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Science today.
Listening to the Today programme this morning, I had two unconnected thoughts that I feel like writing down.
Firstly, they were talking about about a refereeing decision on if contact had been made between players. They then brought up the possibility of some kind of automated system to detect if a ball has crossed the goal line. Which wouldn't have helped here. I thought what they needed was one of those systems that stitches together all the photos of landmarks, and makes a 3D computer model. There's enough cameras on a premiership match. Then I thought about printing it out to make it easier to see what's going on. Then about those picture frames you can buy that subscribe to RSS feeds of photos, and wouldn't it be neat for football fans to get a little 3D sculpt of the most interesting points from each weeks matches. I've been reading Makers too much ;)
The other story that caught my ear was the advisory group on human animal hybrids. Judging them soley on the basis of what they said in the interview, they appear to judging the ethics of this process by what has a squick factor. One of their questions was "Why would it be squicky if rhesus monkey was capable of speech, but isn't if a Parrot is?" I don't think it would be squicky. Humans are not that special animals. Intelligence is not an on-off thing that humanity has, and the rest of the animal kingdom is devoid of.
Oddly given that I think that, I'm not an anti-vivisectionist. I would like for research involving anything with spinal chord to minimal, and for them to be well treated, but (when if I were ruler of the world) I wouldn't stop it entirely.
Firstly, they were talking about about a refereeing decision on if contact had been made between players. They then brought up the possibility of some kind of automated system to detect if a ball has crossed the goal line. Which wouldn't have helped here. I thought what they needed was one of those systems that stitches together all the photos of landmarks, and makes a 3D computer model. There's enough cameras on a premiership match. Then I thought about printing it out to make it easier to see what's going on. Then about those picture frames you can buy that subscribe to RSS feeds of photos, and wouldn't it be neat for football fans to get a little 3D sculpt of the most interesting points from each weeks matches. I've been reading Makers too much ;)
The other story that caught my ear was the advisory group on human animal hybrids. Judging them soley on the basis of what they said in the interview, they appear to judging the ethics of this process by what has a squick factor. One of their questions was "Why would it be squicky if rhesus monkey was capable of speech, but isn't if a Parrot is?" I don't think it would be squicky. Humans are not that special animals. Intelligence is not an on-off thing that humanity has, and the rest of the animal kingdom is devoid of.
Oddly given that I think that, I'm not an anti-vivisectionist. I would like for research involving anything with spinal chord to minimal, and for them to be well treated, but (