…these brief moments of science…
Like lolcats, only different.
I wrote the haiku for an Instructable that describes using soda bottles to make an interesting environment for small rodents, at the website by that name.
Instructables is on the blog roll. Speaking of which, I wonder what progress JBo is maximizing today…
Well that seems like an interesting idea. Carbon fiber laminate over the standard birch, then paint black. How’s that going to look spattered with mouse head? I’d use them in the mouse trap chain reaction, but a full set of 24 x 6 would run $3,816 at the unit price. Wonder what the case discount is…
One dead end in the search for a light weight beam to make a demonstration of orbital center of mass. Currently three meters of aluminum box beam.
A two meter rectangular or square hollow beam from Dragon Plate
could fit the dream version of this demo, which isn’t written up, so I can’t point to it in its current form. Ach.
Snagged this from Maximizing Progress, and see it as a heart bleeding out. Wah. I cut the original animated gif from 420^2 to 200^2, renamed it for distinctness, and present it back as an obscene gif.
Original at: http://nsidc.org/news/press/2007_seaiceminimum/20070810_index.html#22August
Okay, I work at an acad3mic inst1tut10n, so as I write a note to the internet, a search of the literature will internalize state of the art. Leads also to swarm logic.
Interesting. Mostly talk about laying down pheromone trails and reinforcement thereof leading to optimized routes to food from a random wandering of ants.
Great, but not as cool as the behavior of army ants, where the first ants to a break in a trail will form a living bridge for the rest of the swarm to cross. The living bridge ants then rejoin the swarm at the back.
I heard the words “Ant Logic” and found myself noticing human behavior where the application of altruistic ant behavior would increase the efficiency of accomplishing a group task.
Two people entering a building through a double door airlock will often hold the doors for each other. First opens first door, holds for second who opens second door, which he holds for first.
One such group task is the boarding of a city bus by sixty odd high school students, only some of whom carry the Charlie card. Charlie card is our Metro Boston Transit Authority smart fare card. Mine is a perk from R-vard and gets me on bus and subway. Card in wallet to target, beep, and in two seconds I’m on the bus.
The sixty students took about fifteen minutes to board the bus. About half of them had a card, and half of them had to insert coins or bills into the slots. How to apply ant logic, and what is the time savings? One is to have the students pair up, one with and one without the Charlie card. Beep, beep, five seconds for two, about two and a half minutes. Another is to have the teacher with all sixty fares on one card, beep x 60, a minute and a half, perhaps. As fast as getting on the bus, anyway. So a minimum time savings of ten minutes, taking them twice the time just because they are teenagers, and have to sort themselves into groups once on the bus, holding up the line a bit.
So the real question is, are humans in a group less intelligent than ants?
The finest in on-going free-ware development in scientific simulations. It’s tons of fun. Wordpress doesn’t like the file, so I put it over on MomentsofScience.org, and it is just a text file that MolecularWorkbench calls to make this particular huge simulation.
I can do a timed grab of the window, with the cyclotron a 1000×1000 simulation with perfect walls. The massive proton hits the wall and keeps on accelerating each time it crosses the field gap. Blammo, it goes all chaotic before it is going so fast that it crashes the simulator. Aw. Of course, this is physically unreal simulation, at least in the original sense. But the math doesn’t care.
Next simulation, NetLogo, and the nuclear reactor set to go critical. Yay, fission!
I am back on my bicycle now. Five mile commute, half to all of it on city streets, including the option of all five miles on Mass. Ave.
The drivers of cars are still behaving as if there were no consequences to driving alone.
Extra load and other inefficiencies reduce gain, soooo… two in a car only almost doubles the efficiency.
Take that, square piston diesel power module, and good luck getting research funding. I definitely want to see that, micro-size, running on ethane. Oooh, yeah.
There is a ConocoPhillips Energy prize in which to enter Distributed Commuting.
I guess I should enter the whole Stepstones to the Hydrogen fuel thermodynamic economy by way of liq.air, LN2, LOx, and liq. ethane or methane. It was as a by-product of this fuel/oxidizer system that Frozen Metal technologies was considered for exhaust gas scrubbing, given the large amounts of cryogenic fluids available. Performing scientists then made the presentation at MIT bacchanal, notes were burned, and the presentation lost.
The lab development hat-wearing I saw the freeware program Audacity and thought it good. I’m running the beta version, and it crashes sometimes, but otherwise, Wow and Yay!
Then I made music concrete with it starting with a plucked string algorithm sound, and repeats and shifts of speeds in concentric circles. I love it. Now I will load it on this my home PC, and have a go.
I will put the link to the ten meg mp3 file called bingWopp or somesuch here, if you have the stomach for this genre. It is five minutes long, an experiment with a single note. Ahh. Not for the faint of heart. Seriously. On the other hand, sample it for ringtones, whatever, just point to this post.
1812 Overture - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“The Boston Pops Orchestra plays the Overture annually on Independence Day for “Pops Goes The Fourth.” It is one of the best-attended July 4th celebrations in the country and it takes place on the Charles River Esplanade at the Hatch Shell. The performance is accompanied by real cannons from the 101st Field Artillery Regiment, Massachusetts National Guard and by fireworks over Boston Harbor/Charles River. Also, when the Pops are traveling, the cannon noise is supplied by paper bags which have been passed out to the audience by inflating the bag, and then smacking the bottom, causing it to burst.” from the above page on wikipedia.That is a great idea! Optimized paper bags, several per person, and a way of cueing sixteen PoPs. Sixteen shots is what the wiki says.
My favorite venue is at Lowell House http://lowell.harvard.edu/ off
of Mt. Auburn street other side from Harvard Square. They have a set
of sacred Russian bells which were saved from being melted down for
shell casings in the Russian revolution. The monastery got in touch,
and Harvard is swapping the original bells back for a newly cast set
of sacred bells. Students at the House have attended classes in
Russia to learn how to set up and ring the bells. Ringing is a sacrament.
The first weekend of May is Arts First weekend and one of the public events is a performance of Festival Overture “The Year 1812″ in E flat major, Op. 49 in the Lowell courtyard. The bells are huge and sound awesome. The cannons are tiny and also sound awesome. The cannons are a stoichiometric mixture of hydrogen and oxygen in a tethered, spherical rubber membrane.
The orchestra and choir meet in the early afternoon for a 2 pm read-through of the piece. The performance begins at 3 pm, but get there earlier, and bring a blanket to sit on the lawn.In ten years it has been rained indoors once, that is the orchestra moves indoors. I stay outside and, as the whole proceedure is rain-proof, fire the cannons with open windows so the audience can hear the bells and the cannons. Not the easiest cues to pick up, but it worked.
Much better when everyone is out on the lawn.
