Listening to Color

Neil Harbisson is an artist who was born without the ability to sense color.  To him everything is in black and white.  Some time ago, he artificially extended his senses by implanting a chip in his head to convert colors to sounds.  Now he has a very interesting view of the world where sounds and colors are related in very unique ways.  He can tell you what your face sounds like.  He can tell you what color a piece of music is.  It's all because he has chosen to be a cyborg.

via Mental Floss

We Are All Connected

Here's a nice little film that gets across its point completely visually.  Nicely done.

Find My iPhone

First the good news...

Two weeks ago I was traveling in Canada and I lost my iPhone.  It appears that I somehow left it on the plane, despite the fact that I have a mental checklist of all my gear before I get off the plane.  Somehow  I left it behind.  I noticed it immediately and had the crew that was cleaning the plane look specifically in my seat, but they could not find it.  Apparently someone on a later flight did find it and had the presence of mind to turn off airplane mode and call the entry marked home in my address book.  Outstanding!  Of course things got a bit more complicated because during the time the phone was not found it went from Toronto to New York and (luckily) back.  I was no longer in Toronto, so rendezvousing was not easy.  It took several days and finally the use of a program called Find My iPhone to track it down in lost and found at the Toronto airport.  You see when the person who had my phone returned it to the airport (as she said she would when she called), the phone connected to the free wifi (I had international roaming turned off to keep from paying $15/MB(!) so there was no data service until the phone got to the airport) and started sending me its coordinates.  I was able to see exactly where it was on the map and know that I could drive to the airport to pick it up.  It had been two and a half days by the time I was in lost and found to pick it up and I faced another huge problem.  There were a LOT of iPhones there and I needed to prove which one was mine.  Luckily, I was able to use the Find My iPhone app to make the phone make a loud sound, so the person at lost and found knew exactly which phone was mine.

Find My iPhone shows where my phone is on a Google map

When I was finally reunited with my phone, I realized just how lucky I was.  First, someone actually took the time to return my phone to lost and found.  Thank you for honest people!  Second, Toronto has free wifi so that I could use Find My iPhone to communicate with the phone since it needed data service and I had that turned off because of international fees.  Third, when I finally got the phone it had 5% of its battery left.  If the battery had died, I would have had a much harder time proving that the phone was mine.  Fourth, Find My iPhone is great.

This is actually the second time that application has saved my bacon.  The first time was when I left the iPad in a shopping cart and it disappeared.  In that case I was able to track it on a map and saw exactly where it was at all times.  In both cases I was able to lock the iPhone/iPad and have it display a message saying "Reward if found! call " + my phone number.  If things got really bad, I even had the option of wiping all the data from my device remotely.  It really is an incredibly useful program and it comes free as part of iCloud.

I'm not the only one who has had this type of experience.  The writer David Pogue had an interesting experience last week.  Its an entertaining read that you can find here and the Gizmodo play-by-play coverage is here.

Now the bad news...

OK, so that is the good news, lots of lost iPhones/iPads are being recovered.  There are also similar programs for Android.  It sounds great, but, there is always a bad side to these things.  Now that there is a way to remotely wipe phones and iPads and even Macs (newer Apple software added a Find my Mac feature), hackers can take advantage of this ability, break into your account and remotely wipe your phone, tablet or computer, without ever coming anywhere near you.  Now instead of worrying about someone actively stealing your expensive phone from you, you have to also worry about people you don't even see taking your data from you.  This may sound far fetched, but it is actually happening.  This story from Wired is incredibly interesting and shows just how vulnerable we are when it comes to our digital information.  Mat Honan, the author of the article, describes how within an hour, while he was sitting at home playing with his young daughter, his Google account was deleted, his Amazon account was compromised and all his data on his iPhone, iPad and Mac disappeared right before his eyes.  It is quite sobering.  This article is very important because, even if you don't have an iPhone, it shows just how vulnerable your Gmail and Amazon accounts are as well, and it makes you think about all your other online accounts (banks etc).  It should be relevant to all of our readers.

Read this now!

I'm just guessing here, but I expect that Mr Honan has a chance to get his data back by essentially doing what the hackers hoped for; telling the world how insecure these system are and publicly presenting no ill will toward the hackers.  I think that based on the current state of things, there is still the chance that they can give him the unlock code to recover all the data on his computer.  I wish him luck.  I wish us all luck.

Curiosity has landed

In case you've been under a rock for the last 24 hours, Curiosity is safely on the ground on Mars and NASA has released the video above that is a fine summary of what you missed if you didn't see it.

Jeez guys, we just threw a car to Mars... and it got there in one piece.  How cool is that?

Seven Minutes of Terror Live(ish) Tonight!

Some time around 10:31 pm PT tonight, Curiosity will smash into the atmosphere of Mars at 13,000 miles per hour and decelerate to a complete stop over the next 7 minutes.  Of course, you can watch live... well, not exactly live since it takes about 15 minutes for the signal from Mars to reach us here on Earth.  That means that by the time we get the signal that the Mars Science Lab (MSL - which carries the Curiosity rover) is entering the atmosphere it will already have landed or burned up... we just won't know which.  One way or another it will be on the surface of Mars by around 10:23.

So, we here at Digital Diner recommend that you spend the 8 minutes between 10:23 and 10:31 thinking deeply about relativity.  The reality of Curiosity's fate will ripple like a wave traveling at the speed of light from Mars out into the universe.  We will experience the event of Curiosity arriving at Mars 15 minutes after it occurs there, but really all of time there is offset by 15 minutes.  So when does the landing happen?  The answer is relative.  In fact even the speed of MSL (13,000 mph to 0 mph) is relative to the red planet, not us.  Compared to where you sit, the rover may be moving quite quickly because of the rotation of the Earth, Mars and the movement of the planets in their orbits.  However, what we care about is that it comes to a gentle stop compared to the surface of Mars.  Once again, the speed only has meaning if it is relative to something.  Try to explain that to a police officer next time you get pulled over for speeding.  When you are asked, "do you know how fast you were going?" reply with, "compared to what?"... or maybe not.

What ever you think about or where ever you are when Curiosity really sets down, be sure that you watch live when time catches up with us here on Earth.

Here is how to watch the landing live(ish)

NASA TV

NASA Television in HD on UStream

NASA on YouTube

 For those of you in the Bay Area, NASA Ames will have a an event open to the public starting at 4pm today.  You can go there to watch live with everyone else at NASA including some of the scientists who worked on the systems that will be put to the test this evening.

You can see where Curiosity is right now here.

And the NASA JPL main mission site is here.

Enthusiasm

If a little enthusiasm can get you a long way, then this guy will go far indeed.  May we all find passion such as his and follow it to our bliss.  I say don't hold back!

BTW, apparently "foamers" are excessively enthusiastic railfans.  After watching the video, I'm pretty sure I know what that means now.

I guess the "double trainbow" is sort of like the double rainbow below.

To paraphrase the line from "When Harry Met Sally," I'll have what he's having.

They don't call it "Bad"minton for Nothing

By now, you've probably heard about the badminton scandal at the Olympics where some players seemed to intentionally lose in order to have an easier draw in the next round of competition.  While I think it is horrible, I also believe that it was a poor game design that put the players in this moral dilemma in the first place.  Both are to blame here, although I must say that if the referee comes out and warns you that you can be disqualified for playing that way, I would think it would be time to change your behavior.
But, ignoring the actual facts of the situation for a moment, lets just just focus on the coverage of the event.  I believe my favorite summary of the events came from the Wall Street Journal in the video above.  Watch and tell me whether or not you agree.

Smart Phone and Privacy

In some ways, smart phones are what personal computers should have been.  They are computers with sensors that can tell where you are and to some extent what you are doing.   They are devices that you keep with you all the time and that can observe and learn things about you from your actions.  All this information makes them very intimate partners that in some cases can know more about you than any human does.  Using this information they can adapt to work with you seamlessly.  They can adjust to your behavior.  That same information that lets them personalize their behavior to you and can give others a very creepy level of information about your life.
The TED talk above gives you a a little insight into what this can mean.  I think it will take years for this tension between the pros and cons of this technology to be worked out by society.  Right now its a bit of the wild wild west.

Thanks Meg

Getting Ready for Mars

The Curiosity rover has spent the last 8 months traveling through the vast wasteland of space in anticipation of the seven minutes of terror this weekend.  So Curiosity (aka the Mars Science Lab or MSL) has travelled 354 million miles at 13,000 miles over the last 8 months.  What have you done?  Huh?  Feeling a little left behind by this robotic wonder?  No worries, we here at Digital Diner can't send you to Mars, but we can help you keep up on the latest events so that you don't feel too far out of the loop.  Tomorrow (Aug 3) NASA will have a live session at Johnson Space Center that you can tune in to. It may be a good place to start.

Lets start by boning up on Mars and why this mission is headed there in the first place.  The rover's mission objectives include studying Mars' habitability, studying the Martian climate and geology, and collecting data for a potential future manned mission to Mars.  Some of the chemistry experiments are quite interesting (see the video below).

The mission is headed to a place called Gale Crater, next to Mount Sharp, a mountain that rises 3 miles into the martian sky.  

from space.com

Keep up on the latest mission developments from NASA.


Watch Live - Aug. 5, 10:31 p.m. PDT 
› NASA TV       › Ustream With Commentary       › Ustream HD 
› Commentary and News Conference Schedule

Paris In Motion

Paris In Motion (Part I) from Mayeul Akpovi on Vimeo.

Paris is a beautiful city, and we love those time lapse movies, so when you put them together, you get something really nice.  Just a little bit Koyaanisqatsi.