March 8, 2012
Spherical cow is a metaphor for highly simplified scientific models of complex real life phenomena.The phrase comes from a joke about theoretical physicists: ‘Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer ‘I have the solution, but it only works in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum.’
It is told in many variants. In Russian, it is called a spherical horse in a vacuum, from a joke about a physicist who said he could predict the winner of any horse race to multiple decimal points – provided it was a spherical horse moving through a vacuum.The point of the joke is that physicists will often reduce a problem to the simplest form they can imagine in order to make calculations more feasible, even though such simplification may hinder the model’s application to reality.
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March 8, 2012
Venn diagrams are diagrams that show all possible logical relations between a finite collection of sets (aggregation of things). Venn diagrams were conceived around 1880 by John Venn. They are used to teach elementary set theory, as well as illustrate simple set relationships in probability, logic, statistics, linguistics and computer science. Venn diagrams normally comprise overlapping circles. The interior of the circle symbolically represents the elements of the set, while the exterior represents elements that are not members of the set.
For instance, in a two-set Venn diagram, one circle may represent the group of all wooden objects, while another circle may represent the set of all tables. The overlapping area or intersection would then represent the set of all wooden tables. Shapes other than circles can be employed as in Venn’s own higher set diagrams. Venn diagrams do not generally contain information on the relative or absolute sizes (cardinality) of sets; i.e. they are schematic diagrams.
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March 8, 2012
Game Over is a message in video games which signals that the game has ended, often due to a negative outcome – although the phrase sometimes follows the end credits after successful completion of a game. In certain uses; particularly during conversation, ‘Game Over’ is sometimes shortened to the first two letters: ‘GO’ with each letter pronounced individually. The phrase was used as early as the 1950s in devices such as electromechanical pinball machines, which would light up the phrase with a light bulb.
Before the advent of video game consoles and personal computing, arcades were the predominant platform for playing games which required users to deposit a token or coin into an arcade game machine in order to play. Players would usually be given a finite number of lives (or attempts) to progress through the game which when expended would usually result in the display of the message ‘Game Over’ indicating that the game had ended. The phrase might also be followed by the message ‘Continue?’ and a prompt asking the player to insert additional tokens to prevent the game from terminating and allowing the player to continue their progress.
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March 8, 2012
Dimensions of Dialogue (Czech: ‘Možnosti dialogu’) is a 1982 Czechoslovak animated short film directed by Jan Švankmajer. It is 14 minute long and created with stop motion. The animation is divided into three sections:
‘Exhaustive discussion’ shows Arcimboldo-like heads gradually reducing each other to bland copies; ‘Passionate discourse’ shows a clay man and woman who dissolve into one another sexually, then quarrel and reduce themselves to a frenzied, boiling pulp; and ‘Factual conversation’ consists of two elderly clay heads who extrude various objects on their tongues (toothbrush and toothpaste; shoe and shoelaces, etc.) and intertwine them in various combinations.
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March 8, 2012
Jan Švankmajer [shvank-mai-er] (b.1934) is a Czech filmmaker and artist whose work spans several media. He is a self-labeled surrealist known for his surreal animations and features, which have greatly influenced other artists such as Terry Gilliam and the Brothers Quay. An early influence on his later artistic development was a puppet theater he was given for Christmas as a child. He studied at the College of Applied Arts in Prague and later in the Department of Puppetry at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts.
He contributed to Emil Radok’s film ‘Doktor Faust’ in 1958 and then began working for Prague’s Semafor Theatre where he founded the Theatre of Masks. He then moved on to the Laterna Magika multimedia theatre, where he renewed his association with Radok. This theatrical experience is reflected in Švankmajer’s first film ‘The Last Trick,’ which was released in 1964. Under the influence of theoretician Vratislav Effenberger Švankmajer moved from the mannerism of his early work to classic surrealism, first manifested in his film ‘The Garden’ (1968), and joined the Czechoslovakian Surrealist Group.
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March 8, 2012
PES (Adam Pesapane) is a director and animator of numerous short films and commercials. He uses everyday objects and stop-motion animation to create short films such as ‘Roof Sex,’ and ‘Western Spaghetti.’ An early influence on PES’s animation style is the work of Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer. PES’s first animated film, ‘Roof Sex,’ features two life-sized chairs having sex on a New York rooftop. Though only a minute long, the film took 20 shooting days to complete. The war short ‘KaBoom!’ (2004) was instrumental in defining the artist’s personal style and approach to animating objects. The film features an atomic airstrike on a miniature city using children’s toys and festive objects such as gift bows, Christmas ornaments, and clown-head cupcake toppers.
In ‘Game Over’ (2006) PES recreated classic arcade death sequences (from the games Centipede, Frogger, Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man) with familiar objects including muffins, toy cars, insects, pizza and fried eggs. The film was inspired by an interview with Toru Iwatani, the creator of Pac-Man, who said the original source of inspiration for the Pac-Man character was a pizza with a slice missing. In 2008, PES released his short ‘Western Spaghetti.’ The film shows PES cooking spaghetti (the hands in the film are PES’s) but all the ingredients in the dish are replaced with objects such as tomato pin cushions, rubber bands, rubik’s cubes, post-it notes, and bubblewrap, and all are brought to life through stop-motion animation.
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March 7, 2012
Fisherian runaway is a model of sexual selection, first proposed by R.A. Fisher in 1915, and expanded upon in his 1930 book ‘The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection,’ that suggests an explanation for sexual selection of traits that do not obviously increase fitness of survival, based upon a positive feedback ‘runaway’ mechanism. Fisher’s explanation is that selection of such traits is a result of sexual preference; that members of the opposite sex find a trait desirable. This preference makes the trait advantageous, which in a circular fashion makes having a preference for the trait advantageous.
The process is termed ‘runaway’ because over time, it would facilitate the development of greater preference and more pronounced traits, until the costs of producing the trait balance the reproductive benefit of possessing it. By way of example, the peacock’s tail requires a great deal of energy to grow and maintain, it reduces the bird’s agility, and it may increase the animal’s visibility to predators. Yet it has evolved, indicating that birds with longer tails have some advantage.
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March 7, 2012
The court jester hypothesis is a term coined by UC, Berkeley professor Anthony D. Barnosky in 1999, that describes the antithesis of the ‘Red Queen Hypothesis’ in evolutionary theory (the evolutionary ‘arms race’). It refers to the idea that abiotic forces including climate, rather than biotic competition between species, is a major driving force behind the processes in evolution that produce speciation.
Despite the fact that the court jester metaphor is coined in reference to the Red Queen hypothesis, the Jester reference, metaphorically, is not a direct reference to ‘Through The Looking Glass.’ Instead referencing Tarot, where the Jester or Fool is the symbol of death triumphing over all.
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March 7, 2012
The Red Queen is the name of an evolutionary theory of Leigh Van Valen and, later, a book by Matt Ridley. The term is taken from the Red Queen’s race in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking-Glass.’ The Red Queen said, ‘It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.’ The Red Queen principle can be stated as follows: ‘For an evolutionary system, continuing development is needed just to maintain its fitness relative to the systems it is co-evolving with.’
The hypothesis is used to explain two different phenomena: the advantage of sexual reproduction at the level of individuals, and the constant evolutionary arms race between competing species. Ridley’s book takes Van Valen’s idea, which is about co-evolution, and extends it into a discussion about sexual selection in humans. It argues that few aspects of human nature can be understood apart from sex, since human nature is a product of evolution, and evolution in our case is driven by sexual selection. Its counterpart is the Court Jester Hypothesis, which proposes that evolution is driven mostly by abiotic environmental events and forces like climate.
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March 7, 2012
An evolutionary arms race is a struggle between competing sets of co-evolving genes that develop adaptations and counter-adaptations against each other, resembling an arms race, which are also examples of positive feedback (the effects of a small disturbance on a system include an increase in the magnitude of the disturbance). The co-evolving gene sets may be in different species, as in an evolutionary arms race between a predator species and its prey, or a parasite and its host.
Alternatively, the arms race may be between members of the same species, as in the manipulation/sales resistance model of communication or as in runaway evolution or Red Queen effects. One example of an evolutionary arms race is in sexual conflict between the sexes. Thierry Lodé emphasized the role of such antagonist interactions in evolution leading to character displacements and antagonist coevolution. The Escalation hypothesis put forward by Geerat Vermeij speaks of more general conflicts and was originally based on his work with marine gastropod fossils.
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March 7, 2012
Concealed ovulation or hidden estrus is the lack of distinctive signaling that the adult female of a species is ‘in heat’ and near ovulation. These signals may include swelling and redness of the genitalia in baboons and bonobos, pheromone release in the feline family, etc. By comparison, the females of humans and a few other species have few external signs of fecundity, making it difficult to tell, by means of external signs only, whether or not a female is near ovulation.
Several hypotheses regarding human evolution integrate the idea that human females increasingly required supplemental paternal investment in their offspring. This suggests human females concealed ovulation to obtain male aid in rearing offspring. If human females no longer signaled the time of ovulation, males would be unable to detect the exact period in which they were fecund. This led to a change in their mating strategy; rather than seeking multiple female partners and mating with them hoping they were fecund during that period, males instead chose to mate with a particular female multiple times throughout her menstrual cycle. A mating would be successful in resulting in conception when it occurred during ovulation, and thus, frequent matings, necessitated by the effects of concealed ovulation, would be most successful.
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March 7, 2012
Joseph Kony (b.1964) is a Ugandan guerrilla group leader, head of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a group engaged in a violent campaign to establish theocratic government based on the Ten Commandments throughout Uganda. The LRA say that spirits have been sent to communicate this mission directly to Kony. Directed by Kony, the LRA have also spread to parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. It has abducted and forced an estimated 66,000 children to fight for them, and has also forced the internal displacement of over 2,000,000 people since its rebellion began in 1986.
Kony received a surge of attention in early March 2012 with the release of ‘Kony 2012,’ a thirty minute documentary, was made by filmaker Jason Russell for the campaign group Invisible Children Inc.
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