Thus shared scorpfromhell
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Mark Twain on “sponsored content” and “native advertising,” 1873.
It took at least 140 years to trump Paid media with Earned media. Or did we?
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How Bees and Butterflies See
Butterflies and bees can both sense pigments in the center of flowers that we can’t see. UV photography techniques pioneered by Klaus Schmitt and others capture this better than anything else I’ve seen. See how the center of the flower gets darker as the UV fades in? Bulls-eye.
And what’s up with the glowing butterfly?! Living in a UV world would be awesome, except for all the DNA damage to your retinas thanks to the unfiltered radiation.
Click here to watch the latest episode of It’s Okay To Be Smart for more on how bees and butterflies have evolved to see flowers in a new light. And subscribe! It’s free.
Cooool
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The future of glaciers
Entry for the project “Mathematics of Planet Earth” by Guillaume Jouvet, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Freie Univerisität Berlin, Germany.They can simulate the future, but how can they arrive at such complex simulation?
Watch the video -
This is where haptics can & should really excel until a time when sensory substitution can really bridge the gap between the real and the virtual for the normal people with no disability.
Le chal is a beautiful concept shoe where a voice enabled app on any GPS and Bluetooth enabled smartphone can be used to find the route to a destination and then, connected by bluetooth to the phone, the shoes provide directions to the blind user via vibrations. It also has sensors in the shoes to detect obstacles and warn the user via vibrations again.
Do watch the video to understand the concept better.
In the meantime I can only bemoan the toddlers in their sensitive period of development of the sense of touch who are given touch screen devices with vibration as a substitute for tactile feedback by their overzealous parents.As an article in Popular Science, a sponsored one at that, says:
“Vibration absolutely does not work with the human body,” says Steinberg. “The nerves lose track of which vibration is stronger and which one is weaker. All it does, over time, is aggravate you.”
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At its core, haptics is about machines communicating through touch, whether that means a joystick that grinds to a halt when the manipulator it’s commanding hits an obstacle, or a touch screen that buzzes with each tap on its virtual keyboard. Vibration is the most common form of haptic feedback, and the rattle of an incoming call on a silenced cell phone is its most common application.
“Vibration absolutely does not work with the human body,” says Steinberg. “The nerves lose track of which vibration is stronger and which one is weaker. All it does, over time, is aggravate you.”
The Sensitive Robot: How Haptic Technology is Closing the Mechanical Gap
And yet people keep giving their toddlers all sorts of touch devices, right when their sense of touch is developing. I only hope not much harm is perpetrated.
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Rhythms of starlight, melodies of astrophysics
Ever wondered what the music of the cosmos sounds like? You’re about to find out. Astrophysicist and TED Senior Fellow Lucianne Walkowicz works on the Kepler mission, looking at a patch of our galaxy to learn about stars and their planets. Here, she tells us how this is done:
Stars periodically appear brighter and darker on their own because they have bright and dark patches on their surfaces caused by the star’s magnetic field. As it spins, we see light fluctuate as the patches rotate into and out of view – and the frequency of the fluctuation tells us how fast it’s spinning. To make things a bit more complicated, stars don’t rotate exactly like tops, in that different latitudes on the star spin at different rates – so usually there are several frequencies in the star’s light, and they can change and drift in time.
I take the data and search for which frequencies are present at different times, then scale them to frequencies the human ear can hear, using a sine-wave generator. Then I create tones that change with time to represent how the frequencies in the star are changing. A first pass sounds like this: in each second of playback, you hear the three strongest frequencies in the star for a day of real time. As you listen, the sounds change as the frequencies change.
Then I do some additional processing to get the effect I want. Usually I want to capture some echo to convey a sense of vast space, and some blending between notes to convey the dynamic nature of the features on the star’s surface that are creating the changes in the star’s light.
In Powerful Protectors I’ve woven the sounds of two stars in with samples of Buddhist chanting around the world. The composition is about how people try to access deeper knowledge about our universe.
Source: ted.comMy son wanted to know what would be the sound we would hear in space if it could travel in vacuum too. I need to figure out how to explain this to an eight year old!
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Mark Twain on “sponsored content” and “native advertising,” 1873.
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