Well, I’ve always said that I thought the Wind River Mountain Range in Wyoming is way more breathtaking than any of those we have here in Colorado, but I’m not sure I would have done this…
Wyoming Mountain depicted on Colorado Stamp
“Hey, can we borrow this? Nobody up here seems to be using it!”
I have to admit, today’s XKCD comic took me until the second “Boom De Yada” before I recognized it was a song…
The Discovery Channel commercial that it was based on is pretty good too:
Last week, in addition to being introduced to the Miracle of Science Bar and Grill*, I had the opportunity to attend the professional short course from MIT’s Edgerton Center, High-Speed Imaging for Motion Analysis: Systems and Techniques.
Below are a few of the images captured during the course, during the bullet lab. It consisted of taking still images with a 500 nanosecond strobe of (what else?) .22 bullets going through things. These were taken in a dark room with the camera shutter open, and a microphone trigger for the strobe. I re-hosted these and others in the general photography section of this site and in addition you can find them on the Edgerton Center Site, along with others from previous years.
Just in case the last video restored your faith in humanity too much, I give you the other end of the spectrum.
…just ask yourself “Where the Hell is Matt?”
Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.
I just have to mention how much I like Google Reader.
It works very well for collecting all the things I have been reading on a daily basis into one spot. The bad thing is that it keeps track of the number of items “read” in a day, to the tune of 300 plus every day. By read I mean most of them are a quick scan for something interesting. The ones that are interesting, I share on a public page, which is summarized and linked to here. It seems to work for a blogroll until I find a decent RSS feed aggregator.
So I am sort of a filtering service, pointing out the interesting things from the internet, or at least from the 41 (and growing!) current subscriptions on my reader page.
You can find lots of things on the internet. But potentially none will be more important than this.
It is a link to the Developing Intelligence blog over at ScienceBlogs and a post called “Caffeine: A User’s Guide to Getting Optimally Wired”.
For those of you that are too wired to pay attention through the whole thing, here is a short excerpt. You really should read the whole thing, though. The explanations in the details are the best part.
1) Consume in small, frequent amounts.
Between 20-200mg per hour may be an optimal dose for cognitive function.
2) Play to your cognitive strengths while wired.
Caffeine may increase the speed with which you work, may decrease attentional lapses, and may even benefit recall – but is less likely to benefit more complex cognitive functions, and may even hurt others. Plan accordingly (and preferably prior to consuming caffeine!)
3) Play to caffeine’s strengths.
Caffeine’s effects can be maximized or minimized depending on what else is in your system at the time.
4) Know when to stop – and when to start again.
Although you may not grow strongly tolerant to caffeine, you can become dependent on it and suffer withdrawal symptoms. Balance these concerns with the cognitive and health benefits associated with caffeine consumption – and appropriately timed resumption.
5) Finding good sources of caffeine
Despite the huge variety of sources of caffeine – including caffeinated soap, candy, and of course chocolate – the optimal use of caffeine is likely to involve small, hourly doses along with some cardioprotective agent. Given the high solubility of caffeine, absorption time should not be an issue (but if for some reason it is, try gum).
And as a final enabling link, here is an interactive map showing Starbucks’ (Starbuckses? Starbuckae? Starbuckorum?) locations.
I got a chance to give a symposium talk at the conference in San Jose last weekend, and during a bit of free time I found my way over to the Winchester Mystery House. This house was under continuous construction for 38 years, under the daily direction of Sarah Winchester, who supposedly built the additions to the house to appease some spirits that were haunting her. In my opinion, a lot of the odd construction could be the building of additions without any sort of master plan, but thats just me. Not really one that gets excited by ghost stories, I was more interested in the construction of this house, the architecture, and the chance to take some interesting photographs.
The story behind the houses starts on the other side of the country in Connecticut. After her daughter and husband died, Mrs. Winchester consulted a psychic of some sort that told her the family was cursed, and she was haunted but the souls of all the people that had been killed by Winchester firearms. She was ‘drawn west’ so she went to San Jose, bought an six room farm house and started construction in 1884. This construction went on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for 38 years until her death at the age of 83 in 1922. The day she died the workmen stopped. All told she spend over $5 million on construction, funded by the $20 million in cash and the $1000 per day she earned from half ownership in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company she inherited from her husband at his death. Read more »
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