A collection of digital wonders and some other stuff
60 Minutes is reporting that Cold Fusion is gaining traction and may soon be vindicated. I’m a skeptic but I want to believe.
When first presented in 1989 cold fusion was quickly dismissed as junk science. But, as Scott Pelley reports, there’s renewed buzz among scientists that cold fusion could lead to monumental breakthroughs in energy production.
60 Minutes – Cold Fusion Hot Again
This video of Danny MacAskill has got to be one of the most amazing collection of trials riding I’ve ever seen.
Filmed over the period of a few months in and around Edinburgh by Dave Sowerby, this video of Inspired Bicycles team rider Danny MacAskill features probably the best collection of street/street trials riding ever seen. There’s some huge riding, but also some of the most technically difficult and imaginative lines you will ever see. Without a doubt, this video pushes the envelope of what is perceived as possible on a trials bike.
Imagine you’ve gone back in time, but you’re hankering for a few of the amenities you’ve grown accustomed to living in the 21st century. Hopefully you remembered to bring your Time Traveler’s Cheat Sheet, a handy guide to inventing some of life’s essentials.
A moving electric field produces magnetism, and vice versa, wrap copper wire around an iron core and run electricity through it, and you’ve got an electromagnet. Don’t have any electricity? Put a magnet on a water wheel, and put your copper-wrapped iron beside the wheel, and hey presto, you’re converting mechanical energy into electricity.
In 1962, the IBM 704 became the first computer to sing. The song was Daisy Bell. John Kelly and Carol Lockbaum programmed the vocals and the accompaniment was programmed by Max Mathews. This performance was the inspiration for the famous scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey in which the HAL 9000 computer sings the song as it is deactivated.
In 2009, the song has been recreated using 2000 clips of human voices collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Workers were asked to listen to a short clip of the 1962 recording and then prompted to repeat the sound as best they could.
See the Bicycle Built for 2000 project page for an interactive look at each sound clip.
The NHL playoffs begin today. Personally I’m rooting for the Calgary Flames, but I’ll be happy if any Canadian team wins the cup.
Whether or not you’re planning to watch any of the games tonight, take ten minutes to enjoy The Sweater, a classic Canadiana short from the NFB.
In this animated short, Roch Carrier recounts the most mortifying moment of his childhood. At a time when all his friends worshipped Maurice “Rocket” Richard and wore his number 9 Canadiens hockey jersey, he was mistakenly sent a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey from Eaton’s. Unable to convince his mother to send it back, he must face his friends wearing the colours of the opposing team. This short film, based on the book The Hockey Sweater, is an NFB classic that appeals to hockey lovers of all ages.
The Sweater, Sheldon Cohen, provided by the National Film Board of Canada.
Back in the early days of Disney animation, it was not uncommon for animators to cycle animation forward and then backward, repeat action more than once, or use a cross-over technique in which two or more characters do the same action.
From The Illusion of Life:
Sometimes an action could be repeated just as it was in a second scene, but more often a new beginning or a different ending were called for. In these cases, the animator could repeat part of the action by borrowing drawings from the earlier scene. In other cases, there would be an action that could be repeated intact in the same scenes—a character climbing a slippery pole, or sliding down an incline, or being knocked down by a mechanical device.
I remember watching the Disney classics as a kid and thinking some of these scenes are very similar to other Disney movies. I never realized that this type of repeated action was so prominent between films until seeing this YouTube compilation:
[Youtube link – Resemblance]
Having said that, I don’t considering this to be as big of a cheat as to deserve a flippant “fail” tag so indiscriminately handed out by the Pharisees of the net.
The copying done here, is not tracing, but transferring poses from one character to another, perhaps even from Disney’s large collection of reference footage. As anyone that’s done any animation knows, putting any animation onto a new character is still a very difficult task regardless of where you get the poses.
(via)
47 year old Susan Boyle has always wanted to be a professional singer. When asked by Simon Cowell what’s held her back all these years, she replied. “I’ve just never been given a chance before.”
When I was down in San Fransisco a couple of years ago, I dropped into one of the first meetings of the Social Media Club.
While chatting with a group of strangers about social media, I mentioned how Stumble Upon had recently added a video section. One of the ladies was really enthralled and wanted to know just what you had to do to get her politically motivated video featured there.
My “clueless Internet marketing guru” radar was going off and I had to explain to her that videos don’t get put on there by work or money, they get put on there because Stumble Upon has an algorithm that calculates whether or not this video is something I’d like to see.
I explained that if you want your video to show up for me it would have to be something that is interesting enough for people with like-minded interests as me to give it a thumbs-up click. It’s an organic process that can’t be forced unless you are able to create a compelling video. I’m not sure I got through to her, and this saddens me, because I feel like I know tons more about how social media actually works and yet I see many of these self marketed Internet gurus that seem to know next to nothing.
My first thought when I heard that the University of Lethbridge has decided to jump on the social media marketing bandwagon is that hey, I’d be great at that job.
From the job listing as found on the U of L Notice Board:
Social Website Bloggers
$13/hour
5-10 hours per week starting in May
The successful candidates should be passionate about the UofL and eager to share their experiences, opinions and observations. They will maintain and update electronic social networking sites including, but not limited to, blogs, Twitter and Facebook. They will be expected, on a regular basis, to constructively comment on many of the happenings and experiences within the UofL and the City of Lethbridge.
My next thought when I read, “constructively comment” was that this is a bad idea. I wonder how tight the reins will be held on the winning applicant. In my mind, there’s really only a couple of ways this can turn out.
On the one hand, a paid blogger extolling the virtues of the perfect world existing at the U of L is going to come off as contrived, institutional in flavour, and won’t express the kind of unique ideas that will get the kind of attention the University is looking for in the first place. They might as well just save their money and keep pushing the kind of media they already publish.
On the other hand, if the new U of L blogger is free to present ideas about how they see the University run, unfavourable opinions may germinate and it could turn out to be a PR nightmare.
I still wish they had something like that when I went there because it sounds like a fun job. But if I were the person in charge of this position I would keep in mind this post from Matt Haughey, This is how Social Media really works. It’s not about paying someone to get on twitter, facebook, and blogger, it’s about putting together a quality product (in this case higher education) and letting the social network do its own thing.
And for the record, it’s U of L not UofL — that’s a total pet peeve of mine.
In a long but fascinating story about the Arab World’s biggest tourist destination, Johann Hari reports on the Dark Side of Dubai.
I wanted to understand how the government of Dubai will react, so I decided to look at how it has dealt with an environmental problem that already exists — the pollution of its beaches. One woman — an American, working at one of the big hotels — had written in a lot of online forums arguing that it was bad and getting worse, so I called her to arrange a meeting. “I can’t talk to you,” she said sternly. Not even if it’s off the record? “I can’t talk to you.” But I don’t have to disclose your name”¦ “You’re not listening. This phone is bugged. I can’t talk to you,” she snapped, and hung up.
The next day I turned up at her office. “If you reveal my identity, I’ll be sent on the first plane out of this city,” she said, before beginning to nervously pace the shore with me. “It started like this. We began to get complaints from people using the beach. The water looked and smelled odd, and they were starting to get sick after going into it. So I wrote to the ministers of health and tourism and expected to hear back immediately — but there was nothing. Silence. I hand-delivered the letters. Still nothing.”
A few years ago I started considering a visit to the UAE, but stories like this make me reconsider. However, at least one blogger considers this report as overkill.
Even though it’s still over a month away, I’m getting more and more excited about the 2009 Sasquatch! Music Festival. It’s going to be a fantastic time.