Captain Disillusion is the reigning superhero of skepticism, and his video exploits are legendary.
Of course, he’s also a filthy liar, saying I don’t like cats:
[Shh! I have to say I like cats, because if I don't then my cat will steal my breath in the middle of the night and kill me.]
Click through to see the rest. He’s funny. And Bolingbrook Babbler somehow caught wind of this as well, to my chagrin. Of course, it’s one of the few MSM outlets that gets quotes from me right…
Progetto Futurismo
Auditorium del “Pergolesi”, Fermo
6 meetings, the first of which will be held on Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010 at 6pm
Programs will run until May 6, 2010.
Dell's Precision M6500 is the next in an increasingly long line of notebooks upgrading to Core i5, but it'll be one of the first to also ship with an optional USB 3.0 port.
The Precision M6500 currently ships with a quad-core i7 for $2,750, but starting late February you'll be able to configure it to include a Core i5 or i7, a USB 3.0 port, a 3.2 megapixel webcam, and a 64GB SSD mini card. The options will be apparently be available starting later this month, although the minor issue of price has yet to be determined. Oh, wait! That's a major issue. But if the Notebook Italia report is correct, we should know that soon enough. [Notebook Italia via Electronista]
Being a lomo user, photographer Hunter Richards's Canon 5D Mark II hack has totally made my Friday. Using a Russian lomo lens from the '80s with an adapter, he managed to create a beautifully-shot lomo film worthy of your attention.
Hunter's description of his set-up is probably the easiest way to explain it properly to curry favor with the photography crowd:
"What I think is cool about using 2x anamorphic lenses on the fullframe sensor of the 5d mark 2, is that you can extract the full 4-perf anamorphic gate size as on anamorphic 35mm film in video mode (as the 5d mark 2 sensor is 26mm tall and I only need an image height of about 18mmx22mm to use the image area designed for use with the lenses. Basically this is a very cheap way to shoot "full frame" digital anamorphic because there can be literally no crop factor (as with shooting anamorphic with the Red, F35, ect... which makes 2x anamorphic lenses behave like approx. 1.34x their focal length (more telephoto field of view)- The only current other digital systems available I know of for using the full image area required by 2x anamorphic lenses are the Arri 21 and Phantom HD- which of course make nicer images than the 5dmark2's video mode- but its still fun none the less to get some of that look for relatively cheap."
He uses two Lomo "roundfront" anamorphic lenses from Russia, made between the '80s and '90s, but in the video below he used a 75mm t2.4 one, which cost around $3,000 - $5,000. If you're wanting to emulate his set-up, the Oct-19 EOS adapter used is from Cinemods.com and fits all EOS mount models. [Hunter Richards via Planet 5D]
5dm2 + lomo roundfront anamorphics first test from Hunter H. Richards on Vimeo.
It's an iBook G4 case recycled into a clock, with an Apple mouse for the working pendulum. Some nerd's heart just exploded. And it's surprisingly cheap, at $75. [Etsy via The Daily What]
This is the fourth in a series of guest posts by Joel Barkan, a previous contributor to “The Intersection” and a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The renowned Scripps marine biologist Jeremy Jackson is teaching his famed “Marine Science, Economics, and Policy” course for what may be the last time this year (along with Jennifer Jacquet), and Joel will be reporting each week on the contents of the course.
“Find a CITES, find myself a CITES to live in.” Isn’t that how the Talking Heads song goes? No? Either way, I had the tune stuck in my head all afternoon during our most recent class, in which we discussed the merits of listing species on both the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species. The student presentations covered the listing criteria and some of the problems associated with both groups. CITES has successfully impeded illegal trade of tropical reptiles and amphibians, but it lacks the same influence with marine species. For instance, China removed itself from the CITES treaty and freely imports dead seahorses, which are used for traditional medicinal purposes.
Many students seemed puzzled by the role of CITES and the Red List. What exactly are we trying to accomplish by making lists of animals that are in really, really big trouble? Adding a doomed species to a list of other species that aren’t doing so hot doesn’t magically solve the problem, as one student pointed out during our discussion. I came away frustrated at the IUCN’s unwillingness to stand up for the species it so painstakingly evaluates. Each species on the Red List receives a thorough population analysis by groups of unbiased scientists. The product is a detail-rich compilation of thousands of species—some critically endangered, some vulnerable, all meticulously calculated by the IUCN.
So what does the Red List do? You tell me. When I visited the San Diego Zoo a few weeks ago, I read the Red List status of every animal I saw, from the Komodo Dragon (Vulnerable) to the Harpy Eagle (Near Threatened). It’s a wealth of information, sitting on the internet, on dusty library shelves, on sun-bleached zoo placards. The Red List prides itself on its objectivity. It doesn’t want to ruffle any feathers. I think it needs to be subjective. It needs to stick its neck out and make assertive policy recommendations based on its research. I’m sure policy-makers use information from the Red List when making decisions, but the IUCN’s own voice would be welcomed and respected; after all, they did all the grunt work. It’s one thing to make a list—I used to make one every December for Santa. It’s another thing to use your hard work to help make difficult decisions that could lead to important changes.
There’s more bad news for the Baltic Sea. Reports had already indicated that it was one of the most polluted bodies of water in the world, and now a report from a Swedish TV station alleges that Russia dumped nuclear and other toxic waste into Swedish waters in the Baltic in the early 1990s.
According to a report by the SVT network, Russian boats sailed out at night to dump barrels of radioactive material, from a military base in Latvia, into Swedish waters. And even though the Swedish government at the time reportedly knew this, no action was taken to find the waste [BBC News]. These accusations—particularly that the Swedish government knew about the dumping and did nothing—aren’t sitting well with current Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt. But Carl Bildt, who was the country’s prime minister during the alleged dumping, says he never heard about it.
Russian Admiral Vladimir Yegorov, who commanded the Baltic fleet in the 1990s, balked at the charges and called them baloney. “The naval forces that were pulling out of the Liepaja naval base in Latvia in the early 1990s did not have chemical weapons, radioactive materials and waste,” Yegorov insisted [The Local].
The Baltic just can’t seem to catch a break. Last month we reported on concerns that shipworms were creeping north and threatening thousands of shipwrecks that the sea’s normally brackish water (meaning less salty than normal ocean water) had preserved. And because the Baltic is largely enclosed—emptying only through a small opening in the south, around Denmark—toxicity takes a long time to escape. The sea was already in such peril, in fact, that a summit of heads of state of countries bordering the Baltic Sea was to take place in Helsinki Wednesday to try to solve the problems [AFP].
Related Content:
80beats: Next Global Warming Victim: Centuries-Old Shipwrecks [resting at the bottom of the Baltic]
80beats: Russia Is Developing a Secret Plan to Divert a Non-Threatening Asteroid
80beats: 21 Years After Spill, Exxon Valdez Oil is *Still* Stuck In Alaska’s Beaches
Image: flickr / txd
It's hard not to like Steve Wozniak, both for his contributions to modern computing and his jovial nature. In this recent interview, where he recounts the moment he solved bringing color to computing, you get a healthy dose of both.
His description of those moments between awake and asleep when inspiration strikes is a familiar one, although my epiphanies are generally more along the "hey, I bet I can deep fry that" line. The quote I like best, though, is this one:
"Sometimes you're not sure if it's going to work, because it didn't follow all the methodology, all the science in the books, all those numbers. Yet it's similar enough, it might work. And in this case it did."
And that's how innovation happens. Thanks, Woz! This makes me even sadder that you got robbed on Dancing With the Stars. [ForaTV via 9to5 Mac]
While we know what it looks like when a star explodes into a luminous supernova, here’s a chance to discover what one sounds like–sorta. Scientists have translates a supernova’s electromagnetic waves into waves of sound; and when there is sound, there is music. Enter the Grateful Dead.
The band’s famed percussionist Mickey Hart is working on a musical project to “sonify” the universe–taking sounds collected by scientists from supernovae and other astronomical phenomena and using them in his new album “Rhythms of the Universe.” To anyone who has ever heard one of the Grateful Dead’s extended “drums and space” jams, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.
Keith Jackson, a computer scientist and musician who works at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, collaborated with Hart on this project, collecting data from the supernova Cassiopeia A. He converted this high-frequency electromagnetic wave data into lower-frequency sound waves that are within the range of human hearing. Hart took these sounds and used them to create music that was presented during the Cosmology at the Beach Conference held recently in Mexico.
For Jackson, Science Daily reports, the opportunity to turn data from supernovae into something Mickey Hart could use in an album was the best of both worlds.
“It brings together my love of science, my love of music, and my love of the Grateful Dead. What more could you ask for in life?”
Here’s a sample of what a supernova sounds like.
And here is what the rings of Saturn, recorded in a separate project, sound like.
Related Content:
Discoblog: Carl Sagan Sings Again: Symphony of Science, Part 4
Discoblog: Strummin’ the Moon With Your Program
80beats: Detoured Light From Tycho’s Supernova Finally Makes it to Earth
80beats: The First Stars Started Small, Grew Fast, and Died Young
Image: NASA
Nothing like getting a hot steam blast to the face whenever you demand it. Now you can clean out your filthy pores with 'ion-charged nano-particles' that a normal pot of boiling water simply can't provide. Supposedly.
Joe Shishido's character from Branded to Kill (trailer NSFW) would love this thing. It also has a setting to spray cool vapor on hot days so you can put down that spray bottle and enjoy life. If you've spent a significant amount of time rigging your current rusted rice cooker with tubes and LEDs then this product probably isn't for you, but kudos anyway. Get it for for $460 here. [via technabob]
When AT&T announced it's allowing SlingPlayer for the iPhone to stream video over 3G, CEO Ralph de la Vega said that Sling "revise[d] the app to make it more bandwidth sensitive." Sling told Ars they didn't change anything. Updated.
Sling told Ars "AT&T never discussed any specific requirements with us" and that they've always had the code in there to optimize bandwidth. So, it sounds like AT&T was caught making an odd bit of misstatement. Why say Sling made changes to the app to make it more bandwidth friendly, if Sling didn't?
Well, a more mild explanation is that AT&T moves slow. They say they've been testing the app for months, and there's no doubt Sling's made improvements over that longer period of time, and AT&T just now got around to approving it.
On other hand, there's definitely an incentive for AT&T to phrase it the way they did. This way, it wasn't AT&T's fault for keeping it off their fragile network, it was Sling's fault for not optimizing it correctly until now. Hrmmmm.
Update: Just got off the phone with the Sling dudes, and it looks like the milder explanation I proposed is the case: "We've been working with AT&T pretty closely over the last 3-6 months, particularly over the last 1-2 months, and we're always improving." In fact, Sling says they now have a "closer relationship with AT&T than any other operators" because they've had to work with them.
Question though: Sling's been on other AT&T phones for a while, so why did iPhone get the shaft? Well, they say, "Things get amplified on iPhone because of the people using it and the kind of product it is," and "the reality is that it's the only platform we have to go through approval process," so they needed to "reach out to all the partners and work with all if them," versus the direct deployment model they've used on other platforms.
The upshot, they say, is that is wanting to "to treat all their phones equally." Naturally, I turned around and asked AT&T if that meant tethering was coming soon for the iPhone. "Nothing new to say." Oh well. [Ars]
This video of NASA JSC's "Project M" depicts a Robonaut-based, tele-operated mission to the Moon - one that JSC claims could be accomplished in 1,000 days once the go-ahead was given.
Say whatever bad things you will about the PS3, but have you ever seen an alien bust out of an Xbox 360's torso? I didn't think so.
Just in time for cyborg surrealist Hans Rudi Giger's birthday (he's attributed with creating the trademark Alien look), a long-time Alien PS3 modder has completed his latest creation—this far from understated chestburster PS3.
Now if only Sony were ballsy enough to actually mass manufacture one of these mods, I just may be tacky enough to buy it. [Llamma's Forums via technabob]
I love clouds, and Boulder is a never-ending and always-changing nebular cloudscape of them.
Last Saturday I saw this out my home office window:
It was gorgeous! It’s a lenticular (lens-shaped) orographic cloud; a cloud caused by moisture-laden air rising up and cooling as it passes over mountains. We see them here all the time just east of the Rockies, and when they get all lenticular it’s a very cool bonus.
Orographic clouds aren’t limited to the Earth you know; other planets have atmospheres with some moisture and tall mountains to overcome as well.
Some people think that science takes away the romance of nature. Those people are wrong. When I lie out in the Sun and muse about the pretty clouds over my home town, I can know that what I’m seeing happens on other planets spinning around the Sun, and I’ll just bet it’s happening somewhere on a planet orbiting some other distant sun, lost among the billions in our galaxy.
What could possibly be more romantic than that?
When everyone poo poo'd Warfarin, I became very, very upset. Here was a good clinical case for using PGx tests. Not a great case, but a good case. It was only when I began to think about feasability.
Once upon a time, a President thought that taking humans "to the Moon and the planets beyond" was not only good for the economy of the country, but also would push US technology decades beyond everybody's else. He was right.
That President was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Of course, he also wanted to go to the Moon to beat the Soviet Union and win a political war, but there were a thousand more reasons to make that trip. All of them were good. As a result of his political will, the Apollo program became the most complex, most advanced, most successful, most beneficial technology endeavor ever taken by the United States of America.
It put the country decades ahead in every aspect of technology, and its effects, the technologies that came directly out of it, are now an indispensable part of our world: From the development of new metals and microprocessors, to clothing and medicine, the Apollo program touched every single aspect of our lives. Those developments are responsible for your smartphone, your desktop computer, your television set, and even your winter underpants.
But most importantly, the Apollo program inspired generations of kids to become scientists and engineers, indirectly pushing technology even further. Humans were going to the fucking Moon! How cool is that? I can't think of a more inspiring challenge than to conquer the stars, and those kids thought the same.
Like the program itself, that inspiration also brought long term benefits to the US economy. It made American universities thrive with new talent eager to push technology forward. We—not only America, but the entire world—are still enjoying the benefits that those students and the ones who followed brought to all of us decades after Apollo ended. Those kids went to work at IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Boeing, Lockheed, and the thousands of high tech companies that bring us the amazing technology that we use on a daily basis.
So while some people may want to convince you that President Obama's decision to fundamentally kill NASA's manned space program is a great move for the future of space, I'm here to tell you that all that is bullshit.
First, it's an excuse for a President who has failed to deliver on his promise of a better space program. His proposal is not better than what we had before. Actually, it's only good for the private space sector which, incidentally, for the most part is just reinventing the wheel that NASA and the Soviet Union space organization invented decades ago.
Even if you agree that the Constellation program wasn't going anywhere—many people disagree, like those who created the video above—you can't have the US manned spaceflight program disappear in favor of private space cabs to Earth's orbit. Even Burt Rutan—the poster child of private spaceflight, creator of Spaceshipone and Spaceshiptwo—agrees that this is an incredibly bad idea:
That is not a "NASA plan"; it is the proposed budget from the White House. It will likely be revised by the Congress. I am for NASA doing either true Research, or doing forefront Exploration, with taxpayer dollars.
Ares/Orion is more of a Development program than a Research program, so I am not depressed to see it disappear. I am concerned to see NASA manned spaceflight disappear, since they provided world leadership in the 60s and part of the 70s. The result was America's universities being the leader in cience/Engineering PhDs.
Many American kids will be depressed by the thought that our accomplishments will not be continued and thus America will fall deeper away from our previous leadership in Engineering/Science/Math. I believe our future success depends on our ability to motivate our youth.
I would support a restructuring of goals and funding so NASA can be allowed to perform like the 60s on space Research and on Exploration. There is not a shred of evidence that the President sees any value in those goals.
Rutan made those comments yesterday, and I can't agree more with him. It's good to see him—of all people—saying this out loud, especially while the rest of space private companies are gloating about how Obama's "think small" plan will increase their benefits in a big way.
Astronaut Tom Jones—who have been to space four times and has no interest in the private sector—has the same thoughts:
What student would pursue a career in space science or astronautics with the knowledge that the country is turning away from leadership in space?
He also argued in that no private company has launched any astronaut into space and won't be doing that for a very long time—a time in which we will depend on Russia. SpaceX, the only company launching something into orbit has a dismaying 40% success rate. How many years until the private sector reaches the same success rate as NASA? How many years until they put people in orbit? How many decades until a private company gets us to Mars? It just makes no sense except for those hoping to benefit from the move in the short term. A while all this happens, NASA's science programs are only getting a couple extra crumbles, not the core of the money.
In a world of fast forward, short attention spans, and materialism above all things, we need humans in space. Not just tweeting from orbit. But out there, on the Moon and Mars. And if the United States can't do this on its own, that's OK. In fact, that would be perfect: NASA should work together with the European Space Agency, the Russian Federal Space Agency, JAXA, and anyone who wants to achieve the greater good and really push humanity forward.
And yes, we need the satellites and the probes and the telescopes, absolutely, but you can't replace humans with probes. Not because humans would do a better job, but because robots photographing things is not the same as being there. Being there like everyone on Earth arrived to the Moon when Neil Armstrong put his foot on it.
From a bean counter point of view, if you do it right, the economical and technological benefits will be as great as those brought by Apollo, now and in the future. From the point of view of anyone who thinks that the world is about more than counting beans, the benefits are even more obvious than that. The fact is that photographs taken by robots neither push technology forward nor inspire entire generations or bring economical and technological benefits that reverberate through decades to come. That's what the humans in Apollo did.
Maybe Obama needs to watch the entire JFK's We Need to Go to the Moon speech, at the Rice Stadium in Houston, TX in the fall of 1962, and remember that the reason the United States chose to go to the moon:
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
Kennedy ended that speech with this:
Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, "Because it is there."
Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.
I can't possibly add anything else to his words.
Darpa, the Pentagon's crazypants research arm, is taking shit to a whole new level: they're pumping money into developing synthetic organisms immune to death. Oh, except for the built-in genetic kill switch. Yikes.
Danger Room reports that Darpa is investing $6 million into the project, called "BioDesign."
As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating "the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement." The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to "produce the intended biological effect." Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can "ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely."
Of course, Darpa's got to prevent the super-species from being swayed to do enemy work - so they'll encode loyalty right into DNA, by developing genetically programmed locks to create "tamper proof" cells. Plus, the synthetic organism will be traceable, using some kind of DNA manipulation, "similar to a serial number on a handgun." And if that doesn't work, don't worry. In case Darpa's plan somehow goes horribly awry, they're also tossing in a last-resort, genetically-coded kill switch.
Of course, this is no small task. Not only do you have the laws of nature to contend with, but you'll have an angry God tossing lightning bolts down upon you for trying to do his job for him. But really, this is some crazy ambitious science we're talking here. Be sure to read the full piece at Danger Room for the entire story. [Danger Room]
This is an idea that has been bouncing around for a while, but is now apparently seen in experiments: real-world photosynthesis taking advantage of quantum mechanics. (Story in Wired, via @symmetrymag. Here’s the Nature paper on which it’s all based.)
The idea is both simple and awesome: you want to transport energy through an “antenna protein” in a plant cell to the “reaction-center proteins” where it is chemically converted into something useful for the rest of the plant. Obviously you’d like to transport that energy in the most efficient way possible, but you’re in a warm and wet environment where losses are to be expected. But the plants somehow manage the nearly impossible, of sending the energy with nearly perfect efficiency through the judicious use of quantum mechanics.
We can think about this in terms of Feynman’s way of talking about quantum mechanics: rather than a particle taking a unique path between two points, as in classical mechanics, a quantum particle takes every possible path, with simple paths getting a bit more weight than complicated ones. In the case of the protein, different paths for the energy might be more or less efficient at any particular moment, but this bit of quantum trickery allows the energy to find the best possible route at any one time. Imagine at rush hour, if your car could take every possible route from your home to the office, and the time it officially took would be whatever turned out to be the shortest path. How awesome would that be?
The reason you can’t do that is that your car is a giant macroscopic object that can’t really be in two places at once, even though the world is governed by quantum mechanics at a deep level. And the reason for that is decoherence — even if you tried to put your car into a superposition of “take the freeway” and “take the local roads,” it is constantly interacting with the outside world, which “collapses the wave function” and keeps your car looking extremely classical.
Proteins in plants aren’t as big as cars, but they’re still made of a very large number of atoms, and they’re constantly bumping into other molecules around them. That’s why it’s amazing that they can actually maintain quantum coherence long enough to pull off this energy-transport trick. Previous studies had hinted at the possibility, but only by cooling the proteins down and shielding them from external jiggling. This new work happens at room temperature in the context of marine algae, so it seems to indicate that it can happen in real environments.
One step closer to building my teleportation machine. Get to work, quantum engineers!
Na'ama Moran's presentation on the business of Medical Tourism on Ships, given at the 2009 Seasteading Conference, can now be viewed online:
