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“There are lots of people trying to solve this,” explains Peter Bristol, industrial designer at Carbon Design Group. “Some are trying to solve it mechanically with touch in one spot, a little mini-screen, and 5000 buttons.” This “more is more” approach is rarely satisfying. And most of the technology in these devices is decades behind the touch experience we’ve become so accustomed to through smart phones and tablets. A true touch-screen remote with a $400 cost of goods isn’t financially feasible. “You can give someone a remote app, but that doesn’t make it a communal interaction device that lives at home next to the media, and it means they can’t easily use their smart phones while watching TV.”
Having always loved complex mechanical devices, and never having fully outgrown LEGO, I decided to explore where computational mechanics and LEGO meet. This is not LEGO as toy, art, or even the MindStorms® fusion of LEGO and digital electronics. This is almost where Steampunk and LEGO meet. Hand cranked devices that perform complex mechanical tasks.
Lots of people have asked me for the system I used to implement the restriction in the alt-text of today’s comic.
I made it a rule that as soon as I finished any task, or got bored with it, I had to power off my computer.
I could turn it back on right away—this wasn’t about trying to use the computer less. The rule was just that the moment I finished (or lost interest in) the thing I was doing, and felt like checking Google News et. al., before I had time to think too much, I’d start the shutdown process. There was no struggle of willpower; I knew that after I hit the button, I could decide to do anything I wanted. But if I decided to look at a website, I’d have to wait through the startup, and once I was done, I’d have to turn it off again before doing anything else.
The experiments were not devised by the ‘scientist’, but by twenty five 8-year-old children. The children devised the questions; they reasoned an answer; they designed the experiments; and they did all the data analysis.
Some questions asked by the children about bees:
- What if... we had a colour in the tube that connects the hive to the arena, and then they have to go to that colour on the flower wall?
- What if... we could find out how much effort the bees will go through in order to get a reward? For instance, they have to move something heavy out of the way to get a reward.
- What if... we could find out if they prefer warm or cold nectar?
- What if... we could find out if they could follow a route of colour?
- What if... we could discover if bees can learn to go to certain colours depending on how sweet they are?
- What if... we could find out if some bees could learn faster than others?
- What if... we could find out how many colours they could remember?
This colour pdf guarantees to be entertaining, surprising and challenging on every page. With little mathematics, starting from observations of everyday life, the text presents the best stories, images, movies and puzzles in physics. If you are between the age of 17 and 107, you will enjoy it.
The colour pdf tells about animals and sport (mechanics and heat), about the sky at night (relatvity and the structure of the universe), about lightning and nerves (electricity, light, the brain, language and truth), and about colours, pleasure and the stars (basic and advanced quantum physics). If you are interested, a separate volume tells about the search for a final, unified theory of physics. Enjoy!
Motion Mountain is downloaded over 30 000 times per year. Several younger readers liked it so much that they decided to study physics at university. A paper edition delivered to your home can be ordered here.
In contrast to most animals, sedentary creatures, like plants or sea anemones, have no
legs and cannot move much; for their self-defence, they developed poisons. Examples of
such plants are the stinging nettle, the tobacco plant, digitalis, belladonna and poppy;
poisons include caseine, nicotine, and curare. Poisons such as these are at the basis of
most medicines.Therefore, most medicines exist essentially because plants have no legs.
How can the speed of falling rain be measured using an umbrella? The answer is important:
the same method can also be used to measure the speed of light, as we will find out
later. (Can you guess how?)
As a consequence, if the Earth stopped rotating (but kept its shape), the water of the
oceans would žow north; all of Europe would be under water, except for the few moun-
tains of the Alps that are higher than about 4 km. The northern parts of Europe would
be covered by between 6 km and 10 km of water. Mount Sagarmatha would be over 11 km
above sea level. If one takes into account the resulting change of shape of the Earth, the
numbers come out smaller. In addition, the change in shape would produce extremely
strong earthquakes and storms. As long as there are none of these effects, we can be sure
that the Sun will indeed rise tomorrow, despite what some philosophers might pretend.
It is possible to take too many notes; the task of sorting, filing and assimilating them can take for ever, so that nothing gets written. The awful warning is Lord Acton, whose enormous learning never resulted in the great work the world expected of him. An unforgettable description of Acton’s Shropshire study after his death in 1902 was given by Sir Charles Oman. There were shelves and shelves of books, many of them with pencilled notes in the margin. ‘There were pigeonholed desks and cabinets with literally thousands of compartments into each of which were sorted little white slips with references to some particular topic, so drawn up (so far as I could see) that no one but the compiler could easily make out the drift.’ And there were piles of unopened parcels of books, which kept arriving, even after his death. ‘For years apparently he had been endeavouring to keep up with everything that had been written, and to work their results into his vast thesis.’ ‘I never saw a sight,’ Oman writes, ‘that more impressed on me the vanity of human life and learning.’
A Pattern Language is a book about architecture that was written in the 1970s, before the Web as we know it was even conceived. But the book provides hundreds of valuable patterns for community planning and architectural design, many of which can easily be applied to online communities and social networking websites.
Factor belongs to the family of concatenative languages: this means that, at the lowest level, a Factor program is a series of words (functions) that manipulate a stack of references to dynamically-typed values. This gives the language a powerful foundation which allows many abstractions and paradigms to be built on top.
Looking for a unique way to mark the days of the Advent season? The Web site Boston.com offers an Advent calendar composed of images from the Hubble Telescope, both old and new. Each day, from now until the celebration of the Nativity of Christ, the calendar will offer a beautiful image from the heavens above.
The connection between Advent and NASA images might seem odd. However, the calendar offers us a chance to marvel at the wonders of God's works as we anticipate the coming of his Son. For as Psalm 19:1 says, "The heavens declare the glory of God."
One should not see, goes the old saw, laws or sausages being made. This is also true of science, for a reason. Before something is published, scientists argue, insult each other, discuss things in casual ways and use unclear jargon and terminology that looks like, to an outsider who is uninformed, as if the whole thing is just being made up on the spot for political and personal reasons...
The hacked emails are not a conspiracy, as the excellent potholer54 points out in a wonderful piece of science communication. It’s a sausage being made. Of course, those who do not make sausages themselves might be disgusted by this, but if they want sausages, that’s what you have to put up with – rigorous debate, trying out things, and so on. Science is human, who knew? Every single scientist and science student knew, that’s who. If the pundits don’t, that should tell you about the pundits.
OpenGoo has one goal: to make the best Web Office. Period.
There is no way we can achieve that goal if we do not work together as a community. We need to bring together the work of tens of thousands of the Open Source developers working on the pieces all around the World. We need your help. Come join OpenGoo now, and be part of a new Web history.
OPENGOO IS FOSS
There are many commercial alternatives. but none of them offer you the advantages of Free Open Source.
When you have an Open Source piece of software you:
Can change it at will
Can switch your IT providers
Pay less
Use it however you want
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions regarding the licencing of OpenGoo
This camping car is made to small size. Because the road in Japan is narrow.
We made for folding two-story camping-car to prepare the greatest emigration space into the small body.
Time necessary to make the second floor is about two minutes. These operations are done in the driver's seat(cab).
The second floor is about 6 square meters area.
A driver's seat(cab) is not connected to a living-room, so cannot basically ride on living-room while running.
The Whole Earth Catalogs preached the hacker/designer approach to life starting in 1968, decades before this lifehacking became the norm. The Catalogs were a paper-based database offering thousands of hacks, tips, tools, suggestions, and possibilities for optimizing your life.
Like fine wine, the back issues of the Whole Earth Catalogs and its offspring, the CoEvolution Quarterly improve with age. One can read 20-year-old back issues and they will inform and astound you. They feel as if they were written yesterday. I've noted previously that much of their charm comes because they were blogs created in newsprint, written before the internet.
One could read back issues if you could find them. I had the privilege of producing many of the issues of CoEvolution Quarterly and some of the Catalogs, so I had my own personal library of them. (Therefore you should also discount my enthusiasm for them.) I can't tell you how many wonderful evenings I have spent sitting in my reading chair re-exploring the fantastic worlds captured in these back issues. It is impossible to pick one up and not be mesmerized, thrilled, amazed, and informed by at least two stories or reviews. There is a timeless nature to this work that is due to their anti-fashionable status. The Whole Earth Catalogs and CoEvolutions were idea-based journalism, rather than event-based. Instead of reporting on top of things, they liked to get to the bottom of things. These issues zagged while the rest of the culture zigged, only to zag later.
The good news is that all this goodness is now online. Danica Remy and the last holdouts of the old Point Foundation, publishers of the Catalogs and magazine until its last issue in 2002, have given a second life to this gold mine of material by arranging them to be scanned and posted online. The entire 35-year archive of Whole Earth Catalogs, Supplements, Reviews and CoEvolutions are all up and ready to be studied. You can read them for free, or download them for a fee. Go here.
I am not thrilled by the interface or format. The pages are clunky to navigate and worse, the proprietary format goes against the essential open system that Whole Earth both preached and practiced. The scans are analog. I could not find anyway to copy and paste text from them. The pages would have been far more useful and easier to use and share as plain old PDF docs.
But, oh! The richness! There are some very are early Whole Earth Catalog Supplements that in all my time at Whole Earth I never saw or read. They are here online now. For those unfamiliar with the wisdom of the Catalog, this archive will serve as a wonderful start. There are more than 100 issues of CoEvolution Quarterly (later called Whole Earth Review) and dozens of Whole Earth Catalogs to keep you up for years.