Month: March 2013

For all you coffee lovers out there [Invention]

‘text from the website’
Meet Velopresso, an innovative coffee vending trike for true off-grid selling of quality espresso on city streets, at trade fairs, events and in parks, etc. Designed from the ground up around a custom rear-steer tricycle, a unique pedal-driven grinder, and a robust gas-fired lever espresso machine, Velopresso is a celebratory fusion of human power, sensory pleasures and technology – old tech with hi-tech, bicycles and coffee, their engineering and aesthetics. The result is a unique hybrid machine with a compact footprint and near-silent, low carbon operation – fine coffee, no electricity, no motors, no noise!

Building the worlds largest ship in 76 seconds [Video]

Maersk’s Triple-E is a new class of fuel-efficient container ships, designed for lower speeds and CO2 emissions. The 400-meter long ships break the record in container ship capacity and are expected to be the world’s largest ships in service. With the Discovery Channel, Maersk is giving a sneak peek of the construction of one of their massive vessels at the DSME shipyard in Okpo, Korea with this 76-second time-lapse video.

Teaching boys to be kind [Article]

In the wake of another publicised rape, this time in the US, Kim Simon writes about what it means to raise boys to be kind men.

While it’s true that big scary monster men sometimes jump out of bushes to rape unsuspecting women, most rapists look like the men we see every day.  Acquaintance rape (or date rape) accounts for the majority of sexual assaults among young people: in colleges, in high schools, at parties, in the cars and bedrooms that belong to the men who women trust.

Ayumu’s photographic memory & recall [Article, Video]

Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny were awarded the 2012 Ig Nobel Prize for their discovery that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends. (If you’re interested in their research paper, click here for a pdf document). A recent essay by de Waal in the WSJ, called the “Brains of the Animal Kingdom” begins thus:

Who is smarter: a person or an ape? Well, it depends on the task. Consider Ayumu, a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University who, in a 2007 study, put human memory to shame. Trained on a touch screen, Ayumu could recall a random series of nine numbers, from 1 to 9, and tap them in the right order, even though the numbers had been displayed for just a fraction of a second and then replaced with white squares

I tried the task myself and could not keep track of more than five numbers—and I was given much more time than the brainy ape. In the study, Ayumu outperformed a group of university students by a wide margin. The next year, he took on the British memory champion Ben Pridmore and emerged the “chimpion.

How do you give a chimp—or an elephant or an octopus or a horse—an IQ test? It may sound like the setup to a joke, but it is actually one of the thorniest questions facing science today. Over the past decade, researchers on animal cognition have come up with some ingenious solutions to the testing problem. Their findings have started to upend a view of humankind’s unique place in the universe that dates back at least to ancient Greece….

 If nothing, watch the video of Ayumu for a demonstration of his photographic memory!

Personal Tracking. Unwanted. Big Data. [Blog Post]

Doc Sears detects a change in people’s attitudes towards unwanted tracking of their digital activities, & has several links in that blog post. He quotes Erik Cecil :

“The backwash that’s coming is a tsunami that hasn’t hit yet. Right now it’s a wide swell over deep water. But you can tell it’s coming because the tide is suspiciously far out. So we have all these Big Data marketing types, out there on the muddy flats, raking up treasures of exposed personal data. They don’t see that this is not the natural way of things, or that it’s temporary. But the tidal wave is coming. And when it finally hits, watch out.

Top Secret Drum Corps [Video]

Top Secret Drum Corps is a precision drum corps based in Basel, Switzerland. With 25 drummers and colorguard members, the corps became famous for its demanding six-minute routine performed at the Edinburgh Tattoo in 2003. With its invitation to Edinburgh, Top Secret became one of the first non-military, non-British Commonwealth acts to perform on the Esplanade at Edinburgh Castle. Watch a dazzling performance

What’s the right thing to do? [Video, links]

Michael Sandel runs a course on Justice at Harvard. He’s now opening the course to the world, as a Massive Open Online Course. You can register for free, if you’d like to explore your moral limits & how you think about justice. You could, alternatively, watch the series of youtube videos, beginning with “The moral side of murder“, & follow the links for more, if you’re interested. Certain to test your sense of justice, & get you thinking.

 If you had to choose between (1) killing one person to save the lives of five others and (2) doing nothing, even though you knew that five people would die right before your eyes if you did nothing—what would you do? 

Sugar & substance abuse [Article]

Scientifically speaking, a drug is any substance that alters normal bodily function when absorbed into the body of a living organism.  Students have been overdosing on sugar, says the Guardian, & appeals to them to just say no. Sugar has been shown to have the same impact on the human body as heroin.

We don’t think of sugar as a drug: it’s found in most of the foods and drinks we encounter every day. And at university, where stress levels can be high and fast food is cheap, it’s all too easy to reach out for the comfort blanket it provides.

Many students’ diets consist of pizzas, take-aways and chocolate bars. Whether you spend your time raving or revising, there’s always something better to do than think about eating healthily. And with university halls often providing only the most basic cooking facilities, a well-balanced diet simply doesn’t feature in most students’ lifestyles.