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

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.

Ever wonder how Google works?  Here’s a graphic that walks you through some of the things that happen to make sure you find what you are looking for:

(Click on it to go to a bigger version of it that's easier to read!)

Remember the movie Armageddon where Bruce Willis and Ben Afleck save the world from a massive asteroid?  Who can forget Liv Tyler right?  :)

So apparently there is an asteroid that is headed towards earth that might cause some serious destruction.  Some estimates say that it could make a crater the size of say… London.  I haven’t been to London but it seems like that would be a pretty big impact!

Panic! Run! Hide! OK not really.  It won’t get here until 2182… if it does get here.  There’s a 1 in a 1000 chance of impact.

The name of the asteroid is 1999 RQ36. In all seriousness, NASA needs to hire some creative namers.  Look what the hurricane naming has done for the meteorological world!  People talk about Katrina and Andrew and everyone knows what they are talking about.  1999 RQ36?  Really? 

Anyway, I found a way cool simulator at NASA.  Takes a little bit of playing with to get the controls to work but you can fast forward to 2182 by changing the drop down to “1 year” then hitting play for a bit.  When you get to about 2180 pause it and switch it to “1 day” then hit play and let it go through to about September of 2182. 

Way cool stuff!

JPL Small-Body Database Browser

Robots are cool.  Robots that look like the AT-AT from Star Wars are even cooler!

The Ranger is a new robot built by people at Cornell and it recently broke a walking record… for robots anyway!

Read the story on MSNBC.  They say it looks like a toaster on legs but in a side by side comparison I think the AT-AT resemblance is definitely there!

What do you get when you take 4 geeks and 100,000 Lego Mindstorm parts and put them together in a room for a year?   A 156 square foot chess board with fully automated Lego pieces controlled by computer of course!

Monster Chess

(The Knights are ever animated!!! Check out the video for sure…)

The visual display of information is a very intriguing field to me.  I like to think I am an organized person (my fiance disagrees but we won’t go there!) so charts that organize a lot of information efficiently are cool.

Periodic tables are a very efficient method of organizing large amounts of information in a visual space. 

Here are a few periodic tables, starting with the most famous, the Periodic Table of Elements:

Periodic Table of Elements

Periodic Table of Typefaces

Periodic Table of Visualization Methods (ironic or just cool!?)

Here are a few less useful tables.

Periodic Table of Candy

Periodic Table of Elephants

and last but not least for my fiance:

Periodic Table of Wine

Then this guy on his Hot Chocolate Blog points out that you can spell “Chocolate” with the element symbols… in four different ways!

I  optional illusions! 

Professor Michael Bach might just have the coolest job in the world.  Check out his website which is cool because most of the illusions are interactive:

87 Optical Illusions

Some of my favorites:

Motion Induced Blindness

Bulging Checkerboard

Hidden Picture

Today must be MIT day… I keep coming across cool stuff from them!

These days everyone is familiar with barcodes but I remember as a kid being fascinated by these new things that could be read with lasers.  Recently I have been working on an application that is driven by reading barcodes and it’s been a lot of fun to work on.

MIT has an idea of what barcodes in the future might look like.  Rather than having to have special lasers to read the codes, they use ordinary cameras to read the “bokodes”. 

Read about their research here: Barcodes for the Rest of Us

or watch a demo here: Bokode Video