The Hubble Space telescope has just released this “christmas card” image of the nearby (a mere 32 million light-years away) spiral galaxy Messier 74, first discovered by the French astronomer, Pierre Méchain, in 1780. Full details here.

If you have the monitor size, make sure you view the large image.

Stare at this for a few moments and feel all your anthropic principles magically fading away.

This site is amazing. I wrote some time ago about a wall paster of the tree of life which could be downloaded as a pdf. Here is a site which gives you an interactive version, complete with images of representatives of featured species. What an wonderful piece of work. Beats the Bible as scripture any day.

BTW, search for homo sapiens and see who the representative of our species is. Love it!

If you love the work of Salvador Dali as much as I do, you’ll enjoy this nice interactive overview of his vast body of work. Virtual Dali has grouped all the major paintings according to the significant periods of his life. There’s also photographs of Dali, a biography, external links and a shop.

Reminds me of the time I very nearly purchased an original Dalivision in a Hawaii gallery. Eventually common sense and impending bankruptcy prevailed.

I’ve just finished reading Spook Country, the latest book by William Gibson - the ‘father of cyberpunk’. To be frank, this book reminded me why I don’t read much fiction any more.

Spook Country, set in the present day, is peopled by an assortment ex secret service types, thugs, drug addicts, fraudsters, ex rock stars, artists, cyberpunks (of course), adventurers, and fashionable hangers-on. And a billionaire.

But pretty soon I wondered if the title of the book was ironic or something, since all of these characters are so uniformly bloodless they may as well be ghosts. Or perhaps avatars. Attempts by Gibson to flesh them out with some personal details and back stories end up looking like mere skins mapped onto their polygonal forms. In fact, it’s sometimes hard to distinguish the human characters from their technologies. Network servers, wireless broadband, domestic robots, virtual reality helmets, blogs, iPods, Bluetooth, GPS and Powerbooks constantly crop up, like minor characters in their own right. With almost as much personality.

Oh, and did I mention the brandnames? In Spook Country, people don’t just finish their beer, pop on a jacket and throw some stuff into a bag before driving to their hotel. They finish their Asahi Draft, put on a Pendleton, throw stuff into their Barneys, and drive their Phaeton to the Mondrian where the Philippe Starke designed elevator takes them up to their room. It’s like The Devil Wears Prada with GPS.

Maybe this is all deliberate – showing us how the new 24/7 unwired world has stripped us all of our humanity. Or maybe it’s just poor writing. Either way, the cumulative effect over 371 pages is distinctly enervating. I would have been perfectly happy if they’d all bought their gear at Lowes and got on with the plot.

Ah yes, the plot.

The plot, such as it is, involves a rogue shipping container and it’s mysterious cargo, which everyone is tracking. But it’s not so much a plot as an inventory of technologies. It’s purpose seems to be the vehicle for a 59-year-old Gibson to assure his legion of fans that he’s still hip to the future tech beat daddy-o. Except that, sadly, he isn’t quite. This book appears to have been assembled with one eye firmly fixed on the dreaded Google/Wikipedia. As a research tool this can be a mixed blessing or, as my dear late mum would say, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”. Gibson sometimes gets the factoids right, but their common usage completely wrong. As a case in point, one character plays music keyboard. Gibson consistently (and somewhat proudly) refers to this as a MIDI keyboard. Now, since the mid 80s, virtually every keyboard ever made has come equipped with MIDI, so it’s not something you’d bother mentioning these days. It’s about as naff as constantly referring to the electric vacuum cleaner. But it gets worse. At one point, the room is described as being lit by the blue glow of the MIDI lamp. Excuse me? What the hell is a MIDI lamp?

Poor bugger, you can’t help feeling sorry for him. No ordinary author would feel so obligated to cram this much ‘cool stuff’ into one novel. Gibson should have just said: “Fuck it! This time, I think I’ll just write a historical romance.”

And, by the way, I think cyberspace is bullshit.

One of the most interesting and significant robotics projects I’ve ever seen is iCub. In a nutshell, iCub (or ‘RobotCub’) is a completely open-source robot baby. It will be used as a platform for many research teams around the world to develop software control modules and experiments to study robot cognition. The iCub project is now entering it’s third year of existence or, if you prefer the anthropomorphic version, iCub is soon going to be three years old. The iCub project is funded by the European Commission and involves around 11 EU partners and 5 international partners (from Japan and America).

To quote from the recent call for proposals (via Euron-dist): “The iCub is a 53 degree-of-freedom cognitive humanoid robot… At 104 cm tall, the iCub is approximately the size of a three year-old child. It will be able to crawl on all fours and sit up, its hands will allow dexterous manipulation, and its head and eyes are fully articulated. It has visual, vestibular, auditory, and haptic sensory capabilities. As an open system, the design and documentation of all hardware and software is licensed under the Free Software Foundation GNU licences so that the system can be freely replicated and customized.”

iCub will be able to process visual and aural data (colour, motion, face localization, sound localization, aural timbral filtering, etc.) and actively respond to changes in its environment. There is currently a call for proposed experiments by tertiary institutions. To start the ball rolling, there’s the proposed experimental investigation 1. If I read this correctly, the baby will be introduced to people and various brightly coloured toys, which it will be able to reach out towards and play with. To get a grasp of the extent of the project, check out the RobotCub site.

For me, however, the avenue of research which I would most like to see pursued with iCub involves not the robot itself, but a study of the emotional responses of the humans around him/her. Because, unlike robots that resemble metalic snakes or housebricks on wheels, iCub will look and act very much like a human infant. And you can’t really get a more emotionally significant form than that.

I am reminded of the time when Sony first released Aibo the robot dog. I managed to attend a presentation at Fox Studios where Aibo was displayed on a small circular stage, surrounded by a crush of enthusiastic humans. Aibo lumbered around his little enclosure, fetching a thrown ball, coming when called, responding to ‘pats’, begging, and doing all kinds of cute doggy stuff. Pretty soon, I stopped watching Aibo and started studying the faces of all the humans around him. Without exception, everyone bore the unmistakable expression of love. “Oh, he’s so cute!” “Oh look at that!” “He’s just gorgeous!” “He really likes that!”

Obviously, at some level, we must have all understood that we were looking at a mere assemblage of plastic, metal and circuitry, yet we couldn’t help ourselves. It was hard wired into us. And this is the essence of the mysterious relationship which the human race is about to embark upon with robots.

Ultimately, it’s an act of love.

I hadn’t paid a visit to Hirose Fukushima Robotics Lab website for a while, so I checked in. Lot’s of new stuff, with details on snake robots, walking robots, wheeled robots, colony robots, etc. The best bit is the movie gallery with over 50 clips. The cuteness award has to go to TITRUS who looks like a cross between a velocaraptor and a Jack Russel puppy. See him in action here and here. He’s supposed to be ‘working’ but to me he just looks like he’s laughing and playing with his imaginary ball.

Also of interest is the mechanical solution to the daunting task (for a robot) of climbing stairs. See how TITAN-IV manages to accomplish it. Hey, even the Daleks couldn’t manage it!

There is much to see and learn. Or, as they say over at HFR, “see more informations”.

A robot named Tiro has just made his teaching debut, taking a 30-minute English class at Euon Primary School in the central South Korean city of Daejon, south of Seoul. Tiro asked (in English) such questions as: “How many giraffes are there on the board?” Hopefully, for Tiro, there was at least one.

The kids thought it was great. “I hope every class will have such a robotic teacher,” 10-year-old Baek Ji Woong was quoted as saying. Yes well, young Baek Ji Woong, you would have absolutely loved my old school.

Disappointingly, I failed to find a picture of Tiro. I fondly imagined him as sort of metalic version of our old Mr. Pennefather.

My immediate question is: what happens when the kids play up? I assume Tiro has been programmed with such essential teaching skills as ear twisting, ‘going completely mental’ and being able to throw the duster (with lethal accuracy) at that little smartarse up the back.

Yoky Matsuoka is someone to watch. She’s a mechanical engineer, neuroscientist, bioengineer, robotics expert and computer scientist - all rolled into one! And, she’s just been awarded a $500,000 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s ‘genius grant’ for her extraordinary research into ‘neurobotics’.

Matsuoka is associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington and head of the Neurobotics Laboratory. Their site gives a brief overview of some of their projects. I just loved the Anatomically Correct Testbed (ACT) Hand. I wish we could see more, including video of it in operation.

The odd note to all this, however, is the small print at the top of their page which says: This lab is no longer active. What gives?

Sometimes we take for granted (or even completely ignore) the truly amazing scientific undertakings going on while we worry about what to wear this Friday. As a reminder, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has just released this spectacular image of NGC 3603, a prominent star-forming region located in the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way, about 20,000 light-years away from our Solar System. Make sure you view the hi-res image. At the top right corner of the image are a few so-called Bok globules, named after the man who first observed them in the 1940s - Mr. Bart Bok (I kid you not). Now there’s someone who should have changed his name by deed poll. And while you’re there, check out the hall of fame image archive. These pictures leave you breathless. Sorry, now where are we again?