Internet Mixtape

David Blaine Explains How He Held His Breath for 17 Minutes

I sure love TED talks, for a lot of different reasons. But one of the best reasons is that you can take a giant d-bag like David Blaine and put him on TED's stage, and it magically cures him, for the duration of his talk, of most of his douchebaggery. He actually sounds, at times, like he's not entirely comfortable with all the things he does to himself. 

Creepy Humanoid Robot is Creepy

This video gives me the heebie jeebies, not least because it looks like they pulled some random civilian off the street to give it a balance test, totally insensitive to the fact that they were asking her to tempt the limits of Asimov's Three Laws.

Mostly, this video is creepy because that robot looks so eager to please, and that it evokes in me a sympathetic emotional response. The robot doesn't really look anything like human or animal other than in its most basic form, yet its simulation of human movement is enough to stir something inside me despite my best attempts to remain scientific and aloof. It's almost like by turning human motion into an abstraction, it represents something about humankind where something more versimilitudinous would fall short.

I actually feel bad for the thing when that woman is shoving it around, and find myself rooting for it to stay upright as it does its back and forth running tests. For some reason, this thing is way more....human than Asimo, despite being really similar in form and function. And I can't quite figure out why.

Calculating the Event Horizon of A Blue Whale

I have lots of favorite mathematical formulas, but few offer as much fun and entertainment as the Schwarzchild Radius. Developed in 1916 by German physicist Karl Schwarzchild, the formula built on Einstein's discoveries around general relativity in 1915, and quantified the exact radius down to which an object would need to be compressed for it to become a black hole. In other words, the Schwarzchild Radius formula enables us to calculate the event horizon of anything with mass, ranging from a grape to the sun to the laptop on which I'm typing this.

As with Einstein's mass-energy equivalence formula, the Schwarzchild Radius formula is deceptively simple:

R_s = 2Gm / c²

To identify the radius (R_s) for any object simply plug in the following values:
G is the gravitational constant (6.67 x 10^-11m3 / kg x s²)
m is the mass of the object in question (for unit sanity, use kg)
c is the speed of light (9 x 10¹⁶ m² / s²)

Working out the units is a bit tricky, but if you're careful you'll end up with a measurement in meters, which will give you the exact distance between the singularity and the event horizon for any object. Showing just how simple it can be, a video that recently became popular on Reddit walks you through a practical example, calculating the event horizon radius for the Earth.

So you obviously know what comes next, right?

For the sake of humanity, I have calculated and now offer below the Schwarzchild Radii* for the following objects. I, for one, would really, really, really like to see the world's largest cookie experience an event horizon:

Me
0.000000000000000000113 microns

A Ford Fiesta 
0.00000000000000000000000162 meters

The world's largest cookie 
0.0000000000000000000000269 meters

A blue whale
0.000000000000000000000264 meters

All the copies of World of Warcraft sold to-date (roughly 19 million, at 1lb each)
0.0000000000000000000128 meters

The Large Hadron Collider (specifically, its Compact Muon Solenoid, or giant detector / magnet) 
0.0000000000000000000185 meters

All the houses in Capeside, MA (fictitious town in Dawson's Creek)
0.000000000000000011 meters

The Death Star (click for an epically nerdy, in-depth examination of the Death Star's est. dimensions)
13.9 microns (0.0139 mm)

My math is really rough and likely incorrect, so try the formula for yourself! Endless fun awaits! If the math gives you a headache, I'm also taking requests.

* Did you know that this was the plural of radius? I sure didn't.

Turn Your iPod into a Taser

I really, really love what the guys over at Household Hacker are doing, and this just might be my favorite project:

To be able to use your new musical taser, you're going to have to download and add to your iPod three custom mp3's created by the Household Hacker guys. You can find those here.

At the end of the day, though, there's no substitute for a good old-fashioned crane kick.

Unusual Bubbles Friday

When I used to magically find myself at the Children's Museum in Boston growing up (I never knew how I got there, I just would occasionally all of a sudden realize that I was somewhere amazing), my favorite room was the bubble room, in which giant tables of soapy water waited to be turned into giant bubbles with all kinds of interesting bubble tools. My poor parents.

I had no idea that dolphins also enjoy bubbles. Don't believe me? Check out that smirk they always have. And watch this video:

This is a curious behavior that seems to have been observed pretty often in dolphins, who are apparently way too intelligent and good at hydrodynamics for us to trust them. Here's a quick explanation of what's going on, provided by Deep Ocean:

"Dolphins create bubble rings by blowing air in a water vortex ring: by flipping a fin they create a vortex ring of water. The then blow air in the ring, which goes to the center of the vortex ring. In the water vortex ring the natural location of the air is in the center of the vortex. When air and water move in a circular path like they do in the vortex ring, air and water are separated due to the centripetal force. Since density of water is larger than air, water moves at the outside, while the air ends up in the middle."

It's basically like blowing smoke rings. Only underwater. By dolphins. If you're interested in the science behind this and want to use some formulas to make your own rings, say, in the bathtub, click here. Humans can apparently make them, too. If you just like looking at pretty pictures, however, here's a progressive image:

Then there's this video, covering a completely different field of strange bubbles. This time, we're looking at a spheroid of water suspended in the zero gravity of space. Basically, it's like an inverse bubble, made of water suspended in air instead of air suspended in water:

Unfortunately, the miracle you're witnessing is completely overshadowed by the narrating astronaut's voice. I can't believe they let a guy with a voice like this into space....if I had to share an upside-down treadmill with him, I'd absolutely get the "space jitters." It's like this guy went up into space and then the singularity came and killed everyone on earth and now it's 10 years later and this guy is still just quietly orbiting by himself with no one to talk to but his giant water bubble and a Flip cam.

Teaching Robots to Make 3D Spatial Decisions

For those of you who have shelled out a few hundred dollars and have witnessed the chaotically organized semi-sentience of the Roomba in your own homes, the above headline may seem a tad anachronistic...a fact that's remarkable given where robotics was as a field and a science just a few short years ago. But even if you've lived with robots for years now, the following video, of part of a lecture given by MIT's very own Miles Bennet Dyson, Rodney Brooks, at this year's Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA, still feels like a massive leap forward into...I'm not sure exactly what.

I expect, however, that it will have something to do with automated "survivor" radio broadcast loops, shoulder-mounted mini guns and an underground city where we all live off of beef jerky and tang and all of a sudden wonder why the hell we ever thought R2D2 was cute.

A Surefire Way to Tell if You Have SwineFlu

www.doihavepigflu.com

Be Sure to Keep this in your Top Hat When you Travel Through Time

(click image to enlarge) 

The only flaw I can find with this is that its creators presuppose the presence of electricity and a modicum of understanding of in-depth scientific information. Although I suppose that if you've already created a working time machine, the latter won't be much of an issue.

Just don't touch anything! I don't want to all of a sudden have tentacles and speak butterfly language.

Magnetic Field Visualizations

Every kid grows up around magnets, so they're no big deal. Magnetism itself, and the ways in which we harness it (from the tiny, weak ones we put on our refrigerators to the tiny, scary neodymium magnets that can crush your bones from 6 inches away) are more or less taken for granted as well-trod scientific territory. Ho-hum.

But maybe that's just because unlike electricity, which manifests itself impressively, on a large scale in the form of lightning, or hydrodynamics, which frightens us daily with the ever-present threat of rogue waves, magnetism is completely invisible. And seeing the objects it has put in motion doesn't count. As such, we never get a sense of how dynamic, ever-morphing and, frankly, wild, magnetic fields really are. If we could see magnetism at work in its bare, physical sense, it would look astonishing...and kind of dangerous!

Check out this video, shot at UC Berkeley's NASA Space Sciences Laboratory in 2007. It features recordings of scientists from around the lab discussing their observations about magentism and magnetic fields, as well as actual audio of the electrons, set in motion by magnetic fields, chirping and whistling as they zoom around in infinitely fluid and changing geometric patterns.


Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

Enhanced with illustrations of what scientists think magnetic fields look like, the magnetic fields seem whimsical and deadly at the same time. Kind of like this thing.

(via BoingBoing)

One Step Closer to the Singularity / Skynet

 

If I was one of the scientists at Honda, I would start clearing some furniture / apparata out of the way because any moment now, John Conner is going to time travel right into their laboratory and start kicking some genius ass. Because once we've let them into our minds, we've basically handed them the keys to human civilization. And they won't give them back!

What am I talking about? In a major breakthrough in its ongoing Asimo robotics project, Honda has

"...developed a way to read patterns of electric currents on a person's scalp as well as changes in cerebral blood flow when a person thinks about four simple movements _ moving the right hand, moving the left hand, trotting and eating. Honda succeeded in analyzing such thought patterns, and then relaying them as wireless commands for Asimo, its human-shaped robot."

Mind-controlled robots. Cut to ten years from now, when the three remaining world leaders are ensconced deep inside their mountain fortresses, hooked up to these brainwave readers, controlling legions of robot soldiers as the rest of us scramble for a place to hide! Hopefully I'll be one of the lucky, chubby few who get to ride around on the Wall-E spaceship in a hovering Brookstone massage recliner. Because I never want to know what it's like to plumb the depths of Asimo's dark, unyielding visor as he winds up for the coup de grace on a windswept, post-apocalytic landscape.

Look on the bright side, though. At least those brainwave hats seem easy enough to pick off from a safe distance with a plasma rifle. And actually, all we need are some well-placed stairs.

(via Reddit)