In an interview with robotics engineer Dr. Hod Lipson, Galatica Sitrep—a fan blog dedicated to all things Battlestar Galatica—asked him about robot evolution, what it means to be human, and why the bulk of robotics research is happening in the Department of Defense. We would have thrown in a question about the variety of pick-up lines robots are known for on Twitter, but maybe we’ll get our chance at the panel. Here’s an interesting snippet from the interview:
Sitrep: These days, it seems like the bulk of research is happening in military robotics. Why is that, and should we be worried?
Dr. Hod Lipson: Any kind of research is driven by funding. The Department of Defense is the biggest sponsor of robotics research. In the end, however, if you’re developing AI for robotic systems, you’ll run into the same basic questions and problems whether it’s for search and rescue missions or for cleaning your house. And I think that the military focus in robotics is going to change. In Japan there’s a major push for robotics research into care for the elderly… and we’re just now starting to see the development of housecleaning robots, which is something we’ve been promised for decades, right? These are all an amazing new frontier, and it’s proving that there’s commercial viability for robot research beyond military applications.
The rest of the interesting Q&A can be found here, which includes this video of a “self-aware” robot learning to walk that Dr. Hod Lipson built. We’re kind of scared! Skynet?
Find out more at our Battlestar Galactica: Cyborgs on the Horizon on Jun 12 when cast members from Battlestar Galactica join leading roboticists to explore scientifically, philosophically and ethically the approaching frontier where intelligent machines are commonplace. Co-presented with the World Science Festival.
In 2008, an Italian study found that it was possible to distinguish between different honey types, as well as determining in what region it was produced:
...In this study high-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (HR-NMR) and multivariate statistical analysis methods were used to identify and classify honeys of five different floral sources. The 71 honey samples (robinia, chestnut, citrus, eucalyptus, polyfloral) were analyzed by HR-NMR using both 1H NMR and heteronuclear multiple bond correlation spectroscopy (HMBC).
Those Italians it seems, take their honey as serious as they do their wine and cheese. Maybe as serious as noted food historian and expert Francine Segan does. This Jun 17, you can join Francine Segan’s latest talk in her World of Tasting series, Honey: History and Gourmet Tasting. Learn to differentiate the sublime flavors of a dozen types of honey, including French lavender, blueberry blossom, Hawaiian honey with tones of butterscotch and vanilla, and the famed tupelo honey, which comes from a flower of southern Georgia. This talk on honey proceeds her latest talks on aphrodisiacs and food in film. The last talk in this series, Spices: Naughty and Nice, will be Jun 24.
If you take good food as serious as we and Francine do, our CSA is something you might want to consider as well.
The Johnson School at Cornell live tweeted the event at their Twitter, @JohnsonSchool where they reported that Gore said about our dependence on oil: “this rollercoaster is headed for a crash, and we’re on the first car”. Read more @JohnsonSchool’s Twitter, and the Huffington Post, and check out the photos here. And because we couldn’t resist, we have one more photo from the Green Room, after the jump.
You know, when everyone tells you it couldn’t have gone any better, when your agent (who reps among others, the great Michael Chabon) tells you she doesn’t remember a better book event, when someone leaves a message and says she wishes the interview had been three hours rather than an hour and a half, even the self-loathingest alternator in your hard-wiring has to admit that things went okay. And by “you,” I mean Jay McInerney…
It was indeed a great event, and the video above features a few stories that Bill did not include in his recap. One was about an appearance Richard Simmons made on The Late Show with David Letterman, with Richard coming out on stage all oiled up, in his normal outfit of boas around his neck and little shorts on. This was back when Dave still smoked cigars, and Simmons asked in his flirtatious ways, “David, will you teach me how to smoke a cigar?” Skip to 3:50 in the video to hear the punchline that had everybody in stitches.
Next up in our Funny People series is Kate Clinton on Jun 11, when she will be here with Randy Cohen, better known as the writer of The Ethicist column at the New York Times.
Upcoming events:
David Brooks in Conversation with Jon Meacham: Jun 9
Battlestar Galactica: Cyborgs On The Horizon: Jun 12. Read more on the 92Y blog
Jack and Suzy Welch: Decision Making the Welch Way: Jun 18
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche in Conversation with Daniel Goleman : Jun 22
The Cornell Global Forum on Sustainable Enterprise tomorrow evening at 8pm with Al Gore, Stuart L. Hart, H. Fisk Johnson and Ratan N. Tata has been sold out for quite some time now. However, we hear the Johnson School at Cornell will be present, live twittering all the details as fast as their little thumbs can get the information out. You can follow the live Twitter here: @JohnsonSchool. The roundtable discussion of the forum is the culmination of the three-day Cornell Global Forum, working towards creating profitable businesses that raise the quality of life for the world’s poor, respect cultural diversity and conserve the ecological integrity of the planet. Thanks to the magic of Twitter, mobile phones, and the internets, you’ll be able to follow along, almost as if you were there.
Emily Gould is a former co-editor of Gawker and well known blogger. You might remember her cover story in the New York Times last year. On her blog, Emily Magazine, she recently pondered her upcoming appearance Jun 8 at Girls Like Us, a panel discussion on women’s issues at 92Y with Patricia Bosworth (Becoming Jane Fonda), Sheila Weller (Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—and the Journey of a Generation), Judith Warner (Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety),and Joanna Smith Rakoff (A Fortunate Age). Emily wrote:
...I have been thinking a lot, lately, about women. Specifically I have been thinking about the ways that women publicly and privately police other women’s speech and actions in the supposed service of the greater good, or something they call “feminism.”
It’s a topic that elicits passionate opinions, and in light of recent dust-ups online between women who make competing claims on the meaning of feminism, “the women of my generation,” Emily wrote, “— who have more outlets than ever for making their voices heard— need to make sure that we are judging our words carefully, that we aren’t saying anything we don’t actually believe, and that we are accurately representing ourselves.”
You can join Patricia Bosworth, Sheila Weller, Judith Warner, Joanna Smith Rakoff and Emily Gould at the Y on Jun 8 to continue this discussion.
Former director of the Unterberg Poetry Center David Yezzi, blogging at The Best American Poetry blog, attended Richard Wilbur’s reading here last week and wrote:
After a knockout selection of poems new and old, [Wilbur] capped the evening with a bit from his forthcoming translation of Corneille’s The Liar, which will be out in August in a volume that also includes his new translation of Le Cid. Dorante’s long speech from Act Two absolutely killed!
Wilbur was here on May 20 for two events; a discussion with Roger Rosenblatt, and later, for a reading of his poetry. Highlights from both are featured in the video clip above. For Richard Wilbur’s observation on the youth today, and how there is “less hopping of freights [trains], less everything outdoors...and more Twittering and all that,” you can skip to the 3:15 mark.
“History is the next big thing in food. After roaming the world for inspiration, we are coming back to our past.” That’s what The Age is reporting out in Australia (hat tip to Serious Eats):
The subject will receive a popularity boost next year with the transmission of the television series Feast, which will see Heston Blumenthal interpreting historical banquets. For the past four years, the molecular magician and his chefs have been making regular trips to [Ivan] Day’s historic food kitchens in Cumbria to learn techniques.
The Age is on the right track. As a matter of fact, we left that station a few weeks before they arrived. Noted food historian Francine Segan has been giving a series of talks here at the 92nd Street Y, Francine Segan’s World of Tasting, which focus on the history of food. In her Food in Film talk last month, she baked a timballo. A timballo is a large layered pie that was “also a way to do really dazzling things on the table. In the Middle Ages, the pie was the surprise—pie could be four feet high, the crust could even be gilded,” filled with snakes or birds that would be released upon serving. When here for her talk on aphrodisiacs, there was a focus on their popularity with Hercules to Marquis de Sade. Her next talk, on Jun 17, will focus on the history and flavors of honey. You will not be asked to dip your fingers in honey before entering.
A Frenchman, a German, and a Jew are Walking Through the Desert…
This week’s New York Magazinecover story is on Woody Allen’s latest movie, Whatever Works. The screenplay, they note, calls to mind “a brand of Jewish humor that has, in recent years, been all but scrubbed out—neurotic, depressive, abrasive, excluded.” With that, the magazine proceeded to celebrate this humor with a PDF displaying the evolution of a Jewish joke, and a piece on OldJewsTellingJokes.com:
The site, for which he filmed family members and friends telling 30-second-to-three-minute stories...A quarter of the site’s visitors are under 35. “For them, it’s comfort food,” says Hoffman. “It’s a visit with Uncle Steve, who isn’t around anymore. And it channels an element of the culture that isn’t religion but still makes them feel connected.” It’s also a window to a world where certain topics never went out of style: food, sex, aging, analysis, misdiagnosis, couples who hate each other, eating while dying, eating while shtupping, shtupping while dying.
Meet the Press host David Gregory was on The Brian Lehrer Show yesterday to discuss his transition from the White House briefing room to Meet the Press, and previews the president’s speech on closing Guantanamo. Brian went right for the tough questions, asking David if he thinks the timing of the recent arrest and disruption of a Bronx terror plot was a coincidence, or was a set-up by the Justice Department, FBI and NYPD to undermine the Obama administration, since it was revealed shortly before the President was to give his speech on Gitmo and terrorism. David replied, “That kind of coordination is sometimes, uh, you know, gives the government more credit than perhaps it deserves in terms of being able to pull something like that off.”
They both offered nervous laughter. That might have a been a topic for Jane Mayer and Frank Rich to tackle.
The political discourse continues next Tuesday, May 26, when David Gregory (proprietor of a nicely designed Twitter page) joins CBS political analyst Jeff Greenfield at the Y. The next night, May 27, Richard Haass and Katie Couric discuss “War of Necessity, War of Choice?”
Upcoming Events:
Africa: Conversations with a Continent: Liberia: Jun 3
Jack and Suzy Welch: Decision Making the Welch Way: Jun 18
Dennis Ross and David Makovsky: Puncturing Middle East Mythologies: Jun 10
Yours to Decide: Fate, Free Will, Neither or Both?: Jun 13
Despite his yearly appearances in New York, his presence here feels special, something worth celebrating, almost magical. There is a familial chatter and excited hum around the room before he enters, but it’s a warm one — the kind that comes from close friends who stick around and gather together the night after the party. It’s a profoundly caring crowd, the kind that would mourn if he ever stopped writing, but also the kind that would ask, “Would you ever consider running for office?”
Schulz, a drawing teacher by trade, wrote two story collections—Cinnamon Shops (1934) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of Hourglass (1937)—before he was killed by the Gestapo in 1942. His novel-in-progress, The Messiah, has never been found. “I wanted to write a book that would tremble on the shelf,” wrote Israeli novelist David Grossman, whose See Under: Love stands as a lasting tribute to Schulz. “That would equal the blink of an eye in a man’s life...the kind of ‘life’ that Schulz’s writing showed me.” At the Museum of Jewish Heritage for the PEN World Voices Festival, David described what being a writer means for him:
The heart of writing for me is to try to understand another human being from within. Usually we are so protected from other human beings, even from those that we really love, there is this instinct that you have — that is self-preservation — that keeps us from totally exposing ourselves to the chaos that prevails within the other. When I write, I feel like my movement is just in the other direction. I want to be invaded by the other I write about.
The Explorer, The Builder, The Director, and The Negotiator
These are the four types of people Dr. Helen Fisher identified in her study of 40,000 men and women for her new book, Why Him? Why Her?. She determined the types by identifying four chemicals that play leading roles: two sex hormones, testosterone and estrogen; and two neurotransmitters, dopamine and serotonin. With this information, the book seeks to determine who we are and why we are drawn to certain people, to make the dating process more efficient. In an interview with Elle magazine, Fisher said:
People will always make their own mistakes. What I hope to do is enable us to make fewer of them and to understand that sometimes human nature is working against us. Sometimes we fall in love with somebody who will probably never love us, for reasons having nothing to do with us but with their own mind-set, their chemistry.
Fisher maintains a blog as well, The Nature of Love, where she discusses these ideas and more. In one post, she wrote of a new study that shows how our eyes signal trust. We couldn’t look away.
You can learn more when Helen comes to the Y on June 1 to offer her findings and suggestions on these topics. Find out whom we are naturally attracted to, the joys and problems of different kinds of matches and how to use nature’s chemistry to find and keep your life partner.
Dr. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, was a member of the National Security Council during George H.W. Bush’s administration and the director of policy planning at the State Department during George W. Bush’s presidency. The author or editor of eleven books on American foreign policy, including War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars, Haass has been making the rounds on the radio, tv, and print to discuss the content of his new book, which he calls a memoir of two Iraq wars. He argues that the first Iraq war was a war of necessity, while the second war was one of choice—a choice he did not agree with. He told NPR:
I believed in diplomacy, I believe in multilateralism, I believe in institutions. I did not believe in the Iraq war. I thought the United States did have viable alternative policy options, and I feared by going to war, it would — to use the phrase that Colin Powell and I bandied about — ‘Take the oxygen out of the room on American foreign policy.’ So yes, on virtually every foreign policy issue, I found myself on a very different page from my colleagues.
On May 19, New Yorker investigative journalist Jane Mayer and New York Times Op-Ed columnist Frank Rich appeared at the Y for a conversation on Mayer’s book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. They also spoke at length on Obama’s decisions on Guantanamo and torture, a timely discussion as Rachel Maddow has an exclusive report on an off-the-record meeting yesterday between human rights groups and Obama on potential prosecution of Bush administration officials for torture, investigation of Bush era torture policies, and Military Commissions. You can read a recap of the evening by Martin Schneider on the Emdashes blog.
Video highlights above include Mayer talking about how she came to be interested in these issues for her book, her opinion on the compromise Obama has made on Military Commissions, having to withhold publishing certain information in the book per order of the C.I.A., and how investigative reporting might fare in the years to come. When an audience member asked Jane about having to withhold publishing information in the book on the grounds of national security, Mayer candidly replied with an example:
“We’ve been asked to withhold some things, usually by the C.I.A...There’s a redhead who you hear about who is hell on wheels...I wish I could tell people who she was...she renditioned somebody who was innocent and kept him in a dungeon, despite the fact that everybody else kept saying he’s innocent, and she’s been promoted twice since. So I’d love to identify her but I can’t, because the C.I.A. says that she’s in a delicate position job and can’t be identified, so we didn’t.”
On how we can support investigative reporting, Mayer began:
“Read the New Yorker, they’ll be investigative reporting...I know at the New York Times...I know there’ll be investigative reporting so long as [Jill Abramson] is there…
“Not so much television though, which is a problem,” Frank added. “They didn’t even go looking.”
“That’s true,” Mayer agreed. “...I don’t know what’s going to happen, there have been a lot of books...In a way, they perform more of a service now...If you get a book...you start in one place and you follow the whole thing, and you can see how it all unfolded...So maybe, hopefully books, maybe Kindle will save us,”
When Sir Paul Nurse (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2001) comes to the 92nd Street Y on June 13 with psychologist Daniel Wegner, neuroscientist Patrick Haggard and philosopher Alfred Mele to discuss pivotal research into whether free will is real or an illusion, he will be the 50th Nobel Prize winner to have appeared here. Not bad company, the previous 49 are below in alphabetical order.
Kofi Annan, Peace 2001
Saul Bellow, Literature 1976
Heinrich Böll, Literature 1972
Pearl S. Buck, Literature 1938
Joseph Brodsky, Literature 1987
Jimmy Carter, Peace 2002
J. M. Coetzee, Literature 2003
T. S. Eliot, Literature 1948
Mikhail Gorbachev, Peace 1990
Nadine Gordimer, Literature 1991
Al Gore, Peace 2007
Günter Grass, Literature 1999
Seamus Heaney, Literature 1995
Roald Hoffman, Chemistry 1981
Eric R. Kandel, Physiology or Medicine 2000
Imre Kertesz, Literature 2002
Henry Kissinger, Peace 1973
Paul Krugman, Economics 2008
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Literature 2008
Leon M. Lederman, Physics 1988
Doris Lessing, Literature 2007
Konrad Lorenz, Physiology or Medicine 1973
Thomas Mann, Literature 1929
Wangari Muta Maathai, Peace 2004
Czeslaw Milosz, Literature 1980
Franco Modigliani, Economics 1985
Toni Morrison, Literature 1993
V. S. Naipaul, Literature 2001
Pablo Neruda, Literature 1971
Octavio Paz, Literature 1990
Arno Penzias, Physics 1978
Shimon Peres, Peace 1994
Harold Pinter, Literature 2005
Yitzhak Rabin, Peace 1994
Bertrand Russell, Literature 1950
Jose Saramago, Literature 1998
George Seferis, Literature 1963
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Literature 1978
Wole Soyinka, Literature 1986
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Economics 2001
Desmond Tutu, Peace 1984
Harold Varmus, Physiology or Medicine 1989
Derek Walcott, Literature 1992
George Wald, Physiology or Medicine 1967
Lech Walesa, Peace 1983
James Watson, Physiology or Medicine 1962
Elie Wiesel, Peace 1986
Rosalyn Yalow, Physiology or Medicine 1977
Muhammad Yunus, Peace 2006
The 
Emily Gould is a former co-editor of 
Micah Kelber of The Forward 
These are the four types of people Dr. Helen Fisher identified in her study of 40,000 men and women for her new book, 
Dr. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, was a member of the National Security Council during George H.W. Bush’s administration and the director of policy planning at the State Department during George W. Bush’s presidency. The author or editor of eleven books on American foreign policy, including 
When Sir Paul Nurse (
