Last month, TED caused quite a stir online when they refused to release a talk given by venture capitalist Nick Hanauer. The talk, dealing with income inequality and job creation, was deemed highly partisan and “mediocre” which many TED viewers found outrageous given that many previous talks were also very controversial (such as one given by Melinda Gates on contraception).
This is the recently-released video, and TED curator Chris Andersen’s response to the backlash can be found here.
In honor of my little sister’s birthday this Sunday: a chart showing how common birth dates are based on how many babies were born in the US on each date from 1973 to 1999. September 16 was the most common date. Feb 29 was the least common, but that’s to be expected of a day that only occurs every four years. Christmas is the second least common.
The original data for this was compiled by Amitabh Chandra at Harvard University, and a table with these rankings can be found here.
Finally, I get December, but is anyone else wondering what’s so special about October and November?
Beautiful video. Awesome bikes. Wonderful sayings to live by.
In honor of my mother’s birthday today, I’m posting a story I wrote for my Intro to Creative Writing class back in the fall of 2010. The prompt was to write about hair cuts, which, as far as major ones go, I’ve only ever had three. Before anyone says anything (Mom, Francis), it was creative writing—I took artistic liberties.
Anyway, happy birthday, Mom.
This is Noisy Jelly, musical gelatin created by students at L’École nationale supérieure de création industrielle (Ensci), an industrial design college in France. I stumbled upon it while conducting a lit review on artificial touch sensing.
According to one of the student’s websites, Noisy Jelly works by using a board that is basically a giant capacitive sensor. This same technology is used in most touchscreen phones and laptop trackpads which is probably why it came up in my search. The pdf provided by the students is a bit lacking in terms of scientific explanation so here’s as basic an explanation as I can offer to what’s happening.
The Noisy Jelly board consists of a sheet of metal (a conductor) on the bottom and wood (a dielectric) on the top so it is two-thirds of a capacitor. The jellies— composed of water, agar agar, and salt— and your fingers are the other conductor, completing the capacitor. Different sounds can be produced by varying the capacitance of the setup. This can be done by changing the salt concentration (so the different jars in the video probably contain salt solutions of varying concentration), the height and thickness of the jelly, or the distance and strength of the touch.
Beneath the board is an Arduino microcontroller that’s running Arduino2max and Max/MSP, a graphical programming software for musical/media applications (aka musical LabView). The microcontroller picks up on the changes in capacitance and translates them into sound.
And there you have it. I’m not an electrical engineering student so anyone who is, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong/oversimplifying.
This is my favorite scene from Outsourced, in which the main character, Todd, experiences Indian culture shock of the best kind— the kind that involves running through town throwing colored powders at people.
The scene depicts Holi, the Hindu Festival of Colors, which happens to be today. Holi occurs in late February or early March to celebrate the beginning of spring. There are several myths associated with Holi, the most prominent of which is the story of Prahlad and Holika. As the story goes, Prahlad was the son of Hiranyakshyap, a nigh-immortal demon king that wished to be worshipped instead of the gods. Prahlad, however, was a devout follower of Vishnu, prompting his father to attempt several times to kill him. After these attempts failed, Hiranyakshyap ordered Prahlad to sit in a pyre on his (Hiranyakshyap) sister Holika’s lap, intending for Prahlad to perish in the fire while Holika would remain unscathed because she had a boon (blessing) protecting her from burning. Prahlad prayed for Vishnu’s protection, and because of this emerged unharmed while Holika burned to death.
Now I don’t claim to be any kind of expert in Hinduism, and I don’t know how important Holi is on a scale of 1 to Easter, but I’ll assume it’s pretty important. My friend’s mom has apparently been preparing food for this for several days. Regardless, all of the colors and the sense of community the powder wars surely engender must be awe-inspiring.
