Improve your Rock Band drumming technique
Improve your Rock Band drumming technique. Rock Band as in the videogame, that is.
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Bike boxes in Portland Intersections
Following up on some recent cyclist deaths in Portland where cyclists waiting in bike lanes at red lights were crushed by right-turning trucks the strongcity is introducting ‘bike boxes’ to encourage bikes to wait out in front of stopped traffic. The city also plans to promote lower-traffic streets as ‘bike boulevards’ as an alternative to bike lines on high-traffic streets. Last summer when I got smashed by a car taking a right turn without checking his mirror, I was lucky to not be seriously hurt, only my pride/smashed cell phone. The fact that people are dying from the same thing that hit me is a little scary to say the least.
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Beautiful and Mysterious Chemical Reactions Create Undulating Brew
The Wired Science blog posted a YouTube video of a liquid that changes color from clear to yellow to blue over and over again.
In 1973, the spectacular demonstration was perfected by Thomas Briggs and Warren Rauscher, two amazing high school science teachers.
Over thirty-five years later, chemists are still trying to fully understand how it works.
What they do know: Several reactions take place at once. One of them produces iodine, which gives the amber color. Hydrogen peroxide reduces other chemicals into iodide ions. Along with normal iodine, the charged particles interact with starch to create it a blue-black color. The speeds of those transformations are constantly changing. As one overtakes the other, the color suddenly changes.
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Sir Edmund Hillary, RIP
Sir Edmund Hillary died today, aged 88. Best known as the man who “knocked the bastard off”, by scaling Mt Everest, Hillary was an adventurer, activist, and all round kiwi bloke. We will miss you.
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Physics of Information: great panel discussion
Last week on CBC Radio’s national science program, Quirks and Quarks, they broadcast a recording of a fascinating panel discussion on “The Physics of Information: What the Universe Doesn’t Want You to Know,” held at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. In this wide-ranging discussion a panel of distinguished and likable physicists run down such subjects as the universe as a computer, quantum teleportation, the fundamentals of information science, The panelists were in a state of near-hilarity through much of the the event, and that only made the subject better. Included on the panel were: Dr. Leonard Susskind (Stanford), Dr. Seth Lloyd (MIT), Dr. Christopher Fuchs (UNM), Sir Anthony Leggett (Urbana-Champaign), and the moderator, Bob McDonald, host of Quirks and Quarks. Listen yourself.
The Physics of Information was the topic of a recent public forum, sponsored by Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, and moderated by Bob McDonald. And Quirks was there to record the event. Do ideas about information and reality inspire fruitful new approaches to the hardest problems of modern physics? What can we learn about the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, the beginning of the universe and our understanding of black holes, by thinking about the very essence of information? Those are some of the questions our panel tackled.
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AT&T mulls copyright censorship at the network level
AT&T is considering adding content filters to its network. These will try to figure out if your network connection contains a copyrighted work, and censor any communications that are believed to be infringing.
This strategy will work for approximately 30 seconds — about as long as it takes for people who like to download copyrighted works to switch to using an encrypted protocol — and thereafter it will be primarily useful to bullies and schemers who will use it to silence critics (by claiming their works infringe and getting them censored) and prevent competition (by raising the cost of operating an ISP through the inclusion of the spyware and the hardware to run it on).
Of course, AT&T has already shown its commitment to its customers by helping the NSA conduct wholesale warrantless wiretapping on their entire nation — adding a censorious, expensive, and useless piece of spyware to its network operations is entirely in keeping with its behavior.
“What we are already doing to address piracy hasn’t been working. There’s no secret there,” said James Cicconi, senior vice president, external & legal affairs for AT&T.
Mr. Cicconi said that AT&T has been talking to technology companies, and members of the MPAA and RIAA, for the last six months about implementing digital fingerprinting techniques on the network level.
“We are very interested in a technology based solution and we think a network-based solution is the optimal way to approach this,” he said. “We recognize we are not there yet but there are a lot of promising technologies. But we are having an open discussion with a number of content companies, including NBC Universal, to try to explore various technologies that are out there.”
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Sysadmin fails at being l337 hax0r, gets jail time
A 51-year-old systems administrator from New Jersey has received the longest federal prison sentence for attempting a crime designed to damage a computer system. Yung-Hsun Lin (also known as Andy Lin) was given 30 months in jail for planting code on a company server in 2003 that was supposed to destroy a medical drug database. He was also ordered by US District Judge Jose Linares to pay $81,200 in restitution to his former employer, Medco Health Solutions.
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CandyFab
Sweet! Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has made a 3D printer that forms objects out of sugar.
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Rules to Live By
50 Things I’ve Learned in 50 Years.
Best one:
17. Don’t waste your breath proclaiming what’s really important to you. How you spend your time says it all.
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Fifty car pileup closes 1-4 in Florida
“I watched man burn to death, heard others screaming in the fog.” A massive, 50-car pileup, the result of three or more crashes on I-4, has led to at least 3 fatalities and 82 injuries in central Florida near Orlando. The smoke and fog were so bad that rescue efforts were hindered. Drivers with no visibility did not know whether to stay in their burning cars or risk running out onto the highway for help.
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Spoiled teenage pageant princess
The Huffington Post’s round up of “must see” online videos for the week includes this clip from the TV show Wife Swap, about a spoiled teen and her doting parents.
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Jujitsu Moves and Techniques
This section shows many different jujitsu moves and techniques from the traditional art of Jujitsu, along with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu ground-fighting moves.
If you are a training student, many of the traditional techniques may be on your own syllabus at your club. There will obviously be some differences since all clubs will train slightly different, giving more emphasis on particular moves.
Solid presentation of some of the basics. I may not know kung-fu, but I’m willing to learn.
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Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?
Leo Laporte and Martin Sargent of TechTV’s “The Screen Savers” discuss an infamous satire article from Adequacy.org
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Cook (almost) Anything at Least Once
A great recipe-oriented blog with very good accompanying photography.
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18 People Stuck On Roller Coaster
This is why I dont do Roller Coasters
Strong winds brought a roller coaster to a halt at the top of its loop at a fun park in Anhui province in east China, leaving 18 people hanging upside down for about half an hour with six of them falling ill, an official said.
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Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms
It has been 50 years since scientists first created DNA in a test tube, stitching ordinary chemical ingredients together to make life’s most extraordinary molecule. Until recently, however, even the most sophisticated laboratories could make only small snippets of DNA — an extra gene or two to be inserted into corn plants, for example, to help the plants ward off insects or tolerate drought.
Now researchers are poised to cross a dramatic barrier: the creation of life forms driven by completely artificial DNA.
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Czech hackers on trial for nuke blast on the weather channel
Members of a Czech art group who hacked into television broadcasting with images of a hoax nuclear explosion were charged and will have to stand trial, a state prosecutor said Thursday.
The six members of the Prague-based Ztohoven group were charged last month with spreading false information and face up to three years in jail if convicted, said Dusan Ondracek, the state prosecutor in the northern town of Trutnov, who is in charge of the case.
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A theory on why we really dream
Dreams: Night School “The primary function of negative dreams is rehearsal for similar real events, so that threat recognition and avoidance happens faster and more automatically in comparable real situations.”
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Copyright liner-notes for the future
SomethingAwful’s Bob “BobServo” Mackey has created this fantastic (and eerily believable) set of RIAA liner notes for this year’s CDs. I personally Love the 3rd one.
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Rule 1 of Burrito Project: You do not talk about Burrito Project.
Burrito Project
is an organization which helps feed the hungry and homeless in cities
around the world. The organization encourages people “to get together
with friends and build burritos to take to the streets”. Anyone can
start a Burrito Project and the organization encourages everyone to
help feed the hungry in their local communities. Haven’t heard of the Burrito Project? There’s probably a good, albeit very strange, reason why.
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Hello Kitty for Men
Sanrio is launching a line of Hello Kitty stuff for men. Wait, those little pencil-boxes weren’t unisex?
An Sanrio Co. employee shows Hello Kitty products targeted at young men
at the company’s headquarters in Tokyo Friday, Dec. 28, 2007. The
cuddly white cat, usually seen on toys and jewelry for young females,
will soon adorn T-shirts, bags, watches and other products targeting
young men, company spokesman Kazuo Tohmatsu said Friday. The feline
for-men products will go on sale in Japan next month, and will be sold
soon in the U.S. and other Asian nations, according to Sanrio.
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2007: Seven Things We Should Pretend Never Happened
So many memorable things happened in 2007. We’d better start hiding the evidence, now.
Seriously, there’s a whole lot of shit that went on this year that we’d rather not have to explain to our children and grandchildren. Let’s do our best to destroy every record of it. If that fails and if you’re, in fact, reading this in the year 2107, we’ll do our best to put it into context. But, really, you had to be there.
Not safe for work.
RobDurdle.com 
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