Josie Ford
Flowery language
Polymorphic perversion has fallen by the wayside in academia. As a subject of study, that is. Research publications in recent years make few overt mentions of it.
The phrase and long-running quarrels as to its meaning are associated with psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, whose death in 1939 prevented him putting paid to those quarrels. Grażyna Gajewska at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland is one of the few academics who is now overtly studying polymorphic perversion on a broad, societal level. Her recent treatise “” appears in the journal ±Ê´Ç°ùÍѷɲԲ¹²Ô¾±²¹.
Gajewska gives a peek into aspects of life that will be new to many readers. She focuses mainly on our relationships to plants, rather than to bacteria, archaea or non-human animals. Her paper, she says, “presents some of my impressions regarding the ‘vegetal facet of the human'”.
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She then specifies that “one could cite the captivating images of flowers resembling female lips (Psychotria Elata), figures of dancing men (Orchis Italica), [and] swaddled infants (Anguloa Uniflora)”. The orchid, says Gajewska, “can be treated as a figure of this polymorphic perversion”. The remainder of her paper demonstrates the truth of that statement.
Screwing up
Six per cent of 53,400 screwings got screwed up in a massive test done on a vehicle assembly line in Portugal. The test was meant to try out new machine vision equipment and to see how well those new vision gizmos would cooperate with the existing robotic screw-tightening machinery.
The tale is told, with some expected twists, in “” by Joana Dias and her colleagues. They choose a matter-of-fact style to report their joyous news: “the automated bolt-tightening system was able to achieve 94% of success in 53,400 screwing operations.”
Bolt tightening is step two of an especially riveting portion of the complex process of building an automobile. Step one is to get the bolt into its proper place. That isn’t as simple as it sounds. You can see step one lovingly and lengthily described (from a human perspective) in “” by Jingjing Xu and her colleagues at Beijing University of Technology.
After step one comes step two: bolt tightening. More often than laypeople might expect, step two is followed by unplanned bolt loosening, which necessitates step three, a slick bit of robotic detective work known to insiders as “loosened-bolt detection”. A classic work about loosened bolt detection is Lovedeep Ramana and colleagues’ ““.
Successful detection of a loose bolt leads, of course, to another go at step two, bolt tightening. And so it goes, with much repetition, robotic life on the assembly line being a long succession of mechanical screwings, screw-ups, recoveries and let’s-get-on-with-its. That is the quotidian, nuts-and-bolts reality of auto-auto-making machinery.
Midnight musings
Feedback has been having late night fun flipping through the digital pages of the Journal of Controversial Ideas, which describes itself as a “ specifically created to promote free inquiry on controversial topics”.
The journal is filled with papers filled with cleverness. Its aim appears to be stimulation. Stimulation of the fun kind that grows increasingly antic from the hours of midnight to dawn. It reads much like the starts of conversations people have late at night in the first year of university – fun explorations of what-ifs as if maybe there are no ifs – but done here by people who have the high-honed thinking and writing skills of professional philosophers.
Behold an example that gives the flavour. A person named Michael Plant, a research fellow at the University of Oxford, wrote a paper called ““.
“I argue,” Plant says, “that, if meat eating is wrong on animal suffering grounds then, once we consider how much suffering might occur, it starts to seem plausible that saving strangers would be the greater evil than not rescuing them and is, therefore, not required after all.” Plant is planting the idea that we should let people die because that prevents them from later maybe doing bad things.
The Journal of Controversial Ideas is similar in spirit to Medical Hypotheses, a journal that, in its heyday, published a stream of brilliantly super-reasoned ideas. Among them: E. Tuncay Ustuner’s “” and Jarl Flensmark’s ““
If you are old enough to look back fondly on your late-teenage post-midnight what-if chats, you might welcome a fresh journey into that happy frame of mind. If you aren’t yet old enough to have had late-teenage post-midnight what-if chats, you might enjoy a peek ahead at how the older kids get to rev up their wits in the wee hours.
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