Objects and Arrows

Seth Goldstein at Carnegie Mellon works on the practical side of the idea of progammable matter or what he’s calling claytronics. I like how simple and homemade it all looks in the videos. There are some nice videos of his ‘catoms’ in action here.

Pretty cool applications are easy to imagine. Here’s the story from Computerworld which sketches the promise and peril of shape-shifting robot swarms in the living room. There’s an eerie corporate-style video here.

Tons of material here for philosophers.

The web is unforgiving.  Archived audio of an interview I did with the local NPR affiliate show Science Studio just got posted. These guys do a great show on Sunday nights, usually talking with distinguished scientists about current developments.  It’s from fall of 2003 (I think) and I was very nervous.   There are a few things that I said on the show that I would disagree with today, especially my “philosophy is the underlaborer of the sciences” tone.     The funniest thing, for me is just how obsessed I was with anionic hydrogen.  I must have mentioned it six times.  No idea where that came from.  I’m also not so confident anymore about what I say regarding the origin of the word ’scientist’.  The show is here.

I haven’t been keeping up with the slew of anti-religion books over the past few years, there are only so many hours in the day and there are more interesting middle-brow fun topics for this busy atheist to read about. But once in a while the sheer entertainment value wins and YouTube steals a few hours, so in this spirit I offer you some excellent middle-brow fun from C-Span.

While the Liberty University clowns are an easy target, Dawkins shows admirable grace and good humor in his responses. One important point that he touched on very briefly involved the relevance of children’s moral standing. There is something very odd, he notes, about describing children as Christian or Muslim. At best, as he says, these are the children of Christians or Muslims.

Judging from the eagerness with which so many folk want to defend corporal punishment of children, the pernicious effects of religion on children or what to do about these effects are unlikely to get much sophisticated discussion. Maybe in Sweden… Dennett’s suggestion that we ought to institute mandatory education in world religions for children is a very modest beginning. Actually, I don’t really know what philosophical work is being done on our obligations to children, but I imagine there must be a decent literature out there and am curious to learn more about it.