During the holiday season we see images of lots of stuff not found in nature: flying reindeer, sugarplum fairies, and geometrically incorrect snowflakes. Now, Thomas Koop, a chemist, is trying to fix the snowflake problem.
Koop thinks ice crystals are masterpieces of natural beauty. Unfortunately, he says, "This beauty is sometimes corrupted."
The quest for accuracy in advertising. An exercise in futility if ever there were one!
Santa has 31 hours to visit 378 million Christian children; at the rate of 3.5 children per household, and assuming at least one good child per home, this comes to 108 million homes; if each child receives no more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh would be carrying more than 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself; Santa would thus need at least 360,000 Reindeer to pull the sleigh; since Santa must visit 108 homes in 31 hours, he will have to travel at 650 miles per second -- 3,000 times the speed of sound; at that speed, the lead pair of Reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each and vaporize – indeed, the entire Reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second; Santa himself would be subjected to forces of 17,500 G's; a 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, and be crushed.This just shows that there's a miracle for Santa to exist!
I mean there’d be a, you know, a defense or public defender from Podunk, you know, and this woman is really brilliant, you know. Why isn’t she out inventing the automobile or, you know, doing something productive for this society?
I mean lawyers, after all, don’t produce anything. They enable other people to produce and to go on with their lives efficiently and in an atmosphere of freedom. That’s important, but it doesn’t put food on the table and there have to be other people who are doing that. And I worry that we are devoting too many of our very best minds to this enterprise.
And they appear here in the Court, I mean, even the ones who will only argue here once and will never come again. I’m usually impressed with how good they are. Sometimes you get one who’s not so good. But, no, by and large I don’t have any complaint about the quality of counsel, except maybe we’re wasting some of our best minds.
[T]he same team used viruses to construct the negative electrode, or anode, of the battery. In the new work, the researchers engineered viruses for the positive electrode, or cathode. When the two are put together, the virus batteries should perform better than traditional lithium ion batteries and also be environmentally friendly, the team reports.“Because the viruses are living organisms, we had to use only water-based solvents, no high pressures and no high temperatures,” says Angela Belcher, a materials scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and a study coauthor.
From the site:Explanation: Two galaxies are squaring off in Virgo and here are the latest pictures. When two galaxies collide, the stars that compose them usually do not. This is because galaxies are mostly empty space and, however bright, stars only take up only a small fraction of that space. But during the collision, one galaxy can rip the other apart gravitationally, and dust and gas common to both galaxies does collide. If the two galaxies merge, black holes that likely resided in each galaxy center may eventually merge. Because the distances are so large, the whole thing takes place in slow motion -- over hundreds of millions of years. Besides the two large spiral galaxies, a smaller third galaxy is visible on the far left of the above image of Arp 274, also known as NGC 5679. Arp 274 spans about 200,000 light years across and lies about 400 million light years away toward the constellation of Virgo.
Here's a jacket to lett you feel a movie. To wit:The jacket contains 64 independently controlled actuators distributed across the arms and torso. The actuators are arrayed in 16 groups of four and linked along a serial bus; each group shares a microprocessor. The actuators draw so little current that the jacket could operate for an hour on its two AA batteries even if the system was continuously driving 20 of the motors simultaneously.
So what can the jacket make you feel? Can it cause a viewer to feel a blow to the ribs as he watches Bruce Lee take on a dozen thugs? No, says Lemmens. Although the garment can simulate outside forces, translating kicks and punches is not what the actuators are meant to do. The aim, he says, is investigating emotional immersion.
I love this! Movies have terrific visual effects, even 3-D. The sounds is awesome, too. Now, to be able to feel, to have your sense of touch, as part of the experience, that's just terrific. I hope these can be mass produced and that movie makers and theaters will cater to it.
Here's a possible future. Put on the goggles, attach earphones, and you are in another place, another time, and tuned out of the world.In response to a friend's post, I wrote the following. Please enjoy the following.
It's an interesting, no, fascinating discovery that blind people can take such pictures. That they know of cracks in the sidewalk, where people’s heads are, and how to photograph, are amazing feats. It is truly wondrous and miraculous.
Or is it?
Is it so hard to believe that the blind can take beautiful pictures? Perhaps. But, may be not. Let’s explore our senses and see what we might find.
There is a current view in physics that the universe is a computer. This view holds that information is conserved and that it cannot be destroyed. What is information? Well, let us posit that information is a description of the universe, or of a part of that universe that we are experiencing at a specific place and time. There may be more to it, but clearly this is part of information of the universe.
We experience the universe through our senses: seeing, hearing, taste, smell, touch. Instead of calling them senses, let’s call them sensors. Our sensors don’t so much sense the universe as they measure the universe. When we drink tea, our mouths measure the temperature, either hot tea or ice tea. Our taste buds measure the sweetness. When we look we measure objects in our view for shape, color, and position relative to other objects in our field of view. Thus, seeing is really an act of measuring. Some of our senses have a higher resolution than others; we can hear a wide range of amplitudes, see an extremely diverse set of colors, but we cannot discern different tastes so well.
From our measurements we derive a sense of our universe. How do we derive that sense? Our brain. Our own internal, massively connected, computer. Our brains take measurements from our sensors and use those measurements to make sense of our universe. Our brains integrate our sight with our hearing, with our smell, with every sensor we have to describe our world.
For example, we can easily recognize smoke in the kitchen from a pot that’s on fire. We see the flames, see the smoke, hear the crackle, and smell the burn and feel the heat. We know where we are and our brains deduce a pot on fire.
Are our senses limited? In a way, yes, they measure one thing such as sound with our hearing. But that is not a true limitation. Consider a bat. Bats, as you know, emit sound, listen for reflections (echoes) and their brains are able to “see” and easily navigate in the dark of night. Thus hearing can be seeing.
Consider next: sonar. Ships send sound waves through the ocean and from these sound waves computers can print maps of the ocean floor. From sounds come pictures. One sensor can be used to produce what another type of sensor would produce. The trick, the key, is the processing.
Or, if you like, consider radar. A plane sends electromagnetic radiation to the ground and with special processing, that radiation is transformed to a picture of the ground complete with buildings, foliage, cars, and other objects present. It’s not sight, it’s radar and it’s call SAR: Synthetic Aperture Radar.
With those ideas in mind, let’s consider this book. The blind taking pictures. Far fetched? I should think not. Inside each of these creative and inventive people is a brain, a processor. This processor can take all sorts of measurements and with the proper program, call it training, give the user (that person) a sense of his surroundings. Hence, the beautiful story of the girl who “sees” cracks in the sidewalk with her stick. Her vision fails her but her brain is undeterred and processes measurements of touch to give her a sense of the ground beneath her feet.
Our bodies are fascinating and marvelous.
What can we learn from this beyond the lovely pictures and, possibly, what more one can do with a camera? I am no great photographer like my bowling buddy. However, I submit we all can learn to use our sensors in new ways that we are not now trained to do. And with that we can draw new beauty, and new visions, from the universe around us.
