How to steer out of a skid

Watch from 23:17 to 23:30 as a truck expertly steers out of an almost jack-knife skid.

Cattle shown to align north-south

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7575459.stm


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Cows Have Strange Sixth Sense | LiveScience

http://www.livescience.com/5083-cows-strange-sixth-sense.html


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Body of art

http://www.petapixel.com/2012/12/15/photographs-of-19th-century-paintings-recreated-on-the-human-body/

Dogs relieve stress for students

https://www.dal.ca/news/2012/12/05/dal-goes-to-the-dogs.html
listen:
http://www.npr.org/2012/12/04/166470837/puppies-may-help-students-ace-finals

video
http://www.dal.ca/news/2012/12/07/video--students-visit-with-cute--cuddly-canines-at-the-puppy-roo.html

Bubbles bounce

I didn't know bubbles could bounce on water...

Funny text to speech engine with English accents

..including the Queen.

http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo.html

A wall-painted animation

Very imaginative and mesmerizing animation drawn on a wall.

http://youtu.be/uuGaqLT-gO4

Some hi-def spinning/flying feats.

http://youtu.be/d7Q_52oglTA

Hilarious - Top Gear driving a 3-wheel car

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bIn_ZgHJaE&sns=em

Extremely Scary Ghost Elevator Prank in Brazil

They never ride an elevator ever again...

http://youtu.be/7N5OhNplEd4

The Soap Opera Effect on large-screen TVs

http://m.cnet.com/news/the-soap-opera-effect-when-your-tv-tries-to-be-smarter-than-you/57410231?ds=1

Speech recognition on your phone - Siri vs Google

Third world solar autoclave

http://www.popsci.com/bown/2012/product/mit-solarclave

Boiling water isn’t enough to sterilize medical instruments, which is part of the reason that a quarter of surgery patients in rural clinics in developing countries end up with infections. What’s really needed is an autoclave, which blasts tools with 250°F steam under pressure. MIT researchers figured out how to build an autoclave that requires only inexpensive, commonly available materials—a pressure cooker, small mirrors, and buckets—which together concentrate solar rays and produce microbe-killing conditions in 90 minutes.

Sand flea robot

Uses compressed gas to jump 30 feet high. 

Green tech: dyeing fabric without gallons of pollution.

"It takes between 25 and 40 gallons of water to dye 2.2 pounds of fabric. Multiply that by the millions of T-shirts, track pants, and other textiles made each year, and you get two huge environmental problems: millions of tons of chemical-laden wastewater and depletion of freshwater.
Instead of H₂O, DyeCoo’s process uses supercritical carbon dioxide, which has fluidlike properties. The fabric absorbs nearly all the dye while generating no wastewater, and 95 percent of the CO₂ is recycled into the next batch. Plus, reduced energy and chemical use cuts production costs 30 to 50 percent. Nike, which has a partnership with DyeCoo, used it to dye an Olympic singlet for Kenyan marathoner Abel Kirui, and Adidas put its first 50,000 DryDye T-shirts on sale this summer."

http://www.popsci.com/bown/2012/product/dyecoo-textile-systems
http://www.dexigner.com/news/25160

One motor adjusts many solar panels.

Having a single motor travel along a track to adjust a whole array of solar panels reduces the complexity of the system a lot. It is claimed to withstand severe weather, but it's hard to imagine the monorail wheels getting clogged with dust and disabling the entire system. -TE

Aventura Spa Palace - Palace Resorts' Adults-Only Resort

Recommended spa resort in Mexico
http://www.aventura-palace.com/

85 acres of pools, spa, beaches, restaurants and more near Cancun.

Hard-boiled Eggs without Peeling

Tips: add baking soda to the water...crack open both ends of the egg and blow:

http://youtu.be/PN2gYHJNT3Y

Foam overwhelms Aberdeen

Yuck!


http://youtu.be/WLjBilBGalo

From PopularScience: 

According to a 2011 paper by several Austrian scientists called "Foam in the Aquatic Environment," the answer is--somewhat unhelpfully--yes, and yes. In order for foam to form, you need air, water, and a key third ingredient called a "surfactant"--a kind of sticky molecule that clings to the surface between water and air. This surfactant ingredient can come from a lot of places; human-made sources include fertilizers, detergents, paper factories, leather tanneries, and sewage. But surfactants also come from the proteins and fats in algae, seaweed, and other marine plant life.

There are lots of different molecules that can act as surfactants, but they all have one thing in common: one end of the molecule is hydrophilic (attracted to water) while the other end is hydrophobic (repelled by water). When a bunch of surfactant molecules get mixed together with plenty of water and air, they all want to line themselves up right at the boundary, with one end (hydrophilc) facing the water and the other (hydrophobic) facing the air. They'll even line up back to back, so that the hydrophilic ends are pointed at each other, with a thin layer of water in between. That thin layer of water takes the shape of a sphere, because a sphere requires the least energy of any shape, and voila, it's a bubble. Things get slightly more complicated when there are many bubbles packed together--as you might have noticed while taking a bubble bath as a kid (or as an adult), foamy bubbles aren't perfect spheres--but the basic idea is the same. It's all about the surfactant.

"Foam in the Aquatic Environment" mentions several reports of "unusual quantities" of foam forming near large algal blooms. "Great amounts of carbohydrates and proteins are released by the mucilaginous cell colonies," the authors write, giving rise to "copious amounts of viscous foams and mucus in the water column."

When the algal proteins or carbohydrates get close to shore, the waves "act like a big blender," explains Raphael Kudela, a marine ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "Physical agitation breaks them up and lets them reform," as foam; the foam is then swept ashore, where it accumulates.

So the foam at Rockaway Beach may or may not have been "natural"--there was, after all, the funky odor I noticed after diving into the waves--but in any case it's clear that significant sea foam onslaughts--like the one that blanketed a small Scottish fishing village at the end of September--can happen naturally.

River-crossing trucks becomes river crossing trucks.

These guys never heard that discretion is the better part of valor. An accident waiting to happen.

http://youtu.be/EqI8QsAZAYQ

Russian driving

Hmmm - maybe I should rent a car and see the sights of Russia.

http://youtu.be/ZPkE2hHneP4

Slate-ish

Imitation slate made from recycled paper waste.
http://www.slate-ish.com/

Erase hard drive on a MAC

Use the 'Erase' command in the Disk Utility application.
From Popular Science Oct 12 p. 78.

Geothermal heat for a pool

From a renewable energy forum.
"We installed a 5 ton geothermal water-to-water system to heat the radiant floors in our house. In our Maryland climate, our pool (25' x 50', 60,000 gal) gets too hot in the summer, so I ran supply and return lines from the house geo unit 400' underground to the pool for cooling in the summer. It works great! We also heat the pool during the shoulder seasons and that works great too. We turned the heating back to the floors in the house in late October, but we swam until then in 90 degree water. Geo works great for heating and cooling a pool, and our unit is 3 tons undersized for the quantity of water we heat and cool in the pool."

http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/load/energy/msg061645333159.html

Robot Dragonfly | Indiegogo

Flies like a dragonfly, weighs what a AA battery does, motherboard is smaller than a stick of gum. Nice work!


http://www.indiegogo.com/robotdragonfly

#1 Fastest workers compilation

Incredibly skillful practiced dexterity:

http://youtu.be/meo7DZPLWRY

Imaginative Architecture

"Subtractive form" at its finest.

Bus transit directions on iPhone 5

www.google.com/transit

This web page works great on the iPhone for finding bus times and routes just like you could on the old iPhone maps app using google maps. 

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From "Moments with Mark"

"What stops me in my tracks is realizing how little I control of God's plan
for my life, yet how important it is for me to be responsible for that which
I can control - choices."

Residential Swimming Pool Heating with Geothermal Heat Pump Systems

"A simple economic analysis showed that it would not be feasible to incorporate a swimming pool into a GHP system in northern U.S. climates due to the extra ground loop required. On the contrary, immediate savings could be realized in southern U.S. climates."

http://geoheat.oit.edu/bulletin/bull26-1/art4.pdf

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Geothermal Heat Pump Resource - Everything Geothermal - Home

http://www.geothermal-heat-pump-resource.org/

Win Compilation

Some incredible, or incredibly lucky (and foolish) feats.

Stress at work / Office stress COMPILATION!!!

Ever had a day like this? Tantrum city:

http://youtu.be/IzBy6agXKoA

Welcome to Foldit!!

This online game actually helps scientists figure out what shape a given protein sequence folds into. Players tweak the protein shape, while the server computes the overall energy of the chemical interactions in the entire protein, with the underlying assumption that a protein ends up in its lowest possible energy configuration.

http://youtu.be/lGYJyur4FUA

Ribosome kinetics and aa-tRNA competition determine rate and fidelity of peptide synthesis

As my daughter and I studied biology, we wondered how on earth a prokaryote cell can assemble a protein at a mind-boggling 20 amino acids per second. We wondered what the rate limiting step was. 
This paper discusses a mathematical model to prove that the rate-limiting factor when a ribosome is assembling a protein is the time it takes for a near-match amino acid to get shouldered out of the way by a correct-match amino acid in the chemical shuffle of building blocks arriving at the protein assembly site.

http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=cbmeviljoen

Irreducible complexity and evolution

An interesting treatise exploring how it could have been possible for random events in primordial evolutionary history to give rise to something as incredibly complex as protein synthesis via translation of a genetic code. 

"Indeed, the translation system might appear to be the epitome of irreducible complexity because, although some elaborations of this machinery could be readily explainable by incremental evolution, the emergence of the basic principle of translation is not. Indeed, we are unaware of translation being possible without the involvement of ribosomes, the complete sets of tRNA and aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (aaRS), and (at least, for translation to occur at a reasonable rate and accuracy) several translation factors. In other words, staggering complexity is inherent even in the minimally functional translation system. Thus, as outlined above, it appears that the evolutionary origin of translation is to be sought along the exaptation route, i.e., by retrodiction of the ancestral functions of various components of the translation system that would allow them to evolve functionalities enabling their recruitment for translation.

Even this, however, does not do the full justice to the difficulty of the problem. The origin of translation appears to be truly unique among all innovations in the history of life in that it involves the invention of a basic and highly non-trivial molecular-biological principle, the encoding of amino acid sequences in the sequences of nucleic acid bases via the triplet code[15,16]. This principle, although simple and elegant once implemented, is not immediately dictated by any known physics or chemistry (unlike, say, the Watson-Crick complementarity) and seems to be the utmost innovation of biological evolution."

http://www.biology-direct.com/content/pdf/1745-6150-2-14.pdf

Free Streaming Music Online in Canada

http://www.voltagenewmedia.com/general-web-design-seo/listen-to-free-streaming-music-in-canada/


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Dictionary

Word Origin & History for

"hidebound"

hidebound 1550s, from hide (n.1) + past tense of bind. Original reference is to emaciated cattle with skin sticking closely to backbones and ribs; metaphoric sense of "restricted by narrow attitudes" is first recorded c.1600.

http://m.dictionary.com/etymology/hidebound?linkId=8uxrdf

Youtube - a day in the life

Nicely edited vignettes of lives all around the world on a single day.

Car Crash - you get no warning!

Think about defensive driving for each of these scenarios - pretty hard to avoid some of them. Many of them caused by someone rushing to pass a slow vehicle or run a yellow light.

http://youtu.be/VeN7zJhtg60

Travel websites

http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/10-travel-web-sites-worth-bookmarking/

Dishtip.com by single dish, not by restaurant
Skypicker.com figure out where you can fly within your budget
Stay.com listings of top attractions, museums, shopping, restaurants by destination
Staydu.com matches hosts from around the world with travelers
Vayama.com flight search engine that specializes in international routes 
Trivago.com compare many hotel sites at once
Matadornetwork.com free online travel community whose site contains treasure troves of articles
Seat61.com  tickets for any European train journey at the cheapest price
Triptuner.com use a panel of six sliders to “tune” your trip
Expatsblog.com/blogs

Crazy mountain bike skills

Danny McAskill
He's in the new movie Premium Rush. He's the only good part of it.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1547234/

Pithy quotations

"Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment." ~ Rita Mae Brown
Many would be scantily clad if clothed in their humility. ~ Anon
Liberty is the right to discipline ourselves in order not to be disciplined by others ~ Clemenceau
He who is waiting for something to turn up might start with his own shirt sleeves.
You can't make anything idiot proof because idiots are so ingenious. ~ Ron Burns
Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little. ~ Edmunde Burke
"The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself." ~Rita Mae Brown
Write your plans in pencil but give God the eraser. ~ Anon
You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body. -C.S. Lewis
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."~Bernard Baruch




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Delightful free book

This book's a free download at iTunes, and makes for great bedtime reading for kids.
The charming verse is perfectly matched by the delightful drawings.
Cautionary Verses by Hilaire Belloc.

Apple iphone patents and patent wars

"Alongside the impressive technological advances of the last two decades, they argue, a pall has descended: the marketplace for new ideas has been corrupted by software patents used as destructive weapons."
"...many people argue that the nation's patent rules, intended for a mechanical world, are inadequate in today's digital marketplace. Unlike patents for new drug formulas, patents on software often effectively grant ownership of concepts, rather than tangible creations...As a result, some patents are so broad that they allow patent holders to claim sweeping ownership of seemingly unrelated products built by others. Often, companies are sued for violating patents they never knew existed or never dreamed might apply to their creations, at a cost shouldered by consumers in the form of higher prices and fewer choices."
"...Today, Nuance is a giant in voice recognition. Apple is the most valuable company in the world. And the iPhone is wrapped in thousands of patents that keep companies in numerous court battles."
"...The evolution of Apple into one of the industry's patent warriors gained momentum, like many things within the company, with a terse order from its chief executive, Steven P. Jobs...While Apple had long been adept at filing patents, when it came to the new iPhone, "we're going to patent it all." "
"...Patents for software and some kinds of electronics, particularly smartphones, are now so problematic that they contribute to a so-called patent tax that adds as much as 20 percent to companies' research and development costs"

http://nyti.ms/TiZ748

"NYTimes: The Patent, Used as a Sword "




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BEST of Fail / Win Compilation 2012

2:43 the old tablecloth trick actually worked - watch what happens!!

http://youtu.be/aoV0D6wQeck

We Found a Free Smartphone

In our throwaway society, here's a dismantled cell phone interleaved into the pages of every issue of a magazine purely to provide a few moments of a moving picture advertisement, and live tweets.

http://youtu.be/FQm7k4riCoE

World's largest Rube Goldberg

Biggest rubegoldberg I've seen yet.

http://youtu.be/4MiYtvbK4JY

Molotov Cocktail in Slow Motion

Watch from 2:05 on.
http://youtu.be/lfvceHUBWnU

Wave-powered seawater desalination.

I wondered about using wave-action to power desalination at our cottage, because it's a readily available source of the huge power (pressures) needed to drive reverse osmosis to extract water from seawater. Here is a very scholarly examination of the power available from wave action versus the amount of evaporation that occurs in that climate. The numbers are staggering, and the sophistication of the calculations is intriguing.
...Along arid, sunny coastlines, an efficient wave-powered desalination plant could provide water to irrigate a strip of land 0.8 km wide if the waves are 1 m high, increasing to 5 km with waves 2 m high.
...[Potable water] availabilities below about 1700 m3/capita/y are generally considered to indicate water scarcity.
...Waves will generally be available where sea-water is desalinated. But the harnessing of wave energy is, as with other forms of renewable energy, expensive in terms of capital plant and the effort needed to develop the technology.
...Of the 173,000 TW of solar power arriving at the earth's atmosphere, 114,000 TW is absorbed in the atmosphere, oceans and the earth's surface. About 1200 TW [or 0.7% of total solar power] of this thermal energy is then converted into the kinetic energy of the wind. The shearing action of the wind on the surface of the ocean generates currents and waves, involving energy transfer at a rate of around 3 TW [or 0.02% of the total solar power].
...It is evident that wave energy is generally out-of- phase with water demand for irrigation...Between 100 and 200 days of storage are needed to eliminate the need for overcapacity due to seasonal mismatch.
...In Morocco, for example, wave-powered desalination could supply 16% of the shortfall, increasing to 64% in the case of Oman. Somalia is the only mainland nation of those studied where potential supply clearly exceeds the shortfall, by a factor of about 6...there are many arid ocean-facing regions belonging to countries that do not figure as being short of water at the level of national statistics.
...in the Canaries and the Maldives, where lack of rainfall tends to coincide with abundant wave resource
...suggest that the energy cost of desalinating water is equivalent to horizontal transport over 100's of km. ...vertical transport of water requires about 1000 times more energy than horizontal transport.
...Wave energy stands out from other types of renewable energy resource, not only in terms of the intensity of the primary resource, but also in terms of the conversion efficiencies actually and theoretically obtainable. For comparison, the efficiency of solar energy conversion is commonly held to be limited to 86.7%...Real devices can only approximate such ideal devices crudely and the record efficiency of photovoltaic conversion actually attained is 35% [22].
Similarly, wind energy converters are normally interpreted as being subject to the Betz momentum theory that places a limit of 59% on achievable efficiency, with real wind turbines achieving efficiencies up to about 50% [23].
In contrast, there appears to be no theoretical reason why wave energy converters cannot reach 100% efficiency in theory and wave tank devices yielding over 80% have been demonstrated in practice

http://www.desline.com/articoli/6390.pdf

Wave-powered seawater desalination.

Wave-powered seawater desalination.
I wondered about using wave-action to power desalination at our cottage, because it's a readily available source of the huge power (pressures) needed to drive reverse osmosis to extract water from seawater. Here is a very scholarly examination of the power available from wave action versus the amount of evaporation that occurs in that climate. The numbers are staggering, and the souks fixation of the calculations is intriguing.
...Along arid, sunny coastlines, an efficient wave-powered desalination plant could provide water to irrigate a strip of land 0.8 km wide if the waves are 1 m high, increasing to 5 km with waves 2 m high.
...[Potable water] availabilities below about 1700 m3/capita/y are generally considered to indicate water scarcity.
...Waves will generally be available where sea- water is desalinated. But the harnessing of wave energy is, as with other forms of renewable energy, expensive in terms of capital plant and the effort needed to develop the technology.
...Of the 173,000 TW of solar power arriving at the earth's atmosphere, 114,000 TW is absorbed in the atmosphere, oceans and the earth's surface. About 1200 TW of this thermal energy is then converted into the kinetic energy of the wind [10]. The shearing action of the wind on the surface of the ocean generates currents and waves, involving energy transfer at a rate of around 3 TW.
...It is evident that wave energy is generally out-of- phase with water demand for irrigation...Between 100 and 200 days of storage are needed to eliminate the need for overcapacity due to seasonal mismatch.
...In Morocco, for example, wave-powered desalina- tion could supply 16% of the shortfall, increasing to 64% in the case of Oman. Somalia is the only mainland nation of those studied where potential supply clearly exceeds the shortfall, by a factor of about 6...there are many arid ocean-facing regions belonging to countries that do not figure as being short of water at the level of national statistics.
...Canaries and the Maldives, where lack of rainfall tends to coincide with abundant wave resource
...suggest that the energy cost of desalinating water is equivalent to horizontal transport over 100's of km. ...vertical transport of water requires about 1000 times more energy than horizontal transport.
...Wave energy stands out from other types of renewable energy resource, not only in terms of the intensity of the primary resource, but also in terms of the conversion efficiencies actually and theoretically obtainable. For comparison, the effi- ciency of solar energy conversion is commonly held to be limited to 86.7%...Real devices can only approximate such ideal devices crudely and the record efficiency of photovoltaic conversion actually attained is 35% [22].
Similarly, wind energy converters are normally interpreted as being subject to the Betz momentum theory that places a limit of 59% on achievable efficiency, with real wind turbines achieving effi- ciencies up to about 50% [23].
In contrast, there appears to be no theoretical reason why wave energy converters cannot reach 100% efficiency in theory and wave tank devices yielding over 80% have been demon- strated in practice

http://www.desline.com/articoli/6390.pdf



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litotes asyndeton and other obscure linguistic terms

http://www.rinkworks.com/words/linguistics.shtml

rinkworks also has the redneck dialectizer, which is very funny

http://rinkworks.com/dialect/

Albatrosses, nurdles and gyres - and the story that links them all.

LA Times - Plague of Plastic Chokes the Seas
http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-24677341/

...The sheer volume of plastic inside a chick can leave little room for food and liquid.

...Of the 500,000 albatross chicks born here each year, about 200,000 die

...Albatross fly hundreds of miles in their search for food for their young. 

...About four-fifths of marine trash comes from land, swept by wind or washed by rain off highways and city streets, down streams and rivers, and out to sea.

...The average American used 223 pounds of plastic in 2001. The plastics industry expects per-capita usage to increase to 326 pounds by the end of the decade.

...The qualities that make plastics so useful are precisely what cause them to persist as trash.

...About 100 billion pounds of pellets are produced every year and shipped to Los Angeles and other manufacturing centers. Huge numbers are spilled on the ground and swept by rainfall into gutters; down storm drains, creeks and rivers; and into the ocean.

...Also known as "nurdles" or mermaid tears, they are the most widely seen plastic debris around the world

...The pellets, like most types of plastic, are sponges for oily toxic chemicals 

...Some pellets have been found to contain concentrations of these pollutants 1 million times greater than the levels found in surrounding water. As they absorb toxic chemicals, they become poison pills.

...Moore has tried, without success, to get manufacturers to improve their efforts to clean up spills of pellets that wash off lots and into storm drains. He considers beach cleanups a waste of time, except to raise public awareness of the problem. In his view, the cleanup has to start at the source — many miles inland.

..."This is a plastic sand dune," he said. "It's very slippery, very roly-poly. What makes them so good for the factory makes them good for getting into the ocean."

Photo from http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/midway/#CF000774%2015x20

Street View by snowmobile, bicycle, and trolley

Capturing images for street view - didn't know they used snowmobiles, bicycles, and trolleys!

http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/mobile/learn/cars-trikes-and-more.html


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Bread and circuses

Bread and circuses
"... is a metaphor for a superficial means of appeasement. In the case of politics, the phrase is used to describe the creation of public approval, not through exemplary or excellent public service or public policy, but through diversion, distraction, and/or the mere satisfaction of the immediate, shallow requirements of a populace"...
"This phrase originates from Rome in Satire X of the Roman satirist and poet Juvenal (circa 100 C.E.)...identifies the only remaining cares of a new Roman populace which cares not for its historical birthright of political involvement."
"...reference to the Roman practice of providing free wheat to Roman citizens as well as costly circus games and other forms of entertainment as a means of gaining political power."



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Quotation on a high calling from Joseph Conrad

Such fine writing:

"From the hard work of men are born the sympathetic consciousness of a common destiny, the fidelity to right practice which makes great craftsmen, the sense of right conduct which we may call honour, the devotion to our calling and the idealism which is not a misty, winged angel without eyes, but a divine figure of terrestrial aspect with a clear glance and with its feet resting firmly on the earth on which it was born."

http://www.online-literature.com/conrad/notes-life-and-letters/20/


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Captain Sellenburger ditching flight into Hudson river - computer animation

They had very little time to react, as you can see in this re-creation.

makeviolins.com

How cool is this? A summer course where you make a violin. You learn techniques, take the materials gone to continue working for a year, then return the next summer to finish the instrument.

http://www.makeviolins.com/


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How plastic transmits pollution to birds - the story of nurdles.

Plastic resin pellets ("nurdles" - the preproduction form of plastic resin that's shipped to manufacturers) absorb and concentrate PCB and other toxins to a million times their ambient level in the water; the pellets resemble plankton and are ingested by birds. See at 6:27


How BIG is the problem?
In the Pacific, a giant rotating swirling mass of tiny plastic particles is known as
"the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Eastern Garbage Patch floats between Hawaii and California; scientists estimate its size as two times bigger than Texas "
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/oceanography/great-pacific-garbage-patch.htm

Thee pictures will astound you.

Bluetooth forehead thermometer | Popular Science

http://m.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2012-08/new-bluetooth-standard-lets-devices-communicate-without-draining-power


-Tom.

Turning anger into good: A program helping older drivers get around safely

She started a program to give elderly people rides when bus service isn't an option as a way to get elderly drivers off the roads.
http://news.consumerreports.org/cars/2012/08/alternative-transportation-program-helps-older-drivers-get-around-safely.html


-Tom.

Josh Wilson - Amazing Grace guitar with Loop Pedal

Incredible guitar work - hard to believe this all comes from a single player. Very skilful, especially at 4:28 on - beautiful.

NYTimes: Genes Now Tell Doctors Secrets They Can’t Utter

Much genetic research is predicated on study subjects being anonymous, but increasingly researchers are discovering things these subjects, or their relatives, might need or like to know.
""We are living in an awkward interval where our ability to capture the information often exceeds our ability to know what to do with it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/health/research/with-rise-of-gene-sequencing-ethical-puzzles.html


-Tom.

How much electric power does a Google search take?

"A single Google search takes about as much power as turning on a 60-watt light bulb for 17 seconds, and server farms now use at least 1.5% of the world's electricity."

"One minute of streaming YouTube video consumes 0.0002 kWh of energy, which is about the same amount of energy your body uses in eight seconds."

http://techland.time.com/2011/09/09/6-things-youd-never-guess-about-googles-energy-use/

Truck Scales: How They're Made

I like this show, and this was a particularly interesting episode. A huge truck scale with 50-foot steel beams uses a tiny strain gauge chip (seen at 1:54) smaller than a fingernail to measure the weight. The scale is so accurate that the additional weight of a worker shows as 140 additional pounds above the test weight of 10,000 pounds (seen at 5:24-8)



-Tom.

Coffee-grounds-filled robotic trunk: Jamming Grippers Combine to Form Robotic Elephant Trunk

http://m.spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/jamming-grippers-combine-to-form-robotic-elephant-trunk

A cheap way to get many degrees of freedom of movement with 3 motors - jamming (vacuuming air out of a section full of coffee grounds) a proximal segment makes a distal segment move laterally when the outer string is tensioned.


Not unlike this German invention where inflation, rather than deflation, controls the arm.



https://youtu.be/86G9DLJEagw
"the jamming-based gripper’s good performance with almost any object, including a raw egg or a coin – both of which are notoriously difficult for traditional robotic grippers – are what sets the device apart from other grippers."   https://newatlas.com/universal-robotic-gripper/16729/
-Tom.

Ax vs Ask

In Chaucer's day, it was correct to say 'axe' or 'aks' which has persisted in today's Ebonics vernacular.
http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/138663.page


-Tom.

Diet Soft Drinks Linked to Risk of Heart Disease - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/health/research/diet-soft-drinks-linked-to-risk-of-heart-disease.html


-Tom.

Voice algorithms spot Parkinson's | Digg Topnews

http://m.digg.com/newsbar/topnews/voice_algorithms_spot_parkinson_s_1


-Tom.

All-Carbon Solar Cell Harnesses Infrared Light | CleanTechnicaCleanTechnica

http://cleantechnica.com/2012/06/22/all-carbon-solar-cell-harnesses-infrared-light/


-Tom.

Wheat vs corn in a global warming future

"Wheat production generates less than half the fossil-fuel emissions of corn and returns 63 percent more protein."

""The digestibility of unprocessed corn to humans isn't very high," says Jerry Hatfield, a plant physiologist with the USDA. "We have to put it through processing of some sort, whether that happens in a factory or an animal." Set those problems aside, and a deal-breaker remains:modern corn is more sensitive to heat than any other major crop, and attempts to create drought- and heat-resistant corn through genetic modification are still unproven."

"Jones searches for drought-, disease- and flood-tolerant wheat strains that were grown in Washington a century ago (and which fell out of favor because they didn't consistently produce large yields) and breeds them with modern, high-yield varieties. Farmers sow the resulting seeds and, at the end of the season, collect the seeds from the best-performing plants to use for next year's crop. In as little as eight years, this process creates new wheat strains. And in a 2010 test in Washington's Douglas County, one of these new wheat strains outperformed all 59 competitors, including entries from genetic-engineering giants Monsanto and Syngenta"

http://m.popsci.com/science/article/2012-06/adapting-three-top-crops-hotter-planet

Self-cooling soda can

http://westcoastchill.com/


-Tom.

Who's making plug-in electric vehicles - up-to-date list

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_production_plug-in_electric_vehicles

And the timeline for hybrid vehicles:
http://www.hybridcenter.org/hybrid-timeline.html
-Tom.

The 6 Creepiest Lies the Food Industry is Feeding You | Cracked.com

http://www.cracked.com/article_19896_the-6-creepiest-lies-food-industry-feeding-you.html


-Tom.

The Earth Harp

A giant harp with strings dozens of yards long. He barely touches the strings so the sounds must be highly amplified.

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." "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."
From an article 'Garage Biology' about a new breed of garage tinkerer that is making scientific advances in their garage.

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

-Tom.

How to grow trees in the desert.

An effort to combat desertification in the third world - plants are grown with minimal maintenance and effort in a reusable shield that protects and stores a reservoir of water. It 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

Foldit: Biology for gamers - protein folding online game

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 at 2:16  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 in 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 Latin verb "sorbere" and the modern Italian verb sorbire, 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 Persian sharbat, which in turn comes from the Arabic شرباتsharbāt meaning "drink(s)" or "juice."

"Sherbet in the United States must include dairy ingredients such as milk or cream to reach a milk-fat content between 1% and 2%. Products with higher milk-fat 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. 

$$ spent to get rid of graffiti

Graffiti on Washington's highways – Big problem, few resources.
" We use fencing in target areas to block access, install additional lighting where possible, and even use motion sensitive sprinklers. It is a never ending battle of who will get there first"

http://wsdotblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/graffiti-on-washingtons-highways-big.html

"Graffiti removal for just our Seattle office (which covers the Canadian border to the King/Pierce county line) costs between $120,000 and $145,000 annually."
What it costs to remove graffiti - a full time job.

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.

Hybrid minivans - not until 2013.

http://www.hybridcenter.org/hybrid-timeline.html

-Tom.

Tornado - beauty, elegance, power, havoc

The opening paragraphs are particularly well written.
http://m.popsci.com/science/article/2012-01/did-global-warming-destroy-my-hometown-0?page=all

-Tom.

Handsome Men's Club

Very funny.

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

Useful google search tips

https://www.google.com/intl/en/help/features.html#calculator

Porsche bottoms out

Lowest reliability Jaguar and Porsche. Best American is only middle of the list.

Invisible Mercedes

Invisible car

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIGzpi9lCck&feature=youtube_gdata_player

-Tom.

The $1,000 Genome, and the New Problem of Having Too Much Information | Popular Science

What a profound sign of the times:
"Soon the price of sequencing will fall below the cost of storing the data it generates."

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/1000-genome-medicine-has-new-problem-too-much-information

With New Standard, Wi-Fi Could Become As Widespread As Cellular | Popular Science

http://m.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-02/wi-fi-could-become-widespread-cellular

Looking forward to widespread free wifi without continually signing in!
-Tom.

Critique of Googles revamped privacy policy

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2091508/Google-privacy-policy-Search-giant-know-partner.html

-Tom.

Popular Science: How We're Creating "Terminator Vision" in Your Future Contact Lenses

How We're Creating "Terminator Vision" in Your Future Contact Lenses

Terminator Vision "We made a lens that displays a single pixel that can be turned on and off wirelessly. An integrated circuit stores the energy, and ...

Source: http://goo.gl/mag/Ntw3B

Shared via Google Currents

-Tom. 

World's Largest Rope Swing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B36Lr0Unp4&feature=youtube_gdata_player

-Tom.

Zorbing - Rolling inside a giant plastic ball

Looks like fun. Especially when you add water inside the ball.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG3pgV8Crzk&feature=youtube_gdata_player
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yji-QGQ-gZw&feature=youtube_gdata_player

-Tom.

SkyWalk & SkyJump

The cable reel connects to a fan that slows down the descent, like those exercise bikes with a big fan. Near the end of the drop, a gear change spins the fan faster for a soft landing. As described in Popular Science Feb 2012.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPJGC9UizwM&feature=youtube_gdata_player

-Tom.

World's first manned flight with an electric multicopter

Manned flight on a huge 16-rotor multicopter. Looks remarkably stable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L75ESD9PBOw&feature=youtube_gdata_player

-Tom.

Study Finds Elders Improve Health By Volunteering

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=e8f448d52349a159739ca083b611835c

Dangerous Bagels

Making the best bagels in the world. In fact, these bagels are sooooo good that they ruin your taste for any other bagels, forever. I was so happy to find out they deliver online orders. Even with air freight it was a buck a bagel. Mmmmmmm

Here's their whole story

St. Viateur Street Bagel Factory - Montreal Aug 2010
http://www.stviateurbagel.com/main/

-Tom.

OK Go - Needing/Getting - Official Video

I don't know how they think of these videos, but this rock group has thought of some great, artistic, imaginative videos. You won't forget this one.

They were probably chosen to make this ad because of their Rube Goldberg-style video:

Reminds me of the Rube Goldberg Honda ad.

And here's the original OK GO video that made them famous:

And other imaginative videos:

Best definition of medical emergency I've seen.

I've struggled and searched for a definition of 'emergency' before because the definition can be 'stretched' for convenience in hospital settings.
Emergency Services: Any health care service provided to a member after the sudden onset of a medical condition that manifests itself by acute symptoms of sufficient severity or severe pain, such that a prudent layperson, who possesses an average knowledge of health and medicine, could reasonably expect the absence of immediate medical attention to result in i) placing the health of the member, or, with respect to a pregnant member, the health of her unborn child, i) in serious jeopardy; ii) serious impairment to bodily functions; or iii) serious dysfunction of any bodily organ or part.
-from a provider contract with Coventry.
However, I'm not sure in this definition why it can't be an expert opinion rather than a layperson that would expect the adverse outcome. For instance, brainstem herniation is life-threatening but looks like sleepiness to a layperson.
-Tom.

Science behind massage - evidence. Muscle biopsies!

A massage after vigorous exercise unquestionably feels good, and it seems to reduce pain and help muscles recover. Many people — both athletes and health professionals – have long contended it eases inflammation, improves blood flow and reduces muscle tightness. But until now no one has understood why massage has this apparently beneficial effect.

Now researchers have found what happens to muscles when a masseur goes to work on them.

Their experiment required having people exercise to exhaustion and undergo five incisions in their legs in order to obtain muscle tissue for analysis. Despite the hurdles, the scientists still managed to find 11 brave young male volunteers. The study was published in the Feb. 1 issue of Science Translational Medicine.

On a first visit, they biopsied one leg of each subject at rest. At a second session, they had them vigorously exercise on a stationary bicycle for more than an hour until they could go no further. Then they massaged one thigh of each subject for 10 minutes, leaving the other to recover on its own. Immediately after the massage, they biopsied the thigh muscle in each leg again. After allowing another two-and-a-half hours of rest, they did a third biopsy to track the process of muscle injury and repair.

Vigorous exercise causes tiny tears in muscle fibers, leading to an immune reaction — inflammation — as the body gets to work repairing the injured cells. So the researchers screened the tissue from the massaged and unmassaged legs to compare their repair processes, and find out what difference massage would make.

They found that massage reduced the production of compounds called cytokines, which play a critical role in inflammation. Massage also stimulated mitochondria, the tiny powerhouses inside cells that convert glucose into the energy essential for cell function and repair. “The bottom line is that there appears to be a suppression of pathways in inflammation and an increase in mitochondrial biogenesis,” helping the muscle adapt to the demands of increased exercise, said the senior author, Dr. Mark A. Tarnopolsky.

Dr. Tarnopolsky, a professor of pediatrics and medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said that massage works quite differently from Nsaids and other anti-inflammatory drugs, which reduce inflammation and pain but may actually retard healing. Many people, for instance, pop an aspirin or Aleve at the first sign of muscle soreness. “There’s some theoretical concern that there is a maladaptive response in the long run if you’re constantly suppressing inflammation with drugs,” he said. “With massage, you can have your cake and eat it too—massage can suppress inflammation and actually enhance cell recovery.”

“This is important research, because it is the first to show that massage can reduce pro-inflammatory cytokines which may be involved in pain,” said Tiffany Field, director of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami Medical School. She was not involved in the study. “We have known from many studies that pain can be reduced by massage based on self-report, but this is the first demonstration that the pain-related pro-inflammatory cytokines can be reduced.” she said.

Getting a massage from a professional masseur is obviously more expensive than taking an aspirin. But, as Dr. Field points out, massage techniques can be taught. “People within families can learn to massage each other,” she said. “If you can teach parents to massage kids, couples to massage each other. This can be cost effective.”

Dr. Tarnopolsky suggests that, in the long run, a professional massage may even be a better bargain than a pill. “If someone says “This is free and it might make you feel better, but it may slow down your recovery, do you still want it?” he asked. “Or would you rather spend the 50 bucks for a post-exercise massage that also might enhance your recovery?”

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/how-massage-heals-sore-muscles/

mp4a to mp3 converter online

Very convenient to use online - gives you a converted file to download after online conversion.
http://www.convertfiles.com/convert/audio/M4A-to-MP3.html

Liz Phair video

I like this video - clever idea of having album covers in a juke box show all the lyrics to the song.

Dylan video

Stands on a streetcorner throwing down lyric cards. I love this video, especially where he parodies his own lyrics.
The clip was originally a segment of D. A. Pennebaker's film, Dont Look Back.

Much copied, never equalled.  

And a funny parody of it by Weird Al where all the lines are palindromes.

Proust on art

Proust's elegantly incisive observation: "Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance."

-Tom.

Amazon's Kindle Fire Is Blazingly Fast for a Mobile Device | Popular Science

Aha. I've often wondered why I sit waiting a long time for a page to load. This article describes how an operating system can get around the bottleneck of a slow host server, by crowd sourcing page elements and pre packaging them in an efficient format. TE

http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2011-12/amazons-kindle-fire-blazingly-fast-mobile-device

-Tom.

How incredible life is

"It's hard for us to accept how incredible life is, in the moment..."
Nicely phrased thought from a video about time passing.

scan a building into CAD

Within a radius of 400', this $30,000 camera scans in data points so you can recreate an environment, like a crime scene or building design in minutes so you can manipulate your view of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeU4X5B0Zyg&feature=youtube_gdata_player

-Tom.

Spray-On Skin | Popular Science

A harvested skin sample grows while you wait in this device and can be sprayed back on to an area 80 X the size of the harvest.
http://www.popsci.com/bown/2011/product/avitarecell-spray-skin

-Tom.

The Lytro camera

CNET description of the Lytro camera.

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

-Tom.

Lytro light field camera

Camera with thousands of micro lenses captures multiple pictures allowing you to select different parts of the image to bring into focus after the fact.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm3_sbA01zI&feature=youtube_gdata_player

-Tom.

PrintBrush™ - First pocket size ink jet printer/digital camera in the world! (hi def video)

Prints onto any surface.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPhLFxRgfQ8&feature=youtube_gdata_player

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSM5z5vL-Qo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPhLFxRgfQ8&feature=youtube_gdata_player

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5_kkvaIpiM

-Tom.

Very cool. Print on anything. PrintBrush

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSM5z5vL-Qo&feature=youtube_gdata_player

-Tom.

Steve Jobs and product image

He would care, sometimes obsessively, about marketing and image and even details of packaging.
"When you open the box of an iPhone or iPad, we want that tactile experience to set the tone for how you perceive the product." p. 78 of his biopgraphy. http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1501127624/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1445475772&sr=1-1&keywords=steve+jobs+biography