May 9, 2011
Buckyballs are a magnetic toy launched at the New York International Gift Fair in 2009 and sold in the hundreds of thousands before the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a recall. In several cases, children swallowed them, and injured their intestines, resulting in at least one death. As a result, regulatory agencies banned them, and the magnets are no longer marketed as toys. This led to a debate over the risks of toys and parental responsibility.
In 2009, a number of US companies decided to repackage sphere magnets and sell them as toys. Despite existing toy regulations at the time, Maxfield & Oberton, maker of Buckyballs, told the ‘New York Times’ that he saw the product on YouTube and repackaged them as Buckyballs. After the recall all mentions of ‘toy’ were changed to ‘desk toy,’ positioning the product as a stress-reliever for adults and restricted sales from stores that sold primarily children’s products. Continue reading →
Posted in Games, Science |
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May 9, 2011
Drop City was an artists’ community that formed in southern Colorado in 1965. Abandoned by the early 1970s, it became known as the first rural ‘hippie commune.’
In 1965, the four original founders, art students and filmmakers from the University of Kansas and University of Colorado, bought a 7-acre tract of land in south eastern Colorado. Their intention was to create a live-in work of what they called ‘Drop Art’ (sometimes called ‘droppings’), which was informed by the ‘happenings’ of Allan Kaprow and the impromptu performances, a few years earlier, of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Buckminster Fuller, at Black Mountain College. Continue reading →
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May 9, 2011
Buckminster Fuller (1895 – 1983) was an American engineer and author. He popularized terms such as ‘Spaceship Earth,’ ephemeralization, and synergetics. He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, the best known of which is the geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their resemblance to geodesic spheres.
As a child he had trouble with geometry, being unable to understand the abstraction necessary to imagine that a chalk dot on the blackboard represented a mathematical point, or that an imperfectly drawn line with an arrow on the end was meant to stretch off to infinity. He often made items from materials he brought home from the woods, and sometimes made his own tools. Continue reading →
Posted in Philosophy, Technology |
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May 9, 2011
Buckypaper is a thin sheet made from an aggregate of carbon nanotubes. The nanotubes are approximately 50,000 times thinner than a human hair. Originally, it was fabricated as a way to handle carbon nanotubes, but it is also being studied and developed into applications by several research groups, showing promise in vehicle and personal armor and next-generation electronics and displays. It owes its name to the buckminsterfullerene, the 60 carbon fullerene (an allotrope of carbon with similar bonding that is sometimes referred to as a Buckyball in honor of American engineer, Buckminster Fuller.
Buckypaper is one tenth the weight yet potentially 500 times stronger than steel when its sheets are stacked to form a composite. It could disperse heat like brass or steel and it could conduct electricity like copper or silicon.
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May 9, 2011
Discovered in 1965, buckyballs (formally known as buckminsterfullerenes) are hollow spheres made of carbon atoms named after American engineer, Buckminster Fuller (1895 – 1983), who popularized geodesic dome buildings. Buckyballs and nanotubes are an allotrope (structural configuration) of carbon called fullerenes, also after Fuller.
The discovery of fullerenes greatly expanded the number of known carbon allotropes, which until recently were limited to graphite, diamond, and amorphous carbon such as soot and charcoal. Buckyballs and buckytubes have been the subject of intense research, both for their unique chemistry and for their technological applications, especially in materials science, electronics, and nanotechnology.
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May 8, 2011
Graphene is an allotrope (structural configuration) of carbon atoms, in the form of one-atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms that are densely packed in a honeycomb lattice. Graphene is most easily visualized as an atomic-scale chicken wire made of carbon atoms and their bonds.
The crystalline or ‘flake’ form of graphite consists of many graphene sheets stacked together. Graphene is the basic structural element of some carbon allotropes including graphite, charcoal, carbon nanotubes and fullerenes.
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May 8, 2011
A kabuto is a helmet used with traditional Japanese armor as worn by samurai. Upon the return of general peace in the Edo Period, armor became more elaborate and ceremonial. A typical kabuto features a strong bowl, the hachi, which protects the crown of the head, a suspended series of articulated plates shikoro to protect the neck, and a crest or maedate.
The kabuto, along with the German Stahlhelm, was the inspiration for the helmet of Darth Vader in the Star Wars films.
Posted in War, World |
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May 8, 2011
Super Meat Boy is a platform game developed by Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, and is the successor to ‘Meat Boy,’ originally released in 2008. Super Meat Boy was released in 2010. The game follows Meat Boy as he attempts to rescue his girlfriend Bandage Girl from the villainous Dr. Fetus through over 300 levels filled with deadly hazards. It has won acclaim for its extremely high difficulty.
Players must guide Meat Boy to the end of each level while avoiding buzzsaws, salt, and various other fatal obstacles. The player can jump and run, and can stick to walls in order to either jump off of them or to slide down them. The player has an unlimited number of attempts to complete each level; if Meat Boy is killed he immediately restarts the level, though the red blood left behind on surfaces that the player has touched remains.
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May 6, 2011
Thom Yorke (b. 1968) is an English musician who is the lead vocalist and principal songwriter of the alternative rock band Radiohead. He mainly plays guitar and piano, but he has also played drums and bass guitar (notably during the Kid A and Amnesiac sessions). In July 2006, he released his debut solo album, The Eraser.
At birth, his left eye was fixed shut; he underwent five eye operations before he was six years old. He has stated that the last surgery was ‘botched,’ leaving him with a drooping eyelid. Continue reading →
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May 6, 2011
Chromotherapy, sometimes called color therapy, is an pseudoscientific alternative medicine practice. It is claimed that a therapist trained in chromotherapy can use color and light to balance ‘energy’ wherever a person’s body be lacking, be it physical, emotional, spiritual, or mental.
Color therapy is unrelated to light therapy, a valid and proven form of medical treatment for seasonal affective disorder and a small number of other conditions. Continue reading →
Posted in Health, Humor |
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May 5, 2011
The boiling frog story is a widespread anecdote describing a frog slowly being boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. It is a metaphor for the inability of people to react to significant changes that occur gradually. However, the premise of the story is not literally true; an actual frog submerged and gradually heated will jump out. (Similarly, the metaphor of an ostrich with its head buried in the sand is also not base in fact.)
The moral of the story is that people should make themselves aware of gradual change lest they suffer eventual undesirable consequences. At times it is told in support of a slippery slope argument. It is also used in business to illustrate the idea that change needs to be gradual to be accepted. It was used in 1960 to describe the dangers of sympathy towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War; in 1980 about the impending collapse of civilization anticipated by survivalists; and in the 1990s about inaction in response to climate change and staying in abusive relationships. It has also been used by libertarians to warn about slow erosion of civil rights. In philosophy the boiling frog story has been used as a way of explaining the ‘sorites paradox’: if you remove grains one at a time from a heap of sand, at what point does it cease to be a ‘heap.’
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May 5, 2011
Unobtrusive research is a method of data collection used primarily in the social sciences first described in 1966, which do not involve direct elicitation of data from the research subjects. Unobtrusive measures are contrasted with interviews and questionnaires, in that they try to find indirect ways to obtain the necessary data. The unobtrusive approach often seeks unusual data sources, such as garbage, graffiti and obituaries, as well as more conventional ones such as published statistics. Unobtrusive measures should not be perceived as an alternative to more reactive methods such as interviews, surveys and experiments, but rather as an additional tool in the tool chest of the social researcher. Unobtrusive measures can assist in tackling known biases such a subjective bias towards a result expected.
The proliferation of digital media opened a new era for communication researchers in search of unobtrusively obtained data sources. Online communication creates digital footprints that can allow an analysis of data that are obtained through unobtrusive methods, and are also much larger than previous studies. These footprints can now be used to analyze topics such as the content of communication events, the process of communication, and the structure of the communicative network. The surge of Internet-sourced research data rekindled the discussion of the ethical aspects of using unobtrusively obtained data. For example, can all data collected in the public domain be used for research purposes? When should we seek consent, and is it realistic to require informed consent from sources of unobtrusively collected data? These questions do not have a simple answer, and the solution is a result of a careful and ongoing dialog between researchers, and between researchers and society.
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