tingilinde

a bit over two months 'til the holidays - homemade gifts

Soon several holidays will be upon us and with many, an expectation of spending frantic time rushing around to use incantations from a piece of plastic to find gifts that hopefully will work out.   Some will and some won't, but another approach is to spend time making gifts or having gifts made that may be a better fit.  

This takes some discipline and it is unlikely you can do it for many.  A close friend in San Francisco and I have been doing this for several years.  Expectations are high on both sides and it would be wrong to not spend a lot of time thinking and creating.  Many of my creations fall short and both of us slide the due dates, but many of the gifts have been very special - amazing in fact - the sort of thing you remember and treasure. Such is the stuff of gifts from the heart.

I can't recommend doing this for kids.  They'll probably enjoy making a few things for others, but in general their expectations involve commercial store bought loot.  

You can be very creative as to the type of gift when it is personal.  Last year a friend put together suggestions and updated it recently.  Take a look...

This sort of thing isn't impossible, but you do need time and that means starting soon  The main point is there are people who will value you for your time and your thoughts about them rather than your money. For most people the only thing standing between them and a project like this is the tv.

using a duck to teach kids about disabilities

Lemon the Duck was born with a neurological disability, but she is used to teach kids about disabilities.

tiny art from a small world

Every year Nikon has a competition for great microphotography ... wonderful stuff

potentially awesome halloween costumes

(thanks for the link Bart!)

leaning on all four

Nissan's Land Glider concept car...  perhaps just the ticket for urban areas.  There aren't many details, but it is electric and seats two in tandem fashion.  Something like this could be very light and very efficient - and, if you limited its speed for city use (say 35 mph maximum) and let it operated in an environment of similar vehicles, it would be straightforward to make it safe.

A quick back of the envelope suggests a 800 to 1000 pound car could be done without exotic materials and a 15 or 20 kW motor would be just fine as would a 5 kWh battery.  Five years out and this may not be terribly expensive.

An interesting thing about the tandem configuration is that you can make it adjustable for a larger range of driver heights if you are willing to give up back seat use for very tall drivers.  Just the ticket for Colleen with her pups in the back seat/cargo area.  Then again she'll probably opt for her bike most of the time, but perhaps something like this would move people from their cars for many trips.  

Mixing these with normal traffic probably won't work, but imagine taking a quarter of the existing roads in a city and putting twice as many lanes in - make them all half the width. All you need is paint and signs. Bikes would get some of the lanes and very narrow cars would have the others.   Require the narrow cars to be electric.  Those streets would be wonderfully quiet and you could park three or four in a normal parking place ...

The hard bit is probably not building the cars, but getting cities to convert some percentage of their streets into roads that make sense.  It would probably take a huge spike in oil prices to get people to seriously consider something like this.

-13 magnitude meteor over canada

On September 25^th a very bright fireball streaked over Ontario and was captured by the cameras in University of Western Ontario's Southern Ontario's meteor network.  At its brightest it was about one hundred times as bright as the full moon.  The estimate is it started about as a one meter object and was traveling about about 21 km/second

yes that is a killer whale

The image was taken by an albatross equipped with a small ccd camera and the research appeared in PLoS ONE.  Great stuff - thanks for the line Greg!

Abstract 
Albatrosses fly many hundreds of kilometers across the open ocean to find and feed upon their prey. Despite the growing number of studies concerning their foraging behaviour, relatively little is known about how albatrosses actually locate their prey. Here, we present our results from the first deployments of a combined animal-borne camera and depth data logger on free-ranging black-browed albatrosses (Thalassarche melanophrys). The still images recorded from these cameras showed that some albatrosses actively followed a killer whale (Orcinus orca), possibly to feed on food scraps left by this diving predator. The camera images together with the depth profiles showed that the birds dived only occasionally, but that they actively dived when other birds or the killer whale were present. This association with diving predators or other birds may partially explain how albatrosses find their prey more efficiently in the apparently ‘featureless’ ocean, with a minimal requirement for energetically costly diving or landing activities.

give cellphones on airlines a chance

(thanks for the link Dewayne)

brain drain

Some sports are harder on the body than others and a few are hard on the brain.  There have been questions about football for some time.  Bart notes this article on football - it gets interesting around page five.

snip

Let’s say you run a multibillion-dollar football league. And let’s say the scientific community—starting with one young pathologist in Pittsburgh and growing into a chorus of neuroscientists across the country—comes to you and says concussions are making your players crazy, crazy enough to kill themselves, and here, in these slices of brain tissue, is the proof. Do you join these scientists and try to solve the problem, or do you use your power to discredit them?

entropy in the universe

This paper is a bit on the technical side and requires a bit of physics to follow.  The bottom line is supermassive black holes may be the largest contributors to entropy in the observable Universe and the estimate for total entropy is an order of magnitude higher than what people have been using. 

Neat stuff for the astrophysics and cosmology crowd to think about.  Mind wobbling huge numbers.

A LARGER ESTIMATE OF THE ENTROPY OF THE UNIVERSE

CHAS A. EGAN 

Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia 1

CHARLES H. LINEWEAVER 

Planetary Science Institute, Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics and Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University,

Canberra, Australia

Draft version September 22, 2009

ABSTRACT
Using recent measurements of the supermassive black hole mass function we find that supermassive black holes are the largest contributor to the entropy of the observable Universe, contributing at least an order of magnitude more entropy than previously estimated. The total entropy of the observable Universe is correspondingly higher, and is Sobs = 3.1 ^{+3.0 _-1.7} × 10¹⁰⁴k. We calculate the entropy of the current cosmic event horizon to be S_CEH = 2.6^±0.3×10¹²²k, dwarfing the entropy of its interior, S_{CEH int} = 1.2^+1_-0.7.1 ×10¹⁰³k. We make the first tentative estimate of the entropy of dark matter within the observable Universe, S_dm = 10⁸⁸±1k. We highlight several caveats pertaining to these estimates and make recommendations for future work.