Reasons the world will end in 2012.

Don’t know whether its true or not, but just thout of sharing it to you. 7 reasons the world will end in 2012.

Scientific experts from around the world are genuinely predicting that three years from now, all life on Earth could well finish. Some are saying it’ll be humans that set it off. Others believe that a natural phenomenon will be the cause. And the religious folks are saying it’ll be God himself who presses the stop button…

1. Maya Calendar


The first mob to predict 2012 as the end of the world were the Mayans, a bloodthirsty race that were good at two things:

Building highly accurate astrological equipment out of stone and
Sacrificing Virgins.

Thousands of years ago they managed to calculate the length of the lunar moon as 329.53020 days, only 34 seconds out. The Mayan calendar predicts that the Earth will end on December 21, 2012. Given that they were pretty close to the mark with the lunar cycle, it’s likely they’ve got the end of the world right as well.

2. Sun Storms


Solar experts from around the world monitoring the sun have made a startling discovery: our sun is in a bit of strife. The energy output of the sun is, like most things in nature, cyclic, and it’s supposed to be in the middle of a period of relative stability. However, recent solar storms have been bombarding the Earth with so much radiation energy, it’s been knocking out power grids and destroying satellites. This activity is predicted to get worse, and calculations suggest it’ll reach its deadly peak sometime in 2012.

3. The Atom Smasher

Scientists in Europe have been building the world’s largest particle accelerator. Basically its a 27km tunnel designed to smash atoms together to find out what makes the Universe tick. However, the mega-gadget has caused serious concern, with some scientists suggesting that it’s probably even a bad idea to turn it on in the first place. They’re predicting all manner of deadly results, including mini black holes. So when this machine is fired up for its first serious experiment in 2012, the world could be crushed into a super-dense blob the size of a basketball.

4. The Bible says…

If having scientists warning us about the end of the world isn’t bad enough, religious folks are getting in on the act as well. Interpretations of the Christian Bible reveal that the date for Armageddon, the final battle between Good an Evil, has been set down for 2012. The I Ching, also known as the Chinese book of Changes, says the same thing, as do various sections of the Hindu teachings.

5. Super Volcano

Yellowstone National Park in the United States is famous for its thermal springs and Old Faithful geyser. The reason for this is simple – it’s sitting on top of the world’s biggest volcano, and geological experts are beginning to get nervous sweats. The Yellowstone volcano has a pattern of erupting every 650,000 years or so, and we’re many years overdue for an explosion that will fill the atmosphere with ash, blocking the sun and plunging the Earth into a frozen winter that could last up to 15,000 years. The pressure under the Yellowstone is building steadily, and geologists have set 2012 as a likely date for the big bang.

6. The Physicists

This one’s case of bog-simple maths mathematics. Physicists at Berekely Uni have been crunching the numbers. and they’ve determined that the Earth is well overdue for a major catastrophic event. Even worse, they’re claiming their calculations prove, that we’re all going to die, very soon – while also saying their prediction comes with a certainty of 99 percent- and 2012 just happens to be the best guess as to when it occurs.

7. Slip-Slop-Slap- BANG!

We all know the Earth is surrounded by a magnetic field that sheilds us from most of the sun’s radiation. What you might not know is that the magnetic poles we call north and south have a nasty habit of swapping places every 750,000 years or so – and right now we’re about 30,000 years overdue. Scientists have noted that the poles are drifting apart roughly 20-30kms each year, much faster than ever before, which points to a pole-shift being right around the corner. While the pole shift is underway, the magnetic field is disrupted and will eventually disappear, sometimes for up to 100 years. The result is enough UV outdoors to crisp your skin in seconds, killing everything it touches.

Anthropomorphism and the Illusion of Life

What is anthropomorphism?

I think a lot of times when roboticists talk about anthropomorphism, it has an air of cynicism. Like “oh those silly people, they think the robot has thoughts and feelings.” Which is obviously not true for most people, but it’s interesting to think about why people have the propensity to anthropomorphize, and to understand what, if anything, we should do to design for this.

Dan Dennett’s Intenional Stance offers some insight. It explains that while people realize that some thing may not actually have desires and intentions, it ends up being an efficient and successful way to reason about a lot of phenomena that we come across. Put another way, as social animals, humans became very good at reasoning about mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions) to predict the actions of other animals. Human’s applied this reasoning strategy to anything that produced some self-motivated action that could not be described by physics. These days it’s not just animals, there are a lot more things in the world that produce seemingly self-motivated actions that are not (on the surface) describable by physics (cars, computers, robots, …); therefore, the mental state reasoning strategy kicks in.

Don Norman has a similar stance and has long studied how an object’s design and appearance communicate and inform people of the object’s possible functions. In a recent book he takes this into the realm of robots, arguing that anthropomorphism is an abstraction that will help people understand how to interact with a robot, and that robots should use familiar mechanisms like emotive expressions to communicate internal state to a human user.

Maximizing anthropomorphism

The field of animation has a long history of maximizing anthropomorphism. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston wrote a beautiful book in 1981, The Illusion of Life, about the principles and process employed in some of the Disney classic animations. In a SIGGRAPH paper in the late 80s, Pixar’s John Lasseter describes how the Disney principles of creating the “Illusion of Life” in 2D animation should translate to 3D animation. In the paper he steps through the 11 fundamental principles of traditional animation and discusses their 3D corralate, arguing that many of the principles transcend the particular medium. Which to me begs the question….How can these principles of animation inform how we create of an “Illusion of Life” in a robot?

Animation Principles for Robots

I’ll mention six of the principles (interpreted pretty loosely) that I find most directly applicable and interesting for thinking about robot behavior design. Most of these can be summed up as: It’s not just what you do, but how you do it. In robotics, I think we tend to work on how to select a particular motor control program, action, or behavior (selecting what to do). These principles of animation argue for having additional mechanisms to dynamically control parameters of how you do it.

Appeal — Creating a design or an action that the audience enjoys watching. This is what usually comes to mind when people talk about robots and anthropomorphism. It is the principle that would argue for creating robots with baby or pet-like proportions, so they are inherently appealing and nice to watch.

Anticipation — The preparation for an action. This is the technique of doing something to prepare the audience for the action that is about to come. Directing their attention to the right part of the screen. I think the best example of this is the “wheely feet” that cartoon characters get before taking off running. Or making sure that an arm movement winds up before exerting some energy. These are definitely cues that robots of all morphologies could use to help a human partner understand more about what they are “about” to do. It would make people feel more comfortable if they felt they could accurately predict the robots behavior. Thus, I think cues to help with audience/user anticipation are important. I’m not currently working with any mobile robots, but if I was…I would be making them some “wheely-feet”!

Arcs — The visual path of action for natural movement. Many of these principles argue against motion control that is simply based on an efficient path, or some inverse kinematics. Arcs, refers to the fact that even in a reaching action or something where the end point is the goal, there is something about the path that is taken to the end point that can make the motion more natural (and, I would hypothesize more predictable. This could ease interaction because a person would find the robot’s actions more intuitive to follow).

Secondary Action — The action of an object resulting from another action. So, the part about objects moving in relation to a character’s actions, robots get for free with physics. But a more subtle aspect of secondary action is within the character’s body. As one example, when you nod your head, it is more than just your neck bone moving. A natural head nod will have secondary actions in some of the robot’s facial features (e.g., if it has eyebrows, or ears). These secondary actions, while not instrumental to the getting from A to B goal, create a more natural looking behavior.

Timing — Spacing actions to define the weight and size of objects and the personality of characters. Robots can certainly use this one. Slow motions communicate something different than fast motions. Thus, not just getting the hand from A to B, but again, it’s about how you get there with a particular speed.

Follow Through and Overlapping Action — The termination of an action and establishing its relationship to the next action. I think this relates most to the prior point about anticipation. Not only does a single action need to have “set up,” but all of the robot’s actions have to make sense together. One is the anticipation of the other. And importantly, a particular action or behavior might terminate differently depending on what action or behavior is coming next.