Senses in the news:
- This seems too good to be true:
- But apparently it is true. See this paper and this blog post.
- If you're lucky enough to have eyes, here's a good analysis of how all your visual inputs get put together into a single representation.
- For robots, a sense of smell is important, too.
- The next robotic challenge: door-to-door combat operations.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
I'm going to play biologist for a moment, and talk about a species other than humans or nonhuman primates. First, imagine that you're about 10 mm long, a couple mm high, and you're stuck in the middle of the Sahara desert. Eventually you've got to find food, so you leave the comfort of your burrow…
Here's an entirely hypothetical scenario.
You're in a room with two exits, marked Door A and Door B. By each is a guardian, Guardian A and Guardian B. You need to go through one of the doors.
Door A is light and flimsy, easy to open—just turn the knob and you're through it. Reasonably enough,…
This post dates from all the way back in July of 2002, and contains a bunch of thoughts on the preparation of different types of scientific presentations. I've re-covered some of this ground in the previous post, but there's enough different material to justify a separate Classic Edition post.…
Apologies for the long radio silence. Travelling and the obligatory pre-travelling frenzy shut down the blogging assembly line for a couple weeks. Having wrapped up my west-coast jaunt (thanks to the great crowd that came out for the CSPAN taping at Stanford), I can write a bit about some of the…
Holy cow! So Thomas Nagel could have his famous question answered by this young man...
Oops, I see that I wasn't the first to think of that connection. Should have checked the hyperlinks before commenting.
A friend of mine lost his eyes to cancer at the age of three. A few years later, he was cycling slowly around his area on ecolocation. Now he's a radio journalist.
Another blog was discussing whether or not there might be some sort of relation between the clicking sounds in Khoisan languages and this ability to navigate using echolocation. The Khoisan people live in a very open, dry part of Africa today, but long ago the area they inhabited was probably more heavily forested. It seems like a long-shot but echolocation might have come in handy.
What is it like to be a bat? (pdf)
Remarkable. See also Brice Mellen.
Yeah, that is really impressive, though I'd like to see some scientists taking a good look at what that kid does (it'd be interesting to see how much of his visual cortex has been taken over by his auditory system, too).
And the paper on cogprints is more than iffy.