This is Incredible

From the MIT Media Lab: "inFORM," a Display that Renders Dynamically in 3D

This is a beautiful and simple idea from the MIT media lab: on the input side dimensions and movement are measured, then sent through a network (presumptively the internet), and then output through actuators as the three dimensional shape that was input.

Here's a cool-action video from the MIT Media lab showing it in action:

inFORM - Interacting With a Dynamic Shape Display from Tangible Media Group on Vimeo via Colossal.

With this simple model the empty (negative) space between the top of the object and the floor of the projector is lost -- the top surface/edge is a true image and then the space is filled in below.  To remedy this defect the obvious solution is to use a balloon or other flexible sheet: on the output side the actuators or "pins" run inside the balloon and spread out spherically; on the input side the actuators (which can simply be a means for the computer/input apparatus to measure location in space) are on the outside.  So, for example, let's suppose on the input side one puts on a tight latex glove with markers on it that are read by the machine and translated into spatial coordinates. On the output side, then, the balloon is deformed by the varying pressure of hundreds or thousands of pins and actuators to render a hand.  Here's a very crude sketch I've whipped up in MS Word (yes, really, but I am in a hurry) to give a sense of the output side:

Precussive Maintenance

Percussive Maintenance from Duncan Robson on Vimeo and via Colossal. Music by Joel Robson.

Mechanical Beauty

The blue gears (on a single axle) turn in a single direction
varying the red gear from clockwise to counterclockwise
depending on whether it is meshing at the time with the
inner or outer blue gear

Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements is a website reproducing each of the mechanical illustrations by Henry T. Brown, first published in 1868 and updated and republished many times since.  The website authors are in the process of animating Brown's illustrations.  The animations are fantastic; they make the function of the gears and other mechanical elements crystal clear (Brown's original drawings not so much, but that can be part of the fun).  If you care about how things work or how to make things work or just the beauty of function, this site is a wonder.

Via BoingBoing and O'Reilly Radar (which, btw, is a great site).

We're Living in the Space Age, Dude

Beginning "I am sick of hearing people say that the Space Age is "over" because we haven't sent humans back to the Moon. Seriously? That's your complaint? ...," Annalee Newitz begins a rant at io9 on the incredible technology we now have in space and the incredible amount of knowledge we've gained.  And, indeed, we knew so little about space even a century ago that we had no concrete knowledge of the size of the universe, the amount of planets, suns, and galaxies in the universe, what in detail composed them, that there might be dark matter and dark energy, or how most of it worked. A century ago Einstein's writings on special relativity and the quantum, which are now fundamental to physics and chemistry, had only recently been published and were barely understood; his theory of general relativity was still a year away. Humans had few large telescopes, had no large rockets, and had never sent anything into space nor had any realistic plans to do so.  We now have a space station -- we've had space stations for several decades now.  Oh how things have changed.

So Newitz's article is an enjoyable rant and right.  No, we are not going today to other star systems.  Really?  Do you think that is going to happen?  This is the space age for the foreseeable future.

Newitz's rant, BTW, seems to borrow heavily in tone from Louis C.K., and he is damn funny (Newitz not so much, though that's not her point), so you should watch this:

Comedy Central

Wikipedia Live Monitor

Wikipedia Live Monitor is a major event tracking site that takes edit traffic at Wikipedia, concurrently comparing multiple different language versions of the site, and then compares them in "real time" to international social media edits. The information is used to generate notes (lists? posts? ticklers? I'm not sure what to call these) of rapidly emerging stories around the world. In short, it's a news monitoring service.

I used it during the recent Boston Marathon bombing unfolding story to see how well it worked; I think it is sort of meh right now, but could emerge into a great tracking device. I think it would be better, in the short term, for human editors to review and further edit the output -- at least more than they do -- as well as develop a much better output display.

Wikipedia Live Monitor has it genesis in articles on the possibility of using Wikipedia edits as a news alert, an idea that came from the crash of Wikipedia after Michael Jackson died and edit wars erupted.

"False Flags and Roof Terrorists: Your Guide to All the Internet Horseshit"

"Roof Guy"

An article at Gawker a few days ago, "False Flags and Roof Terrorists: Your Guide to All the Internet Horseshit," if fun of short reading of all an example of the crap nonsense people were spouting on the web and social media after the Boston Bombings when few if any of us really knew what was going on. We get a primer of "false flag attacks," "the roof guy," "crisis actors," and the "fact" that the show Family Guy supposedly predicted the attack. Of course, the readers at Reddit and 4chan were also actively trying (and failing) to solve the crime. (As Matt Buchanan said in an article at The New Yorker on the trend, "This moment is, for better or for worse, the shape of things to come.")

It is a brave new world where everybody has ready access to information on how to maim and kill hundreds or thousands and then we can all play FBI together, speculating on who did it.

What Hurts More: AC or DC?

The way to determine this is to to test:

Bottom line: AC hurts a lot more than DC. But they both hurt a lot.

Score 1 for Edison.

A Random Conspiracy Generator

Although this is not guaranteed to be as exciting as the real thing ("real" in relation to conspiracy theories may not be the best word choice), modern technology has now advanced to the point where computers can generate our fake conspiracies for us. I loooove technology!

Click here (if not to your liking, just click refresh).

Silent Circle -- Easily Encrypted Communications

Silent Circle is an encryption company that sells easy to use (so they say) text, email, phone, and video encryption applications for cell phones and computers. Using Pretty Good Privacy and other state of the art encryption methodologies -- indeed, it was created by the inventors of some of those technologies -- its primary benefit (they say) is that it makes them easy to use so it allows widespread communications free of snooping. That, if true, would be revolutionary (they say).

Silent Circle asserts that it does not keep the keys so it cannot encrypt the messages its service encrypts and transmits. It also says it makes it products without "backdoors," which are ways in for the company that would ordinarily be hidden to users. Believing that, of course, requires a level of trust (which may be warranted -- I have no idea).

Is widespread use of completely encrytpable communication a "good thing"? I don't know -- I can see good arguments on both sides. I distrust anyone who insists that it is absolutely one way or the other. Via Tim!

In Office Full Genomic Analysis

I posted about two weeks ago about an interview at Spiegel Online with Harvard biologist George Church who asserts that DNA not only soon can but will be used to create synthetic Neanderthals and other animals, as well as changing individual's genomes, and even will be used to design machines. (A follow-up post a few days later reported on two very promising studies in the use of DNA, particularly as a memory device for computation.)

Dr. Church, it turns out, has been very busy.

As reported in The New York Times, Knome, a company he co-founded and for which he is the chief scientific adviser  has just released a full genome sequencer that is the size of a file cabinet and costs about $125 K. It used to cost $250 K to sequence the full genome of one individual. In short, this is a pretty incredible development.

The science of DNA engineering is moving ahead extraordinarily fast -- must faster than our culture.

The Challenger Disaster 27 Years On

Yesterday was the 27th anniversary of the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, caused by the failure of a frozen rubber o-ring in one of its booster rockets. I was not going to posted on it, and I might have taken the easy route and posted Richard Feynman's famous appendix to the official report on the disaster in which he demonstrates the causes, briefly, and discusses the bureaucratic role of management in underestimating the risk and pushing forward the launch. (Here's a related video.) But, via Miss Cellania, I saw this video today, and I like it best:

Two Developments in Solar Cells

Solar cells are, of course, one of the great hopes for a renewable energy source, but they're expensive to make and install and not that efficient. (See also these general articles on solar efficiency and grid parity.)

Two recent theoretical developments may improve the situation, though neither is a cure all (and there is no cure all for solar power without radically different approaches than silicon based solar cells).

First, scientists in Finland have developed a nano surface (theoretically) that traps a large amount of light -- a better development than current anti-reflective surfaces which still allow a significant amount of light to pass through. They believe the surface is capable of being printed on at low cost.

Second, Swedish and German scientists, along with a scientist from China, have developed a method for growing micro wires of indium and phosphorus which can capture and convert more sunlight to electricity. This process hopefully can be further tweaked to increase efficiency and may be developed for application on industrial scales, though that seems a ways away. This method also apparently lends itself to multijunction solar cells in which multiple layers of different types of solar cells capture more sunlight, though still less than 50%.

As a bonus, Scientific American has a nice interactive graphic on solar cells work.

Father Builds His Son a Driveable Carbon Fiber Toy Car

If this is legit -- and I admit I'm a little skeptical -- a father in China built his son a toy car which the son can ride in -- okay that'ss believable -- and which is made out of carbon fiber and has an aluminum chassis with shocks and a wishbone suspension and keyless start of an electric motor and detailed working headlights and custom wheels and he designed it with a drag coefficient of a Tesla S and has painted it twice and it looks far nicer than any car I've ever owned. Some pictures (more at this link):

How LCD Monitors Work

There's also a good article at How Stuff Works on LCD technology. There's also a sort of meh LCD article at Wikipedia.  No to pontificate, but really we should all know this stuff.

This Looks Like the Fine Work of Galileo Feynman Labs (But It's Not)

Our work is not this well tested.

Bump Firing Your AR-15 at 900 Rounds Per Minute, Legally.

Apparently this is for hunting zombies. Or just hunting. Because assault rifles, particularly assault rifles that fire hundreds of rounds a second, are good for hunting.

This works by "bump firing," where the shooter doesn't pull the trigger back but pulls the rifle forward. Holding it forward with the recoil from each shot pulling it back turns the semi-automatic effectively into an automatic. It's an old technique, but, as discussed at Slate, the perfectly legal Slide Fire turns an ineffective hip firing method into an effective (aimed) shoulder firing method.

A Farm Tractor with a Volvo 240 Engine

"Christiaan Huygens": Ah Nuts, I've Been Saying It Wrong

Christiaan Huygens was a brilliant dutch physicist who possibly ranks in the class of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz and yet, of those, the one so few people (in the U.S.) seem to know about. For what it's worth, he wrote an early version of what became Newton's second law of motion (no, Newton did not come up with this stuff all by himself), invented the pendulum clock, demonstrated that light has wave properties, independently discovered the balance spring, discovered coupled oscillations (see also!), solved the tautochrone problem (which was critical to the creation of a useful pendulum clock), used an early geometric form of calculus predating Newton, developed the theory and formula for centripetal force, wrote the first lengthy work on probability, designed a large tubeless telescope, was the first to understand that Saturn has a ring around it, discovered Saturn's planet Titan, was the first to draw the Orion Nebula, designed an early internal combustion engine that was intended to work with gunpowder, and designed a pocket watch (an outgrowth of the balance spring), among many other inventions. His father, grandfather, and brother were also very successful (his father, though Dutch, was knighted by both England and France and is historically one of the Netherlands most famous poets as well as a composer and was a friend of John Donne and an acquaintance of Rembrandt and Descartes (who lived in the Netherlands for 20 years)).

So, okay, here's the deal: it turns out pretty much everybody who isn't Dutch has been mispronouncing his name all along.  According to Wikipedia it's pronounced like this; according to the video below it's {Huh}{clear your throat or something}{ens}. Also, while we're on it, Euler is pronounced {oiler}, Leibnitz is pronounced {laip}{nits}, and Newton is pronounced {New}{ton}.  Dr. Lewin, below, is right: I've got no idea how to say it.

BTW, Dr. Lewin's other physics videos are also awesome. Via Neatorama.

A List of Reference and Educational Sites

[Note: An updated list of sources is in the "References Sources" tab, above]

I looked for a list of reference and educational sources on the internet, and I wasn't able to find one I discuss one here and linked it below, so I've made a more updated one.

After going through hundreds of sites, I've winnowed the list to about 150.  If I had to only pick a few they'd be Wikipedia (and its associated sites), Google (also for its associated sites), The New York Times (for its archives), the Internet Archive, WolframAlpha, JSTOR, SSRN, NASA, FindLaw, How Stuff Works, Khan Academy, and Open Culture. (For non-reference/education, but just general interest I'd have to add MetaFilter.)

The full list, below, avoids sites behind a paywall or requiring registration (though sometimes that's necessary for full content). Here's the full list: