Wednesday, 6 June 2007

The Ratio Club

Anyone know anything about the Ratio Club?

It was a dining club that sprang from a conference on animal behaviour held by the Society of Experimental Biology in Cambridge in 1949. I first came across it researching primate visual behaviour, although the emphasis of the club's discussions tended much more towards cybernetics. Turing was a member.

The Wikipedia entry says Owen Holland (A machine ethologist! Eat your heart out, Kevin Warwick!) is doing a book about it, but there's no sign of it yet.

Incidentally, a couple of clicks away from Holland's webpage I found this 30Mb movie from Cornell's Human Motion Lab. A strangely moving demonstration that if you want to do something right (in this case, walking), evolution has probably done it first.

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