Incorruptible Data

From Gizmag. Finally, there is a way to make sure your data is safe. Hitachi has developed an "incorruptible" glass-based data storage technique. It uses microscopic dots within a piece of quartz glass, the dots being binary data. The data should be stable for at least several hundred million years.

The current two-centimeter square, two millimeter thick prototype can contain about 40 megs of data. Researchers are confident they can increase storage by adding more layers.

Fun Time! Father And Son Send Toy Train Into Space!

On Aug 24th 2012, Ron Fugelseth and his 4-year-old son sent "Stanley" to space in a weather balloon with a HD camera and an old cell phone for GPS. He was recovered 27 miles away in a corn field. This video documents the journey from liftoff to landing. Fugelset animated Stanley's face with After Effects and Photoshop to bring him to life.

3D Printing For The Masses

MakerBot Replicator2

There is a true revolution going on that most folks simply aren't aware of. It's being driven by people who want to make things. It's facilitated by 3D printing.

Decades ago, while living in Boston, I heard that a certain high-tech company in the area had a device that would allow you to input any design and presto! out would come the finished product. Now, we mere mortals can enjoy the same excitement at seeing our material fantasies realized.

At the forefront of the home maker craze are two "affordable" printers (affordable being in the $2000-3000 range), the MakerBot Replicator and Form1's high resolution printer. I won't go into the particulars here, but follow the links provided and have a look at the video below to learn more.

Common Parasite Linked to Personality Changes

It appears that about 22 percent of the American public, over the age of twelve, is infected with a parasite that can influence behavior. People infected with the microscopic parasite Toxoplasma gondii are more extroverted and less conscientious than those that are not infected and that the longer men are infected the less conscientious they become.

Here's a link to the Scientific American article this came from.

Travel Photo of the Week

Venice, italy

Open Source Brick Press

A little over a year ago, I featured Marcin Jakubowski and his plans to build 50 open source machines with which you can rebuild the comforts of civilization. Here's a video of his "Liberator," an open source, compressed earth, brick press.

Small House In Australia

Here's a beautiful small house in the Australian outback. It's renting out as a tourist cabin, only $2000 per night.

Control Your DSLR From Your iThing And Smartphone

Here's a neat gadget. Now you can control your DSLR from your iPod Touch, iPad, iPhone or smartphone with a gadget called Triggertrap. Lots of applications: timelapse, security. All kinds of ways to trigger the shot. If you do any kind of photography other than point and shoot, you want to know about this.

Fun Time! Plot-oon!

Plot-oon from Chris Butcher

Warp Drive For Real?

It looks like the speed of light might not be the barrier it's always been made out to be and that interstellar travel (within reasonable amounts of time) just might be possible.

"There is hope," Harold "Sonny" White of NASA's Johnson Space Center said Friday (Sept. 14) at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting to discuss the challenges of interstellar spaceflight.

Here are links to two articles discussing the tech and the problems that need to be overcome to make this happen.

The Warp Drive Could become Science Fact
Dark Energy and Surfing Spacetime

Taylor Made Body Parts

From this article the in New York Times, it looks like we'll be able to engineer replacement parts for our bodies pretty soon.

Dr. Paolo Macchiarini at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, "built" a new windpipe for his patient from a porous plastic and stem cells from the patient's bone marrow.

Those involved in this work caution that although this is promising research, "that the creation of complex organs is still a long way off. But they are increasingly optimistic about the possibilities."

Travel Photo of the Week

Manarola, Italty

Find Out Who's Going To Win: Election Analytics

Interested in the 2012 elections? Want to know who's going to be occupying the Oval Office come January next year?

Well then, Election Analytics might just be what you need. As the site says, Election Analytics is "...a web tool that tracks and analyzes polling data to forecast who will win the upcoming November 2012 elections. The analytics used in our computations are based on Bayesian statistics and operations research methodologies."

Here's looking at November 6th!

Nomiku Immersion Circulator

Sous vide is all the rage in cooking these days. But slow cooking at low temperatures can be tricky.

Here's device (that was crowd-funded on Kickstarter, no less) that makes the cooking technique easy. Watch the video to get the whole idea. You can order one here. Here's the founder's website that covers all the joys of sous vide.

Everything Is Incredible

This short documentary film by Tyler Bastian features Agustin, a Honduran man severely disabled by polio, who has been building his own helicopter for the past 50 years. Beautiful, heartbreaking, inspirational.

Fun Time!

Here's a video of Clockwork, a K'nex ball machine. It took 8 months to build, has over 40,000 pieces, over 450 feet of track, 21 different paths, 8 motors, 5 lifts, and a one-of-a-kind computer-controlled crane, as well as two computer-controlled illuminated K'nex balls. Here's a link to the Laughing Squid page that I found this on with lots more videos of this person's K'nex machines.

What Is Sustainable Community?

"Within Reach" is a film about one couple's journey to find sustainable community. What is sustainable community, you ask? I'll let them explain.

Less Than 10% Of Caribbean Coral Reefs Left

In this article in The Guardian, Carl Gustaf Lundin, director of the global marine and polar program at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, says research shows that less than 10% of coral reefs in the Caribbean are left.

"The major causes of coral decline are well known and include overfishing, pollution, disease and bleaching caused by rising temperatures resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. Looking forward, there is an urgent need to immediately and drastically reduce all human impacts [in the area] if coral reefs and the vitally important fisheries that depend on them are to survive in the decades to come."

Travel Photo Of The Week

Emerald Pool, Dominica

Food Riots And Other Unrest 2013

This little tidbit from Slashdot. It seems there's a paper out that predicts some severe food rioting next year in the fall. Seems that all this extreme weather has thrown agriculture for a loop and now developing nations are going to feel the brunt of it. Here is a link to the actual study.

From the abstract:

"We identify a specific food price threshold above which protests become likely. These observations suggest that protests may reflect not only long-standing political failings of governments,but also the sudden desperate straits of vulnerable populations. If food prices remain high, there is likely to be persistent and increasing global social disruption."

We in the wealthy nations spend about 15% of our income on food while the rest of the world spends about 80% of theirs. If food prices go up too much, to fast, it's easy to see how things could quickly get out of hand.

But it's not like we didn't already know this stuff back in the '60s.

Wood Extract Stronger Than Carbon Fiber, Kevlar

Wood by-products, such as wood chips and sawdust can now by processed into cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) and if prepared properly, can result in materials stronger than Kevlar. It also can be made at about a tenth the cost of the more exotic stuff. Here's an article from Gizmag.com on the process.

The Day Eno Met Cage

Two of my favorite musical conceptualists are John Cage and Brian Eno. Here's a 1985 article/interview from Musician that chronicles the day they met.

Here's a couple of excerpts......

CAGE: [to Eno] I've unfortunately only heard one record of yours, and I'd like to know more about your work. The one I heard was the airport thing...

ENO: Right, Music For Airports.

CAGE: And the way I heard it was by coming into a situation where there was a sound system and a large record collection at the Crown Point Press in (Oakland) California, where most of the [visual] artists work while records are being played. And the only other composer, as far as I know, who was asked to make etchings was Steve Reich. Anyway, as you know I like silence very much [laughs]. So I never asked to hear anything. But one January at Crown Point I said, "Do you have any Brian Eno?" And they played this record. I was struck, of course, as anyone hearing it for the first time would be, by the structure, which is sound... and silence. And on my way here this afternoon, it seemed to me that you must work with some rhythmic structure. I would enjoy knowing how you work.

 ENO: It's quite interesting actually that you mentioned Steve Reich, because if I had continued this list of pieces of music that influenced me, there was a piece by Steve Reich that was probably, as a working composer, the most important piece that I heard, in that it gave me an idea I've never ceased being fascinated with - how variety can be generated by very, very simple systems. The piece I'm talking about is called It's Gonna Rain, the tape piece. It's a loop of tape of a preacher saying, "It's gonna rain, it's gonna rain, it's gonna rain, it's gonna rain." And at the same time, on another recording, the same loop is being played at a slightly different speed. So that gradually, the two tapes are sliding out of sync. And a very interesting thing happens to your brain, which is that any information which is common, after several repetitions, you cease to hear. You reject the common information, rather like if you gaze at something for a long time, you'll cease to really see it. You'll see any aspect of it that's changing, but the static elements you won't see. And what fascinated me with that piece was that it generated a kind of audible difference and patterns. The amount of material there is extremely limited, but the amount of activity it triggers in you is very rich and complex.

and....

MUSICIAN: Both of you have defended the idea that you can be a good composer whether you're trained or untrained, but this creates a certain problem. There seem to be a lot of Enoesque or Cageian composers who think that because they have no training, they're automatically daring. So what is it that separates untrained composers who aren't worth listening to from untrained composers who are?

CAGE: I think the term "worth listening to" depends on who s listening. I think it would be right to say that no matter what, if it is sounds, one could listen to it. I haven't yet heard sounds that I didn't enjoy, except when they became too musical. I have trouble, I think, when music attempts to control me. I have trouble, for instance, with the Hallelujah Chorus. But if the sound is unintentional, then I have no problem.

ENO: That's right. Some sound comes so heavily laden with intention that you can't hear it for the intentions. This is the great problem of lyrics, as far as I'm concerned. It's notable that if you read the way critics write about pop music, they'll always write about lyrics because it happens to be their medium. It's much easier to talk about lyrics than to talk about... music. But I have the same feeling about lyrics. I just don't want to hear them most of the time. They always impose something that is so unmysterious compared to the sound of the music they debase the music for me, in most cases.

Fun Time! Man-Eater Game

Daniel Disselkøen is a Dutch graphic designer who also comes up with amusing things. Man Eater is a little game he devised for boring bus trips.

In his words, "For four years, each day I took the same tram to art academy. Why would you then look out the window with curiosity when there is no reason to expect anything new. I decided to change the daily journey for my fellow passengers and myself. I wouldn’t move the tramway track, but maybe I could add something. Make something so that what already exists would look very different now."

WalkScore

I'm getting to a point in my life where I'm beginning to contemplate life without a car. I was car-less once for six years and in many ways it was a liberating experience. No insurance, gasoline, repairs, maintenance, no parking worries and no car payments. I was limited to mass transit, but I was living in Boston, so that really didn't matter much.

Now as I consider the future and I think about being able to walk to everything I want, I can use Walkscore to evaluate various locations and walk-ability. You put an address or zipcode into their search engine and you can find just how many amenities are in the vicinity. You can also use the search engine to find an apartment.

As the site says..."People in walkable neighborhoods weigh 6-10 lbs less. Walkable places make you feel happier and healthier. Short commutes reduce stress and increase community involvement."

Right now the location I live at scores a 29, which is pretty poor. The closer to a score of 100 the better. But I still have a few years to think about this.

Was Van Gogh Colorblind?

Van Gogh's "Wheat Field behind Saint
 Paul Hospital with a Reaper" — Top:
 Original / Bottom: Color blind simulation

In a recent essay, Japanese medical scientist and poet, Kazunori Asada, hypothesized that Vincent Van Gogh suffered from colorblindness.

He utilized a device to simulate what Van Gogh's paintings would look like to someone with a moderate lack of receptors for the color red.

Asada writes, “The incongruity of color and roughness of line had quietly disappeared,” the scientist writes. “Each picture had changed into one of brilliance with very delicate lines and shades.”

It's hard to imagine Van Gogh's work being even more beautiful than it already is. It's even harder to imagine it being that way for someone with colorblindness.

Travel Photo of the Week

Bora Bora

My Home In A Box

As people explore more ways of achieving an affordable home, shipping containers are becoming a popular alternative to conventional construction techniques. The website, "My Home In A Box," is a great place to begin research to see if a shipping container is in your future.

The site offers many tips and tools to work out the logistics. There are articles on water and energy use, insulation. There are videos on conversion techniques. They also offer design kits where you get a cutout versions of shipping containers to design your own container compound.

Off-Grid Float Cabin In BC Wilderness

Here's another great video from faircompanies.com. They even have a floating garden.

When Galaxies Collide

This is an animation of the effects on two galaxies containing super-massive black holes when then collide.

Fun Time! Toothpick San Fran!

One guy, 35 years, 100,000 toothpicks.