When lions meet water buffalo

This is one of those videos you should just watch without knowing ahead of time what’s going to happen.

Okay, I can tell you that this video involves lions chasing down a water buffalo. This part is very much dog-bites-man, straight out of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. We’ve seen it all before. Then things get a little loopy. There’s some man-bites-dog action, and there’s also a splash of crocodile-pops-out-of-nowhere-and-bites-terrified-water-buffalo-calf. I’m not giving away too much to say the moral of the story is that it never pays to anger a herd of water buffalo.

YouTube – Battle at Kruger

It’s safe to say this is the luckiest group of camera-toting tourists to visit this place in a long time. You can hear the game-warden guy saying over and over “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

[via the Popular Science blog]

TED Talks: Photosynth demo

You may have seen the demos pages for Microsoft’s Photosynth project, but here’s an impressive video of a live demo from the latest TED conference: Blaise Aguera y Arcas on Photosynth. Photosynth is a tool for managing and aggregating photos and information about photos across whole populations of people. I like how the presenter emphasizes the fact that the true limiting factor for information display is the number of pixels on your screen, not the number of pictures you’re surveying on that screen. There’s still plenty of room to improve the systems we have now. The other thing that occurred to me is that David Weinberger is right to observe that there’s no longer any difference between data and metadata. Your beloved photo is valuable data to you, but a minor metadata reference point for me.

TED, incidentally, stands for Technology Education and Design. I’m amazed at the number of places where you can get free access to interesting videos and podcasts (see IT Conversations and SALT to name just two examples), but these TED videos stand out for their remarkably high production values. I don’t begrudge BMW their little ad in there, because they must be writing some big checks to support this.

http://static.videoegg.com/ted/flash/loader.swf

Diligent teaspoons: how to put Captchas to work

Regenerative braking is the process by which a car like the Toyota Prius can simultaneously slow down your car and turn some of your kinetic energy into electricity. The basic insight is this: a moving car is lovely energy source, waiting to be harvested. When you step on the brakes, as eventually you must, your ordinary old pre-Prius can only convert that energy into brake heat. But if you employ some clever electromagnetic torque, you can recapture that same energy, energy that otherwise goes pouring down the entropy hole in God’s great plenty every day.

Recapturing energy otherwise lost is the idea behind the reCaptcha, as I learned from this post to the O’Reilly Radar site. To understand the reCaptcha, you first have to understand the Captcha. Captchas were invented by Louis von Ahn and others at CMU as a way of stopping naughty computer programs from masquerading as humans (Captcha is the improbable acronym for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart). When, for example, Hotmail gives you a free account, they want to make sure you’re a real person. The way they do this by making you read some blurry smeared text like this.

recaptcha

Von Ahn’s latest brainstorm was to realize that “in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.” Like cars in motion, that’s an energy source that’s crying out to be harvested. So his new reCaptchas give you two words to decode. For one of these, he already knows the answer. But the other one is from a book scan that a computer is having a hard time reading. By deciphering the text, you’re actually helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive.

Harvesting energy one teaspoon at a time is theme that fascinates me, because it seems to promise something for nothing. Of course it’s really just a matter of spotting untapped energy sources and putting the right machine in place to capture it. Here, for example, is a New Scientist article about harvesting heat energy: Mini heat harvesters could be new energy source. This technique sometimes goes under the heading of energy scavenging, as studied by Rajeevan Amirtharajah’s group at UC Davis. “Energy scavenging” is a marvelous phrase. I think that’s what my son does to me.

Maps and Eichler houses on Zillow and Trulia

Zillow has gotten such glowing reviews of its real estate heat maps (cool blue is cheap; red hot is expensive) that it has made them available for much of the country. It’s fun to browse around at the state level looking for high contrast regions. For instance, you don’t need a realtor’s license to see that Stamford, Connecticut lacks the luster of its neighbors Greenwich and Darien. Be sure and check the little box next to “Heat Map”. The contrast is striking.

But there are some other nifty real estate visualizations out there. Trulia now has a tool for seeing when houses were built. As the slider moves through time, colored spots erupt at each new address. It’s a cool effect, and it got me thinking about places that saw dramatic housing booms. Levittown, Pennsylvania was such a place. Just after World War II it appeared so quickly it was named after developer William C. Levitt. Here’s the Trulia map. Compare this with a place like Newton, Massachusetts (of fig newton fame) that had much steadier growth.


Since I recently posted about my old house in Palo Alto, I was reminded of the many Eichler houses in and around that city. Joseph Eichler was developer with a vision of affordable luxury, and some ten thousand of his iconic Modernist homes sprouted in California during the 1950s. Here’s a brochure from around that time: Enter the Wonderful World of Eichler. This Trulia interface shows the Fairmeadow development just off East Charleston Road in Palo Alto. Dig the crazy circular road plans.

Eichlers went up fast, and they sometimes came down fast too. They were known to local firemen as eight-minute wonders for their ability to burn to the ground in less time than it takes to mix a martini and put some Sinatra on the Hi-Fi. Even so, plenty of them are still around and lovingly cared for by a community of Eichler aficionados. Here’s a nice example straight out of Fairmeadow as seen on Google Maps.

Street Views in Google Maps

Be sure and look at the new street views in Google Maps. In some neighborhoods for a few big cities, they give you the ability to “drive around” and look in any direction. Amazon had something like this, but this feels better to me.

Here, for example, is the house where I lived when I was Palo Alto. Not so interesting? Take a look at the view from the Golden Gate Bridge. Be sure and click and drag in the viewing window to change your view. Here’s the cool Ukrainian restaurant on the street where my sister used to live in New York.

Parkour, the art of not crashing into walls

St. Frank recently posted about parkour, the zany and dangerous sport that mixes gymnastics with testosterone and brick walls. When it works, as it usually does in the dozens of parkour videos you can find on YouTube, it’s impressive.

The New Yorker recently did a piece on parkour, and they even put some videos on their web site. But they were careful to include a video of a failed jump. It doesn’t always work.

Still, when it works, it’s something to behold. Here it is working.

I keep thinking that this is exactly how superhero comics start out: “Young Davie Dawson was a brilliant but tortured youth who trained himself to be… Parkour Man.” The colored tights might work out okay, but if you tried some of these moves with a cape, you’d just be asking for trouble.

Power plants in the basement

Have you ever wondered what happens to all the heat they generate at the power plant? They burn tons and tons of coal to make steam, the steam spins the turbine, the turbine makes electricity, which they distribute and sell. Everything else is just managing the consequences, because now you’ve got a lot of excess smoke, ash, and heat to deal with. Smoke and ash aren’t so useful, but you should be able to do something with all that heat, right? But like the natural gas that they’re constantly flaring on oil rigs, while it’s true that they CAN do something useful with it, economically it’s not worth their while. Just send it up the stack and be done with it.

So here’s an appealing story: if you install your own electric power plant in your basement, you’re in a good position to benefit from the heat. Even though your economies of scale are nothing like what they have at the power plant, you gain a lot of efficiency by cutting your heating bill and avoiding losses associated with long-distance power distribution. If you live in a place that requires a fair amount of winter heating, it actually makes sense to generate your own electricity. The technology is called micro-combined heat and power (Micro CHP) and if you live in the Northeast, you can get it now: ‘Power plants’ in the basement heat up.

In a related story, if you produce a sitcom in your own house, it is guaranteed to be funnier and have a lower carbon footprint than a typical Hollywood sitcom. Losses due to long-distance humor transport are horrendous.

Ha ha.

Bill Moyers interviews Jon Stewart

Bill Moyers recently interviewed Jon Stewart for his show Bill Moyers Journal on PBS. If you have the time to watch it, I recommend it. I sat in front of my computer and watched the whole thing, something I didn’t expect to do when pressed the “play” button.

Jon Stewart likes to say “I’m just a comedian,” and it’s fun to watch Bill Moyers needling him, essentially saying, “Oh no you’re not” and Stewart says “Oh yes I am.” But in the ensuing interview, it’s obvious that years of spoofing the news have given him some lucid insights into the political process in America.

Here he is talking about Alberto Gonzales.

For instance, Alberto Gonzales … is either a perjurer, or a low-functioning pinhead. And he allowed himself to be portrayed in those hearings as a low-functioning pinhead, rather than give the Congressional Committee charged with oversight, any information as to his decision-making process at the Department of Justice.

And here he is talking about the tightrope the president has to walk between stirring up fear about Iraq but not stirring up fear of his administration.

You know, one of the things that I do think government counts on is that people are busy. It’s very difficult to mobilize a busy and relatively affluent country. … I’ve always had this problem with the rationality of it, that the President says, “We are in the fight for a way of life. This is the greatest battle of our generation, and of the generations to come. Iraq has to be won, or our way of life ends, and our children and our children’s children all suffer. So, what I’m gonna do is … send 10,000 more troops to Baghdad.”

So, there’s a disconnect there between — you’re telling me this is fight of our generation, and you’re going to increase troops by 10 percent? And that’s gonna do it? I’m sure what he would like to do is send 400,000 more troops there, but he can’t, because he doesn’t have them. And the way to get that would be to institute a draft. And the minute you do that, suddenly the country’s not so damn busy anymore.

Even if you don’t have time to watch the show, Moyers’ site was good enough to post the whole transcript.

Magnetic brain stimulation: the new drug

I just came across this Wired item on a magnetic brain stimulator that’s being discussed at the latest American Psychiatric Association meeting as a new therapeutic tool for treating depression.

It works like this: much of your brain activity is electrical. You can drive electrical activity by changing nearby magnetic fields. Thus, with cleverly designed electromagnets, you can push and pull the electrical activity deep in your brain through the process known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). This technique has been around for a while, but like all things technological, it’s gotten much better in the last few years. An article in the New York Times Magazine a few years ago made a splash by describing how an Australian researcher could turn anybody into a creative savant (temporarily) with TMS. These claims, it turns out, may have been overstated, but still, the news about TMS was starting to spread.

At the same MIT conference I mentioned here (H2.0 at the Media Lab) there was a brief presentation by neurological research wunderkind Ed Boyden. He’s doing all kinds of fascinating research, including using lasers to suppress and excite neuron activity in rats. But all anybody wanted to ask him about was his TMS research. Does it work? Does it hurt? Is it fun? It was obvious that there’s a fascination with this device that’s going to catapult it into the street when it becomes cheap. The whole thing vaguely reminded me of the period in the early 1960s when LSD escaped from the Stanford Psychology department. Not to suggest that this has the hitting power of LSD, but I know that anything that promises to give people a cheap thrill or even a dull buzz will be appropriated and abused in short order. The first thing that occurred to me was that researchers in this area should make sure they’re in a position to learn from the crazy shit people will do in their basements because nobody can stop them. I mentioned this to Ed Boyden, and I was impressed that he had already considered this. He’s created a wiki site called OpenStim that’s dedicated to letting people report on their research. Or their “research” as the case may be.

Seed: Science In Silico

I used to work in aeronautics at NASA Ames Research Center. I worked in a big wind tunnel building, and the people I worked with were either wind tunnel engineers or CFD engineers. CFD stands for Computational Fluid Dynamics. They’re the people who write programs to simulate the flow of air around an airplane. They always had the prettiest pictures to show management. It didn’t matter if the simulations were inaccurate, they were beautiful and convincing. This drove the wind tunnel guys crazy. Their wind tunnels were ugly, loud, and incredibly expensive to run, but often they were the only way to get an answer you could trust. They were the Rodney Dangerfields of the center.

But simulation has come a long way in the last decade. People sometimes speak of three pillars supporting scientific progress as being experiment, theory, and simulation. Simulation, once the weak sibling of the three, has seen fantastic growth in power and scope. In molecular biology, like aeronautics, experiments are difficult, slow, and expensive. You do as many as you can afford, but sometimes simulation is the only way to get the information you need.

Seed magazine has produced a nice video describing the nature of science in silico, which is to say, science as simulated on a silicon computer chip. Follow the link to get to the video: Science In Silico