Thus shared scorpfromhell

explore-blog: Mark Twain on “sponsored content” and “native...

Sat, 18 May 2013 02:33:57 +0530

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?

jtotheizzoe: How Bees and Butterflies See Butterflies and bees...

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 11:56:07 +0530

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

science-junkie: The future of glaciersEntry for the project...

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 09:50:27 +0530

science-junkie:

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...

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 08:43:00 +0530

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.”

"At its core, haptics is about machines communicating through touch, whether that means a joystick..."

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 08:26:36 +0530

“At its core, haptics is about machines communicating through touch, whether that means a...

There’s no homework in Finland

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 20:21:21 +0530

There’s no homework in Finland

Negative temperatures are hot!

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 08:45:35 +0530

Negative temperatures are hot!

science-junkie: Rhythms of starlight, melodies of...

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 06:59:23 +0530

science-junkie:

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.com

My 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!

Ubuntu for Tablets Now that is something I am willing to jump...

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 17:56:26 +0530

Ubuntu for Tablets

Now that is something I am willing to jump into, but unlike a PC I don’t know nothing about hacking phones or tablets.

Photo

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:14:28 +0530

fer1972: The 16th Avenue Tiled Steps Project via Bored...

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 21:41:50 +0530

fer1972:

The 16th Avenue Tiled Steps Project via Bored Panda

Just wow!

Seeing

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 09:15:26 +0530

Seeing

theatlantic: City Life Changes How Our Brains Deal With...

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 22:11:50 +0530

theatlantic:

City Life Changes How Our Brains Deal With Distractions

In an upcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, a group of British psychologists reports that people who live in cities show diminished powers of general attention compared to people from remote areas. With so much going on around them, urbanites don’t pay much attention to surroundings unless they’re highly engaging.

Instead, as the researchers put it, city dwellers have developed a form of attention that puts priority on “the search for potential dangers or new opportunities.”

Read more. [Image: Shutterstock]

I knew there had to be a downside to all the hype around urbanization for collaboration, innovation and what not.

Social CRM Mindmap from SFDC

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 09:24:08 +0530

Social CRM Mindmap from SFDC: This ‘mindmap’ web page from Salesforce.com tackles...

science-junkie: Why trees can’t grow taller than 100...

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 21:55:11 +0530

science-junkie:

Why trees can’t grow taller than 100 metres

TYPICALLY, the taller the tree, the smaller its leaves. The mathematical explanation for this phenomenon, it turns out, also sets a limit on how tall trees can grow.

Kaare Jensen of Harvard University and Maciej Zwieniecki of the University of California, Davis, compared 1925 tree species, with leaves ranging from a few millimetres to over 1 metre long, and found that leaf size varied most in relatively short trees.

Jensen thinks the explanation lies in the plant’s circulatory system. Sugars produced in leaves diffuse through a network of tube-shaped cells called the phloem. Sugars accelerate as they move, so the bigger the leaves the faster they reach the rest of the plant. But the phloem in stems, branches and the trunk acts as a bottleneck. There comes a point when it becomes a waste of energy for leaves to grow any bigger. Tall trees hit this limit when their leaves are still small, because sugars have to move through so much trunk to get to the roots, creating a bigger bottleneck.

Jensen’s equations describing the relationship show that as trees get taller, unusually large or small leaves both cease to be viable (Physical Review Letters, doi.org/j6n). The range of leaf sizes narrows and at around 100 m tall, the upper limit matches the lower limit. Above that, it seems, trees can’t build a viable leaf. Which could explain why California’s tallest redwoods max out at 115.6 m.

Source: New Scientist.
Images: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4.

A chirpy locust paid us a visit

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 21:31:51 +0530

A chirpy locust paid us a visit

jtotheizzoe: There Are Whales Alive Today That Are Older Than...

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 14:23:10 +0530

jtotheizzoe:

There Are Whales Alive Today That Are Older Than Moby Dick!

Eskimo hunters, whaling off the coast of Alaska, discovered 19th century stone and metal harpoon tips embedded in the blubber of bowhead whales. That means these relatives of humpbacks and other baleen whales were dodging harpoons as far back as the 1870’s!

Of course, Herman Melville published Moby Dick in 1851, so dating harpoons just means they were born sometime before 1879. Biologist Craig George decided to use a technique that measures certain protein chemistry in the whales eyes (basically as whales age, their eyes accumulate certain amino acids) to date them more accurately.

The result? There are likely bowhead whales out there that are more than 200 years old! That makes them older than any known tortoise, and perhaps the oldest animal on Earth! Check out more at Smithsonian.

They still don’t have anything on trees when it comes to age, though.

One surface folded in an endless möbius band. Floors transform...

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 12:30:41 +0530

One surface folded in an endless möbius band. Floors transform into ceilings, inside into outside. Production with innovative 3D printing techniques. Architecture of continuity with an endless array of applicability.

Printing liveable homes. We didn’t get flying cars, but this is no less cool!

“If you don’t control all levels of the human system you are...

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 12:01:43 +0530

“If you don’t control all levels of the human system you are at risk of poor performance or a loss of form. The Integrated Performance Model ensures we give you control of the real drivers of your success so you can deliver outstanding results every single day.”

Dr. Alan Watkins, CEO CCL

Watch his brilliant TEDx talk titled “Being Brilliant Every Single Day”

montessoriindia: Did you hate Maths at school? Had difficulty...

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 14:49:00 +0530

Timeless class

Pegboard

Long multiplication board

montessoriindia:

Did you hate Maths at school? Had difficulty understanding what those formulae meant?

With Montessori materials it is not just easy, but very interesting, fun and inviting too. Children below 6 years work with the binomial & trinomial formulae and understand the concept long before they even get started with algebra. Can you beat that? Have a look at this trinomial cube. Doesn’t it look colourful and inviting?

Don’t get it? Maybe this might help.