On the frontiers of biology: plant communications

It's often assumed that plants boring, sedentary, and solitary organisms, but new research (or old research reexamined) changes that.  Plants communicate, the mount defenses against predators;  they seemingly act in concert with one another, though other hypotheses call into question the intentionality of such communication.

Quanta magazine has a recent article titled "The Secret Language of Plants" detailing some new research.

PBS's Nature has a full episode online- What Plants Talk About.

Both provide a fascinating look into a normally overlooked part of our world.

Cheap stratum 1 NTP server

A cool project for an IT person or someone with a Raspberry Pi: build a small stratum one NTP server.

Enterprise NTP servers with GPS modules can cost thousands.  A Raspberry Pi based NTP server is a small form factor inexpensive way to get GPS based NTP time.  Other good uses, especially at small sites, remote offices, or co-location facilities:

• DHCP
• Out-of-band/management network
• Performance monitoring, troubleshooting, packet capture

Birth Stars

The Joint Astronomy Centre at the University of Hawaii will map out a star whose light started traveling the month you were born. 

Amazingly, it can take thousands to millions of years for a photon to make it from the core of a sun to the surface, depending on many factors including density.  Once at the surface, outside the dense star, it travels at the speed of light.
Put in your birthday, and you can find a star whose light started its journey about the same time you did.  Visit the sight often, because the location of the star will change as you age.

Online LaTeX

LaTeX is a document markup language and the de-facto standard for writing research papers, especially where special formatting (such as math and chemical formulas) is needed.  It has a pretty steep learning curve, and if you don't really need to use it, its hard to justify learning for occasional use (or at least, that's how I've always felt about it). 

Enter WriteLaTeX, an online, real-time LaTex editor and collaboration site.

Fuzzycast

File under: things I wish I had time to play with AND things that should be used more widely.

Fuzzycast is a multicast distribution system that allows for pause, rewind, fast forward of Video on Demand (VoD) content.  Multicast is useful for one-to-many distribution of content, but generally must be watched in real time (as it streams) by the clients. 

Fuzzycast addresses these problems.

Pure Evil, but genius: 802.1X by-pass

Pwnie Express device also works in networks "protected" with 802.1X on wired ports.  It doesn't completely invalidate 802.1X port security.  As the saying goes--- if you have physical access to a device, it is insecure.  It's still a good way around 802.1X

Calendar simplicity = Calendar beauty

French design company has a simple way to track days of the month: Monthly Measure.  Something about the simplicity makes this appealing:

A wooden rule with 31 'day' notches and a metal cog with the days of the week (one side English, one side French). 

Cool optical illusion

Enjoy!

Stirling Engine to the rescue

Because NASA is running out of Plutonium-238, a new method of power generation must be found.  Enter a 200-year old design: the Stirling Engine.  With this design, engineers are about to increase efficiency of this dwindling fuel.  Granted it isn't exactly like the one pictured below, it's still cool to see this type of design being used

Mushrooms for landfills

Gizmodo has an interesting article about a mushroom that can exist soley on polyurethane, and live without oxygen (it's anaerobic). Might we finally be able to digest the indestructible plastic we've made?

Clock of the Long Now

Good summary article on how the Clock of the Long Now works.  This clock is designed to run for 10,000 and is being built in Texas.

Timescape

We live on a pretty cool planet, and thankfully, there are talented people to capture the amazing images.  A preview of Timescapes.

The Internet of Things: Streaming Data

Pachube is a site that allows users to stream data to and collect data from the site in real time.  Examples include sensors for radiation, temperature, and light level.  Often, microcontrollers like the Arduino are used to collect and transmit data.  The site offers are rich API along with online tools such as visualization and mapping.  Not sure exactly what I could use it for, but seems interesting.

Glass Steam Engine

Great video of an all-glass steam engine.  No seals were used- just well fitting glass.

Moore's Law: From this to that with an ENIAC

The ENIAC is considered the first general purpose, programmable, Turing-complete computer.  It was, quite literally, the size of a room:

For the machine's 50th anniversary, folks at the University of Pennsylvania implemented the entire machine on a single chip:

This chip is on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

Shot now, focus later.

Silicon Valley star-up Lytro is releasing a new kind of camera that will change the way pictures are taken: the company is calling it 'light-field' technology.  Rather than focus the image on a standard sensor, this technology also records the angle of the light which allows the picture to be refocus after the fact.

Its a little oddly shaped and has very few controls: on/off, shutter, and zoom.  The memory is fixed (no SD card).

An example of what you can do with this technology:

Same picture, different subject is put in focus.  With a regular camera, this would be two different pictures (good luck getting BOTH cats to stay in the same location).

The company has a photo gallery, with some of the pictures you can change the focus on.  There is a picture of a Nixue Tube clock


Here are a couple of articles:
Technology Review
CNet

Cool gadget

Better than nerd cufflinks, a kinetic ring:

File Under: things to buy

An SD HC card that has an integrated USB connector.  Useful for those times when you don't have a USB cable for your camera.

SanDisk has a similar product: Sandisk Ducati