Archive for 2011

Mar

2011

Shades of Cognition

I have a good friend who works on developing artificial intelligence, specifically language acquisition. As a result, I had the chance to photograph the only iCub outside of Europe.1 The iCub is an open source robot platform, roughly to the scale of a 3.5 year old child. It’s production is a result of the embodied cognition hypothesis. It was a great opportunity to study the machine for weaknesses before it inevitably becomes self-aware and declares war on humanity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICub [↩]

Tags: AI, iCub, Machine, Robot
Posted in Eclectic | 1 Comment »

Feb

2011

Ice Wyrm

There was an ice carving festival over the weekend here in St. Joseph. A number of frozen sculptures where on display along the streets, but I really liked this one of a rearing dragon. It was about 40° yesterday when I took this, so our dragon is starting to melt. A large part of me doesn’t understand why one would go to all the trouble of carving something out of ice, when it will inevitably melt, however, I suppose that is part of the allure of the medium, plus water is relatively cheap, so if you screw up, it isn’t as bad as say, marble.

Tags: dragon, ice sculpture, ice wyrm
Posted in Festivals, HDR | Comments Off on Ice Wyrm

Feb

2011

Above the Mire

Once a man has set his heart and soul on getting to a certain point, if he has to climb the crag, he climbs the crag; if he has to walk in the mire—He walks in the mire.1

This snap is from the highest point in Grand Mere State Park, overlooking Lake Michigan. The park is really more of a mire surrounded by dunes than a mere worthy of being called “grand”. In any case it is still quite pretty. Much of the uneven looking ground beyond the tree line isn’t actually ground at all, but shelf-ice.

On the way back I decided that it would be much faster to cut across the mire rather than follow the path leading around the mire. But, in the words of a young Hobbit, “Short cuts make long delays.”2 Although the mire was mostly frozen, at two points during the crossing the ice gave way, and I found myself knee-deep in muddy water. Fortunately, because I was wearing wool socks, and my car was only 20 minutes away, I managed to make the rest of the trek back without losing any toes to frostbite.