Jacob Morse

Fred Rogers - Archive Interview Part 4 of 9

Wed, 08 May 2013 10:45:15 -0500

Fred Rogers - Archive Interview Part 4 of 9

8bitfuture: Tiny implant can transmit realtime blood data to...

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 19:33:29 -0500

Tiny implant can transmit realtime blood data to your doctor.

Researchers at Switzerlands EPFL have demonstrated a 14mm long implant, able to analyse up to five proteins and organic acids in the blood simultaneously, and transmit the data to a doctor.

The data transmission works in several stages, with the implant using radio waves to transmit to a patch on the skin (which also provides power back to the implant through the patients skin). The patch then uses bluetooth to transmit data to a smartphone, which can then feed it into a web-based database accessible by a doctor.

The implant could be particularly useful in chemotherapy applications. Currently, oncologists use occasional blood tests to evaluate their patients’ tolerance to a particular treatment dosage. In these conditions, it is very difficult to administer the optimal dose. De Micheli is convinced his system will be an important step towards better, more personalized medicine. “It will allow direct and continuous monitoring based on a patient’s individual tolerance, and not on age and weight charts or weekly blood tests.”

In patients withchronic illness, the implants could send alerts even before symptoms emerge, and anticipate the need for medication. “In a general sense, our system has enormous potential in cases where the evolution of a pathology needs to be monitored or the tolerance to a treatment tested.”

Photo

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 19:29:13 -0500

explore-blog: Beatboxing Bach’s Goldberg Variations – best...

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 17:04:40 -0600

explore-blog:

Beatboxing Bach’s Goldberg Variations – best thing since the solar system set to music in a near-perpetual homage to Bach.

(↬ Open Culture)

"The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy..."

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 11:44:58 -0600

“The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted – recognizing a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question – in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived… As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.”

- Moravec’s paradox

Anamorphic Illusions by Brasspup

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 16:15:24 -0600

Anamorphic Illusions by Brasspup

8 months behind on sharing this, but here’s the birth...

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 15:12:43 -0600

8 months behind on sharing this, but here’s the birth announcement I designed for my son, Finley.

Photography by Lauren Tarpley.

Wikipedia Wednesday: Judit Polgár

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 10:41:40 -0500

Judit Polgár (born July 23, 1976) is a Hungarian chess grandmaster. She is by far the strongest female chess player in history. In 1991, Polgár achieved the title of Grandmaster at the age of 15 years and 4 months, the youngest person ever to do so at that time.

An impressive feat made more interesting by the fact that she and her sister were “were part of an educational experiment carried out by their father László Polgár, in an attempt to prove that children could make exceptional achievements if trained in a specialist subject from a very early age.”

“Geniuses are made, not born”, was László’s thesis. He and his wife Klára educated their three daughters at home, with chess as the specialist subject. László also taught his three daughters the international language Esperanto. They received resistance from Hungarian authorities as home-schooling was not a “socialist” approach. They also received criticism at the time from some western commentators for depriving the sisters of a normal childhood. However, by most reports the girls appeared happy and well-adjusted.

This type of stuff is fascinating, as it’s nearly impossible to separate nature and nurture. It seems that László was correct about the “making” of genius. However, given that he and his wife were the type to conduct an educational experiment in the first place, it’s likely that intelligence was a hereditary trait to some extent.

Trained in her early years by her sister Susan, who ultimately became Women’s World Champion, Judit Polgár was a prodigy from an early age. At age five she defeated a family friend without looking at the board. After the game the friend joked, “You are good at chess, but I’m a good cook.” Judit replied, “Do you cook without looking at the stove?” However, according to Susan, Judit was not the sister with the most talent, explaining “Judit was a slow starter, but very hard-working.” Polgár described herself at that age as “obsessive” about chess. She first defeated an International Master, Dolfi Drimer, at age 10, and a Grandmaster, Vladimir Kovacevic, at age 11.

The whole article is worth a read.

Soon, You May Download New Skills to Your Brain

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 09:17:25 -0500

Here comes the Matrix.

It may someday be possible to use brain technology to learn to play the piano, reduce mental stress, or even master kung fu with little or no conscious effort. Lead author and BU neuroscientist Takeo Watanabe says in a statement: “Adult early visual areas are sufficiently plastic to cause visual perceptual learning.”

from The Atlantic.

What Earth would look like with rings like Saturn.

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 09:36:08 -0500

What Earth would look like with rings like Saturn.

The coolest video of yesterday's annular solar eclipse

Mon, 21 May 2012 23:17:40 -0500

jkottke:

Cory Poole made this video of the annular solar ecplise yesterday using 700 photographs from a telescope with “a very narrow bandpass allowing you to see the chromosphere and not the much brighter photosphere below it.”

Cory says: “The filter only allows light that is created when hydrogen atoms go from the 2nd excited state to the 1st excited state.” Very cool.

This isn’t a game system that roughly maps your hand movements....

Mon, 21 May 2012 09:55:59 -0500

This isn’t a game system that roughly maps your hand movements. The Leap technology is 200 times more accurate than anything else on the market — at any price point. Just about the size of a flash drive, the Leap can distinguish your individual fingers and track your movements down to a 1/100th of a millimeter.

explore-blog: Yes, great. If Maurice Sendak had drawn The...

Sat, 19 May 2012 09:29:53 -0500

explore-blog:

Yes, great. If Maurice Sendak had drawn The Avengers, a loving homage by designer Hannah Friedrichs.

"When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men—but..."

Sat, 12 May 2012 10:46:26 -0500

“When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men—but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his.”

- Letters of Note: The bulk of all human utterances is plagiarism

Photo

Fri, 04 May 2012 10:22:56 -0500

What would happen if you put your hand in front of the LHC beam?

Thu, 03 May 2012 11:01:36 -0500

What would happen if you put your hand in front of the LHC beam?

Patterned by Nature was commissioned by the North Carolina...

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 10:47:23 -0500

Patterned by Nature was commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (naturalsciences.org) for the newly built Nature Research Center in Raleigh, North Carolina. The exhibit celebrates our abstraction of nature’s infinite complexity into patterns through the scientific process, and through our perceptions. It brings to light the similarity of patterns in our universe, across all scales of space and time.

10 feet wide and 90 feet in length, this sculptural ribbon winds through the five story atrium of the museum and is made of 3600 tiles of LCD glass. It runs on roughly 75 watts, less power than a laptop computer. Animations are created by independently varying the transparency of each piece of glass.

The content cycles through twenty programs, ranging from clouds to rain drops to colonies of bacteria to flocking birds to geese to cuttlefish skin to pulsating black holes. The animations were created through a combination of algorithmic software modeling of natural phenomena and compositing of actual footage.

explore-blog: This music video for “I Will Never Change” for...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 13:02:33 -0500

explore-blog:

This music video for “I Will Never Change” for electronic musician Benga by London-based studio US visualizes the waveform of the song via 960 records animated in stop-motion.

(ᔥ Laughing Squid)

Some Conceptual Literature on Twitter: The Poetry Foundation

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:47:36 -0500

Some Conceptual Literature on Twitter: The Poetry Foundation

People who don't know how to spell "cologne"

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 09:00:42 -0500

People who don't know how to spell "cologne"