Can Computers Create Art?

This essay discusses whether computers, using Artificial Intelligence (AI), could create art. First, the history of technologies that automated aspects of art is surveyed, including photography and animation. In each case, there were initial fears and denial of the technology, followed by a blossoming of new creative and professional opportunities for artists. The current hype and reality of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for art making is then discussed, together with predictions about how AI tools will be used. It is then speculated about whether it could ever happen that AI systems could be credited with authorship of artwork. It is theorized that art is something created by social agents, and so computers cannot be credited with authorship of art in our current understanding. A few ways that this could change are also hypothesized.Comment: to appear in Arts, special issue on Machine as Artist (21st Century

Design and Construction of Sinusoidal Targets for Resolving Power Cameras

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The Refrigerator Revolution

This paper looks at the history of the refrigerator and how acceptance of this technological innovation was not instant. To become ubiquitous the refrigerator needed the support of a nascent electric power generating industry and the technical development of electric motors

The Wire That Made Cooking Electric

Modern inventions normally build upon advances in science and engineering that have gone on before. Such was the case in 1859 when George B. Simpson was granted a patent for an ‘Improved Electrical Heating Apparatus’ (Simpson). (See Figure 1.) The ‘electro-heater’ consisted of a long coil of ‘platina’ wire laid in a serpentine groove cut into ‘common soapstone’. When electricity was applied from ‘any well-known electric or galvanic battery now in use’, the wire glowed and radiated heat. The apparatus worked by ‘generating heat sufficient to warm rooms, boil water, cook victuals, &c., by passing currents of electricity over the combined arrangement over coils of platina or other metallic wire properly encased in metallic tubes or open vessels insulated with any of the well-known substances non-conducting of electricity’. What Simpson described was a perfect description of the electric hobs in the cooktop I purchased 134 years later

Of Pails and Buckets, Boxes and Bags

During the Second Industrial Revolution in America, the population shifted from being mostly rural to slightly more than half urban. Along with rearrangement came the situation that non-farm workers could no longer return home at midday to eat their dinner. The average laborer needed to carry his dinner with him to his worksite. The dinner pail (or dinner bucket) made this possible. As time progressed, dinner supplanted supper as the evening meal. Lunch became the noon meal. Likewise, the lunch box (lunch pail, lunch bucket, or lunch bag) replaced the dinner pail as the means of conveyance for the meal. The dinner pail grew to be more than just a physical object during its existence. It was used as a metaphor for prosperity in two presidential elections and then when suitable for another three decades. At the same time, the dinner pail became the symbol of the blue-collar worker. The dinner pail was represented in poems, songs, and plays. By mid-twentieth century, the metal lunch box has all but replaced the dinner pail, and 35 years later it would cease to be made