Ringtones on Paper

The Mechanical Music Box: "Make your own music box melodies with this mechanical music box set. Comes with hand-cranked music box, one pre-punched music strip that plays the "Happy Birthday" song, 3 unpunched strips (48cm), a hole punch, and instruction manual to have you creating your own music box melody in minutes." About $15.



http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2007/05/ringtones-on-paper.html

Quantum physics says goodbye to reality

Some physicists are uncomfortable with the idea that all individual quantum events are innately random. This is why many have proposed more complete theories, which suggest that events are at least partially governed by extra "hidden variables". Now physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism -- giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it (Nature 446 871).



http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/11/4/14

Idea: Self-Powering Billboards

A concept by an Arizona State Uni student to turn overhead signage on highways into turbines "that will be powered by the turbulence created from the passing cars."



http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2007/05/idea-self-powering-billboards.html

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106,000 aluminum cans

...is 30 seconds of consumption









http://www.chrisjordan.com/

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Aluminum guitars, carved by computer

Dave in Alaska carves guitars out of blocks of aluminium on a CNC machine. He's only built four so far, but is planning more. He'll also be selling the electronic plans, so you can plug a block of aluminium into your own CNC machine, and it will spit out a guitar body. He's not the only person building guitars from aluminium. There's also Specimen, Industrial Guitars, Veleno, Zero and most famously Kramer, who made aluminium-necked (and generally out of tune) guitars in the '70s. (Thanks, Jack)



http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2007/04/aluminium-guitars-carved-by-computer.html

T. rex analysis supports dino-bird link

For the first time, researchers have read what they say is the biological signature of a tyrannosaur — a signature that confirms the increasingly accepted view that modern birds are the descendants of dinosaurs.

The signature doesn't come from studying the shape of the 68 million-year-old dinosaur's fossilized bones, but from analyzing the organic material found inside those bones. It's not DNA — despite what you've seen in movies like "Jurassic Park," that genetic material couldn't be recovered. But researchers say it's the next-best thing: collagen proteins that were isolated using techniques on the very edge of what's possible today.

Those techniques, detailed in Friday's issue of the journal Science, could open up "a new window into an entirely new approach" for paleontology, one expert told MSNBC.com. What's more, researchers say the methods are already being incorporated into improved tools for detecting present-day diseases.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18075420/from/RS.5/

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Google Maps for the sky

http://www.wikisky.org/

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Water Found in Extrasolar Planet's Atmosphere

Astronomers have detected water in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system for the first time.

The finding, to be detailed in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal,
confirms previous theories that say water vapor should be present in
the atmospheres of nearly all the known extrasolar planets. Even hot Jupiters, gaseous planets that orbit closer to their stars than Mercury to our Sun, are thought to have water.

The discovery, announced today, means one of the most crucial elements for life as we know it can exist around planets orbiting other stars.

“We know that water vapor exists in the
atmospheres of one extrasolar planet and there is good reason to
believe that other extrasolar planets contain water vapor,” said
Travis Barman, an astronomer at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona who
made the discovery.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070410_water_exoplanet.html

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Subway Stradivarius

The Washington Post got world class violinist Josh Bell to play his Stradivarius at a subway stop to see how commuters would react. Turns out they didn’t react much.

In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played,
seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in
the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most
of them on the run—for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the
1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few
even turning to look.

“At a music hall, I’ll
get upset if someone coughs or if someone’s cellphone goes off.
But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate
any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when
someone threw in a dollar instead of change.” This is from a man
whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/364-subway-stradivarius

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100 Million iPods Served

Apple today announced that the 100 millionth iPod has been sold, making the iPod the fastest selling music player in history. The first iPod was sold five and a half years ago, in November 2001, and since then Apple has introduced more than 10 new iPod models, including five generations of iPod, two generations of iPod mini, two generations of iPod nano and two generations of iPod shuffle.





http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2007/04/100-million-ipods-served.html

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Scientists Assemble Single Atoms Into Predefined Nanostructures

Science Daily — Scientists at the Paul Drude Institute for Solid State Electronics in Berlin, Germany, have assembled single atoms of different elements, thus forming nanostructures of predefined size and composition.

Three-dimensional representation showing the topography of a nine-atomic chain comprised of three Co and six Cu atoms assembled and imaged in a low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope. Both ends and the center of the chain are occupied by a single Co atom each. The interatomic spacing within the binary chain is 2.55 Angstroem. (Credit: Image courtesy of Forschungsverbund Berlin)

The team lead by Stefan Foelsch used copper (Cu) and cobalt (Co) atoms to produce pairs or various chains of atoms on a substrate surface made of crystalline copper.

“We manipulated the atoms in a low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope”, says Stefan Foelsch. He adds: “We found that the quantum effects in these structures can be understood within the framework of textbook physics describing the electronic properties of simple molecules.” Thus, it is possible to taylor “artificial molecules” supported by a solid surface made of magnetic and non-magnetic elements.

All known bodies in the Solar System Larger than 200 Miles in Diameter

All (known) Bodies in the Solar System Larger than 200 Miles in Diameter

http://www.liftport.com/progress/wp/?p=1108

TierneyLab hereby promises to name Saturn’s mysterious hexagon after the reader who comes up with the most entertaining explanation for this 15,000-mile wide feature at the planet’s north pole. NASA says it looks like clouds are whipping around a hexagaonal race track, but to me it doesn’t look anything like Nascar.

Construction of the World's Highest Bridge

Construction of the Millau Bridge in France

The Millau bridge over the River Tarn in the Massif Central mountains is more than 300m (984ft) high - taller even than the Eiffel Tower. With its concrete and steel pillars soaring high above the morning fog in the Tarn Valley, the construction makes a spectacular sight.

POSSIBLY THE BEST WAY TO FIGHT POVERTY AND DESERTIFICATION

"Desertification is potentially the most threatening ecosystem change impacting livelihoods of the poor" (UNCCD). It is about land degradation caused by CLIMATE CHANGE and human-induced factors.
By planting a tree you will make a difference by helping to create a giant heart in Niger, the poorest country in the world, and one of the most affected by desertification. see project
You can use the interactive map to navigate the park and choose an exact spot to plant your tree or trees. With GPS coordinates your virtual tree corresponds to a real tree planted in the eco-park in Niger, so you and the whole world can always find it.

Yoshihiko Satoh's 12-necked art guitar

Thanks to Travis, Reid, Circuit Master, Andrew, Make and vvork for letting me know about the bonkers art of Yoshihiko Satoh. His 12-neck stratocaster is functional, and he's also made a pair of clock-like 12-neck circular guitars.

Building the Cortex in Silicon

An ambitious project to model the cerebral cortex in silicon is under way at Stanford. The man-made brain could help scientists understand how the most recently evolved part of our brain performs its complex computational feats, allowing us to understand language, recognize faces, and schedule the day. It could also lead to new neural prosthetics.

"Brains do things in technically and conceptually novel ways--they can solve rather effortlessly issues which we cannot yet resolve with the largest and most modern digital machines," says Rodney Douglas, a professor at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, in Zurich. "One of the ways to explore this is to develop hardware that goes in the same direction."

Neurons communicate with a series of electrical pulses; chemical signals transiently change the electrical properties of individual cells, which in turn trigger an electrical change in the next neuron in the circuit. In the 1980s, Carver Mead, a pioneer in microelectronics at the California Institute of Technology, realized that the same transistors used to build computer chips could be used to build circuits that mimicked the electrical properties of neurons. Since then, scientists and engineers have been using these transistor-based neurons to build more-complicated neural circuits, modeling the retina, the cochlea (the part of the inner ear that translates sound waves into neural signals), and the hippocampus (a part of the brain crucial for memory). They call the process neuromorphing.

Mimicking how the brain recognizes street scenes

At last, neuroscience is having an impact on computer science and artificial intelligence (AI). For the first time, scientists in Tomaso Poggio's laboratory at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT applied a computational model of how the brain processes visual information to a complex, real world task: recognizing the objects in a busy street scene. The researchers were pleasantly surprised at the power of this new approach.

"People have been talking about computers imitating the brain for a long time," said Poggio, who is also the Eugene McDermott Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the co-director of the Center for Biological and Computational Learning at MIT. "That was Alan Turing's original motivation in the 1940s. But in the last 50 years, computer science and AI have developed independently of neuroscience. Our work is biologically inspired computer science."

"We developed a model of the visual system that was meant to be useful for neuroscientists in designing and interpreting experiments, but that also could be used for computer science," said Thomas Serre, a former PhD student and now a post-doctoral researcher in Poggio's lab and lead author a paper about the street scene application in the 2007 IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. "We chose street scene recognition as an example because it has a restricted set of object categories, and it has practical social applications."

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-02/mifb-mht020607.php

Quantum computer to debut next Tuesday?

Remember where you were when you heard about Steorn? Us neither. (Yet.) Kind of the same with D-Wave, which, as you may recall, claims to be the first and only "commercial" quantum computing venture; despite a low hanging cloud of skeptical academics, D-Wave is claiming next Tuesday it'll finally debut the first quantum computer: a 16 qubit processor capable of 64,000 simultaneous calculations in quantum space(s). What's a qubit? Why, it's the quantum computer measurement equivalent of a conventional computer's bit (i.e. more (qu)bits = more data and processes), but we're not even going to insult your intelligence by pretending to understand how a many-hundreds qubit quantum computer could supposedly solve more operations than the universe has atoms. We just know that a quantum computer has yet to be built, has the potential to revolutionize the way we understand and use computation -- and with any luck D-Wave's supposed machine will be promptly put to work analyzing weather patterns so we'll know the exact climate this time next year and not buy the wrong things when this year's fall lines come out. That is, if it doesn't open up a black hole, or something.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/08/quantum-computer-to-debut-next-tuesday/

Why Windows is less secure than Linux

Windows is inherently harder to secure than Linux. There I said it. The simple truth.

Many millions of words have been written and said on this topic. I have a couple of pictures. The basic argument goes like this. In its long evolution, Windows has grown so complicated that it is harder to secure. Well these images make the point very well. Both images are a complete map of the system calls that occur when a web server serves up a single page of html with a single picture. The same page and picture. A system call is an opportunity to address memory. A hacker investigates each memory access to see if it is vulnerable to a buffer overflow attack. The developer must do QA on each of these entry points. The more system calls, the greater potential for vulnerability, the more effort needed to create secure applications.

The first picture is of the system calls that occur on a Linux server running Apache.

This second image is of a Windows Server running IIS.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/threatchaos/?p=311

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