My friend Matt just published his book! A little light reading.
August 22, 2011
August 15, 2011
With a Whisper
The world’s first acoustic diode.
“The acoustic diode works much like the electrical component of the same name, letting current (or, in this case, sound waves) pass in one direction but blocking it in the other. Composed of a structured arrangement of elastic spheres that ferry the sound through the material, the diode can be tuned to work only at certain frequencies or to downshift the frequencies moving through the material to lower frequencies as needed….the tunable diode could scavenge energy from noisy machinery and channel it back into a transducer that converts those sound vibrations into electricity that could be fed back to the machine, reducing net energy consumption. It could also downshift sound frequencies to ranges that are optimal for energy conversion.”
July 6, 2011
Reboot
Juan Enriquez on the ultimate reboot. Starts with bad news, ends with good news. Great stuff.
June 16, 2011
June 13, 2011
June 8, 2011
Add One to the Menagerie
Cool, physicists might just have discovered a new fundamental particle.
June 3, 2011
June 1, 2011
Googolmess
“I have this vision of hoards of shadowy numbers lurking out there in the dark, beyond the small sphere of light cast by the candle of reason. They are whispering to each other; plotting who knows what. Perhaps they don’t like us very much for capturing their smaller brethren with our minds. Or perhaps they just live uniquely numberish lifestyles, out there beyond our ken.”
These are the biggest numbers in the universe
Go read it and have your mind blown.
May 18, 2011
May 17, 2011
May 15, 2011
May 3, 2011
April 28, 2011
April 26, 2011
Long Now
Scientific experiments that have lasted a century or more: “”
How about a clock that has been ticking, untouched, since 1864?
Heal
Brilliantly done. I actually found myself tearing up a bit at this (probably the music).
April 24, 2011
April 21, 2011
April 18, 2011
Surrender
Culling is easy; it implies a huge amount of control and mastery. Surrender, on the other hand, is a little sad. That’s the moment you realize you’re separated from so much. That’s your moment of understanding that you’ll miss most of the music and the dancing and the art and the books and the films that there have ever been and ever will be, and right now, there’s something being performed somewhere in the world that you’re not seeing that you would love.
Just beautiful. Read the whole thing.