Babbage's Difference Engine and the Antikythera Mechanism in Legos

Andrew Carol just is a marvel. He excells at building antique and ancient computing mechanisms...in Legos. Below is his version of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine.



And here is his version of the Antikythera Mechanism, a device from about 150BC used to predict astronomical events.

Unlimited Green Energy Supply From Google!

"New research from SMU’s Geothermal Laboratory, funded by a grant from Google.org, documents significant geothermal resources across the United States capable of producing more than three million megawatts of green power – 10 times the installed capacity of coal power plants today."

That quote, from a public relations release from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, points us to a clear and clean future for energy production and consumption. We make the vast amount of our energy through burning things, things that add heat to our world, not to mention fouling our air.

If heat is the answer to our problems, then we have plenty to go around, according to the study. If we tapped those sources we could power the entire country without adding one plant or nuclear power plant. Look at the map below to see how hot your area is.

Fun Time!

On last week's Fun Time I posted a link to the BBC production, "Holy Flying Circus," the recent mocumentary about the events and difficulties experienced by the Python's when they released "The Life of Brian."

Then the BBC pulled the vid from YouTube. So for my revenge, here's a link to the Python's YouTube channel. Most of the funny bits are there (Dead Parrot, Ministry of Silly Walks, Spam, Lumberjack Song, etc.), plus there are some great interviews, if you like that sort of stuff.

Here's one of my favorite Python skits, Upper Class Twit of the Year.

Travel Photo of the Week

Simonetti Staircase, Vatican Museum

Self Powered Robot Legs

It looks like some brilliant folks at Nagoya Institute of Technology in Japan have come up with some robot legs that only need to go downhill to keep walking. All they need is a little push and off they go. They walked 100,000 steps, 15km, over 13 hours last year. Have a look at these two videos, the applications are obvious.

The Evolution of the Spacesuit

Wired has a great retrospective on the evolution of the spacesuit. What started as a simple way to maintain consciousness in high altitude balloons has gradually given way to the spacesuit as complex, self-contained spaceship.

This article and accompanying photo essay chronicles the development and history of this most under-appreciated of garments. Perhaps it's because although your jeans don't keep you alive, you think they are important.

JBJ Soul Kitchen

Jon Bon Jovi has started a restaurant that is accepting cash or volunteer work in payment for meals. Inspired by another such restaurant in Denver CO, The Soul Kitchen opened in Red Bank NJ, on October 19th and hopes to bring the surrounding community together and raise awareness on issues of hunger and poverty in the area.

The building was originally a three bay garage and has been beautifully converted. The menu has no prices. You select your meal and either pay the minumum donation, pay more to help feed a neighbor or donate an hour's work volunteering.

Synthesizer 404: Daphne Oram and the Oramics Machine

And here's a video on the machine and the exhibit itself.

The Oramics Machine

I have an obsession with machines that go "Ping!" Ever since the first heard Switched on Bach album by Wendy Carlos, I've been interested in synthesizers, electronic devices for sculpting sound. Through my years of study, many names have popped up: Robert Moog, Terry Riley, Karlheinz Stockhausen. But recently one in particular has been on my mind.

Daphne Oram was one of the founders of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. They're the folks who did the Dr. Who theme music (and many others). Oram, however, has often been omitted from accounts of the Workshop, and passed away in 2003 leaving little evidence of her life's work. Slowly, but surely, that has changed, and an exhibition at The Science Museum in London has recently further revealed her visionary understanding of how music would be made in the future.

The exhibit offers information on her life and work and the device she invented to make music, The Oramics Machine. Oram had adapted the process by which sound was mated film to create music. She drew squiggly lines on film to control pitch, volume and other parameters and the machine "read" those lines and turned them into sound.

Here is a video about the rediscovery of this device and work to restore it for the exhibit.



Here is a link to the Apple store. They have an Oramics Machine app. I have it and it's pretty cool.

Fun Time

I love the Pythons and obviously the BBC does, too. This week they are airing "Holy Flying Circus," a mocumtenary over the furor surrounding the release of the film "The Life of Brian."

The video below is a short documentary on the creation of the opening title sequence which pays homage to Terry Gilliams's wonderful animations for the Pythons.

Travel Photo of the Week



waterfall in the middle of Morocco



360 Degree View of Things



photo by Jonas Pfeil

This nifty ball can be thrown in the air and at its apogee, take a suround photograph. 36 cameras snap photos that are knitted together by software to create a spherical panorama.

To be presented as the Emerging Technologies demonstration 'Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera' at the SIGGRAPH Asia 2011.

The Future of Work: These Mexican Immigrants Made Their Own Jobs

As we contemplate the economic meltdown that 40 years of increasing income disparity and overseas outsourcing has brought the US, we wonder: where will the jobs come from?

These women are not wondering. They are banding together to create businesses. This group, the Apple Eco-friendly Cleaning Cooperative, is a collective of five Mexican women living in New York City who got tired of working odd gigs and wanted more control of their careers. After meeting at a Brooklyn day laborer hiring site, where they would compete for cleaning jobs with dozens of other women, the quintet decided go into business for themselves, and formed an LLC.

If you want to shape your own destiny, start a business.

Homemade Mayonnaise

I love to cook and some times I make my own condiments. Here's a short video on how to make mayonnaise. I've got to get one of those hand blenders.

Martin Luther King Memorial

My wife, a friend and I visited the MLK Memorial in DC yesterday. I remember as a young teen hearing this great man speak on television and being so moved by his heart and words. His words hold no less power today and to see this magnificent memorial was very moving, bringing back those times clearly to me.

Here are some photos I took. If you get the chance, go see this great tribute to one of our nation's great leaders.

Click on images for higher resolution.

How Do You Save a Dying Language? Crowdsource It!

In an earlier post I shared my concern about dying languages. Every year, around 26 languages become extinct and it's estimated that up the 50% the languages now spoken on the Earth will be gone by 2100.
Althought there are many groups dedicated to stopping this trend, one of the most interesting ideas circulating is the notion of crowdsourcing the task.

Biagio Arobba , a 32-year-old South Dakotan, has launched LiveAndTell, a user-generated content site for documenting and learning rare languages. Arobba is especially in preserving Native American tongues. The site has an accompanying Facebook page to facitate crowdsourcing endangered languages by speaking another that the next generation already knows: the language of the Internet.

Fun Time! Cigar Box Guitars!

Travel Photo of the Week

Often mistaken for Ireland, the view from my mother's backyard in Stephenson, VA.

Space - The Vinyl Frontier

If you've ever thought that NASA was the last word in space exploration and that we've lost our commitment to that grand adventure, think again. It is now officially the age of consumer space travel and I'm not just talking about Scaled Composite's Spaceship One and Two or Blue Origins New Shepard or any of the other commercial outfits that are charging hundreds of thousands of dollars for short suborbital flights.

Have a look at this video of Derek Deville's Qu8k (pronounced "Quake"). Deville has been building and launching rockets for quite a while and it's not a surprise to find out he worked for DARPA and helped design SpaceShip One's rocket engine.

This particular rocket was built in an attempt to win the Carmack Prize which awards $10,000 to the first person or team to launch a vehicle that achieves an altitude of over 100,000 feet. Deville's rocket made it to 121,000 feet, but alas, the GPS crapped out on him.

I think it's important to note that this is how the personal computer started out.

It's Time For Time

I have always been fascinated by the concept of time. If you sit and talk with me awhile, it will eventually come up. But what IS time? By that question, I mean how do you actually define it and does it really exist as more than a useful concept? Does time have inherent independent existence? Many cultures don't even have a word for time and no past or future tenses in their languages.

Here, in New Scientist magazine, is a series of articles discussing time. Notions of time's arrow (does time flow in both directions? into the future and the past?), time flowing at different rates for different observers, an end to time and time travel are all covered. I won't go into a discussion of all the ideas here.

Perhaps we should sit down and talk about it in person. Sometime.

ZenDome

Almost a century ago, Dr. Walther Bauersfeld invented the geodesic dome, which was later patented and popularized by Buckminster Fuller. During the 1960s, young people, who thought they were inventing a new world, built many of these structures thinking that they would be the future of mankind's habitations. Well, they leaked and were difficult to build and live in.

Fast forward to today and the dome is once again becoming popular. Various advancements have solved the problems that had been encountered and now folks have decided that they make good guesthouses, small vacation homes and handy emergency shelter.

Enter the Zendome company. This outfit from Germany provides quick to assemble, structurally resilient domes for industry and private use. The domes listed are very affordable, too.

Fog Collectors

There are many places on the face of the Earth where the ground is dry, but the air is not. FogQuest is a non-profit Canadian outfit geared to helping communities in places where access to water is a problem. They help residents of these areas by showing them how to build fog and rainfall collectors to squeeze enough water out of their environment to sustain their communities.

Here's a short video on their work.

La Cocina, the Food Entrepreneur Incubator

If you've followed my postings, you know there's a food revolution going on. People are becoming aware of what they eat and where it comes from. What is also happening is that there is an entrepreneurial revolution going on at the same time.

La Cocina is a non-profit organization in San Francisco that is dedicated to transforming talented home cooks into successful businesswomen by removing obstacles to entrepreneurship. It's organizational director, Caleb Zigas say that, "..the barriers to entering the food industry are high and they are real." He adds that commercial kitchen space is prohibitively expensive. Potential entrepreneurs face additional problems such as perception barriers, language barriers and class barriers and these issues make it extremely difficult to start and maintain a small business. His job has been to find the resources to take these budding businesswomen from home kitchens to viable business.

It looks like things have been going well for La Cocina. The client base has expanded from six to over 50 and is still growing.  You can read more about La Cocina here.

Fun Time!

Here's a great thing to do for Halloween. Without spending lots of money, you can decorate an entire house by cutting large silhouttes for all the windows. This article at Craft website shows you how and gives some inspiration for subject matter.

Boo!

Travel Photo of the Week

The Queen’s Hamlet, built for Marie Antoinette between 1785 and 1792. Versailles, France.

What Are You Going To Do With That College Degree?

Director Peter Sellars is one of the great minds of our time. He was already famous as an undergrad at Harvard. His theatrical productions are simply stunning and always controversial. In this hour-plus talk he asks a simple question: Why are you going to college when there are no jobs for you?

Asking this question makes you think about why you go to school and what you want out of it. If there aren't any  (or very few) jobs available, then why train for something that you can't get (and perhaps don't even want to do)? Maybe you can train to be an artist instead of a software engineer. Maybe you should think about taking classes in theater rather than learning to be an attorney. He suggests that the very best thing to do is follow your heart when it comes your education. And do it not for the money, but because your heart is in it. He suggests there's a very good chance that economic and social systems are poised for change and people with this idea in mind might be better prepared to to deal with these changes as new systems of commerce and society develop.

His simple idea is that the world has forever changed and why make your decisions based on conditions that no longer exist?  One of the things I tell young people is that they are being educated to live in the past because their parents think that's the only safe place left. Local governments and educators are complicit in this because they all want to keep their jobs. And then we wonder why we are losing our competitve edge.

He says, "We're living in a period where you're mostly surrounded by lies and most everything you encounter is propaganda. We're here on Earth to move things, to change things, to transform things."

Peter's talk starts at 12:30.

Machinery As You Have Never Seen It

This series of photographs highlights the use of HDR (high dynamic range) in digital photography. It allows you to manipulate the range of light to dark, color saturation and other factors to deliver images that would be next to impossible to do any other way. I think that you'll agree that the result is stunning if, at some times, a little surreal.

The series comes from one of my favorite blogs, Lightstalking.

LEGO Greenhouse

LEGO UK commissioned award-winning designer, Sebastian Bergne, to create a public installation using the iconic bricks, as part of the London Design Festival 2011. His finished work, entitled the "LEGO Greenhouse", was on display in the North East Piazza, Covent Garden, the West End's premier retail, cultural and entertainment district, from September 15th to 25th.

This is the first fully functioning greenhouse built entirely from LEGO bricks. The walls, the floors, even the earth is LEGO bricks. The plants and vegetables growing inside are however, entirely real.

Garage Remodeled as Home

Live in the country or suburbs? Ever wanted a small abode in a large city? Photographer Jérémie Buchholtz lived in Paris but wanted a small place in Bordeaux. Enter Architect Matthieu de Marien. Marien took a junk-filled garage on a private historic alleyway on Bordeaux’s right bank and turned it into a beautiful small (441 square feet) home.

This short article by Matt Hickman describes the conversion on his blog.

LOST...and found

Kim Obermeyer, rock star biologist and Holly Beck entrepreneurial pro surfer, writer, and model have spent the last couple of years finding , in their own words, "ways to live simply and sustainably, spending time barefoot in the sand, eating locally and organically, using solar energy and constructing a comfortable habitat without having to work a 'real' job to do it." Sounds good to me.

Unfortunately, they had to move away from America to do it. Here's a link to their website, hip-E habitat. Surfing, yoga, jungle architecture and real food. How can it get better than this?