Comments Off on ZeroN: Levitated Interaction ElementTechnology
When you see stuff like this you really wonder (especially as a father) what kind of crazy ass futuristic shit you’re gonna walk in on one day and see your kid doing and ask ‘whoa, what the hell is that’ and then all smart-like they’ll answer, ‘geez Dad this is the T.V. remote’ and you’ll say, ‘yeah I know, whatever’.
All jokes aside though, this levitated magnetic digital interaction system is really amazing. Brought to you from the minds at MIT of course.
“What if materials could defy gravity, so that we could leave them suspended in mid-air? ZeroN is a physical and digital interaction element that floats and moves in space by computer-controlled magnetic levitation.
by Jinha Lee, in collaboration with Rehmi Post, and Hiroshi Ishii”
This sweet little video was created by Owen Gatley and Luke Jinks. “It’s loosely based on the scientific recording of life’s great species. And how this has given us clues that piece together, for us to discover the secrets of the evolution and diversity of life on Earth.”
Comments Off on Imaginary Foundation Pattern SeekersFashion
The Imaginary Foundation got in touch with me this week and sent me a really great t-shirt along with a box of cards featuring some incredibly inspiring individuals, including one of my personal favorites, Buckminster Fuller. The t-shirts and cards are a really great way to help educate, inspire and spread the legacy of some of the brightest minds in the science and philosophy realm. It was nice to receive something that wasn’t meant just to look and be cool, but actually serve as a tool or pathway into learning something new and discovering some people that might further inspire thought and creativity. It’s tantamount really to the Imaginary Foundation’s entire message and premise. I really respect what they are doing. They are genuine about creating things that inspire the imagination and enlighten people to consider the world, their place in it, and help to broaden their idealogies and philosophy. After all, art and science are closer cousins than most people think. The shirt and cards will be available at their website starting Monday.
Two German biotech experts have decided to convert the entire human genome into audio and stream it over the internet. They estimate that it will take about 23.5 years until the entirety of the code has been distributed over the internet. They are also generating imagery that you can see above (looks like static).
Why? I don’t know. Interesting and kind of awesome? Yes.
I apologize again for not keeping up on my one TED talk a week policy but life has been a little hectic lately. I was just thumbing through some of the talks the other day and discovered this talk by Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor. Her story is unique in that she actually studies the human brain and suffered a stroke. She remembers every bit of the experience in vivid detail and tried her hardest to do so because she saw it as a once in a lifetime opportunity, if she survived, to share her first person insight with the rest of the world. That is exactly what she does in this talk. It has to be one of the most moving talks on the entire TED website and it really stuck with me. I have had someone in my family go through a similar experience that it took them a long time to recover from and it may be because of that I found Taylor’s talk so touching. It takes a massive amount of courage to share something like that with so many people and her story is really amazing.
Here is the background about the talk copied from the TED website:
“One morning, a blood vessel in Jill Bolte Taylor’s brain exploded. As a brain scientist, she realized she had a ringside seat to her own stroke. She watched as her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness …
Amazed to find herself alive, Taylor spent eight years recovering her ability to think, walk and talk. She has become a spokesperson for stroke recovery and for the possibility of coming back from brain injury stronger than before. In her case, although the stroke damaged the left side of her brain, her recovery unleashed a torrent of creative energy from her right. From her home base in Indiana, she now travels the country on behalf of the Harvard Brain Bank as the “Singin’ Scientist.”
‘How many brain scientists have been able to study the brain from the inside out? I’ve gotten as much out of this experience of losing my left mind as I have in my entire academic career.’
A coworker alerted me to this disturbingly terrifying project today. I have to say it kind of sent me reeling a little bit especially when considering a group of people with the level of intelligence it would take to complete a project like this would get together to actually follow through with it. It sometimes sounds like our civilization and planet are in a lot more peril than most of us would like to consider. Whether or not any of this is right or we are totally nuts remains to be seen.
Apparently several of the seeds on our planet have been going extinct even faster than the fish and animal populations. According to Dr. Cary Fowler, Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, “Every day that passes we lose crop biodiversity. We must conserve the seeds that will allow agriculture to adapt to challenges such as climate change and crop disease.”
In order to combat this problem they have constructed the Svalbard International Seed Vault that will be carved deep into the frozen rock of an island not far from the North Pole. According to the architects the “fail-safe” seed vault will “gleam like a gem in the midnight sun,” signaling the priceless treasure within: seed samples of nearly every food crop of every country.
My question is what do they know that they aren’t telling the rest of us? If they really think it is worth the resources it would take to carve a gigantic vault into one of the most inhospitable regions of the entire planet, what is signaling the disaster that would provide just cause for such an insane project. I try to take the optimistic side when it comes to conspiracy theories but this definitely caught my attention. It’s just too bad our government could care less.
