A smart phone controlled, energy saving add-on for your bike wheel.
Read more at the Guardian.
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Archive for the science Category
MIT re-invents the wheel, for bicycles
Posted in art and design, science, videos with tags bicycles, bikes, Copenhagen, Guardian, iphone, MIT, technology on December 17, 2009 by absurddelightFrom Baldness to Boldness
Posted in accidental art, business, science with tags cure for baldness, hair plugs, rogain, tattoo on June 16, 2009 by absurddelightGoing bald is a drag. And until the big pharma companies muster the resources away from impotence towards hairline recessions, shiney headed men will just have to endure hats and hokey schemes.
And here’s a doozy.
Who exactly is the target audience for this ad?
Tattoo that hairline back into the the crisp fresh-from-the-barber eye catcher it used to be. Convenient and classy, all at once. Details, contact info, and close-up pic below.
The BBC Meets Animal Planet
Posted in news and media, science with tags cormorant, eel, pets and animals, wild animals on June 15, 2009 by absurddelightThis is huge news folks. International sensation. The venerable BBC is reporting on an amazing victory bound to inspire millions: a little bird ate a big eel.
Here’s the official headline:
Bird swallows eel after struggle.
What exactly these pictures show, we’re not sure, but we can pretty well guess that without them, there wouldn’t have been this scoop at all.
A hungry bird was seen struggling to eat a 4ft long (1.2m) eel for 20 minutes before swallowing it whole on the banks of a city river.
Eyewitnesses said the eel was almost twice the size of the cormorant which was fishing in the River Taff near the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff.
One woman said the eel coiled itself round the bird’s neck causing it to drop and re-catch it four times.
Read more eye-witness Bird vs Eel reports at the BBC here.
Follow Absurd Delight on Twitter for links we’re too lazy to blog about here.
If Only – 7 Deadly Sins Map of America
Posted in art and design, neato, science with tags Data Visualization, geography, Kansas State University, Lust, Maps, Seven Deadly Sins, sin index on June 5, 2009 by absurddelightA clever researcher at Kansas State University clearly needed something catchy to map for a geographer’s conference. And he picked a doozie, conceptually anyway.
The geographer(s) mapped all the rest of the seven deadly sins too. Gluttony is pretty much an evenly distributed nationwide character trait. California is a chart topper in a few categories. Various other cliches are also “confirmed.” But really, isn’t a mapped “sin index” (that’s what these academics named their data), just foolish fun with meaningless numbers? Yes. Yes it is.
This is a precision party trick — rigorous mapping of ridiculous data. – Las Vegas Sun.
ChartPorn was kind enough to synthesize the methodology. Read more »
Cadillac WTF Concept Car
Posted in art and design, science, WTF with tags Cadillac, concept cars, Loren Kulesus, sustainable fuels on March 31, 2009 by absurddelightHere’s a sick concept car dreamed up by (insane?) designer Loren Kulesus for Cadillac‘s 100th birthday. It’s called the World Throrium Fuel Vehicle … right the WTF! So, he says, he wanted to make a car that would last another 100 years.
This vehicle was designed with high-quality materials that are build [sic] to resist 100-years of daily use. There are redundancies built for all the major systems of the vehicle so even if something were to fail on the vehicle it would continue to function. This is why the vehicle has 24 wheels with individual internal induction motors. The vehicle would require the tires to be adjusted every 5 years, but no material would need to be added or subtracted.
In the pic, you can see that each wheel is really six separate parallel wheels. Pretty smart really.
Also… Read more »
Guess What It Is?
Posted in accidental art, science with tags earth from above, geography, photos on March 27, 2009 by absurddelight
Newsflash: The Universe Exists
Posted in science with tags hardy's paradox, philosophy, photons on March 14, 2009 by absurddelightScientists have just made a major breakthrough: reality is real! (For you geeks and overachievers, this has to do with Hardy’s Paradox.)
Mildly Relevant CC licensed graphic called "Scheme of Two-photon excitation microscopy" by user:Akira.pl.
Here’s the baffling excerpt that made me want to post this:
“The stunning result, though, was that in some places the number of photons was actually less than zero. … The weird things [Hardy's Paradox] predicted are real and they can, indeed, only be seen by people who are not looking. Dr Yokota and his colleagues went so far as to call their results “preposterous”.” – Source: The Economist
From what I can tell, this discovery can be summed up as follows for Boeotians like me: we now know that if a quantum-mechanical tree (a photon) falls in the quantum-mechanical forest (um, a lab?) it makes a sound (poof) even if no scientist is around to hear it.
BONUS: Check out the abstract of the scientific study that “discovered” reality is real. In four sentences I got confused six times by phrases like: “entangled meter state in polarization degrees of freedom.” The fun part is that the words “spooky” and “preposterous” are also in there.
