Fault Lines – In Deep Water: A Way of Life in Peril

Sea Shepherd

If you believe business as usual will work and you don’t need to do much more than pay your bills and drop your kids off to school, you may want to watch this. Human Governments and Big Business have squeezed out pretty much all that Earth can take and keep on giving. From here on [...]

Sam Shepard on requesting to use his horse for a film shoot, a stuntman, and a cactus

Sam Shepard was offered a role in the early 80′s for a film called The Right Stuff. The film was to be shot in the Mojave Desert of California. One of the reasons Shepard was interested in the film was a chase scene on galloping horses, a man (his character) chasing his wife through the [...]

FlyFire – MIT’s micro-copter swarming pixels in the sky

Not sure if the double rotor copters seem quite as high tech and precise as the video footage, but if it’s MIT it must be real, right? And it would/will be amazing to see. http://senseable.mit.edu/flyfire/

Robot muscle – YouTube

artist rendering of artificial muscle on robot frame is by dcldesign. Electroactive Polymers or EAPs are polymers whose shape is modified when a voltage is applied to them. They can be used as actuators or sensors. As actuators, they are characterized by being able to undergo a large amount of deformation while sustaining large forces. [...]

Time and Spacetime: The Crystallizing Block Universe

The nature of the future is completely different from the nature of the past. When quantum effects are significant, the future shows all the signs of quantum weirdness, including duality, uncertainty, and entanglement. With the passage of time, after the time-irreversible process of state-vector reduction has taken place, the past emerges, with the previous quantum [...]

Butterfly Emerges from Stellar Demise in Planetary Nebula NGC 6302

A collection of hubble photography – the hubblesite.org – is the source for this beautiful image. The provided information is worth a read, here’s an excerpt: What resemble dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles [...]

Open Source is Magic by Chris DiBoda of Google

Chris goes on at length to describe and promote open source. He delves into it’s early rise, the nay sayers, their collapse against the inevitable rightness of open source as a means to an end (the most usable product), other reasons why it’s good, and it’s ubiquity in today’s world. It is long, over 1 [...]

Fungi kill insects on BBC video clip

Seen photos of the dead ant with a death spasm bight on a tree stem, the killer fungus growing out of it’s back. First time I see video on it. Dark and tragic (from a Fauna’s point of view), but interesting to see. The colonized moth is actually almost beautiful…

TED in 2004 – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on flow

From TED: Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi asks, “What makes a life worth living?” Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of “flow.”