Shiny Things

10:03 am - Her Morning Elegance

This is perhaps the shiniest music video I've ever seen. bushi7 showed it to me before I got to it on the Reaction blog, and she had me drop everything and watch it with her right then. I'm glad she did. Wow.

05:29 am - MacBook Wheel

Maybe you've already seen this, but it was too awesome not to share. (Thanks, maerson !)

EDIT: Embedded video replaced with this link, because the video autoplayed even though it looked like it wasn't supposed to. Sorry.

09:37 am - For the Love of Pie

A fascinating article about the merits of pie over cake, with which I heartily agree.

Pie (in the name of love), by Vincent Rossmeier

05:24 am - Just Another Day on Sampsonia Way

What do you do when you find out beforehand that Google is coming to take Street View pictures? If you're Ben Kingsley and Robin Hewlett of Carnegie Mellon University, you draft your neighbors into making sure there are interesting things going on: a parade, a marathon, and a giant chicken, for example. Start your tour here.

09:13 am - Area Code Evolution

In a ongoing search for standards for displaying international telephone numbers (upshot: there pretty much aren't any), I stumbled upon this animated map that shows the change in distribution of US telephone area codes from 1947 to 2002. It's a fascinating display of the increase in telecommunications density.

There are lots of other interesting maps on the site. I apologize in advance for destroying reubeneater's productivity for the day.

10:30 am - The Itch

This is a link to an utterly fascinating article I found via the Made to Stick RSS feed. Warning: it's rather long, and kind of disturbing. But dang, it's fascinating.

The article reminds me of a thought I had long ago about image compression. I'd noticed that we currently use algorithms to compress the data in images while minimally reducing the quality of the image, so that when we compare the compressed image to the original, they appear to be more or less the same. But I also know that if I read the word "tree", the image of a tree appears in my mind, with no other visual cue. And when I look at a cartoon of a tree, I know it's supposed to be a tree, though most of the details are lacking. Obviously, my brain fills in the details with what I already know about trees. So I wonder if there's some way to use this to compress images even further: perhaps some algorithm, like a Photoshop filter, that converts an actual image to a cartoon image that's good enough for the viewer to perceive and fill in the rest of the details from his own brain. After all, even when I do have the original image, the truth is I don't usually perceive all of its details: I just look at enough of them to realize that it's a tree. Would something like this be useful in some way? I don't know. It's just a weird thought.

07:17 pm - Foodscapes

A colleague at work just sent me a Powerpoint file with foodscapes by Carl Warner. Warner is a British photographer who, among other things, makes landscapes out of food. To see them:

1. Go to http://www.carlwarner.com/
2. In the Flash window that pops up, select the orange square: FOTOGRAPHICS (you will have to allow popups).

01:16 pm - Rapid Game Development

My good pal Scotto linked to this article from his blog, and I thought it was so awesome that I'd link to it here too. I want to be able to find it again!

How to Prototype a Game in Under Seven Days: Tips and Tricks from 4 Grad Students Who Made Over 50 Games in 1 Semester

10:57 am - How Smell Works

I thought today's Straight Dope mail bag article was particularly interesting. I remember when I was pretty young a friend mentioned that he hated going into livestock barns, because he knew if he could smell the manure, manure molecules must be in the air and getting all over him. He was right.

I've wondered for some time if we would ever be able to mechanically reproduce smells the way we do with light and sound: perhaps something that releases samples from the seven primary odorant groupings (camphoric, musky, rose, peppermint, etherial, pungent, and putrid) could do a worthwhile but limited simulation, sort of like black & white TV does for vision. You'd have to periodically replenish the chemicals, I assume.

It was also interesting to me to learn that you can't actually smell metal, but smell instead the oxidated lipids upon them. Come to think of it, maybe that's why all metals seem to smell the same.

08:40 am - Squid Beaks

Scientists have apparently pondered for some time how a creature with no bones can use a hard, sharp beak without damaging itself. The answer: the chitinous material of the beak changes in density from the hard point to where it attaches to the rest of the squid, creating a protective cushion. This potentially has applications for human prosthetics. (Discovery News) Squids are nifty.

11:39 am - Cheaper Eyeglasses

Found today on 43folders.com: how to save money by ordering eyeglasses online.

This is something I'm sure I'll need to try out fairly soon. 

09:45 am - How Sewing Machines Work

I've wondered about this for years, but never thought to look it up until bushi7 and I were talking about it this morning. I think it came up because we were looking at old photos of my family and saw Mom's old sewing machine in the background. And we just watched Fiddler on the Roof this week.

How Sewing Machines Work (howstuffworks.com)

04:53 pm - Big Dog

I know I told all of you that I would no longer link to etre's Reaction blog, because you should all be subscribing yourselves, but this is so shiny that I can't help myself.

This video demonstrates Boston Dynamics' Big Dog, a robot that can "traverse uneven slopes, ice, snow banks and piles of bricks and can even withstand the occasional kick in the side to boot."

04:24 pm - Argyria

Today's Straight Dope article is about the practice of taking colloidal minerals as a homeopathic remedy. At the end of the article Cecil points out that taking colloidal silver can lead to a condition called argyria, in which the skin turns bluish gray.

I'm glad I read this, because a while back I happened to see a guy on Oprah (it was on in the breakroom: I wasn't watching it willingly) who had blue skin. I was fascinated, but I couldn't hear what they were saying, so I couldn't find out more. By looking up argyria in Wikipedia, I found a link to this article about him. 

07:13 pm - Prince Rupert's Drop

A nifty video bushi7 sent to me.

09:30 am - Chemistry Videos

bushi7 shared with me these nifty chemistry videos, selected by Wired. Things that impressed me:

1. Anyone who watches a show called "Brainiac" but thinks negative hundreds of degrees of liquid nitrogen will have any impact on positive thousands of degrees of thermite (duh).
2. How dangerous gummy bears can be.
3. How much I think follybard is going to love video #7.
4. Watching the brew in #6 change over and over again.
5. How funny the Wired science host is.
6. Finding out how chemical hand warmers work.
7. How hard a time my six-and-a-half-year-old computer is having with playing videos.

08:14 am - Apostrophe Trouble

People with surnames like O'Brien or Al-Kurd or van Campen are being forced to change them because of bad interface design and bad programming. This comes as no surprise to me, but it's good to be reminded of it.

05:51 am - Phun!

bushi7 showed me this demo movie last night for Phun, a free 2D physics playground, and I'm itching to start playing with it.

10:42 am - Alkali Metals in Water

Behind this link there's a video of people demonstrating the reactivity of various alkali metals with water, starting with lithium, sodium, and potassium, but including rubidium and cesium. Boom!

EDIT: Unfortunately, it's faked. Sad. Here's one that's not.

07:14 am - Photosynth demo at TED

Behind this link there's an amazing demonstration of digital photo imaging technology, especially the synthetic image of Notre Dame generated from thousands of individual photos on Flickr. Wonderful stuff.