Lucca Italy

Bruno suggests staying in this town to be central to everything.

Lucca LU
Italy
http://goo.gl/maps/Ri5bL


Sent from my iPhone

Anesthetic gases contribute to Global warming

Wow! "Most of the organic anesthetic gases remain for a long time in the atmosphere where they have the potential to act as greenhouse gases. Published atmospheric lifetimes range between 1.4 and 21.4 years for sevoflurane and desflurane, respectively. Various volatile anesthetics have been calculated to have a range of 1100 (isoflurane)9 to 3766 (desflurane)3 times the greenhouse warming potential of carbon dioxide (CO2)...[a typical hospital puts out] the equivalent of approximately 100 to 1200 passenger car emissions/year/midsized hospital.  In more personal terms, one 8-hour day, or 8 MAC-hours of desflurane delivery at 1 to 2 L FGF would equal 58 to 116 days of average auto emissions"

Noisy art.

I think this artist has always been fascinated with the sound of falling rain. His complicated installations must take an army of workers to set up.

All that work, and I'm sure it's only interesting to view for a minute or so. 

I like the woodworms munching at 9:46.

One of my favorite sounds is rain falling on a completely calm lake when you're out in a canoe. None of his installations get quite that sound, though the ones at 3:42 and 8:38 and 12:58 come close. 

It looks like this:
Rain falling on a lake has a wonderful musical silvery sound, and it sounds kind of like this, although there's too much other noise here from rain hitting the camera body, and the water is too shallow. 

You can't quite hear the musical quality of the sound on this video, mostly because of all the talking.

The sound of raindrops hitting water is caused by bubbles of air oscillating underwater.^[35][36]
The sound of raindrops hitting water is caused by bubbles of air oscillating underwater.^[35][36][37]

Google navigates

A nice illustration of the complexities of driving past cyclists who change their mind, or a construction zone where lane blockages change daily.

http://youtu.be/dk3oc1Hr62g

Hearing aids harness the brains of your iPhone

Conjuring Images of a Bionic Future

As they work more closely with our mobile computers, devices that once simply fixed whatever ailed us will begin to do much more.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/technology/personaltech/app-controlled-hearing-aid-improves-even-normal-hearing.html


Sent from my iPhone

Self-balancing 2-wheel car.

Very cool. 

http://youtu.be/SLHvs7LA23w

Dramatic demonstration of it's balancing ability when it's yanked by a pickup at 1:16 in this video: 

http://youtu.be/O1aAmWim838

Reminds me of the two-wheeled DARPA-challenge motorcycle, though a lot sleeker. 

http://youtu.be/6CYGT97i8qU

Hearing quality restored with bionic ear technology used for gene therapy | e! Science News

What a novel use of electric current from a cochlear implant - use it to achieve targeted delivery of neurotrophins by electroporation - cool. 

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2014/04/23/hearing.quality.restored.with.bionic.ear.technology.used.gene.therapy

Electroporation sounds like a tricky process to achieve the right voltage that doesn't fry the cell: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroporation

Face recognition

This interesting article explores pros, cons, and challenges of face recognition - how it can be used for good to find criminals quickly, and for bad, potentially allowing google glasses to identify a stranger and give you his social security number. 

http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/end-anonymity

And here's a blog that links to some examples of super-resolution video processing to create a high resolution image from a grainy one. 

http://c0de517e.blogspot.ca/2013/12/enhance-this.html?m=1

• An example with nameplates, showing extreme reconstructions
• Hallucinating faces
• An opensource implementation of video-based SR and a commercial multiple-image SR implementation
• Video to video SR, and another one...
• Classic paper of single-image super-resolution, trying to find similarities in the same image (to a degree, similar to fractal methods for image compression, which can indeed be used also for SR). Less strong results as the algorithm makes no prior assumptions.
• Multiple cameras (i.e. surveilance)
• More and more...

And here's an interesting proposal that you can increase a camera's resolution by shaking it. In essence, an indistinct line that crosses two pixels on the recording chip is made more distinct by shaking the chip by an amount less than a pixel width and then analyzing the consecutive images to achieve better clarity. 

http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/jitter_camera/

Sent from my iPhone

Successful software - what it takes to win a 5-star award

Thought you'd enjoy this! 

http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards-scam/

Sent from my iPhone

Concussions per 1000 player-hours

Guess I'll cross horse-racing off my bucket list!

Groasis Waterboxx - reforestation without constant watering

Conserves water by collecting condensation and capturing evaporation to reduce watering needs of fledgling seedlings.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groasis_Waterboxx

(A little better idea than the treetpee which only works around a sprinkler head. http://www.treetpee.com)


Here a desert was transformed with a single watering of 10L into the Groasis Waterbox that slowly releases water into the roots as they grow towards a deep water source. 4:24 They claim that 95% of plantings survived. 

NYTimes: How to Think Like the Dutch in a Post-Sandy World

I enjoyed this article - unusual thinking. He says " "We need to use the future as a reference, not the past.""

http://nyti.ms/1efRWWs

Can Henk Ovink sell Americans on a new approach to flooding — letting the water in?

Sent from my iPhone

3M Paint Defender Spray Film with synthetic wax - Sprayable Paint Protection Film, 90000 - 3M Auto

Dries in 3 hours, lasts a year, peels off.

http://3mauto.com/paint-defender-spray-film.html


It's $12 currently.
http://m.autozone.com/autozone-mobile/en/accessories/3M-Paint-defender-application-kit/_/N-25h1?id=255943

Word test

Interesting test of vocabulary. It's not as easy as it would first appear, especially when you're racing the clock. Have fun.
http://vocabulary.ugent.be/wordtest/start

The "Person from Porlock"

My daughter reminded me today of this story I heard years ago about creativity interrupted. It has even coined an expression. 

The author Samuel Taylor Coleridge had a (perhaps drug-augmented) moment of inspiration, but was interrupted by a visitor, and he could never regain the inspiration for the poem.  It has even led to the expression, apparently, of "the person from Porlock" - which means "unwanted intruders who disrupt inspired creativity." 

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

Sent from my iPhone