Simulations Plus

Take a look at BigDog and his amazing robot pals in this link to the New York Times. Or, if you love cute and cuddly, you should check out Paro.

One of the true pleasures of my job is the opportunity to travel and meet people from all over the world. Different cultures presume different business and social behaviors, of course.* But I have found that in spite of the differences, there are at least two similarities among world cultures: a passion to cheer for your national team to win the World Cup and a nearly universal reviling of the vuvuzelas.

In a recent Wall Street Journal column, Terry Teachout had a wonderful essay questioning the complexity of modern art.* He quotes from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which contains sentences like this:

If you want to understand process formalization, read Jane Austen.

As you study the blue ball machine, it is easy to see how you can be mesmerized by a process that doesn’t actually do anything. See if you can find the part where the ball replaces the worker’s head. Then find the little sign that every now and then flashes NO. It never says yes

I first came across the word “disambiguation” at a weekend workshop called Ontology in Science. (There is so much that’s just wrong about what I just admitted, but never mind.) I like this word a lot because it makes people ask, “for goodness sake, what are you talking about?” But disambiguation is a serious word, especially in science. It means “to remove ambiguity.” Once you learn that there is a word for getting rid of ambiguity, you begin to realize how much ambiguity there is in the world, especially when people communicate. And it seems to me that the smarter the people and the more complex the topic, the more disambiguation is necessary.