SynapticNulship

Recently I visited the Museum of Sex in New York City.

Museum of Sex

I took a few photos, mostly of robotics and/or cyborg related exhibits.  There was also a comics exhibit (I didn’t bother taking any photos) which was somewhat interesting, such as Superman co-creator Joe Shuster’s racy drawings, including some copies of Nights of Horror.

The “Sex Lives of Animals” exhibit was quite interesting also, including a large model of a dolphin inserting its penis in another dolphin’s blowhole (by artist Rune Olsen).

dolphin sex sculpture

Anyway, artist Michael Sullivan makes these weird models of robots, a tie-in to his stop motion film The Sex Life of Robots:

Iron Hole?

Deeper into the Iron Hole

There was a separate area for “Robots and Figurines” but it was disappointingly sparse.

Robots & Figurines. And...um...masks.

Since you can see it in the reflection, I might as well throw this one in:

Torpedo Tit Catsuit

A concept of wearable computing that is somewhat different than what I’ve seen before:

I'm not sure what's going on here.

side view

The next photo shows examples of Realdolls.  And if you think this is getting weird, visit their website, where you will learn that elf ears can be added to a female doll for an extra $150.

Realdolls (much better than Fakedolls)

One of the early uses of the electric motor was for female stimulation.  Sears Roebuck used to sell vibrators.

Old fashioned vibrator

And that concludes this brief survey of the Museum of Sex.  I wouldn’t make a special trip for it, but if you happen to be in NYC, I recommend checking it out.

Image credits:  All photos taken by the author Samuel H. Kenyon, except for dolphins from Rune Olsen.

You spend a large portion of your time staring at heads of people. But have you wondered how they evolved? Harvard scientist Daniel Lieberman, Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology, has been studying human head evolution, particularly the unique features relative to other animals.

I attended his lecture at Harvard tonight, “Heads Up! How and Why the Amazing Human Head Evolved to Be the Way It Is,” which is timed with the release of his new book The Evolution of the Human Head.

First, Lieberman took off his shoes. It just snowed again in Cambridge and he doesn’t like wearing his boots (or maybe he has some kind of Mr. Rogers complex).

Second, Lieberman talks about how the functions and ontogeny of the human head would boggle any engineer if they had to make something like that. For instance, it’s hard to imagine how to design and implement a pea-sized robot that grows into a cantaloupe-sized robot while maintaining survival functionality the entire time.

If robot heads could grow.

Of course, it’s not an entirely fair comparison since natural products aren’t engineered, but the point is that the head seems overwhelmingly complex to us.

Integration

Not surprisingly (to me), Lieberman’s basic recipe for head development is integration. You can view the development of a body part as a series of interactions with atomic parts, which lie at various levels of granularity. For instance, you have proteins, cells, tissues, organs, etc. All the parts constantly adjust to each other, so as to maintain the overall system.

Lieberman uses the concept of skeletal capsules, but he warns us that it’s just a hypothesis called the functional matrix hypothesis. Some of his past research was to find correlations between various bone structure sizes in mice, and apparently he found a wicked lot of correlations.

Integration continues all through ontogeny.

He showed two photos of characters from Harry Potter, and claimed that it showed how each person’s nose matches their face. However, it wasn’t very convincing, especially his calling Daniel Radcliffe’s head narrow when it looks really wide to me, like as wide as Elijah Wood’s.

Harry Potter, wide in cranium, narrow in patience.

What would have been better is an example of what would happen without the integration between subsystems—would somebody have a nose covering up their eyes or something?

Harry Potter with development error.

Or the nose would just fall off and run away?

Nooooooooooooooooose!

Of course, the environment is also involved in ontogeny—later in the presentation he described an experiment he did with hyraxes, in which they found that if the babies chewed softer food, they had smaller teeth as adults.

Hyrax Potter.

Anyway, the way this complex head integration relates to evolution is that it gives evolution something very hackable. It enables evolution to cause major changes in growth from minor tweaks.

The rest of the talk was a quick tour of the evolutionary history of human heads.

Human Head Uniqueness

So what are the aforementioned unusual characteristics of human heads? Well, the brain case is different, our neck comes out of the bottom of our head, we have vertical foreheads, visible eye whites, external nose, no snout, small mouths, small canine teeth, big ear holes, etc.

Your head is remarkably unusual.

Unfortunately, Lieberman does not have a good theory for one of the human head’s unique features: the chin. It’s still a mystery.

The Chin: Science's Next Challenge

Image credits:

Robot head: Rodimuspower
Hyrax: Nitzan Cohen Kafri

Cross-posted with Science 2.0.

We have an everyday sense of interfaces.  The computers we use all have interfaces, both in software and hardware.  If they didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to use them (of course, some interfaces are clearly better than others).  But interfaces aren’t just for computers—every tool or entertainment device has interfaces.  For instance the size and shape of a hammer or a pistol affords a certain usage by human hands which is very effective, and even comfortable.

But is there a more fundamental, general concept of interface?

First, we can enumerate a few of the more important roles that our common human interfaces can take: Interfaces can be thought of as translators, for instance human-computer interfaces translate a machine language into something humans can deal with such as text and/or graphics.  Interfaces can be masks, for instance avatars and augmented reality insert a layer of reality modification between users and worlds.  Interfaces can connect different types of substrates, for instance biological to electronics.  Interfaces can connect objects of different scales, for instance the interfaces of heavy machinery allow a single human to move massive quantities of material (or in a somewhat less common example, a human can manipulate specific atoms with the interfaces provided by a scanning tunneling microscope).

There are other types of interfaces, such as chemical surface boundaries between two phases.  Biology has various kinds of interfaces; computer science has its kinds of interfaces; and so on.  Basically, whenever two or more objects interact, there is an interface at that interaction.  Some interfaces are natural, and some are designed to make the interaction between the objects effective.  But there doesn’t need to be a third thing that is the interface.  The interface can be the transient place at which two or more things intersect.

What is the metaphysical situation for interfaces?  Do interfaces exist as universals?  Are they abstract?  Are they objective or subjective?  Let’s say that I am ontologically committed to the existence of objective interfaces.  So these could be concrete, but can an interface in its simplest form be concrete or must it be abstract?  Perhaps there is a universal interface—a class of which all interfaces are instances of.  This would posit that the phenomenon of interfacing is the same at all scales and regardless of whatever particulars were involved in the interfacing.

Now, let’s say that we thought there were real world instances everywhere of the universal interface.  At what scales would that stop?  Is there some underlying level in which entities no longer interface?

Now, why would I even bother to think about objective abstract interfaces?  Because, it’s possible that interfaces at the simplest conception are the basic connector of objects.  If that premise is true, then without the existence of objective interfaces there would not objectively exist anything separate from anything else—or there could be but they would effectively be in their own universes because they would never be able to interact.

If objective interfaces do not actually exist in this world, then we have to deal with the concept of interface just as a metaphor.

At the human scale, discussing interfaces seems to embrace an object-oriented point of view, which is basically the natural human point of view.  Humans operate largely by perceiving the world in terms of objects, with agents being a special class of object that operate autonomously.  Other humans are agents, other animals are agents, anything that appears to move by its own volition is suspicious and given at the very least temporary status as an agent.  But are objects, i.e. particular entities, necessary for the concept of interface?  Perhaps an objective theory of interface would not require objects.  Maybe objects are just slices of the world which are convenient for our minds to process.  Although it seems like we interface with objects, it’s possible that all interfaces operate between folds of the same cloth—some continuity that is not composed of objects (or the world itself is the only object).

Cross-posted with Science 2.0.

A cilium is a subunit of a cell that sticks out like a hair.  They are quite common in animals—a human has cilia on almost every cell, and cilium failures can result in various diseases.

cilia on a protozoan

Cilia can act as sensors, for instance responding to light or chemicals or temperature.  Some cilia can also wave around in patterns of synchronized movement.  This movement causes locomotion, either of nearby stuff (such as cells in human lungs raking mucus), or of the parent body itself (as in the case of certain microscopic organisms).

cilia in a lung

Writer Sally Pobojewski describes cilia’s usefulness:

Thanks to cilia, you can see the words on this page, smell fresh coffee brewing in the morning and hear birds chirping outside the window. Cilia regulate the growth of kidney cells and control how an embryo develops. They sweep particles and mucus out of the respiratory tract, nudge eggs down fallopian tubes, and help neurons in the brain grow new connections.

Of course, nature also has arrays of cilium-like structures at scales larger than single cells, for instance hair and the various slender protuberances in flowers.

stapelia glanduliflora flower

Artificial Cilia

A recent report describes a new type of material with cilia-like protuberances that was developed by Fang Liu, Dhanya Ramachandran, and Marek W. Urban at the University of Southern Mississippi.  The artificial cilia on this copolymer film can change shape and color in response to various electromagnetic, chemical, and thermal stimuli.  This material, especially if it advances, could be used for new types of sensors and actuators.

artificial cilia on colloidal copolymer films

Artificial cilia are also potentially useful at a macro scale, for instance Super Cilia Skin designed by Hayes Raffle, Mitchell Joachim, and James Tichenor.  Super Cilia Skin is a haptic membrane for human-computer interaction.

super cilia

A human can move the cilia with their hand, which could be an interesting tactile experience in itself when combined with a computer system.  Each cilium can move on its own as well for feedback to the user, either by feel or as a visual display.  Although the killer app for Super Cilia Skin has not surfaced yet, it also has potential as an exotic energy harnessing material for building exteriors.

Another artificial cilia example is designer Giles Miller’s Miranda Surface Tiles.  These silicon tiles have thousands of plastic hairs and could at the very least be used as interactive decorations.

plastic hairs of the miranda surface

person drawing with their hand on a miranda surface

There are some provocative fictional uses of cilia-like structures, for instance in James Cameron’s movie Avatar the lifeforms of Pandora have wiggling fibers called queues (or tswin in the Na’vi language).  When two queues are connected, they establish a neural bond (tsaheylu) between the two organisms.

Creating a neural connection (Tsahaylu)

Perhaps soon we will be making artificial cilia that can enable interfaces as good as in nature and as informationally complex as in Avatar.

(Also published on h+ magazine.)

Image Credits:

1. The Journal of Cell Biology
2. Louisa Howard via Wikipedia
3. Martin Heigan
4. Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation
5. Hayes Raffle
6. Giles Miller
7. Ibid.
8. Avatar Wiki