Super-Kamiokande Neutrino detection facility, 1,000m underground in Hida City, Japan
Science is beautiful
Bullet traveling through air at about 1.5 times the speed of sound.
When a moving object breaks the sound barrier, a shock wave and often turbulence are created. In this image, the curved line at the nose of the bullet is a shock wave. Other shock waves can be seen alongside the bullet, and a turbulent wake trails behind it.
Credit: Andrew Davidhazy/Rochester Institute of Technology
Source: GALEX - Galaxy Evolution Explorer, link
Connecting Broadcast TV and the Web using a resolver « NoTube blog »
Interesting post on the technology behind connecting Broadcast TV and the Web.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, but I’d wager a large amount of cash that within 12 months we’ll have secondary devices (like, say, the rumoured IOS AppleTV) that will revolutionize the way we surf TV - it’s been a long time coming but connecting internet enabled devices with TV streams will happen, and I think it’ll happen very soon.
Whether it is Apple who are first out of the starting blocks (again I’ll wager it is an IOS AppleTV that really nails this) I forsee a TV that is aware of a ‘smart-remote’.
For Apple this is a cinch, get an Apple TV in the home and your various iPods, iPads and Laptop can all become large, smart, touch screen controllers.
noTube points out the reasons why…
“NoTube is about TV and the Web, and one aspect of this is connecting broadcast TV and the Web. This connection need not (and, we often argue, should not) manifest itself on the TV screen. It’s much more useful in most cases for audiences to have access to the Web on a second screen, such as a laptop, phone or tablet, because this avoids problems of on-screen clutter, co-watcher irritation, and laborious text entry.
For this second screen to be able to do interesting things such as provide more information about the programme, provide interactive applications, or interesting EPG navigation, it needs to be able to receive information about what is happening on the TV device.
For example, if the second screen is running a voting application for ‘Kittens do the cutest things’, where you can vote for your favourite clip, then the second screen needs to know what programme is playing, and which clip is showing.”
via Connecting Broadcast TV and the Web using a resolver « NoTube blog
Seriously… you heard it here first. AppleTV plus iPad = TV Surfing heaven.
Unless the rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new addictions, we’ll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to protect us. Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction—the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations—we’ll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how. It will actually become a reasonable strategy (or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect everything new.
—
Over the past 20 years of computer use I’ve gone through many cycles of addiction, from hours at a Prestel terminal in the library (the internet before the web), too spending weeks completing Gauntlet II on the Amiga, to Google, Wordpress, Tumblr and Twitter.
I’ve always been a bit of a care-free techno-utopian. Until very recently I’ve seen people like Dr Susan Greenfield as part of the old-guard, the old generation who’ll never ‘get it’.
Slowly, over just the last couple of years, I’ve been starting to look more carefully at Carr, Lanier and Greenfield, looking at their concerns a bit more seriously.
Paul Graham’s essay The Acceleration of Addictiveness is a great exploration of this theme and this quote especially captures the real issue…
As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don’t think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they’re made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.
This is how I imagine Buddhist mandalas
Remember what the dormouse said
Why don’t more books have trailers?
one last psytranimation
“Passion is the missing ingredient in most of the product out there”
AMEN!
Put This On, Episode 1: Denim (by Put This On)
A beautifully crafted “web-series about dressing like a grownup”. Follow America’s Sweetheart Jesse Thorn as he discovers a pair of $500 denim jeans. Some really touching moments in this interview and amazing insight into the craft of making denim.
How often should you wash denim?
Short answer: When they stink
Long answer: Start with raw jeans, turn inside out, put in hot bath for ~1hr. Wear for 6 months or they stink so bad you basically can’t handle it! Wash And… Repeat. Every month. Or as rarely as 3-6 months.
Happy Birthday Minimal Mac! »
HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR Minimal Mac HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU
If you have a Mac and like to keep it clean, simple and Zen-like in its operation then you are probably already following Minimal Mac.
If not. Do it today and receive sage-like advice on apps, desktops and workflows from here on in.
SRSLY MNML SRLY GD
Minimal Mac recently rounded the corner of it’s first year in existence. I think I can safely say that everything about it has exceeded my expectations, mostly because I really had none at the start. I thought I would come up with this little project that a few people might enjoy that discussed…
iPad, the handheld schoolhouse »
Mark Pesce, Australian writer, researcher, and teacher, on the iPad’s potential for what’s to come in education:
It’s not clear that computers as we know them today — that is, desktops and laptops — will be common in a decade’s time. They may still be employed in very specialized tasks. For almost everything else, we will be using our iPads. They’ll rarely leave our sides. They will become so pervasive that in many environments — around the home, in the office, or at school — we will simply have a supply of them sufficient to the task. …. You will be able to pick up any iPad and — almost instantaneously — the custom features which mark that device as uniquely yours will be downloaded into it.Now let’s imagine them in the hands of students everywhere:
No student, however poor, will be without their own iPad — the Government of the day will see to that. These students of 2020 are at least as well connected as you are, as their parents are, as anyone is. …. This is a world where the classroom walls have been effectively leveled by the pervasive presence of the network, and a device which can display anything on that network. This is a world where education can be provided anywhere, on demand, as called for. This is a world where the constructivist premise of learning-by-doing can be implemented beyond year two.Need some concrete examples? It happens:
Where a student working on an engine can stare at a three-dimensional breakout model of the components while engaging in a conversation with an instructor half a continent away. Where a student learning French can actually engage with a French student learning English, and do so without much more than a press of a few buttons. Where a student learning about the Eureka Stockade can survey the ground, iPad in hand, and find within the device hidden depths to the history. iPad is the handheld schoolhouse, and it is, in many ways, the thing that replaces the chalkboard, the classroom, and the library.Before closing, Mark reminds us that — just like children — we too learn by exploration. “The joy we feel when we play with our new toy is the feeling a child has when he confronts a box of LEGOs, or new video game — it’s the joy of exploration, the joy of learning. That joy is foundational to us. If we didn’t love learning, we wouldn’t be running things around here. We’d still be in the trees.” It took about four weeks for me. But as an iPad junkie myself (Uzu! Google Earth! Flipboard! Reeder! NPR!), I couldn’t agree more. I’m addicted to its possibility. Consider the classroom in your hand. Now go play.
[via, again]
Creative crowdsourced sideshow
“for this to work, space150 required the use of high-tech surveillance equipment and computer vision technology”
Bringing History Alive
Watching Simon Sharma’s ‘Britain’ last night I was really taken with his exuberance and placing the facts into the locations he was visiting — I’ve never noticed it before but I felt that there is a big difference between the narration/Ken Burns style and Sharma’s pointing and jiggling in front of the actual historical scene.
I’ve done a lot of Welsh castles in my time but the National Trust never really helped me to fill them with the stories. Seeing Sharma talk about the plight of the Welsh while standing in front of Conwy castle made me realise just how powerful a good story, embedded in it’s actual surroundings, can be.
This morning I stumbled across a collection of images showing ‘The Ghosts of World War II’ — and they produce exactly the same kind of feeling in me… the old photos have a power, but placed in a context I’m more familiar with they really bring the reality of war alive.
The Ghosts of World War II’s Past (20 photos) - My Modern Metropolis
