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What is the role of critical theory today and who is it for? What kind of maps can theory provide in the context of entrenched capitalist crisis? These are some of the questions posed by this seminar series. 

I am working on a project that relies on different ways to present instructions. I want to collect as many ways as possible. These can be visual, written, or otherwise, but each 'type' of instruction must have a design aesthetic or formulaic quality that is particular to it. So, for instance, recipes are usually laid out in a certain way; architectural blueprints have a design that we all recognise, as do maps, exploded diagrams, algorithms, technical schematics, toolkits... Can you help me think of more?

Nichons-nous dans l'Internet est une revue en papier intégralement consacrée à Internet. Au sommaire du quatrième numéro : 9gag, le Bon Coin, les Youtubeuses, Google Maps et Kenneth Goldsmith.

Human genome pioneer J. Craig Venter announced plans Tuesday to sequence the gene maps of 40,000 volunteers in a bid to crack the secrets of healthy human aging.

Online now – @laturboavedon's exhibition 'New Sculpt' at @transfergallery in Second Life at http://t.co/zK2JgN49ip http://t.co/yHlaQUVCbM – netartnet.net (netartnet) http://twitter.com/netartnet/status/358746892017995776

Your work spans several distinct, but overlapping areas of discourse. We could start by talking through design, animation, glitch art, code, game play or the interface. I want to start right from the bottom though, and ask you about inputs and outputs. A recent work you collaborated on with Jeff Thompson, You Have Been Blinded - “a non-visual adventure game” -  takes me back to my childhood when playing a videogame often meant referring to badly sketched dungeon maps, before typing N S E or W on a clunky keyboard. Nostalgia certainly plays a part in You Have Been Blinded, but what else drives you to strip things back to their elements? I’ve always been interested in how things are built. From computers to houses to rocks to software. What makes these things stand up? What makes them work? Naturally I’ve shifted to exploring how we construct experiences. How do we know? Each one of us has a wholly unique experience of… experience, of life.. When I was a kid I was always wondering what it was like to be any of the other kids at school. Or a kid in another country. What was it like to be my cat or any of the non-people things I came across each day? These sorts of questions have driven me to peel back experience and ask it some pointed questions. I don’t know that I’m really interested in the answers. I don’t think we could really know those answers, but I think it’s enough to ask the questions. Stripping these things down to their elements shows you that no matter how hard you try, nothing you make will ever be perfect. There are always flaws and the evidence of failure to be found, no matter how small. I relish these failures. Your ongoing artgame project, Writing Things We Can No Longer Read, revels in the state of apophenia, “the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data”. [1] The title invokes Walter Benjamin for me, who argued that before we read writing we “read what was never written” [2] in star constellations, communal dances, or the entrails of sacrificed animals. From a player’s point of view the surrealistic landscapes and disfigured interactions within your (not)(art)games certainly ask, even beg, to be interpreted. But, what role does apophenia have to play in the making of your work? When I make stuff, I surround myself with lots of disparate media. Music, movies, TV shows, comics, books, games. All sorts of stuff gets thrown into the pot of my head and stews until it comes out. It might not actually come out in a recognizable form, but the associations are there. A specific example can be found in a lot of the models I use. I get most of them, or at least the seed of them, from open source models I find on 3D Warehouse. Because of the way that website works, it’s constantly showing you models it thinks are similar for whatever reason. Often I’ll follow those links and it will take me down symbolic paths that I never would have consciously decided to pursue. This allows a completely associative and emergent composition to take form. I’d like to paraphrase and link up your last two answers, if I may. How do “relishing failures” and “allowing things to take form” overlap for you? I know you have connections with the GLI.TC/H community, for instance. But your notgames Me&You, Down&Up, and your recent work/proposition Make Me Something seem to invoke experiments, slips and disasters from a more oblique angle. All are a means of encouraging surprise. In each piece it’s not about the skill involved, but about the thrill of the unknown. In all of my projects I try to construct a situation where I have very little control over the outcome. Glitch does this. But within the glitch community there’s a definite aesthetic involved. You can look at something and know that it’s glitch art. That’s not true for everything, but there is a baseline. For my notgames work I embrace the practice, not necessarily the look. I want irregularity. I want things to break. I want to be surprised. Your work in progress, the Remeshed series, appears to be toying with another irregular logic,  one you hinted at in your comments about “associative and emergent composition”; a logic that begins with the objects and works out. I hear an Object Oriented echo again in your work Make Me Something, where you align yourself more with the 3D objects produced than with the people who requested them. What can we learn from things, from objects? Has Remeshed pushed/allowed you to think beyond tools? That’s a tricky question and I’m not sure I have a satisfactory answer. Both projects owe their existence to a human curatorial eye. But in both I relinquish a lot of control over the final object or experience. I do this in the spirit of ready-to-hand things. By making experiences and objects that break expectations our attention is focused upon them. They slam into the foreground and demand our attention. Remeshed, and to an extent, Make Me Something, allows me to focus less on the craft of modeling and animation and more on pushing what those two terms mean. As Assistant Professor and Program Director of the Game Studies BSc atBellevue University you inevitably inhabit a position of authority for your students. Are there contradictions inherent in this status, especially when aiming to break design conventions, to glitch for creative and practical ends, and promote those same acts in your students? Yourecently modified Roland Barthes’ 1967 text ‘The Death of the Author’ to fit into a game criticism context. It makes me wonder whether “The Player-God” is something you are always looking to kill in yourself? Absolutely. When teaching I try break down the relationship of authority as much as possible. I prefer to think of myself as a mentor, or guide, to the students. Helping them find the right path for themselves. Doing this from within a traditional pedagogical structure is difficult, but worthwhile. Or so I tell myself. In terms of the Player-God, I think yes, I’m always trying to kill it. But at the same time, I’m trying to kill the Maker-God. There is no one place or source for a work. There’s no Truth. I reject the Platonic Ideal. Both maker and player are complicit in the act of the experience. Without either, the other wouldn’t exist.

Age: Somewhere in my third decade. Location: The Land of Wind and Grass / The Void Between Chicago and Denver How long have you been working creatively with technology? How did you start? Oof, for as long as I can remember. When I was 13 I killed my first computer about 4 days after getting it. I was trying to change the textures in DOOM. I had no idea what I was doing. Later, in college I was in a fairly traditional arts program learning to blow glass. At some point someone gave me a cheap Sony 8mm digital camcorder and I started filming weird things and incorporating the (terrible) video art into my glass sculptures. After that I started making overly ambitious text adventures and playing around with generative text and speech synthesizers. Describe your experience with the tools you use. How did you start using them? Where did you go to school? What did you study? I use Unity and Blender primarily right now. They’re the natural evolution of what I was trying to do way back when I was using Hammer and Maya. I did my MFA in Interactive Media and Environments at The Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen, NL. I started working in Hammer around this time making Gun-Game maps for Counter-Strike: Source. During the start of my second semester of grad school I suffered a horrible hard drive failure and lost all of my work. In a fit of depression I did pretty much nothing but play CS:S and drink beer for three months. At the end of that I made WINNING. What traditional media do you use, if any? Do you think your work with traditional media relates to your work with technology? I’m not sure how to answer this. About the most traditional thing I do anymore is make prints from the results of my digital tinkering. Object art doesn’t interest me much these days, but it definitely influenced how I first approached Non-Object art. Are you involved in other creative or social activities (i.e. music, writing, activism, community organizing)? I’m involved with a lot of local game developer and non-profit digital arts organizations. What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? Do you think this work relates to your art practice in a significant way? I’m an Assistant Professor of Game Studies at Bellevue University. The job and my work are inexorably bound together. I enjoy teaching in a non-arts environment because I feel it affords me freedom and resources I wouldn’t otherwise have. I actually hate the idea of walled-disciplines in education. Everyone should learn from and collaborate with everyone else. Who are your key artistic influences? Mostly people I know: Jeff Thompson, Darius Kazemi, Rosa Menkman, THERON JACOBS and some people I don’t know: Joseph Cornell, Theodor Seuss Geisel, Bosch, Brueghel the Elder, most of Vimeo. Have you collaborated with anyone in the art community on a project? With whom, and on what? Yes. Definitely. Most recently I’ve been working with Jeff Thompson. We made You Have Been Blinded and Thrown into a Dungeon, a non-visual, haptic dungeon adventure. We’ve also been curating Games++ for the last two years. Do you actively study art history? Yep. I’m constantly looking at and referencing new and old art. I don’t limit it to art, though. I’m sick of art that references other art in a never ending strange loop. I try to cast my net further afield. Do you read art criticism, philosophy, or critical theory? If so, which authors inspire you? Definitely. In no particular order: Dr. Seuss, Alastair Reynolds, Alan Sondheim, Dan Abnett, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, Italo Calvino, Mother Goose, Jacques Lacan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Carl Jung, H.P. Lovecraft, Jonathan Hickman, Brandon Graham, John Dewey, Umberto Eco... the list goes on and on. Are there any issues around the production of, or the display/exhibition of new media art that you are concerned about? I think we’ve partially reached an era of the ascendant non-object. That is, an art form, distinct from performance and theatre, that places an emphasis wholly on the experience and not on the uniqueness of the object. Because of this move away from a distinct singular form, there’s no place for it in the art market. Most artists that work this way live by other means. I teach. Others move freely between the worlds of art and design. Still others do other things. The couple of times I’ve had solo exhibitions in Europe, I’ve almost always been offered a livable exhibition fee. Here in the States that’s never been the case. When I have shows stateside, I always take a loss. The organizer may cover my material costs, but there’s no way I could ever live off of it. Nor would I want to. I think the pressures of survival would limit my artistic output. I’m happier with a separation between survival and art.

[1] “Apophenia,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopaedia, March 21, 2013, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Apophenia&oldid=545047760.

[2] Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schoclen Books, 1933), 333–336.

Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions. This is the data that you're drawing from when you ask Google to navigate you from point A to point B -- and last week, Google showed me the internal map and demonstrated how it was built. It's the first time the company has let anyone watch how the project it calls GT, or "Ground Truth," actually works.

Google opened up at a key moment in its evolution. The company began as an online search company that made money almost exclusively from selling ads based on what you were querying for. But then the mobile world exploded. Where you're searching from has become almost as important as what you're searching for. Google responded by creating an operating system, brand, and ecosystem in Android that has become the only significant rival to Apple's iOS.

Fractal, rorsch patterns in Google maps

Baker's house, located in San Jose, California, has been like this for decades. Baker, described as eccentric and volatile, has been collecting stuff for over 40 years. The worst part is that Baker doesn't even live in the home! He hasn't been seen for months and no one knows how to get a hold of him. Luckily for his neighbors, local officials will be cleaning up the house in the next two months (after pressure from ABC 7/KGO). Richard Baker, it's time to find somewhere else to put your crap.

A trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of "trapping" potential copyright violators of the map, who will be unable to justify the inclusion of the "trap street" on their map. On maps that are not of streets, other "copyright trap" features (such as non-existent towns or mountains with the wrong elevations) may be inserted or altered for the same purpose.[1] Trap streets are often nonexistent streets; but sometimes, rather than actually depicting a street where none exists, a map will misrepresent the nature of a street in a fashion that can still be used to detect copyright violators but is less likely to interfere with navigation. For instance, a map might add nonexistent bends to a street, or depict a major street as a narrow lane, without changing its location or its connections to other streets.

Failure and malfunction are inherent in all technological products. In The Art of the Accident, the concept of “accident” contains not just the idea that each machine brings with it its own form of disaster but also the suggestion that in a world of network technologies the old distinction between timeless form and time-dependent processes is becoming increasingly unclear.

Ars accidentalis recognizes the creative potential of the accident, the fall, and the instability of digital media. The book maps the transformation of space, time bodies, machines and architectures through the conceptual and noninstrumental use of the computer.

by Brian Holmes

===> INTRODUCTIONS

-The Affectivist Manifesto:

Artistic Critique for the 21st Century

-Toward the New Body:

Marcelo Expósito’s “Entre Sueños“

-Recapturing Subversion:

Twenty Twisted Rules for the Culture Game

.

===> POTENTIALS

01-Network Maps, Energy Diagrams:

Structure and Agency in the Global System

02-Do-It-Yourself Geopolitics:

Global Protest and Artistic Process

03-The Potential Personality:

Trans-Subjectivity in the Society of Control

Three years ago, Edge collaborated with The Serpentine Gallery in London in a program of "table-top experiments" as part of the Serpentine's Experiment Marathon . This live event was featured along with the Edge/Serpentine collaboration: "What Is Your Formula? Your Equation? Your Algorithm? Formulae For the 21st Century."

Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator of the Serpentine, has invited Edge to collaborate in his latest project, The Serpentine Map Marathon, Saturday and Sunday, 16 – 17 October, at Royal Geographical Society, 1 Kensington Gore, London SW7 2AR (Map).

The multi-dimensional Map Marathon features non-stop live presentations by over 50 artists, poets, writers, philosophers, scholars, musicians, architects, designers and scientists. The two-day event takes place in London during Frieze Art Fair week.

The event features maps by Edge contributors, and an Edge panel of Lewis Wopert, Armand Leroi, and John Brockman, on Sunday (17 October) 1:15pm-2:15pm.

The gallery is a work-in-prog

Jacques Rancière prepares for us a parable. A student who is illiterate, after living a fulfilled life without text, one day decides to teach herself to read. Luckily she knows a single poem by heart and procures a copy of that poem, presumably from a trusted source, by which to work. By comparing her knowledge, sign by sign, word by word, with the poem she can, Rancière believes, finally piece together a foundational understanding of her language: “From this ignoramus, spelling out signs, to the scientist who constructs hypotheses, the same intelligence is always at work – an intelligence that translates signs into other signs and proceeds by comparisons and illustrations in order to communicate its intellectual adventures and understand what another intelligence is endeavoring to communicate to it. This poetic labour of translation is at the heart of all learning.” The Emancipated Spectator (2008)

What interests me in Rancière’s example is not so much the act of translation as the possibility of mis-translation. Taken in light of The Ignorant Schoolmaster we can assume that Rancière is aware of the wide gap that exists between knowing something and knowing enough about something for it to be valuable. But what distinction can we uncover between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’, hell, even between the ‘true’ and ‘almost true’? How does one calculate the value of what is effectively a mistake? Error appears to be a crucial component of Rancière’s position. In a sense, Rancière is positing a world that has from first principles always uncovered itself through a kind of decoding. A world in which subjects “translate signs into other signs and proceed by comparison and illustration”. Now forgive me for side-stepping a little here, but doesn’t that sound an awful lot like biological development? Here’s a paragraph from Richard Dawkins (worth his salt as long as he is talking about biology): “Think about the two qualities that a virus, or any sort of parasitic replicator, demands of a friendly medium, the two qualities that make cellular machinery so friendly towards parasitic DNA, and that make computers so friendly towards computer viruses. These qualities are, firstly, a readiness to replicate information accurately, perhaps with some mistakes that are subsequently reproduced accurately; and, secondly, a readiness to obey instructions encoded in the information so replicated.” Viruses of the Mind (1993)

Hidden amongst Dawkins’ words, I believe, we find an interesting answer to the problem of mis-translation I pose above. A mistake is useless if accuracy is your aim, but what if your aim is merely to learn something? To enrich and expand the connections that exist between your systems of knowledge. As Dawkins alludes to above, it is beneficial for life that errors do exist and are propagated by biological systems. Too many copying errors and all biological processes would be cancerous, mutating towards oblivion. Too much error management (what in information theory would be metered by a coded ‘redundancy‘) and biological change, and thus evolution, could never occur. Simply put, exchange within and between systems is almost valueless unless change, and thus error, is possible within the system. At the scale Rancière exposes for us there are two types of value: firstly, the value of repeating the message (the poem) and secondly, the value of making an error and thus producing entirely new knowledge. In information theory the value of a message is calculated by the amount of work saved on the part of the receiver. That is, if the receiver were to attempt to create that exact message, entirely from scratch. In his influential essay, Encoding, Decoding (1980), Stuart Hall maps a four-stage theory of “linked but distinctive moments” in the circuit of communication:

production circulation use (consumption) reproduction

John Corner further elaborates on these definitions:

the moment of encoding: ‘the institutional practices and organizational conditions and practices of production’; the moment of the text: ‘the… symbolic construction, arrangement and perhaps performance… The form and content of what is published or broadcast’; and the moment of decoding: ‘the moment of reception [or] consumption… by… the reader/hearer/viewer’ which is regarded by most theorists as ‘closer to a form of “construction”‘ than to ‘the passivity… suggested by the term “reception”‘

(source) At each ‘moment’ a new set of limits and possibilities arises. This means that the way a message is coded/decoded is not the only controlling factor in its reception. The intended message I produce, for instance, could be circulated against those intentions, or consumed in a way I never imagined it would be. What’s more, at each stage there emerges the possibility for the message to be replicated incorrectly, or, even more profoundly, for a completely different component of the message to be taken as its defining principle. Let’s say I write a letter, intending to send it to my newly literate, ignoramus friend. The letter contains a recipe for a cake I have recently baked. For some reason my letter is intercepted by the CIA,who are convinced that the recipe is a cleverly coded message for building a bomb. At this stage in the communication cycle the possibility for mis-translation to occur is high. Stuart Hall would claim is that this shows how messages are determined by the social and institutional power-relations via which they are encoded and then made to circulate. Any cake recipe can be a bomb recipe if pushed into the ‘correct’ relationships. Every ignoramus, if they have the right teacher, can develop knowledge that effectively lies beyond the teacher’s. What it is crucial to understand is that work is done at each “moment” of the message. As John Corner states, decoding is constructive: the CIA make the message just as readily as I did when I wrote and sent it. These examples are crude, no doubt, but they set up a way to think about exchange (communication and information) through its relationships, rather than through its mediums and methods. The problem here that requires further examination is thus: What is ‘value’ and how does one define it within a relational model of exchange? Like biological evolution, information theory is devoid of intentionality. Life prospers in error, in noise and mistakes. Perhaps, as I am coming to believe, if we want to maximise the potential of art, of writing and other systems of exchange, we first need to determine their inherent redundancy. Or, more profoundly, to devise ways to maximise or even increase that redundancy. To determine art’s redundancy, and then, like Rancière’s ignoramus, for new knowledge to emerge through mis-translation and mis-relation.

Oe fateful day in early August, Google Maps turned Arunachal Pradesh Chinese. It happened without warning. One minute, the mountainous border state adjacent to Tibet was labeled with its usual complement of Indian place-names; the next it was sprinkled with Mandarin characters, like a virtual annex of the People’s Republic.

The error could hardly have been more awkward. Governed by India but claimed by China, Arunachal Pradesh has been a source of rankling dispute between the two nations for decades. Google’s sudden relabeling of the province gave the appearance of a special tip of the hat toward Beijing. Its timing, moreover, was freakishly bad: the press noticed that Google’s servers had started splaying Mandarin place-names all over the state only a few hours before Indian and Chinese negotiating teams sat down for talks in New Delhi to work toward resolving the delicate border issue.

Google rushed to admit its mistake, but not before a round of angry Indian blog posts and news ar

Via: Testing the flotation dynamics and swimming abilities of giraffes by way of computational analysis : Tetrapod Zoology

The background to this research

Everybody loves giraffes, and god knows they've been covered on Tet Zoo enough times (see the links below). And something that's been mentioned many times is the alleged inability of giraffes to swim, or even to float. There are several specific comments on this in the literature (e.g., Shortridge 1934, Goodwin 1954, MacClintock 1973, Wood 1982); Crandall (1964) mentioned a case where a captive giraffe escaped from a carrying crate, fell off the end of a jetty, and immediately sank in the Hudson River (incidentally, dead giraffes have apparently been in the Hudson more than once: it is alleged that the river has, on occasion, been used as a dump for the corpses of zoo animals).

Why should giraffes be unable to swim? I'm extremely sceptical of such claims, given that other animals sometimes said to be unable to swim - like giant tortoises, pigs, rhinos and camels - actually swim just fine or even very well. Nevertheless, giraffes are such a strange shape that one can just about believe that their swimming and/or floating behaviour differs from that of other quadrupedal mammals.

And while it's possible to find reports and even images of giraffes wading [photos above below © Jeff Arnold] (Jonathan Kingdon notes that giraffes "will wade quite deep rivers" (Kingdon 1989, p. 325)), reports that describe them swimming don't exist, so far as I can tell. A few years ago, the excellent BBC series Big Cat Diary featured a scene where a group of giraffes tried to cross the Mara while it was in flood. The giraffes got about half-way across before turning back [two of them are at the turning-back phase in the adjacent still, © BBC], and at one stage were in water that submerged them right up to the bases of their necks. I thought at the time that these giraffes must have been swimming: I was so confident that I even mentioned this on the Dinosaur Mailing List back in 2000 (I now think it more likely that those Kenyan giraffes still had their feet on the riverbed: you can see this for yourself, as the footage is online here*). Several writers and researchers who have googled 'swimming giraffes' during the course of research have discovered my comment, and I've since seen it paraphrased in a few places (such as here at Telegraph.co.uk and on Focus magazine's Q&A page).

• Thanks to Dartian for finding this video for me.

After seeing the Focus magazine piece (this was in 2008, I think), I came up with an idea. I knew that my august colleague Donald Henderson of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology - well known for his work on what you might call mathematic palaeontology - had produced a digital model of a giraffe for a previous project (Henderson 1999), and had been testing the buoyancy of some of his models in 'digital water' (Henderson 2003a, b, 2006). Could, I wonder, Don take his digital giraffe and drop it into digital water, and thereby test the hypothesis that giraffes cannot float, or cannot swim? This, my friends, is how papers are born...

Modelling a digital giraffe

To start with, it's clear that we wouldn't actually be able to fully test the swimming abilities of giraffes (given that we couldn't accurately replicate or estimate all the details of aquatic movement in a giraffe), but we could test the floating abilities, and hence indirectly test the potential swimming abilities.

Giraffes are complicated objects, and modelling them digitally is fraught with difficulty. A 3D giraffe model was generated via the digital slicing method described by Henderson (1999) (our model isn't definitely meant to depict any of the Giraffa taxa in particular; yes, we're well aware of the suggestion that the several 'subspecies' conventionally included in G. camelopardalis might warrant species status). Several things were done to make the model more like a real giraffe: ears, ossicones and the fleshy part of the tail were created, and a synthesized reticulated pattern was created because it made the model look so much better. Don has actually pioneered a very interesting technique for generating regularly spaced polygons and/or blotches - it has some really interesting implications that I can't discuss here (for more information, see Appendix A in Henderson & Naish (2010)).

Two details of a digital model are particularly important when testing simulated buoyancy: density and lung volume.

Giraffe limb bones are slightly thicker than those of other artiodactyls (van Schalwyk et al. 2004), so their density was set as being somewhat higher than the rest of the body (1050 g/l vs 1000 g/l). The giraffe's most notable feature - its neck - was set at 850 g/l, as is typical for hoofed mammals. As we'll see, the high density of the distal parts of the limbs and low density of the neck and head seem to have implications for the floating and swimming behaviour of giraffes.

The lungs of giraffes are peculiar in size and shape (as you'll know if you watched Inside Nature's Giants), and exactly how large they are has long been a point of controversy: estimates of their volume in an 'average' giraffe (of 1.1 tons) have ranged from a low of 10 litres (Patterson et al. 1957) to a high of 47 litres (Robin et al. 1960). By scaling up from a horse to a big, male, 1.6 ton giraffe, an enormous projected lung volume of 141 litres was obtained (lung volume is about 6 litres in humans). Projections of this size have long been thought to be erroneous, however (Stahl 1967). A probable lung size about eight times that of a human is generally thought about right... in which case about 48 litres is correct for a 1.1 ton giraffe; this scales to 74 litres for a 1.6 ton giraffe. Obviously, there's much uncertainty here and more data is needed.

Don also modelled a horse Equus caballus [shown here] as a control for the experiment.

Can a giraffe float?

Given that the horse model seems to accurately predict the real-life buoyancy of floating and swimming horses (Henderson & Naish 2010), we're fairly confident that the giraffe model mimics the real thing. By rising the simulated water level around the giraffe model [as shown in the figure below], it was found that an adult giraffe would start to float at a water depth of about 2.8 m. It seems that the hindlimbs would leave the substrate before the forelimbs, raising the possibility that giraffes in deep water might be able to pole themselves along with their forelimbs alone.

But if the water becomes deeper still, what happens when the giraffe lifts off the substrate and begins to float? In a simulated floating posture, the hips are higher than the shoulders and the heavy forelimbs and short body mean that the foreparts are angled downwards relative to the horizontal. In turn, this means that the neck is rotated downwards and has to be held near-horizontally and just at, or under, the water surface: so far as we can tell, it doesn't seem possible for giraffes to swim with the neck held erect out of the water. The horizontal neck posture then means that the head has to be held at a very awkward, upward-angled posture (assuming, of course, that the animal wants to keep its eyes and nostrils above the surface).

It's well known that the giraffe head - particularly that of old males - is dense-boned and fairly heavy, but the cavities in the head and the long trachea and oesophagus make the head and neck rather less dense than the rest of the animal (850 g/l vs 1000 g/l or more). The neck and head account for about 10.8% of the animal's total mass, but it seems that their low density actually prevents the animal's anterior part from being even further down in the water (Henderson & Naish 2010). The overall density of the giraffe is higher than that of the horse, making the animal closer to being negatively buoyant and also making it sit lower in the water than the horse model.

In conclusion, it seems that giraffes can float: there's no reason to assume that they might 'sink like stones', nor was there any indication from the model that it was particularly unstable and prone to capsizing. But the model's posture in the water is low and hardly ideal, and looks downright uncomfortable. What might this mean for swimming ability?

Bad at swimming, or really bad at swimming?

The high mean density of the giraffe and the peculiar and difficult horizontal-necked posture the model adopts in water suggest that giraffes would not perform well in water. A large amount of drag and rotational inertia also afflict the model: in fact, it suffered from 13.5% more frictional drag than the horse model (Henderson & Naish 2010). We also suggest that the unusual gait practised by giraffes may well impair their swimming abilities. Giraffes on land use a synchronous movement of the neck and limbs where backwards and forwards movement of the neck is closely linked to the limb movements. But, with its neck constrained to a sub-horizontal posture where little or no backwards and forwards movement is possible, a swimming giraffe cannot adopt a gait like the one it uses on land.

Quadrupedal mammals - like the horse - typically swim with a trot like that used on land, so it seems reasonable to assume that swimming giraffes should try and swim with a 'terrestrial'-style gait too. However, note that this argument isn't completely conclusive, because the swimming gaits of some quadrupedal mammals are very different from their walking or running gaits. Nevertheless, I still think that our assumption is a reasonable one.

Positioned in the water in an uncomfortable pose, afflicted with a relatively high mean density, suffering from substantially high frictional drag, and unable to raise and lower its neck and hence unable to adopt a synchronous gait, we conclude that giraffes would be very poor swimmers, and that it might be assumed that they would avoid this activity if at all possible. Looked at another way, we conclude that giraffes can swim, but not at all well [image below from wikipedia].

Does this have any implications whatsoever for anything?

Making predictions about the floating and swimming abilities of giraffes is fun, but does it have any wider implications? For one thing, it perhaps helps make the point that we're increasingly able to test questions in biology using computational models and simulation, rather than experimentation on real animals. In the case of the question "Can giraffes swim?", we just aren't able to use real giraffes, so our approach is - at the moment - the only one we can use to test it.

If giraffes do perform poorly in water - so much so that they avoid crossing large bodies of water should they need do - has this had any impact on their biogeography? If you look at maps of giraffe distribution - and specifically at the ranges of the different giraffe taxa - you'll see that, in places, rivers and lakes form what appear to be giraffe-proof barriers. The Zambezi and its tributaries might form a southern barrier to Angolan and Thornicroft's giraffes (Spinage 1968), for example, the Niger and Benue might have prevented the southern spread of the Nigerian giraffe (Hassanin et al. 2007), while the Nile and Great Lakes might have prevented gene flow between Kordofan and Nigerian giraffes (Hassanin et al. 2007) [figure below - from Brown et al. (2007) - shows the approximate ranges and pelage patterns of the extant giraffe taxa].

Unfortunately, we don't really know enough to be sure whether these distributional limits actually have anything to do with the ability or inability of giraffes to cross water. As we note (Henderson & Naish 2010), big rivers and lakes are formidable barriers to everything terrestrial, not just to clumsy swimmers. Furthermore, the biogeographical history of giraffes extends over many millions of years (and involves Eurasia, too), meaning that climatic changes, changes in drainage patterns, and the terrestrial movement of giraffe populations make it difficult to definitively link any aquatic barriers to giraffe distribution. Others have made similar comments (Cramer & Mazel 2007) [image below: awesome male Masai Giraffe G. camelopardalis tippelskirchi (or G. tippelskirchi), photographed at Lake Manyara National Park, Tanzania. From wikipedia].

Finally, this project is one of several I've been involved in that's gotten a bit of media attention; this attention means that the paper is going to be the subject of more content-free discussion on websites than is usual for peer-reviewed research. Let me assure all concerned readers that this research did not involve the frittering away of pennies otherwise allotted to cancer research or the detection of Earth-killing asteroids. As I've said before (and, given that this article is appearing on ScienceBlogs, I'm preaching to the choir anyway), it isn't widely realised how much work scientists do FOR FREE and FOR FUN, IN THEIR SPARE TIME. Rant over.

Oh, and having mentioned Inside Nature's Giants, it is my duty to inform you that series 2 starts on June 8th. Episode 1 looks at the anatomy of Carcharodon carcharias, the white shark. This is incredible news; I'll be writing about the series in due time.

A new technique for unpeeling the Earth’s skin and displaying it on a flat surface provides a fresh perspective on geography, making it possible to create maps that string out the continents for easy comparison, or lump together the world’s oceans into one huge mass of water surrounded by coastlines.

“Myriahedral projection” was developed by Jack van Wijk, a computer scientist at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.

“The basic idea is surprisingly simple,” says van Wijk. His algorithms divide the globe’s surface into small polygons that are unfolded into a flat map, just as a cube can be unfolded into six squares.

Cartographers have tried this trick before; van Wijk’s innovation is to up the number of polygons from just a few to thousands. He has coined the word “myriahedral” to describe it, a combination of “myriad” with “polyhedron”, the name for polygonal 3D shapes.

It’s not too often that legacy media learns a new mass communication tool along with its audience. But that’s exactly what’s going on now because of Google Wave. Although it’s still invitation only and in preview, the real-time wiki collaboration platform is being used by some media companies for community building, real-time discussion, crowdsourcing, collaboration both inside and outside the newsroom, and for cross publishing content.

Google Wave (Google Wave) may seem familiar to older users of the Internet, who have been using the parts that make up the whole of the platform for years. Wave, however, brings those pieces together cohesively to allow users to share photos, embed videos, and converge other Google (Google) applications such as Google Maps (Google Maps) and Google Calendar to create customized blocks of user-editable content on the fly. Here are four ways that newsrooms are using Wave.