Watch Movies In The ... Oh, This is a Dumb Tagline.



Strikes me as simultaneously pretentious and geekily cool.

The reasons this blog has been such a neglected stepchild recently are twofold:

1) Less free time (seeking work, working, study etc.)

2) what free time I do have is dedicated to my current fictional informatics kick.


Still, there is a world of difference between "rarely" and "never".

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Florida Company claims they can convert Water into Gasoline

Let's see what the military-industrial blahblahblah has to say about this!

Anyhoo, the website is here and -- oh, look -- there's even a video!


Update (4:12 PM): It seems I spoke too soon ...

Sadly, to quote Howard Tayler, "Murphy is always gunning for optimists, and he’s a crack shot."

Huh?

In the past few years, scientists have found ways to make light go both faster and slower than its usual speed limit, but now researchers at the University of Rochester have published a paper today in Science on how they've gone one step further: pushing light into reverse. As if to defy common sense, the backward-moving pulse of light travels faster than light.

Yoinked from Centauri Dreams, whoever the hell they are.

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In other news, A Miracle of Science is coming to an end. This too shall pass and such.


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We Got Mo'F**king Lasers!!

Do You Want an Androoo-oid, The BEYOND Corporation's Gonna Help You Out ...



"For now, EveR-1 can be employed as a guide robot at museums and department stores or as an educational model to read books to children," Baeg said.

"But we are looking further ahead _ we are working on upgrading the android with the aim of making it move its legs by the end of this year. It will be able to sit down and stand up by then," he expects.

This Be Some Da Vinci Code Isht Right Here

ROSSLYN Chapel holds many secrets. For hundreds of years experts and visitors alike have puzzled over the carvings in the chapel. Whilst some debate whether they point to hidden treasure, Edinburgh composer Stuart Mitchell thinks he has cracked one part of the enigma.

He believes that the ornate ceiling of carved arches, featuring 213 decorated cubes holds a code for medieval music. His father Thomas Mitchell spent 20 years cracking this code in the ceiling and now Stuart is orchestrating the findings for a new recording called The Rosslyn Motet.

... The breakthrough to interpreting the notation came when Mitchell's father discovered that the markings carved on the face of the cubes seem to match a phenomenon called Cymatics or Chladni patterns. Chladni patterns form when a sustained note is used to vibrate a sheet of metal covered in powder producing marks. The frequency used dictates the shape of the pattern ...

So Dark The ... argh, I've stopped caring. Go read (and listen) now.

In Teh Future(OMG!), People Will See With Their Tongues.

Scientists at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition have found a way to use the tongue to give soldiers extrasensory abilities. A device known as "Brain Port" provides users with owl-like 360-degree vision at night. It gives Navy SEALs whale-like sonar capabilities that allow them to navigate without using a compass -- or even their eyes.

Using a gross of microelectrodes, they translate artificially-acquired sense data (e.g. sonar, compass reading and who knows what else) into touch sensations on your tongue. It seems the reason they picked the tongue is that it has scads and scads of nerve endings. I know of another body part that's just as sensitive ...

*ahem*

Sorry.

Anyway, Michael Zinszer, Navy diver and underwater crime scene investigator, tested out a prototype and had this to say:

"You are feeling the outline of this image [with your tongue]. I was in the pool, they were directing me to a very small object and I was able to locate everything very easily."

Apparently, it's a sensation very similar to Pop Rocks.

Originally found here a.k.a. Peter Watt's Newscrawl. Buy Blindsight!!

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Personal note: This appears to be a parallel (albeit militarized) take on The Voice - which I mentioned earlier by the by :p