I can’t say I put much stock in his portal to another time story but it makes a really good story. It’s complete with strange lights, weird noises, and ghost horses, not to mention the pebbles from the sky. I used to read stories like that all the time when I was a kid.
There have been a lot of magnetic motor designs and videos out there lately. Here is an open source one.
I was helping my folks set up their wireless network recently. I ran across this article on securing your network. A lot of people don’t bother but with all the things you can get thrown in jail or sued for, you really don’t want strangers on your network.
From my friend Matt, the Heart Attack Grill diet center. My arteries were hardening just from looking at that site. I got a laugh out of the line “The Government Requires Us To Inform You That Our “Nurses” Do Not Actually Have Any Accredited Medical Training”.
How to pay for the 700 billion dollar bailout? Invest 4.5 trillion in clean energy sources, become energy independent, and make 5.5 trillion on it!
And finally there was a story in the news lately where someone had taught their dog to call 911 and saved them. Here’s a funny picture of a puppy giving CPR.
We are painting the living room. We’ve gotten to the point where you look at it and decide whether to do another coat or it’s good enough and time to move on to another room. We have a lot of house plants and it won’t be too long before we have to get them inside. As I work, I can’t help but think how I would design a robot to paint a room. I found a couple of painting robots but they aren’t the kind that paints a house. This one ‘Action Jackson‘ mimics Jackson Pollock’s style of painting. This site had a number of examples including a simple one you could build.
Speaking of different ways of creating art, here is a video of what happens when you pour salt on a speaker.
Google is celebrating their tenth anniversary by offering ten million dollars for a world changing idea.
Canon’s EOS 5D Mark II Digital SLR camera features a 21.1-megapixel full frame 24 x 36mm CMOS sensor, DIGIC 4 imaging processor and significantly lower noise, with an expanded sensitivity range from ISO 50 to ISO 25,600.
It does full HD video too, and my wife says “No, you can’t have one”. Someday it will be nice to have something that’s not only very high resolution but so fast you can shoot in any natural light.
I thought these videos of the most amazing UFO sightings were intriguing but the camera work could have been so much better. The second one is interesting because you see the movement.
There is a video out there which teaches you something about perception. I had seen it on some site originally but it took some looking to find it. What I want you to do is watch the video and count the number of times the people in the white shirts pass the basketball. Here it is, it takes a while to load. When you are done watching it, leave the window open because you may want to see it again.
I’m going to get back to that in a minute. The video was also presented in a TED Talk by Michael Shermer publisher of Skeptic magazine. I think it was probably this talk but then got edited for copyright reasons. When I went looking for it and realized it wasn’t part of the talk I still thought the guy was interesting and entertaining.
Okay back to the first video. Did you see the guy in the gorilla suit?
If you liked the Virgin Mary muffin check out these images. I really liked the third one.
I’m no economist but the first thing I would do in a financial crisis is look to see how other countries handled a similar situation. Here’s how the Swedes handled it.
Esquire magazine recently had a cover created with E-paper. The stuff is remarkably tough.
Looking at the pictures of this snake, I was reminded there are real monsters out there.
And finally, it’s not very good at it but this cat tries to play the piano.
I read this article at InfoWorld on 10 future technologies which may be available in ten years. Number 8 is a little scary. I laughed at number 3. Everything works and you don’t have to wait. Some times I sit down to do something on my computer and by the time it boots and everything asks me if I want to upgrade it, I’ve forgotten what it was I was going to do in the first place. I guess I have thought about the idea of being able to capture all of your life and record it somehow. As much as it would be nice to be able to create a high resolution image of something beautiful you saw when you didn’t have your camera. I often think how strange it would be now to be a kid and have something stupid you did being posted to YouTube.
The idea of using a space elevator has been around for a long time. This article points out carbon nanotubes would only have to be 4 times stronger than they are now to accomplish that. This is one technology I thought was well off into the future but if you believe the article, the Japanese are planning to build one.
I’ve often felt like there should be a way to go play golf on an extremely hot day and stay cool somehow, especially if you rented a cart. This device sounds like the only real difference between it and sticking you hands in cold water is that it draws a vacuum on your palms to speed up the process. The part where the guy goes from 180 pull-ups to 616 in six weeks is pretty amazing.
First there was dark energy, then dark matter, now dark flow. Is there a cosmic vacuum cleaner sucking up the universe?
This is an ad for condoms which has an interactive visualization of the “beer goggle” effect.
Probably not safe for work, but if you can cross view, check out these photos from a bikini contest. If you want to learn to cross view, see my tutorial here.
TV on the web is really evolving. Now at Hulu you can watch shows which have not premiered on TV yet.
I played this little robot game over the weekend called light-bot. You have to program the robot to step over squares and light them up. You create your program by dragging the symbols onto your programming space. If you aren’t a programmer, I think it gives you a pretty good idea of what programmers do, although it’s a pretty simple programming language. Also the days of trying to keep your program small are long gone. I think it also illustrates a mistake programmers make so often we just call it OBO (off by one).
There are 12 levels. I’m thinking I must have missed something on level 10 because even though I finally solved it, it seemed so much harder than all the other levels. My solution involved re-using a lot of code where the robot did a bunch of useless but not harmful things.
The Keppe motor is another one of those motors where the inventors claim it gets ‘free’ energy. They wanted to get you to fill out a form to see a video so I did a check of YouTube and found these. If they have actually achieved what they claim, they are brilliant but I can’t say they know how to make a good video. The real demonstration of the motor starts about halfway through part two.
You have to wonder given the size of this ancient reef and it’s proximity to Melbourne why no one noticed it before.
This is different. Scientists discover a way to turn recycled plastic bottles into a more valuable type of plastic.
I had a macro lens I built for my old camera but unfortunately it doesn’t fit on my new one. Here is a nice collection of macro photos.
Staying with the photo theme, here are some beautiful pictures from Scotland.
Also, here are some funny photos taken from just the right angle.
And finally, here is your funny animal picture. This one is a little sexier than usual and although it doesn’t really show anything, it may not be appropriate if you are at work.
I’m beginning the long overdue process of painting my living room. I watched Iron Man last night and I could sure use one of those exoskeletons. Grabbing a large speaker I hadn’t lifted in years, I wondered if I could still lift it. It was up high and once I started there was no going back. Luckily it didn’t flatten me. Why doesn’t someone invent wall paper that just peels off and has another layer underneath? So instead of painting you just peel off the dirty sheet to reveal a clean one. You could have fresh walls in minutes without having to move everything.
Our house is pretty small so having to do without our largest room even for a short time is pretty painful. I guess one thing I like is now I have the computer I use for blogging next to the one I use for rendering so it’s easier to post while I have the other one making pictures. Check out these computer generated pictures by 33 different artists.
I have a picture in the 2D art section where I created a 2D fractal and then reflected it on a 3D object. I’ve thought about this issue before; how would you create a true 3D fractal?
I’ve linked to musical roads before. The idea is you put a pattern of grooves in the road so they play a tune as you drive over them. I’ve always thought the ones they have on the side of the road, which my wife calls slumber bumps, should say “Wake Up!”
These cloud pictures reminded me of one time when we had a bunch of Mammatus clouds. Some of the others are very cool and scary.
I got up this morning and as usual, sat down with a cup of coffee to read the news on the internet. I don’t know why I start my day this way. The news is always bad and it often makes me angry. Once again the government is bailing out another private financial institution to the tune of 85 billion dollars. I’ve had a number of businesses and the government never helped me out. In fact, when I was doing well and trying to grow they just taxed the hell out of me. Then there was the political wrangling of the story by both parties. My degrees are in physics, chemistry, and computer science, all tied strongly to experimental verification and logic. I often ask myself why politics is so illogical. I mean, it seems social policies, tax laws, and so forth could be subjected to experimentation and people on both sides could surely see what works and what does not. We could examine policies in other countries and takes what works from them. That is absolutely never going to happen and I think I’m beginning to understand why.
This article by Psychologist Jonathan Haidt is titled “What Makes People Vote Republican?” but it could just as well be titled “What makes People vote Democratic?” I found it a pretty fascinating read and also an explanation for why politics is the way it is and why it will never change. Then I found this video he did at TED Talks. It does contain some adult language. It is insightful and at times very humorous. It also presents some ideas on how it might be possible for people to work together for the greater good.
Also if you wonder why there is so much misinformation and lying in the political process, it’s because it pays off. If you read quotes from this article on left leaning websites you would only find the stuff towards the bottom but if you read the article in full you see both sides will believe things even after they have been refuted. There is no hope for the “truth” therefore no possibility of logic.
If you read the article by Jonathan Haidt and or watched the video, you are on my team. You know, my side, my tribe. I don’t mean Democrat or Republican, I mean you are just like me, you get online. What ever you think of Senator McCain, you have to think it’s odd he doesn’t use the internet because you do, or you wouldn’t be reading this now. Now you might be young and just think it’s that age group but my parents are considerably older and they are avid users of the web, email, and using a printer to produce my Mom’s artwork. Their friends are too. I have to admit I was unsure what to expect when my nephew gave them an old computer. I guess I was expecting to have to do a lot of support but they learned very quickly and were quite capable of finding solutions on their own. I have to admit it was a bit of a shock the first time my mother used the word Jpeg in a sentence.
Don’t believe for a second I’m going to get people to come to my site based on the above intellectual observations. Here are some really hot pictures of Jessica Alba.
And we have alien speech found in a NASA radio signal.
And yes, I do have an explanation. If you start frequency shifting audio you can make a lot of things sound like very different things.
I read a post today about generating power from ball lightning. I tracked down the site belonging to Dr. Kiril Chukanov here. Dr. Chukanov claims to have developed Quantum Free Energy generators capable of generating clean energy without fuel. There are some interview videos at the site but his accent is pretty heavy so it can be hard to follow at times.
It seems like I saw a movie or TV show recently where someone wanted to fire a gun in space and they ended up putting it in something so it would shoot. Turns out you don’t need oxygen to fire a gun in space.
This is just strange. It’s an article you might expect in the Enquirer but it’s from the Discovery Channel and it is about a girl with X-ray eyes.
Here is a pretty nice animation of how the Large Hadron Collider works.
Binaural recording isn’t just using two microphones. It actually models the human head and ears. It’s pretty amazing to hear when you are used to just stereo. Here is an interesting demonstration.
Check out these dramatic pictures of tornadoes. We had the remains of hurricane Ike pass over us yesterday. When the house was creaking and you could hear debris hitting it, you just can’t believe some people would attempt to ride out the real thing.
