I like art but like most people in northern Colorado this time of year the wind sort of annoys me.  When I saw was David Bynoe had done to make a mechanical version of a wheat field blowing in the wind I thought “now that is wind I can live with!” 

Here is what he says about his work: "This is a kinetic sculpture I built to look like a field of wheat blowing in the wind. It consists of 40 wooden poles, each about 6' high that are hooked up via a series of ropes to a pair of large motorized cams. Each cam turns at a slightly different speed, and the movement of each is mixed so that it will take about 14 minutes for the machine to repeat its pattern. The show is happening at Truck Gallery in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, it opens on June 3rd, and runs till the 30th."

See more of his work on his website, David Bynoe… works in progress.

My mom send me a link to this video.  Very cool footage of a creek in Yosemite that looks like the output of a giant slurpee machine!  It’s ice and water that flows like lava. 

Bonus feature is the “snow cone” that forms at the bottom of one of the water falls as water freezes on the way down.

Lexar has a video posted on their YouTube channel that details how they make their memory chips.  It is interesting to see which parts of the process are automated and which aren’t!

They have some other videos on their YouTube channel including one with “real life” vibration testing.  Worth a visit for sure!

Lexar Media Inc YouTube Channel

It’s one thing to get a picture of the International Space Station… quite another to get a picture while it’s passing in front of the moon or sun!

I got this picture from Discover Magazine who did a whole article about how the photograph was taken.  Check it out!

Discover - Bad Astronomy: Insanely Awesome Solar Eclipse Picture

There is also another article with a shot of the ISS passing in front of the moon.

Discover - Bad Astronomy: When Natural and Artificial Moons Align

I love data visualization stuff and this video is a very cool way of looking at a LOT of data. 

I noticed a couple of things about this presentation that skewed the data a little bit.  Did you notice that the Y axis doesn’t start at zero?  Did you notice that the X axis is logarithmic while the Y axis is linear? The overall effect is to make wealth appear to have a greater impact on lifespan than it does. 

In spite of the skewing of the data, it’s still a very cool visualization!

In the software world we like to “demo” new features whenever we write them.  Sometimes we do live demonstrations, other times we record them and post the videos for end users to see. 

Back in 1968 (before I was born just do you know) they not only had computers and software but they actually did demos.  Here are some videos of one of the coolest demos of all time, Doug Engelbart’s “Mother of all Demos”. 

At the link above you can see several videos, including one of the first computer mousewhich Engelbart invented. In the video he actually apologizes for calling it a mouse.  He can’t remember why they started calling it that but to this day we still call it a mouse!

Towards the end of this video clip you can see the chorded keypad that he also invented.  It never took off like the mouse, partly because you really need to understand binary numbers in order to use it effectively!

Also you can see a video of real-time collaboration (Google Wave wasn’t exactly a new concept.)

Pretty amazing stuff considering it was 1968!

If you are a geek then XKCD is old news to you.  This is one of the feeds that comes into my Google Reader every day. 

Here is an example of the kind of awesome geek humor that you can find at XKCD.

This morning I came across an awesome site for Robotics.  Festo is a company that focuses on industrial automation and they do a lot of research through their Bionic Learning Network. 

Below is a video they put together a few years ago…. super cool stuff!

They also have a  CyberKitevideo on their website that is worth checking out.

Their website (link above) has a lot of videos posted and a search of "Festo Bionic Learning Network"on YouTube will bring up lots of other time wasting educational videos.

I love wasting time using the internet to learn new things.  Google Demo Slam is a series of videos of users finding creative ways to demo Google’s products.  Each week there are two new videos and we get to vote for which one we think is best.

This week for instance there was a demo of Google Goggles, an application for Android that identifies things in pictures you take.  These guys decided to make themselves into Mount Rushmore and see if Google Goggles would take the bait. 

(Click on the picture to check out the YouTube of their escapade!)

So if you get bored at work need a creative break check out Google Demo Slam

Did your mom ever yell at you for looking directly at the sun?  Turns out that long before Galileo figured out how to use a telescope to project sunlight onto paper people were viewing sunspots with their naked eyes.  History records that some observations of sunspots go back before the time of Christ even!

This week I came across some interesting graphs in a book by Edward Tufte.  They showed some recorded history of sunspots showing their intensity and number vary on a roughly 10 year cycle. 

Turns out that tonight and tomorrow we are going to get blasted with a wall of ionized atoms that erupted from the Sun’s surface on Sunday.  Apparently the ten year cycle is starting over and the sun is waking up to become more active for a while!

Here’s a story about the solar storm from Fox News

Solar Tsunami

Click on this cool image of the sun to see a slideshow with more great pics!