Phadroid, William Close and The Earth Harp - New Years 2012 at Momai

A giant harp with strings dozens of yards long.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ-hukZW8Sk&feature=youtube_gdata_player


-Tom.

Lose yourself in your work.

flow, the notion developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced "me-high chick-sent-me-high"—perhaps the most fun name to say, ever). This Hungarian-American psychologist holds that there is a very satisfying state of mind that occurs when one is totally absorbed by an action. ... One might experience flow while painting a complex landscape or painting the front porch...

Its commonness is why we have so many phrases for this pleasant state of existence: being in the zone, losing ourselves in our work, being on the ball, in the groove.

http://m.popsci.com/science/article/2012-05/guess-whats-cooking-garage?page=1

Doug's reading list of classics

 Some of you have asked me for a list of books that would be appropriate for 7^th and 8^th Grade English Literature students (and for parents who might wish to reacquaint themselves with the classics). The canon is so rich and diverse that this just scratches the surface, but it's a start:

 

Emily Bronte—"Wuthering Heights";   Alexander Pope—"The Odyssey";   Jonathan Swift---"Gulliver's Travels";   Charles Dickens---"Oliver Twist" or "Bleak House";   

Isak Dinesen---"Out of Africa";   Thoreau---"Walden";  

 E.M. Forster---"A Passage To India";  Rudyard Kipling---"Captains Courageous";   

Virginia Woolf---"To the Lighthouse";   Anthony Trollope---"Barchester Towers";  

Willa Cather---"O Pioneers!" or "My Antonia";   

William M. Thackeray---"Vanity Fair";   George Eliot---"Middlemarch";   

George Orwell---"Animal Farm" or "1984";   

Ernest Hemingway---short story collections, "In Our Time" or "Men Without Women", or "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" or "A Moveable Feast" or  "The Sun Also Rises" or "A Farewell To Arms";  

Mark Twain---"Huck Finn";    

Jane Austen---"Pride and Prejudice";  T.H. White---"The Sword in the Stone";   Herman Melville---"Typee";  

 Joseph Conrad---"Heart of Darkness";   Oscar Wilde---"The Importance of Being Earnest" or "The Picture of Dorian Grey";  

John Steinbeck---"The Red Pony" or "Of Mice and Men";   

Walt Whitman---"Leaves of Grass";  Robert L. Stevenson---"The Strange Tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" or "Treasure Island";   

William Shakespeare---"The Sonnets" or "Romeo and Juliet" or "Macbeth" or "Julius Caesar";  

Theodore Dreiser----"An American Tragedy";  

P.G. Wodehouse---"My Man Jeeves";  H.G. Wells---"The Time Machine";  Evelyn Waugh---"A Handful of Dust";  

A selection from the poems of Longfellow, Tennyson, Dickinson, Larkin, Keats, Plath, T.S. Eliot, Hardy, Frost, Burns, Emerson, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Blake. 

Well, that's a beginning.  Happy reading and regards,  Doug 

Ambitious amateurs

"America has always been a place of ambitious amateurs."
From an article 'Garage Biology' about a new breed of garage tinkerer that is making scientific advances in their garage. "They've started to form 'synbio' clubs in the way radio enthusiasts did in the early 1900's, or computer programmers did in the 1970's or robotics amateurs in the '00's."
http://m.popsci.com/science/article/2012-05/guess-whats-cooking-garage

-Tom.

How to grow trees in the desert.

Shades the roots from evaporation and keeps the seedling warm at night and cool during the day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRF2bUBPA90&feature=youtube_gdata_player


-Tom.

Foldit: Biology for gamers - by Nature Video

I had no idea this existed. Researchers developed an online computer game about protein folding, based on the premise that proteins often fold into the conformation with the lowest energy. Out of millions of possibilities, the human brain is better than a computer at solving this. The program simply shows the amino acid chain as red when it's in a Hugh energy state, and players manipulate the structure to find the lowest energy state. Ultimately, the way they do this is teaching the computer how to solve the puzzle more efficiently. Watch mid-way through the clip for a time-lapse of someone solving the puzzle where a protein gradually turns green. Incredible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axN0xdhznhY&feature=youtube_gdata_player


-Tom.

hapax legomenon - Wiktionary

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hapax_legomenon


-Tom.

Can Treating Your Life As a Game Make You a Better Person? | Popular Science

Surprising how much incentive there is inherent in earning a score for the most mundane things...
http://m.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-01/can-treating-your-life-game-make-you-better-person

-Tom.

Ironically, corn syrup may have caused bee catastrophes through pesticide use - Colony Collapse Disorder - | PBS

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/silence-of-the-bees/impact-of-ccd-on-us-agriculture/37/

-Tom.

10th Performance - Pentatonix - "Let's Get It On" By Marvin Gaye - Sing Off - Series 3

Pentatonix at their best.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhTh6BqK6Nw&feature=youtube_gdata_player

-Tom.

Marketing tricks on supermarkets

Shoppers buy 40% of the items in their carts from shelves that were within 12 inches of eye level.
...beware of 'bumpouts' - displays and shelves that jut out...
Shoppers who proceeded round the store clockwise spent $2 less than shoppers who went the usual counterclockwise.
Consumer Reports May '12 p. 20
-Tom.

No More GPS Voice: Haptic Steering Wheel Buzzes to Give You Directions from Popular Science

 No More GPS Voice: Haptic Steering Wheel Buzzes to Give You Directions

Swimming On The Hot Side | Popular Science

Intriguing article about the people who dive in radioactive water, and the pressures they're under. 

"it was darkly glamorous"

"the pay was poor - as little as $12 am hour"

"Nuclear plants may be the most earnest places in America. People speak clearly and say what they mean. At the same time, they're incredibly friendly..."

"once in a while, a feeling of eeriness will come over you, like 'Boy, if something went wrong, it would really be bad right now.'"

"Since so many vital parts of nuclear-energy production take place under water, it follows that divers will play an increasingly central rôle in the ongoing life of the plants."

"...living with the threat of radiation. Again, she brushed the question aside. The topic was so all-encompassing as to be unexplainable." 

"They keep track of their dose levels the way most people keep track of their weight. And just as people are hard pressed to say no to food, divers find it difficult to turn down a job, no matter how dangerous."

http://m.popsci.com/science/article/2012-03/swimming-hot-side

-Tom. 

Sorbet vs. sherbert or sherbet

"The name comes from the Latinverb "sorbere" and the modern Italian verbsorbire, meaning to eat and drink at the same time. The noun form, sorbetto, is a mixture of a solid and liquid food. The term sherbet or charbet is derived from the Turkish şerbet, "sorbet", from the Persiansharbat, which in turn comes from the Arabic شرباتsharbāt meaning "drink(s)" or "juice."

"Sherbet in the United States must include dairyingredients such as milk or cream to reach a milkfat content between 1% and 2%. Products with higher milkfat content of 10% or higher are defined as ice cream, while those between 2% and 10% milkfat are termed "frozen dairy dessert"; products with lower milkfat content and not using any milk or cream ingredients, and no egg ingredients other than the egg white, are defined as water ice.^[4] The use of the term "sorbet" is unregulated and is most commonly used with non-dairy, fruit juice "italian ice" products"

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbet

-Tom. 

Ouch! Movie Theater Food = more than a day's food!

"That large tub of buttered popcorn and soda can provide not only a day's calories(of the recommended daily allowance) but also two days' worth of fat and almost a cup of sugars."
Consumer Reports Mar 2012 p. 10
-Tom.