n-rd

I try to keep my political opinions out of this blog as I think that science must be objective. However, living in NY State and knowing that the state Senate was going to vote on gay marriage, I can’t help but post this video that ended up in my RSS reader.

This women makes several good points. The sad part about this is the first feed to send me this video was a comedy aggregation site.

certified bullshit technician., robhuebel: (not meant to be funny) This woman…

As a side note, the bill was not passed.

Saw this interesting, but short time lapse of construction of a shipping container office building in RI.

Time-lapse of construction of shipping-container office-building – Boing Boing

It seems that a research group took some LIDAR and did a mapping of the Stonehenge area. This is a pretty short 3d rendering of that data mostly fly overs of the area.

Stonehenge: virtual 3D animation – Boing Boing

Awesome video of a substation producing a Jacob’s ladder. I have no idea why this happened, I’d assume some kind of break down that allowed it. It is pretty spectacular.

YouTube – Jacob’s Ladder: 500kV Switch Opening

Looks like the Adler Planetarium has an interesting exhibit setup to showcase the images taken by LRO! It’s a virtual fly-by using the images taken from the LRO’s 500 megapixel camera.

Digital Displays at Adler Planetarium BizTech Magazine

Looks like NEC is making great progress toward a universal translator. I think the best part about this is the projection onto the retina. This might just start leading the way in augmented reality devices.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Smart spectacles aid translation

I must admit I’ve been a bit lax in posting one of the more interesting new pieces of Mathematics that has come around. I’ve enjoyed fractals for a long time and some of my first programs where of Sierpinski’s triangle, and the Mandelbrot. This has been saturating the interwebs, so I was reluctant to post it, but it just impresses me so much every time I see it, so here ya go.

Gorgeous 3D Mandelbrot sets! | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

From the “seriously, WTF?” files. Turns out a linguist is hell bent on messing up some children by only speaking Klingon to them.

Me thinks these(this) child might end up like Comic Book Guy.

Klingon as a First Language – Boing Boing

Make has this interesting video of a bomb proof kevlar wall. While it is neat there are a number of things that really don’t make sense to me here. First the wallpaper is held to the frame of the rig, as long as the wall paper doesn’t rip then the wall isn’t going to fall down. How is this going to work in the real world, are people going to have to put rigging on their ceiling and floor? What if a bomber takes out enough load bearing members to make the supports not hold anymore. Wouldn’t the wallpaper then become moot?

Not that I’m trying to poo-poo research, just seems like I’d like to see more video of this in actual situations and more rigorous tests.

Make: Online : “Bomb-proof” kevlar wallpaper

With all this new work that I’ve been doing in Mathematics, I’ve started to enjoy various visualizations. Here is a really nice one showing the decline of the largest empires of old. I really like the way that the wars and independence of various countries.

Visualizing the decline of empires – Boing Boing