Technology

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.

PITTSBURGH -- Randy Pausch, a former Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist whose “last lecture” about facing terminal cancer became an international sensation and a best-selling book, died Friday. He was 47.

MSNBC Article announcing that Dr. Randy Pausch has passed away

His last lecture.

It’s been almost 6 weeks since the accident, and my wife is still on high alert. She is still having lots of nightmares, and what I can only describe as flashbacks. Every interaction on the road leaps out at her like a high definition instant replay, in a thousand variations. She isn’t driving yet, and is seeing a therapist, who seems sincere. The therapist has her sitting behind the wheel of a safely parked vehicle, and doing breathing exercises, and that seems to help a bit, but it is a slow process. How can I describe to you what she is going through? I barely understand it myself. Her reptile brain has taken over, and she is in a constant state of agitation; the fight or flight reflex that for most comes only in small doses when really needed. For her it has come to stay and this heightened sense of alert magnifies her pain and keeps her in a shadowy half life that I am seemingly powerless to rescue her from. So as you can imagine I am constantly looking for ways to help her through this and get her “back on the horse” as they say.

To that end I discovered and recommended a kind of distraction that allows her to experience horrific car crashes in a safe and dare I say it? — “fun” setting. I turned her on to Grand Theft Auto 4. At first she was mortified by the violence of the car crashes in game, but over the course of a few hours she has definitely begin to enjoy it. I see a smile creep across her face that resembles my wife before the accident. She is learning to enjoy the interaction of twisted metal in first person, from the relative safety of the couch. I am thinking I may be on to something here.

It is probably to early to give a definite answer as we just started playing last night. She slept well though, and seemed to ride well today as we ran around town on several “real-life” errands. She is not behind the wheel herself yet, but the little changes are a welcome difference. She is still tense, to be sure. Tonight she leaned over to hug our daughter and turned her neck in an odd way that caused her to lock up — head and shoulders — for 20 – 30 minutes until we could massage the spasm out. I am certain that her pain was both real and distressing, but it seemed to pass quickly compared to previous days.

“One can only hope, and remain open to new ideas…” has become my only motto.

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.

What a crazy secret. What a waste. I barely print anything any more, although I use a laser printer when I do.

From this post

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?

In this video – Israeli entrepreneur and venture capitalist – Yossi Vardi – gives a humorous 6 minute presentation at T.E.D about the phenomenon of local warming. He is an interesting person who focuses on the human side of investment, and clearly has a conscience. He can certainly afford to, his company, ICQ – was sold for 400 million.

“Happiness is relative,” Mr Vardi warns. “The more successful the high-tech sector, the more frustrated and unhappy the rest of society could become.”

Launch Video via Videoegg Player

You can read an excellent profile of Yossi Vardi in this Economist article