Logic gates made of live crabs:

In Robust Soldier Crab Ball Gate, recently published in Complex Systems, a Japanese-UK computer science team describe how they made functional logic gates by constructing a maze of narrow tunnels and spooking soldier crabs into running through them in predictable ways by exposing them to bird-of-prey silhouettes. Lead researcher Yukio-Pegio Gunji (Kobe University) and colleagues implemented a “billiard ball computer” (a computer that implements logic gates out of chutes through which balls are dropped, either colliding or falling straight through) using the crabs, who have a repertoire of deterministic flocking responses to various stimuli, including narrow passages and the presence of predator shadows. The result is a relatively functional AND gate and a less-reliable OR gate. A Technical Review blog summarizes the method well:

When placed next to a wall, a leader will always follow the wall in a direction that can be controlled by shadowing the swarm from above to mimic to the presence of the predatory birds that eat the crabs.

Under these conditions, a swarm of crabs will follow a wall like a rolling billiard ball.

So what happens when two “crab balls” collide? According to Gunji and co’s experiments, the balls merge and continue in a direction that is the sum of their velocities.

What’s more, the behaviour is remarkably robust to noise, largely because the crab’s individuals behaviours generates noise that is indistinguishable from external noise. These creatures have evolved to cope with noise.

That immediately suggested a potential application in computing, say Gunji and co. If the balls of crabs behave like billiard balls, it should be straightforward to build a pattern of channels that act like a logic gate.

Computer Scientists Build Computer Using Swarms of Crabs

(via Wired)

Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? – Magazine – The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/8930/

(via Instapaper)

[Oh dear god. I am simultaneously impressed by the graphic design and disgusted by the content. -egg]

TSA waste infographic:
An infographic from Online Criminal Justice Degree does a great job of laying out the incredible waste, incompetence and invasiveness of the TSA. Click through below for the whole thing.
TSA Waste | Online Criminal Justice Degree (via Techdirt)

[Also wut. -egg]
Survivalist Singles and climate change erotica:
Related to my earlier post about prepper condos, The Guardian’s Alice Bell riffs on “doomsday dating” services like Survivalist Singles and Amazon’s curious book category Books › Fiction › Erotica › “Global Warming & Climate Change.” Yes, both are real. From The Guardian:

The emergence of a discourse on doomsday dating – real or fictional – maybe says something quite depressing about 21st-century attitudes to the future. Romance is often about hope after all, though I appreciate some might argue this is a slightly heteronormative view (or at least the politics of childbirth is worth reflecting upon if digging deeper into this issue). If you want some optimism, there’s that icon of postmodernist survivalism, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who, on a date in one of the later series, is told by her boyfriend that knowing her leads to him puzzling over what the plural for apocalypse is.

Maybe scorched earths, like broken hearts, do heal. Or maybe not. Perhaps the plural for apocalypse is simply the conceit of commercial television wanting to run beyond the previous season’s overly dramatic denouement. Perhaps living through disaster by proxy of science fiction has made us too blasé about it all. It’s easy to giggle at doomsday dating, but arguably it’s no laughing matter.

“Fancy a doomsday date? If things get really bad, it may be your best bet” (via The Daily Grail)

[Wut. -egg]
15th century Flemish portraits recreated in airplane lavs using toilet tissue, seat-covers and paper towels:

It all started when artist Nina Katchadourian went into an airplane bathroom and spontaneously improvised a 15th century Flemish costume from a toilet-seat cover and shot a suitably posed self-portrait. This inaugurated an ongoing series of wonderful 15th century Flemish-esque portraits shot in a series of airplane lavs, in which a variety of replica garb is improvised from toilet tissue, seat covers and paper towels.

While in the lavatory on a domestic flight in March 2010, I spontaneously put a tissue paper toilet cover seat cover over my head and took a picture in the mirror. The image evoked 15th-century Flemish portraiture. I decided to add more images made in this mode and planned to take advantage of a long-haul flight from San Francisco to Auckland, guessing that there were likely to be long periods of time when no one was using the lavatory on the 14-hour flight. I made several forays to the bathroom from my aisle seat, and by the time we landed I had a large group of new photographs entitled Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style. I was wearing a thin black scarf that I sometimes hung up on the wall behind me to create the deep black ground that is typical of these portraits. There is no special illumination in use other than the lavatory’s own lights and all the images are shot hand-held with the camera phone. At the Dunedin Public Art gallery, the photos were framed in faux-historical frames and hung on a deep red wall reminiscent of the painting galleries in museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Seat Assignment: Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style