Travel Photo of the Week

Bookstore in Livraria Lello, Porto, Portugal

Big Oil/Coal Censor Art

“Carbon Sink,” by Chris Drury

It seems that oil and coal executives around Laramie, Wyoming are particularly thin skinned. When British artist Chris Drury installed a 36-foot-diameter sculpture, called “Carbon Sink," at the University of Wyoming, a bitter battle ensued.

Local lawmakers and officials in Wyoming’s energy industry, which helps support the university through state taxes, felt betrayed.  State Representative Thomas E. Lubnau II threatened to introduce legislation that would ensure that “no fossil-fuel-derived tax dollars find their way in the University of Wyoming funding stream.” The university removed the sculpture citing water damage — an irrigation line had broken in the area.

“I’m disappointed that the university caved in to that sort of extortion and that sort of implied threat,” said Dr. Jeff Lockwood, a professor of natural sciences and humanities. “And I’m angry that this sort of behavior on the part of private industry, as well as their effectiveness in lobbying our elected officials, would lead to an act of artistic censorship on a university campus.”

Here's link to the New York Times article that gives the whole picture.

But Who Watches the Watchers? Predicting Personal Behavior.

This one is right out of the film Minority Report. It's not enough to have our every move monitored in today's surveillance society. Now researchers at Carnegie Mellon have developed a system that can not only recognize human behaviors, but could also predict what they might do next. The Army funded research would also sound an alarm if it detects "anomalous" behaviors.

The research has been presented in a paper entitled, "Using Ontologies in a Cognitive-Grounded System: Automatic Action Recognition in Video Surveillance" and focuses on an artificial intelligence cognitive engine that automatically detects and interprets a person's actions using its surveillance feed.

The next step will be to tie the software to drones. Careful what you do, Big Data is watching.

A Simple Fix For Farming

The title above is the same as the New York Times article it comes from. We all eat. What we eat matters, to us, the farmers that raise it and the planet it's grown on.

The article talks about being able to grow enough food to feed us all without poisoning our land (and eventually ourselves) to do it.

The sentence that really sticks out to me is:

"In short, there was only upside — and no downside at all — associated with the longer rotations. There was an increase in labor costs, but remember that profits were stable. So this is a matter of paying people for their knowledge and smart work instead of paying chemical companies for poisons."

Paying for people instead of poison. Doesn't that say it all?

If you're interested in exploring a farm already doing what the article suggests, check out the Polyface Farms.

Fun Time! Save The Enterprise!

No, it's not a new video game. Restore the Enterprise Bridge is dedicated to restoring a replica of the fictional starship's bridge from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The original bridge was completely destroyed during the making of the film, Star Trek: Generations.

From the project's website: "It is our Prime Directive to completely restore the STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION D Bridge Set to make it a Fully Interactive, Simulator available for Display, Parties, Movie Showings, Fundraising, Charities, Fan Films, as well as newly created interactive Education Missions, so entire classrooms of students can steer the Enterprise to other planets, galaxies and more!"

The finished bridge will have touchscreen panels and working displays. The founder of the project describes it as an immersive experience, like a video game come alive.

They have a Kickstarter page and an Indigogo page, if you're interested in participating.

This is what it will look like when they're done.

Piano From The Future

I used to have a Peugeot. Fickle, unreliable, finicky. I ended up losing my temper with it once. I won't go into details. Now the company has invaded my professional life. The company's design lab has come up with a piano. Not just any design would do. This would be fitting on the Enterprise and I don't mean the shuttle.

Yep, that's it. It almost looks like a spaceship, itself. Here's a link to the  Peugeot Design Lab page so you can have a closer look. I'll probably stick to Steinway.

The Island Where People Forget To Die

Stamatis Moraiti,s at least 97 years old

Ah, wouldn't we all like to life a nice, long, healthy life? The inhabitants of the Greek Island, Ikaria, abouth 30 miles off the coast of Turkey appear to have discovered the elixir of life. Their home's reputation as a healthy place dates back at least 2500 years, when visitors came to bathe in the hot springs near Therma.  The 17th century bishop of Ikaria, Joseph Georgirenes, once wrote, “The most commendable thing on this island is their air and water, both so healthful that people are very long-lived, it being an ordinary thing to see persons in it of 100 years of age.”

Well, Dan Buettner, with support from the National Geographic Society, has been studying places where the residents live unusually long lives. His work is due to appear in next month's issue of the magazine, but the New York Times has done a piece on his work.

A quote from the Times article........

"After gathering all the data, he and his colleagues at the University of Athens concluded that people on Ikaria were, in fact, reaching the age of 90 at two and a half times the rate Americans do. (Ikarian men in particular are nearly four times as likely as their American counterparts to reach 90, often in better health.) But more than that, they were also living about 8 to 10 years longer before succumbing to cancers and cardiovascular disease, and they suffered less depression and about a quarter the rate of dementia. Almost half of Americans 85 and older show signs of Alzheimer’s. (The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that dementia cost Americans some $200 billion in 2012.) On Ikaria, however, people have been managing to stay sharp to the end."

What a difference with America, where most lose their wits before the age of 30.

Travel Photo of the Week

Androscoggin River, Turner, Maine

Print Your Own Plane

I've done a couple of posts on 3D printing and this is an update on this fast moving innovation.

Two University of Virginia engineering students have use 3D printing to make an plane, not full size, but very impressive none the less. It all came about when they created a turbofan engine using the technology and then posted a video of it on youtube.

Executives at MITRE Corporation saw the video and offered them the summer job of making the plane.

Need Spy Gear?

Getting ready for the new James Bond movie? Have international bad guys to track? Top secret information to acquire and disseminate? Spymaster is your go-to vendor. Your Q on he run, so to speak.

Spymaster is London's leading spy shop supplying surveillance, counter-surveillance and personal protection equipment. As they say on their website:

"Established since 1991, Spymaster is regarded as London's most respected and best equipped spy shop providing for all your surveillance, counter-surveillance, personal protection and related security needs."

I like the mini-submarine (shown on the right), but when are they going to offer high-powered laser pistols?

No TV For Under Threes

From the Guardian, it seems that TV for children under three years of age might really be a bad idea.

From the article: "A review of the evidence in the Archives Of Disease in Childhood says children's obsession with TV, computers and screen games is causing developmental damage as well as long-term physical harm. The critical time for brain growth is the first three years of life, he says. That is when babies and small children need to interact with their parents, eye to eye, and not with a screen."

I wonder if people will pay attention. Oh wait...most people don't read academic studies. They're too busy using their computers and watching TV.

Fun Time! Beautiful Animated Short, The Maker.

Make Your Own Tools

Modern Neolithic Tools

Homemade Tools is an online community for folks who make their own tools. There are categories for almost any tool type you can think of, including (but not limited to) automotive, buffing and polishing, cleaning, cutting, drilling and tapping, electrical, fastening, machining, measuring and marking, metalworking, sanding, sharpening and woodworking (whew!). They feature over 2900 tools and the people who've made them. Forums, top builders, blogs.

You love tools? Here your website.

How To Beat Stage Fright

Here's a link to a webpage that gives advice on the performer's nightmare, stage fright.

Some of the nuggets of wisdom included are:

Jason Alexander: "And as the curtain rose on that first night, I had a flash of intense vertigo, like I was going to pass out and couldn’t find my center. It sent me into a cold-sweat panic. Luckily, I held on, managed to perform, and warmed into the performance. But the next night as I stood on the stage waiting for the curtain to rise, I was in a panic that the experience might repeat itself. I worked myself up so much that when the curtain rose, the vertigo was even worse than the first night. Every night became a nightmare at the opening of the show. Once I got past the first scene, I would settle down and be all right. But since this had never happened to me before, it was very unsettling."

Robin Williams:"  I think that, especially in the beginning, nervousness is almost a natural response. It’s a bit like fight or flight. You go on stage and there’s an adrenaline rush."

Dave Goelz (Gonzo the Great): "The state I’m in when I go in there is alert—alert, and I know where the doors are. So if it really goes bad, I can get out and they’ll never see me again. I’ll be out the side door, get a taxi, and I’ll never run into those people again."

Travel Photo of the Week

Easter Island

Is Our Universe Just A Computer Simulation?

As a followup to yesterday's entry, here is a link to an article from Technology Review on work that Silas Beane, at the University of Bonn in Germany, is doing to discover if our universe is just someone else's computer simulation.

This is a notion that's been floating around for some time and it seems there are ways to discover if we all are  just numbers floating around somewhere else.

Heaven, maybe?

Is Reality Really Real?

This month's New Scientist magazine is devoted to the question of reality.

An easy question if you don't probe too deeply, a thorny subject if you try to investigate thoroughly.

You go have a look.

Travel Photo of the Week

Restaurant at Chi Lin Nunnery in Hong Kong, China 

No, I didn't forget. I was just one a roll with all that science stuff. You know, flying saucers, starships and transporters.

Fun Time! This Lifesize Mousetrap Game Can Crush A Car!

And just because this is so much fun, here's another video of the Mousetrap in operation.

Life Size Mousetrap - Maker Faire Detroit from Mark Webster on Vimeo.

Things Get Strange When You Travel Faster Than Light

It seems that when mathematicians work on Einstein's relativity equations instead of physicists, that there is no real barrier to going faster than light. Things just get really weird.

Mathematician James Hill and colleague Barry Cox have extended Einstein's equations to show what it would happens if faster-than-light velocities become possible. Their equations show that as something accelerates beyond the speed of light it begins to loose mass until, at infinite velocities, its mass becomes zero.

"The actual business of going through the speed of light is not defined," says Hill. "The theory we've come up with is simply for velocities greater than the speed of light."

Hill believes that the speed of light is not an absolute barrier and compares it to Chuck Yeager flying faster than the speed of sound which, at the time, many thought impossible.

"I think it's only a matter of time. Human ingenuity being what it is, it's going to happen, but maybe it will involve a transportation mechanism entirely different from anything presently envisaged."

As Mr. Spock would say, "fascinating."

For more on this, here's a link to the Christian Science Monitor's article.

Great, You've Proved Quantum Superposition. Now Can We Have Transporters?

And the 2012 Nobel prize for Physics goes to Serge Haroche of France and American David Wineland. Their work now points the way to being able to measure quantum particles without destroying them.

"The Nobel laureates have opened the door to a new era of experimentation with quantum physics by demonstrating the direct observation of individual quantum particles without destroying them," said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, "Perhaps the quantum computer will change our everyday lives in this century in the same radical way as the classical computer did in the last century."

Now that these fine gentleman have discovered the means to make a particle exist in two places at the same time, perhaps they'll start working on quantum teleportation. A guy can hope, right?

Dilithium Crystals Power New Fusion Engine

More good news in the science fiction becomes science fact category. Researchers at University of Huntsville in Alabama have developed a new fusion impulse engine that would cut the travel time to Mars down to as little as six weeks, instead of the six months it currently takes to get to the red planet.

The best part? In the words of PH.D. candidate and team member Ross Cortez, "The fusion fuel we're focusing on is deuterium [a stable isotope of hydrogen] and Li6 [a stable isotope of the metal lithium] in a crystal structure. That's basically dilithium crystals we're using."

Score one more for Gene Roddenberry.

That Flying Saucer Is One Of Ours

This is from Extreme Tech. It seems that the US Air Force was trying to make a flying saucer back in the '50s.

Recently declassified, Project 1794 was a circular craft capable of up to Mach 4 speeds, had a 1000 mile range (that won't get you to Mars), an altitude limit of almost twenty miles and was capable of vertical takeoff and landing.

There are two boxes of declassified documents on project 1794, so it might be awhile before we know whether the craft ever flew. But the the Canadian company working on the project, Avro Canada, did develop a smaller version, the VZ-9 Avrocar, that apparently flew 35 mph and achieved the grand altitude of 35 feet.

VZ-9 Avrocar

A $3000 Car?

A 1971 Datsun 240Z. Probably not
what Nissan is going to reboot.

I remember when I was a senior in high school that the Datsun 240Z was about $3000.  Well, it looks like Nissan has decided to revive the Datsun brand with a new car for only $3000. In interviews, Nissan’s CEO, Carlos Ghosn, said that the stripped-down models will appear in emerging-market countries as bare-boned as any rival has tried. Here are a links to three articles from The Wall street Journal that give more background.

Maybe they'll make their first reborn model the 240Z. A guy can hope, right?

A Cost Cutting Car

Why Revive Datsun?

Can $3,000 Cars Revive Nissan’s Datsun Brand?

Another Language Dies

I find it immensely sad when we lose a language. It is as if an entire people, their way of life, their knowledge, their insights and secrets vanish from the face of the Earth as if they never existed. Yes, we can memorialize them in a book or Wikipedia page, but the living proof is gone.

Last week, 92 year old Bobby Hogg died and took the Cromarty fisherfolk dialect with him. Here's a link to the CNN article with the details.

Fun Time: Homer Votes!

Micro Dwellings: Solution Or New Problem

Since I post so much stuff on tiny homes, I thought I would put up a a link to very well reasoned critique that I found on Gizmag.

The basic gist of the downside described in the article is that adding lots of micro-dwellings, in a big city like New York, creates overcrowding problems that would bring down the standard of life for everyone. I'm not sure that I fully agree, but I guess we'll have to wait and have a real example, and not just theories, before we really know. The author assesses the current situations in NYC and San Francisco for the article.

Finnish Micro House

From Design\Milk. This lovely little cottage is on a lake. 96 square feet of house and 50 square feet of loft with a deck. Lots of recycled materials and it only cost $10,500. It was built this size to avoid having to get a building permit.

Travel Photo of the Week

Persepolis,Iran

Make Your Own Solar Oven

And while we're talking about homemade solar, here are instructions from Alt. Build Blog for making your own solar oven mostly from stuff laying around the house. They recorded temperature up to 325 degrees, but mostly it stayed in the 200 to 250 degree range. Not enough to boil water, but you could slow cook a chicken.

Here's a link to the original source they used form Backwoods Home Magazine.

Print Your Own Solar Panels

This comes from NPR'S Science Friday. Want to power all your gadgets from the sun? You want a Solar Pocket Factory! Inventors Shawn Frayne and Alex Hornstein have cooked up this great little device to make small solar panels cheaply. Below is a video they did in SciFri's Flora Lichtman's backyard. They are raising funds on Kickstarter.