Money

Randall Munro did it again.

(you can buy a poster of it here)

Lightning Foundry

Here's an idea: build two 10 story tall Tesla Coil towers and watch them go off! That's exactly what Greg Leyh and The Lightning Foundry wants to do and he needs your money.

Its a cool idea, and what could go wrong?!?!!!

Moon Unit Zappa

Slashdot points out that Shackleton Energy Company, a small startup with $1.2MM in seed funding, wants to create a lunar base camp and mine the moon by 2020 for "processing and transporting lunar products to market in Low Earth Orbit and beyond".

Actually, this would make a lot more sense for NASA to take this on, and jumpstart a new industry, but the idea is fantastic. Currently "all" the cost of getting something in space is in the launch vehicle, and many of the times it doesn't work. Once the basic infrastructure and rail gun launch system is in place, building systems on the moon could be less costly, and simple to get in space.

Grading the Teachers

Slashdot notes:

"Bill and Melinda Gates write that in the field of education, we really don't know very much at all about what makes someone an effective teacher. 'We have all known terrific teachers,' write the Gates. 'But nobody has been able to identify what, precisely, makes them so outstanding.' For the last several years, the Gates Foundation has been working with more than 3,000 teachers on a large research project called Measures of Effective Teaching to get a better sense of what makes teaching work (PDF) so that school districts can start to hire, train and promote based on meaningful standards. 'Once the MET research is completed, we hope that school districts will work with teachers and their unions to create fair and reliable evaluations that reward teachers who are effective and identify and help those who need to improve. When that happens, we believe that districts will be on the cusp of providing every student with an effective teacher, in every class, every year.'"

The 147 Corporations Controlling Most of the Global Economy

NewScientist reports on research by Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston showing how

An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

and that

"In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

Though,

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

This ties in -sort of- with the book by John Perkins, titled Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Which explains (among other things) how USAID and the World Bank are used by the US to gain votes in the UN, and how that does not always end up being so popular.

more lego goodness

Lego CD/DVD Ripper: See Engadget (Nov 1, 2011)



Robot CubeStormer II record breaking 5.66 second Rubix's Cube Solver! (See slashdot Oct 19, 2011)

Nest Learning Thermostat

The folks over at engadget are reporting on the "nest", a learning thermostat that is made by the creators of the iPhone.

According to Nest, the thermostat takes about a week to start picking up on your routine, at which point it adjusts the temperature accordingly. It knows, for instance, that the whole family's out of the house by 9am, and that people start trickling back in around four in the afternoon. That's all thanks to a collection of six sensors, which keep tabs on metrics like temperature, ambient light, humidity and motion -- whether it's fingers about to touch the display or people passing in and out of the room.

Uses wifi, works with your pc or iphone/pad, priced around $250, very slick!

Update:
It is COOL (I got one!)
Unfortunately, it's so cool that Honeywell wants to sue it out of existence. 

Derek Deville's Qu8k

Derek Deville, built a 8" diameter, ~14 foot rocket, that went 121,000 feet (~23 miles) up into space to capture Carmack's $5k "100kft Micro Prize".

Top speed of the rocket was 3,200ft/s (2,181 mph) and it's all on video:


(BTW, it landed only 3 miles from the launch site.) More on this at HuffPo and Gizmo.

FoldIt!

As NPR's On the Media points out about Foldit, a "new online game [that] helps solve medical mysteries".

Using a game available to anyone online called Foldit, gamers successfully built a model of an enzyme crucial to understanding how many diseases, such as AIDS, do their damage. Solving the crystal structure of the M-PMV retroviral protease has stumped scientists for more than ten years.

Foldit is available for MAC, Windows and Linux. (no phone apps yet.) See more at their wiki. ...Funny, it wasn't even a full year after Jane McGonigal lectured at TED that "Gaming can make a better world", and sure enough, here's proof of that!

On the heals of this is phylo, a crowd sourcing game to solve multiple sequence alignment issues with RNA/DNA. Slashdot points out how "gamers playing Phylo have beaten a state-of-the-art program at aligning regions of 521 disease-associated genes form different species"

Portlands Voodoo Donuts!

No.. Ive never been there, but I gotsta go!

A local Portland Organ donuts shop is getting really good reviews for their speciality creations.  You name it, they got it!  (and I'm betting they have others you never thought of....

 

In other related news, Scientific American, with the help of thevisualMD has a very interesting spread on "A Graphic Look at Obesity--Inside and Out".