$60 Bike Made From Cardboard

What a cool idea: a bike made almost entirely from cardboard.

Two Disturbing Musical Studies

I make my living as a musician these days and I find almost any scientific study of music interesting. Here are two that have recently crossed my desk. The first is one from Nature.com and covers an idea that many have long suspected, but had little data to prove.

To summarize, over the past 50 years or so, popular music has been becoming louder and employing less variation in melody, timbre and chord progression. I can offer several anecdotal reason for this, but you should read the article and form your own opinions.

The second study is from Scientific American and discusses how harmony affects mood. To quote from the article: "Daniel Bowling, a cognitive neuroscientist at Duke University, analyzed the intervals, or distances between notes, in melodies from Western classical music and Indian ragas in a study published in March in PLoS ONE. He found that in both types of music, the size of the average interval is smaller in melodies associated with sadness and larger in melodies linked with happiness."

"Bowling suggests that music mimics the natural patterns of our most primitive instrument—the voice. To test his theory, he collected speech samples from 20 English speakers and 20 Tamil Indian speakers and looked at whether the changes in frequency predicted the emotional content of their words. He found the same pattern as he did in written melodies: the sadder the speech, the more monotone the delivery."

It doesn't really take a genius to put these two studies together and see the implications and I, for one, find those implications disturbing.

9 Cool Secret Subway Stations

Here's a great photo-essay from Flavorwire. Subways have always fascinated me. So far I been on only three. New York City's, Boston's and Washington D.C.'s. Each is different and had its own charm. The photos in the piece feature abandoned ones.

Fun Time! How To Lose Weight In 60 Seconds.

Extra-Jurisdictional (and Illegal) Police Operations

Here's an interesting article from the Associated Press. It seems that in New Brunswick, N.J. the locals have discovered a on-going police operation, but it's the NYPD that is running the operation. A little out of their jurisdiction.

But that shouldn't surprise us, what with Maricopa County, Arizona's Sheriff Joe Arpaio thinking that he is a Federal Agent tasked with investigating a sitting President. Reports of police behaving in illegal fashions with impunity are surfacing in many places in our nation. Perhaps it's time that an independent group start auditing our police forces to determine if they are using precious resource to follow personal agendas.

Travel Photo of the Week

Skyline Drive, Shenandoah National Park, Virginia

Microgrid For Power Local, Cheap, and Reliable Power

Good things coming from a jail. That's a surprise. This from MIT Technology Review....

"A recently completed distributed energy project at the large, 4,000-inmate Santa Rita Jail in Alameda County, California, ties together power from fuel cells, solar panels, wind turbines, and diesel generators—all located at the jail—to form a microgrid that can operate independently of large, centralized power plants. The system keeps the power on when storms take down the grid, which is essential for safety at the maximum security facility, and it's saving the jail about $100,000 a year."

I'd like to see this idea taken a step further. Separate power plants for each building in the US that can be "grid-able" if one or several go out. Which makes me wonder, what's Bloom Energy up to these days?

One Square Meter House

This from Tiny House Living.

Which Super PAC Ran That Ad? There's An App For That.

This from Forbes magazine and MIT's Media lab.

"The Super PAC App, soon available for free in the iTunes store, will use audio fingerprinting technology employed by apps like Shazam and SoundHound to identify adverts."

Now you can find out just who is behind the ad that's extolling or trashing your candidate. That way you can fuss and fume to all your friends how such and such is ruining the world with their ill-got riches.

I just love election season, don't you?

Finally, Bionic Eyes

This in from Extremetech.com. It looks like the age of bionic replacement body parts has finally arrived. We've all seen the prostheses that have been developed by the military and high tech research. Now comes bionic eyesight.

From the website......

"The first of these implants, Argus II developed by Second Sight, is already available in Europe. For around $115,000, you get a 4-hour operation to install an antenna behind your eye, and a special pair of camera-equipped glasses that send signals to the antenna. The antenna is wired into your retina with around 60 electrodes, creating the equivalent of a 60-pixel display for your brain to interpret. The first users of the Argus II bionic eye report that they can see rough shapes and track the movement of objects, and slowly read large writing."

"The second bionic eye implant, the Bio-Retina developed by Nano Retina, is a whole lot more exciting. The Bio-Retina costs less — around the $60,000 mark — and instead of an external camera, the vision-restoring sensor is actually placed inside the eye, on top of the retina. The operation only takes 30 minutes and can be performed under local anesthetic".

Darth Vader, come on down. It's your turn on "The Time Is Ripe!"

One More Gadget

Here's a website that features new gadgets for those inclined to be early adopters. You never know quite what you'll find here. Lots of electronics, but the are also simple things that make life easier like the Freakeys key covers pictured here.

I also liked the recent Mr. Snot tissue box entry.

See-Through Smart Phone

This looks sweet.

Fire Extinguished By Sound

DARPA has developed a method of flame suppression that uses sound waves. Below is a video demonstration. Here is a link to the Wired article on this new tech.

Travel Photo(s) of the Week

Georgia based photographer David Smith created this beautiful time-lapse video using over 30,000 photos of the many cities that he visited throughout Europe.

A 320 Square Foot Container Guest House

Here's a neat little container home in San Antonio, Texas that I found on LittleDiggs.com. It's missing a kitchen, but other than that it's pretty complete. I especially like the green roof.

The Ecology of Disease

This is from Sunday's New York Times. It seems that as we mow down the natural world it is fighting back. 60% of the infectious diseases we contract come from animals we have domesticated. Many of the worst of them - AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, SARS, Lyme - have reared their ugly heads as we push further into natural habitat.

“Any emerging disease in the last 30 or 40 years has come about as a result of encroachment into wild lands and changes in demography,” says Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist and the president of EcoHealth.

Now, with project called Predict, "experts are trying to figure out, based on how people alter the landscape — with a new farm or road, for example — where the next diseases are likely to spill over into humans and how to spot them when they do emerge, before they can spread."

And it isn't just human health that is effected. World Bank predicts that a severe flu pandemic could cost the world economy as much as three trillion dollars.

College Students Design $20 Digital Stethoscope That Can Diagnose Pneumonia

This from Good.is......

"Every year 2.1 million children around the globe die from pneumonia...making it the number one killer of kids under the age of 5... In the developing world, the infection is either not diagnosed or diagnosed too late for antibiotics to help...Those diagnosis challenges could disappear thanks to the StethoCloud, a custom built stethoscope and mobile phone app system that analyzes a person's breathing to determine if they have pneumonia."

"The StethoCloud is the creation of four students from the University of Melbourne—Hon Weng Chong, Kim Ramchen, Mahsa Salehi, and Andrew Lin—for Microsoft's student innovation competition, the Imagine Cup."

"The mic captures the sounds of the person breathing and the app uploads the recording onto cloud servers. Then the app analyzes the breathing patterns, makes a diagnosis according to the standards of the World Health Organization—either the subject has pneumonia or doesn't—and then presents the user with the appropriate treatment plan."

Thanks to Liz Dwyer for reporting on this.

Fun Time! Pee Wee Does Batman!

Moyers and Company

I have always believed that Bill Moyers' career as a journalist was in some way paying penance for his involvement in the 1964 presidential campaign in which he was responsible for an anti-Goldwater ad that featured a nuclear bomb going off. Since then he has done remarkable work.

My first real taste was his six part interview with Joseph Campbell, "The Power of Myth." After that I found the PBS special (and accompanying book) "A World of Ideas." Both my wife and I were very disheartened when he decided to stop producing "Bill Moyers Journal."

But now we have him back with "Bill Moyers and Company." I won't go into a long explanation of his show here. I will offer a video selection and let you explore the links on your own.

Teen Shames Seventeen Magazine To Stop Photoshopping

This in from good.is. Julia Bluhm of Waterville, Maine was tired of opening up her issues of Seventeen Magazine and only seeing perfect images of girls retouched with Photoshop. So what did she do? She started a  Change.org petition and got over 86,000 signatures.

"Here's what lots of girls don't know: those pretty women that we see in magazines are fake," Bluhm said on Change.org. "I’m in a ballet class with a bunch of high-school girls. On a daily basis I hear comments like: 'It’s a fat day,' and 'I ate well today, but I still feel fat.' To girls today, the word 'pretty' means skinny and blemish-free. Why is that, when so few girls actually fit into such a narrow category? It’s because the media tells us that 'pretty' girls are impossibly thin with perfect skin."

Because of Julia's activism, Seventeen Magazine has agreed to stop using digital tools to alter the images of their models.

I agree. Let's stop lying to our children about who they are and who they should be.

Travel Photo of the Week

Tiger's Nest Monastery, Bhutan

Printing The World's Fastest Running Shoe

French-born engineer and designer Luc Fusaro claims he has invented a way to make the world’s fastest running shoe. The process allows Fusaro to take 3-D scans of a runner’s foot, then prints the shoes out of nylon polyamide powder on a 3D printer. It's said that the shoe can improve performance by as much as 3.5%--or about .35 seconds.  In a 100-meter dash, that could be the difference between a silver and a gold medal.

You wouldn't want to run a marathon in them, though. “It’s not good for more than 400 meters because it’s too stiff,” says Fusaro.

Remotely Activated Protein-Producing Nanoparticles

That was a mouthful, but it describes something that, if made practical, would be very useful for medical purposes. A group of scientists from MIT and the University of British Columbia have discovered a way to use nanotech to create “mini-factories” that can be programmed using lasers to produce different types of proteins and, when implanted into living cells, would distribute those proteins throughout the body. This would have many uses, from treating diabetes to cancer.

Here is a link to the American Chemical Association abstract and a link to the site Gizmo-Crazed where I picked this up.

Liberty Tool

Ah, what a good idea. Recycle tools. With the high cost of everything these days, being able to find usable tools at reduced rates could make the difference in getting your job done. Liberty Tool in Liberty, Maine is just such a place. Their services are available in person, online and on Ebay.

This place is the very essence of cool tools.

Fun Time! Godzilla In The Forecast!

The weather has been acting kind'a strange lately.

Walmart Fail = Library Success

Your Walmart has just gone out of business because everyone in town has all the cheap, shoddy consumer goods they can ever use. What to do with the empty cavernous shell that drove all your locally owned businesses out?

How about a library? That's what McAllen, Texas did with theirs. This article on Artinfo.com shows you how!

Physics Mysteries Coming Unraveled

Yesterday the big news (other than America's annual birthday party) was that the Higgs Boson has finally been seen. Unless you've been living with the Amish you know that the Higgs is one on the last pieces of the Standard Model of Physics puzzle to be put in place.

Well today comes news that Jörg Dietrich, an astronomer at the University Observatory Munich in Germany and his colleagues have mapped a dark matter filament that connects two massive galaxies.

“Filaments of dark matter have never been seen before,” says Dietrich, whose team reports the finding online July 4 in Nature. “For the first time, we successfully mapped one.”

From the Science News Article: "To improve the odds of seeing one, Dietrich and colleagues focused on Abell 222/223, a pair of galaxy clusters that are close together and thus should be connected by a relatively massive filament. X-ray observations had already revealed a ribbon of hot gas between the clusters — the first hint of a dark matter link. Using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii, the researchers looked at light from distant galaxies passing through the space between the clusters."

"The distorted shapes of the galaxies revealed a thick cord of matter with a mass comparable to that of a small galaxy cluster. Gas can account for only about 9 percent of that mass. Dark matter seems to make up the rest."

Now can we get on with inventing warp drive?

Travel Photo of the Week

Making Saltwater Drinkable With Graphene

Graphene, that amazing substance that's stronger than steel, thinner than paper, can generate electricity and so much more, now appears to be very useful taking the salt out of saltwater. Two or three magnitudes of order more useful, it appears. Here's an article from Geekosystem.com detailing the process.

Boston Tries To Engineer Away Its Traffic Problems

Boston is a terrible city to drive in. I know; I used to do it. In fact, it got so bad I gave up. I walked and took the T.

Well it seems that IBM had a com-
petition (Smarter Cities Challenge) and awarded 33 cities each $400k worth of engineering aid to help figure out and alleviate each city's problem (good luck, LA).

Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino tasked the IBM team with tackling two big issues: How can the city quickly spot and undo congestion while slashing greenhouse gas emissions at the same time.  “We don’t do a good job of moving traffic,” said Menino. “We’ve got to modernize, and understand our carbon footprint.”

The IBM team developed an app for city planners that will eventually be available to all. IBM will formally present its work later this year.

50 Healthiest Foods

This list of the healthiest foods is from Huffington Post and was developed by their "favorite medical and nutritional experts." I expected green tea, cherries and flax seeds to be on the list, but it's good to know that good old tomatoes and potatoes still count as health food. Coffee and dark chocolate, too!