch the mountain glide past the town. The police were called. Two hundred residents were told to evacuate. They did, but not quietly.

YouTube

And, finally, here's one more, this one so gentle I could imagine doing it myself. In this case, we're at a mudslide in Wyoming — in the Snake River Canyon, near Jackson, so you've got this mountain of earth moving like a slow escalator down to a river, and what we see is a highway worker (this is at about 20 seconds in, you have to be patient.) He walks onto the mound of moving mud, stands there for a little downhill ride, then suddenly, like something out of a Monty Python sketch, he turns, bounds down the mud pile to the highway on the other side, and you see him roaring on foot up the road into the distance—to do what? I have no idea. Maybe the mud ride made him giddy. Mountains seem to do that to people.

YouTube

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