Three Wise Men

The story of the three wise men got me wondering: What if you did walk towards a star at a fixed speed?  What path would you trace on the Earth? Does it converge to a fixed cycle?

—N. Murdoch

If the wise men leave Jerusalem and walk toward the star Sirius, day and night, even when it’s below the horizon, this is the path they follow over the surface:

If we allow a little theological confusion and assume the wise men can walk on water, they’ll eventually wind up going in an endless circle, 30 kilometers in diameter, around the South Pole.

But let’s be a little more realistic; the wise men are hardly going to walk toward the star while it’s behind the Earth. Let’s assume that they only walk toward the star when it’s in the sky and the Sun has set.

In that case, their path actually takes them through Bethlehem:

If they don’t stop there, after a few years, they wind up orbiting Botswana:

These paths are calculated using, among other things, PyEphem, which provides tools for determining the historical positions of astronomical objects.

It’s tricky to figure out exactly what the wise men would have been following. There aren’t very many good astronomical candidates for the Star of Bethlehem (Chinese records don’t show a supernova at the right time, and none of the other obvious candidates check out) and, furthermore, there’s a lot of historical and theological debate over Jesus’s date of birth (“4 BC” seems to be the closest thing to a historical consensus date). These charts are all calculated for a somewhat arbitrary departure date from Jerusalem of December 25th, 1 AD; different departure days would lead to different paths, but the overall picture would be the same.

What if the wise men followed a planet?

Planets move against the background of stars, so the paths they produce are more complex. Here’s where the Wise Men would’ve gone if they followed Venus:

And here’s their path for Mars:

If the three wise men had a hovercar that could move at highway speed over land and water (it’s in the gnostic gospels somewhere) and decided to follow Venus, they’d take a particularly weird path:

At one point, they wind up near the North Pole in October. There, the Sun and Venus spend months near the horizon, rising and setting, nudging the Magi into a month-long spiral around the pole, a chaotic strange Magi attractor around the North Pole which some argue provides the theological foundation for the story of Santa Claus^{[citation needed]}.

Sadly, the three wise men probably weren’t following Venus. It’s one of the most familiar objects in the night sky, and as the late Sir Patrick Moore observed, if the wise men mistook it for a new star, they couldn’t have been very wise.

But maybe they’re wiser than Sir Patrick gives them credit for. After all, if you pick a random star in the sky, point at the horizon, and predict that there’s a baby about to be born in that direction, statistics—and birth rates—are on your side.

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We’ve seen quite a few mutations on the alarm clock app, the most recent being Uniqlo Wake Up, which chooses music tailored to the weather each day. Aiming to get people out of bed energetically, the Wake N Shake app forces users to shake their phone and encourages them to compete with friends.

Using smartphones’ built-in accelerometer, the app allows heavy sleepers to set the difficulty level of the shaking required to turn the alarm off. A red bar moves along the screen to show how much more shaking is required to shut it off. The developers recently redesigned the app to make it more social, introducing the ability to compete with friends – either by wake up time or difficulty of shaking – as well as obtain 50 personal achievements for things like using the app 20 days in a row or moving to a harder level. The following video shows the app in action:

Wake N Shake increases productivity by using energy and competition as motivations for getting out of bed in the morning. What other tasks could be set to stop people snoozing?

Website: www.wakenshakeapp.com
Contact: www.wakenshakeapp.com/contact

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The new Star Trek Into Darkness trailer offers more eye-gouging “Red Forest” chase chaos along with quick glimpses of Chris Pine’s Kirk hurtling through space in solo mode and take a flying leap off a futuristic skyscraper. Yikes! Expanding on ...

We’re not sure what it it is about Hanukkah that brings out the Star Trek fans, but they’re back. First, Joyce brings us an updated TNG hanukiah. Joyce was one of those responsible for the epic menorah we posted about in 2009. The LED on the Enterprise is being worked on–we think they may have a problem with their dilithium crystals.

Next, VanEdge posted this menorah in the forums. Both of these fine examples are based on Pez dispensers, which seem to be a handy size for holiday hacking, particularly when combined with our LED Menorah kit.

Happy Hanukkah to you both, and thank you for sharing your projects!

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A study has found a correlation between vitamin D3 serum levels and subsequent incidence of Type 1 diabetes. The six-year study of blood levels of nearly 2,000 individuals suggests a preventive role for vitamin D3 in this disease.

Throughout the course of this year, you likely added all sorts of new things to your digital life. You followed more people on Twitter, added some RSS subscriptions, let your inbox get out of control, and saved hundreds of articles into Instapaper. Now, your digital life is cluttered, and blogger Frank Chimero suggests you get rid of it all to start from scratch.

Our digital tools make it incredibly easy to add new things to them. You can send a page to Instapaper in a click, you can add new people to Twitter in a second, and adding apps to your homescreen takes two seconds. If this clutter is feeling a bit like a burden, it might be time to ditch it all. Chimero explains his "digital jubilee:"

The Jubilee offers a way out of oppressive expectations, even if they are our own. This year, I'm practicing a digital jubilee by archiving my inbox, deleting my RSS subscriptions, and unfollowing most everyone on Twitter. These, of course, will fill back up as time passes, but now I have a recurring way to purge.

I've done this before as well. Last year I trashed all my personal RSS subscriptions so I could start from scratch and find new things. Last weekend I cleaned out the 200 articles I had saved in Pocket, 195 of which I'd never read.

Everyone wants to stay caught up with the news, articles, and people you're interested in, but it's easy to get buried under your own tools. This is a way to clean them up, and rebuild them with your new interests. Obviously you may only need this with certain tools—or maybe none at all—but if you're buried under your own interests it's one of the ways to get yourself back on track.

Remember, in a lot of cases you can archive without deleting, which gets your digital junk out of your way without permanently destroying them. While you're at it, it's probably a good time to clean up all that media clutter too.

Digital Jubilee | Frank Chimero via Enough

Hey art geeks! Shawn Coss, who has done most of our recent shirt designs has a facebook page where he posts his (occasionally terrifying) art. Check it out!

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Add this to the list of terrifying robots we hope to never be chased by. Thankfully, Kenshiro here looks to be fairly slow from the video below. Still, this skeleton-and-muscle headless humanoid robot has secured a place in our nightmares for the foreseeable future, thanks in part to its lifelike movements. The 'bot, which is a followup to 2010's Kojiro model, stands about 5'1 and weighs around 110 pounds. It was developed by Yuto Nakanishi and a team of researchers at University of Tokyo, making its public debut at the recent Humanoids conference in Osaka. You can watch Kenshiro in action after the break.

Continue reading Kenshiro robot has muscle and bones, is ready to stretch its way into your nightmares

Filed under: Robots

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Via: IEEE Spectrum, Phys Org

Source: University of Tokyo

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We've often noted that willpower is a finite resource, but it seems that's only the case if you believe it. According to a few studies. More »

23andMe, a wonderful annual sponsor of the Quantified Self, has some exciting news to share with us. Check out this letter from 23andMe’s CEO Anne Wojcicki below!

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Today we’re announcing some big news. I don’t want this moment to go by without a note of gratitude to our customers and those who have been advocates for 23andMe over the years.

We have come a long way together.  Because of you we pioneered the use of personal genetics.  You are helping us establish a new medical era that is defined by wellness, disease prevention, and personalized care.  You also helped us create a novel research platform.  By leveraging online tools, social networking and crowd sourcing, and combining them with genetics, we created a platform that has set the stage to transform the way pharma companies and academics do health and wellness research.

We want to do more.

23andMe has raised more than $50 million in new financing with the goal of reaching one million customers.  To help us reach our goal, we are happy to announce today, that we are dropping our price to $99.

One million customers can be the tipping point that moves medicine into the molecular era.  Hundreds of you have written to us about how genetic information changed your lives and, in some cases, saved your lives.  We believe genetics should be an integral part of health care and we will work hard in the coming year to help genetics become part of everyone’s health and wellness.

A community of one million individuals will also benefit the world.  A genetic data resource of this magnitude has enormous potential to address unanswered questions related to the contributions of genes, the environment and your health.  Understanding these factors and their interactions could lead to major improvement in diagnostics, preventive medicine and therapeutics [Collins NATURE | VOL 429 | 27 MAY 2004].

This change is not just about a new price point for personal genetic testing. It is about an ambitious plan that could transform medicine for generations to come.

If you have questions about the new pricing please go to our FAQ or email your questions to customercare@23andMe.com.

When it comes to picking the best computer monitors on the market, features, value, and screen size all come into play. There are dozens of brands and models to pick from, and when it comes to displays, you often get what you pay for. Even so, when we asked you earlier last week to nominate the monitors you thought were the best, you offered up some great contenders. We counted your votes, and then looked at the five best computer monitors overall, and put them to a vote. Now we're back to highlight the winner.

Apple fans turned out the vote for their pick: The Apple Thunderbolt 27" Display took the top spot, but only barely with close to 32% of the votes cast. Its limited compatibility and high price didn't stop those of you who votes for it based on its panel quality and excellent colors.

In second place with close to 20% of the overall vote was the Dell UltraSharp U3011 30" Display, the most expensive in our lineup, but also the one with the most inputs and overall features. Third place was where the battle was really fought—the difference between third and fourth was a mere six votes. The Yamakasi Catleap and its Korean contemporaries took the third place slot with 17.22% of the vote. Admittedly, these were my favorites—the fact that you can get the same glass as the bigger names use in their displays for a fraction of the cost (even if you sacrifice support and inputs in the process) makes them a compelling buy. Just behind in fourth place with 17.13% of the vote was the Dell UltraSharp U2410 24" Display, a fantastic 24-inch panel that's very frequently on sale. Bringing up the rear in fifth with 14% of the votes cast was the ASUS PB278Q 27" Display, Asus's flagship 27 incher.

The Hive Five is based on reader nominations. As with most Hive Five posts, if your favorite was left out, it's not because we hate it—it's because it didn't get the nominations required in the call for contenders post to make the top five. We understand it's a bit of a popularity contest, but if you have a favorite, we want to hear about it. Have a suggestion for the Hive Five? Send us an email at tips+hivefive@lifehacker.com!

Freelancing is a tough business, and it's important to keep yourself flexible so you can meet your income goals. Creativity site 99U suggests that the best way to do that is to treat your freelancing just like a stock portfolio.

The idea here is that a financial portfolio is a great way to balance risk and reward, and it allows you to figure out how much you should invest in projects. 99U explains:

It helps you weigh how much time and energy to "invest" in projects, and change the mix depending on the work market and your income needs. It lets you decide how work fits into your plans, not the other way around.

You want to balance your Freelance Portfolio so it meets these three goals:

1. Have enough clients of the right kind: not too few and not more than you can handle, who pay well and/or can advance your career in some way.
2. Bring in enough steady income to reduce cash flow highs and lows.
3. Meet your total income goals.

To do so, 99U recommends you divide your freelance work into four different levels: blue chips (the core of your work), growth investments (extra projects), one-shots and long shots, and new ventures. It's an interesting approach to freelancing, and if you find yourself feeling a bit lost on how (or if) you should be expanding your work, 99U's article shows one way to do it.

Why You Should Treat Your Freelance Portfolio Like a Stock Portfolio | 99U

Photo by Beck Tench.

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