Venus & Mars Express

Venus Express has been making the most detailed study of the planet’s thick and complex atmosphere to date. The latest findings highlight the features that make Venus unique in the Solar System and provide fresh clues as to how the planet is - despite everything - a more Earth-like planetary neighbour than one could have imagined.


Venus: Earth’s twin planet?

ESA’s Venus Express has revealed Venus as never before. For the first time, scientists are able to investigate from the top of its atmosphere, down nearly to the surface. They have shown it to be a planet of surprises that may once have been more Earth-like, and still is, to a certain extent.



Mars Express

This HRSC image provides a perspective view of residual water ice on the floor of Vastitas Borealis Crater on Mars.











The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.

At high resolution, terrain in the transition region between bright and dark hemispheres on Saturn's moon Iapetus reveals a spotty appearance reminiscent of a Dalmatian. The bright material on the frozen surface of Iapetus, 1,468 kilometers (912 miles) across, is water ice, and the dark material is likely carbonaceous in composition.

HoneySoul.com - Giving Soul Music A Voice

“Anything great always starts with love,” says soul-music aficionado Vonnie “Honey” Woods, whose means of expressing her sincere, simple passion for the music and its artists, has grown from a small mailing list about new music finds, to an internet show called Soul 2 Soul.

Example:

After 40 interviews in one year - which Honey prefers to call “conversations” (with soul luminaries such as Maurice White, Chaka Khan, India.Arie, Teena Marie, Ron Isley, Meshell Ndegeocello, Brian McKnight, Marcus Miller, Van Hunt, Amel Larrieux, Donell Jones, Dwele and Syleena Johnson), Honey shows no signs of slowing down.

The former banker and self-described “bridge … between good old soul music and those of us who love it,” is known for her command of “the art of conversation,” for making the music the star (”It’s never been about who I could talk to, but what I can reveal about music”) and her emotion-centered definition of soul music. “From R&B to hip hop to jazz to gospel to rock, if you can feel it, I call it soul.” Honey sums up her platform this way: “If you’re a soul artist making meaningful music, let’s talk.”

Chart chooser from Juice analytics

The Extreme presentation Blog is known for presentation recommendations, along with a few other sites like Stephen Few's Perceptual Edge or Junk Charts. Some have also taken to create great charts, like Juice Analytics, maani.us, Adobe's flex charts or Engauge's Digitalizer.

Some time ago I mentioned a sites to find nice Excel charts. Now there is a new option, built on the of popular Chart Chooser diagram. Well, here it is, live, thanks to their hard work: http://www.chartchooser.com/. Juice Analytics are also providing customized versions of the chart chooser, which will link with your own company's databases to automatically create or update charts. See their post at www.juiceanalytics.com/writing.

You could also check out Process trends, Exeluser or Xcelsius.

Ig Nobel Award

The awards, founded in 1991, mark achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think".

Pioneering research into a "gay bomb" that makes enemy troops "sexually irresistible" to each other has scooped one of this year's Ig Nobel Prizes.

Other winners included work on treating hamster jetlag with impotency drugs, extracting vanilla from cow dung, and the side-effects of sword swallowing.

Video: Chicken, Chicken, Chicken: Chicken, Chicken

Real research

The awards, now in their 17th year, are intended to "celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative - and spur people's interest in science, medicine and technology".

Marc Abrahams, the editor of AIR, told the BBC News website: "When I became the editor of a science magazine, suddenly I was meeting all kinds of people who had done things that were hard to describe, and for the most part, nobody had ever heard of.

"For some of them, it seemed a great shame that nobody would give them any kind of recognition, and that was what really led to the birth of the Ig Nobels."

Like their more sober counterpart, the Nobel Prizes, the Ig Nobels are split into several categories and all research is real and published.

2007 Ig Nobel Winners

Medicine - Brian Witcombe, of Gloucestershire Royal NHS Foundation Trust, UK, and Dan Meyer for their probing work on the health consequences of swallowing a sword.

Physics - A US-Chile team who ironed out the problem of how sheets become wrinkled.

Biology - Dr Johanna van Bronswijk of the Netherlands for carrying out a creepy crawly census of all of the mites, insects, spiders, ferns and fungi that share our beds.

Chemistry - Mayu Yamamoto, from Japan, for developing a method to extract vanilla fragrance and flavouring from cow dung.

Linguistics - A University of Barcelona team for showing that rats are unable to tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and somebody speaking Dutch backwards.

Literature - Glenda Browne of Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word "the", and how it can flummox those trying to put things into alphabetical order.

Peace - The US Air Force Wright Laboratory for instigating research and development on a chemical weapon that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among enemy troops.

Nutrition - Brian Wansink of Cornell University for investigating the limits of human appetite by feeding volunteers a self-refilling, "bottomless" bowl of soup.

Economics - Kuo Cheng Hsieh of Taiwan for patenting a device that can catch bank robbers by dropping a net over them.

Aviation - A National University of Quilmes, Argentina, team for discovering that impotency drugs can help hamsters to recover from jet lag.

Source: BBC

Content Aware Image Resizing

"We all resize images quite frequently, but more times than not the result is not what we want. Either the image doesn’t scale correctly, or we are forced to crop off content that we would otherwise want to have. A solution for this problem might be just around the corner.

Content aware image resizing will more than likely be a common occurrence in the future. It uses a seam carving technique to eliminate the less important portions of an image, thereby leaving only what people want to see. The two images above are a good example of how this works. The one on the left is the original, and it shows two red lines indicating the next two "seams" that have been marked to be stretched or removed. The image on the right is the result: wider than the original, but only half the height. It was most of the water that was removed, which is exactly what most people would want to happen.

The creators of the system, Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan, have thought a lot of things through, and they left me drooling. If there is a portion of the image that is marked to be removed, you can reverse that action and tell the software to preserve that area (useful for preserving faces). If there is a portion that you want removed first, you can do that as well which makes removing people out of images easier than ever!

Go ahead and watch this video to see what I’m talking about. The end is one of the most exciting parts, and I’m sure you’ll be wanting to get your hands on this after you see it:

Video resizing .mov (66mb)
Source:CyberNetNews

Yoko Kanno - Jazz & Funk & Anime soundtrack

How much do you know about Anime music? Probably as much as I did before I read this:
"Yoko Kanno is the mind behind some of the finest anime music out there. Lucky for me, in college I lived down the hall from an anime fan. As the horns from the intro theme song to the popular Cowboy Bepop blared out, I crept down the hall to investigate. After falling in love with a dynamic and unpredictable arrangement, I delve deeper into the songwriter. I found a breadth of vocal and melodic writing in a wide span of genres."
Below is a good sampling of her work:
The Seatbelts - Tank!
Yoko Kanno - Dreams In A Pie
Yoko Kanno - The Egg and You

Here are some more Music:

SeeqPod Music beta - Playable Search


Another excellent Free Music Service:

Andy Mckee - Rylynn

If you have not heard Andy Mckee before, you will love to hear this. This tune is called Rylynn from his latest album Art of motion and is dedicated to a friend of his family who passed away suddenly.

One of so many comments: "I've been playing for 10 years or so. But never have i heard "real" beaufiful music like this one. It's magical. Words can't explain how Andy plays. his music comes within the soul, that is what music is all about, creating something so amazing like this. It's like a time travel, takes me to happy moments in life."

Here are some more tunes: Drifting, The Friend I never met, For My Father, Rylynn Live, Into the Ocean Live
And don't miss his homepage http://www.andymckee.com/

Here is another great song writer Billy Mclaughlin. First time I heard Helms place was a great moment. Especially after reading about his fight against dystonia, 2.

First Interactive Flash program

This is my first interactive flash program.
Try to move the blue levers and the gauges will change.





If you get this message: "Some controls on this presentation can't be activated. They might not be registered on this computer." Then you have to reinstall Flash in Internet Explorer. Unfortunately it's a Windows bug. Uninstall Flash, Check your version of flash and install the latest Flash player. To check version move the mouse over the "About" label. Remember you have to check both Firefox and Internet Explorer.

The relative size of earth

This is a small animation illustrating the relative size of stars & plants, from Mercury (4,480km) over Jupiter (142,984km) to W Cephei (3,676,200,000km)

It can also be seen here.
Here you can also view the smallest to the largest object known to mankind.

Life inside a cell - video

This is a very impressive 8 minute animation created for Harvard's Molecular & Cellular Biology program that "transports Harvard Biology undergraduate students into a three-dimensional journey through the microscopic world of a cell". the animation illustrates the mechanisms that allow a white blood cell to sense its surroundings & respond to an external stimulus.
Harvard University expects a performance improvement of its biology students of almost 30% by using such visualization tools. Here with a narrator.

We feel fine

The 2006 Pixel Award, winner of the category, Weired is "We feel fine". It's an exploration of human emotion, in six movements. Yes it is creative.

Jonathan Harris - one of the creators - has a website worth exploring.
Source: juiceanalytics

How popular is your name?

How popular is your name? The Baby name wizard can tell if you your kids name is trendy or unique. Select boy/girl and type the name in the upper left corner (see where the O is).

Graphical representation

This is a great example of a complex reality made into a simple picture . I hope someone develops a software that can make graphs like this.

The 2007 edition has just been released. It become so popular that it now has it's own homepage with posters and all.

Eavesdropping - Tjuvlyssnat

En typisk 'må bra site', trots en del elakheter. Här kan man hitta många underbara vardagshändelser som får en att skratta högt.

Gapminder

I've just had a lesson in the powerful visualisation. Gapminder’s Trendalyzer software unveils the beauty of statistics by converting boring numbers into enjoyable interactive animations. This is a great software and I am just waiting to play around with it. Apperently it can interact with my favorite tool of choice, Excel.
You can watch a 20min webcast of Hans Rosling talk at the TED, or a 1 hour presentation of Ola Rosling talk at the Google TechTalks.
Now combine this with Crystal Xcelsius and you have a very powerful combination. Clearly Microsoft needs to find a strategy as Flash is stealing the show everywhere.

Spore

I just saw a gameplay demo of Spore, the next big hit being produced by Maxis and published by EA. I not a gamer but this looks really promising. Basically they wrap up all game concepts you ever heard of in one huge game (except maybe car racing and kung fu). The video is a cut-out of a presentation held at the Game Developers Conference 2006. See the links below for a link the the whole presentation and a nice flash.

Sexual network map

For the first time, sociologists have mapped the romantic and sexual relationships of an entire high school over 18 months, providing evidence that these adolescent networks may be structured differently than researchers previously thought.

The results showed that, unlike many adult networks, there was no core group of very sexually active people at the high school.

Island of Genius

Savant Syndrome is a rare, but spectacular, condition in which persons with various developmental disorders, including autistic disorder, have astonishing islands of ability, brilliance or talent that stand in stark, markedly incongruous contrast to overall limitations.

Daniel Tammet first came to worldwide attention in March 2004 on international Pi Day (3/14, of course) when he recited, from memory, Pi to 22,514 decimal places.

The story of Leslie Lemke begins in Milwaukee in 1952. His mother gave him up for adoption at birth. "Leslie Lemke is a memorable man." That was Morley Safer's description of Leslie after he watched him play the piano as part of a 60 Minutes program in 1983 on savant syndrome. Dustin Hoffman watched the program and was "moved to tears" by Leslie.

Other fashinating Video excerpts.
Kim Peek: The Real Rain Man, Gilles Tréhin: City Creator, ...

Speedtest

Applications that test bandwidth speeds have been around for years, but Speedtest.net takes the concept a step further.

The site allows you to select servers to ping from around the country on an interactive map and graphically displays connections as they travel with varying speeds along the way. It also lets you store results of tests for your computer and sort them by date, time, speed and distance.

Coro36ink

Coro36ink is a very talented artist. The way he handles light, black and color composition is just pure amazing. His city oil painting are is worth to spend a few minutes one.
Don't miss his archive, even though it takes a bit of time to browse through.