this will play with your head:
That’s counter intuitive, at least for me. I would have expected the force of gravity to be applicable and manifest along the entire length of it. Huh.
Via Penn Jillette on Twitter, this fascinating clip:
Have fun!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Bad Astronomy, Ballistics, Feedback, Hospice, Phil Plait, Promotion, Publishing, Science, YouTube
First, sharing this from Phil Plait:
I’d been familiar with the illusion, but this is a really good demonstration of it. Nice.
A follow-up to this post of last week: ‘Her Majesty’ is still hanging in there, though very weak. She spent a couple of hours sleeping on my chest this morning, purring quietly. Makes it hard for me to get any work done, but I don’t regret the time. At all.
We continue to get excellent reviews and comments about Her Final Year, which makes the lack of sales of the book even more frustrating. Ah well. I won’t be posting a lot here about that book, but you can follow developments on the dedicated blog. We do have a number of big things lined up which may be of interest – reviews in papers and magazines. As those come to fruition I’ll probably mention the most important items.
Oh, if you want, you can now find me on Twitter. I’m still getting the hang of it, but can see why it appeals to some folks a lot.
And another follow-up, this time to a post from several years ago: on Monday we ‘closed’ on the real estate transaction which was the resolution of that whole debacle. The property in question is now ours. There are still some lingering details which need to be dealt with over the next year, but once again that is really someone else’s concern. And now if I never have to deal with the people involved ever again, it’ll be just fine by me, as I am perfectly happy to let this little piece of small-town history finally be buried.
Lastly, yes, we *are* making some headway on the big BBTI revamp and expanded data sets. Remember, the data we collected during the tests in May was almost as much data as we had collected in all the previous tests. Then adding in the .22 tests from June, and I think that did surpass the previous amount.
It’s been a busy and productive year. And it isn’t yet 2/3 done.
Jim Downey
As noted, I’ve been more than a bit preoccupied with something else of late. But I do want to take a moment and pass along this delightful tribute, via Phil Plait:
I was never a hard-core Shuttle fan. The whole project was a series of compromises, both political and technological, and it never lived up to the original promise. And yet . . .
. . . and yet even with all that being true, the Shuttle, and the people who made it work, undeniably accomplished remarkable things. It would be churlish to say otherwise, just because it didn’t meet my youthful expectations.
We all compromise in the face of reality. But those who still manage to create the future even with that limitation deserve our honor, and our praise. Life is short, and the stars are far away.
Jim Downey
Ah, this is truly delightful:
Full information and background from Robert Krulwich.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Brave New World, DARPA, Firefox, movies, Predictions, Publishing, Science Fiction, tech, YouTube
So, the massive ballistics testing is done. Most everything has been cleaned up and put away. My head has stopped throbbing from the repeated low-level concussion of firing over 7,000 rounds of ammo, much of it very powerful and from very short barrels. Now it’s time to see if I can get my attention shifted over to all the other stuff I’ve ignored for the last couple of weeks.
Like this wonderful glimpse of the future here now:
I think it says something – a lot, actually – about the state of the world today that some of the first applications of functional brainwave-controlled mechanisms would show up in this kind of consumer product rather than a military application. It’s not the first such toy, either. Which isn’t to say that DARPA or some similar organization hasn’t been experimenting with such tech, but still.
Again and again, I am surprised at how quickly some of the predictions from fiction (including my own) are coming to be actuality. But that’s just the nature of the beast – what you think is going to happen later happens sooner, what you think is going to happen sooner sometimes doesn’t happen at all.
Related, I’ve just about given up on ever getting a straight answer from Trapdoor about if/when Communion of Dreams is actually going to be published. I’ll worry about it after I see to getting Her Final Year out. Some things I can control with brainwaves (indirectly), some things I cannot.
Jim Downey
Interesting:
From the FRIDA project page:
Today, the development is at a stage where several prototypes have left the research lab and are being tested in pilot applications, with more work required to reach a fully agile assembly scenario.
This is more of an economic development than it is the advent of our New Robotic Overlords. Having such a robot on a human scale which is fairly modular means that it can be plugged into existing factories and systems with minimal additional investment. Depending on the cost of these things once they’re ready for sale, they could wind up supplanting human labor – likely first in environments where it is too dangerous/costly for humans to work, then increasingly in general repetitive labor.
The Utopian science fiction writers foresaw a society where robotic workers freed humans for a life of ease – allow people to do creative work at their leisure. Cynical bastard that I am, I always figured that such a life of ease would mostly be reserved for the people who *owned* the robotic workers, with everyone else struggling to get by in a society which no longer really needed human labor. Current economic trends have tended to bear this out.
But I suppose we’ll see what the future actually holds.
Jim Downey
I’ve heard of engineering projects described as “graceful.” My uncle Ted was one of the people primarily responsible for building such a project – the Clark Bridge.
But this . . . this goes beyond graceful, and straight to beautiful, like something out of a dream:
Via a delightful blog post by Robert Krulwich, science reporter for NPR. He’s got more videos and complete explanation there.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 