Engineering

Ringed Shaped UFO — Interesting

This is one of the best “UFO in action” videos on Youtube right now. Whether it is legit or not is a whole nuther’ ball of wax. It is fair to note that the guy who shot this didn’t stabilize or focus correctly. Hell — if we had seen something like this, would we?

Check it out.

This is a very well done video.

Amazing video about Abu Dhabi’s urban planning decisions

If you haven’t seen the amusing and interesting movie, Project Grizzly, about Ontario, Canada inventor Troy Hurtubuise I strongly recommend you check it out. It features Troy on an expensive quest ($100,000) to build a suit that would allow him to go head to head with a grizzly bear. I won’t spoil the ending but its a good one. He worked on that project for 7 years.

Anyways, Troy seemingly never stops thinking about solution for potential imagined or real problems. His latest exoskeleton suit appears at first glance to be an escapee from a sci-fi B-movie. There is something inspiring about people tilting at windmills while producing interesting design I guess.

This is a fascinating story. The earliest human voice recorded by smoke blackened paper. Amazing. The recording will be presented on Friday at a conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in California, Giovannoni said. It is also posted on the Web here

Listen to an Mp3 of this first recording

American researchers have pieced together a 10-second audio clip of a French folk song which they believe is the oldest recognisable recording of the human voice.

The recording appears to be of a young woman singing a couple of phrases from the 18th century folk song Au Clair de la Lune. It was made in 1860 by Edouard Leon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and librarian, on a Heath Robinson-style device he called a “phonautograph”.

But in successfully playing back the clip, the team from the University of California’s Berkeley Lab, may have robbed their compatriot Thomas Edison of the honour long accorded him as the first man to successfully record sound.

Edison’s recording of himself reciting ‘Mary had a little lamb’, recorded on a tinfoil cylinder and no longer playable, dates from 1877. The first playable recording is thought to be from a performance of a Handel oratorio at Crystal Palace in 1888.

Scott’s phonoautograph had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a hog’s bristle stylus which etched sound waves onto sheets of smoke-blackened paper.

The New York Times reported that Scott never intended them to be played back but saw them as merely a visual representation of sound. It said that when Edison unveiled his phonograph, which was designed to play back its recordings, the Frenchman even accused him of misusing the technology.

The recording was discovered earlier this month at the French Academy of Sciences by David Gioavannoni, an “audio historian” who led the effort to find Scott’s original “phonoautograms”.

Mr Giovannoni had found earlier recordings at a Paris patent office, dating back as early as 1857 but he told the newspaper that his “eureka moment” came when he found the immaculately preserved 1860 recording on a sheet of rag paper measuring nine inches by 29 inches.

“It was pristine,” Mr Giovannoni said. “The sound waves were remarkably clear and clean.”

Mr Giovannoni sent scans of the recording to the Berkeley Lab where they were painstakingly converted into sound by scientists using technology designed to salvage historic recordings.

That technology allows the voice of a young French woman, recorded in Paris in the months before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration as President of the United States, to be heard again.

Times of London Source Article

I love this picture. I wonder what play lists they have on their ipod?

Higher res version:

Ah,  sweet Lego. Is there nothing you can’t do?

I saw this amazing video yesterday from Boston Dynamics. Its a robotic packbot quadreped that can carry 340 pounds. Amazing stuff. Its incredibly stable and at times, eerily real. What do you think? Could you use one on the back 40?