Prevocative: Connecting the Dots

A 13-year-old boy from New York conducts an experiment using the Fibonacci Sequence to place solar panels in a geometric pattern, mimicking the strategy of nature. Proves that it is effective. We were all 13 years old, once! http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/2011/aidan.html  

A lively commentary from Eli Pariser, founder of Moveon.org — on the perils of too much personalization. The unintended consequences of web services that try to algorythmically guess what you want to see, based on who they think you are and the patterns of what you do…

Some clear, simple thinking on the changes to human psychology through history…and what may be required to take the next step. Offered by author Jeremy Rifkin; more about him here. Illustrated talk to the Royal Society for the Arts, London.

A fascinating website, appearing simple on the surface but concealing enormous depth and significance — the World Digital Library. A joint venture of UNESCO and the Library of Congress, with participation from dozens of other great libraries around the world. . See http://www.wdl.org/en/ . Slicing great works of world culture up by time, topic, type of [...]

http://www.sortuv.com This company is interesting because it attempts to break out of the box of search-as-we-know-it. In a quite different way from Search Visualizer; perhaps a complementary way: “We build search technologies that make it possible to discover information that is difficult to describe. Words like cool, modern, hip, romantic, retro and timeless mean different [...]

The human eye, mind and heart…the ultimate camera. Autistic? Not.

This video describes an interpretation of the meaning of the Voynich Manuscript by Dr. Gordon Rugg, one of the founders of Prevocative and a professor of knowledge modelling at Keele University, Staffordshire U.K. Professor Rugg demonstrates how the Voynich, a classic problem that has fascinated linguists and encryption excerpts for centuries, could be a hoax. [...]

A journey from Earth, just above the high Tibetan plain — to the edge of the known universe, moving back in time billions of years…and back home again. All based on current scientific data. From the Museum of Natural History, and their partner across the Park, the Hayden Planetarium, with funding from NASA. If this [...]

Arthur Lipper comments: This is the most fascinating thing I have seen in a long time. Felt slightly dizzy just looking at it. Michael North adds: Play this in hi-def if you can — a six minute tour of the most advanced technologies ever deployed. And one of the greatest examples of international co-operation, too. [...]

See http://bit.ly/clUMUw Creativity, iteration, ambiguity, time — reflections from innovators at Google and GE. From a worthy source, http://fora.tv — subscription to their bi-weekly updates almost always nets a useful video or two.

This is an excerpt from a United States Air Force training tape about missile guidance systems. It describes how guided missiles locate themselves, and get to their target. “The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn’t. By subtracting where it is from where it isn’t, [...]

Bouncing a focused beam of radio waves off the moon, and listening for the echo. Pretty cool, you can send data, audio and still photos that way. The first to do it were the Apollo astronauts. Since then, it’s been a project that many HAM radio enthusiasts enjoy, because it involves some nicely sophisticated targeting, [...]

Wry observation from the editors of Big Think about the recent spectacular experiments at the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva: “We are grateful that, improbable as it seemed, the collider did not create a fatal black hole.” Other quotable quotes from this article in The Atlantic Monthly (where there are links to videos): “I value [...]

Virtual Reality (VR) photography has come a long way. The technology for taking a series of related photos of a scene, stitching them together and then placing them in an animated, navigable framework has been around for some time — it just keeps getting better. Three current links: http://www.utah3d.net/SulpherCreek_swf.html http://www.utah3d.net/DoubleArch1_swf.html http://www.utah3d.net/PaysonC_swf.html Rotate all the way [...]

http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/ Unused cycles on your computer go to building a complete 3D model of the Milky Way. The newest addition to the boinc open source project, which has hundreds of thousands of computers around the world working on problems in the medical, climate, cryptology, physics, genetics, astronomy…and the original, search for extraterrerstrial life. Downloads, info: [...]