Technology
grrlscientist | April 15, 2010tags: iPad: The World's Most Expensive Cat Toy, iPad, Macintosh, Apple, laptops, technology, IT, cultural observation, social commentary, humor, funny, pets, cats, streaming video
This cat is demonstrating the value of an iPad as a cat toy. Who cares if it's a bit on the expensive side, since the cat obviously enjoys playing with it?
Sure, it's probably the most controversial gadget that Apple has ever come out with, but come on, your cat will love you for it. Don't be cheap when it comes to cat toys.
drorzel | April 14, 2010What's the application? Telecommunications, namely, the sending of messages over very long distances by encoding them in light pulses which are sent over optical fibers.
What problem(s) is it the solution to? "How can we send large numbers of messages from one place to another more efficiently than with electrical pulses sent down copper wires?"
How does it work? The concept is dead simple: You take a signal and encode it in light-- this could be analog, like the SpectraSound demo LaserFest is selling, with higher intensity meaning higher signal, or it could be digital, with a bright pulse…
gregladen | April 14, 2010Randall Hyde's book is now out in it's second edition.
Your computer has little dohickies in it that know how to read and respond to commands that are, in turn, stored in (and read from) other dohickies.
These instructions are collectively known as "machine language." If you do an programming at all, you probably know this. A form of this very low level language that is designed to be somewhat more readable by humans is known as Assembly Language.
Higher level languages allow programmers to avoid messy details like the kind of hardware their program may run on, and higher level…
clock | April 14, 2010If you attended ScienceOnline2010, either physically or virtually, you know that Anil Dash was there, leading a session called Government 2.0.
Anil Dash is a pioneer blogger (and of course twitterer) and the very first employee of Six Apart, the company that built blogging platforms including MoveableType (which is used by Scienceblogs.com) and Typepad.
Just before ScienceOnline2010, Anil made an official announcement that he will be leading Expert Labs (also on Twitter) which is a new project funded by AAAS to facilitate feedback by the experts (including scientists, of course) to the Obama…
drorzel | April 12, 2010What's the application? LIGO stands for Laser Interferometer Graviitational Wave Observatory, because (astro)physicists feel free to drop inconvenient words when making up cute acronyms. This is an experiment to look for disturbances in space-time caused by massive objects, which would manifest as a slight stretching and compression of space itself.
What problem(s) is it the solution to? 1) "Can we directly observe the gravitational waves that are predicted by the equations of General Relativity?" 2) "Can we detect things like colliding black holes, because that would be awesome!"
How does it…
drorzel | April 12, 2010Several weeks ago, I announced a contest to determine the Most Amazing Laser Application. Personal issues interrupted this, but I want to finish it out in honor of LaserFest Here's the list of finalists, with links to those already written up:
Cat toy/ dog toy/ laser light show
Laser cooling/ BEC
Lunar laser ranging
Optical tweezers
Optical storage media (CD/DVD/Blu-Ray)
LIGO
Telecommunications
Holography
Laser ignited fusion
Laser eye surgery
Laser frequency comb/ spectroscopy
Laser guide stars/ adaptive optics
I'll be writing up LIGO shortly, and will try to finish the whole thing as soon…
grrlscientist | April 12, 2010tags: PiXar, NeXt, Apple computers, technology, follow your passion, education, advice, Stanford University, Steve Jobs, streaming video
Steve Jobs demonstrates tremendous tunnel vision as he talks about his life in his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, this white man with a loving family makes a huge and very basic error in logic: because he somehow managed to "make it" doesn't mean that everyone does -- or will. Most of us fail, and fail miserably, and fail publicly, and we fail repeatedly until the day we die as we strive to do what…
revere | April 12, 2010Markos Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of DailyKos, the world's largest political blog. He travels quite a bit and is dependent on his laptop and the internet. So I read his first experience with the iPad with a great deal of interest. Go read it (like they need the traffic; on a quiet Sunday night they are running 35,000 visits an hour!). Bottom line: overwhelmingly positive for someone who has a few, routine but critical functions handled by email and Microsoft Office level programs. I've already written about my own plans to get one later in the year, after the kinks are worked out…
gregladen | April 11, 2010A while back I would have said that I have three reasons to maintain a Windows computer.
1) iTunes;
2) a couple of games;
3) tax software.
Yes, yes, I know, these things can be done with Wine or an emulator. But really, having the relic Windows machine sitting there has simply bee easier.
Tax software is now obviated because it all works on line. Ironically, one of Microsoft's original ideas was to have the "browser" be part of the "operating system" which, we may guess, was a ruse to avoid orders to remove their browser from the shipped OS back in the early browser war days. But it turns…
clock | April 11, 2010Yesterday, Jay Rosen on Twitter wrote that his goal on Twitter was to have "a Twitter feed that is 100 percent personal (my own view on things...) and zero percent private."
This is an excellent description of mindcasting. Its alternative, 'lifecasting' is 100% private made public.
There is nothing wrong with lifecasting, of course. It is a different style of communication. It is using Twitter with a different goal in mind.
Mindcasting is a method to use Twitter for exchange of news, information, analysis and opinion.
Lifecasting is a method to use Twitter to make friends and communicate…
grrlscientist | April 9, 2010tags: math class, film making, animation, technology, weird, offbeat, flatland, Biola University, Matthew Weathers, streaming video
This is a trick that Matthew Weathers made for a lecture he presented in his Nature of Math class at Biola University. He apparently likes experimenting with mixing live action with video.
Here's his Halloween 2009 lecture:
How the heck did he do that?
grrlscientist | April 8, 2010tags: Lego Monsters Attack NYC, Lego, art, animation, technology, weird, offbeat, NYC, New York City, streaming video
This is a silly video but the technology that was used to create it is really interesting to watch, especially for this NYCer!
gregladen | April 7, 2010I'm going to make an argument that you should buy an Apple iPad despite widespread rumors of hardware problems and despite widespread criticisms of its design as funky and flawed.
And by "you" I mean yooz guyz who are skeptics.
In order to get there, to the point of this argument, I'm going to have to define skeptical computing, and to do that, skeptical anything, and to do that, what being a skeptic is. That sounds like a long journey but I promise to be concise.
What is a skeptic? A skeptic is a person (or other sentient, symbolically thinking being) with the ability to make rational…
clock | April 7, 2010Our April Science Café (description below) will be held on Tuesday 4/20 at the Irregardless Cafe on Morgan Street. Our café speaker for that night is Rogelio Sullivan, Associate Director of the Advanced Transportation Energy Center and also of the Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management Systems Center (FREEDM) at NCSU. Come and learn how our country is dealing with our ever-increasing energy consumption, and of ways that we may be able to reduce our dependence on foreign oil using a combination of innovative alternative energy cars and changes in our daily transportation…
cevans | April 6, 2010
I don't have the attention span to write this article.
In the course of penning this introductory paragraph, I've taken umpteen email breaks, gotten distracted by several Wikipedia wormholes, and taken an hour's time out to watch Frontline documentary clips on YouTube. It has taken me, in toto, seven days to write a five-paragraph article about my generation's decreasing attention span. At least the irony isn't lost on me.
A social researcher tracking my movements across the web might discover that, in the words of University College of London professor and director of CIBER (the Centre…
revere | April 4, 2010I haven't bought myself an iPad yet, but I'll probably do it before heading off on vacation in August. By that time it will have passed its shakedown phase and we'll know the best and worst. But from what I see and hear it looks pretty good, especially if you travel a lot. My trusty MacBook Pro weighs about 6 lbs with everything and this is less than 2 lbs (if I spring for the docking keyboard). One knock on it is price: $499 (and more if I go for the 3G version at $630. But it's all relative. Relative to what?
In 1981 I bought my first computer, an Apple II+. It had no monitor, 48K of RAM (…
pharyngula | April 1, 2010It's here. The iPad. Stephen Fry reviews. I am reduced to a Homer-esque gurgle.
cagapakis | March 31, 2010Because of my recent interest in autonomous, biologically inspired robots, my friend Tami sent me some fascinating links about designs and concepts for future flesh eating robots.
From New Scientist, furniture that captures vermin and uses the biomass to power fuel cells that run small electronics:
From Wired, Human corpse powered robots being developed by the Defense Department:
From the file marked "Evidently, many scientists have never seen even one scary sci-fi movie": The Defense Department is funding research into battlefield robots that power themselves by eating human corpses. What…