Monday, December 30, 2013

So How Does Education Really Work?

SEE HERE  A Delancey Place article about some fascinating experiments in India among the very poor and why things in the future will be better than you expect.

Monday, December 23, 2013

I Wonder If He Does Crop Circles During Warmer Times

SEE HERE  Gotta see this ... great snow art.

The Science Before Science

Science is built on a foundation of Philosophy.

Thursday, November 14, 2013

Build A Tiny Teeny House For $25 Grand ...

SEE HERE  An interesting idea ... I think I'd be incredibly claustrophobic and there's no place for my books at all.

Sunday, November 10, 2013

Click For A Ten Minute Stream Of Amazing Video

VIDEO
I guess I'm a wimp but you could not get me doing any of this stuff. One strike and you're out and I'm a pretty cautious guy so maybe not ... still it is fascinating to watch and quite breathtaking.

Sunday, October 27, 2013

I Love This Optical Illusion Stuff ... Here's Another

SEE HERE  This one is a car commercial but it includes some really awesome optical illusions.

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Stained Glass Designs For The Lord Of The Rings

SEE HERE  Some things are too good not to want to share.  Click on the link and scroll through some very nice concept designs for stained glass windows based on the Lord of the Rings.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

The Future Belongs To Those Who Seek It Positively

There are too many people who give up instead of rising to the challenge.

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Where Is Education Going?

We live in a world that is in great flux because of the emergence of amazing technology that allows extensions of communications and analysis universally like the leveling of the six-gun in the old West. Change is coming and it is going to be extensive and amazing.

Monday, September 2, 2013

Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans

Controlling Everything On Your Own Internet

SEE HERE  Flutter for home applications and control and over a half-mile range.  What can you do with this?  Use your imagination!

Monday, August 26, 2013

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Techies Are Badass! Georgia Tech Telling It Like It Is

Check out the faculty guy who looks bored at the beginning and gets more and more involved.  Nothing like Techies Turned On To Excellence!

Sunday, August 18, 2013

Saturday, August 17, 2013

Some Things To Think About

Global pseudo-science exposed ... great fun!

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Lessons Learned From Randy Pausch

SEE HERE  I'm a big fan of Randy Pausch's "The Last Lecture" so this appealed to me.  I hope you enjoy it too.  If you have not seen "The Last Lecture" then WATCH BELOW.

Friday, July 19, 2013

The School of Athens

Philosophy's origins in Raphael's great fresco.  DETAIL

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Cancer Tissue Classification On The Fly

SEE HERE  This is technology that could revolutionize cancer surgery and make it much more precise and hopefully that much less invasive.  One question of course is just how accurate it is, but it certainly seems like a step in the right direction.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

84" Whiteboard Interactive Wall Sized Computer

Cool device.  Wonder how long before it's being sold for not much?

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Another Stupid Health Myth Bites The Dust

SEE HERE  As a saltaholic I'm particularly thrilled to discover that there's no basis for all the gloom and doom that doctors have always been peddling about reducing your salt intake.  I've told them that I thought it was nonsense for a long time and they just write me off as incorrigible.  Now to have some actual references that make the point ... how good is that!?

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Quantum Computing Around The Corner?

SEE HERE  Rather specialized so far but coming perhaps quicker than you think.

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Old And Too Funny ...

FUNNY  I've seen this video before a few times because it is so funny that even though it's pretty old it keeps circulating.  It's of a juggler who is also a stand up comic performing for an audience that includes Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neil and other politicians as well as first lady Nancy Reagan.  Hilarious!!

Tablet With Built In DLP Laser Projector: Wave Of The Future?


Only 35 lumens but not too bad and definitely an interesting direction for the future.  LINK HERE

Star Wars ... Seen From The Elizabethan Viewpoint


Friday, June 28, 2013

Processing 2.0 Is Available


Go get it HERE. It's free and fun, what more could you want?

Thursday, June 27, 2013

Helicopter Retrieval Of P-51 RC Model In The Trees

This is pretty cool. A helicopter pilot sees a model airplane crash into a tree top and goes and retrieves it for the modelers on the ground.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Amazing Pictures

LOOK AT THIS  Totally amazing surveillance footage ... a picture with so much resolution that you can scan the crowd for individual facial recognition.  Coupled with face recognition technology this is a step in the direction of total surveillance.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

A Litany Of Liars

SEE HERE  Here they are lined up for all to see, a chain of liars lying.  It is time to hold politicians to a higher standard.  When they lie they should be called on it immediately and held to a record so we know.  Perhaps each elected official should have an objective score sheet complete with analysis graphs that give them a rating as to consistency and degree of lying.  It ought to be an objective standard and not muddied with alleged good intentions.  "By their fruits you shall know them," I think is the applicable standard.

Monday, June 24, 2013

Paranoia To The Max — Beyond Science Fiction

  If you're planning a dystopian science fiction novel this lady has a lot of ideas that you could use.  I watched it and it's mostly beyond paranoia to something resembling a kind of insanity ... but she's personally convinced and that's interesting in itself.  Put your tongue deeply in your cheek if you decide to watch.  Government conspiracy theories at the max.

Friday, June 21, 2013

Spitfire Over Germany

A great memoir of WWII recon over Berlin in of all things, a Spitfire. Most people would tell you a Spitfire can't fly that far. This fellow would tell you different.

Hard To Machine Read Text Font — Why Does This Make Sense


This may work for OCR but it won't work at all if you have the codes available since just changing fonts should get you to an intelligible one. It will work perhaps for automated screen shots but since there's no reason to believe that the codes that encode the text don't come across (afterall how can the screen be generated otherwise?) I don't see this as an effective technique.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Monday, June 17, 2013

Spiders, Spiders Everywhere ...

  SEE HERE  I guess I'm in no hurry to visit Brazil during spider season.

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Saturday, May 25, 2013

In The Prime ... Numbers That Is!

SEE HERE Breakthrough result in prime number distribution.

Monday, May 20, 2013

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

The Workmanship Of The Past

WATCH THIS It's very hard to find workmanship that rises to this kind of standard today. What we have gained in mass production has been lost in originality and craftsmanship. It's a wonder.

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

The Latest Flying Car

SEE HERE Flying cars keep coming around.  Most are horribly grotesque and impractical but this one is the latest and greatest apparently.  See what you think!

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Wine Expertise Mostly Hype!

SEE HERE This is rather funny really.  Most very expensive wines are really not all that much better and likely worse than much less expensive wines.  Also the idea that particular wines must be drunk with particular foods, red wines with beef and red meat, white wines with fish or poultry have no particular basis in reality, just preferences.  It's all very amusing.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Technology: Transforming Education?

SEE HERE  I have reservations about the idea that technology "transforms" education.  But it is certainly an hypothesis that will be explored in the coming years.  Much of technology seems more of a distraction than a help and before one heralds it as a breakthrough or even a useful aid, one needs to have a better definition in mind of just what education is.  I believe that education is not the learning of facts or even principles, but rather the development in the human person of the faculty of being a good learner so that you can educate yourself effectively no matter what comes up.  You need to learn how to think and develop yourself and not what to think.  The former is education the latter is indoctrination.

Monday, April 1, 2013

C.S. Lewis on "The Laws of Nature"


This is rather like a lesson in pictorial notetaking.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Growing Human Organs From The Patient's Own Cells

SEE HERE This is certainly pregnant with possibilities. Science continues to amaze. If this technology moves forward rapidly it will be a revolution in health care in the area of organ replacement.  MORE HERE

Friday, March 22, 2013

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Leonard Nimoy and The Origin of The Vulcan Salute

I've always found this an interesting story.  Enjoy!

Saturday, March 9, 2013

How Much Technology Do We Need Before Humanity Begins To Break Down

SEE HERE Google Glass is cool everyone seems to suggest. I've had no experience of it but it sounds like it takes electronic connectivity up a big notch and we end up approaching the Borg and that gets to a point that starts looking rather inhuman.

Monday, February 25, 2013

More Drones With Interesting Capabilities

According to the comments the range is limited by the WiFi level to maybe 250' so don't get too excited. Although it couldn't be that big a feat to extend the range. The next likely limitation is battery life which can't be more than a few minutes.

Saturday, February 2, 2013

Speaking of Drones

It's just amazing the things you can do with today's technology.  This is awesome!

Capability Drives Deployment: Of Course They're Watching You

SURVEILLANCE Check out this amazing video of the latest drone surveillance capability developed for DARPA.  Pretty amazing and pretty darn undetectable.

Friday, January 25, 2013

A Moment of Levity

WATCH This little amusing song got my attention.  It was sent to me by a friend (no it wasn't a suggestion that I was getting old) and it was fun.  The bit about the refrigerator door caught me since I do that every morning, opening it up for the bacon, getting an egg, getting the bacon fat can to pour the grease into and I often find myself pausing ... now why did I open the fridge this time?  I suppose that means the senior moments will be increasing before long.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

3D Printing With Something Like Marble

SEE HERE This is just an amazing idea.  Building a Moebius Strip building made with a 3D printer using sand and binder.  D-SHAPE

DNA for Archival Data Storage? Really?

SEE  HERE I've given up making technological predictions.  I've been wrong every time and the technology that developed has always been far more impressive than I could have imagined.  Does this make sense?  DNA?  On the face of it I'd say no, but no doubt someone will come up with a quick way to encode and decode DNA and then I'll be wrong again.

Speaking of James Bond

Now that's useful if you want to watch TV outside while lazing on the lawn.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Is Asteroid Mining In Our Future?

SEE HERE  I am working on a sequence of science fiction novels of the near future in a technological background I call "Sutter's Mill" which is a large asteroid processing plant in the asteroid belt.  One of the problems with near term science fiction is that there is always the possibility that you'll be overtaken by reality.  It should be interesting.