With headlines like “Octopus ride accident injures two” and “Ferris wheel catastrophe kills five”, it will be hard to look at amusement park rides in quite the same light.
Not that they ever seemed on par with the safety of something like, say, bonsai gardening.
(via BoingBoing)
Researchers in Spain have proven that metamaterials, materials defined by their unusual man-made cellular structure, can be designed to produce an acoustic cloak - a cloak that can make objects impervious to sound waves, literally diverting sound waves around an object.The research, ‘Acoustic cloaking in two dimensions: a feasible approach’, published today, Friday, 13 June, 2008, in the New Journal of Physics (NJP), builds on recent theoretical research which has sought ways to produce materials that can hide objects from sound, sight and x-rays.
Do you really need it spelled out for you?
Oh. Well: it’s convenient that recent scientific advances would relate nicely to the properties of a device relied on frequently in Get Smart, and referred to as the “Cone of Silence”. Of course, it never worked that well–but that’s not the point. Not that there is a point. (I’m assuming the Cone of Silence is somehow featured in the new movie — and hope to find out, first-hand, soon enough. I can’t imagine it being left out.)
(via ScienceBlog: “Cloak of silence realized with metamaterials”)
Exhibit A:
Over a six-hour period this morning, high-powered radars in the Arctic Circle broadcast an advertisement into space for the first time.
The advertisement, for Doritos tortilla chips, was being directed towards a solar system in the Ursa Major constellation, just 42 light years from Earth. The solar system contains a habitable zone, and could host an Earth-like planet and extraterrestrial life.
Exhibit B:
The advert itself is unlikely to be decoded by extraterrestrial life, according to van Eyken. “We’re sending it as an MPEG file coded into 1s and 0s. It’s going to look pretty random,” he says. But repeating the message in a series of regular pulses over several hours should help extraterrestrials identify the message as intelligent, he thinks. (emphasis added)
It’s really just semantics, but I would prefer not to think of an ad for Doritos as intelligent.
(via Warren Ellis)
The rain was sidelong and clever, flying at us upside-down and zig-zag, wetting places you didn’t think about, making you wish for the dryness of a bath. I hadn’t believed it was true, at first. It certainly wasn’t possible. Writing articles about nachos shaped like the Virgin Mary, everyone joked: that’s what you’ll be doing next. It seemed like a gag.
The driest place on earth, that’s tedious, but measurable. A place that’s inside isn’t even in the running. Most places it doesn’t rain inside, not proper-like. Conversation of raining inside, and you expect you’re talking to someone without a proper understanding of sprinkler systems, or of “inside”. That’s what I thought.
A color piece. A crazy eccentric. That’s what I expected. UFOs and folk art, a leaky pipe and a cracked ceiling. I pictured: everything painted blue.
The rain in Trevor Wheelock’s apartment was like nothing you’ve ever seen. Everything covered in tarps and sealed in zip-log bags and garbage bags or dissolving into the floor. Plastic furniture. It was raining when they built the house, Trevor said, and it hadn’t stopped since.
A while ago it had stopped raining on the second floor, Trevor said, which was just uncanny. I thought I saw a fish, out of the corner of my eye. It might have been Doris.
Yet awkward in its own way.
(via MAKE Blog)
You can always build forts.
(via Bookslut)
The cover story1 of the July/August edition of The Atlantic hits an interesting note, if one that’s hit with a fair amount of frequency (if not depth). One of the points is that the way our tools2 process information affects the way we process information. Which should be obvious enough, but isn’t always.
The article’s focal point is Google, and the internet, and how the fragmenting, attention-scattering nature of the internet rewires our brains, making it more difficult for us to process long, deep passages of text. Nicholas Carr (the author of said article) worries, and sprinkles anecdotes of people who find their reading habits severely impinged upon by their internet browsing habits — people who can no longer delve into long works of fiction, who (as the author) can no longer read tomes they’d regularly re-read in the past; but, also, he is circumspect, and skeptical, and does not burn bridges: maybe it’s bad, and maybe it isn’t.
Reading the article, I couldn’t help but feel that, while my real-world (read: books, magazines, newspapers) reading habits haven’t been impacted by the internet, my internet reading habits have definitely evolved. Finding tasty morsels of facts on the internet has devolved from a thing of learning to a thing for its own sake. Trivia and ephemera are great, but when the fact only exists in memory long enough to lead to another fact, never to be recalled again — well, that’s just silly.
My folder of “read it later” bookmarks is poorly named, because I don’t know that I will. Or wouldn’t have. But conscious effort is intriguing. And maybe it will change.
This could be the beginning of more depth on here, or of nothing at all.
P.S. That’s not to say there will be fewer posts on here about secret iguana-smuggling compartments and such.
Notes:
1 “Is Google making us stupid?” by Nicholas Carr
2 Also: written language; the printing press; clocks.
I bet it wasn’t this:
(via WFMU)
