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POPSOn becoming invisible More: I abandoned my cart, walked over to Customer Service, and asked if I could have a comment form to fill out. The Customer Service employee—who, bless his heart, could see me—said they didn’t have a comment form, but he listened to my complaint… He told me that if I wanted to talk to the Assistant Manager…I could deliver my complaint in person. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the Assistant Manager had been one of the guys who couldn’t see me. What the hell. It was worth a try. I walked over to the Assistant Manager. When I was just a few feet away from him, I stopped, planted my cane, and looked directly at him. Damned if I wasn’t still invisible. It was weird—he was a tall man, but when his eyes moved from one side to the other I could see them making an upward bump in their travel path when they were passing over me. He refused to look directly at me for even a second. I kept looking straight at him. There was no way he could have missed me.
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POPSIf you want to tell a story you have to know the code.
The following clip from an interview Samir Husni did with Bob Guccione Jr. betrays a what I see as a key blind spot in the the contemporary journalistic field of vision - a notion that story telling is somehow a non-technical act. If I had to guess I'd say that this notion is fed by these journalists coming of age in a time when the dominant tools of their trade - the technology that drove their stories for centuries - was fundamentally invisible. This invisibility mislead them into thinking that the art of story telling was somehow a ethereal act of creation - as mysterious and graceful as human existence - something that spewed forth from the muse - natural, organic, and clean. This mistaken assumption makes me think of a recent essay by Douglas Rushkoff in which he writes: <blockquote>Like those failed media renaissances before this one, we remain one step behind the capability actually being offered us. Only an elite"sometimes a new elite, but an elite nonetheless"ga
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POPSThe memory of metamaterials This is very interesting! Being able to give a "set-and-forget" memory to metamaterials by applying voltage or light on them? I can definitely think of one use or two to it! :) And I still wonder how these guys manage to discover these things...
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POPSSarah Palin’s ‘Political Pornography’ is an Updated Version of McCarthyism
As with McCarthyism, Palinism is a product of its times. McCarthy exploited the public’s fear of communism and communists. Not only were they abroad, but they were here in America — spies, fellow travelers, pinkos, apologists, intellectuals and short, bespectacled minorities. It was their very ubiquity and invisibility that made them so dangerous. Health-care reform provides Palin the same opportunity. The klutziness of Obama’s effort — people think they know what they can lose but have no idea of what they can gain — again raises the specter of invisible forces that will take but not give, dictate but not listen, tax but not provide. But as is almost always the case with right-wing populists, the shooter has aimed at her own foot. Palin’s “death panel” remarks either killed or helped kill the proposal to offer end-of-life counseling. The victims will be the poor, the uninformed and the ideologically blind who will find themselves unable to make a graceful exit. The affluent have th
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POPSHans Christian Ørsted : Who he was and why you owe him But no one had ever before scientifically documented the connection between electricity and magnetism, Cadden-Zimansky said. Ørsted's observation helped set the stage for the discovery of electromagnetic induction, whereby a changing magnetic field is used to produce an electric current and vice versa. Hans Christian Ørsted: 21st-Century Man Today Ørsted's fingerprints are on everything from medical scanners to your car's motor to theoretical invisibility devices. Cadden-Zimansky compared Ørsted's contribution to science to that made by another European scientist who lived more than a century before."Isaac Newton showed that the same phenomenon"—gravity—"causes a ball thrown into the air to fall down and the planets to orbit the sun," he said.Like electricity and magnetism, the different expressions of gravity "look like two different phenomena, but the same rules can describe them both. Ørsted's discovery was analogous."
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POPSAN ILLUSION device that makes one object look like another To make a cup look like a spoon, for example, light first strikes the cup and is distorted. It then passes through a complementary metamaterial which cancels out the distortions to make the cup seem invisible. The light then moves into a region of the metamaterial that creates a distortion as if a spoon were present. The result is that an observer looking at the cup through the metamaterial would see a spoon
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POPSInvisibility Cloaks May Shield Buildings From Earthquakes "The conceptual cloak will be made up of several large, concentric plastic rings affixed to the Earth’s surface. In order for the destructive surface waves to pass smoothly into the plastic, the stiffness and elasticity of the rings must be very closely controlled. The waves that travel through the cloak are compressed into minuscule fluctuations in pressure and density and are able to travel along the fastest path available. The path can be molded into an arc that directs surface waves away from objects inside the cloak by tweaking the characteristics of the plastic. As soon as the waves exit the cloak, they return to their original, larger size." ....More at the site: http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/06/30/invisibility-cloaks-may-shield-buildings-from-earthquakes/
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POPSTIME Top 10 scientific discoveries 9. Can You Spell Science? only one in four adults can read and understand the stories in the weekly science section of The New York Times. 10. First Family Researchers in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, found the oldest nuclear family ever uncovered when they excavated 4,600-year-old graves of a group of Stone-Age people who appeared to have been killed together in a raid
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