MikMikEternity gives us this wonderful custom Groot minifigure. The detail and sculpting are impressive. He says he sculpted the additional pieces and painted by hand. I love the weathered, wooden look and the subtle greenery all over Groot. There is so much character.
We’re still not too sure if the Amazon Dash button is a brilliant marketing and advertising ploy, or is just downright stupid. But what we do know, is for $5, it’s a lot of hackable tech that could be used for more… useful purposes. The big A sells these dash buttons for one purpose — you push the button and whichever product is assigned to it shows up on your doorstep in a few days. [Ted Benson] wanted them to do more than that so he turned a few dash buttons into a way of tracking his baby’s health!
Apparently, data acquisition of your baby’s wake-up times and poops is useful to identify health patterns. [Ted] tried using some phone apps to keep track of this stuff, but found it would be a lot easier if there was just a big button on the wall or something… which is where he got the idea to make use of the Amazon Dash button.
It’s actually really simple to do. Buy the dash button, do the setup with Amazon… but don’t do the final step: selecting the product you want to order. If you don’t select anything, you won’t order anything…
The beauty of the dash button is that it’s designed to save power, which means it only turns itself on when you press the button.
Every time it boots up it has to reconnect to your WiFi network. This is a terribly simple thing to track and record using a simple Python script.
Record the MAC address of each dash button, and all you have to do is sniff the WiFi network for the ARP probe that gets sent out by the button! It’s so simple, you can pretty much copy and paste the code from [Ted’s] blog and do it yourself. Think this isn’t useful to you? Human fingers aren’t the only way to push buttons — rig this up mechanically or electrically and you can easily record recurring events.
And for more information about the tech inside the Dash button? Check out our Dash button tear down coverage.
grand elder cats who come out of hiding and meet only when the most dire circumstances demand it
brian eno - windows 95 start up
The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, “Here’s a specific problem – solve it.”
The thing from the agency said, “We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said “and it must be 3 ¼ seconds long.”
I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel.
In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.
The audacity of hiring Brian Eno to make your UI sound pack is just inspiring. Everyone talks about their computer product changing the world, but this is the act of someone who really believes it, like the Marcel Duchamp of IT.
okay google help me out
okay but is that really the coolest of wait a fucking second
hell fuckin yeah
at last, political campaigning has achieved its purist form: meme fights
the founding fathers are all high-fiving each other right now, in hell
holy god is this real
edit: jesus christ it is
Continuing the subject of art and projection, here is a very brief talk from Ali Momeni who is putting together a book to inspire lo-fi creative projects using light:
Creative Capital have put together a small interview with the artist:
Alex: A Manual for Urban Projection is the first book to come out of this project. Who is it meant for? What do you hope will come out of its publication?
Ali: We wrote A Manual for Urban Projection for a broad range of people. It’s made to be readable in 1-hour, easily photocopiable, and it’s highly pictorial. We think it’ll be useful for artists, activists, community organizers or citizens at large who see potential in sharing images and ideas in public spaces. We really believe that the medium of urban projection is approachable to many more people outside of large-scale spectacle producers and advertisement companies, and the manual is an attempt to open those doorways.
You can read the interview at Creative Capital here
One of the great tragedies of the Second World War has been remembered with Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul G Allen recovering the bell from the British battlecruiser HMS Hood, which was sunk in battle 74 years ago by Hitler’s flagship Bismarck. The brass ship's bell was recovered from a mile and a half (2.4 km) down in the Denmark Straits by a remote operated submersible (ROV) controlled from Allen's private yacht M/Y Octopus.
.. Continue Reading Paul Allen recovers bell from HMS Hood
The El Portal Fire burns on a hillside in the Stanislaus National Forest and Yosemite National Park on Sunday evening July 27, 2014. The community of El Portal was under a mandatory evacuation. By Tuesday the blaze had burned nearly 3,000 acres. Long exposure image.
The Etiwanda Fire burns shortly after dusk on April 30, 2014 in Rancho Cucamonga, CA. Long exposure image.
The news of deadly wildfires ravaging California has been as awe-inspiring as it is terrifying. Great swaths of forests, mountains, fields, and entire neighborhoods can be incinerated in moments leaving nothing unscathed. For the last few years, Los Angeles-based photographer Stuart Palley has been shooting these fires as they rage across Southern California as part of a series he calls Terra Flamma.
More than just capturing flames or firefighters, Palley focuses instead on the entire landscape surrounding each event. By utilizing long exposure techniques he incorporates trails of sparks, the lights of firefighting aircraft, and even the stars above to create images that speak more to the strange beauty of wildfires than simple editorial documentation.
Though Palley often jumps at the opportunity to photograph a fire at a moment’s notice, he’s also well prepared. He takes a number of precautions including completion of the US Forestry Service’s “Introduction to Wildland Fire Behavior” to better ensure his safety.
You can follow more of Palley’s work on Instagram. (via PetaPixel)
The French Fire burns overnight in the Sierra National Forest near the town of North Fork, CA on August 1st, 2014. The blaze was burning in steep, rugged, and remote terrain.
The Way Fire burns on August 19, 2014 in the Sierra National Forest near Kernville, CA overnight. Long exposure image.
The Meadow Fire burns overnight near Half Dome in Yosemite National Park early Monday September 8, 2014. As of Wednesday the fire had burned over 4,500 acres and was 10% contained. Long exposure image.
The Shirley Fire burns at night off of Old State Rd near Lake Isabella, CA while a helicopter circles overhead and crews work on a slopover. Long exposure image.
The Lake Fire burns in the San Bernardino National Forest Thursday June 18, 2015. By evening the fire burned over 10,000 acres and was 5% contained. The Lake Fire burns along its northern flank at night in the San Bernardino National Forest Late Thursday night.
The Lake Fire burns in the San Bernardino National Forest Thursday June 18, 2015. By evening the fire burned over 10,000 acres and was 5% contained. The Lake Fire burns along its northern flank at night in the San Bernardino National Forest Late Thursday night.
The Lake Fire burns in the San Bernardino National Forest Thursday June 18, 2015. By evening the fire burned over 10,000 acres and was 5% contained. The Lake Fire burns along its northern flank at night in the San Bernardino National Forest Late Thursday night.
The Lake Fire burns in the San Bernardino National Forest Friday June 19, 2015. By evening the fire burned over 13,000 acres and was 10% contained.
The Lake Fire burns in the San Bernardino National Forest Friday June 19, 2015. By evening the fire burned over 13,000 acres and was 10% contained.
Bunker.jordanI chuckled at this. That box might fit *one* of my bags-o'-resistors (only one value). Estate sales FTW!
Check out this handy system for storing resistors! Tutorial via mxx on instructables.
Storing resistors in envelopes or small plastic bags is an obvious way of storing them in a way that makes them easily retrievable. I followed the same route, but in a way I think has some extra benefits: It’s very easy to find a specific resistor and retrieve it without getting bags/envelopes mixed up or lost.
Each Tuesday is EducationTuesday here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts about educators and all things STEM. Adafruit supports our educators and loves to spread the good word about educational STEM innovations!
Bunker.jordanDoes this count as a "robot?" Seems like a machine controlled by a WALDO to me... Unless it's doing some amount of computation and action itself.
Robotics research is moving along at such a fast pace that it can be difficult to spot the major milestones of innovation in the technology as they go by. One significant step forward is in evidence at MIT in the form of Hermes. Physically it's all robot, but its actions and reflexes are controlled by a human being.
.. Continue Reading MIT's Hermes remote-controlled robot has human-like reflexesBunker.jordanbirbs
When in school, artist and penman Jake Weidmann watched as his classmates typed their notes in laptops. Weidmann instead took the old-fashioned approach and wrote everything longhand with pen and paper, using every opportunity to practice and perfect his exquisite penmanship. The hard work quickly paid off he’s now one of only a dozen people designated as a master penman—not to mention the youngest by three decades.
This new video from Uproxx profiles Weidman has he talks a bit about his process and shows off some of his delicate pencraft, much more of which you can see on his website where he also shares his paintings, drawings, and sculptural work. (via Sploid)
Bunker.jordanThis also makes me sad for humanity.
There will not be “two Moons” in the sky on August 27, 2015, despite what this circulating image claims. (Original credit unknown.)
No, no, no…a thousand times NO: Mars will not become a “second Moon” in the sky on August 27. It won’t this year, it didn’t last year, and it didn’t in the past dozen years since this silly yet strangely perennial cyber-legend (yes I just used the prefix “cyber”) first started circulating on teh interwebz. I don’t know why it keeps rising from the e-dead every year, some years more omnipresently than others, but the bottom line is it simply won’t happen. Not this time, not ever… the Solar System just doesn’t work that way. (And good thing too!)
“But wait,” you say, “couldn’t it happen? Maybe? One day? A what-if scenario?” Again, no. Mars is happily orbiting the Sun, just like Earth and all of the other stuff in the Solar System is according to Newton and Kepler’s lovely laws of gravitation and planetary motion, and it’s not going to come suddenly drifting our way for a visit just for fun. And I’m no physicist but I’d guess that any sort of hypothetical collision event powerful enough to rock a planet from its orbit would more likely shatter Mars apart entirely into a mess of molten rubble, sending chunks our way to create a global meteor shower and forming a temporary new ring of asteroids around the Sun. (But calm down – that’s not going to happen either.)
Not only will Mars not be anywhere near Earth or the Moon as of August 27, it will actually be quite far off: 2.523 AU, or about 234.5 million miles away, and almost on the opposite side of the Sun. In fact the closest Mars ever gets to Earth is about 35 million miles, which is still much, much too far away for a planet half the size of Earth to appear as large as the Moon (which is about 1/4 the size of our planet) in the sky.
What Mars and the Moon really look like next to each other (Credit: David Dickinson, Universe Today)
In fact during an opposition event (when Earth and Mars reach their closest points in their respective orbits, which occurs every 2.13 years) on August 27, 2003, Mars came the closest to us in over 50,000 years – and still it was 34.8 million miles away. It was a nice viewing event for amateur astronomers, sure, but still very tiny in the sky compared to the Moon.
That was also when these “double Moon” rumors appear to have started, so perhaps we can just blame bad science reporting for the whole mess.
But the real problem here isn’t necessarily the (very) wrong information, it’s that people otherwise unfamiliar with astronomy who may think this is a special event that they’ll be able to witness for themselves in the night sky end up getting disappointed… which is the opposite of what astronomy should instill in folks.
Said Phil Plait on bis Bad Astronomy blog on Slate.com in 2013:
“We have enough woe and misfortune in the world as it is. Astronomy, the beauty of the sky, and the natural awe laid out before us are instead a source of wonder and joy. I’d prefer to keep them that way.”
So tell your friends, tell your mom, tell your crazy uncle who swears the “S” in NASA stands for “secret alien bases”… two Moons: it’s not gonna happen. But that shouldn’t prevent them from enjoying the beauty of a summer’s evening sky and the one beautiful Moon we do have (it will be nearly full this August 27, too.)
Want to read more? Check out some of the articles below (by some very good science reporters!)
The Cyber-Myth That Just Won’t Die by David Dickinson
No Double Moon in 2015, or Ever by Deborah Byrd
No, Mars Won’t Be As Big As The Moon. Ever. by Phil Plait
Bunker.jordanThis makes me sad for humanity.
Curiosity Mastcam image from Mars taken on Aug. 5, 2014. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS. Edit by J. Major.)
I’m in a debunking mood today, probably brought on by the seasonal “double Moon hoax” that raises its oh-so-wrong head every August. (Read more on that nonsense here.) So here’s one more thing to say “NO” to: giant alien cave crabs on Mars.
Apparently there’d been some buzz recently in the “space woo” circles online over an image acquired by NASA’s Curiosity rover showing an exposed rock outcrop on Mars. In the image, tucked into a corner between a couple of larger rocks, is an oddly-shaped… thing… that some of the more “open-minded” (sarcasm intended) viewers have claimed is an alien organism, not unlike some that have made appearances in various sci-fi films over the years.
I’ve included the original Mastcam image above with the object in question outlined and “enhanced” on the left. Is this indisputable evidence of tentacled cave dwellers on the Red Planet? Hardly.
Let’s keep in mind that the image is a compressed JPEG (you can see the original for yourself here) and as such there are pixel artifacts all over the place. Fine detail is difficult to discern at the distance that the image was acquired, and the compression doesn’t help.
Also, the image was captured on mission Sol 710. That was, August 5, 2014 – over a year ago! Curiosity has long since moved on from this area near the dangerously soft sands of “Hidden Valley”…wouldn’t you think that if a crab-like critter was spotted they’d have hung around for a closer look? For crying out loud, if a slab of suspected hydrologic mineral is found beneath the rover’s tires they’ll dedicate a month or two to checking it out!
And this was around the same time that ESA’s Rosetta mission was arriving at comet 67P – if NASA’s own robot was spotting tentacle-waving aliens on Mars I suspect someone at HQ would want to throw that out to the wires.
Remember the gorilla on Mars? Needless to say it wasn’t a gorilla on Mars.
So no, our first discovery of extraterrestrial life probably isn’t going to come from some fringy internet forum where members with black-almond-eyed avatars squawk about secret alien autopsies, suspected Nibiru sightings, and ancient lunar pyramids.
So what IS that thing? (And yes, I see it too.) It’s most likely just another dust-coated rock formation in Gale Crater, carved by wind over many tens or hundreds of thousands of years into something that looks a bit strange – especially when compressed into image data that’s shot 150 million miles through space. (Give or take a few million.) It’s not an alien – it’s pareidolia, and it’s what we get when our lazy eyes and lizard-brains conspire to make quick sense of something unfamiliar.
Like SETI scientist Seth Shostak told Huffington Post editor Ed Mazza in an email regarding this very thing:
“Recognizing a crab in a landscape filled with wind-weathered rocks is no more surprising – nor more significant – than seeing a winking face in a semi-colon followed by a parenthesis. ;) ” Read more here.
Also check out a heavily tongue-in-cheeked article on this over on io9.com and another more sensible one on CNET here.
*Can I say I know 100% without-a-doubt that this isn’t a picture of a Martian cave monster? No, of course not. But the likelihood that it’s a rock or other geologic formation is much, much higher than that that it’s a living, breathing, macroscopic organism currently eking out a living on the surface of Mars, one of our robots caught it on camera, and no scientist or team member bothered to even mention it.
ADDITION 8/8/15: And this isn’t a picture of a woman on Mars either. (Yes, that’s also become a thing. Come on now.)
This is a stretch even for pareidolia: an outcrop in a Mastcam image from Sol 1001 is claimed to look like a woman. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
Earth was seen from the Moon for the first time by Lunar Orbiter I on August 23, 1966. (NASA/LPI/USGS)
A test version of the 2-meter-long, 390-kg Lunar Orbiter spacecraft. (Eric Long, National Air & Space Museum)
On August 10, 1966, NASA’s Lunar Orbiter I launched from Cape Canaveral aboard an Atlas-Agena D rocket, the flagship spacecraft of a program designed to map the Moon and investigate intended landing sites for the planned Apollo landings, including helping determine the risks from micrometeorite and radiation exposure. Over the course of the next twelve months and five successful missions the Lunar Orbiter program photographed 99% of the Moon’s surface, both nearside and far, to a resolution as fine as 1 meter – which at the time was ten times better than what could be achieved from Earth.
Lunar Orbiter I was also responsible for sending back our first views of Earth from lunar orbit, one of which can be seen above.
Learn more about Lunar Orbiter here, and see original images from the Lunar Orbiter program here. Also, check out a cool old Apollo-era film about the Lunar Orbiter and Apollo prep missions below:
Recently a group of researchers and engineers set themselves to the seemingly Sisyphean task of recovering and remastering the image data collected by NASA’s pre-Apollo lunar missions, much of which was archived in now-antiquated analog tape formats. See the results of their work on the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) site here and here.
Bunker.jordanso cool! pic doesn't show on here, but check it out anyway.
