The Arduino Story

This looks pretty interesting.  Its the story of how Arduinos came to be.  Did you ever wonder where that name came from?  Well, that and plenty of other things are revealed in this story.

The Making of Arduino

Steve Jobs Eulogy

There has been a lot about Steve Jobs in the news since his death.  He certainly had an impact on our world.  So far the most interesting and touching view into his world comes from his sister's Eulogy.  It gives more insight into the kind of person he was than most anything else I've read.

Read it in its entirety here.

Spashes

I've said it before.  High-speed photography is very cool.  Take a look at what this guy did...  He took a whole bunch of pictures of splashes (I've talked about them before too, but this is different) with some food coloring and fancy lighting.  He got some really cool shots.

Click for more Splashes they amazing!

Sleep Tracking

So I just finished night one with the new Zeo sleep tracker.  Its not much data yet, but I think its interesting to compare with the FitBit data from the same night.  Since Zeo is tracking brainwaves and FitBit is tracking arm motion, I was curious to see how they compare.  See the graphs below:

Zeo Sleep Data

FitBit Sleep Data

My first impression is that they are pretty similar.  Clearly the Zeo shows more data, breaking my sleep time up into Awake, Light Sleep, REM Sleep and Deep Sleep.  Both show the awake time at 1:30am and again at around 2am when Monika got up to move the laundry to the dryer.  It is interesting to see that the FitBit shows that I was moving around at a little before midnight, and a couple times between 3 and 4 am.  During these times, the Zeo shows that I am in deep sleep.  The FitBit interprets any movement as an indication that you are awake.  If we believe the Zeo data, I was certainly not awake at that time.  I certainly don't remember being awake at that time.  This makes me think that the combination of the two devices may give more information than either one on its own.  The FitBit can tell whether or not I'm having a restless sleep while the Zeo can help me interpret which motion on the FitBit was due to being awake or just to restless sleep.

Another interesting bit of data the Zeo gives you is a chart showing the percentage of time you spend in the various modes of sleep.  With only one night's sleep, I don't have much of an interpretation yet to tell me if this is interesting information yet, but that may come later when I start using the weekly summaries and other data analysis tools.

So far my biggest complaint with the Zeo is that it isn't all that comfortable to wear.  I definitely know it is there.  Additionally, it leaves marks on my forehead that take hours to go away.  I'm hoping that I can adjust the headband to fix this problem.

VW Factory

This video shows the factory where they make the Phaeton, a very expensive Volkswagen.  It looks pretty impressive to me.  It really doesn't look anything like what I would expect a car factory to look like.

What is your vision of the future?

This is Microsoft's vision of the future.  What do you think the future will look like?  What technologies will it take to get us there?

I'm number 3,239,716,956. What is your number?

This web site is interesting.  You put in your birthday and it tells you what number person you were on the earth.  I'm roughly the 77 billionth person to have lived and the 3.2 billionth person alive when I was born.  If you follow through the pages you learn a little bit about the population growth and its implications.  One of the more telling quotes was:

• It is estimated that your group of the richest countries consumes double the resources used by the rest of the world. The UN estimates that if current population and consumption trends continue, by the 2030s we will need the equivalent of two Earths to support us.

yikes!

take a look for yourself.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15391515

Daylight Savings Time

Soon we move the clocks back and go off of daylight savings time.  Did you ever wonder why we do this?  This video gives some background.

Printable Circuits

It looks like the guys at Xerox have something cool working.  Its a printing system that can cheaply and reliably print circuits.  This should allow simple circuits, RFIDs and NFC circuits to be printed onto almost anything.

http://www.parc.com/news-release/39/thinfilm-works-with-parc-to-develop-next-generation-printed-memory-solutions.html

The Holodesk

Microsoft has done something kind of interesting here.  They have connected a display and face tracking up with a beam splitter (half silvered mirror) and a physics engine so that they can combine your real hands with virtual objects.  Its pretty neat.  Can you think of any interesting uses for this technology?

http://microsoft-news.com/another-interesting-research-project-from-microsoft-holodesk/