Gamepocalypse is coming

Jesse Schell, an assistant professor at carnegie mellon university gave a mind-melting seminar entitled "Visions of the Gamepocalypse" at the Long Now Foundation's SALT series. I highly recommend listening to this podcast (and all other SALT podcasts for that matter), as he is a really energetic speaker and lays out a pretty convincing description about how games are going to become integrated into every part of our lives. The seminar is a bit long though (still highly recommended), so for those ADHD folks out there, here is a snippet of a different talk that gives a decent summary of his basic idea:

In case you're not interested in watching or listening to either, his basic point is that wi-fi and sensors of all kinds are becoming extremely cheap and abundant, and that combination allows you to turn everything into a game. In this case everything mainly involves things related to a consumer society, though the government could get involved as well. I don't think he talked about the possibility for your parents/spouse/family to turn your life into a game, but that seems plausible..."mow the lawn and you'll get a power-up" "wash the dishes or I'll cast a level three polymorph spell on you".

I came from That??!?

Last weekend I visited the Field Museum in Chicago.  It may come as no surprise to some of you that this museum completely blew my mind.  My friend Willard and I spent almost the entire time in their "Evolving Planet" exhibit, which walked us from the formation of the earth through to the present day.  Afterwards we talked about asteroids and looked at some wicked crystals.

Anyhow, the most surprising discovery from this visit concerned Dimetrodon, which when I was a child was one of my favorite dinosaurs from my extensive collection of plastic dinosaur toys.  My Dimetrodon toy looked vaguely like the one below, minus the "Dino-Strike Clamping Jaws".

What an awesome sail on his/her back, right?  Coolest dinosaur ever, or so I thought until my weekend stroll past the "Synapsid vs Diapsid" section of the evolving planet exhibit.  It was in this section that one of my childhood dino dreams died, and out of the ashes rose what I like to call the phoenix of discovery!  I discovered that Dimetrodon was not a dinosaur, but was instead our ancestor!!!!!  While that sinks in, here are some cool Dimetrodon pictures.

The Correlation of Human Skin Color and UV Radiation Levels

AMAZING!!!!!!!!!

For more on this, go here and here.

Where's My Hoverboard!!???!!!

Crap!  Here I am in the year 2010, no flying cars, no hoverboards, I am pissed!  Nobody has even levitated anything yet!

J/K!  Levitation exists!

Here is a video of Dutch scientists levitating things like water droplets, cherry tomatoes, and even a frog:



They are able to do this by taking advantage of a property known as diamagnetism, which is possessed by many materials.  Many common things such as wood, plastic, and water are all diamagnetic (frogs are mostly water).  Diamagnetic objects are repelled by magnets.  Diamagnetism can be thought of as the opposite of ferromagnetism, which is the property possessed by objects made of many metals such as iron and nickel.  Ferromagnetic objects are attracted to magnets.  However, this attractive, ferromagnetic force is much stronger than the repulsive, diamagnetic force.  So, in order to manipulate diamagnetic objects, you need STRONG magnets.  The Dutch scientists used a 16 Tesla magnet, which is around a million times more powerful than a pretty strong refrigerator magnet.

For more on this experiment, visit the Radboud Univeristy Nijmegen High Field Magnet Laboratory page.

I Am a Scientist! - part 1

I am a scientist.  Here is me pretending that life in lab is just as I had imagined it as a child...lab coat, frizzy hair, flasks of colored solutions, smoke, and all:

Atomic Rainbow

Here are some pictures of an atomic bomb exploding in space, at night.  In SPACE, at NIGHT! This is light from nuclear reactions, but not the kind that happen inside our sun.

Time Lapse Awesomeness - pt 1

I love to think about how differently we would see the universe if our sense of time were significantly altered. There are a number of illegal ways of doing this, but one legal way of experiencing an altered sense of time is through time-lapse photography.

Here are some awesome time-lapse videos by this guy Henry Jun Wah Lee: