In At The Deep End

Now I’ve finally got the spiffy new WordPress walking to heel properly, here are some links I’ve come across recently that I liked that at least some of you might also like - sorry if they’re old news. In no particular order:

• For those who take lots of digital photos, here’s a reason to take even more: Photosynth. It stitches together lots of photos taken of the same place / thing. I haven’t installed it yet, so I don’t know what it’s like, but there is a very groovy demo video on TED from one of its creators. When I see amazing technology like this, I sometimes wonder if there are people working on classified projects for governments who did this ages ago but can’t tell anyone.
• Talking of TED, I have no idea how he does this - 30 minutes of genius.
• If you start taking loads more photos, you’ll need somewhere to store them. A colleague is thinking of buying this neat gizmo, which seems to be hard disks That Just Work.
• I often get fed up when people say how the Internet is going to change the world, how we’re going to order pet food online from specialist pet food web sites, how the world is going to be a better place etc. However, when Clay Shirky talks about the internet it’s usually thought-provoking and often seems perceptive and accurate. He’s written an another article on social participation and the internet with parallels to the past, which is much more interesting than it sounds, and there’s a good introduction by Tim O’Reilly.
• The internet isn’t going to save the world, but people like Amy Smith and her International Development Design students might.
• More stuff to make me ponder, but in a different way.

Otherwise known as Sulphur Hexafluoride. It’s amazing stuff, a colourless gas that’s denser than air i.e. like helium but the opposite. My colleague Rick pointed me to the first video below, and the magic of YouTube presented me with the other one.

With it you can

• Appear to defy gravity
• Get Darth Vader to give the traffic report on a radio programme.

I know the tension is unbearable until Busy Days parts 1, 2 and 4 arrive, but what the hey. In the meantime, here are some links that made Katy and me laugh till we cried.

The perils of bugs in your e-commerce site.
Words fail me (you may have seen this one before)
A fireman and his hose
Another one where words fail me
The perils of ordering over the phone

All but one were made by professionals, for money.

The periodic table of videos, from the University of Nottingham. Warning, it’s addictive. I love the low production quality coupled with the love of the subject from the slightly dotty mad professor (CBE) and his lab-coat-wearing assistants.

It’s part of a bigger thing called Test Tube.

If you’ve read enough of this blog you’ll probably know I’m not the biggest fan of George. W. Bush - here’s something that will rant on my behalf: law breaking, weirdness, paranoia and the defying of logic in the name of national security. It’s a well-written article by someone involved in a depressing law suit.

I ought to be in bed as it’s an hour ahead here, but I’m catching up on RSS feeds from our week away and came across these via TED.

• I shan’t introduce this video, just watch it.
• Probably out of date by now (it’s from 2002) but an amazing look at how humans and other animals walk, and how that can lead to incredibly simple robots that can walk very well.
• A blog about African ingenuity.
• To show I’m not a snob at least some of the time, a Daily Mail article by Brian Cox on the Large Hadron Collider and the science around it. An excellent quote from it:
  

  Your hand is nothing more than a complex, temporary arrangement of these three particles. The particles themselves have been around for the entire life of the universe. They are spending the blink of a cosmic eye in the pattern known as ‘you’.

Tomorrow night, after I’ve had another struggle to find veggie food in the Land of Meat, I’ll do the Kentwell stuff. In the photos of the Green Man in Katy’s post you can see Katy + A dancing, and Dave H’s friend Sam on his hurdy-gurdy.

Compare and contrast - the original track (with boring video) and a remix (slightly less boring video).

How to cope with rising fuel costs.

One fewer excuse to be rubbish at pool (video - see the responses too).

GeekDad on home education / schooling.

A small article on nanobots tickled me. As well as the title, it included this quote:

Among the nanosoccer drills that will be demonstrated in Pittsburgh are the two-millimeter dash in which nanobots seek fast times for a goal-to-goal sprint across the playing field

An excellent TED video about the biggest geological feature on the planet (and other things), plus the Jason Project (looks like lots of stuff for free).