Acetio | Blogma

Now with rumors that the heretofore undiscovered Higgs-Boson may have been detected, it's time to understand how that detector actually works.

HowToons is/are great at using simple, visual methods to explain how to build things. Blunder Lab take sthe same methods to explain basic scientific phenomena. While the artwork isn't as polished as HowToons, Blunder Lab still manages to fill a void.

It's all in the same spirit of Instructables and HowStuffWorks

The green ones are safe. The yellow ones are predicted to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere. The red one's would cause devastation if they were to hit the Earth. Note how many red ones there are by the end of the clip.

I did this kind of molecular visualization in the mid-90s on a Silicon Graphics Onyx. It's mind-blowing that you can do it in your browser now, using JavaScript no less.

"Sick of complicated protein viewers?
Then welcome to Jolecule, the truly web-based protein viewer - all your work saved to the cloud - and no plugins needed.

Jolecule has a beautiful interface that makes it incredibly easy to focus on specific atoms. It works with trackpads and even (slowly) on the iPad.

Written in HTML5, Jolecule works in modern browsers such as Chrome and Safari and mostly in Firefox."

A spoof the dryness of math texts from spikedmath.com

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: The answer is trivial

http://spikedmath.com/340.html

The Internet Archive describes the 1959 film as: "Simon Ramo's concept of "polymorphic" computing is laid out in stop-motion animation, accompanied by acoustic guitar. The film anticipates parallel, distributed processing and the architecture of ARPANET and the Internet."

Article and photos

I did this stuff in the mid-90s (although the technology then was not as sophisticated). When I moved to New York in 1997 I had to choose between a job doing more cellular visualization at Columbia Medical School or doing Web production at Ziff-Davis. The Web seemed more exciting at the time and the ZD office was a shorter commute, so that's the path I chose. I wonder how different my career would have been if I had chosen differently.

This is one of those things that sounds more like a discarded Dharma Initiative plot line from Lost than reality, yet it's real. The Burlington (VT) Free Press recently profiled the Teresem Movement Foundation, based in Bristol, VT, which calls itself a "a transreligion for technological times".

They are working on promoting "exponential life" - essentially getting to the point where we can download our consciousnesses into robotic bodies. The idea has been explored recently in shows such as Dollhouse and Caprica and does seem to be the ultimate target of a lot of scientific research.

Teresem has two journals: The Journal of Geoethical Nanotechnology and The Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness.

The NYTimes profiled one of the automatons, Bina48, which, along with tripping the "uncanny valley" alarm, is a good demonstration of how AI hasn't changed much since the days of the Alice chatbot

Heady stuff. Cool and unnerving.

Scientific American has had a dozen or so articles about the science behind visual illusions. Their 11th one, "Colors out of Space" included a slideshow with a few strikingly powerful illusions.

"In this illusion by Italian vision scientist Baingio Pinna, a thin, orange contour adjacent to a darker purple contour casts an orange tint over long distances—as though a watery paint was filling in the gaps between the orange lines. On the opposite side of the purple contour, the outlined areas look white."

"This Japanese manga girl by Kitaoka looks like she has one blue eye and one gray eye. In fact, both eyes are exactly the same shade of gray. The girl's right eye only looks the same as the turquoise hair clip because of the reddish context. Part of the process of seeing color is that three different kinds of photoreceptors in the eye are tuned to three overlapping families of color: red, green and blue (which are activated by visible light of long, medium and short wavelengths). These signals are then instantaneously compared with signals from nearby regions in the same scene. As the signals are passed along to higher and higher processing centers in the brain, they continue to be compared with larger and larger swaths of the surrounding scene. This "opponent process," as scientists call it, means that color and brightness are always relative."

Scientific American - Illusions: Colors out of Space

Through transferring data on computers more than anything else, we have learned prefixes such as "kilo", "mega", and "giga" meaning "thousand of", "million of", and "billion of" (or "milliard of" if you're an old-timey Englishman)

Similarly, as metric measurements creep into our collective consciousness, we have become aware of the prefixes that denote small fractions such as "milli", "micro", and "nano" meaning "thousandth of a", "millionth of a", and "billionth of a"

What strikes me is that the prefixes seem to enter common parlance in symmetry. People began using "mega" (million) in casual conversation when I was a kid to mean something really big or striking e.g. "mega-awesome" and at the same time began using "micro" (millionth) to refer to something really fast e.g. "micro-second". And perhaps ten years ago the terms "giga" (billion) and "nano" (billionth) became more widely used particularly because of familiarity with gigabytes and nanotechnology. (most of us first heard the prefix "giga" when Doc Brown screeched about the "one point twenty-one gigawatts" needed to power the flux capacitor, back in 1985, during the brief period when "giga" was pronounced with a soft "g")