Right then...

...I shall mostly be out of town until April. Thanks everybody for keeping up with Dysonology but I need a wee break (not a euphemism). See you in a few weeks! J xxx

UncategorizedJack DysonComment
What happens if you cross a fork with a theramin?

Fascinating and slightly bonkers piece by Alice Vincent in Wired UK: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlNTIMR5kR4&feature=player_embedded]

Researchers from Ochanomizu University have invented cutlery that makes bizarre "music" when used during meal times, just in case eating wasn't fun enough already.

The eating utensils, known as EaTheremin, create a complete electrical circuit when they come into contact with human body moisture. That in turn creates sound, duly celebrating the food party in your mouth.

As the video above demonstrates, the noises produced vary depending on the resistance generated by the food that's being eaten. The sound is also affected by conductivity, so the wetter your mouth, the noisier the result. Indeed, as the human body is between 55 and 60 percent water, you can put the EaTheremin pretty much anywhere to make a sound.

Munching grub that blends textures (like the fried chicken in the video) will create the most interesting results, and the stretchy chicken skin can create a vibrato effect. Unlike the video, however, all your food doesn't have to be compressed into cylinders.

Furthermore, the researchers are keen to expand beyond musical forks to spoons and cups. Utensils used to deal with liquid would make different sounds, and if the electrodes were divided between two objects at once then you could have your own mini food orchestra during lunch.

EaTheremin already has the potential for duets and even more. Reina Nakamori says, "Several people can use this if they eat together. With the current system, I think it would be fun if a special sound could be created when two people make the same sound as one person."

 (via)

UncategorizedJack Dysonfood, japan, musical eating, theramin, wiredComment
Alain de Botton on Tsunamis and Stoicism

From The School of Life's site: Early in the morning on the fifth of February AD 62, a gigantic earthquake rippled beneath the Roman province of Campania and in seconds, killed thousands of unsuspecting inhabitants. Large sections of Pompeii collapsed on top of people in their beds. Attempts to rescue them were stopped when fires broke out. The survivors were left destitute in only the soot-covered clothes they stood in, their noble buildings shattered into rubble. There was horror, disbelief and anger throughout the Empire. How could the Romans, the world’s mightiest, most technologically sophisticated people, who had built aqueducts and tamed barbarian hordes, be so vulnerable to the insane tempers of nature?

The suffering and confusion – only too familiar today in the wake of the earthquake off Japan – attracted the notice of the Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca. He wrote a succession of essays to comfort his readers but, typically for Seneca, the consolation on offer was of the stiffest, darkest sort: ‘You say: ‘I did not think it would happen.’ Do you think there is anything that will not happen, when you know that it is possible to happen, when you see that it has already happened...?’ Seneca tried to calm the sense of injustice in his readers by reminding them – in the spring of AD62 – that natural and man-made disasters will always be a feature of our lives, however sophisticated and safe we think we have become. We must therefore at all times expect the unexpected. Calm is only an interval between chaos. Nothing is guaranteed, not even the ground we stand on.

If we do not dwell on the risk of sudden giant waves and pay a price for our innocence, it is because reality comprises two cruelly confusing characteristics: on the one hand, continuity and reliability lasting across generations, on the other, unheralded cataclysms. We find ourselves divided between a plausible invitation to assume that tomorrow will be much like today, and the possibility that we will meet with an appalling event after which nothing will ever be the same again. It is because we have such powerful incentives to neglect the latter scenario that Seneca asked us to remember that our fate is forever in the hands of the Goddess of Fortune. This Goddess can scatter gifts, then with terrifying speed watch us choke to death on a fishbone or disappear along with our hotel in a tidal wave.

Because we are hurt most by what we do not expect, and because we must expect everything (‘There is nothing which Fortune does not dare’), we must, argued Seneca, hold the possibility of the most obscene events in mind at all times. No one should undertake a journey by car, or walk down the stairs or say goodbye to a friend without an awareness, which Seneca would have wished to be neither gruesome nor unnecessarily dramatic, of fatal possibilities.

Given our technological prowess, it’s become natural to think of ourselves as controlling our destiny. Man doesn’t any longer have to be a plaything of random forces and with the application of reason, all our problems may be solved. Nothing could be further from a Stoic mindset. We must, stressed Seneca, expand our sense of what may at any time go wrong in our lives: ‘Nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all the problems, and we should consider, not what is wont to happen, but what can happen. What is man? A vessel that the slightest shaking, the slightest toss will break. A body weak and fragile.’

In the wake of the Calabria earthquake, many people argued that the whole area should be evacuated, and nothing more built on earthquake zones. But Seneca disagreed with the underlying belief that there might be somewhere on earth, in Liguria or Calabria perhaps, where someone could actually be wholly safe, out of reach of Fortune's will: ‘Who promises them better foundations for this or that soil to stand on? All places have the same conditions and if they have not yet had an earthquake, they can none the less have quakes. Perhaps tonight or before tonight will split open the spot where you stand securely. How do you know whether conditions will henceforth be better in those places against which Fortune has already exhausted her strength or in those places which are supported on their own ruins? We are mistaken if we believe any part of the world is exempt and safe... Nature has not created anything in such a way that it is immobile."

To try to prepare ourselves psychologically for disaster, Seneca asked us to perform a strange exercise every morning which he called in Latin a praemeditatio – a premedition – and which involved lying in bed before breakfast and imagining everything that could go wrong in the day ahead. This exercise was no idle fun, it was designed to prepared you if your town burnt down that evening or your children died: ‘We live in the middle of things which have all been destined to die,’ ran one example of a premeditation, ‘Mortal have you been born, to mortals have you given birth. So you must reckon on everything, expect everything.’

Does Stoicism mean accepting everything that life throws at you? No, it simply means recognising how vulnerable we remain, despite all our advances. Seneca asked us to think of ourselves like dogs who have been tied to a charriot driven by an unpredictable driver. Our leash is long enough to give us a degree of leeway, but is not long enough to allow us to wander wherever we please. A dog will naturally hope to roam about as it wants. But as Seneca’s metaphor implies, if it can’t, then it’s better for the animal to follow obediently behind the cart rather than dragged and strangled by it. As Seneca put it: ‘An animal, struggling against the noose, tightens it... there is no yoke so tight that it will not hurt the animal less if it pulls with it than if it fights against it. The best alleviation for overwhelming evils is to endure and bow to necessity.’

By turning back to the wisdom of the Stoic philosophers, we may find a helpful way of tempering some of our expectations and dampening our shock at disasters and bloodshed. When, in AD 65, Seneca was ordered to kill himself by the crazed Emperor Nero, his wife and family collapsed in tears, but Seneca had learnt to follow the charriot of life with resignation. As he calmly took the knife to his veins, he remarked – in a sentence we may be wise to repeat to ourselves as we read the news on certain particularly sad mornings – ‘What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.’

Alain de Botton is founder of The School of Life. www.alaindebotton.com

UncategorizedJack Dysonalain de botton, philosophy, school of life, stoicism, tsunami, writing Comments
The New York Hipster Trap

This photo of a hipster trap is allegedly from New York City.

Contents/bait: brightly-colored bike chain, American Spirit cigarettes, can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and plastic glasses. It just needs a Moleskine notebook to lure in the more hesitant prey.

(via)

UncategorizedJack DysonComment
Japan quake shifted earth on its axis

The magnitude-9.0 earthquake that struck Japan shifted the Earth on its axis and shortened the length of a day by a hair, U.S. scientists said. It also moved Japan's coastline, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The redistribution of mass caused by the quake tilted the Earth's axis 6.5 inches and shortened the day by a 1.8 millionths of a second, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory said.

It also made Japan about 13 feet wider than it was before, the geological survey said.

In addition, a 250-mile-long coastal section of Japan dropped in altitude by 2 feet, which let the tsunami travel farther and faster onto land, geological survey geophysicist Ross Stein was quoted by The New York Times as saying.

(via)

UncategorizedJack DysonComment
Dallas Clayton - warm fuzzy poetry update

Haven't checked his site much since I last blogged about it, but Dallas Clayton has some sweet new pieces out. I've put a couple here, but there's a link to his site at the end of this post: ===

THE BRINK

You know what’s in the ocean and that most of it, including the ocean itself, can kill you without concern.

But here you are on the shore all alone stripped down to nothing smile on your face charging toward the waves.

=== GROWN

It‘s a dismal day that day when your parents decide because of books they’ve read and teacher’s they’ve talked to that you are too old to keep taking baths with your friends.

No more bubbles splashing playing pretend submarines. Only washing yourself clean and thorough.

It’s a hopeful day the day that follows as you set out looking to make new friends the kind who will not care what their parents think and many years later will wander with you arm in arm in search of larger bathtubs and neverending bubbles.

===

TOURING SHOULD BE A MANDATORY HIGH SCHOOL CLASS

What good is it having access to all these hundreds and thousands of virtual friends if you don’t use that ability and that information to get in a van and travel the world meeting people face to face and learning what it’s really like to be where they’ve been?

=== PENNANCE

With a hotel pen I scratched all kinds of facts on the other side of that dollar bill ones about how many people I’ve punched and how many have punched me, their names and ages and reasons we were both so mad and how we felt afterward and if anyone threw up or had to go to the hospital or snitched.

I spent it on a snow cone flavored like tamarind. I didn’t know what that was when I first moved here but now I do and it’s delicious.

===

PASSION

As a teenager It is important to shake your fist at the gods to run as far and as fast as you can into the dark get lost, pass out, and wake up the next day with a volume of new and troubling goals and no plan whatsoever to help you achieve them.

As an adult it is important to look back at how hard your fist shook and how those gods still forgave you, because they had been there too, running and passing out, and now that it is all here upon you plan or no plan those goals don’t seem nearly as troubling.

===

His website is here, you should check it if you like these.

UncategorizedJack Dysonart, dallas clayton, poetry, writingComment
Nature raw in tooth and claw

I imagine it's instinctive, when you hear about natural disasters, to ask yourself what you would do or how you would cope. It taps into the same gene that makes men want to know about fighting and war, to find out once and for all whether, when the chips are down, you are a man or a mouse.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/21002844]

But then you see footage of things like the Japan tsunami, and the conversation takes a different turn. Early in the video above, as the wave starts out as a trickle, you see a car speeding away from it and think - yeah I could do that, I could drive away like a Hollywood car chase. If the water came faster I'd be sure to open the window enough that I didn't get trapped but stay in the car for protection, or I'd drive into a shop window and get on to the roof, or I'd jump on a scooter and just make it, or any number of scenarios.

Thirty seconds later, you realise that the person in that car, unless they are incredibly lucky, is not going to make it. Never mind the water; cars, lorries, boats and even houses are sweeping down the road faster than you can drive or run.

You can have as many daydreams as you want about movie-style dramatic escapes, but the bottom line is that they are just daydreams.

However brave you are, however swift and courageous, no matter what you do -- with some things you just don't stand a chance.

We spend thousands of years building societies and beliefs and buildings and more, but they can be swept away in minutes. So today, while it's still light, or tonight under the moon, just pop outside for a minute and look around you, and have a little think about all the tiny things you have that you don't even notice now because you take them for granted, and appreciate them. You might not always feel it, but on the whole you are incredibly, incredibly lucky.

===

Click here for an absolutely chilling series of "before and after" images of Sendai.

Click here to visit Google's disaster response page where you can make a donation.

===

This Taoist saying seems apt:

When you discover nature’s power to break through all obstacles, You will discover that this same power is inside of you.

UncategorizedJack Dysonearthquake, japan, tsunami, writingComment