This is a very interesting article for those of us that are addicted to adapting real world physics to our television, movies, and video games. In this article a student did a number of in game experiments while playing World of Warcraft and determined it to be a tiny Dyson sphere. This is a very interesting article if you love physics, or WoW!
Vi Hart's mathematical videos take the ordinary doodles of a somewhat bored student in math class to a higher level. Narrating and doodling at a rapid pace, Vi helps connect often confusing mathematical concepts in an entirely new way. So far she's covered topics like the sums of infinite series, graph theory, Eulcid's proof and exponential growth. Watching these clips makes me, always a reluctant student of math, hate the subject a little bit less.
Free public WiFi? Sounds pretty good, right? This news story from NPR sheds light on how a computer virus is being spread through this seemingly innocent channel. NPR's site provides information about this ongoing problem and also includes tips on how you can protect your computer. Running time for the audio version of the news report is 3:59.
A team from UKs Centre for Quantum Photonics has just created a a microchip that works on light rather than electricity. This difference means that information can be processed much faster, thus the speed of the computer increases dramatically. What is more interesting though is that this breakthrough may lead to quantum computing much sooner than expected, within the next five years! This is a very cool article that is worth a read.
Cooper, a 4 year old American Shorthair cat living in Seattle, wears a small digital camera attached to his collar once a week. The camera snaps a photo every 2 minutes, giving us a view into Cooper's world. Along with the standard photos of the neighborhood, Cooper snaps shots many photographers would be envious of. His photographs were even part of an exhibit at The Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago. View more of his photos on his Flickr page.
Not since 1982 has an American won the New York City marathon. This all changed on Sunday morning when Meb Keflezighi crossed the line in a first place finish of 2 hours 9 minutes and 15 seconds. Donning his white United States team singlet, Keflezighi ran an inspired final 10,000 meters to break away from the field on the difficult Central Park section of the course. While some may debate the American-ness of Keflezighi, as he immigrated to this country as a twelve year old from Eritrea, I see no cause for this argument.
One dress, 365 days. The Uniform Project is one womans commitment to giving back through sustainable fashion! Sheena Matheiken will wear the same simple, black dress everyday, accessorizing it with an impressive array of donated, thrifted, and eBay-ed hats, vests, skirts, scarves, tights and shoes. Each outfit is a testament to her creativity through daring fashion sense. The Uniform Project will be manufacturing and selling the LBD as well as holding an auction for the mass amounts of accessories accumulated over the course of the year.
Ever find yourself wondering exactly where federal dollars are spent, but lacking the ambition to read an encyclopedia-sized volume? "Death and taxes" is a wall-poster sized chart of where federal dollars are spent, with the emblems of programs and agencies sized proportionally to their spending, and annual %change shown for each program.
Please call Stella. How many ways are there to say this phrase? Did you guess 1,204? Thats how many differing voice samples the Speech Accent Archive has chronicled. They use an elicitation paragraph consisting of all English sounds and sound combinations to document the English accent as spoken all over the world. Want to compare a speaker from Brooklyn to another New Yorker? Or speakers from Brisbane and London? Im no linguist, but I couldnt hold my tongue over this gem of a website.
Ever find yourself overwhelmed by your search results? The Carrot search engine tries (and generally succeeds) to help alleviate this clutter by breaking down search results into thematic clusters. I've found this to be fairly helpful when my search phrases occur across a number of topics and I only want results from one of them.