Hobbit Home

Simon & Jasmine Dale have built a fantastic Low Impact Woodland Home in the Wales. It took him (and friends) four months to build and a total of 3k in cash! Fantastic job, and wonderful place (I only wonder how the site will age over time. Things like rotting, sagging walls/ceiling, etc.) His site is fantastic with a very good writeup on how he put everything together.

MSM

Mechanically separated meat!

(That's chicken parts by the way.) Kind of Gross. ... maybe...
Snopes has a nice write up on how it's made, and the truths and (not) that is being told about it.

Best part is that Jamie Oliver (a TV Sheff) did a great show for kids on how it's made.



More hype from this topic, as it's now got the better label of "Pink Slime". (Why would you ever call it MSM when you could call it pink slime?!?!)

Media Consolidation

Frugal Dad has a great infographic on how bad things have gotten in the media world.

Note the following sites that are attempting to fix this:

• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• RootStrikers
  
• FreePress.net

VI Hart

"VI" produces these great stop motion videos that explain all sorts of math stuff in a really fun way!

Cool Lego

When folks with legos go nuts. (to be continued...)

• Crawler Town (by DeGobbi)
• Seven foot long Serenity Model (by Jeff Stevens)
• Lego Mindstorms model of the Mars Curiosity Rover (by Doug Moran and Will Gorman) 
• Star Blazers Yamato  
• Great Ball Contraption: Also see some of the details of the pieces at his website.   
• WW2 Tanks: And Stijn Oom's other fantastic creations!
• HMS Hood: What a ship!

How Computer Animation is Done

BBC Nature Video Collections explains how they have been producing their "One Planet Dinosaur" show.

Can You Crack It?

BBC notes that GCHQ (the UK intelligence agency) has setup an unbranded website called canyoucrackit.co.uk challenging people to crack the cipher code they post on their website. (hint: it's probably a LOT easier to crack the website and figure out the answer then cracking it brute force.)

Conflict History Map

akg1330 tweets about the Conflict History Map. It's a google map that lets you scan to a specific time and see where all the conflicts were during that time.

Printrbot

PCWorld (and Kickstarter) has a nice brief on Brook Drumm's Printrbot, a low cost ($200), DIY 3d printer.

The Periodic Table of Videos

David Bradley notes the Periodic Table of QR codes by Martyn Poliakoff and Brady Haran.

Each QR is basically a link to a video in the PToV from Nottingham Uni’s chemistry department. Point and shoot and up pops the appropriate Youtube clip.

(BTW, here's the direct link to the image you need to download and print out )

HOW THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE WAS DEVELOPED

First we learned the difference between United Kingdom, Great Britain and England, and now this!

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". 

Eyeborg

BBC  has a piece on Rob Spence, a Canadian documentary maker (and blogger) who lost his eye, and replaced it with a small camera.

He has a 12 min documentary about his new "eye" and other "cyborgs" (folks with prosthetic body parts).  Wonder if he would get thrown in jail if he got pulled over in Boston? 

National Ignition Facility to go online

The Guardian notes that the very coolly named "National Ignition Facility" will be bringing online their Laser fusion power test facility.

The $3.5bn National Ignition Facility (NIF) sits in a 10-storey building covering three football fields and will harness the power of lasers to turn tiny pellets of hydrogen into thermonuclear energy. If the machine works as planned, it will become the first to generate more energy than it consumes, a feat that could pave the way for commercial laser fusion power stations and an end to the world's energy security problems.

 NIF's explanation on how it works is very interesting.


....  Now how could I rig a way to mount this on a sharks head....

Electric Tron Motorcycle

A custom motorcycle company in Florida called Parker Brothers Choppers made a very cool electric TRON Light Cycle.  (see in Slashdot and gizmag)

Hire the Hackers!

A Threat Post posting by, Paul Roberts notes that in a TED Talk,
Misha Glenny makes the argument that most hackers are brilliant folks with a high chance of Aspergers, that were just easily misguided.  He says that rather then putting them in prison, we should hire them and leverage their talents. 

Time Lapse Video From ISS

Fraser Cain at Universe Today on Sep 18 posts a short note about

Science educator James Drake built this amazing timelapse video from the perspective of the International Space Station as it flew over North and South America.

Night scene with the lights below, and the lightening storms are very cool.

Space Junk

While a Sep2 slashdot article "report warns of space junk reaching a tipping point" points out that there is too much (16k cataloged objects) orbiting the planet. Mike Orcutt has a piece titled "Space over Time" in Technology Review (Sep/Oct 2011) showing how much each country has put up there (by year, and purpose - military/commercial/etc.)

Smart Grid might make you late

The Federal Government has mandated (years and years ago) that all US electrical power run on average (over 24hours) at 60Hz.  This has been useful for clocks to keep time. This seems to be a bit (by multiple factors) of a cost challenge when building out smarter, and more robust power systems through out the country. 

So the thought is to test the effects of phasing out the strict 60Hz rule which The North American Electric Reliability Corp, who manages the countries electrical power systems, will be doing. 

Results to your oven clock (per year):

• East Coast: +20 min/year
• West Coast: +8 min/year
• Texas: +2 min/year
• Quebec: 0 min/year

(also see AP article on this topic.)

Human IQ

Christopher Eppig, a grad student in New Mexico posts on Sep6 2011 in SciAm "Why Is Average IQ Higher in Some Places".  His research finds:

"[...] we not only found a very strong relationship between levels of infectious disease and IQ, but controlling for the effects of education, national wealth, temperature, and distance from sub-Saharan Africa, infectious disease emerged as the best predictor of the bunch."

The gist of this is because of lack of fuel for the developing brain:

"One study found that newborn humans spend close to 90 percent of their calories on building and running their brains. (Even as adults, our brains consume as much as a quarter of our energy.) If, during childhood, when the brain is being built, some unexpected energy cost comes along, the brain will suffer."

Michael Shermer’s Baloney Detection Kit

Michael Shermer from Skeptic Magazine (and columnist in SciAm) took Carl Sagan’s idea that we need a Boloney Detection Kit to sift through all the boloney out there, and proposed this solution.

The summary of it is as follows:

1. How reliable is the source of the claim?
2. Does the source make similar claims?
3. Have the claims been verified by somebody else?
4. Does this fit with the way the world works?
5. Has anyone tried to disprove the claim?
6. Where does the preponderance of evidence point?
7. Is the claimant playing by the rules of science?
8. Is the claimant providing positive evidence?
9. Does the new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory?
10. Are personal beliefs driving their claim?

Google ponies up $1/2 BILLION fine to DOJ

As per JetLaw's June7th article, google is looking at coughing up some serious coin (even for google) for showing "illegal online pharmacy ads".

"Google is facing a $500 million dollar fine “in connection with a potential resolution of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice into the use of Google advertising by certain advertisers,” they disclosed in their 10-Q last week."

HuffPosts August 24th article points out that google chose to settle paying the full half billion so that they would not face criminal charges.

"It sends a clear message to both Google and to others that contribute to America's pill problem that they will be held to account for endangering the health and safety of the residents of this district and to persons all across the United States," said Neronha, who described the forfeiture as one of the largest in U.S. history.

It will be interesting to see how this will change how you get your adds included in Googles AdSense.

As a (Jan 24, 2012) followup, slashdot notes that

PC Magazine reports that the U.S. government used convicted con artist David Whitaker, owner of an online business selling steroids and human growth hormone to U.S. consumers, to help federal agents in a sting operation against Google when he began advertising with Google with advertisements that included the statement 'no prescription needed,' clearly violating U.S. laws.

War Flying

geek.com has a writeup about Mike Tassey and Richard Perkins who built a very cool remote RC plane that scans the airwaves below it, tracks wifi nets, and pen tests them. It runs the full backtrack suite on the plane, and can be remotely managed, but it can also do everything (fly and sniff) on its own.

The "World's Largest" Stop Motion Animation Was Created With A Nokia N8

Known as the best phone in the world with the worst UI, here's a cute video made with the Nokia N8. (and a short writeup of it in FastCompany.)

Gulp. The world's largest stop-motion animation shot on a Nokia N8. from Nokia HD on Vimeo.

Carrier (PBS Show)

Cool PBS show about life on board a Nimitz class air craft carrier. Good highlight would be landing on a pitching deck (one & two) where the pilots who are already on deck, sit around eating popcorn making bets on if their approaching buddies will safely land, die, or miss and need to fly back around.

Undersea Cable Map

As pointed out in TechCentral, Greg Mahlknecht created a free online ocean cable map showing who owns the cables, their stats, and what they link. akg-random also points out an old undersea cable map from 1901!

Also note TeleGeography's Submarine Cable Map (more underwater net/network diagrams)

Akamai 2011 Q1 Report

Akamai's state of the internet is out, and it's an interesting read. Gizmag has a writeup of the details, including notes about increasing access speeds, more mobile users and attack stats.

Kevin Mitnick shows how easy it is to hack a phone

cnet security has an article/interview with Kevin Mitnick about how easy it is to listen/hack into to others voicemails. (use asterisk, dial up your cell# and in caller id, say your coming from your cell#)

How bad is our decisions making? Just ask the monkeys!

Good TED talk on by Dr. Laurie Santos about how monkeys make similar financial decisions making mistakes as humans.



Well, as Rowan Hooper from the New Scientist points out, this has now inspired the The first advertising campaign for non-human primates. (of monkeys shaking their booty, to advertise specific kinds of Jello.)

Reich's 6 points on the economy

From Pragmatic Capitalism, I found Robert Reich's 2.5 min, six bullet skinny on the economy:

The bullet points:

1. Economy doubles since 1980, but wages flat. Where did the money go?
2. All gains from the economy go to the super rich. and...
3. With money comes political power. Taxes on Super rich slashed, revenues evaporate. this leads to...
4. Huge budget deficits. Middle class agitated, fight for scraps
5. Middle class divided. Buying and borrowing slow. Resulting in:
6. Anemic recovery.

Apples new Pad

Here's one for urban planners. Apple is proposing a new campus that will provide the following:

• increase employee seating by 40% (up to 13k)
• increase space by 20% (3.1M sq ft.)
• increase external landscape by 350% (5.9M sq.ft.)
• increase trees by 60% (6k)
• reduce surface parking, and all that assfault by 90% (-8600 sq.ft.)
• reduce the building foot print by 30% (-400k sq.ft.)

From:

To:

Evil Cisco?

(shocker...Not!) Network World reports on Bloomberg story about how Cisco is resorting on intimidation tactics to sell their product. ...never saw anything like that before... :)

The Art of the Start

How to present (or how to present your startup), by Guy Kawasaki.
part one, two, three, four.

You spent how much on that degree?!?!?

Anthony P. Carnevale, Jeff Strohl, and Michelle Melton from Georgetown University, put together a nice document outlining how much a degree is worth. There is also a nice article in the Chronicle of Higher Education reviewing it.

Fun things to do in a coffee shop...

Well... More related to Wifi, how to troubleshoot it, and maybe to hack it too.

• inSSIDer and ekahau for coverage maps
• Nice writeup on how to crack WEP, and another howto
• NeoPwn to let you crack from your cell phone, or how to get backtrack on your phone
  

Salman Khan: Let's use video to reinvent education

I've mentioned free online learning before, but here's a great TED talk with Salman Khan, about a brilliant method for integrating technology and learning.

VoIP != Secure

Cisco was concerned that Vomit was too difficult to run, so they made it a bit simpler to hack the phone system assuming that you deploy it with the out of the box configs. With IT shops known for liking their "IT Budget Tight and My Developers Stupid", this can only be a good thing!

Gaming...

Forget EA, how about Cat?

Caterpillar has a series of training games to help teach folks how to use their heavy equipment. It's not just he computer games (which seem cool enough), but it also includes these serious seating platforms. (few more monitors, and would be perfect for my new office!)

Check out the youtube video.. not sure about needing to ware a hardhat to play a video game..

Night Sky (photographed)

Nick Risinger is an astronomer who went nuts and decided to photograph ~all~ of the night's sky. (yea.. with no clouds) Well the end result is very cool, with a fantastic webpage that lets you pan and zoom of his huge mosaic photograph.

Notes from his website skysurvey.org:

The Photopic Sky Survey is a 5,000 megapixel photograph of the entire night sky stitched together from 37,440 exposures.

[...]

On a journey that covered 45,000 miles by air and 15,000 by land—the equivalent of nearly 2½ passes around the equator—I toured much of the American west and twice visited the western Cape of South Africa. Through it I was able to enjoy not only the wonders of the natural world but also the company of my retired father whom I was able to convince had nothing better to do

United Kingdom, Great Britain and England

Why does our 51st state still have the Queen on it's money? What's up with Ireland? (Are they part of UK or not?) Finally, someone explains what the difference between Great Britain and UK, and all the places that still worship the queen.

Hand writing makes you smarter?

Need more links for this one.. but:

• How writing by hand makes kids smarter. The Week, Oct 2010
• How Handwriting Trains the Brain: Wall Street Journal, Oct 2010
  

RIAA/MPAA

Slashdot pointed out a piece in the Harvard Business Review on how the “RIAA/MPAA: the Greatest Threat To Tech Innovation”. Amazon would certainly agree with this! (Note the illegal prime number)

GPS Jamming

David Hambling in New Scientist has a good read on how a $30 GPS jammer can screw just about everything up. Everything including the serious, like airports, to the odd, like ATM machine. GPS is so intertwined in our lives today, that one of these easy to get, very low power devices can do some major hosing. The cure? Bring back LORAN!

“The cost of setting [LORAN] up again would be a fraction of the cost of one GPS satellite, and there’s a total of 31 of them in orbit at the moment. So just for a, a very small extra expenditure it could make sure that that kind of catastrophe could be avoided.” [David Hambling]

Elsewhere:

• The Economist: No jam tomorrow (March 10, 2011)

• On the Media: How to Jam GPS (March 11, 2011)