n-rd

Make has this post on this awesome yet creepy vocoded piano.
Make: Online : Mechanical reproduction of digitized speech on a piano

Found this interesting animation explaining the lifecycle of a star like our sun. It’s a more detailed explanation of Hydrogen is converted to Helium which then converts to carbon as the star dies over time.
Low Mass Stars

Boing Boing has a really interesting video with David Attenborough about carnivorous pitcher plants. These plants are so large that it’s said they have been known to consume small rodents. The best part about this video is a visually stunning surreal time lapse segment showing how the plant constructs the pitchers.
Video: giant carnivorous [...]

I saw a soduko solver somewhere today, and this is the website that it was on. These are two pretty nifty robots, one that solves Rubik’s cubes and the other solves soduko. Looks like they’re both done with LEGO mindstorms, so given that small footprint these are pretty elegant solutions.
Tilted Twister

Here’s an interesting video found via Make. It shows work done on the vision system of an ASIMO robot to detect and avoid moving obstacles in it’s environment. It’s amazing to watch this robot navigate and calculate trajectories completely on the fly.
Make: Online : ASIMO avoids moving obstacles
At this rate the [...]

Phil Plait has up today a very well done piece of educational video about the nature of light. Apparently there is going to be a series of these, if they’re all this well done that should be great.
Shine a light | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

Also known as how to make your head hurt.
Visualizing up to ten dimensions – Boing Boing
Now if you understood that you’re in the wrong business. If you don’t have a headache you didn’t pay close enough attention.

As probably all of you know at this point I’m going back for my degree in applied statistics. As such I have to fulfill some requirements, namely Calc I & II. Having a conversation with my brother recently it became obvious to me that I was having some real problems understanding the exponential [...]

A cute little stab at how difficult it is to land a spacecraft on mars. Mars: Springtime 2020

Worlds coolest wedding cake

Nerd cake. Delicious and awesome.