The future of technology goes through new interfaces. It is simply no possibly to keep within the actual modes of interfacing, we have to go beyond, and this is maybe a glimpse of what it could be. A combination of 3D images and ultrasounds to transmit images and “touch”.
To read more: Makino Lab.
Have you ever been waiting too long for a bus and suddenly two buses appear?
Do you ask yourself why it happens?
Setosa makes possible to understand this and more other things by visual explanations.
Going back to the buses, here is a very simple simulation that lets you play with 2 buses doing the same route.
As you can see from playing around, it is quite easy to destabilize the system but difficult to bring it back to the situation with regular buses. One way of going back to normal is if the second bus stops and waits for the other buss to be quite ahead.
If you like it, then explore other visual explanations.
The Royal Institution of Great Britain has introduced a series of experiments for kids.
Here are the ones I like the most.
The next one can be turned into a nice experiment. Try for instance collecting water from different sources and test which one is more acid. Then try watering plants with them and see which plant grows more.
This is a nice variation of the water rockets experiments… with low level risk.
Nice an easy electricity experiments.
The final “lava lamp” is awesome.
The last one….
A couple of days ago I discovered for first time hydrographic printing. It works like this.
Looks cool? Well, look what people at the Columbia University just developed (paper here). The computational version allows aligning the object with the pattern in order to paint the object.
The possibility of combining this with 3D printing is amazing!
Usually, I reserve this section to post what I consider interesting Kickstarter opportunities, but this week I need to point to a different web page for a different kind of funding opportunity. The project is called Sugru, it’s a plastic that can be used to fast fixes and belong to the company Sugru which has been doing business for a while. The funding opportunity consist in buying a share in the company and you can do it through Crowdcube a new platform similar to Kickstarter which allows you to actually buy part of the companies you help to fund.
For those of you who are not sure about this, let me tell you the very basics about buying shares of a company:
So what is the good in it?
Here is the proof of the growing Sugru community of hackers (more can be found in the Sugru webpage).
Bumpers fro GoPro
New position for buttons
Quick fix
Fix magnets to any surface
Repair boots
Isolate/improve objects
Fix things that otherwise has to be completely replaced
And many other projects. One thing I like from this company is that they keep a blog for posting new ideas and also users can post their creations in the company webpage.
The end of the video is amazing, it shows spaghetti breaking in several pieces.
Original title: c
Title of this edition: The selfish gene.
Author: Richard Dawkins.
Gender: Divulgation.
Saga: —
Editorial: Oxford University Press.
Edition year: 1, 1989.
Prizes: …
Synopsis [Warning: Spoiler]: The gen is the basic entity in terms of evolution. When you think of evolution you need to think of the gen as a self-replicating structure that competes with other gens for the materials to replicate. The best ones will replicate, the worst… well, there is no second price. In this challenge the gens choose to cooperate, to be selfish and to build elaborate survival machines known as cells, tissues and bodies.
Personal Review: My field is physics, but I have some background in complex systems, and viewing this book from that perspective, this is a must read.
What is important here is that this book will go a little bit further than the “survival of the best fittest”. Allowing people with a good scientific level to reason into further details and general public to have access to a more updated view inside the field.
I think what the book does very well is turning the table and putting the gene and not the individual as the key element in the evolution game. This allows to go further into the implications of evolution and the book discusses a few examples quite interesting.
For those not willing to read it, this video tells more or less the key elements of the book.
Something that the book also introduces is the meme idea. Meme’s have been around since humans begun to create abstractions from the reality, but it is not until very recently that the idea of meme has hit the big public. As in the gene pool, there is a meme pool where meme’s compete for time in human brains, the more interesting (or funny), the more attraction and the best chances to survive longer time and pass from one mind to another (self-replicate). Chances to mutate or evolve may be different from meme to meme. For instance a Mozart’s composition is a meme that will not evolve quite fast, but still remain in many brains, while the internet memes change and mix together quite fast.
A quite interesting observation is that some memes cooperate together (as genes do). For instance, religion is a meme and celibacy is another meme. There is no reason for them to cooperate, but the fact is that if they do, there is more chances for them to survive. The idea here is that if monks practice celibacy, they will expend more time into the religion, making it possible for the religion to self-replicate.
Bear in mind that this is an essay and that some terms are quite vague, so it is easy to generalize them from one context to another. That doesn’t mean applying the ideas to a field will help making advances in the field. For instance, car shapes can be think as a meme that self-replicates and evolves. Since every new generation goes back to the designing table and starts from ideas that worked in the previous version… there is parallelism with evolution. But this doesn’t mean you will know how to design the new car. You know what you should not put on the car and that some features can be kept, but you will have no idea about how to proceed.
In resume, I encourage you to read it, because I learn quite a lot from it and I’m now willing to read its continuation, the extended phenotype.
the Brick In the Sky 