From Mohammad F. Haque, a.k.a. Hawk, the artist of Applegeeks:
I do so love living in the future.
Via the Twitter of Fred Gallagher, artist and writer of Megatokyo.
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
The Watch
Sunday, November 8th, 2009Gun Pr0n: Bullets at a Million Frames Per Second
Friday, October 9th, 2009Surprisingly gorgeous, as so many things are when slowed down sufficiently for us to watch them happen. You may want to turn your sound down to defend against the musical dramatrack.
“We Are As Gods, And Have To Get Good At It.”
Friday, October 2nd, 2009Stewart Brand proclaims “Environmental Heresies“, over at TED.
There are TED presentations that make you gasp with awe and wonder. The audience laughs and claps throughout, simply because the charts and graphs are so enlightening.
This is not one of them. It is cold, dry, and sobering. The audience is silent. I’m not going to try to summarize, you really need to see the whole thing.
I don’t agree with everything here — Brand believes in AGW, for instance, and is reflexively socialist — but overwhelmingly, the message is good, and Brand presses the need for local, even personal control and power. (Brand understands very well the difference between the two.) As I say, his socialism is reflexive, but the message is inherently capitalist.
The amazing thing is, he sees so clearly that even though his politics color his presentation, he still tells the truth.
QotD: “Only The Toads Spoke”
Thursday, July 16th, 2009Today is the 64th anniversary of the Atomic Age, which opened at 05:29 a.m. “Mountain War Time” 16 July 1945 over the sands of Trinity, New Mexico.
Today we pause and remember the day we became as gods.
So far, we’ve managed not to kill ourselves.
The headline is my favorite quote from Lansing Lamont’s Trinity, a good, quick read on the Manhattan Project. It’s from chapter 9: “July 16, 1945: Zero Minus One Hour”.
At 5 seconds the cameras began churning…. Julian Mack perched in his machine gun turret [converted to a camera turret]…Suddenly he smelled smoke. The power generator in his turret had overheated and caught fire. The turret was ablaze. An assistant shouted that he was turning off the power. “No, no!” Mack screamed. “The cameras are still running! Let it burn!”
In the control center [announcer] Sam Allison was seized by a sudden fear that the explosion would create a lightning effect and pump electrocuting volts into the microphone he gripped. At minus one second, he dropped the microphone and screamed as loud as h e could: “Zero!” In that instant, a final surge of high voltage engulfed the firing unit, and the signals from McKibben and Titterton charged across the desert to galvanize the detonators on the bomb.
Fermi and the others heard Allison’s last scream. Then silence for what seemed an enternity. And in that millisecond, only the toads spoke at Trinity.
“How To Take Ritalin”
Sunday, July 5th, 2009This is the kind of extremely useful advice you rarely get because it’s illegal. Stupid drug laws. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
[T]he key to amphetamines and Ritalin is to stop thinking of them as stimulants, and to think of them as reinforcers.Let’s conceptualize how these drugs work. Imagine getting a brain scan while you are performing a task. The parts of your brain you are using for the task will light up, brighter than those you aren’t using.
Now you drink coffee. The whole brain lights up brighter, proportionally.
Now you take amphetamines. The parts of your brain that you are using light up brighter, but the parts you aren’t using go darker. Get it? Caffeine is a global brain stimulant, while amphetamines focus your attention, reducing distraction.
This is entirely selective and controlled by you. You have to decide what you want to focus your attention on. If it’s reading, the reading parts of your brain will be brighter. But if you stop reading and decide to talk to your friend on the phone, you know, the hot one with the hotter roommate, then you’ll be more focused on that (obviously). Attention is always decreased when it is split among several tasks. In other words, you can only concentrate on one thing at a time, even though it may feel like you are doing two things at once.
While amphetamines and Ritalin do stimulate you and keep you awake, using them to pull an all nighter completely subverts their awesome power. If you want a stimulant, drink coffee or Red Bull. Amphetamines should be saved for reinforcement.
You want to set up a study situation that as closely as possible resembles your testing context. Do you take tests in the middle of the night? Using multicolored highlighters? With The Daily Show on in the background and eating Doritos? Then you’re a pig, and you deserve to fail. You’re dead to me.
You should study in the morning, at a desk, under the same “fed” conditions as on test day. (So you would have eaten before taking the test, not snacking at the test.) Quiet room, no distractions. Remember, attention is decreased with multiple stimuli in normal conditions, but on amphetamines, this will be be greatly magnified. Studying while talking to your friend means your “talking to friend” parts of the brain are brighter while your “”studying” parts of the brain are darker. Same thing with listening to music and studying.
Take the amphetamine (takes about 30 minutes to “kick in.”) Study, straight, with no distractions or interruptions, for about four hours. Quit. You’re done. Amphetamines give you about 4 hours tops of great concentration. Go to lunch, the gym, watch a movie, etc.
This is Leary’s “set and setting” understanding harnessed and put to work.
It should be noted that all this probably works without amphetamines almost as well. I’m beginning to understand that brains are all about reinforcement and habit.
Drugs are tools, just like guns, or computers, or shovels, or pencils. Drugs cause enormous damage because the drug war forces us to treat them like an enemy, and they reflect that back at us. The only people “studying” drugs are hedonists, losers, and violent criminals.
Incidentally, many of the comments are useful and informative, but then, many are not. You will have to step carefully to avoid the mines and cowpats, but they’re worth reading.
Mom: Just Humming Along
Saturday, May 16th, 2009Mom has a humming bird feeder on her patio.
Mom, this is what you can’t see:
An Ocean of Data
Saturday, May 16th, 2009From the Vancouver Sun, “Little Ocean Tattletales Fail to Find Right Facts”:
They drift along in the worlds’ oceans at a depth of 2,000 metres — more than a mile down — constantly monitoring the temperature, salinity, pressure and velocity of the upper oceans.
Then, about once every 10 days, a bladder on the outside of these buoys inflates and raises them slowly to the surface, gathering data about each strata of seawater they pass through.
After an upward journey of nearly six hours, the Argo monitors bob on the waves while an onboard transmitter sends their information to a satellite that in turn retransmits it to several land-based research computers where it may be accessed by anyone who wishes to see it.
These 3,000 yellow sentinels — about the size and shape of a large fencepost — free-float the world’s oceans, season in and season out, surfacing between 30 and 40 times a year, disgorging their findings, then submerging again for another fact-finding voyage.
It’s fascinating to watch their progress online. (The URLs are too complex to reproduce here, but Google “Argo Buoy Movement” or “Argo Float Animation,” and you will be directed to the links.)
[Here's a good one. Below is a still from one of these movies, so you can get an idea of just how well these little guys are surveying the ocean. -- djm]
Still from a NASA animation showing tracks of free-floating oceanographic buoys.
When they were first deployed in 2003, the Argos were hailed for their ability to collect information on ocean conditions more precisely, at more places and greater depths and in more conditions than ever before.
No longer would scientists have to rely on measurements mostly at the surface from older scientific buoys or inconsistent shipboard monitors.
So why are some scientists now beginning to question the buoys’ findings? Because in five years the little blighters have failed to detect any global warming. They are not reinforcing the scientific orthodoxy of the day, namely that man is causing the planet to warm dangerously. They are not proving the predetermined conclusions of their human masters. Therefore they, and not their masters’ hypotheses, must be wrong.
In fact, “there has been a very slight cooling,” according to a U.S. National Public Radio (NPR) interview with Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a scientist who keeps close watch on the Argo findings.
I’d quote the whole thing, but the Sun deserves your traffic, so go read the whole thing.
update:
Cold Fury calls out global warming: “It ain’t science, it’s religion.”
The people pushing the GW agenda don’t give a good goddamn about Mother Earth. They want to return us all to a pre-industrial culture, with us as dirty sweaty agrarian peasants and them as the exalted overlords, wallowing in the rotting corpse of the richest, most powerful society the world has ever seen. The religion is all about making us accept it by making us think we’re saving ourselves.
They will never accept the limits they want to impose on us.
Damn straight, Al Gore and Barack Obama are only the most visible of the They.
NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio rocks,. and I mean hard. I’m going to be spending more time there than I have, I can tell. Just… damn!
Here’s what I found by just clicking on the “Next” link on the Argo page:
This is a map of “relative sea level around the Earth“. Red indicates highs, blue lows.
Here’s the trick: this map shows a variation of 500 mm above and below average. The total range, highest to lowest, is one meter. That’s right, about a yard on a globe 8000 miles in diameter, measuring a surface covered with waves well over one meter high.
There is nothing, nothing, we cannot know about our world if we choose to find out.
And if this is a firehose, just wait: It’s going to become a Niagra.
[Credit for both images to NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.]
[Link to Sun via Dan at Protein Wisdom.]
Never Too Late to Mock Earth Day
Saturday, April 25th, 2009Oh, yeah:
Via Dr. Sanity, who’s got some very sane things to say. Goest thou, and readeth ye Whole Thingy.
Yes, I love the old TV show M*A*S*H. Really, I do. Great characters (especially Col. Potter), great dialog, great jokes, great stories. As human a show as has ever been on TV.
But every time they get political, and mock the rationale behind the American presence in Korea (and, by implication, Viet Nam) I think of this picture. The part of Korea that we saved is, down there at the bottom, is even today a civilized industrial nation.
The part of Korea that we abandoned, in those last few episodes where everyone is so thrilled that the war is over and they get to go home, is that black atavistic hellhole up there at the top.
God damn it, Major Frank Burns was essentially right, and the fact that he was portrayed as a bumbling, jingoistic idiot was a betrayal of the people and the way of life his patients were there to fight for.
Tweenbots
Saturday, April 11th, 2009Your feel-good must-read for the day week month:
In New York City, we are very occupied with getting from one place to another. I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? To answer these questions, I built robots.Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.
There’s a word I think I’m going to have to start using more often, and in a completely non-ironic way: “charming”. This is charming.
Via, yes, Hacker News.
Alton Brown Probably Knew All Along
Friday, March 6th, 2009Via Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred:
And via there, this from The Economist:
The evolutionary role of cookery
Youare what you eat, or so the saying goes. But Richard Wrangham, of Harvard University, believes that this is true in a more profound sense than the one implied by the old proverb. It is not just you who are what you eat, but the entire human species. And with Homo sapiens, what makes the species unique in Dr Wrangham’s opinion is that its food is so often cooked.
Cooking is a human universal. No society is without it. No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal in the evening, usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running. Dr Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval.
In fact, as he outlined to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in Chicago, he thinks that cooking and other forms of preparing food are humanity’s “killer app”: the evolutionary change that underpins all of the other—and subsequent—changes that have made people such unusual animals.
Humans became human, as it were, with the emergence 1.8m years ago of a species called Homo erectus. This had a skeleton much like modern man’s—a big, brain-filled skull and a narrow pelvis and rib cage, which imply a small abdomen and thus a small gut. Hitherto, the explanation for this shift from the smaller skulls and wider pelvises of man’s apelike ancestors has been a shift from a vegetable-based diet to a meat-based one. Meat has more calories than plant matter, the theory went. A smaller gut could therefore support a larger brain.
Dr Wrangham disagrees. When you do the sums, he argues, raw meat is still insufficient to bridge the gap. He points out that even modern “raw foodists”, members of a town-dwelling, back-to-nature social movement, struggle to maintain their weight—and they have access to animals and plants that have been bred for the table. Pre-agricultural man confined to raw food would have starved.
Firelight
Start cooking, however, and things change radically. Cooking alters food in three important ways. It breaks starch molecules into more digestible fragments. It “denatures” protein molecules, so that their amino-acid chains unfold and digestive enzymes can attack them more easily. And heat physically softens food. That makes it easier to digest, so even though the stuff is no more calorific, the body uses fewer calories dealing with it.