Jacqueline Kory-Westlund

Background

During my college semester studying abroad in Sydney, Australia in 2009, I took a sculpture class. I've already documented the sculpture I created during the second half of the class, which focused on space.

This project is from the first half of the class, where we considered mass. We worked in clay and plaster.

Mass:

1. A coherent, typically large body of matter with no definite shape
2. A collection of incoherent particles, parts, or objects regarded as forming one body

Concept

The assignment was to sculpt a head -- our professor's head, who sat as the model -- out of clay, and then cast it in plaster.

I decided I wanted to sculpt a realistic head, rather than an overtly abstract one. The biggest reason for this was that I had never sculpted anything big out of clay before. Although it certainly takes skill to create chaos in a visually pleasing way, it is perhaps more difficult to create order in one-to-one correspondence with the actual world. I like a challenge.

We started by talking about the proportions of the human head, looking at example sculptures of human heads that varied from realistic to highly abstract. The next task was to practice: we took lumps of brown clay and mushed them into representations of various facial features. Eyes, noses, mouths. As it turned out, this practice was remarkably helpful when trying to form the much larger block of clay into a realistic head shape.

Construction of the clay model

I added lumps of clay to a wooden base set with a wooden center post piece by piece, using my hands to mold the clay into a general head-like shape. A variety of tools for working with clay were provided. I preferred to use my hands. I felt I had better control over the resultant shapes that way.

After finishing the initial form, I smoothed out his features a bit:

Casting in plaster

The next stage was to make a plaster waste-mold using the clay head as a base.

After touching up the clay head, I sketched a seam line through across the top of the head and down in front of its ears to mark out where the metal shim fence would go. This would keep the two halves of the plaster mold apart.

Then it was time to throw plaster. Literally. First, I applied two aptly-named splash coats. The point of throwing handfuls of plaster at the clay model was to remove air bubbles. These layers were followed by a clay rubbing--which makes it easier to remove the plaster layers later--and three layers of thicker plaster, about the consistency of thick whipped cream.

The next class, we separated our molds. A chisel and mallet did the trick. The front half came off clean, except for the nose. I scraped the clay out of the back half and cleaned them both up. This was followed by painting on two coats of shellac to seal the mold.

Then it was time to fill the mold! After spraying on a thin coat of WD-40 to prevent the poured plaster from sticking, I tied the two halves together with wire. Any gaps along the seam line were plugged with clay. Then I propped up the mold open-side up in a bucket, and poured in the plaster.

The following week, it was time to remove the mold from the casting. A chisel and mallet came in handy once again.

I chipped away at the plaster mold to reveal the casting. Some cleanup with sandpaper, a scrub brush, and a metal scraper was required.

In the end...

"The world is an okay place."

I had tried not to distort the face's features during my initial clay work. I returned later to adjust the clay to work better for the plaster mold, smoothing out some features, slightly exaggerating or emphasizing others. The result is a calm face, a peaceful face. He looks content, does he not?

Despite the little holes here and there, the pockmark at the corner of his mouth, the pimple of plaster--he is content. He knows that no person is perfect. The blemishes, the marks, the indents and pocks on our faces are evidence that we have lived in and interacted with the world around us, instead of hiding in a sterile box where the world is not.

I tried, with this sculpture, to convey a sense of acceptance of things as they are, of life as it is. So I did not fill in the holes or file away all the pimples; I didn't cover the plaster by some other color or finish. It reflects the way life is: a little imperfect, a little unfinished. But despite, okay. Good enough for us.

Thus the title:

The world is an okay place.

Scene: One of the last episodes of Series 2 of the new Doctor Who (the 10th Doctor) Characters:

• Rose Tyler, companion of the Doctor as he travels through time and space
• Jackie Tyler, Rose's mother

Conversation:

Jackie: Do you think you'll ever settle down?

Rose: The Doctor never will so I can't. I'll just keep on traveling.

Jackie: And you'll keep on changing. And in forty years time, fifty, there'll be this woman, this strange woman, walking through the marketplace on some planet a billion miles from Earth. She's not Rose Tyler. Not any more. She's not even human.

Except that's not how it works. If Rose changes, she won't be the same Rose her mother remembers (and perhaps this is what her mother is referring to). If Rose changes, she's still Rose. She's just progressing, changing, adapting, learning, growing, pick your favorite synonym, it's what everyone does as they progress through life. Are you the same person you were ten years ago?

I thought not.

The longest Monday of my life

I recently returned to the US from Australia. The 14-hour flight took me from Monday morning in Sydney to Monday morning, again, in L.A. Crossing the date line messed up my sense of time enough without the added bonus of thinking I should be heading to bed just as the sun began to climb into the California sky.

You may be familiar with the concept: Jet lag. The catch-all name for circadian misalignment, the disruption of sleep cycles and circadian rhythms. If you've had the pleasure of crossing time zones in a jet plane, whether it was a mere three-hour hop from one coast of the US to the other or a trip to another continent, chances are, you've experienced some amount of jet lag.

The pathophysiology of jet lag

Normally, two systems--the homeostatic system and the circadian system--work together to produce a 24-hour sleep cycle. During the day, the homeostatic system slowly accumulates a 'sleep drive,' a desire to sleep that increases as a function of time spent awake. The circadian system generates an alerting signal in opposition to this sleep drive, which, during the day, keeps a person from feeling increasingly sleepy. An hour or two before bedtime, this signal subsides, and s/he realizes it's time to hit the pillow. The sleep drive dissipates as a person sleeps and by morning (assuming a full night's rest and possibly some coffee), s/he will be feeling alert and ready to go again.

Robert Sack wrote a delightful paper [PDF] on jet lag, by the way, which is where I'm getting much of my information.

So we've got a nice cycle of sleep. Jet lag is what happens when the homeostatic and circadian processes are misaligned. For example, the circadian system may signal a person to be alert when it's not actually morning, or may be reduced during daytime hours, causing daytime sleepiness because the homeostatic sleep drive is no longer cancelled out.

But I don't want to be sleepy!

How do you beat jet lag? Robert Sack lists three primary approaches:

1. Reset the body clock
2. Prescribed sleep scheduling
3. Medication to counteract daytime sleepiness or insomnia

Let's start with the first one, as it turns out to be the most complicated.

Resetting the body clock

The two most effective ways to reset the body clock are 1) through bright light exposure, and 2) timed melatonin administration. (But see the end of this post: fasting can also reset the body clock.)

Light is one of the most important cues about time of day and has the greatest effect on circadian timing (much smaller effects are seen from regular activities and meals, for example). Studies have shown that without light cues, totally blind people tend to have free-running circadian rhythms with an average period of 24.5 hours, instead of the usual 24. If a person is exposed to bright light early in the day, the person's internal clock is reset to an earlier time; if exposure is instead in the evening, the internal clock is reset to a later time. Brighter light has more of an effect (such as the sun, at 3000 to 10,000 lux), though lower intensities (e.g., 100-550 lux) can produce changes.

Artificial light sources can be used to supplement daylight, to help reset a person's internal clock to the correct new time zone when traveling. Alternatively, a person could wear very dark glasses, as light avoidance could help minimize the problems of light exposure at the wrong time of day or night.

Resetting the body clock, Part 2: Melatonin

Melatonin is a hormone that has been linked to the regulation of circadian rhythms and sleep cycles [PDF]. Melatonin is secreted by the pineal gland at night; secretion is suppressed by light exposure, and as such, the hormone can be thought of as a "darkness signal." If doses of melatonin are administered in the morning, circadian rhythms will be shifted later; evening doses shift rhythms earlier. Timing of the doses is more important than amount per dose, though it remains to be seen what the optimal dose and optimal time of administration is--trials have been done with doses from 0.5 to 10mg, at times ranging from three days before departure to five days after arrival in the new time zone.

If doses of melatonin are combined with light exposure, the results are what you might expect: synergistic if both are administered to produce a time shift in the same direction (both earlier or both later); antagonistic otherwise.

Sleep, wake, sleep, wake

The second way to beat jet lag: Sleep at weird times. Slowly adjust your sleep schedule to match that of your destination, or keep your home sleep schedule for a while after you arrive. The problem with this is that your sleep-wake schedule won't match up with that of the people around you, and if you need to be awake for breakfast at 7am or for a meeting in the afternoon, your sleep schedule may interfere. Use this method at your own risk.

Drugs for everything

Lastly, we have sleep medicines. As you might guess, hypnotic medications combat insomnia and stimulants fight off daytime sleepiness pretty well, because by definition, that's what they do. Both benzodiazepine and non-benzodiazepine drugs have been shown to be effective in the first case; for the latter, the most common solution is to consume more coffee [PDF]. This works! In the study linked, subjects were treated with slow-release caffeine or with melatonin prior to a long eastward flight; the caffeine subjects were less sleepy than either melatonin or placebo. Granted, caffeine subjects also took longer to fall asleep later and awoke more frequently, but that may be a risk you have to take.

Lagging behind

Light, melatonin, drugs, strange sleep schedules. Of course, the only solution that will always work is time. The homeostatic and circadian processes need to realign, and while the aforementioned ways of beating jet lag can fast track the process, it still takes time.

UPDATE: I was alerted by a friend of the existence further research of which I was unaware: Another way to reset your sleep-wake cycle is to stop eating. If you fast for about 12 to 16 hours, your body clock will reset, with whatever time you break your fast as morning. The Fuller, Lu, & Saper paper [PDF], published in Science, discusses the mechanism, though a more recent paper argues that the Fuller et al. results are inconclusive.

Billions and trillions

Step by slow, super-computed step, we approach singularity.

This step: Two massively parallel cortical simulations, run at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs by Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, Steven Esser, and Dharmendra Modha of the IBM Almaden Research Center, and Horst Simon of the aforementioned labs--these are the guys who previously simulated at the scale of mouse and rat cortices. They used a Blue Gene supercomputer (with a whopping 456 CPUs and 144 TB of main memory--just wait, ten years from now I'll look back on this sentence and laugh at how little computing power and memory that is). The first, and larger, simulation included 1.6 billion neurons and 8.87 trillion synapses. Human brains still dwarf these numbers: roughly 20 billion neurons and 200 trillion synapses. But it's a cat-sized step with the complexity and scale of a feline brain.

The first simulation used experimentally-measured gray matter thalamocortical connectivity from a cat's visual cortex--the simulations neurons were connected in a biologically plausible fashion. Phenomenological spiking neurons, individual learning synapses, axonal delays, and dynamic synaptic channels were all included in the software. The second simulation, with 900 million neurons and 9 trillion synapses, had probabilistic connectivity.

Speed-wise, the researchers report that their simulation runs 2-3 orders of magnitude slower than real-time, when compared to a human cortex. With near perfect weak scaling (doubling the memory resource doubles the model size that can be simulated), human-scale models may be just around the corner... well, relatively speaking; the researchers predict it'll happen in less than ten years. Just as soon as there's a supercomputer super enough.

The research paper is also available at researcher Dharmendra Modha's blog [PDF].

But bigger isn't necessarily better

We may have to wait ten years for human-scale simulations, but we may not need a human-scale platform to be able to build intelligent AI. Researchers at Queen Mary, University of London suggest that bigger may not necessarily be better, when it comes to brains. A lot of complexity can be found even in tiny insect brains. Maybe it'll be a swarm of honeybee robots that takes over the world!

The complexity of models

For a time, I was convinced that every model out there would not be an adequate model of what a human brain could do because every model out there had to simplify, and thus, that no model or computer software would ever be able truly intelligent until we had the computing power to make an electronic human. I knew there was value to models, but deep down, I retained the conviction that no model, no simulation, no AI would ever manage the same level of complexity or intelligence as a human without being, simply put, a human.

Fortunately, I was relieved of this notion around the same time I started taking Cognitive Science classes: Humans aren't the only intelligent creatures, the point of a model is not to create the thing you are modeling, all models simplify some aspect (it's just a matter of choosing which aspects are most important to get exactly right). The world may be its own best representation, as Rodney Brooks so aptly said, but that should not preclude us from simplifying the world to better understand how it works, nor should that, in return, prevent us from trying to simulate ourselves in software.

I, for one, am looking forward to watching the intelligent honeybee robots and the supercomputer human brains band together to overthrow the government.

Beautiful and good to eat

Deep down, maybe we all know we are, every one of us, a unique snowflake. But a lot of people, they don't want it to be true. They want all the snowflakes to melt together into one big puddle. They want to be able to share their subjective view of the world with everyone else. They want to be able to look at a sunset and know that what it's like for me to see the sunset is the same as what it's like for you to see the sunset.

Hey, we all want things we can't have. And in this case, science says no! Here's a piece of wisdom from David Brin's sci-fi novel Kiln People:

“We may use similar terms to describe a sunset. Our subjective worlds often correspond, correlate, and map onto each other. That makes cooperation and relationships possible, even complex civilization. Yet a person's actual sensations and feelings remain forever unique. Because a brain isn't a computer and neurons aren't transistors. It's why telepathy can't happen. We are, each of us, singular and forever alien..."

The amazing thing about people is that this fact doesn't deter us. We keep trying to share our sensations and feelings with each other. As Virginia Woolf writes in her book Orlando:

For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they can only say “good to eat” when they mean “beautiful” and the other way about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves.

To be known

Maybe we're just stubborn. Maybe we're clinging to a shred of hope that science is wrong and someday, instead of just overlapping with pieces of each other, we'll be able to know what it's like to experience the sunset the way someone else does. Here's a passage from a favorite book of mine, Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss:

“When you're young, you think it's going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close—as close as you can get—to another person only makes clear the impassable distance between you. . . .

"But see, the incredible thing about people is that we forgot,” Ray continued. “Time passes and somehow the hope creeps back and sooner or later someone else comes along and we think this is the one. And the whole thing starts all over again. We got through our lives like that, and either we just accept the lesser relationship—it may not be total understanding, but it's pretty good—or we keep trying for that perfect union, trying and failing, leaving behind us a trail of broken hearts, our own included. In the end, we die as alone as we were born, having struggled to understand others, to make ourselves understood, but having failed in what we once imagined was possible.”

“People really want that, what did you say, merging souls? Total union?” [Samson]

“Yes. Or at least they think they do. Mostly what they want, I think, is to feel known.”

What do you think? Is the ultimate human goal to feel known and understood? And if that's the case, is the illusion of feeling known enough to compensate for never truly being able to share one's experiences with anyone else?