Regruntled.com

Reader jde sends a note about a new Asus laptop.  From the manufacturer’s announcement:

The organic tactility, refreshing scent and minimalist aesthetics of bamboo lend the ASUS Bamboo Series notebook an arresting aura of spirituality, warmth and old world charm that synthetic materials and cold, impersonal metals will struggle to replicate.

I like the bamboo.  I like the juxtaposition of nature and technology.  But really, the BS is piled high and deep here.  An “arresting aura of spirituality”?  In a laptop?

Asus is careful to say “bamboo-clad” and “bamboo paneling”, rather than saying the case is made out of bamboo.

And of course, by “bamboo”, they don’t mean actual bamboo, they mean something that was originally bamboo, before it was sliced, laminated, glued, processed and machined.

The genuine bamboo fiber patterns on the touch pad create the sensation of touching live bamboo.

Did you catch that?  The patterns are genuine and create a sensation of bamboo… the touch pad is not made out of bamboo.

Instructables has a step-by-step account of the baking of a 3-dimensional, icosahedral (20-sided) pecan pie.  These guys even made their own triangular pie plates out of sheet metal.  The pie plates have magnets on them to hold the icosahedron together.  Their only mistake was attaching the magnets to the pie plates before baking… the heat of the oven scrambled the magnets.

Becca Compton at The AntiCraft will knit you something you can’t refuse.

The AntiCraft seems to be run by Wiccan knitters.  From their Antifesto:

We were deep in the clutches of a weeklong absinthe binge when the Divine Hand of Brilliance touched us in an inappropriate place.

Creation from chaos is natural. We’ve come to a place where we’ve realized that we have this actual, physical need to create things. We’ve discovered that we hate people en masse, we’re sick of homogenized culture, and these realizations have left holes in our hearts. We create to fill those holes, to be able to sleep at night knowing we’ve done something, even a small something, to confront the manufactured culture that is currently being churned out.

There is a toolbox of programming techniques inspired by evolution, variously called evolutionary algorithms or genetic algorithms.  The techniques mimic evolution and borrow a lot of the terminology.  The basic idea is to make a bunch of guesses (a population) as to the solution of a problem, and see how well the guesses work (apply a fitness function).  Then you throw out the bad guesses and keep the good ones (natural selection).  You combine some of the old guesses into new ones (reproduction) and make a few random changes (mutations).  Lather, rinse, repeat.  As you do this over and over again (multiple generations), the guesses get better and better.

The picture shows an antenna that NASA developed using an evolutionary algorithm.  The bent-paper-clip shape is the result of trial and error and natural selection, not theory and calculation.

The Biologic Institute argues that the participation of the programmers constitutes “guidance” to the evolutionary algorithm, and that, by analogy, if an evolutionary algorithm requires guidance by programmers, then evolution in nature also requires some sort of guidance or intelligent design.

I’d like to make a couple of points here.  First, if the algorithms work, the Creationists will argue that the differences between evolution and evolutionary algorithms imply that evolution doesn’t work.  On the other hand, if the algorithms don’t work, the Creationists will argue that the similarities between evolution and evolutionary algorithms imply that  evolution doesn’t work.  Creationists are not intellectually serious people.

Second, NASA was trying to design an antenna, not settle a theological question.  There is a tradeoff between the cleverness of a program and the time it takes to run it.  If you want an answer tomorrow morning and you have a hundred computers that you can use overnight, you need a clever program.  If you have 10,000 computers and can wait a few weeks, not so much.  If you’re Mother Nature and you can experiment on  a million organisms for a million generations, maybe survival is all the guidance you need.

Interesting images from Brazilian graphics company Platinum FMD.

I’ve seen kite surfers do something like this over the ocean, but water is soft compared to rocks.

Looks like it has a lot of fiber.