davidgilbert

This is the picture I didn’t take of the girl sitting with her feet dangling in the pool, who finally plucked up courage to wade to the center of the pool. She stood there moving her arms in gentle swirls feeling the water coursing through her fingers, head lifted back. She was there for several minutes until she looked around, and noticed she was under adult-observation. Thinking a rule broken, she wandered safely back to the edge, the solitary moment transgressed.

non-Newtonian liquids aren’t your regular liquids. There are various types, all exhibiting different patterns of changing viscosity. Some behave like solids when stressed, and others more like liquids. Space Pen ink, and paints that stick to a brush when at rest but glide on easily when the brush is applied to a surface behave more liquid when stressed.

Some pretty common substances are non-Newtonian: ketchup, blood, yogurt, gravy, pie fillings, and cornstarch paste don’t follow the normal liquid model. This is also why you don’t want to struggle when you inevitibly get stuck in quicksand.

You can do some pretty weird stuff with non-Newtonian liquids. Excitable game show hosts can walk on them.

Common old cornstarch mixture, also known as an Oobleck is the DIY version of a non-Newtonian fluid. You can make it behave in a truely disturbingly organic fashion. Monsters are made of this. Mix up some cornstarch and water, put a metal tray on top of a sub-woofer, hold the tray down, and watch the fun.

Or simply mix some Oobleck in a bucket. Put your hands in, and it’s a fluid. Punch the surface of the liquid, and it’ll be a solid. Kind of like a liquid version of silly putty, which is also non-Newtonian.

Here’s the thing, see. When you wake up one fine morning, head out for a nice drive, and see a huge sandstorm moshing nearer, don’t drive towards it. Drive away. Fast. Unless you have a video recorder, and manage to capture this intense drive into the hugest, most ominous cloud of sand. Kind of “Blair Witch” how they get into the cloud, things go dark, and then the loudest, nothing. Dark. Movie ends…

https://www.liveleak.com/e/a94_1216779982

This is a video of a dinosaur on the loose in the LA Museum of Natural History. The overall effect is pretty compelling. The movements are very well controlled.

Not suprisingly, it’s not a ‘real’ robot. There’s a pupeteer inside controlling the action, with a lot of motorized assistance. What is suprising is that the on you saw above is the small version. Check out this video showing their construction, and a few of the larger models.

Destined to become a classic. And quite simply the most irritating melody ever recorded.

30-Jun-2008 Update: Today Netflix announced that they will not remove the profiles feature. This is excellent news. Now Netflix needs to revisit the internal process that allowed the initial decision to be made, managed, and announced in the way that it was.

Netflix have a really cool feature called Profiles. This lets you setup more than one queue for a single account. We use it so our kids can manage their own movie queue, separate from the parent queue. When the profile returns a movie to Netflix, the next movie in the profile queue is sent out. You can set the maximum number of movies allowed out at a time per profile. So the kids-profile gets one movie; the parent profile gets two :)

Plenty of reasons why this is a good system:

• No-one gets to hog the queue by front-loading all their movies.
• No-one gets to hold-up the queue by not watching the movie for two-weeks.
• Aside from maintaining family bliss, the other neat thing about profiles is that recommendations are based on profile. So my kids movie ratings don’t get mixed in with the parents movie ratings. Similarly movie recommendations are separate as well.
• Did I mention family bliss?

The only minor downside from a user perspective is that you need to specify which profile you’re using when you manage your queue – a simple set-it-and-forget-it pull-down list.

Well recently Netflix announced, that this feature will be removed in September. This appears to be a very popular feature across a very small but vocal cross-section of the Netflix user-base. So much so that there’s a petition asking Netflix to reconsider. (Yes, I signed it.)

A partial quote attempts to describe the reasoning:
Please know that the motivation is solely driven by keeping our service as simple and as easy to use as possible. Too many members found the feature difficult to understand and cumbersome, having to consistently log in and out of the website.

Well what to say. If it’s too cumbersome for those users, then either make the login process easier, or find a way to circumvent the issue altogether.

James Houston took on Radiohead’s Remix Challenge. He used a ZX Spectrum, a dot-matrix printer, an oscilloscope, and a scanner. Oh, and a hard-disk speaker array. Seriously cool.

This is Loc Jean Albert, inventor of the wing-suit, jumping off a mountain. As you do.

A picture paints a thousand words. Stands to reason that 200 words would be a pretty crappy picture. Not so. Imagine standing, camera in hand, but being so struck by the moment that you forgot to click. No photograph. Duh. Now imagine being able to paint that image with just 200 words. These words are better than the picture missed.