Genes, energy, science fiction, materials and disease – nothing on computing!
11 books on science Bill Gates thinks everyone should read
Vintage cool: Velvet Underground
There’s a banana and some vintage old school cool. That’s all it takes to make it onto my blog 🙂
Bionic ‘Skippy’ saves energy spent jumping
BionicKangaroo – energy-efficient jump kinematics based on a natural model
Festo has reproduced the unique way a kangaroo moves. The mechanical can recover the energy it spent jumping, store it and efficiently use it for the next jump. Almost like the real thing. Click here for full article – and great short video (watch right through).
The gypsy jazz style of Klezmer music
Klezmer is a Jewish folk musician of eastern Europe, played by small, traditionally itinerant bands. Musicologists have noted similarities between Klezmer and other improvisational styles such as gypsy music and jazz. Klezmer is a Yiddish name that can either be applied to the type of music – or the musician playing the music. The term derives from two Jewish words: kle (vessel or instrument) and zemer (song), literally meaning “instrument or vessel of song”. Klezmer was first used to describe the traditional instrumental music of Yiddish speaking Jews in Eastern Europe.
Making words into patterns
This is very clever!
Visualising rain patterns over 50 years
Stephen Von Worley from the site Data Pointed has charted the last fifty years of rainfall in downtown San Francisco. He uses a line per rain year – that is, the period running from July 1st through the following June, centred on California’s wet winter months. The bars show the total rainfall received on either side of Valentine’s Day for each year. The years which finished wettest share one thing in common: none started out unusually dry. Click to see the graphic.
Einstein’s tongue still has us talking
I get many referrals from around the world to my blog from people searching for “Einstein + tongue”. Here is the original post.
Mr SKA
Lou’s family have started calling him “Mr SKA”…
My brain got picked!
I was excited to be featured recently on the excellent blog and Twitter of @brainpicker My surname was slightly misspelled but it links to this post about famous science fiction author Arthur C Clarke describing the first iPad (or news-pad, as he called it) back in 1968.
We need to talk about Kevin’s mugshot
We Need to Talk About Kevin is a well-known novel by Lionel Shriver. Based on Shriver’s description of the psychopathic Kevin, the title character of the story, what would the boy look like? According to The Composites website, which creates identikit pictures based on the descriptions of characters from famous literary characters, the fiendish Kevin looks something like this:
