Light-Juggling-Thingy now updated with LED-Display-Awesomeness
Youtube Direktlight, via Adafruit
Tolles Update für diese Lichtjonglierdingsbumse, mit denen Hippies auf Festivals immer ihre Show abziehen. Diesmal mit LED-Display-Funktion, auf dem man unter anderem Nyan-Cat rumkreiselpixeln kann. Toll! Kaufen kann man den Kram hier.
Berlin from Space
Von Commander Chris Hadfield auf der ISS: „Berlin at night. Amazingly, I think the light bulbs still show the East/West division from orbit.“ Kennt sich einer mit Berliner Straßenlaternen aus? (via Laughing Squid)
[update] Von Reddit (Danke Moep0r!):
The Orange is actually still gas light, not electric light. The Soviets put them in everywhere after WWII. If you’ve ever lit a camping lantern, you know the sort of orange/yellow they put off. The city has plans to switch them over by 2016, which you can find here.
[…] it’s interesting to note that the color and quality of light was a big deal to people who liked the old gas lights (even though they used 50 times the energy of electric lights).
[update] spOnline: „Doch nicht Gas- und Elektroleuchten sind schuld daran, dass Berlin aus dem All noch immer eine geteilte Stadt ist, wie eine Nachfrage bei der Vattenfall-Tochter BerlinLicht ergibt. Die Unterschiede gibt es nämlich auch bei den elektrischen Lampen: Im Osten kamen vor allem gelbliche Natriumdampflampen zum Einsatz, im Westen eher weiße Leuchstoff- und Quecksilberdampflampen. Und das hat sich zumindest zum Teil noch bis heute erhalten.“
Glowsticks in a Waterfall
Reddit Exposureporn: Glowsticks in a Waterfall, hier in HighRes. [update] Das Bild stammt aus der Fotoserie Neon Luminance.
Light in Slow Motion with 1.000.000.000.000 Frames per Second
Youtube Direktlight, via Petapixel
Ramesh Raskar erklärt auf der TED Konferenz seine Femto-Fotografie, mit der er eine Billion Frames pro Sekunde aufnehmen und damit Photonen (Lichtteilchen) in Slow Motion einfangen kann. Impressive, most impressive!
Ramesh Raskar presents femto-photography, a new type of imaging so fast it shows the world one trillion frames per second, so detailed it shows light itself in motion. This technology may someday be used to build cameras that can look “around” corners or see inside the body without X-rays.
Hier noch das Q&A von der Konferenz und hier die Website zur Femto-Fotogafie: Visualizing Photons in Motion at a Trillion Frames Per Second.
Lucid Dreaming Goggles
William Finucane von den Mad Science Labs hat sich eine Brille gebaut, mit der er luzide Träume anschalten will. Das Teil wiederholt zwei Stunden nach dem Anschalten eine Folge blinkender Lichter, die in der REM-Phase des Schlafs erkannt werden können und so bewusst machen, dass man sich in einem Traum befindet. Zu dem Ding gibt es auch ein Video, dass bei uns wegen kleingeistigen Schnickschnacks gesperrt ist, aber die ich mag die Idee immer noch.
To use your new lucid dreaming goggles, wear them for a few minutes each day and take note of the light pattern. Each time you notice the pattern, think about your surroundings and how you got there. If you are in real life, you will remember specifics, but in the dream world, most things are vague.
Turn on the goggles and put them on just before going to bed. If one of the flashes catches you in your REM stage of sleep and you are keen enough to notice it in your dream, you can be the god of your brain! All it takes is knowing you are dreaming without waking up!
Inception in Real Life: Make These Lucid Dreaming Glasses and Take Control of Your Dreams
Urban Stargazing
Oscar Ihermitte hat mit ein paar Verbündeten neue, solarbetriebene Sternen-Netze mit teleskopischen Schleudern zwischen Bäume und urbane Strukturen geschossen und dazu New School Sternbilder erfunden, um gegen Lichtverschmutzung zu protestieren. Toll!
The Urban Stargazing project focuses on bringing back the stars in the city sky by recreating existing constellations and adding new ones, narrating old and contemporary myths about London. Twelve groups of stars have been installed at different locations in the city, and can only be observed by the naked eye at night time. […]
Each constellation is a triangulated struture made out of clear ø 0.6mm nylon line, ø 0.2mm polyethylene braid, ø 0.75mm fibre optic and a solar powered LED. During the day, the battery is being recharged by the solar panel and the circuit switches ON the LED when it is dark enough to observe stars. In order to have the constellation in the air, the team uses a telescopic catapult to fix the structure on top of trees.
Urban Stargazing und Urban Stargazing team (via Macelodeon)
Sensations from Solar Particles on your Retina in Space
Ein frisch auf der Erde eingetroffener Astronaut, der die letzten paar Monate im Weltall verbracht hat, beantwortet grade ein paar Fragen auf Reddit. Die meisten Antworten kannte ich, das hier aber nicht:
I read that when you’re in space and close your eyes, you experience solar particles hitting your retinas as speckles of light. Was this the case, or was the experience different for you? – Yes I did experience that. Sometimes it was a flash and at other times it was a streak of light. I’m sure it happens all the time but I only noticed it as I was getting ready to fall asleep
Also: „Is there any astronaut food that tastes good? – Lasagna.“
Snowboarding in a LED-Suit
Kurzfilm von Jacob Sutton mit Snowboarder William Hughes, der in einem LED-Anzug ‘nen Hang im französischen Rhône-Alpes runterfährt. Schick!
The electrifying film sees Hughes light up the snow-covered French hills in a bespoke L.E.D.-enveloped suit courtesy of designer and electronics whizz John Spatcher. “I was really drawn to the idea of a lone character made of light surfing through darkness,” says Sutton of his costume choice. “I’ve always been excited by unusual ways of lighting things, so it seemed like an exciting idea to make the subject of the film the only light source.”
Jacob Sutton’s L.E.D. Surfer – A Night-time Snowboarding Short Lights Up the Last of the Winter Snow (via MeFi)
Faster than Light-Neutrino confirmed
Vor ein paar Wochen ging die Meldung durch Science-Blogs, dass Wissenschaftler am National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Italien Neutrinos beobachtet hatten, die sich angeblich schneller als das Licht bewegten. Dazu hatten sie Neutrinos vom CERN in den OPERA Neutrino-Detektor des Laboratori Nazionali im Gran Sasso-Gebirge geschossen und die Teilchen kamen 60,7 Nanosekunden früher an, als es die Lichtgeschwindigkeit erlaubt. Das ergab natürlich ein riesen Bohei, viele Wissenschaftler aus dem Team wollten das Papier mit den Ergebnissen nicht unterzeichnen und sowieso ging man allgemein von einem Fehler aus, so auch ich, weshalb ich erst gar nix dazu gebloggt hatte. Das alles erschien mir viel, viel, viel zu unwahrscheinlich um kein Fehler zu sein. Neil deGrasse formulierte das neulich bei einem AMA auf Reddit so:
What are your thoughts on the reports of neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light?
Three options:
1) Mistake in the data
VERY DISTANT 2) New particle traveling backwards through time. No need to modify relativity.
EVEN MORE DISTANT 3) Need to modify Relativity.
Das Problem ist nun: Sie haben das Experiment wiederholt und erneut Neutrinos gemessen, die sich schneller als das Licht bewegten. WHOA! Ich verstehe vielleicht die Hälfte der Artikel, die ich gleich verlinken werde, aber ich verstehe das hier zu hundert Prozent: Sollte sich das Testergebnis noch einmal wiederholen, dann ist das ziemlich sicher die wichtigste Entdeckung der Wissenschaft seit Einsteins Relativitätstheorie und all das wird dann die Physik komplett auf den Kopf stellen.
OPERA beginnt nun mit einer neuen Testreihe, die sich ein paar Monate hinziehen wird und MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) am Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois kalibriert grade sein System, um das OPERA-Experiment nachzustellen, Ergebnisse werden für Anfang nächsten Jahres erwartet. Ich bin extrem gespannt, was da noch kommt.
One of the most staggering results in physics – that neutrinos may go faster than light – has not gone away with two further weeks of observations. The researchers behind the jaw-dropping finding are now confident enough in the result that they are submitting it to a peer-reviewed journal.
“The measurement seems robust,” says Luca Stanco of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Italy. “We have received many criticisms, and most of them have been washed out.” […]
The result also unsettled those within the OPERA collaboration. Stanco was one of 15 team members who did not sign the original preprint of the paper because they thought the results were too preliminary.
One of the main concerns was that it was difficult to link individual neutrino hits at Gran Sasso to the particles that left CERN. To double check, the team ran a second set of measurements with tighter bunches of particles from 21 October to 6 November. In that time, they observed 20 new neutrino hits – a piddling number compared to the 16,000 hits in the original experiment. But Stanco says the tighter particle bunches made those hits easier to track and time: “So they are very powerful, these 20 events.”
New Scientist: More data shows neutrinos still faster than light (via Reddit)
Science2.0: OPERA Confirms: Neutrinos Travel Faster Than Light!
Nature: Neutrino experiment affirms faster-than-light claim
Wikipedia: Neutrinotests – OPERA, Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso
Burning Man 2011 Timelapse’d
(Youtube Direktburning, via Ronny)
Nettes Video vom Burning Man 2011, das drei Tage vorher beginnt und alle Tage des Festivals in 5 Minuten zeigt: „From dust to dust, this time lapse covers over 5 weeks including the preparation of the event, from before the trash fence erection and after basically everyone except for DPW trickles out. Other than a few occasional pauses, the main event goest by at a rate of 3 hours every second.“
Party Rats! Ideal for Raving and Night-Blogging
Whooohooo, Party Rats! „Colorful rodent Lights for your Fingers, Ideal for Night-Blogging!“ Jetzt weiß ich, was ich mein ganzes Leben lang vermisst habe oder wie es Redditor ShallowBasketcase formuliert: „By day, I am a simple newspaper reporter, unremarkable in every way. By night, I am The Blogger.“
People of all ages are putting these colorful, plastic, rodent lights on their fingers and waving their hands in the air like they just don’t care. Each 1-3/4″ long rat sends out a different colored beam of light, allowing you to create your own personal light show! Also great for the latest computer craze, night blogging! Five rats in each package. Batteries included.
Warren Ellis’ UV-Light-Comic
Schickes neues Comic von Warren Ellis, Matt “D’Israeli” Brooker und dem Designbüro BERG. SVK ist eine klassische Agentenstory, die nicht so klassisch auch mit Spezial-Farbe gedruckt wurde, die nur mit der mitgelieferten UV-Taschenlampe sichtbar wird. Schöne Idee!
Comics break the rules of storytelling, invent new ones, and break them again – more often than almost any other medium. This graphic novella is about looking – an investigation into perception, storytelling and optical experimentation that inherits some of the curiosities behind the previous work of BERG.
Litho printed on 115gsm silk paper in tones of black and blue, SVK uses a third ink invisible without the SVK object. The object is a UV light source which unlocks hidden layers woven throughout the comic book. Reading SVK becomes a unique and strange experience as you see the story unfold through the eyes of Thomas Woodwind.
First and foremost SVK is a modern detective story, one that Ellis describes as “Franz Kafka’s Bourne Identity”.
It’s a story about cities, technology and surveillance, mixed with human themes of the power, corruption and lies that lurk in the data-smog of our near-future.
SVK – A comic from Warren Ellis, Matt “D’Israeli” Brooker & BERG, hier ein Preview auf Flickr (via Boing Boing)
Bookmarks for Juni 24th
- Vinyl Has Become Too Mainstream So Hipsters Now Making Records On Chocolate | Badass Digest:
- Plot Device on Vimeo: A young filmmaker obtains a mysterious device that unleashes the full force of cinema on his front lawn.
- The math of the Rubik’s cube – MIT News Office: New research establishes the relationship between the number of squares in a Rubik’s-cube-type puzzle and the maximum number of moves required to solve it.
- nathaniel mellors at venice art biennale 2011: british-born, amsterdam-based artist nathaniel mellors displays 'hippy dialectics (ourhouse)' in 'illuminations,' the international exhibition curated by bice curiger at the venice art biennale 2011. a double-headed animatronic sculpture, the work delivers a short schizophrenic dialogue which is both humorous and disturbing. the parenthetical 'ourhouse' in the title refers to a video work by mellors, a surrealist sitcom about an eccentric family featuring two central figures, ‘daddy’ and ‘the object.’ 'hippy dialectics' features two versions of the 'daddy' character – one blue, one yellow – connected by a ribbon of hair. cast from the face of the actor in the film, the latex heads are brought to life by means of electronics and software. they deliver a looped kind of pep talk, including a range of compliments ('god, you're looking buff. no seriously, you look great!' and 'cool, you are cool!') before reaching an absurdist conclusion of rebutting 'yes' with 'no'.
- 555 Chip Footstool:
- The Shocking True Tale Of The Mad Genius Who Invented Sea-Monkeys | The Awl: As anyone sold by the Sea-Monkey ads could tell you, it was hard to say exactly where von Braunhut was walking on the terrain between truth, embellishment and con. That was his gift. He convinced us to look at the jazz hands and lose sight of the footwork. Von Braunhut’s inventions were not quite what they seemed to be. Neither was he.
- Robots of Brixton on Vimeo: „The film follows the trials and tribulations of young robots surviving at the sharp end of inner city life, living the predictable existence of a populous hemmed in by poverty, disillusionment and mass unemployment. When the Police invade the one space which the robots can call their own, the fierce and strained relationship between the two sides explodes into an outbreak of violence echoing that of 1981.“
- 3-D ‘Motion Pictures’ From The Civil War : The Picture Show : NPR: „Here are some animated stereoviews from the Smithsonian's Photographic History Collection to show the images in 3-D by flickering the right and left sides of the views.“
- Minecraft Katamari Damacy-Mod: „“
- Poetry Shopdropping: „“
- LightScythe – The Mechatronics Guy: „The LightScythe is a device for writing text and images frozen in midair. The hardware information and software is open source and anyone can make it.“
- Bullet time Tesla Coil: „“
- Paramount Cease and Desist Targets 3D Printer ‘Pirate’ | TorrentFreak: „“
- 10 cameras + 1 Tesla coil = 70 megapixel bullet time lightning: „“
- A Journey Through The 1955 Disneyland Guidebook | Disney by Mark: „“
- In violent video games, teens face (and fight) their demons: „Sixteen-year-old Evan Jones played his first violent videogames when he was 3. He slew demons in Diablo II, blasted Lovecraftian horrors in Quake and shot terrorists in Counter-Strike. If you buy conventional wisdom, by now Jones should be a tightly wound coil of aggression, ready to attack someone at the slightest provocation. Instead, he’s a pretty laid-back kid.“
- Inside Google+ — How the Search Giant Plans to Go Social | Epicenter | Wired.com: „“
- Time-lapse Spider in space: „Esmeralda the spider isn't wasting away from homesickness in space, in fact she's doubled in size. She's one of two golden silk orb-weaver spiders (Nephila clavipes) that was recently sent to the International Space Station (ISS) on NASA's last shuttle mission to space, as part of a national education project in the US. One of the experiments, designed by Stefanie Countryman and her team at BioServe Space Technologies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, involves comparing spider behaviour in space and on Earth. Students in elementary and middle schools across the country are watching videos like this one of the spiders spinning webs in near-weighlessness and looking for differences from the same set-up in their classrooms.“
- Tiny Steve Jobs Still Makes More Money than You Do – Technabob: „1/6 scale Steve Jobs Limited Edition 12-inch Collectible Figurine which will include a 1/6 scale Steve Jobs head sculpt and 12-inch figure body plus 1/6 Scale items such as the iMac, Magic Mouse, keyboard, iPhone 4, iPad 2, Desk, Chair, Steve's outfit (New balance 992 sneakers, black T-shirt and jeans).“
- The Archiver on Vimeo: „“
- Splitscreen: A Love Story on Vimeo: „“
- Göbekli Tepe – The Birth of Religion: „We used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.“
- BBC’s The Romantics: The Birth of the Individual in Modern Society | Brain Pickings: „What The French Revolution has to do with the love of nature and the birth of the modern individual.“
- Inside Commodore DOS: „Inside Commodore DOS : the complete guide to the 1541 disk operating system.“
- YouTube – Solarnauts (Part 1 of 3): „An unsold pilot for a proposed 1967 sci-fi actioner out of the UK. Eye-popping costumes and sets belie an overall cheesy but charming tone. Cast of familiar but un-nameable Brit character actors, only Bond-Girl Martine Beswick stands out. Beware of LOGIK! You have been warned…“
- The Vintage Drink: „“
- History Cookbook – Cookit!: „Do you know what the Vikings ate for dinner? What a typical meal of a wealthy family in Roman Britain consisted of, or what food was like in a Victorian Workhouse? Why not drop into history cookbook and find out? This project looks at the food of the past and how this influenced the health of the people living in each time period.“
- Afghanistan’s Amazing DIY Internet | Fast Company: „FabFi is an ambitious project which is creating Internet networks for eastern Afghanistan whose main components can be built out of trash. It's low-tech, it's simple–and it works.“
- OpenWatch | Demand Marvelous Secrets: „OpenWatch, a global participatory counter-surveillance project which uses cellular phones as a way of monitoring authority figures.“
Graffiti Research Lab Germany builds a Light Rider
Das deutsche Graffiti Research Lab baut einen Light Rider, ein Fahrrad (ausgestattet mit Projektor, Laptop, Kamera und Sound Anlage), mit dem man großformatige, digitale Tags und Pieces an Häuserwände werfen kann. Dafür brauchen sie noch Unterstützung für einen brauchbaren Projektor und die suchen sie jetzt per Crowdfunding auf Startnext. Ich habe grade nen Fuffi dafür lockergemacht.
Der Tradition unserer Schwester-Gruppen in New York, Wien und Montreal folgend baut GRL Germany eine mobile Projetionseinheit: Ein dreirädriges Lastenrad mit der Ladefläche vorne, ausgestattet mit Batterie, Wandler, Projektor, Laptop, Kamera und Sound Anlage. Sie soll uns ermöglichen Guerilla-Projektionen mit virtuellem Graffiti zu veranstalten – unabhängig von der lokalen Stromversorgung, für mehrere Stunden autark und soweit uns der LIGHT RIDER trägt.
Bisher haben wir genug Unterstützung gefunden um das Fahrrad und die Komponenten für die Stromversorgung anzuschaffen. Jetzt hoffen wir auf die StartNext Community um uns den Projektor leisten zu können, der uns noch fehlt um uns logistisch unabhängig und den Aufbau vollständig zu machen. Sobald der LIGHT RIDER vollständig ist soll sie auch anderen Gruppen für Kundgebungen, als mobiles Kino oder für andere nicht-kommerzielle Zwecke zur Verfügung stehen.
Hier die Seite auf Startnext.de, hier die Website vom Graffiti Research Lab Germany
Living Laser made from human Kidney-Cells and Jellyfish
Noch sind wir von einem Real Life-Cyclops, der Laser aus seinen Augen ballern kann, ein gutes Stück entfernt… aber Wissenschaftler haben eine menschliche Nierenzelle genetisch so modifiziert, dass sie ein fluoreszierendes Protein produziert, dessen Licht wiederum gebündelt werden kann.
They injected a human kidney cell with a loop of DNA that codes for an enhanced form of green fluorescent protein. Originally isolated from jellyfish, GFP glows green when exposed to blue light and has been invaluable as a biological beacon, tracking the path of molecules inside cells and lighting up when certain genes are expressed.
After placing the cell between two mirrors, the researchers bombarded it with pulses of blue light until it began to glow. As the green light bounced between the mirrors, certain wavelengths were preferentially amplified until they burst through the semi-transparent mirrors as laser light. Even after a few minutes of lasing, the cell was still alive and well.
First ‘living’ laser made from kidney cell, auf PhysOrg: Single Green Fluorescent Protein-expressing cell is basis of living laser device
