Clare Townhill

Byeee

Off to Egypt to play with the fishes and pet camels. Back on the 8th.
Bye for now.

Doggy iD

Sniftag: Tails told, friends made. This really is very lovely. It's a Nike iD for dogs and their owners combined with an introduction service under the pretence of building social networks of four-legged friends. Genius.

From one snif to another. New research on what makes dogs noses so brilliant:

'Snot makes dogs supersleuths'

DOGS' extraordinary ability to sniff out anything from cocaine to cancer turns out to owe much to the gunk inside their nose.

Dogs have many more nerve cells in their nasal cavities than we do and a wider variety of receptors to latch on to odour molecules. Now a team led by Brent Craven of Pennsylvania State University in University Park has shown that the complex network of snot-coated tubes in a dog's nose also "pre-sorts" smells, which may make it easier for the brain to identify them.

Before odour molecules can reach smell receptors, they must get through a layer of mucus - and some molecules are absorbed quicker than others. To find out how this might affect smell perception, Craven's team used MRI images of a dog's nasal airways to develop computer models of how air travels along them. The team found that different molecules are first picked up at different points in the airway network.

Until now, research has focused on how receptors pick up different chemicals. "We've shown that the sorting out of the different odorants before they even get to the receptors is also important," says Craven. The team presented its results this week at a meeting of the American Physical Society's division of fluid dynamics in San Antonio, Texas.

The UK's Digital Obsession

Our digital addiction: 727 hours surfing, 27 phoning and 972 texts
We love camera phones, digital TVs and recorders more than anyone else

'In the heyday of rock music, no stadium gig was complete without a slow number that prompted the crowd to hold aloft their cigarette lighters to create hundreds of flickering points of light. Now the same effect is created by hundreds of people holding up their mobile phones as the audience takes photo after photo to prove they were there.'

Here's the Guardian's opening paragraph on the results of Ofcom's International Communications Audit. Findings reveal that this 'digital-lighter' effect is more likely to occur amongst a British crowd than amongst any other nation. We use our phones as cameras more than any other nation in the world, including Japan.

Here's a link to the key points.

(The picture was taken by me last Thursday at a gig; the little blue lights towards the bottom of the image are digital-lighters/camera-phones)

Mutate Britain

The latest in a series of odd jobs for me this year. Working with my friend Reuben making coffee from a machine stationed in a Russian military side-car. Why? Why to warm the cockles of visitors to the Mutoid Waste show 'Mutate Britain' of course. The exhibition is set in four-floors of warehouse on Curtain Road, there's another private view this Thursday as last weeks opening rather typically forgot to invite any press. The gallery is open for the next three weekends. Well worth a visit.

www.mutatebritain.co.uk

Addictive Games (Science in Disguise)

I've been doing some long overdue catching up with my NewScientist subscription. I really like this evolution in distributed computing: 60,000 players log on regularly to play Fold.it. Fold.it is a game that involves twisting, wiggling and pulling a 3D structure that looks a bit like a tree's root system. It may sound like a rather bizarre game, a distant relative of Tetris perhaps, it is in fact a brilliant disguise for one of the toughest conundrums facing biologists today:

"Predicting exactly how a long protein chain curls up as compactly as possible, amongst all the myriad possibilities, is a very hard problem to solve with computers," says David Baker at the University of Washington in Seattle, who invented the game.

As the length of a protein chain increases, the number of possible ways it can be folded increases exponentially. Even for the simplest chains, it would take a typical desktop computer several centuries to predict the optimum way a protein would fold. Yet with the help of the 60,000 amateur players like Aristides (or 'cheese' as he is known in-game), in the six months it has been running Foldit has already calculated how scores of proteins would fold.

For a while now there have been many projects asking us to lend us computer power, most famously SETI - the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence project using the processing power of otherwise idle and daydreaming computers to analyse squillions of telescope signals. But there are limits to what even a million computers can do. For many tasks such as visual processing, spatial reasoning and problem solving the human brain surpasses. People are increasingly being asked to turn their spare intellectual processing powers to the common good - lots more on this here or go to gwap (games with a purpose) for just some of the projects masquerading as games.

In the interests of science and research I thought is was probably wise to have a go. Whoever could have thought that pulling helices about could be so much fun? Stupidly addictive. I'll just go and do a couple more before I go to bed...

Mystery on Fifth Avenue

Here is another post inspired by last week's Playful Event. I was tempted to call this post 'Rekindling of Faith' which is the feeling I had after hearing Eric Clough talking about his architectural-puzzle-wonder on Fifth Avenue in NY. Eric was commissioned to apply his architectural and design talents to create a 'non-cookie-cutter style apartment' for the Klinsky-Sherry family. What followed was this:

1. The architectural designer Eric Clough embedded 18 clues in the Fifth Avenue apartment of the Klinsky-Sherry family, leading them on a scavenger hunt through the rooms of their home.

But not all at once. One of the things I love about this is the patience, the ability to hold back, wait:

Finally, one day last fall, more than a year after they moved in, Mr. Klinsky received a letter in the mail containing a poem that began:

We’ve taken liberties with Yeats

to lead you through a tale

that tells of most inspired fates

in hopes to lift the veil.

The letter directed the family to a hidden panel in the front hall that contained a beautifully bound and printed book. The book led them on a scavenger hunt through their own apartment.

 

3. A rectangular panel in the den and guest room opens to reveal acrylic slices, far left, that fit together to form a cube. When the chamfered magnetic cube lodged above the slices is dragged over the 24 panels on a nearby wall, they open.

4. Behind the panels, large white letters laser-cut into teal blue acrylic spell out the words of a poem written years ago by Steven B. Klinsky, the apartment's owner, for his wife, Maureen Sherry, and their children.

5. Decorative leather molding stamped with letters in a hallway can be popped out and wrapped around a rod removed from the foot of Ms. Sherry and Mr. Klinsky’s bed so that the letters on the coiled leather spell out a clue.

Here's something else that I love about this story; here's a little piece from the full NYT article:

'Another evening, Ms. Sherry and Mr. Klinsky were lying in their custom-made bed when a rod running along its foot snapped off. “I’m thinking, What the heck kind of cheap bed is this?” said Ms. Sherry, who phoned Mr. Clough the next day.

His response, which might have taken a less adventurous person aback, was that she take a wait-and-see attitude, that the bed bit was part of a larger “story” and that all would be revealed in good time. Oh, and he told her to just snap the piece back into the bed.'

And she did.

6. Behind a drawing of a plane that hangs in a hallway is a little niche containing a scale model of the kitchen, a clue that leads to a musical score written for the apartment, which is hidden in a drawer above the stove.

7. Millwork panels in a hallway were designed to look like Le Corbusier’s Modular Man and da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Puzzle pieces hidden in one fit together to make a key that opens the other.

8. In assembling talents for his project, Mr. Clough aimed high. His first choice for the author of the book that contains clues to the scavenger hunt in addition to the mystery story, was Jonathan Safran Foer, whose work contains its own sort of coded narrative pyrotechnics. Mr. Clough sent him a puzzle cube similar to this one, stamped with his firm’s phone number and the word “Please.”

9. Photographs of the apartment’s original interiors have secret writing on the back that reveals the number of salamanders in the apartment. The salamander is a motif that is part of the puzzle and appears throughout the apartment.

10. Door knockers on opposite walls of a hallway initially seemed pointless. They can be removed and joined to create a crank that opens hidden panels in the dining room sideboard.

11. The custom-made sideboard has hidden panels on either side that can be cranked open to display keys and keyholes.

12. When the correct keys are used, hidden drawers are revealed.

13. The drawers contained acrylic letters and a table-size cloth imprinted with the beginnings of a crossword puzzle. The answers to the crossword puzzle led to the panels in the guest room, behind which were the words of the poem.

14. The children’s bedrooms have radiator covers with poems written specifically for each child cut into them in code. The Caesar Shift cipher in the bedroom of the oldest child, Cavan, was broken by a friend.

All pictures taken from the NYT slideshow 'Cracking the Code'. Full 'Mystery on Fifth Avenue' article and narrative here.

Bloody wonderful.

Space Station Dana

 
If like me you spent many happy hours as a child planning your illustrious future as an astronaut this may well be right up your intergalactic highway:

Want to be an astronaut? Have you got what it takes? Join Coney and a host of probing experts in a recruitment game for Space Station Dana. Your mission: to make a crew that could orbit the Earth and communicate the sheer beauty of going into space.

Jean-Francois Clervoy, astronaut for the European Space Agency, who has been on three space missions and spent a total of 675 hours in space, will be joining us for this event.

This event is free but you must pre-book: Call 020 7942 4040 or e-mail tickets@danacentre.org.uk

The event runs 7-9 but I'd recommend arriving at about 6.30. Come play!

Date:	Thursday, November 13, 2008
Time:	7:00pm - 9:00pm
Location:	Dana Centre
Street:	165 Queen's Gate, london SW7 5HD
City/Town:	London, United Kingdom

Ammo for the Guns of Accusation

In the past I have been accused of being a bit dogcentric with my posts. I was therefore perturbed to notice a distinct lack of four-legged, wet nosed and betailed action on my blog of late. Not wishing to disappoint my critics, may I humbly offer:

this:

and these:

Problem solved.

The Mouse that Roared

The Mouse that roared was the mouse that was clicked; hundred's of thousands of American's have interacted with, and made their voices heard via the internet. My hope is that online contributions will spill over into physical motion towards the polling booths. This anxiety is obviously the driving force behind sites enabling the kind of video I posted a few days ago. This year's US Presidential election campaigning draws to a close today. Here's a much better round up of the online contribution to the race (in every sense) than I have time for today: NYT: Campaign 2.0

Here's a little round up of the YouTube postings as they stand at the time of writing, plus the most watched for each:

John McCain: 205,000

Barack Obama: 364,000

Sarah Palin: 109,000

'Lovely Delicious Play'

“When we do these computer models, those aren’t the real models; the real models are in the gamer’s head. The computer game is just a compiler for that mental model in the player. We have this ability as humans to build these fairly elaborate models in our imaginations, and the process of play is the process of pushing against reality, building a model, refining a model by looking at the results of looking at interacting with things.“

I should really blogged about this on Friday but my mind was such an overstimulated spin I probably wouldn't have written anything decipherable (no smart comments please). The Playful day was wonderful, thoroughly enjoyable and a good chance to meet some other over-excitable types. I'll try to break down my thoughts over several posts to avoid hernias on my part and fatigue on yours.

Moments of Inspiration
Matthew Irvine Brown - SingingSockPuppets.net

Singing Sock Puppet & Curtis Mayfield - Blues in F from Matt Brown on Vimeo.
Singing Sock Puppets @ Shunt Lounge from Matt Brown on Vimeo.

Utterly joyful.