N Y B B L E M O N T H L Y N E W S L E T T E R
A Free Ezine about Anything Tech and Everything Else
2007.12.14 Issue No. 195
Just the other day I was asking my Finnish instructor where the
nearest Nokia Shop is. He asked if I was shopping for a Vertu. Yeah,
right. I told him that when Vertu first came out, you could buy easily
Vertu fakes in the shops. Better yet, instead of buying a Vertu (real
or fake), just swipe that Vertu demo unit from the Nokia Shop. Install
a ringer and pretend to make calls on it. Anyway, my instructor tells
me that's exactly what happened in their town. It was many, many years
ago; Nokia wasn't even making mobiles yet. There's this guy in their
town who had a cellular phone. So he was inside the town shop chatting
away loudly. Suddenly an old lady had a heart attack, so everybody was
pleading with him to call 911 (or whatever emergency number they use).
He was stunned for a while, then admitted that his mobile was not
actually working. He was so embarrassed he didn't show up in any of
the public places for a year, and did all his groceries in the next town.
Ah, honest Finns. If I were him, I would've claimed that the mobile
ran out of battery, and rush home to charge it. :-)
Have an answer, comment, suggestion, or violent reaction? Send them my
way by clicking on Reply or join nybbletalk@yahoogroups.com to discuss
a topic. If you think Nybble is good enough, do tell the Finns about
it. Thanks.
_________TABLE OF CONTENTS_________
* MIT's Stackable Cars
* Single Carbon Nanotube Radio
* CSIRO's Electrical Shirt
* Kids Treat Robot as a Peer
* Hidden Music in Last Supper
* 3D Models from Vacation Photos
* Japan's Melody Roads
* Laser Link of 1.5 Million Kilometers
* Nybblets
* Likeable Links
* Questionable Question
* Quotable Quote
* Trivial Trivia
* Laughable Laugh
_________MIT'S STACKABLE CARS_________
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/110807-mit-reinvents-the-wheel-with.html
Researchers from MIT are working on a design project for the City Car
- a foldable, stackable two-seater vehicle. The frame of the car is
designed to fold in half so the cars can be stacked up eight deep in
one city parking space. In MIT's vision, people would find a stack of
electrical-powered City Cars on nearly every block in the city. When a
user would want to drive somewhere in town, he would swipe a smart
card or cell phone across an electronic reader and take a car out of
the stack. When he gets to a business meeting across town, a shopping
mall or their doctor's office, the driver simply leaves the car in a
stack at his destination. The drivers don't own the cars. They simply
rent them. It's fully self-service. The next person takes a car out of
the stack, and off he goes.
The two-seater is designed to weigh 1,000 to 1,500 pounds. It's
expected to cruise at average city speed limits and may even be
capable of topping 100 miles per hour. One of the more interesting
aspects of the design is that electric motors will be built into each
wheel, along with mechanisms for steering, braking and the suspension.
The car has four of these wheels, and that's what drives the vehicle
forward. The car doesn't have an engine. There are no gears. No
transmission. Having so much of the technology in the robotic wheels
frees up a lot of space throughout the rest of the vehicle, allowing
the team to make it collapsible. While the vehicles are in the stack,
waiting to be rented out, their lithium-ion batteries would be
charging off the city's power grid. But the project is designed to
give power back to the city, too. Solar panels erected on nearby
buildings would feed energy into the charging stations and when the
cars' batteries were full, the excess power would flow into the city's
grid.
The City Car team is in the process of having a prototype of the
vehicle built.
_________SINGLE CARBON NANOTUBE RADIO_________
http://nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=110566
A research team from the University of California at Berkeley has
crafted a working radio from a single fiber of carbon nanotube. Fixed
between two electrodes, the vibrating tube successfully performed the
four critical roles of a radio--antenna, tunable filter, amplifier and
demodulator--to tune in a radio signal generated in the room and play
it back through an attached speaker. Functional across a bandwidth
widely used for commercial radio, the tiny device could have
applications far beyond novelty, from radio-controlled devices that
could flow in the human bloodstream to highly efficient, miniscule,
cell phone devices.
The new device works in a manner more similar to the vacuum tubes from
the 1930s than the transistors found in modern radios. In the new
radio, a single carbon fiber a few hundred nanometers (billionths of a
meter) long, and only a few molecules thick, stands glued to a
negatively charged base of tungsten that acts as a cathode. Roughly
one millionth of a meter directly across from the base lies a
positively charged piece of copper that acts as an anode. Power in the
form of streaming electrons travels from an attached battery through
the cathode, into the nanotube, and across a vacuum to the anode via a
field-emission tunneling process. The stream of electrons along the
nanotube changes when a radio wave encoded with information--simply a
wave of photons that travels in a controlled manner--washes across the
tube and causes it to resonate. This mechanical action is what
amplifies and demodulates, or decodes, the radio signal. The
researchers fine-tune the nanoradio to a frequency, akin to a channel,
by using the electrostatic field between the cathode and anode to
tighten or loosen the nanotube.
_________CSIRO'S ELECTRICAL SHIRT________
http://snipurl.com/1v8qx
CSIRO is receiving $4.4 million worth of funding from the Australian
Defence Department for research into designing clothing which can be
used as a self-recharging electrical source on the battlefield.
Called Flexible Integrated Energy Device (FIED), the electrical shirt
will resemble ordinary garments, and will be used to store and provide
energy over a continuous period of time. It can be charged by either
vibration energy harvesting or through plugging into an electrical
power point. The technology would be unobtrusively incorporated into a
piece of clothing with three components: advanced conductive fabrics
that form the battery, a vibration energy harvesting device and a
rechargeable battery with low flammability and toxicity.
The Defence Department is hoping that once the technology is proven,
it will be used on the battlefield to eliminate the cumbersome and
wasteful batteries that soldiers must carry around to fuel a host of
devices including communications equipment, imaging devices and small
computing equipment. Aside from military applications, CSIRO is
looking to position the FIED as a consumer and sports product where it
could be integrated into garments and used to power heart-rate
monitors, iPods, and even mobile phones or PDAs.
_________KIDS TREAT ROBOT AS A PEER_________
http://snipurl.com/1v8r2
An experiment led by Javier Movellan at the University of California
San Diego, US shows that a giggling robot is sophisticated enough to
get toddlers to treat it as a peer.
In the first long-term study of interaction between toddlers and
robots, researchers stationed Sony's 2-foot-tall QRIO (pronounced
"curio") robot in a classroom of a dozen toddlers aged between 18
months and two years. QRIO stayed in the middle of the room using its
sensors to avoid bumping the kids or the walls. It was initially
programmed to giggle when the kids touched its head, to occasionally
sit down, and to lie down when its batteries died. A human operator
could also make the robot turn its gaze towards a child or wave as
they went away. The researchers then measured the bond between the
children and the robot. Firstly, as with other toddlers, they touched
QRIO mostly on the arms and hands, rather than on the face or legs.
The children also treated QRIO with more care and attention than a
similar-looking but inanimate robot that the researchers called Robby.
Eventually, the children seemed to care about the robot's well being.
They helped it up when it fell, and played "care-taking" games with it
– most commonly, when QRIO's batteries ran out of juice and it lay
down, a toddler would come up and cover it with a blanket and say
"night, night".
One of the problems with past robots was that people quickly got bored
of them. Since QRIO was able to hold children's interest, this study
opens the possibility of robots for classroom applications or for
helping autistic children.
_________HIDDEN MUSIC IN LAST SUPPER_________
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7088600.stm
Giovanni Maria Pala claimed to have cracked a real Da Vinci code, by
finding musical notes encoded in the masterpiece The Last Supper. The
15th century painting depicts Jesus' last meal with the 12 Apostles
before his arrest and crucifixion.
According to Mr. Pala's book La Musica Celata (The Hidden Music), each
loaf of bread in the picture represents a note. By drawing the five
lines of a musical staff across the painting, the loaves of bread on
the table and the hands of Jesus and the Apostles could each represent
a musical note. The notes make sense musically when the resulting
score is read from right to left, following Da Vinci's own writing
style. The result is a 40-second "hymn to God" which Mr. Pala
described as "like a soundtrack that emphasises the passion of Jesus".
Alessandro Vezzosi, director of Tuscany's Da Vinci museum, said the
theory was "plausible", though he warns about "a risk of seeing
something that is not there".
_________3D MODELS FROM VACATION PHOTOS_________
http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/article.asp?articleID=37724
Researchers at the University of Washington are downloading thousands
of photos from Flickr and using them to recreate 3D models of world
landmarks. Their long-term goal is to be able to reconstruct the
detailed geometry of all the structures on the surface of the Earth.
But the freely available photos do present a challenge: these are
holiday snapshots and personal photos, not laboratory-quality research
images. While some may be postcard-perfect representations of a
setting, others may be dark, blurry or have people covering up most of
the scene. To make the 3D digital model, the researchers first
download photos of a landmark. For instance, they might download the
roughly 60,000 pictures on Flickr that are tagged with the words
"Statue of Liberty." The computer finds photos that it will be able to
use in the reconstruction and discards pictures that are of low
quality or have obstructions. Photo Tourism, a tool developed at the
UW, then calculates where each person was standing when he or she took
the photo. By comparing two photos of the same object that were taken
from slightly different perspectives, the software applies principles
of computer vision to figure out the distance to each point.
In tests, a computer took less than two hours to make a 3D
reconstruction of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, using 151 photos taken
by 50 different photographers. A reconstruction of Notre Dame
Cathedral used 206 images taken by 92 people. All the calculations and
image sorting were performed automatically.
_________JAPAN'S MELODY ROADS_________
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2209957,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=technology
A team from the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has built a
number of "melody roads", which use cars as tuning forks to play music
as they travel. The concept works by using grooves, which are cut at
very specific intervals in the road surface. Just as travelling over
small speed bumps or road markings can emit a rumbling tone throughout
a vehicle, the melody road uses the spaces between to create different
notes. According to reports, the system was the brainchild of Shizuo
Shinoda, who accidentally scraped some markings into a road with a
bulldozer before driving over them and realising that they helped to
produce a variety of tones.
There are three musical strips in central and northern Japan - one of
which plays the tune of a Japanese pop song. Notice of an impending
musical interlude, which lasts for about 30 seconds, is highlighted by
coloured musical notes painted on to the road. Based on motorist
feedback, the optimal speed for achieving melody road playback is
28mph. Driving too fast will sound like playing fast forward, while
driving around 12mph has a slow-motion effect, making you almost carsick.
_________LASER LINK OF 1.5 MILLION KILOMETERS_________
http://www.oerlikon.com/ecomaXL/index.php?site=SPACE_EN_press_releases_detail&udtx_id=5060
A team from Oerlikon Space demonstrated the feasibility of a laser
link across a distance of 1.5 million kilometres for the first time
ever. In the future, laser links like this one will be able to
transmit data across huge distances through the universe far more
rapidly and efficiently than is possible using conventional radio
links today.
To prove that data transmission across the vast distance of 1.5
million kilometres is really feasible, the Oerlikon engineers had
devised a special experiment in which they set up a laser link between
the islands of La Palma and Tenerife on the Canary Islands. The
transmission unit was modified in such a way that the conditions on
the 144-kilometre stretch between the islands exactly reflected those
that would prevail on a 1.5 million kilometre link through space. In
the course of the experiment, the engineers achieved transmission
rates of over 10 Mbit/sec. At this speed, it would take a mere two
seconds to transmit the entire text of the Bible. The data rate would
also be sufficient to transmit three digital television programmes
simultaneously.
Laser-based data transmission has several advantages over conventional
radio links. Because of the shorter wavelength, lasers can transmit
more data than radio signals in the same period of time. Lasers can
also be far more accurately aligned with the receiver than radio
waves, and therefore require less power for data transmission.
_________NYBBLETS_________
* South Korea to build two robot theme parks in Incheon and Masan for
$1.6 billion by 2013.
* Physicists from both the University of Surrey and Salford
University have devised a method to trap a multi-colored rainbow of
light inside a prism
* Research out of the California Pacific Medical Center Research
Institute suggesting that a compound found in cannabis may stop breast
cancer from metastasizing
* University of Melbourne research fellow Dr John Papandriopoulos
discovers an algorithm to make DSL broadband connections up to 100
times faster
* A team of University of Tokyo researchers genetically-engineers a
mouse that does not fear cats, simply by controlling its sense of smell
_________LIKEABLE LINKS_________
String Theory in 2 Minutes or Less
http://discovermagazine.com/twominutesorless
To-Do List Blog
http://www.todolistblog.com/
A blog of to-do lists
howjsay.com
http://www.howjsay.com/
An English Pronouncing Dictionary with Instant Sound
Zamzar
http://www.zamzar.com/
Free online file conversion
_________QUESTIONABLE QUESTION_________
How can we tell if sour cream has gone bad?
_________QUOTABLE QUOTE_________
Love at first sight is easy to understand; it's when two people have
been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.
~ Amy Bloom ~
_________TRIVIAL TRIVIA_________
How can you tell male oysters from females?
The oyster is usually ambisexual. It begins life as a male, then
becomes a female, then changes back to being a male, then back to
being female. It may go back and forth many times.
Source: Arcamax Trivia
_________LAUGHABLE LAUGH_________
A man goes to his proctologist and says, "Doc, you gotta help me.
Every time I fart, it sounds like, "Honda."
The doctor says, "You mean you say, 'Honda?'"
"No," the man says. "My farts do."
"OK, open your mouth," says the doctor and looks inside.
After a minute the doctor says, "I'm sorry, I can't help you, you need
to go see a dentist."
The man asks, "Why a dentist?"
The doctor answers, "Because you have an absessed tooth."
"What the heck does that have to do with my condition?"
The doctor says, "Well, didn't you know? Absess makes the farts go Honda!"
_________DOWNLOADABLE DOWNLOAD_________
Free Linux eBooks
http://freebooks.homelinux.org/
The 20 Best iPod Utilities
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/tips/2007/12/05/the_20_best_ipod_utilities.html
Free Screensavers from 9301
http://www.9031.com/downloads/screensavers.html
That's all for this week. Nybble is and will always be a work in
progress. Please do send me your comments and suggestions on how to
improve Nybble. Just hit the reply button to you know, reply.
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