Two weeks ago, I wrote about animal adaptations that depict unusual responses to environmental challenges. In particular, I covered anomalies like the pistol shrimp and the walking carp. Both of these animals have an evolutionary “trick” that they’ve developed to help them survive. But some animals have grown beyond the need for singular, individual adaptation and have relied on a mass social evolution. These animals have developed an understanding with their animal colleagues that ventures into the realms of teamwork and  cooperation. Some animals have friends, and some of these animals seem to have adapted beyond even physical symbols into some realm of extra-sensory perception that allows them to know exactly where their friends (or enemies) are at all times.

The first animal that deserves mention for being social creatures are bees. Now, it turns out that there are very many different kinds of bees out there, but for the sake of this post, I will stress the difference between the bees that are more “primitive” and those that are known as “eusocial” bees. Eusocial (for the non-English majors out there) means, “characterized by, pertaining to, or designating an advanced level of social behaviour in animals” (OED). The primitive bees are related more to wasps and tend to be solitary creatures. For the pirmitive bees, the individual must adopt different roles in order to protect their hive. For eusocial bees, tasks and roles are split among different groups of bees that develop specialized jobs and even adaptations that aid them in their work. Here’s an excerpt from everythingabout.net that states, “Highly eusocial bees, a few hundred species, form permanent colonies in which the queen and worker castes are markedly different in structure, each specialized for its own activities and unable to survive without the other. Colonies of eusocial bees are complex, highly coordinated societies. Individual bees may have highly specialized functions within the colony. The tasks of defense, food collection and storage, reproduction, and many other activities are regulated by the colony’s response to environmental conditions inside and outside the hive. Individuals communicate by means of chemical messages, touch, sound, and, in the case of honey bees, a symbolic dance language. The nests of many eusocial bees are very elaborate and may be constructed partially of wax secreted by the bees.” Certain bee colonies adapt to environmental stresses by dividing up the work for survival into parts that each sub-group can perform. If you’ve ever had a job (which I’m hoping most of you have) then you get the idea behind this practice. These social organizations allow for one particular being to adapt to the pinnacle of one aspect of the hive’s needs for survival while the others are free to specialize in their own hive needs. Interestingly enough, people use this kind of organization all of the time. One of Henry Ford’s crowning achievements was his implementation of assembly line building procedures; much like the bees, Ford realized that if people focused on just one task, then they would quickly become superior at that task. If you gathered enough people together, then the car could be assembled quickly. In theory, Ford was just following the kind of biological organization that occurs in nature. The assembly line may have been a novel idea to Henry Ford, but the bees have been doing this for centuries. Here’s a really complicated (I’m sorry I couldn’t find the layman’s version of this video) explanation of the eusocial behavior in bees and how it may have come about.

Another animal that often mystifies people is the jellyfish. They are often thought of as having no intelligence whatsoever, but I’m not convinced. In fact, the “moon jelly” lives out its days in large packs of other moon jellies who set up a living wall that feeds together. When they are fully gathered, the moon jellyfish can span for up to a mile or two and can consist of millions of individual jellyfish. Essentially, these social jellyfish have realized that social organization gets results. Together, in their mobile jellyfish community, they are able to reproduce more successfully, avoid predators, and have a much higher chance of successfully feeding together; that sounds a lot like why people live in cities. This video should show you just how amazing this feat of social organization amongst animals is:

Personally, I’m a big fan of jelly fish (I think most people enjoy watching them move around), so I’m going to include another video that shows some pink jelly fish.

Again, the interesting part to me is that the jellyfish have recognized that they are extremely vulnerable in solitary numbers. If they group together, then the jellyfish are much more likely to thrive. Humans have obviously assimilated this basic understanding of social interactions into their own survival tactics; jellyfish adaptations somehow make it into human adaptations. The last critter that I’ll cover here is similar to the bees in many ways: ants.

Ants are often seen as the pinnacle of social organization. Each ant has a specific job to fill and they perform it, but there are ants that concern themselves with performing a job when it is required of them: the army ants. The army ants have developed an interesting social network in which they are able to develop a plan and execute it flawlessly; they still rely on social designation and certain occupation of ants have developed adaptations that allow them to do their job better; for instance, the ants that forage for food have longer legs that allow them to move faster and carry more. But the collective ability of ants to know their place and do a job is unbelievable. In this video, you will see ants that construct a living bridge. How they organize their ranks, how they decide which ant will go to which place, how they know when to start dismantling the bridge is still a mystery. There is a communication process, but it is unlike anything that we can relate to. Here are these fascinating creatures:

Here’s another video of a living ant bridge (these are driver ants, but they are very similar to army ants) that is constructed. In both of these videos it is important to note that EVERY one of those ants will survive being in that bridge.

Here’s video of ants forming a living lifeboat:

The point that I wish to make is this: evolution sometimes occurs as a collective blanket, a becoming aware of other beings and working in harmony with all of them. If human evolution proceeds along this course, could we expect to truly know the feelings, emotions, thoughts, and desires of every other person? Is that what the internet is heading toward? Will the technological singularity make individual concerns petty and trivial? It is a bizarre thought, but I believe that hive and swarm dynamics are important in considering the limits (or limitlessness) of biological adaptation. Next week, we’ll go aerial with some fancy fliers.

I have spent the past couple of posts looking at the progression and evolution of man. Essentially, the point can be made that the next step in the evolution of humans is the melding of humanity with machines. But what about creatures that didn’t develop an IPhone? Are there some kinds of animals out there that have developed some incredible adaptations that may be harvestable by humans? Maybe at the moment these genetic adaptations seem a little far-fetched or even frightening, but humans have been imitating animals and animal behavior for years in attempting to adapt to special situations. So, in this post, I’ll be looking at several animals that have developed some really interesting genetic solutions to problems as well as several inventions that are based on natural animal adaptations.

The first critter in this week’s post is the pistol shrimp. Those of you who know me, know that I have a particular fondness for this tiny guy. He’s not the biggest of animals, but what he has developed is an oversized claw that is capable of snapping shut with tremendous speed and power. The force of this oversized-claw suddenly snapping shut underwater creates a shock wave that stuns its prey. Amazingly, the heat created by the sudden friction of the claw generates a heat that is equal to that of the sun. As you can see by the video, the result of this strike is undeniably effective. The question that I would ask you to consider is why did this little shrimp develop this particular strategy? I know it’s like asking why did people get legs instead of tank treads, but  I still think that it’s a decent question to consider. Another interesting line of questioning deals with the kinds of genetic adaptations that one could possibly assimilate from this little critter. Super scuba soldiers with oversized “pistol” claws that could blow holes into submarines? Even if it never becomes a reality, it would make a decent science fiction bad-guy at the least.

Another creature that has created a great deal of controversy also comes from the ocean. The giant squid is something of an enigma. It is incredibly large, and it is practically unknown to humans. It was not until 2008 that a large female was pulled up out of an arctic fishing boat’s lines. The length of the creature was around thirty feet, but scientists believe that a full grown male could grow as large as fifty feet. The tentacles not only had suction cups but also had hooks. It is thought that these squids are probably highly aggressive, but that is just a guess as they typically operate at below 1500 ft. depth and no one has really been able to get any footage on the habits of these creatures, but I think that they are incredibly interesting from an evolutionary standpoint. If one arm is good, then eight can’t be that bad. And as if eight arms aren’t enough, nature just had to go and develop suction cups and hooks to ensure that once the squid catches its prey, it won’t let go. The same can be said for some man-made inventions. Velcro functions on a series of hooks and loops that ensure a firm grip. Extra appendages are always a plus; for the squid, they help to ensure a higher chance of gripping prey; but what would you do with an extra four or six arms? What kind of multi-tasking could you accomplish?

The last animal that I want to look at for this post is perhaps the greatest argument for evolutionary adaptation. It is the climbing fish. This fish is pretty hard to find, the researchers that were able to actually deduce that such a thing existed had to spend twenty years just trying to find the creature. Very little footage actually exists regarding this fish, but I’ll paint you a little picture: the fish looks like any other little feeder fish, long body and the characteristic gills and classic fish eyes that you would expect, but it has a slight adaptation near its gills. Instead of having ordinary flaps of skin where the sea water passes through, the gills are adapted with a hand-like protrusion that can be used to grip different surfaces. The interior of the fish is amphibian, allowing it to breath both under and above water. It turns out that the little fish is good enough to use his gill-hand “things” to scale rocks and difficult terrain in looking for food or shelter from his predators. I think that this offers an interesting insight into the possibilities of evolution as a progressive force that continues to work in sudden bursts and subtle transformations. At the bottom of this post, you can watch a short video of a fish that is related to the rock-climbing fish, and is still able to crawl out of its watery world for a drier one. Next week, we’ll continue looking at animals, and I’ll show you a couple of designs that have been inspired by animals when I look at the wild world of biomimetic engineering.

For the past couple of weeks, I have been covering different manifestations of robots in our armed forces and in society in general. For the most part, robotic proliferation has not been kept a secret. Anybody that has a Mac based product knows the frustrations of being outdated almost immediately, but there is the crux. The rate at which technology is increasing is far ahead of the rate at which technology gets sold. This is what is called the technology curve. But recent developments have made the concept of a technology curve obsoletable in their own right; some products have gained the ability to learn for themselves, growing not at the request of the original manufacturer, but growing through the manipulation of third parties that encourage directions for which others can create applications that increase the abilities of the original product. What does this mean? Essentially, this means that products have the capacity to receive improvement from different sources. Going back to our Mac idea, the IPhone does not just rely on Macintosh to create updates; by creating the application market, they are essentially creating a network that allows users and fans to create applications that can possibly make their original product better. So let’s continue on this trend of thought.

Another popular computer game that relies on the input of thousands of users are games like World of Warcraft. These MMORPGs have some really interesting features; they are capable of updating the game content in real-time and allow users to manipulate the UI to suit their particular needs. This means that the game is no longer just a simple product that is made and then handed out to the players, but the game actually grows along with the players. Whenever content becomes added, the source of the content is now ambiguous or even in some cases, irrelevant. No one really cares who took the time to create the helpful “patch” or “update” or “app”; the only real concern with the new piece of programming is whether or not it makes the product better/more accessible/more unique/more individual/etc. This model works well when the product in question is something simple like an IPhone, a billion dollar video game, and other trifles. What some people are starting to predict is the emergence of a new kind of thought process: a living simultaneous human network that might just herald the next stage of human evolution. Enter the technological singularity.

Carl Jung once theorized that there was something called a “collective unconscious.” If you look at the graph over here to the left, you can get an idea of the concept that he was trying to express. Essentially, he was relating the human experience as universal at a certain level. Sure, everyone has their own personal consciousness where you are in control of your actions (most of the time) and you are able to interact with others at their personal conscious level. This is represented by the little man on the chart over here. That is your individual conscious. But beyond that, there are several features that seem to be universal to all human beings. Jung realized that everybody shares emotional and psychological expressions that culminate in the “human experience.” These shared emotional and psychological expressions are the basis for a history that is considered shared and a force that one finds themselves born into. A crafty philosopher might ask how that collective unconscious was started, but that is like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg? The real point is that whichever came first, they are both real today.

So what does this have to do with Technological Singularity? Jung’s “collective” was “unconscious;” the collective of a technological singularity would be completely conscious. Here is a definition that I think serves well; it comes from The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence: “The Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. There are several technologies that are often mentioned as heading in this direction. The most commonly mentioned is probably Artificial Intelligence, but there are others: direct brain-computer interfaces, biological augmentation of the brain, genetic engineering, ultra-high-resolution scans of the brain followed by computer emulation. Some of these technologies seem likely to arrive much earlier than the others, but there are nonetheless several independent technologies all heading in the direction of the Singularity – several different technologies which, if they reached a threshold level of sophistication, would enable the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence.” If this sounds like something that is out of a sci-fi horror movie, then you’re probably still sane. Anxieties about the increase in human-robot relations have been stemming since the Luddite Rebellion of the 1800s. The fear is that humans will fall under the control of some robot that speaks like a speak-and-spell and hates all humans because they are too emotional/illogical/unpredictable/weak/whatever-the-writers-can-conceive. But this fear is really the same underlying fear that people have harvested towards each other. Before machines were part of the equation, people were engaging in battles against other people that they found too emotional/illogical/unpredictable/weak/whatever-the-politicians-can-conceive. The key is that the machines do not really have this power on their own; they are the tools that people use, but there does seem to be a change occurring; people and machines (robots) are becoming indistinguishable from each other. This will have interesting implications for the future.

Essentially, what some people are predicting (and others are working feverishly to actually accomplish) is the union of humankind and machines. Personally, I think that the separation between humans and machines is a trick of semantics; humans and machines have been in harmony since the days when someone figured out how to sharpen a spear or reasoned how to dig a ditch to hold rain-water. But the future union of machines and humans will be a far more deeper wave. A network just like the one in video games and cell phones will be online for all of us; we will be able to receive everyone’s input on a process; whenever someone learns something it will instantly become available to everyone else for their benefit. Bodies will be different, possibly even changeable, and gender will be a thing of the past. As humans and machines will meld further and further, they will begin to be seamless; things like race, ethnicity, gender, and appearance will not be hereditary markers of anything, they will be identities that can be adopted or discarded depending on one’s inclinations. Imagine a world in which there is no separation between the individual and the communal; if you’re finding it hard to imagine, that is because there is absolutely no way to describe the kind of connectivity and network that is being proposed here. The cognitive foundation that is being proposed here is the next step in human evolution. For more information and other links, please visit this site. See you next week.

Last post, I covered two masters of internal martial arts from the 20th century. There are three kinds of reactions that people have: denial, indecision, or acceptance. I’ve revealed that I’m aboard, and the reasoning that propelled me to that conclusion was founded by a belief in the unknown. But as I sat thinking about it, there is more to it than my belief that the human potential has not been fully tapped. In addition, I believe that we can use the human imagination as contrasted with reality. It’s true that super-heroes and supernatural stories are usually relegated to the literature of children, but there is an undeniable connection between the imagination and the reality that surrounds us. Someone had to envision a particle accelerator, really imagine the thing, before one was created. This is a tricky process because that means that the imagination is dependent on the reality that it encounters. In other words, you couldn’t just jump from the stone age to the nuclear age … or could you? Is technology dependent on single-file, chronological, easily trackable, evolutionary type steps? Or can you have sudden spurts of evolution? Can you skip ahead in the evolutionary cycle without leaving a trace of it behind?

The thought that predominates our Western perspective of history is that we are the culmination of all human civilization that came before us. We are the most technologically advanced, the most evolved, the prettiest, the smartest, and the most dominant of the space that we inhabit. This gives a very tidy (and incredibly anthropocentric) view of our species today. But there are some troubling relics out there that challenge that view. The first, which was hotly debated but has been recently reconstructed, is the Antikythera machine.

Those that are familiar with the Antikythera machine are probably familiar with the content in this article by Live Science. The origins of the machine are interesting as well and suggest that there may have been more than one of these little devices. In 1900, divers off the coast of the little island of Antikythera found the device inside of an ancient cargo shipwreck in fragments. The picture here shows all of the fragments that the divers brought to the surface, and researchers from around the world have been reconstructing for over a century. Modern technology has helped in the analysis of the pieces as well, though some of the parts are hypothetical. If you read the article, then you know that the machine functions as a very accurate astronomical calculator that could even predict eclipses and trace star patterns. The article also describes the device as, “a clock-like machine consisting of more than 30 precise, hand-cut bronze gears, [which] show it to be more advanced than previously thought—so much so that nothing comparable was built for another thousand years.” This means that the culture that created this device was capable of a metallurgy that far proceeded any culture ahead of it for a millennium.  It is even possible that this device wasn’t even the most advanced machine that those people built, but the most advanced machine from them that we’ve found. Another machine that creates a great amount of skepticism is the Baghdad battery.

Many people have heard about these batteries, but I’ll elaborate a little. Here is an article that provides the information I will paraphrase. The battery works off of gathering electrons from acidic liquids by using different metals (pardon the simplicity of this explanation) and can generate up to two volts of electricity. These batteries could hypothetically be used together, but there is no real explanation for how they were used. There are a lot of theories, but the reality is that we may just not understand the “wiring” of the day because we are expecting them to look like something that we would use today. The important part is that two thousand years ago, someone came up with a concept that would lie dormant until a century or two ago. They came up with technology out of a sync with the rest of the world. This means that some societies and some cultures were really dominant in areas of technology that did not last or were buried under the banner of war, disease, or some other decline of a civilization. This also paints a picture that perhaps we are not as much at the height of all civilization before us. At the end of the BBC article, they mention the last machine that I’ll look at before getting back to the connection with super-heroes or the supernatural: Hero’s engine.

First, no one has any idea what this could have been used for, or if it was even used for any other purpose. Many physics classes use these devices to talk about thermodynamics. The device is named after Hero of Alexandria, but it is unclear if he devised the machine himself or whether his disciples devised it after his passing. Essentially, fire is applied to a kettle that is full of water, the water turns to steam which escapes through two tubes that are bent in opposite directions. When the steam pressure builds, the force of the escaping steam turns the machine. Sound simple? It gets interesting if you add a pole to the bottom of the machine and then attack a simple gear that could turn another gear on an axle. There you would have a two-thousand year old steam engine. Yet another instance of a technology that was developed thousands of years ago but that we credit ourselves with the “correct” application. Ultimately, these technologies paint a picture of technological progress that is not uniform and certainly not necessarily progressive in the kind of sense that we like to envision it. If we start to think that maybe some peoples were incredibly advanced in some aspects of their civilizations while maybe not very advanced in others, we get a picture of a landscape that houses thousands of possibilities; once again, we can maybe understand a bubble of evolution: spasms of development and progress in the unraveling of time that stand alone and unexplainable to us except as fancies of the imagination. But reminders of our inferiority are out there foiling our smug hubris.

What does this have to do with martial arts and specifically those two martial artists? Maybe nothing. I’m willing to concede that, but maybe, just as we’ve seen physical technologies that developed ahead of the curve, certain civilizations developed internal-technologies that were far ahead of our time.  So let’s see where our super-men are at. Here’s some of the craziest acts of strength I found:

This video is impressive because the guy is not that large, and he is able to use his strength multiple times. Check this one out:

Now here comes an interesting video. Most people think that Tank Abbot is a bad-ass, and I don’t doubt that he is, but he can only bench the same amount of weight as the guy above only once. Here’s the proof:

Now check out this interesting little clip. This guy has some incredible control of his body.

This next video shows another expression of strength. It is truly amazing.

Take this video as an example, and I fear that I’m going to have to do one more part on this to get a little more in-depth, but this video shows an indication of how chi could be used in conjunction with hypnosis. This would also explain some of Ueshiba’s video. Here it is: judge for yourselves.

And finally, here is a real fighter. I have nothing but positive things to say about this guy, and I don’t even know if he’s to blame or not, but he can certainly walk the talk.

This guy knocks a bunch of people out with seeming ease. Granted, they’re not level 3 Spartans (Halo reference [I think I got that right]), but imagine what Ueshiba and Cheng Man Ching may have been able to accomplish by using a technology that was thousands of years old but completely effective today as it was back then. Perhaps these men were just more evolved in some sense or were able to utilize a cognitive technology that enabled them to tap into an energy that most of us can’t see. See you next week.

Good Morning everyone!

I hope that you all enjoyed Baman, Piederman, and Tuba, a true force for good in the universe. Today being the lovely Sunday that it is, I thought that I would grab a nice cup of coffee, go visit the long box library, and read a few comic series that I greatly enjoyed as youngling, cementing the comic’s greatness in my mind (I still love me some BATMAN: LONG HALLOWEEN), or helping me realize what horrible taste I had in comics as a child (yes, BRUTE FORCE, I am talking about you).

As I began my digging, I ventured into the “X-men” box, where I came across this:

There was something about this comic that made me pause for a moment. It wasn’t the story, I recall “The Phalanx Covenant” being rather pedestrian. It wasn’t the art, although I am a fan of any and all Kuberts. It was the cover. You see, all these neat phalanx tie-in books had a mid-nineties, super-cool, chrome stripe running along the left side of the books. This was the first cover where I ever recognized branding on a cover. This got me thinking about how the comic book cover had evolved over the years.

The comic book cover has always been vital to comic success. If the cover sucks, I know that I am not going to give that book a shot. Back in the ‘30s and ‘40s you would see covers like the ones above, a striking image, the comic title, and maybe a blurb about what to expect inside. It was clean, it was clear, and at the time, it was what grabbed the attention of would-be comic buyers. As comics moved forward into the 1950s, there was a wider variety of genres available to people. The cover made it easy to distinguish between your horror comics and your superhero comics.

Pretty easy to figure out which is which, right? It’s not just the picture, the coloring is different, the brightly colored backgrounds for the kiddies, the spooky lighting for the horror book. Even the font has become more diverse, helping to differentiate the books. Hooray for diversity!

While the comic code got rid of a lot of diversity in comics, covers in the 1960s started using more and more text bubbles on covers. There was still an eye catching image on the cover, but text was used to attract readers to the story hiding inside. Observe the glory of BUBBLE!

In the 1970s things started to get crazy. Just one character on a cover was no longer enough. The covers of this era were almost an extra page of story, almost all the characters had speech or thought bubbles, and there was still a blurb about the story inside. It seemed the goal was to have the busiest cover possible, because that’s what the younger reader base was looking for. It was like warfare on the eyes.

Luckily sanity was soon restored. After a decade of ocular dishevelment, the 1980s brought back the more focused single image. The fonts continued to evolve as well. Comic book readers were growing up, and the covers started to show it.There were still a fair amount of words on the page, but it was at a greatly reduced rate.

The 1990s saw a renewed variety in comics, and a myriad of cover styles typified the growth of the medium. Superhero comics went back towards the singular, more iconic image, darker books, like DC’s Vertigo line and Dark Horse brought out elements that set them apart from the kiddie stuff, and in cases like the “Phalanx Covenant” cover branding was even used.

As the new millennium has dawned, the single cover image is back and branding has became even more important. Big “Event” books now have a special trade dress to delineate them from other books, and whole imprints, like Marvel’s Ultimate line, share a trade dress.

One thing that I have noticed as these covers become more and more elaborate is that the smaller publishers seem to stick with the strong single image. While the “Big two” of Marvel and DC continue to use these branding techniques, the smaller guys don’t, and I do not know why. I would think that independent publishers would be free to be the most creative, but most just stick with what has already been established. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a negative comment towards my fellow small pressers, just a curiosity.

So over the years as the comic reader has grown, so has the art of the cover. I, for one,  cannot wait to see what the next decade brings us.

Thanks for stopping in everyone, see you all tomorrow.