All the Best Bits

Our Whole New Look

2008-06-06T10:11:00.000-07:00

Check out the live beta of the new All the Best Bits web site! It should be more usable and accessible. We'll keep this site running as traffic picks up over at the new digs, but please do check it out and post comments at either blog to let me know what you think!

cheers,
-Phillip

San Francisco Bay Area from the ISS

2008-05-03T13:32:00.000-07:00

Here's a neat image of the Bay Area taken from the International Space Station. I particularly like the visible outflow from the receding tide through the Golden Gate as well as the visible colored salt ponds in the south bay.

In this photograph of the San Francisco Bay area taken from the International Space Station during Expedition 4, the gray urban footprint of San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and their surrounding suburbs contrasts strongly with the green hillsides. ISS004-E-10288 (April 21, 2002, 105 mm lens) Click on the image for full-resolution version.

Glass Frog

2008-04-05T20:50:00.001-07:00

MA Regional First Championships

2008-04-01T10:38:00.000-07:00

During my trip to Boston last week for the National Science Teacher's Association conference (more on that later) I totally lucked out in also catching the FIRST Robotics League Northeastern Regional Championships . If you haven't been to one, you simply must go. As remarkable as this sounds, there is almost certainly one in your area. It was AWESOME. There were more than 7,000 people in attendance in the Agganis Arena at Boston University to see the real deal, professionally produced and run, very well-organized, with pro announcers, cameramen and lighting.

Over forty teams of high school students were running robots that they built from nothing inside of 6 weeks to accomplish a VERY complicated challenge. They were so FANTASTIC that I am going to run out of superlatives before getting to the end of this post. The very idea that this organization has grown since 1992 to reach more than 13,000 schools across the US, and that there are 41 REGIONAL competitions before the upcoming late April finals in Atlanta is just incredible. Better yet, FIRST has clearly been very successful in perpetuating and growing a model that is self-sustaining, with many teams having competed for several years, with former FIRST team members returning to mentor their old team or going on to start new ones.

I managed to arrive just in time to watch the contest start up for the final day with a performance by the Blue Man Group, followed by the grand entrance of Woodie Flowers, the legendary MIT professor who founded FIRST, and before that was the originator of the famous MIT 2.70 and 6.270 robotics contests. Check out how these people LOVE him as he enters the arena using an interesting MIT spin-out technology called the Atlas Ascender (a self-contained box that allows rapid ascent as well descent.)

Woodie Rappelling - Boston Regional 2008.

The day began with the quarter-finals matches and I stayed through the final. The designs were quite varied, with the older more experienced teams (you could tell from the low team numbers below 100 that were granted years ago) clearly demonstrating that years of experience really helps in refining robust approaches to complicated problems. That said, even the rookie teams showed great creativity and incredible dedication and teamwork. Check out these photos of several of the robots.

The matches were real nail-biters with cheering and chants that rivaled any football game I had ever attended (except maybe the Chelsea Tottenham match in London). To see this leve of excitement and adulation usually reserved for sports and entertainment celebrities unleashed on students for engineering and innovation just warmed my heart. Something has been made right in the world.

Everyone I spoke with loved the experience and couldn't even imagine failing to participate next year. And as Steve Wozniak, one of the FIRST luminaries said, "There are lots of prizes and awards, and only one of them is for winning." Their hearts and minds are certainly in the right place.

Find out about your local FIRST events and sign up however you can, as a participant. mentor, coach, parent, whatever. You won't regret it.

Sneaking Out of the House to Build Robots

2008-03-30T12:47:00.000-07:00

My favorite story from the whole FIRST Northeastern Regional competition was revealed in the delivery of the "Woodie Flowers" award. Woodie, you see, is the MIT professor who founded FIRST with Dean Kamen of Segway fame, after starting the legendary 2.70 and later 6.270 robotics contests at MIT. In many ways, Woodie was responsible for my attendance at MIT, just as he has now been responsible for inspiring tens of thousands of aspiring technologists across the US through FIRST.

So in thanks and recognition, the Woodie Flowers Award is granted to the team mentor at each regional and final First contest that best exemplifies Woodie's spirit of contribution, teamwork, and inspiration.

Woodie Flowers and Elizabeth Carruthers

This year's recipient, Elizabeth Carruthers from the Columbus School for Girls, had a great story. As a high school student, her parents weren't all that supportive of the time and energy that FIRST demanded, so she had to sneak out of the house to work on her team's FIRST robot.

She was so committed to the program and her teammates, that when her parents caught her sneaking out, she told them that she was just going to "parties with her friends," which turned out to be okay with them. You see, they wanted her to be socially well-adjusted, and feared seeing their daughter turned into a nerd.

Given that she has now gone on to a technical undergraduate program, and returned to mentor her old high school's FIRST team (an all-girl's team, at that) into the regional finals, (a remarkable accomplishment that takes MANY more skills in communication and leadership and interpersonal relationships than just the technical ones) I'd say she's VERY well adjusted!

Congrats, Elizabeth. Our nation need more inspirations like you.

Shuttle and ISS

2008-03-25T19:38:00.001-07:00

Data Visualization for US Politics

2008-03-24T10:53:00.000-07:00

With the end of the primary season coming up this summer, I expect a resurgence of the talk about "red and blue states" that dominated the 2004 election as we approach the direct engagement of the Republican and Democratic parties. This morning, I stumbled on a great site by Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman from the University of Michigan that uses very nice cartographic representations of the last election results to better visualize the electorate.

Popular publications such as USA today published many maps of this sort showing the winner's party by county.

But this graphical representation fails to take into account either the population density, electoral votes by county, or how close the vote was. If you process the map topology and scale each county to represent electoral votes, and color the vote results as a continuous scale from red to blue with even results represented as a mixed color of purple, the result is much more interesting.

Rather than the stark red/blue divide of the trivial map above, a more representative view of our nation deemphasizes sparsely-populated geographies with little economic impact and highlights those regions driving tomorrow's economy. We also look like a much more homogeneous purple nation in this view.

Interestingly enough, in the economic-political view, the most politically homogeneous regions are the blue counties where economic development is the strongest.

Check out the whole site here.

Time-Lapse Video of Retreating Glacier

2008-03-24T10:47:00.000-07:00

For all you climate change skeptics, check out this time-lapse video of the Columbia glacier near Valdez Alaska from National Geographic (click through for full res version.)

From the Nat Geo page:

This remarkable image sequence captures a series of massive calving events at Columbia Glacier near Valdez, Alaska. Composed of 436 frames taken between May and September of 2007, it shows the glacier rapidly retreating by about half a mile (1.6 kilometers), a volume loss of some 0.4 cubic miles (1.67 cubic kilometers) of ice or 400 billion gallons (1.5 trillion liters) of water.

The time-lapse was taken as part of the ongoing Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), an ambitious project to capture global warming-induced glacial retreat in the act. Beginning in December 2006, photographer James Balog and his colleagues set up 26 solar-powered cameras at glaciers in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, the Alps, and the Rocky Mountains. Each unit will take a photograph every daylight hour until fall 2009.

In 2008, Balog's team began to return to each of the camera sites to collect images. In the end, they will have more than 300,000 images to analyze and stitch together to produce more dramatic videos like this one.

This kind of multiyear effort, says Balog, is necessary to "radically alter public perception of the global warming issue."

Aurora from ISS

2008-03-24T08:19:00.001-07:00

While docked and onboard the International Space Station, a STS-123 Endeavour crew member captures the glowing green beauty of the Aurora Borealis March 21, 2008. Looking northward across the Gulf of Alaska, over a low pressure area (cloud vortex), the aurora brightens the night sky. This image was taken on March 21, 2008 at 09:08:46 GMT, credit-Reuters.

Most Children Left Behind

2008-03-23T09:58:00.000-07:00

Just last week, I had a chance to hear a presentation by Alfie Kohn, one of the more (in)famous progressive education proponents, on the perils of emphasizing achievement and performance over engagement in a subject. Besides being an enthusiastic and engaging speaker, Alfie made a number of great points that really resonated with me regarding the damage a national obsession with standardized testing and assessment has wreaked on the quality of education at large. (We coincidentally follow most of Kohn's recommendations in how we operate the WISE labs and programs...)

His central point on this topic was that by focusing so much school and parental attention on HOW students are doing instead of on WHAT they are doing and WHY, the very effort assessment has a now reasonably well proven effect of focusing the student's attention on external validation from teachers and grades instead of on the actual subjects under study. The result, according to the many cited research articles, is that students lose intrinsic motivation and interest in the very subjects around which we really hope to instill a lifelong love of learning. It didn't take much effort to extend the notions not only to grades and class rank, but even further to parenting techniques and practices as well.

And of course, the "No Child Left Behind" legislation, already the whipping boy of education Illuminati nationwide, took a severe beating in the process. One of my favorite moments in his talk was when he impersonated our current President and Senator Ted Kennedy complete with accents in their "misguided support in passing the law." It didn't take much looking around online to find pretty strong independent evidence in support of what Mr Kohn has been saying for years on this topic. My favorite articles came from Rice University and the NY Times.

The Rice/UT study was particularly sobering, not just for its striking revelations surrounding the duplicity of the Texas public school system's reporting, but because it was this very public school system's approach that was used to promote and establish the model for the national NCLB legislation. In the study entitled "Avoidable Losses: High Stakes Accountability and the Dropout Crisis" McNeil, Coppola, and Radigan of Rice University basically stripped the clothes right off the emperor.

Until recently, the GOP held out the "Texas Miracle" program as a model for national education reform with improving scores and an astonishingly low dropout rate of less than 3%. According to this paper, however, when researchers actually investigated how many high school students actually graduated within 5 years (not even the hoped for four-year tenure) the answer was a horrifyingly low 33%. Yes, 33%. I'll say it again, because I didn't believe it the first two times I read it either. Fewer than 33% percent of entering public high school students in Texas graduate within 5 years.

Needless to say, this doesn't quite match up with the public accounting of dropout rates the state has been touting for the last few years. When challenged, the state sheepishly admitted,

"The discrepancy between the official dropout rates, in the 2 to 3 percent range, and the actual rates can be attributed to the state's method of counting, which does not include students who drop out of school for reasons such as pregnancy or incarceration or declare intent to take the GED sometime in the future."

Duh. As if they didn't know that their purposefully and carefully chosen metric diverged so widely from the stated goals of the program. "Oh. You mean you want us to count ALL the dropouts?" And the real results?

"A new study by researchers at Rice University and the University of Texas-Austin finds that Texas' public school accountability system, the model for the national No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), directly contributes to lower graduation rates. Each year Texas public high schools lose at least 135,000 youth prior to graduation -- a disproportionate number of whom are African-American, Latino and English-as-a-second-language (ESL) students.

By analyzing data from more than 271,000 students, the study found that 60 percent of African-American students, 75 percent of Latino students and 80 percent of ESL students did not graduate within five years. The researchers found an overall graduation rate of only 33 percent.

"High-stakes, test-based accountability doesn't lead to school improvement or equitable educational possibilities," said Linda McSpadden McNeil, director of the Center for Education at Rice University. "It leads to avoidable losses of students. Inherently the system creates a dilemma for principals: comply or educate. Unfortunately we found that compliance means losing students."

In the effort to improve scores, MOST children, 67% of them in fact, are being left behind. My personal belief has been for years that we KNOW there is a problem already, and more testing will not fix the problem. Further, it won't even tell us anything we don't already know. In reality, the effect is even more damaging than I could have possibly imagined.

This was exactly one of the key points Mr. Kohn was making writ large across an entire state with unforgivable effects on the lives of millions of children across the nation, particularly impacting minorities. Don't take my word for it, and don't think I have even begun to cover all the deleterious effects of the assessment obsession that Kohn describes with heartrending insight. Read the whole report here.

If all of the references on Alfie Kohn's site and the Rice/UT report weren't enough to really depress you, or if maybe the paper was a little too academic for you, check out last week's article from the NY Times entitled, "State's Data Obscure How Few Finish High School." It basically exposes more of the same sort of accounting fraud. Here is the acompanying graphic from the article.

This educational assessment disaster is yet another very good reason to strongly consider replacing the current republican administration so that we might quickly halt the spread of this cancer that is strangling our nation's future.

Even more importantly, don't be fooled that the testing is good for your own kids, much less for the minority kids down the street.

Live 3D Graphics With Excel

2008-03-07T07:32:00.000-08:00

Every time I get a chance to watch one of our finance folks over at MobiTV wield a spreadsheet, I learn some new tricks. Those financial analysis folks steeped in the arcane features of Excel seem to be able to make the software package produce ever more astounding and useful models of increasingly complex systems.

But this one takes the cake. Check out this really cool implementation of a 3D graphics rendering engine. IN EXCEL! Peter Rakos over at Gamasutra outdid himself.

This image and video pair shows the rendering system using a simple display that colors the native Excel spreadsheet cells as the calculations are being performed.

This image and video pair shows the same program using the Microsoft Office Graphics Abstraction Layer to do the rendering instead of using writes to the spreadsheet cell.

Even better, some of the spatial layout and cell computation models of spreadsheets turn out to be very useful in designing and presenting very compact and elegant representations of the rendering pipeline. This design and layout in the 2-D spreadsheet grid is massively easier to see and understand than all the simple linear text files that I coded up in my college graphics course. It also makes the interrelationships and cell/function dependencies immediately obvious, and debugging is trivial with live previews of the calculations while the program is running. High cool.

"The yellow color marks the user-defined parameters and green color indicates the engine-calculated values. Numbered areas contain the following data:

Parameters of the perspective projection
3D coordinates of the objects' points (relative to their center)
Shift and rotation matrix (further details can be found e.g. at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_projection)
Parameters of the rotation
3D absolute coordinates of the points after the shift and rotation
2D coordinates of the points after the perspective projection
Screen coordinates of the points
End points of the objects' edges
Formula of an element in the shift and rotation matrix. Simplicity and compactness are clearly visible."

Now I don't think anyone currently expects this to evolve into a real 3D simulation system, but it does point to some very interesting 2D layout programming paradigms that might very well turn out to be VERY useful in developing more complex software. It wouldn't surprise me if the professional code development environments evolve towards this sort of thing within the next few years. And of course, 3D environments are just a step away.

And I have a whole new animation tool for my next presentation!

Check out the whole post here.

Earth As Seen From Mars

2008-03-05T06:26:00.000-08:00

Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

The Last Twelve Lunar Eclipses

2008-03-01T08:10:00.000-08:00

Here's a nice montage of the 12 most recent Lunar eclipses from APOD. Click on the image for a higher-res version.

Twelve Lunar Eclipses
Credit Tunç Tezel (TWAN)

Explanation: Welcome to the extra day in the Gregorian Calendar's leap year 2008! To celebrate, consider this grid of lunar eclipse pictures - starting in leap year 1996 and ending with February's eclipse - with the date in numerical year/month/day format beneath each image. Mostly based on visibility from a site in Turkey, the 3x4 matrix includes 11 of the 13 total lunar eclipses during that period, and fills out the grid with the partial lunar eclipse of September 2006. Still, as the pictures are at the same scale, they illustrate a noticeable variation in the apparent size of the eclipsed Moon caused by the real change in Earth-Moon distance around the Moon's elliptical orbit. The total phases are also seen to differ in color and darkness. Those effects are due to changes in cloud cover and dust content in the atmosphere reddening and refracting sunlight into Earth's shadow. Of course, the next chance to add a total lunar eclipse to this grid will come at the very end of the decade.

For another nice series of images highlighting the Moon's libration (wobble and variation in orbit ) see my related post entitled "Our Constant Moon?"

Abstinence-only Driver's Ed

2008-02-29T07:08:00.000-08:00

Don't miss reading this link at McSweeny's. Hilarious.

We Are What We Drink

2008-02-26T06:22:00.000-08:00

Cerling and Ehleringer over at the University of Utah just published a paper in the online journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" describing their new forensic technique, which uses Hydrogen and Oxygen isotope concentrations from local water tables in your hair to determine where you have spend your time.

The two maps here show predicted average hydrogen (top) and oxygen (bottom) isotope levels in human hair across the continental United States -- isotopes that vary with geography because of different isotope levels in local drinking water. The ratios of heavy, rare hydrogen-2 to lighter, common hydrogen -1 are highest in red and orange areas in the top map, and lowest in the blue and darker green areas. The ratios of heavy, rare oxygen-18 to lighter, common oxygen-16 are highest in red and orange areas of the bottom map, and lowest in the blue and darker green areas. Credit: University of Utah

“You can tell the difference between Utah and Texas,” Ehleringer says. But, Cerling adds, “You may not be able to distinguish between Chicago and Kansas City.”

So in case you're considering a life of crime, you might want to

Consider a new bald or buzz-cut look so the encoded travel history you carry along with you is limited.
Drink only bottled water
Shelve any green tendencies and eat at only imported meat and produce.

Lunar Eclipse Tonight

2008-02-20T11:40:00.000-08:00

Don't miss tonight's Lunar Eclipse. Otherwise you'll have to wait at least three more years to see another one.

More details at NASA.

Aqua Forest Aquariums in SF

2008-02-17T14:54:00.000-08:00

If you happen to live in the area, and have the slightest interest in fresh-water aquaria, don't miss this amazing store in San Francisco.

Read my whole review of the field and the store complete with more images at the WISE student blog where we're helping schools learn how to set up these incredible balanced micro-ecosystems.

New WISE Web Site Launched

2008-02-17T14:28:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

We just launched the new web site for the Westminster Institute for Science Education [W.I.S.E.]. Click on the logo below to check it out, including the links to the student and teacher blogs. Comments and suggestions welcome!

Oh yes, and for any of you wealthy philanthropists or corporate titans with a hankering to invest in nationwide science, math, or technology education reform, donations are encouraged! Just email or message me, or post a comment here on "All the Best Bits."

How Grandma Sees the Remote

2008-02-17T08:51:00.000-08:00

via Gizmodo.

"Teach Like Your Hair's On Fire" Book Review

2008-02-07T10:31:00.001-08:00

If any of you need just the littlest bit of inspiration in your roles as teachers, mentors, or students or perhaps if you are a parent looking for that perfect school for your kids, I can strongly recommend Rafe Esquith's book entitled "Teach Like Your Hair is On Fire."

Even halfway through the book, I found myself wishing I could get my daughters into a class like Room 56 at Hobart Elementary. Several chapters actually choked me up a little and seriously redoubled my motivations to make WISE a success. And the stories went on, and on, and on, and on to the point where it seemed almost impossible that so many incredibly cool things could be happening in one class under a single teacher. By the time I was finished with the quick read I realized that it is a passing rare teacher that can give so much of themselves to their students.

Esquith demonstrates an almost pathological level of commitment to his students. But a couple of other critical traits show through the anecdotes. Esquith has an innate sense of very high standards across a very broad range of disciplines, coupled with both humility and initiative that in combination are more rare than hen's teeth. His humility reveals itself with a wry self-awareness and a willingness to critically evaluate where his skills and efforts fall short of his exceptional standards. The initiative comes into play when he realizes his failings and takes steps to find true experts and recruit them to support his cause. All of that combined with a work ethic most Protestants would find over-the-top makes for a magical classroom experience and students who regularly return after decades.

After succumbing to my recommendation, me wannabe-teacher wife's major comment was, "I'm not sure I could give that much to my students. How would my own kids feel when so abandoned? That said, she read the book over a single night, and came away with the feeling "I would TOTALLY have LOVED that in 5th grade." An excellent read indeed. I wonder if there is any way to get seats for the play.

From the book's back cover:

“Rafe Esquith is my only hero.”
—Sir Ian McKellan

“Politicians, burbling over how to educate the underclass, would do well to stop by Rafe Esquith’s fifth grade class as it mounts its annual Shakespeare play. Sound like a grind? Listen to the peals of laughter bouncing off the classroom walls.”
—Time

“Esquith is a modern-day Thoreau, preaching the value of good work, honest self-reflection, and the courage to go one’s own way.”
—Newsday

Get it here on Amazon.

Dean Kamen's Prosthetic "Luke" Arm

2008-02-05T17:12:00.000-08:00

What a technical home run. If you need any more motivation to engage in cool robotics projects, just check out the reaction when the test subject figures out he can feed himself for the first time in 26 years. That's social impact. From the IEEE Spectrum site.

Do Your Civic Duty

2008-02-05T08:35:00.000-08:00

Decisions are made by those who show up. So go and cast your vote without delay. Our country's future depends on you.

And as long as you are planning to vote, I'd like to put in a plug for the candidates who support those areas of science, technology, and education that will form the foundation of our future economy.

If you are in any doubt as to which candidates are looking towards the future, just visit these links that the American Association for the Advancement of Science has established to review the science and technology policies of each of the leading candidates.

Hillary Clinton
Barack Obama
John McCain
Mitt Romney

Without making any specific plugs, let's just say that the Republican party has not been kind to science in the last eight years, and it would be good for this country to realize significant revitalization in those areas. Vote for science and our future!

Kindle Review

2008-01-27T06:29:00.000-08:00

I have seen the future of books, and it is the Kindle. Or maybe Kindle rev. 2 will be anyway.

Having witness the repeated failure of several electronic book efforts in the past, I was pessimistic. But now I believe. Amazon's new approach to the electronic book has successfully tackled several of the key barriers that stymied earlier efforts with a very well-executed end-to-end service on top of an aggressive device design. And while there are still a few warts on the Kindle typical of most first-generation consumer electronics products, it is clearly pointing to a very interesting future.

As an avid reader with an extensive personal library of fiction, non-fiction, and technical books (as the numerous bookshelves scattered about the house and the 40 boxes of books in my garage will attest) the idea of forgoing the heft and ease of browsing and reference was a daunting one. And yet, I acknowledge having suffered under challenges of managing both the library and the habit, particularly while traveling. I have come to resign myself to allocating at least 10-12 pounds of luggage space to carry the books and magazines necessary to fuel a week-long trip when I might not otherwise have time to stop at a book store on the way.

So when the Kindle emerged, bolstered by the ~90,000 title library, I was intrigued. So I convinced a friend of mine with a similar early-adopter bent to loan me one for a couple weeks while I traveled in Europe and the US. I hoped to be able to load it up before traveling abroad, and so save some weight. I anticipated a few primary areas of potential concern surrounding usability, ergonomics, and the image quality and readability of the E-ink display.

The integrated 3-G wireless system (using Sprint's 3G CDMA network, which while fine in the US, fails to roam internationally---so I had to load it up while in the US before leaving the country.) was already pre-provisioned on the device and linked to my Amazon account, which made it completely trivial to download half a dozen books from various best-seller and "New and Noteworthy" type lists, and a built in search feature made it equally trivial to purchase a couple more esoteric science fiction titles for some brain candy. The wireless service, while not competitive with my snappy broadband connection at home, was perfectly adequate to the task of downloading the books, and had generally delivered ordered titles within about 10 seconds. But mostly, it just worked. I also purchased copies of The NY Times, SF Chronicle, Washington Post, WSJ, SJ Merc. News, Time Magazine, and the Atlantic Monthly. In the purchase process, I found the magazine library to be the most limited, but I did like the push-delivery feature of both the newspapers and the magazines, where subscriptions are automatically delivered to the device. It was nice not to have to stop by the news stand on the way to the plane. The stuff was just on the device without having to worry about it.

Even before I got on the plane, I was feeling pretty good about storing all the books, papers and mags on the 10 ounce Kindle, and enjoying the uncharacteristically light heft of my luggage. And I was feeling greener than ever when I realized how much paper I had just avoided purchasing, along with the fact that there was going to be no land-fill impact from my reading addiction, and perhaps even some jet fuel savings as well (there was a great article not to long ago on how one airline had saved something like $230 million in fuel expenses the first year they instituted a policy of removing as many magazines as possible from the planes between flights.). The titles were also about 1/3 the retail price of the books.

A couple quick mental calculations were illuminating. In terms of personal cost, even at the hefty early-adopter price of $399 for the Kindle electronics, at my rate of reading, because the electronic versions were significantly discounted from the paper versions burdened with production and shipping costs (magazines were roughly 1/4 to 1/5 the paper price and books were between 1/3 and 1/2 the paper price), I would recover the cost of the device purchase inside of 2 months. Yes. I read A LOT.

Moreover, I realize that in terms of potential national impact, if everyone in the US went electronic just in their newspaper habits, i.e. if everyone received their newspapers via Kindle instead of having them printed on paper and delivered to their door, the savings in fuel costs for distribution alone would likely fulfill the nation's obligations under the Kyoto accord. And there would obviously be further green benefits from leaving all the trees standing to help sequester more CO2. (My wife is probably having heart palpitations at the prospect of a greener husband.)

Yes, yes, sorry about the green diversion. Back to books and reading. My first flight with the device, a one-stopper from SFO to Zurich, was a resounding success. The size and overall form-factor of the device made reading books and flipping pages easier than with the real thing. Newspapers became manageable even in the cramped airplane seating which would otherwise require much folding, refolding, and apologizing the neighbors. I didn't even utter the obligatory curses when the person in front of me slammed their seat back up under my chin.

Even though, the E-ink screen re-write was slow (about 600 ms) compared to LCD panels, it was still faster and easier to click the button your thumb was resting on than to flip a real paper page. The screen resolution is fantastic, and the text is very readable even at the smallest font size, which makes an electronic book mimic a regular paperback in terms of words-per-page. The contrast could be better (only about 100:1 because the high-res black text sits on a background that is gray rather than white), but in the proper diffuse lighting (standard plane lamps were fine) I had no difficulties whatsoever even with my aging eyes. The fact that the display appears to be only black and white with no grayscale limits picture rendering to dithered images. So I think there are going to be delays in the transition for many media that are more image dependent, like Wired, or Cosmo, say, but the model clearly works for most text-centric media, and it is simply a matter of time until future generations of the device/service expand to support the entire industry.

After using the device all week in Switzerland, and making the return flight to the US without having had to recharge the unit even once, I said a short mental eulogy to the paper books and magazines. Their days are numbered. From now on, I'll be doing as much reading on the Kindle and its progeny as possible. In several years, I might not even need a bookshelf anymore. How about that? An electronic gadget that enhances Feng Shuei!

==========================
Here are a few observations on things that should, and will likely, improve in subsequent versions of the product.

1.) There are too many next and previous page buttons, and their current positioning makes them too easy to press accidentally. There is no easy and obvious way to hold the device or hand the device to someone without advancing a page unless you are REALLY careful. Smaller and fewer buttons, placed on the front of the device where thumbs naturally rest would be sufficient.

2.) The current buttons look designed to be really cheap and simple to manufacture, but are open to dirt and look easy to break off with rough or extended use because of overhangs at the device edge and open gaps between the buttons and the overall device chassis. Future versions should take note of lessons from the mobile phone industry which now have closed single-membrane front faces or continuous touch screens with no gaps for dirt or mechanical failure.

3.) I would have preferred a slightly larger screen, along with the possibility of having that extra horizontal and vertical real estate potentially reduce the thickness or depth of the device.

4.) A simple anti-reflection coating on the front surface of the e-ink panel would substantially improve the display performance and readability with more specular lighting.

5.) the qwerty keyboard would benefit from being virtual on a larger touch-screen display, because you really only use it in the purchase phase, and not at all while reading, which is how you spend the majority of usage time. It would be nice if it could go away when you're not using it. I realize, however, that the current E-Ink display is too slow to offer UI feedback, so some development will be necessary there.

6.) The power and wireless buttons need to be moved to the front or sides of the device. It's a pain in the ass to have to flip the unit over to find the buttons.

7.) While the white plastic unit case does evoke the color of a regular book page, it also collects dirt and smudges from being in a briefcase. And while it does come with a leather cover, my inclination was to discard it because of the extra size and weight it adds. Again, lessons from the cellular phone and PDA industry would be instructive regarding enhanced metallic and textured finishes that are more attractive and wear better at little additional cost.

8.) The overall UI design was generally utilitarian, but clearly suffers from the slow update rate of the E-ink display. Menus take too damn long to load because they require a complete screen re-write cycle. There is a clever hack using a small PDLC display and scroll wheel on the side of the main display, but it is clearly a hack. I would recommend looking at figuring out how to do partial screen refreshes at faster update rates, i.e. only re-write the menu window to see if there isn't some way to speed that up. (the current version seems to gray-out the contents in the main window to forward the menu, but I think there might be a better trade-off in leaving the background and speeding up the menu refresh to improve navigation. This would be a nice area to explore in conjunction with making a virtual keyboard using a touch-screen interface.

9.) Regarding the e-book format, it would be nice to have this be an open format that I could read on any device. While I don't expect my laptop battery to over a competitive platform to well-designed Kindle-type tablet for extended reading sessions, I would love to have electronic reference books available for my laptop.

=================

Keep in mind here, that I'm notably particular about gadget design, and that even with these first-generation flaws, I think the device is a winner. I'm definitely looking forward to the next revision. In summary, if you're a casual or infrequent reader, I'm not sure this is a device or service for you. But for the avid reader, particularly you mobile ones, don't wait. Get one now.

Flagging Economy Needs Science Investments

2008-01-23T07:23:00.000-08:00

A very topical Op-Ed piece from Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle by Intel Chairman Craig Barrett. I liked it so much I include it in its entirety here.

Flagging Economy Needs Science Investments

Craig Barrett

Sunday, January 20, 2008
"Two years ago, the National Academies published the seminal study on U.S. competitiveness entitled "Rising Above the Gathering Storm." The study identified major shortcomings in U.S. investments in basic scientific research as well as in math and science education for our youngsters. The suggestions contained in this study were immediately picked up by the Democratic House Leadership as their competitiveness strategy and later by President Bush in his State of the Union message under his American Competitiveness Initiative. Legislation in the form of the America Competes Act was passed in the House and Senate in 2007, and it appeared the United States was finally going to move forward after years of neglect to increase investment in math, science and basic research. All parties agreed that our competitiveness in the 21st century was at stake and we needed to act.

So much for political will.

The recent budget deal between Republicans and Democrats effectively flat-funds or cuts funding for key science agencies. Excluding "earmarks," the Department of Energy funding for fiscal year 2008 is up only 2.6 percent, thus losing ground to inflation. The National Science Foundation is up 2.5 percent, with the same result. The National Institute of Standards and Technology is up 11 percent, however the labs where research happens only get 2.3 percent, again losing ground to inflation. Key national laboratories, such as the Fermilab, which focuses on high-energy particle physics research, face the likelihood of hundreds of jobs being lost and the closing of some facilities, helping to shortchange defense research. Predicting the impact of such funding cuts in basic research on future job creation is difficult. Who could have predicted a $300 billion semiconductor industry from the invention of a transistor? But our kids who are heading to college are very smart. They will make their career decisions based on where they see the priorities of our government and economy.

The funding decisions on the America Competes Act took place a few days after Congress passed a $250 billion farm bill. In the eyes of our political leaders, apparently, corn subsidies to Iowa farmers are more important for our competitiveness in the next century than investing a few billion in our major research universities. The president expressed his happiness with the budget and Sen. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, said, "The president didn't get his priorities, we got ours."

At a time when the rest of the world is increasing its emphasis on math and science education (the most recent international tests - NAEP and PISA - show U.S. kids to be below average) and increasing their budgets for basic engineering and physical science research, Congress is telling the world these areas are not important to our future. At a time when we are failing our next generation of students, politically charged topics such as steroids in Major League Baseball and the destruction of CIA interrogation tapes command instantaneous congressional hearings while the seed corn (no pun intended) of our future is ignored and placed lower in priority than billions of dollars of earmarks.

Perhaps this would all be a moot discussion if we could continue to import the best and brightest minds from around the world to start and staff our next generation of high tech startups. But Washington can't even get that strategy straight, as legal immigration - the process by which bright, highly educated workers immigrate to the United States - is being choked by our inability to control illegal immigration. While the EU has proposed a simplified and expanded program for importing highly educated talent from the rest of the world, we continue to make if more difficult for the same talent to work in the United States, even when some of these knowledge workers have received their education in the United States at partial taxpayer expense.

Where are the voices in Washington to bring reasoned debate and action to these topics? Where are the voices among the presidential candidates to propose solutions to these challenges? What do we elect our political leaders for if not to protect our long-term future?

The United States stands at a pivotal point in our history. Competition is heating up around the world with millions of industrious, highly educated workers who are willing to compete at salaries far below those paid here. The only way we can hope to compete is with brains and ideas that set us above the competition - and that only comes from investments in education and R&D. Practically everyone who has traveled outside the United States in the last decade has seen this dynamic at work. The only place where it is apparently still a deep, dark secret is in Washington, D.C.

What are they thinking? When will they wake up? It may already be too late; but I genuinely think the citizenry of this country wants the United States to compete. If only our elected leaders weren't holding us back.

Craig Barrett is the chairman of Intel."

Twinkle Twinkle Little Variable Stars

2008-01-09T08:23:00.000-08:00

My astrophysics professors always TALKED about variable stars and how particularly important the Cepheid and RR Lyrae variables have been in helping establish interstellar and intergalactic distance scales. They would show "Light Curve" graphs like this one from McMaster University in Canada that depicted the changes in stellar brightness over time.

I realized intellectually, that many of the variable stars had periods on the order of a day and rather large changes in magnitude, but for some reason, nobody had taken any decent movies to really highlight the ubiquity or true visual impact of these stars. But contrast this traditional static image of the M3 Globular Cluster

with this relatively recent four-frame movie take by Krzysztof Stanek and Andrew Szentgyorgyi over the course of one night in 1998 on the 1.2 m. telescope at F.L. Whipple Observatory in Arizona.

Wow. That really gets the idea of variable stars across. And now with the temporal information across field of view, you start to notice other things that weren't obvious before, and that leads to new questions such as, "...so why to several of the stars separated by many light years seem to flash in synchrony? What is the mechanism for synchronization?"

If you like that action, you'll love what the forthcoming LST telescope will turn out. Stay tuned for more.

Images courtesy (APOD)

Politicians Speaking in Code

2008-01-09T07:09:00.000-08:00

Who says encryption is only for mathematicians, geeks, or credit card transactions?

Generally, I am used to politicians dodging questions they are asked while trying to "stay on message" to push their specific agenda. But there seems to be a new trend in political communication of sending "secret" messages to core constituent groups that are very strategically and specifically encoded or worded so as to not put-off others outside of that core group. Otherwise they might otherwise seek alternative candidates if directly confronted with an open message. And I really do mean code, as in encrypted messages that only those who have, or figure out, the appropriate key can understand. My favorite recent example was pointed out to me by Josh Marshal and his blog readers.

One of Mike Huckabee's core campaign messages this season is that he thinks America needs "Vertical Politics" rather than "Horizontal Politics," and a "Vertical Thinker" for its next President. Here are a couple of examples from his speeches and his web site.

Being reasonably well-informed politically, this sort of verbiage didn't even register with me as anything unusual or even noteworthy. It didn't appear to me as anything more than a typical no-content type positioning statement much like "We need change," or "The urgency of now." (More on this last code later).

But it turns out there was a very important message embedded in what sounded, at first blush, to be otherwise meaningless positioning verbiage. I, however, being outside of the core group of intended recipients, did not have the key to decrypt the secret message. If you happen to be an evangelical Christian, or a faithful church-going Baptist, you probably already know what Mr. Huckabee is talking about because you have the key to his secret code. "Vertical Thinking" has become part of the common evangelical vernacular (see here on "Vertical vs. Horizontal Thinking" and here at the "www.verticalthought.org" blog for explanations and the general philosophy).

The real message turns out to be a very clear statement to those "informed" that the US as a whole would be better off with a leader who holds God as the origin of all inspiration, morality, and, well, everything, and uses that to guide his leadership. This is in contrast to "Horizontal Thinking" wherein man figures things out without looking to God; it is this "Horizontal Thinking," according to Huckabee, which has gotten the US into so much trouble.

Now it's certainly true that Mr. Huckabee has been completely open about his history as Baptist minister, and I have to say that in the end, the message is completely consistent with his background. And I have nothing against any candidate who would clearly state a religious political agenda. But I find the wording that was so clearly calculated to pass innocuously beneath the notice of the unaligned moderates while still reassuring the faithful to be both a stroke of genius and rather insidious at the same time. It demonstrates a realization that if his agenda were completely out in the open, and the candidate were forced to speak clearly and openly without obfuscating their position in order to placate a conflicted constituency (i.e. the evangelical vs. fiscal republican bases) they could not actually garner winning support.

In all fairness, Huckabe isn't the only politician speaking in code. Sean over at Cosmic Variance pointed out Obama's "Urgency of Now" type code words taken straight from the civil rights movement.

My personal preference would be to support a candidate who is completely open in his communication, without depending on codes or secret messages decipherable only be specific constituent groups. I want to understand what other constituencies I might be supporting inadvertently by supporting someone like Huckabee, and where their agendas differ from my own.

I would also prefer that a candidate support such "horizontally" conceived issues such as stem cell research, family planning strategies based on real historical performance data and research, support for abatement of climate change. Lately, I have begun to contrast candidates who look backwards through tradition and religious adherence, and favor candidates who will openly accept the world as it is based on open scientific inquiry and look forward to how things might be. Is there such a visionary candidate?

Well anyway, I have a couple new code keys now, and so do you. What other sorts of secret political codes can we winkle out? How would you construct a clever political code?

No News is Good News?

2007-12-24T07:37:00.000-08:00

I came across this graphic this morning, which really tells the story of the decline and fall of television news. Check out "30 Minutes with CNN." What is worse, there are other "news" stations that are worse, having mostly replaced factual reporting with talking heads screaming at each other.

(click on image for larger version)

With all of the news now ad-supported, the key financial goal of the "news stations" has become to keep viewers watching as long as possible so they see as many commercials as possible. Sadly, Americans would rather be entertained than informed, and so departed the news, international first, and then almost everything else.

It would seem to me that there MUST be an opportunity for a next-gen CNN with more factual reporting, even if we real news wonks have become a tiny niche...

I Want Half!

2007-11-29T17:02:00.000-08:00

An important milestone was reached today. Roughly half of the human race has a cellphone account. It's actually somewhat less, since many countries average more than one mobile phone per person, over 3.3 BILLION mobile phone accounts across the globe....but still. Wow. Now to outfit them all with live TV!

Read more here.

Our Conflicted Government

2007-11-28T15:54:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the right picture is worth more than a thousand words. There's a fine art to representing data to clearly illuminate an issue, and this one takes my nomination for the graph of the year. This graphic comparing our government's nutritional recommendations to its actual spending tells the story of money (from lobbyists) over morals.

Hat tip to Sean over at Cosmic Variance and Ezra Klein.

ISS over Italy and Greece

2007-11-28T15:50:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of NASA.

The "Dog's Nuts" of the Periodic Table

2007-10-21T08:54:00.001-07:00

Shelly Batts over at Retrospectacle just turned me on to this great show called Brainiacs. Here are a couple of fine videos starting off with a bit on alkali earth metals. I think Shelly is right, a British accent does lend an air of legitimacy. Kind of. Ahem. Don't try this at home.

Try a YouTube search on Brainiac for more.

Great Bubble Demos and Formula

2007-10-18T15:16:00.000-07:00

Several people have asked me recently about bubble solution formulations that improve on the regular dish soap stand-by. Take a look at this video to see some truly resilient, and even self-healing bubbles, along with the complete formulation!

Go forth and study bubble science!

Fine Art Photoshop Contest

2007-10-07T12:00:00.000-07:00

Yes, my favorites are all irreverent, but I just can't resist. Check out the growing collection at the Fine Art Photoshop Contest posted here, where you can also see the un-retouched originals.

Fire on Land and In The Sky

2007-10-05T09:23:00.000-07:00

Here's a cool photo of an exploding volcano (Tungurahua, located in Ecuador) under the Pleiades star cluster from Universe Today. Click on the image to see the full-resolution version (it's worth it!).

Nikon Small World Image Contest Results: 2007

2007-10-05T07:06:00.000-07:00

Nikon just posted the results from their annual photo micro-graph competition, and the winning images are simply stunning. One of the things that struck me about this year's images was the significant leap in imaging technologies based on florescent DNA tagging combined with the use of confocal microscopy and volumetric tomography, even over last year's images.

I really enjoyed browsing the Nikon site, going back in time, to see how science has advanced over even a couple of years. Clearer vision brings clearer insight, as they say; these images let us see things never seen before and witness processes first-hand that were mere hypothesis last year. More than insight, there is wondrous beauty and complexity in every image. Here are a few of my favorites from the 2007 gallery, but don't miss browsing the rest on the home site.

Zebrafish embryo midbrain and diencephalon showing neural fibers in blue and developing neural interconnections in red, by Michael Hendricks of the Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, National University of Singapore.

Erpobdella octoculata (fresh water leech) muscle strands surrounding a central nerve cord at 25x magnification, by Vera Hunnekuhl, Department of Zoology, University of Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany

Giant unilamellar and multilamellar vesicles (liposomes) at 40x magnification, by Dr. Jorge Bernardino de la Serna, MEMPHYS-Center for Biomembrane Physics, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Fyn, Denmark.

Trematode sp. (parasitic worm) at 400x magnification, by Rodrigo Mexas, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Lime tree leaf vessels architectonics at 60x magnification, by Dr. Josef Spacek, University Hospital, Department of Pathology, Charles University Prague Faculty of Medicine Hradec Kralove, Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic.

Cancer Cells at 1500x magnification, by Tomasz Szul, High Resolution Imaging Facility, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama, USA.

A Nice Visual Illusion

2007-10-03T09:19:00.000-07:00

No, this one is not animated. All the motion is happening in your head. If you don't believe me, try covering most of the image with your hand or a piece of paper and only looking at a small part. You will see that no individual part of the image moves at all. It is only when you try to see the whole image that you notice motion.

So can any of you tell me how this works?

Science and the Islamic World

2007-10-03T09:07:00.000-07:00

I just stumbled upon a fascinating article on Science in the Islamic World, by a Pakistani scholar named Pervez Amirala Hoodbhoy at PhysicsToday.org. The article is mostly an exploration of the rise and fall of scientific inquiry in the Islamic states and the attendant root causes. There are clearly lessons here even for Western states that face rising tides of fundamentalism and calls for conformity, religious or otherwise.

The author doesn't skip a beat as he calls out the similar US trends surrounding religious conservatives and their push for Creationism, Intelligent Design, curbs on genetic research, and so on.

But there are also some interesting tidbits on the technologies for daily living in the Islamic world, and how they have penetrated largely in support of the religions which otherwise strive to limit their spread.

"...while driving in Islamabad, it would occasion no surprise if you were to receive an urgent SMS (short message service) requesting immediate prayers for helping Pakistan's cricket team win a match. Popular new Islamic cell-phone models now provide the exact GPS-based direction for Muslims to face while praying, certified translations of the Qur'an, and step-by-step instructions for performing the pilgrimages of Haj and Umrah. Digital Qur'ans are already popular, and prayer rugs with microchips (for counting bend-downs during prayers) have made their debut."

A great read start-to-finish.

What a difference 20 Years Makes: 1GB Then and Now

2007-09-28T10:02:00.000-07:00

Man Survives Chair Leg Penetrating Eye and Throat

2007-09-26T21:18:00.000-07:00

I don't usually like to post morbid stories, but this one takes the cake as far as medical miracles go.

Hat tip goes to BoingBoing on catching this one.

Here is an MRI image of a fellow who survived having a metal chair leg impale his skill through his eye socket all the way down to his throat. Not only did he survive, it looks like he will keep his vision. He's even forgiven the fellow who threw the chair!

Only In Japan: Rice Paddy Art

2007-08-28T09:13:00.000-07:00

You've heard of crop circles? Well, here's the Japanese version made of living plants. By patterned planting of four different varieties of rice plants, each with different colored leaves, Akio Nakayam and friends grew these reproductions of the Edo-period prints. Wow.

How Nerds Eat

2007-08-14T06:39:00.000-07:00

I just stumbled on a great post from Julieanne over at Cosmic Variance.

"My temporary officemate runs down to the vending machine and buys a bag of gummi bears. He dumps them on the desk, sorts them by color, and then proceeds to eat them in order of increasing bin size (i.e. the pile of 1 orange one, then the pile of 3 yellow ones, then the pile of 4 green ones, etc).

If I buy a bag of M&M’s, I sort them by color, then figure out a division that lets me arrange them in a triangle, with one color per horizontal row, but allowing colors to be repeated (i.e. it’s ok for 9 red M&M’s to show up as a row of 7, and then further up, a row of 2). I then eat off each diagonal, producing a progressively smaller triangle, but one that maintains the horizontal color structure till the tasty end.

My kids, who I suspect inherited a geek-streak a mile wide, also sort multicolored candy into patterns and make up an algorithm for eating it.

The non-scientists who I have asked about this habit look at me like I’m nuts. (So do people who grew up in large families, because someone was bound to snarf the candy before they could take the time to develop this particular neurosis.)"

One of my personal favorites on the candy consumption side is to conduct natural selection experiments with M&Ms. I like to take two M&M's and squeeze them together until one fails structurally, and then I eat the failure, setting aside the victor to participate in the next round of trials. The winner of the single elimination tournament is the most fit M&M prototype for future generations. The superior M&M is always the last to be eaten.

I am also known to organize my French Fry consumption by waiting just until the smallest fries reach the perfect temperature, and then eating them in order of increasing size, catching each one as it passes through the optimal temperature (for the layman, the higher surface area-to-volume ratio of the smaller fries means that they cool faster.)

My wife does, in fact, think I'm nuts, though she seems to find it endearing in some odd way.

Climate Change Update

2007-08-14T05:38:00.001-07:00

It's been a while since I've posted on this topic, and in the meantime, a few more juicy tidbits have emerged that I thought warranted attention.

The general trend of recent news and data around the melting of the polar ice caps is not a good one. In fact, the recent data shows that the thinning and melting of the western Arctic sea ice in particular is progressing more than 3 times faster than even the most pessimistic of climate models projected. According to William Chapman, et. al. at the University of Illinois, this melting is progressing so swiftly now, that:

Today [August 9, 2007], the Northern Hemisphere sea ice area broke the record for the lowest ice area in recorded history. The new record came a full month before the historic summer minimum typically occurs. There is still a month or more of melt likely this year. It is therefore almost certain that the previous 2005 record will be annihilated by the final 2007 annual minima closer to the end of this summer.

This new data, along with other similar results has led NASA's notable head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, to conclude that the prevalent climate models fail to account for the self-reinforcing feedback cycle that ensues from the melting ice, and as such, underestimate the rate at which the melting will likely occur.

Hansen warns (read Hansen's full article on Sea Level Rises at New Scientist) that the likely results of ice faster-than-expected melts are huge rises in Sea levels. Hansen notes:

"Sea level is already rising at a moderate rate. In the past decade, it increased by 3 centimetres, about double the average rate during the preceding century. The rate of sea level rise over the 20th century was itself probably greater than the rate in the prior millennium, and this is due at least in part to human activity."

Worse yet, is the very real possibility of runaway collapse.

"..the primary issue is whether global warming will reach a level such that ice sheets begin to disintegrate in a rapid, non-linear fashion on West Antarctica, Greenland or both. Once well under way, such a collapse might be impossible to stop, because there are multiple positive feedbacks. In that event, a sea level rise of several metres at least would be expected.
As an example, let us say that ice sheet melting adds 1 centimetre to sea level for the decade 2005 to 2015, and that this doubles each decade until the West Antarctic ice sheet is largely depleted. This would yield a rise in sea level of more than 5 metres by 2095."

Hansen seems convinced that the most recent data on historical temperatures is more accurate than earlier research, and places our current global temperature within 1 degree of its highest temperature in the past million years, making the horrific prospect of a 5 meter increase in sea levels seem much more ominous.

He concludes:

"The broader picture strongly indicates that ice sheets will respond in a non-linear fashion to global warming - and are already beginning to do so. There is enough information now, in my opinion, to make it a near certainty that business-as-usual scenarios will lead to disastrous multi-metre sea level rise on the century time scale."

According to Jeremy Weiss and Jonathan Overpeck at the University of Arizona, here is what Florida and the Netherlands would look like within 100 years under this scenario.

One would think that large-scale government action should be inevitable at this point. How can we get our nation in gear?

Peel an Egg in 5 Seconds, Updated

2007-07-28T08:38:00.000-07:00

Update September 8, 2007:

I happened to walk into our kitchen the other morning to discover my wife and a friend chatting over a late breakfast. I said my normal hellos and good mornings but really intellectually engaged at the time. But as I was turning around to go back to my home office, our friend picked up a hard-boiled egg (the first hard-boiled egg I had seen since originally posting the video below) and was preparing to start peeling it.

I have to admit that she dealt with it rather well when I leaped across the kitchen to snatch the egg from her grip before she could begin to break the shell. When everyone had recovered from my surprise leap, largely I suspect in allowance of my somewhat regular odd (nerdly) behaviors, I asked her "how long do you think it would take you to peel this egg?"

"A few minutes," she responded.

I then asked, "what would you say if I told you I could to do it in under 5 seconds?"

"No. Way."

"Time me." I used the technique pictured below. It took 3.5 seconds.

10 seconds of stunned silence followed, whereupon she shouted, "That was TOTALLY COOL!"

Ah yes. Nerd pride.

4th Grade Math Genius Calculates High Probability of Getting Beat Up

2007-07-26T17:09:00.000-07:00

The title says it all. I almost couldn't stop laughing and crying at the same time.

“First, I computed my annoyance ratio to determine the probability that each student would want to beat me up,” said Mosley. “Then I gauged that against the Beatings to Hand Raises Theory along with past historical data from my previous physical assaults.”

“The probability of me remaining this smart, let alone becoming slightly smarter, is very high,” said Mosley. “Given that, getting beat up within the month is an expected result. Furthermore, when taking into account my small stature proportional to the most likely inflictors of given beating, I’m estimating a 30 percent chance of a broken bone.”

Hat tip to The Giant Napkin.

Rocketcar Day

2007-07-24T23:49:00.000-07:00

Usually when one of our model rockets went sideways in the teen years, it was a problem and we were diving for cover. Here's to making a problem an opportunity! Rocketcar day!

i-Limb Bionic Hand Video

2007-07-22T17:46:00.000-07:00

Just in time for NBC's new series reprise of "The Bionic Woman," reality has caught up with science fiction. Watch this incredible video of the first commercial bionic hand which operates entirely using nerve impulses.

Photoshop at Work

2007-07-17T23:04:00.000-07:00

Apparently, all you need to really look your hottest is Photoshop. Check out this post from Jezebel.

And don't miss the annotated step-by-step by-the-numbers summary of all the retouching that was necessary to make Faith hot.

Make a Jet Engine in an Hour

2007-07-13T10:42:00.001-07:00

As most of you loyal readers are aware, one of my ongoing crusades is to transform k-12 science education from boring rote cookbook style exercises in contrived tedium into the interesting explorations they SHOULD be.

So I constantly have science teachers asking me, "...but what sort of experiments should I have the kids do, and how much would the materials cost? Those Pasco kits are just so convenient."

Yes, the pre-fab shrink-wrapped curriculum materials make it easy on the overloaded teacher, but there ensues no opportunity for student innovation or creativity. An example, you ask?

Well here is an example for any class discussing fuel, or energy, or Newton's laws of action and reaction. And it involves fire, which tends to keenly engage the teenage mind.

Have your middle or high school science students make jet engines and test them.

Sounds dangerous? That's what protective glasses and gloves are for.
Sounds expensive? Try almost free with a recycled jar.
Sounds out of reach of most secondary students? Pah! Let them try and they will surprise you.

Make Magazine has a great podcast and written directions on how to make a Pulse-jet engine out of a used jam jar. The parts are very low cost to the point where each student can make their own.

Better yet, the operational principles of the pulse jet are simple enough that this project could be part of a broader series of experiments where the students figure out how to measure, and then optimize the engine thrust by varying the jar materials and shape, exit aperture position and diameter, heat exchanger configuration and so on. They could even go on to explore alternative fuel delivery methods with external tanks and combustion chambers of alternative (more stable) materials.

Get the full written guide here, (the images in this post were excerpt from the article.) or watch the step-by-step video.

A Robot That Walks on Water

2007-07-13T10:30:00.001-07:00

Yun Seong Song and Metin Sitti from Carnegie Mellon University have created a water-strider robot based on the insect, which uses surface tension to literally walk on water.

(Left) Photo of the water strider insect. (Right) Photo of the 1-gram robot on the surface of the water. A, B, C, D: supporting legs; E and F: actuating legs; G: body with on-board electronics and power source; H: middle actuator; I and J: right and left actuators. Image credit: Yun Seong Song and Metin Sitti. ©IEEE 2007

"For locomotion, the water strider insect creates a sculling motion with specialized sculling legs. The robot functions the same way. Three piezoelectric actuators, when attached to the legs in a T shape, create both vertical and horizontal motion to cause the elliptical sculling motion required to move.

Because the piezoelectric actuators provided only a small deflection, an amplifier was needed to create large strokes. To achieve this, the researchers used a resonant frequency with a vibration mode favorable to generating the sculling motion to drive the actuators. While a water strider insect can move at speeds of up to 1.5 m/s, the first robot still achieved a forward speed of 3 cm/s, and could also turn, rotate and move backwards."

More details here.

35 Years of HP Calculators

2007-07-13T10:24:00.000-07:00

Here's the HP nostalgia piece.

International Broadband Pricing

2007-07-13T10:16:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting chart via Ohm Malik's blog on the OECD telecommunications outlook report on the cost of broadband Internet in different countries. It's an interesting metric on industrialization. Sadly, we're not looking so good.

Robocup 2007 in Atlanta

2007-07-04T08:56:00.000-07:00

All you Atlanta natives have no excuse for missing the 2007 Robocup competition, currently ongoing (July 1st-10th) at Georgia Tech. The official competition just began yesterday (Tuesday, July 3rd), but the event continues through finals on July 10th.

It's so cool I don't think I need to even say anything more about it other than check out these images and videos. And get over to GaTech and check it out!

How Nerds Cook Hotdogs

2007-07-04T08:36:00.001-07:00

Another honorary 4th of July post I just can't resist. Normally, I'd say, "...kids, don't try this at home." All appropriate burn-your-house-down type disclaimers are hereby offered. But hey, if you can figure out a cooler way to cook a dog, let me know.

All you need area couple of forks, matching alligator clips and an old power cord. Plug that sucker into the wall, perhaps via a power strip and viola...smoking dogs in a couple of minutes.

AND you can demonstrate the voltage gradient across the dog by just sticking LEDs into the dog (with the leads in line with the forks.) You can even have fun adjusting the lead spacing and trying to explain why the LEDs don't burn out or why the brightness changes.

But PLEASE. REMEMBER. THIS. IS. NOT. SAFE. If you are crazy enough to try this even under adult supervision (my wife says I don't qualify here) Don't touch anything when it is plugged in.

(From evilmadscientist.com)
Happy 4th!

For the 4th: Make Your Own Sparklers

2007-07-04T08:29:00.000-07:00

In honor of our nation's anniversary, I urge all you innovators to go forth and make your own sparklers!

From about.com:

What You Need:
- iron wires or wooden sticks
- 300 parts potassium chlorate
- 60 parts aluminum fines, flitter, or granules
- 2 parts charcoal
- 10% dextrin in water solution
- 500 parts strontium nitrate (optional, for red color)
- 60 parts barium nitrate (optional, for green color)

All these ingredients are legal and can be ordered or bought at a chemical supply store like Science Stuff or Chem Bargains.

Mix the dry ingredients with enough dextrin solution to make a moist slurry. Include the strontium nitrate if you want a red sparkler or the barium nitrate if you want a green sparkler. Dip the wires or sticks in the sparkler mixture. Be sure to leave enough uncoated space at one end to safely grasp the finished sparkler. Allow the mixture to dry completely before igniting the sparkler. Store sparklers away from heat or flame, and protected from high humidity.

Airline Vortex Image

2007-07-04T00:12:00.001-07:00

Here's a very nice image from Steve Morris' airliners.net site showing the extent of the wingtip vortex generated by a wide-body jetliner (a Boeing 767 in this case).

Next time I am frustrated at taxi and runway delays, I'll try and remember this photo. Even though you can't ordinarily SEE the churning air behind a jumbo jet, it's still a good idea to wait a bit between take-offs.

A Great Spinning Optical Illusion

2007-06-27T00:45:00.000-07:00

If you look at the spinning girl's silhouette below, you will think it is spinning clockwise, probably. When you check her shadow below, momentarily the spinning direction changes in your mind, and now the girl is spinning counter-clockwise. It can be quite hard at the beginning to notice switch of the spinning direction, but eventually you'll manage.

More Rooms With a View on the Space Station

2007-06-24T22:42:00.000-07:00

From APOD,

The International Space Station Expands Again
Credit: STS-117 Shuttle Crew, NASA
Explanation: The developing International Space Station (ISS) has changed its appearance again. During the past week, the Space Shuttle Atlantis visited the ISS and added pieces of the Integrated Truss Structure that mirrored those added in September 2006, including a second impressively long array of solar panels. The entire array of expansive solar panels are visible at the edges of the above image taken by the Shuttle Atlantis Crew after leaving the ISS to return to Earth. The world's foremost space outpost can be seen developing over the past several years by comparing the above image to past images. Also visible above are many different types of modules, a robotic arm, another impressive set of solar panels, and a supply ship. Construction began on the ISS in 1998.

Only in Japan: Bubble Wrap Toy

2007-06-24T20:38:00.000-07:00

via Gizmodo...

"...the pocket device simulates the feel of popping bubble wrap while using a tiny speaker to make that ever so satisfying popping noise. What bubble wrap aficionados will find disturbing, however, is that every 100 pops bestows the user with a fart, barking dog, door chime or sexy voice."

Get it here.

Twilight Turtle: a Planetarium Night Light

2007-06-24T20:35:00.000-07:00

Too cute for words. Start conditioning those young scientists early!

Buy Twilight Turtle here on Amazon.

An Aurora from Outer Space

2007-06-24T20:30:00.000-07:00

A Mechanical Marble Computer

2007-06-22T17:35:00.000-07:00

Matthias Wandel has developed a fantastic mechanical binary adding machine using a simple series of cascaded chutes to store numbers and perform carries through mechanical toggles. Don't miss the video embedded below to see it in operations.

Ingenious!

More details can be found on his web site: www.Woodgears.ca along with all manner of interesting contraptions.

A Catapult Watch: For the Geek that has Everything

2007-06-22T08:14:00.000-07:00

Do you have friends who still play Dungeons & Dragons? Well, then this is the perfect gift for them. The Catapult watch. Co-workers will never again sleep within range.

Purchase the catapult watch here.

FIRST Lego League Registration is Open!

2007-06-16T06:45:00.000-07:00

Have all of you student and teacher readers out there already registered for the FIRST Lego Robotics League? Well, what are you waiting for? Register for the First Lego League Here.

This awesome robotics contest registration opened May first (and will likely fill up by the end of the summer: 1,715 teams have already signed-up!) so get those applications in!

Here is the tentative schedule for the year:

May 1
Registration Opens

Mid-May
Registration Materials and Robot Sets Begin to Ship

August
Field Setup Kits Begin to Ship

September 5
International Challenge Release

Mid-to-late-September
Team Registration Closes/Last Day to Order Products

October 1-12
Tournament Applications Accepted (If FLL is handling applications)

November- January
Tournament Season

April 2008
World Festival

Registration costs $200 per team, but also be sure to order the Field set-up kit (which should start shipping around August first) when you register, or it will be difficult to practice.

Click on the following links to find:

And don't forget the opportunities for the younger and older set with the JFLL [Junior First Lego League], and their community web site. Check out these budding scientists!

And, of course, there is the FIRST league proper for the older kids.

Hell, I want to sign-up. Why don't they have a league for us grownups?! I guess I'll have to live with being a mentor or something. It appears as if there are plenty of volunteer opportunities in support for frustrated teachers like myself.

I just love the fact that these tournaments are becoming better attended than the school basketball games! I can only hope now, that FIRST will rise to eclipse football as well. Just imagine a nation of youngsters innovating instead of bashing into each other!

If you can't tell already, I'm a big fan of this program. I've always been of the opinion that this is exactly the sort of open-ended creative challenge that nurtures the seeds of inspiration, and that these sorts of activities should be fostered at an early age. Now there is some data to back up my faith. From a recent Brandeis University study, the impact of the FIRST program is astounding. From the study:

When compared with the comparison group, FIRST students are:
More than 3 times as likely to major specifically in engineering.
Roughly 10 times as likely to have had an apprenticeship, internship, or co-op job in their freshman year.
Significantly more likely to expect to achieve a post graduate degree.
More than twice as likely to expect to pursue a career in science and technology.
Nearly 4 times as likely to expect to pursue a career specifically in engineering.

How can you turn your back on statistics like those, even if there is a bit of self-selected sample group?

Go forth and Innovate!

ISS Fly-by Images Taken From Earth

2007-06-14T08:43:00.000-07:00

From Spaceweather.com:

Mike Tyrrell photographed the expanding spaceship through his 10-inch Meade LX-200. The new panels are indicated by the arrow:

Meanwhile in the Czech Republic, Martin Popek photographed an "ISS flare" from his hometown of Nýdek:

Track the Hubble Space Telescope and ISS

2007-06-04T08:20:00.000-07:00

From the European Space Agency web site comes a nice Google Gadget mashup that shows the ground track of several noteworthy satellites including the Hubble Space Telescope [HST], and the International Space Station [ISS]. Just click on the links in the table below to see exactly where overhead any one of these satellites fly displayed on Google Maps.

Teach Both Theories, Let the Kids Decide

2007-06-03T16:07:00.000-07:00

Indoor Radio-Controlled Plane

2007-05-31T08:11:00.000-07:00

Some of you may remember my post last year on the "Butterfly" living room flier from Plantraco Hobbies. Technology is marching on though, with new composite materials and ever more integrated electronics in smaller and smaller packages. Witness the latest in living room RC technology, the Carbon Butterfly. (you can purchase one at the previous link complete with controller and padded carrying case for $299) (hint...hint...anyone planning ahead for my 2007 Birthday/Christmas season...)

(Check out videos of the Carbon Butterfly in flight here.)

The new version above weighs in at a scarce 3 grams including all of the receiver, rudder actuator, and prop motor hardware despite the addition of the new landing gear. Smaller carbon fiber rods and a redesigned mylar-coated wing comprise the major advances. Here's the older version for comparison (at 3.6 grams):

The new Carbon Butterfly sports a fully proportional 2-channel controller for both the throttle speed and the rudder actuator, and a nice light gear reduction to drive the prop.

Better-yet, the founder of the indoor flyer community, Michael Hendricksen, has started an indoor flier blog showing how you can make your own miniature actuators with simple coils and magnets!

and the Plantraco Micro-RC web site has all the supplies and components you could need to build your own miniature airplanes and helicopters and indoor flying pleasure. These sorts of things are great starter projects to get kids excited about electronics, mechanical design, and aeronautics, all at once!

Rube Goldberg Machines From Japan

2007-05-29T04:53:00.001-07:00

The best collection I've seen so far made with ordinary household objects.

Prefab Treehouse Artistry

2007-05-28T09:05:00.000-07:00

It figures that as soon as I set up a play structure for the kids, I discover the real artists of the playground world. Check out Daniel's Wood Land.

My one consolation is that while incredibly cool, they look out of my price range....well, that and the hopes that the kids won't be jaded by the Disney Land quality gear when we actually make it to SoCal.

Water Baloon Popping In Slow Motion

2007-05-28T08:50:00.000-07:00

Leonardo, A Social Robot

2007-05-25T07:53:00.000-07:00

One of my grad school friends turned MIT professor, Cynthia Breazeal, has teamed up with Stan Winston Studios of animatronic movie robot fame to create an astounding new robot named Leonardo.

Photographs, copyright Sam Ogden

This little artificial creature was not designed to move around or navigate, but rather to interact socially with humans. 61 different motors (32 in the face alone) articulate its limbs, hands, digits, expressive facial features, eyelids, and ears so that it can communicate its artificial feelings.

Photograph, copyright Sam Ogden

The software driving the robot is also interesting, and designed to learn by visual and verbal example, just as humans do. The video available through the preceding link is a little spooky in that regard. You can also check out the technical paper here, C. Breazeal, G. Hoffman, and A. Lockerd (2004). "Teaching and Working with Robots as a Collaboration."

Be sure to hunt around the main Leonardo web site for more movies foretelling our robotic future.

A Mathematical Mazda

2007-05-25T00:16:00.001-07:00

Check out the model number on this bad boy.

Yes, it's Pi to 27 digits. From techEblog.

Paper Star Wars Models

2007-05-24T21:43:00.000-07:00

Print a few copies. Build them. Annex your living room for the galactic empire.

More models at Papercraft.

Teach Kids to Program

2007-05-23T07:46:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, my wife and I took the kids to the Maker Faire, where I ran into some folks from MIT's Lifelong Kindergarten group. I would have to say that of the whole Maker contingent, they were showing the most refined educational tools of the bunch, kits and software to teach young children how to program.

The Scratch programming environment (download Scratch for free here) was designed to eliminate the requirement that a programmer understand code syntax and grammar before being able to do anything useful. The main tool here was to devise a simplified language encapsulated in graphical blocks with shapes that only fit together properly when slotted in the right order and positions.

The software package includes mechanisms for a host of graphically interesting drawing, sprite control, and audio effects, as well as a built-in mechanism for code sharing and community building. Don't miss the project pages to check out all the cool code a host of kids have already written.

One thing that I particularly about the Scratch system is that they have included a physical interface component called the Scratch Board, that allows children's programs to interact with the real world with sensor blocks, buttons, sliders and so on, each paired with a programming element in the software. Now they can learn to write code, and connect it to the real world!

You can check out a nice intro Scratch video here:

Another project on display from the Playful Invention Company [PICO] which grew out of the same group at MIT was called the Pico Cricket. The cricket kit is basically an extension and refinement of Scratch that includes smart blocks designed to interlock with Legos.

A lot of thought and work has gone into making the programming element even more clear, and the external components more bulletproof, dare I even say kid-proof. For example, each block that houses a sensor or processor or motor has a chip in it which identifies itself and automatically configures the use of interconnecting wires, so you don't have to worry about how any system is wired together, you just connect them with wires that are all identical in the same way.

Order your Pico Cricket kits here.

For more developed students in higher grades, don't miss Hackety-Hack, a cleaned-up (free) version of Ruby/smalltalk with a very nice community and instructional environment packaged around it. This is for the kids who outgrow the limitations of Scratch and are up for the rigors of typing the syntax themselves.

The amazing thing about this system is the thought that went into incorporating a fantastic Internet, web, and graphics library that is very powerful. As an example, you can implement an entire blog with in six lines of code:

blog = Table("MyBlog").recent(10)
Web.page {
blog.each do |entry|
title entry[:title]
puts entry[:editbox]
end
}

This testimonial from the web site says it all:

Our 8th grader reporting in: did Lesson Four in about 10 minutes but kept hacking for another 20 minutes. Today, video games lost the battle with Ruby. Unprecedented!
— Brian D

In researching the effectiveness of these tools, I came across a fantastic blog documenting both the opportunities and potential pitfalls surrounding the use of all these new technology tools to teach 5th grade integrated technology classes. Check out how ENGAGED and excited SOME of these kids are to be creating their own widgets and discovering things on their own! Others seem stuck without the proper guidance. (mostly stuck on the programming parts.)

I was also led, inevitably to the Playfull Inventing & Exploring effort [PIE]. From their site:

PIE (Playful Invention and Exploration) is an approach to using new technologies that integrates art, science, music, and engineering. The main goal of PIE is to enable and inspire more people to create, invent, and explore -- using a combination of traditional craft materials and new digital technologies.

PIE projects and workshops make use of Crickets, small programmable devices you can use to create your own musical sculptures, interactive jewelry, communicating creatures, and other playful inventions. The PIE approach was developed through a collaboration of six museums with MIT Media Lab, with support from the National Science Foundation. (For background on the project, see the PIE Network grant proposal.)

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Climate Change: A Guide For The Perplexed

2007-05-18T06:47:00.000-07:00

New Scientist just published great online article debunking the 26 most common climate change myths and misconceptions. The article is very well written and includes links to all of the primary data sources. Better yet, it is very well-targeted, hitting many of the most common responses I have received personally from friends and colleagues over the past year of office-cooler debate on the topic almost verbatim. My personal top hits include the following myths:

• We can't trust computer models of climate

• They predicted global cooling in the 1970s

• It's been far warmer in the past, what's the big deal?

• Global warming is down to the Sun, not humans

• The cooling after 1940 shows CO₂ does not cause warming

• It was warmer during the Medieval period, with vineyards in England

• We are simply recovering from the Little Ice Age

• Ice cores show CO₂ increases lag behind temperature rises, disproving the link to global warming

• Ice cores show CO₂ rising as temperatures fell

• Many leading scientists question climate change

But do link over to the main article from the top of this post to see the complete list.
Here are a couple of my favorite images from the compendium:

Active Matrix Organic LEDs Get Real

2007-05-17T07:05:00.000-07:00

This is a watershed moment in consumer electronics! For decades now, LCD panel technology has dominated portable consumer electronics despite its need for power-hungry back-lights. The newer AM-OLEDs that are self-emmisive (requiring no back-light) have been in development since around the time I started MicroDisplay in 1995, with some early applications emerging over the last few years in tiny segmented character display applications like MP3 players.

Well today's news held the first product announcements from Samsung and Philips/LG to show the new technology in active matrix formats that can display high quality video (albeit still in limited QVGA resolution.)

What will this mean for Joe-consumer? Well, our sexy gadgets are going to get even smaller, thinner [about half a MILLIMETER in thickness], and draw even less power than before (allowing the batteries to be smaller and thinner as well.) Oh yes, and the viewing angles and contrast [10,000:1] will be much better than for LCDs. Check out these images from AVING.net.

Maker Faire This Weekend: Don't Miss It!

2007-05-17T06:48:00.000-07:00

This has become one of my favorite events anywhere, anytime. You'll find a great collection of art, technology, science projects and demonstrations, contests (like the "King of Fling" catapult contest) kits for sale, tools...and of course the people that make and use them! It is a completely unique collection of interesting things and people.

I strongly recommend the Faire to any family that can make it to the San Francisco Bay Area this weekend, not just the nerds among you. There really is something for everyone. Even my one-and-a-half-year-old daughter was enthralled last time around, so don't miss it!

Click on the picture link above for more info and tickets!

Now THAT'S a Rocket Launch!

2007-05-15T10:50:00.000-07:00

Check out this Scout troop from Austin, TX who just shattered the world record for "Most model rockets launched in a 5 second window." Their new record of 965 crushes the old mark of 400.

The Awesome Power of Tornadoes

2007-05-15T10:14:00.000-07:00

Photographer Mike Theiss recently toured Greensburg, Kansas, the small town at ground zero of that monster tornado. Having seen the stock news footage on CNN, I still hadn't really internalized the true power and energy unleashed in the EF-5 storm with winds howling at over 200 mph. Check out these photos of the utter devastation, linked directly from Mike's site.

From Mike's comments on Spaceweather.com:

"The power of the wind from this EF-5 tornado was evident," says Theiss. "I documented a fork stuck in a tree, a Kansas license plate ripped off a car and stuck in a tree, millions of splintered pieces of wood and much more. There was amazing evidence of winds over 200 mph everywhere."

"Every single vehicle I saw was peppered with rocks, boards and other debris," he continues. "The only safe place would have been underground, but I think that might not have been very safe either because I saw basements that were filled with tons of debris from the house collapsing in on itself."
"My experience at ground zero was depressing yet uplifting. Among all the destruction, the only reaction I witnessed among residents was positive excitement about how great the city will be once it's rebuilt. The entire community pulled together and began cleanup immediately. One idea being tossed around is to 'go green'--i.e., to use wind, solar energy and other resources at hand to power the reconstructed city. This would make Greensburg the first 100% green city in the USA. What an amazing idea!"

Greensburg Photo Gallery
[donate to the Green for Greensburg Fund]

FIRST Robotics Contest Book

2007-05-10T13:17:00.000-07:00

I just picked up a copy of the book by Dean Kamen and Woodie Flowers chronicling several of the winning designs from the FIRST robotics competition. The innovation emerging from high school students is staggering.

Purchase the book here at Amazon and be inspired.

Weekend Robotics Projects

2007-05-05T07:51:00.000-07:00

Don't miss this week's Make Magazine blog feature podcast on weekend starter robotics projects with pdf hardcopy support this week. It's a great source for parts, kits, how-to videos and general tutorial resources. The kits and instructions are PERFECT for first-time electronics hackers and roboticist wanna-be types. The materials costs are modest and the projects can be completed and tested inside a few hours.

The article also includes a few links to some nice sources of parts (particularly the wonderful little pager motors)

and kits for those less inclined to scour the junk bins and create your own, Check out PagerMotors.com and Solarbotics.com.

The tiny kits follow in the fine tradition set by one of my old MIT acquaintances, Mark Tilden, who's book entitled "Junkbots, Bugbots & Bots on Wheels" is the canonical must-read source on how to build disassemble all those old Sony Walkmen otherwise gathering dust in the junk drawer and use their component parts to build nifty little artificial critters. You can get Mark's book here from Amazon.

Create your very own artificial creatures in a weekend? How cool is that?

Our Constant Moon?

2007-05-03T06:30:00.000-07:00

Most of us probably think of the Moon as our constant and reliable companion, always showing a familiar face. Popular lore has us always seeing the same face of the moon, the "bright side," with the dark side forever hidden from earthbound viewers as the moon orbits in lock-step with the Earth's rotation.

But as with much of science, the tricky little details reveal a more interesting picture. Here is a short animation sequence taken by Laurent Laveder in France that is comprised of full moon images captured every (lunar) month for two years, all compressed into 2 seconds of video.

This video is a fantastic articulation of the fact that the Moon's orbit around Earth is not, in fact, a perfect circle, but rather an ellipse (with about 5% eccentricity) which travels closer and then farther away in turn and changing apparent size in the process. The orbit is tilted slightly with respect to Earth's daily planetary rotation, presenting slightly varying angles, and there is obviously some wobble in the orbital path, which astronomers call libration. In total, we actually see somewhere closer to 59% of the Moon over time rather than what the pedestrian 50% bright-side model would offer.

Keep in mind that this was a two-YEAR project to take and assemble and process all the monthly images.

Wikipedia has a great page with more details on the orbit of the Moon, and a hat-tip to Spaceweather.com for the links.

Sobering Climate Change Data on Arctic Sea Ice Extent

2007-05-02T08:17:00.000-07:00

Marika Holland, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder has published a study comparing the actual decline in the extent of Arctic sea ice with the climate change models. There is an undeniable trend of decline in the actual sea ice melting that is even more drastic than the most pessimistic computer models of the global environment. In fact, this latest data shows the melting ice is about 30 years ahead of schedule.

This figure illustrates the extent to which Arctic sea ice is melting faster than projected by computer models. The dotted line represents the average rate of melting indicated by computer models, with the blue area indicating the spread among the different models (shown as plus/minus one standard deviation). The red line shows the actual rate of Arctic ice loss based on observations. The observations have been particularly accurate since 1979 because of new satellite technology. (Illustration by Steve Deyo, ©UCAR, based on research by NSIDC and NCAR. News media terms of use*)

For those of you new to the global warming debate, the extent of polar ice coverage is critical to keeping temperatures low, because the ice is more reflective than the Earth or ocean beneath it. If the polar ice melts faster than expected, the bare earth or liquid water will absorb even more solar radiation and global temperatures will therefore increase faster than expected as well. This, of course, will melt more ice even faster, creating a positive feedback loop that will even further accelerate climate change.

Stunning Panorama of Carina Nebula

2007-05-02T07:52:00.000-07:00

While I may have posted not too long ago about the inevitable obsolescence of the Hubble Space Telescope, the old girl still impresses. NASA recently released the largest-ever visible image panorama on the 17th anniversary of the telescope.

The incredible detail is simply stunning, and exposes the process of stellar evolution as never before seen. Here are a few of the images, but do be sure to click through to the NASA site in order to see them in all their massive native-resolution glory.

Hubble's view of the Carina Nebula shows star birth in a new level of detail. The fantasy-like landscape of the nebula is sculpted by the action of outflowing winds and scorching ultraviolet radiation from the monster stars that inhabit this inferno. In the process, these stars are shredding the surrounding material that is the last vestige of the giant cloud from which the stars were born.
The immense nebula is an estimated 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina the Keel (of the old southern constellation Argo Navis, the ship of Jason and the Argonauts, from Greek mythology).

This image is a mosaic of the Carina Nebula assembled from 48 frames taken with Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The Hubble images were taken in the light of ionized hydrogen. Colour information was added with data taken at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Red corresponds to sulfur, green to hydrogen, and blue to oxygen emission. Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley), and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

[Left] -- A towering "mountain" of cold hydrogen gas laced with dust is the site of new star formation in the Carina Nebula. The great gas pillar is being eroded by the ultraviolet radiation from the hottest newborn stars in the nebula.

[Right] -- A close-up look at the peak of one of these "pillars of creation" reveals unequivocal evidence that stars are being born inside the columns. A pencil-like streamer of gas shoots out in both directions from the pillar and ploughs into surrounding gas like a fire hose hitting a wall of sand. The jet is being launched from a newly forming star hidden inside the column. A similar jet appears near the bottom of the image. These stellar jets are a common signature of the birth of a new star. Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley), and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

A series of so-called Bok globules from a mosaic of the Carina Nebula assembled from 48 frames taken with the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. The island-like clumps of dark clouds scattered across the nebula are nodules of dust and gas that have so far resisted being eaten away by photoionisation.
One globule nicknamed the "caterpillar" is shown in the central image. Its glowing edge indicates that it is being photoionized by the hottest stars in the cluster. It has been hypothesized that stars may form inside such dusty cocoons. Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley), and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

These three snapshots reveal nuggets of cold molecular hydrogen in the Carina Nebula. This Hubble Space Telescope view of the central region of the Carina Nebula reveals a violent maelstrom of star birth. The fantasy-like landscape of the nebula is sculpted by the intense pressure of starlight from monster stars and their accompanying star clusters, as well as the hydrodynamics of their stellar winds of charged particles.The glowing edges of some of these objects indicates that they are being photoionized by the hottest stars in the cluster. It has been hypothesized that stars may form inside such dusty cocoons. Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley), and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

[top] - An approximately one-light-year tall "pillar" of cold hydrogen towers above the wall of the molecular cloud. The 2.5-million-year-old star cluster called Trumpler 14 appears at the right side of the image. A small nugget of cold molecular hydrogen, called a Bok globule, is silhouetted against the star cluster.
[middle] – Detailed view of the central portion of the Carina Nebula near the so-called Keyhole Nebula.
[bottom] – These great clouds of cold hydrogen resemble summer afternoon thunderheads. They tower above the surface of a molecular cloud on the edge of the nebula. So-called "elephant trunk" pillars resist being heated and eaten away by blistering ultraviolet radiation from the nebula’s brightest stars.

Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley), and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Saturn in Sunlight

2007-04-30T17:26:00.000-07:00

Cassini just keeps on chugging. From the NASA site:

Such a view is only possible from the Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft. This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 33 degrees above the ringplane. Shadows of the innermost rings are cast upon the planet at upper left. The edge of Saturn's shadow cuts a straight line across the rings near upper right.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on March 30, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.9 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 117 kilometers (73 miles) per pixel.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Smartfish: A Hydrogen Fuel Cell Powered Airplane

2007-04-24T06:32:00.000-07:00

With declining budgets at NASA and an airline industry beset with growth pains, soaring fuel costs, and bankrupt carriers it has been some time since I have seen true innovation in the aerospace industry. For decades, airplanes have advanced very little despite tremendous strides in tools, materials, and engines. Incremental tweaks on 20+ year-old designs comprise the bulk of the commercial and military complement. But I now have new hope of a resurgent industry.

Check out the Smartfish personal aircraft design project that has been the ongoing masterwork of a rock-star design team from Germany and Switzerland since 2003. Smartfish might seem like an odd name for an airplane until you get a look at it's profile; it is very piranha-like indeed.

The basic concept is to design and build a new generation of personal aircraft using the latest software design and simulation tool, aerodynamics, composite materials, and jet engine technologies. When aggregated into one cohesive design demonstrating unprecedented efficiencies, the initial results promise a tiny craft whose entire body provides lift rather just relying on the wings. The svelte profile of the composite material lifting body introduces less drag with modest wings, and requires less thrust to power. It requires so much less thrust that a tiny engine powered by a hydrogen fuel cell drove the first 1-meter model craft at full speed for 15 minutes.

There are so many interesting aspects to this design project that I almost don't know where to start. Thankfully, their web site nicely documents the project's evolution from initial concept, to computer modeling and optimization, to wind-tunnel tests and model flights. Truly amazing start-to-finish. Here is a short photo summary of the amazing project to-date.

Here is the original CAD drawing for the design concept.

This is a rendering of the simulated air flow around the CAD model which shows the vortex-lift generated by the novel lifting body shape that makes the craft so efficient.

This is an image of the numerically-controlled milling machine carving the mold for the single-piece carbon-composite body.

An image of the completed top-panel mold.

The completed 1 meter scale model.

A Trade-show booth highlighting the completed model and the simple hydrogen fuel cell powered jet engine.

The engineers installing the model in the big wind tunnel for stability and control testing and design optimization.

Making the last pre-test connections.

The post-test flow patterns painted on the model by the test fluids.

And see the model in flight in this short promo video.

This project is a complete tour-de-force of modern design, and demonstrates what it takes to change an industry: several years of monomaniacal focus in a small elite team. I believe these folks are really going to succeed in changing the industry where multi-billion dollar multinational aerospace conglomerates have been stalled for decades. It is really the silicon valley start-up model applied to aerospace, much like Tesla is changing the automotive world.

And oh yes, I definitely want one. I'd even take a MODEL of one.

Make a Homo-polar Motor in Five Minutes

2007-04-21T08:54:00.000-07:00

Here's a REALLY simple example of how anyone can make a simple motor in about 10 minutes or less from Make Magazine.

Building it is simple. Explaining how it works is a little trickier, as there are no alternating poles or brushes typical of the garden variety motor. Check out the homopolar motor description on Wikipedia, and another example of how to make a homopolar motor here at scitoys.com

Stand-up Economist

2007-04-19T15:17:00.000-07:00

Okay, I admit it. I'm a nerd. But this one killed me.

The Real Nature of a Scientist

2007-04-19T07:34:00.000-07:00

This one spoke to me. My wife even nodded when she read it, "Yep, I could totally see you doing that."

The roll-over caption says it all. "How could you possibly choose avoiding a little pain over understanding a magic lightning machine?"

From xkcd, and thanks to Benjamin over at The World's Fair for the tip.

Videorama

2007-04-14T16:06:00.000-07:00

Photojojo had a nice post about stitching snippets of panned videos together to make a single video panorama that they call a videorama.

Cool, eh?

Here's a link on how to make your own video-ramas with Flash, or with Final Cut Pro.

The Steady March of Progress

2007-04-12T13:04:00.000-07:00

From TechEBlog, check out this 5 MegaByte hard disk from 1956.

Global Warming Update and More Political Science

2007-04-12T09:23:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to post an update on climate change for some time now, as I have refrained from opining since I saw Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" several months ago. At that time, I posted a story, "A Convenient Supposition" which called out that from the data available and collated at the time (and presented in the film) there was still a big difference between correlation and causality. Moreover, there was a long way between correlations in CO2 levels and global temperature fluctuations and the claim that one CAUSED the other. In fact, there was some considerable evidence that over the past few million years that it was the temperature changes that preceded the CO2 concentration changes, offering a strong indication that the chain of causation was reversed from what alarmists might otherwise prefer in their supporting data.

But since that time, additional evidence has been collected by Hansen and others that, to my mind, irrefutably demonstrates and validates the hypothesis that the industrial development and emission of greenhouse gases has contributed substantially to global temperature increases.

For a more detailed look at the most recent data compilations and analysis, check out the original scientific draft report from the International Panel on Climate Change, and the IPCC's 4th assessment report. There's a lot of good stuff in the latter, but my favorite chart from the presentation is the following.

FIGURE SPM-4. Comparison of observed continental- and global-scale changes in surface temperature with results simulated by climate models using natural and anthropogenic forcings. Decadal averages of observations are shown for the period 1906–2005 (black line) plotted against the centre of the decade and relative to the corresponding average for 1901–1950. Lines are dashed where spatial coverage is less than 50%. Blue shaded bands show the 5–95% range for 19 simulations from 5 climate models using only the natural forcings due to solar activity and volcanoes. Red shaded bands show the 5–95% range for 58 simulations from 14 climate models using both natural and anthropogenic forcings. {FAQ 9.2, Figure 1}

Some of you may have noted that the link to the latest assessment I offered above led to a draft marked "not for distribution." This was on purpose, because what I have offered was the output of the scientific communities BEFORE the politicians insisted on editing the more "inflammatory" wording. I will let you draw your own conclusions as to the intent of said edits by also pointing you to the finally approved version available on the IPCC web site so you might make your own line-by-line comparisons.

For those too busy to track down the details, here is an example from the original draft page 2:

"Many natural systems, on all continents and in some oceans, are being affected by regional climate changes, particularly temperature increases [very high confidence]."

And in the final version:

"Observational evidence from all continents and most oceans shows that many natural systems are being affected by regional climate changes, particularly high temperatures."

Subsequent edits are similar.

Does anyone else find it odd that Politicians are telling scientists that they should be LESS certain? Usually it's the other way around. And when this particular cart is in front of the horse, the politicization of science seems very dangerous to me.

If you want more details on the political monkeying with the scientific reports, see these articles from:

The Associated Press:

"Several scientists objected to the editing of the final draft by government negotiators but in the end agreed to compromises. However, some scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change vowed never to take part in the process again."
"The authors lost," said one participant. "A lot of authors are not going to engage in the IPCC process any more. I have had it with them," he said on condition of anonymity because the proceedings were supposed to remain confidential. An Associated Press reporter, however, witnessed part of the final meeting.

and a more detailed report from the New York Times.

Which version do you all think the general public should be exposed to, the original scientific summary provided for policy-makers, or the watered-down version spun by the politicians?

I actually think it is important to show both, and not only get the proper technical and scientific message across, but also to expose the political maneuvering and agendas hampering action on important scientific issues.

The Bounce-O-Meter

2007-04-05T08:25:00.000-07:00

Have you ever found yourself saying something, and the very moment those ill-considered words passed your lips, there was a subtle foreshadowing that you had touched off a chain of events that would soon escaped your control? Well, I was reminded of one such historical gaffe from my teaching years this morning.

It all began innocuously enough in my high school Physics class when a student asked the disappointingly common question, "...but what will this REALLY be good for in the rest of my life?" My response was reflexive. "You can use the techniques and problem solving skills in addition to the knowledge of physical systems to understand literally ANYTHING in the world around you."

Seems harmless enough right? But then I went on to say, "Pick a topic, ...any topic whatsoever, and we will apply these techniques to analyze it." And yes, that was where I had failed to truly anticipate the effect of surging hormones on pubescent males. What else could possibly be on the minds of teenage males? Of course they said, "BOOBS!"

It's true, I could have said something like "...yeah, very funny. Pick another topic." But I really wanted to get the students eyes out of the textbook and looking at the world around them in an analytical frame of mind. They were clearly already looking in that particular direction, and I don't think I ever had a class achieve such rapt attention and engagement in any other prospect. In retrospect, students seem to have a keen sense of when a teacher is walking a razors edge, and I should have been more wary of their finely tuned instincts for instructional embarrassments. Well, I seized the day, as they say. What can I say? I was young and brash.

And so began my discourse on how one might go about designing a bra; mass, moments of inertia, oscillation, resonance, damping, elasticity, and energy storage in material design all figured prominently. I tried to move from diagrams of breasts in motion to more abstract free-body diagrams of forces and equations as quickly as possible, but the damage was done. I think it may have taken all of about 30 seconds after the class was dismissed for the news of my enlightened Physics lesson to be relayed across the school, to the entire student body, the faculty, the school administration, the parents and even the school board.

Fortunately, I had taken to preserving meticulous notes and audio tapes of the classes in anticipation of possible future publication opportunities, and they, and my rather dispassionate mathematical description of a fashion and textile design problem saved me from being fired the next day, though there was a right-wing contingent all a-twitter from their kids having heard the word "breast" uttered by a male teacher. My one consolation was that the students performed better on that unit of physical modeling than on any other. Engaged, indeed.

Thankfully, however, another firm has now taken up the challenge of properly modeling, simulating, rendering, and articulating (ahem) in fact, the issues surrounding proper sports bra design. If only I had had this tool available for my fateful lesson. Witness the Bounce-O-Meter, a web site application that demonstrates how proper bra design impacts comfort during strenuous activities.

Be sure to check out the wire-frame and fully rendered animated models here after you select a cup size and level of activity. Bare breasts, breasts encased in a traditional bra, and a set supported by the latest "Shock Absorber" bra can all be compared. Now THAT's physical modeling.

The Latest Tips for Evil Overlords

2007-04-05T07:53:00.000-07:00

The original post of advice for Evil Overlords was an immediate Internet cult classic. See the vastly expanded list here, complete with new tips for excelling as an evil henchmen, or a trooper in a legion of doom, or the Overlord's accountant, or even for the Evil Overlord's beautiful but wicked daughter.

A couple of my favorites:

12. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

15. I will never employ any device with a digital countdown. If I find that such a device is absolutely unavoidable, I will set it to activate when the counter reaches 117 and the hero is just putting his plan into operation.

A Great Book for the Kids

2007-04-04T14:56:00.000-07:00

Always on the lookout for more science education resources, I stumbled across a real gem last week. There are any number of "kids science experiment" style books, but precious few articulate fundamental engineering principles in such a way that elementary students can get their hands dirty and build something at little or no expense.

Check out "How Things Work" by Neil Ardley. You can purchase it here from Amazon.

The book guides readers through an introduction to a broad range of foundational engineering challenges from structural design, to aerodynamics of birds and planes, to hydraulic valves and pumps, and almost everything in between. Each chapter includes clear directions on how to build prototypes with paper, cardboard, straw types of materials. They are FANTASTIC.

The demo projects are by-and-large rather simple and short, but do a great job demonstrating fundamental principles and techniques. They then become the perfect platform to ask, "so how would you make your widget ______ [Stronger, Faster, Lighter, etc...]?" Then you just give 'em a bucket of parts and watch them go.

The cover touts a target demographic of ages 8-14 but I already have my 4 1/2 year-old daughter working on a couple of projects. Takes after her 'ol Dad she does!

Every school (and parent) should have one! Go forth and engineer!

Surpassing Hubble from the Ground

2007-03-24T15:36:00.000-07:00

Several friends have asked me recently what I thought of the eventual, and possibly imminent, decommissioning of the Hubble Space telescope, arguably one of the preeminent scientific instruments of the last century. My reply describing wondrous past utility now becoming obsolete was almost always met with stark surprise. Wasn't Phillip supposed to be the champion of all things space and astronautics?

Well, for all you space telescope traditionalists, witness the future today. Last week, there was a release from the Gemini Observatory in Hilo, HI that included images even the Hubble telescope couldn't have taken, and they were taken from the ground, through the earth's atmosphere.

The Gemini observatory images combined optical and infrared wavelength images of the Pillars of Creation area of the Orion nebula. The really interesting new data refutes one of the earlier theories that hot energetic starts were blowing dust and matter off of several proto-stellar objects to form the dusty pillars. Gemini's latest data shows that there was a violent explosion from below the lower left corner of the image that ejected several large objects (shown in blue from the hot and energetic iron gas emissions) that are leaving wakes of energized hydrogen gas shown in orange.

The innovation that made this type of image quality possible from the ground, even through the distortion due to the Earth's turbulent atmosphere is called adaptive optics. An actuated deformable mirror is manipulated to introduce the inverse distortion from an image of a very tiny or point source of bright light which has passed through the atmosphere. Here is a diagram of the system used by Gemini.

From the Gemini site: A schematic of how an adaptive optics systems, like Altair on Gemini North, works to correct distorted starlight. The illustration (1) is an example of a blurry image taken without the help of adaptive optics. When starlight is collected and focused by the telescope, just prior to coming to a focus, the light entering an adaptive optics system is first collimated (2) and is reflected off a deformable mirror (3). After reflecting off the deformable mirror, the light passes through a beam-splitter (4) where the shorter wavelength light (optical) enters the wavefront sensor (5) which takes a "snapshot" of the distortions on the wavefront and sends the information via a computer (6) to the deformable mirror to keep the wavefronts corrected and flat. Finally, the light is focused (7) and imaged on a detector (8) for astronomers to study.

When there is no bright star in the field of view, the Gemini system uses a laser that targets the ionosphere to create an artificial star. Here is an image of the system in operation.

I can't wait to see what else this system comes up with.
Do check out their web site for all the details: Gemini observatory.

Chandra Reveals Thousands of Black Holes

2007-03-18T09:49:00.000-07:00

NASA's Chandra X-Ray observatory in orbit is racking up quite a record of groundbreaking discoveries this year. After enabling the verification of Dark Matter earlier this year, Chandra's latest mission peered through interstellar dust and obscuration that have historically plagued visible light instruments to discover over 1000 Black Holes in a patch of the sky about the size of a paperback book held at arm's length.

Each of the colored dots in the field below (taken in the constellation Bootes) is a direct image of a black hole that lies at the center of a remote galaxy (hence the name "Active Galactic Nuclei" [AGN]).

X-Ray astronomers are already all stirred up about the fact that the prevailing theories on Black Hole formation and light emission are now being called into question by this new data. In our latest theories, matter falling into Black Holes would emit light as it sheds angular momentum while falling into the hole, to result in a bright torus (donut) of orbiting matter.

Animation Published by: Goddard Space Flight Center
Date Published: April 30, 2001
Official ID:blackholebinary1

Animation from Harvard's Chandra center.

But Chandra's latest survey doesn't show the distribution of brightness we would expect from over 1000 donuts of orbiting material oriented randomly around 1000 Black Holes. Stay tuned while the astronomers figure out what is really going on!

Read all the details from the Chandra Web site, and learn more about Black Holes here.

Behold the Glide Toaster

2007-03-17T15:49:00.000-07:00

Hat tip to Gizmodo.

More details here.

Only in Japan: A Pedal-Powered Roller Coaster

2007-03-17T10:29:00.000-07:00

Via TechBlog and Tree-Hugger, and an auto-translated version of the original Japanese site.

The Skycycle at Washuzan Highland Park in Okayama, a pedal-powered roller coaster.

More on Mary's Spectrograph

2007-03-17T09:55:00.000-07:00

After digging around the web for a bit, I found Mary Masterson's web sites that chronicle her life, with the Littrow Spectrograph project figuring prominently. (See my earlier post on High School Innovation for the initial story on Mary's award-winning science fair project.)

Check out the Spectroscopy web site that Mary put together including links to the MIT science institute for high school students she recently attended FREE OF CHARGE!

She also has a more technically oriented site that describes her project in detail, including nice photos of her equipment in operation. The real beauty of her shining example is that Mary covers all the scientific bases from strong inquiry and innovation, disciplined and meticulous experimental techniques, strong communication and presentations skills (including web, paper, and poster publication), all the way to strong participation in the broader scientific community to learn from others at world-class institutions and share her ideas with mentors and peers.

One of the things I really love about Mary's project is how she was able to assemble a first-rate solidly designed and constructed bit of scientific equipment for under $300. At first glance, the whole assembly looks like a bit of expensive commercial-grade laboratory equipment, but the reality is that Mary found many of these parts to be readily available in surplus equipment shops. A couple of used camera lenses, a pre-owned CCD camera and a laser were the big tickets that were all attached to some custom-machined base and mounting hardware. So in order to complete the project, Mary started with the theories, designed the physical system, machined the parts, assembled them, wrote software, managed the computer interface, data collection and analysis, and finally published the results.

A very complete package indeed.

The real shame, in light of this gold standard, is that most students are completely unaware that these sorts of opportunities exist and are open to any motivated applicant.