Archive for August, 2009
It’s a Zombie Apocalypse, Mathematically Speaking
Posted by Raiven in Miscellaneous, Science on August 28, 2009
iPhones ... I mean Brains ...
Straight out of the land of “Someone Got Paid to Do This” comes the mathematical apocalypse known as When Zombies Attack!
A team of mathematicians from the University of Ottawa have taken the time (and money) to calculate how fast the spread of undead will occur should the popular doomsday scenario outbreak begin (finally!). It’s not all bad news though as they have also determine a possible solution to stave off certain doom. Turns out it’s quick, aggressive attacks, just like I keep saying.
In an attempt to make this sound like something more scientific and less like they are just pissing away money, the Ottawa team feels that this research can teach us something about the spread of infectious diseases. You know what else teaches us about the spread of infectious diseases? The study of infectious diseases … the real kind. Go figure.
The paper’s subtitle is “Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection” changed shortly before publishing from the more accurate “How to F–k Off And Get Paid With Mathematics”.
Frozen Lightning In Your Veins
Image Credit: Discovery News
First, the background. When you electrically charge a block of plastic and then strike the plastic with a nail you get what we see on the left there, termed “frozen lightning”. In truth it’s actually a series of tunnels carved out of the middle of the plastic when the electrically charged particles race toward the nail to escape the plastic, forming what looks like a lightning bolt frozen in the plastic. Cool huh? Good for a Mr. Wizard episode or making some scientifically interesting art … or maybe something else?
How about a vascular system? Turns out that the tunnels are remarkable similar to the capillary system within the human body with the vein or artery at the point of the nail and the smaller tunnels the size of capillaries. All created in only a few seconds.
So what? Well scientists think that it will be possible to use biodegradable plastic blocks about the size of an inch thick block of post-it’s to build artificial organs. You see the tunnels could provide a blood system and …
With a blood system, scientists can now work to implant cells that will become the actual blood vessels. Then the cells that would become the actual liver, kidney or heart would have to be implanted. As the cells grow, the plastic would harmlessly degrade, until only the organ remained.
Freaky cool, yeah? And a whole lot faster than the usual method of photolithography (how they make computer chips) to create the tunnels. Don’t get too excited (or freaked out) just yet though as it will be several years before they make anything that they would begin to test in animals, let alone humans. The full scoop is on Discovery.
‘E’ is for Evil
Take a good look at that guy, he is the face of Evil. Well he’s at least the computer generated face of E, an artificial intelligence specifically programed to be … evil.
Yes, this does immediately make everyone say, “why?” which leads to the obvious answer, “for science!” Selmer Bringsjord of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute created E in 2005 to study what makes people do evil things, a noble cause for sure, but now E has his own virtual world to exist in (read: conquer).
“I’ve been working on what is evil and how to formally define it,” says Bringsjord … “It’s creepy, I know it is.”
Well that doesn’t exactly give me a warm fuzzy feeling but at least he knows it. E will continue to be developed and will next learn to communicate in simple English (read: no slang) with the hopes that some day it will be used to analyze information gained on potential terrorists.
So what about the thing we’re all concerned with, when does this guy turn into the Matrix? Bringsjord says he wouldn’t think of releasing E into the world, even purely virtual environments like Second Life without “engineering safeguards” that would be similar to Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” to prevent him from harming humans.
“Because I have a lot of faith in this approach,” he says, “E will be controlled.”
Yeah, we’re all dead. Better read this link from Scientific American before it’s too late.
Electric Chopper
Posted by Raiven in Miscellaneous on August 14, 2009
Paul Teutul Sr. and the gang at OCC have created an electric chopper for the Siemens company. While it’s not the first electric bike by far (both the Zero and the Brammo are publicly available if you want one) it might be the first ever electric chopper style bike and it’s also probably the coolest looking electric motorcycle I’ve ever seen.
The 27hp electric motor gives the bike a top speed of over 100mph and a range of 60 miles per charge. The green ‘cred’ doesn’t stop there though as the bike also sports LED lighting and parts made from recycled material.
The episode of American Chopper showing the build of this bike will are on TLC October 22nd at 9 PM ET/PT if you’d like to check it out. Or you can read the rather boring details from Siemens.
Sony Pulls Up A Stool At The EPUB
Sony has been in the eReader business for a while now but with the recent success of Amazon’s Kindle devices, Sony has redoubled it’s efforts in order to push themselves back into this market.
In a surprising (for Sony) move in the right direction they have abandoned their proprietary eBook format, BeBB, for the EPUB standard that was established in 2007, the very format that the Kindle does not support. Supporting the EPUB standard means that any eBook you buy for your Sony touch screen eReader will work on any other eReader that supports the format, which is pretty much all of them save the Kindle. Standards support is good for consumers who are then free to choose which device they want on features rather than which one supports the format they need, however, since the Kindle has it’s own format and happens to be the most popular reader out there it might all mean nothing to the consumers.
If this all sounds a tad too familiar then you’re probably thinking about the music industry and it’s digital juggernaut, iTunes. The world may be happily suckling at Steve Jobs’ teat for their musical fix since his baby is the dominate force in the industry but the few people who want standards on their music so they can take it anywhere are getting crapped on almost daily, and it doesn’t seem like that will end anytime soon.
Will the same thing happen in the eReader world? Will Amazon become the next Apple and become so large and powerful that they can dictate how the eBook universe will get it’s content however they see fit? Only time will tell I suppose but in all of this there is something else that’s bothering me …
Sony gave up it’s own proprietary format!? This is the company that tried to give the world BetaMAX, the MiniDisc, UMD’s and the MemoryStick and for the most part they still insist on using their own formats despite the fact that no one cares about them at all. I would have thought after the hard won success of BluRay, Sony would try even harder to press their own formats. Well color me surprised. I guess this means one of two things, either Sony is actually starting to actually believe what Steve Haber, president of Sony’s Digital Reading Business Division said about the EPUB move:
A world of proprietary formats and DRMs creates silos and limits overall market growth. Consumers should not have to worry about which device works with which store. With a common format and common content protection solution (DRM), consumers will be able to shop around for the content they want regardless of where they get it or what device they use.
Or what’s more likely, they have gotten a little better at seeing when their own formats are going to fail miserably. After all they have a lot of experience with that.
Nintendo Says: Sit On It
A European patent reveals a new Wii peripheral tentatively called the Nintendo Wii-tarded (not really). The inflatable seat … thing, to the left there is supposed to house a Wiimote to sense balance shifts and use the nun-chuck or second Wiimote to simulate riding a horse or other animal or perhaps a vehicle (like a motorcycle for shark jumping I would presume).
I’m speechless and/or choking on my own laughter here so I’ll just give you some links. Joystiq, European patent.
Netflix an Xbox 360 Exclusive
While it’s not terribly surprising to hear, the recent update to the Xbox 360 dashboard (released today) contains a little blurb about how Netflix has an “exclusive” partnership with Microsoft, sorry PS3 and Wii fans.
Netflix Partnership
This exclusive partnership offers you the ability to instantly stream movies and TV episodes from Netflix to the television via Xbox 360. Xbox 360 will be the only game console to offer this movie-watching experience, available to Xbox LIVE Gold members who are also Netflix unlimited plan subscribers**, at no additional cost.
Of course the time was right for Microsoft to seal this deal now before things developed too far with other console manufacturers otherwise things would have been a lot more expensive I’m sure. As long as it stayed on the Xbox it was fine with me, additional consoles streaming directly might have encouraged Netflix to press for some more direct download content but hey, what can you do.
Kepler Gets to Work
Artist's rendering of the Kelper Space Telescope. Credit: NASA
Launched in March of this year, NASA’s latest planet-hunting telescope, Kepler, has just turned in it’s first report. The result was gas giant HAT-P-7b, a planet with an orbit of 2.2 days and a surface temperature of over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, known as a “Hot Jupiter”.
Sure ol’ HATtie has been spotted before but what’s important is that Kepler found it within 10 days of it’s mission start and reported back with a great amount of detail about the find.
Kepler uses the transit method to find new planets which detects the dip in light from a star when a planet passes in front of it. For HAT-P-7b this was easy because it’s so big and orbits so frequently, however, Kepler also detected HAT’s occultation (a method that my spellchecker doesn’t even know about) which measures the light dip as the planet passes behind the star.
This is significant because that amount is roughly equal to whats needed for Kepler to detect Earth-like planets using the transit method, so it proves Kepler has the power. Now all it needs is 3 years or so to confirm the data of an Earth-like planet, you know, 365 day orbits and all. Good thing Kepler is focusing in on about 100,000 stars at the same time huh?
Read the full story at Space.com.
Captain Planet’s Cell Phone
See ... it's green!
Sprint and Samsung are going green in a bigger way now with the newly announced “Reclaim”, available August 16th. Although environmentally friendly, the phone is no slouch either featuring a full QWERTY slide out keyboard, web browser, 2.0 Megapixel camera with 3x digital zoom, stereo Bluetooth 2.0 and expandable memory up to 32GB.
So what about the greenliness of it all? Here’s some stats:
- 40% of the outer casing made from bio-plastic material which is made from corn
- Free of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and phthalates and nearly free of brominated flame retardants (BFR).
- Packaging made from 70% recycled material
- Images printed using soy-based ink
- No paper manual, only “virtual”, saving on paper material
- Charger is energy star approved to meet the highest standards and uses 12 times less power than other energy star chargers in standby power consumption
Not into green? No worries, you can get the “Ocean Blue” variant. The phone will be available for less than $50 (with contract of course) and $2 of that will go toward The Nature Conservancy’s Adopt an Acre program. Want a bunch more info? Read it over on Businesswire.
Apple Censors the Dictionary
Oh this is just good. Apple has now censored the English dictionary. The new app “Ninjawords” has finally been released to the app store after a three month waiting and updating period because it contains words that are in every single other dictionary out there.
Apple censored an English dictionary.A dictionary. A reference book. For words contained in all reasonable dictionaries. For words contained in dictionaries that are used every day in elementary school libraries and classrooms.
Even Walmart, notorious for its censorship of “objectionable” music and movies, neither restricts nor places warning labels on dictionaries. Apple’s App Store review team makes Walmart seem liberal by comparison.
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