When I read "tensegrity" I thought of these strange tables/scupltures you can buy: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=tensegrity
If you look at the article, you'll see the picture of such sculpture (a rather impressive one, by the way).
Why birds do not fall while sleeping
41–50 of 191 posts
Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping
#42People who do robotics, is efficient stable balancing at rest something which is studied and applied ?
Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping
#43When I was younger, I was fascinated by evolution, especially the intricacies of how things just work. This fascination also explains why many people believe in the intelligent design theory. However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.
AFAIK key insight into evolution is not randomness but rather sheer amount of compute. Specifically, evolution is a massively parallel flood algorithm that will try every single mutation. Barely any of them will have positive impact on organism fitness, but some will.
That, and of course the other key insight is the "flood algorithm" part. I.e. evolution isn't about randomness (the "throw some parts into a bag and spin them until a 747 flies out" criticism), it's about bias and feedback: the environment itself isn't uniform, creating a bias in what would otherwise be entirely uniform selection, one which compounds with every generation. Randomness is just adding variance here, jitter preventing the process from getting stuck with one outcome.
Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
So do humans, babies and the elderly especially. What has 4 legs in the morning, 2 in the afternoon, and 3 in the evening? The key here is how relaxed is the interpretation of "permanent".
> So do humans, babies and the elderly especially. Only the healthy adult form is taken into account generally, you wouldn't say that dragonflies are mainly swimming animals for example, even if they do spend most of their life underwater as larvae. The point here is that kangaroos that are capable of bipedal motion will always choose quadrupedal motion at low speeds. While humans who can walk will always choose to w…
Adults crawl all the time
Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping
#45"The mechanism’s passive character is surprising"
Are they saying that birds are in a stable equilibrium while standing? I always assumed that some low level activity in the Cerebellum would actively stabilize them even during sleep.
If this is not the case, a dead parrot should be perfectly able to stand, right?
Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So do humans, babies and the elderly especially. Only the healthy adult form is taken into account generally, you wouldn't say that dragonflies are mainly swimming animals for example, even if they do spend most of their life underwater as larvae. The point here is that kangaroos that are capable of bipedal motion will always choose quadrupedal motion at low speeds. While humans who can walk will always choose to w…
Adults crawl all the time
Adults never choose to crawl, unless in tight spaces or drunk off their rocker.
Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping
#47"The mechanism’s passive character is surprising" Are they saying that birds are in a stable equilibrium while standing? I always assumed that some low level activity in the Cerebellum would actively stabilize them even during sleep. If this is not the case, a dead parrot should be perfectly able to stand, right?
Only if it's a Norwegian Blue, as far as I know.
Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping
#48Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping
#49When I was younger, I was fascinated by evolution, especially the intricacies of how things just work. This fascination also explains why many people believe in the intelligent design theory. However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.
AFAIK key insight into evolution is not randomness but rather sheer amount of compute. Specifically, evolution is a massively parallel flood algorithm that will try every single mutation. Barely any of them will have positive impact on organism fitness, but some will.
The way I understood evolution wasn't that "some mutations will have a positive impact", it's more like, when a species hits hard times, "some mutations allow it to survive long enough to reproduce".
Sure, you have dominant genes like eye colour. But evolutionary changes to a whole species are more about weeding out genes that cannot survive, right? Because if a species has no specific sexual selectors for breeding and all mutations survive and reproduce, then how does a specific gene thrive?
Edit: but chatting to my wife, she mentioned that species is a difficult concept, generally taken to be a generic group that actual mate in the wild. There are several different species that could technically produce offspring but through sexual selection, do not.
Re: Why birds do not fall while sleeping
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Birds migrating are mostly zero legging it! To answer the question: a yacht race?
I like the answer, I'm just not sure it's correct - are there any yacht races that have that many legs? (Aside from AI Yacht's, of course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U79-kDQnbPE )
Mahy do. The Caribbean 600, for example.
Now, nobody is completing that race in one day, but that’s a different issue.