Born out of the demented mind of Fabien Cappello, this oldschool typewriter has each of its keys wired to play a different musical note as you type. And while we give it a 10 for creativity, the device doesn’t rate very high in our mind when it comes to melodiousness, especially if you use it in the usual matter.
[Via PopSci]
Ok, this might not be a very efficient way to start a fire, but it sure is one of the most fun we’ve seen!
We humans think we are mighty clever when we come up with amusing captions for pictures of cute kitties. It turns out they’ve got us wrapped around their little claws.
Researchers in Britain have discovered cats are able to tailor their purring sounds to manipulate humans. There are significant differences between their ‘standard’ purring, which humans often find comforting, and the sounds they make when they want feeding.
The “feed me” purr incorporates a sound with a similar frequency to a human baby crying. The result is that people unwittingly feel obliged to respond. It’s not clear whether this is because it stirs our natural parental instincts, or because it is such an urgent and unpleasant sound that we feel obliged to respond to silence it. However, the trickery even works on people who don’t own cats.
The trick is pulled off by the cat using the muscles surrounding its vocal chords to alter the pitch of the sounds it makes. This technique – which isn’t possible in most animals – is why cats are able to purr. In the process, the cat’s vocal chords get freed up to make high pitched noises which means they can make both sounds at once, allowing the vocal chords to embed a cry in an otherwise comforting purr. Were the cat to simply make the crying sound, humans would be more likely to simply shoo it away.
Dr Karen McComb of the University of Sussex asked cat trainers to record the sounds of 10 cats in different situations, then tested the sounds on 50 volunteers to see how they responded. She told the BBC that while a normal purr contains a quiet cry, the cats appeared to have learned to intentionally exaggerate the cry once they realized it would get a response.
Galatic Mail: A 3D short produced by French Animator Douglas Lassance in collaboration with Jonathan Vuillemin.
Galactic Mail is a short film I made in collaboration with my fellow friend Jonathan Vuillemin aka Motraboy. It was produced by The Mill which basically gave us some time to create it. We spent around four months working on it together from storyboards to compositing. Because of the time we had to complete the piece, we went for a different approach than Sigg Jones. On one hand, we had to make things simple and turn it at our advantage. On the other hand, I was keen to experiment a lot of things I had thought about using the 3D media. To me Sigg Jones was a proper global illumination shaded film, something we wanted to do at the time. I like to call it the “classic” way of making full 3D animation, involving proper lighting, shading with texture channels for bump, reflection, etc… With Galactic Mail, It wasn’t about generating impressive 3D renders, but more about the pictures themself, composition, colors and overall coherence of the style. I had this idea of making a movie with self-illuminated textures where all the shadows would be painted in already, and then combined with a “sliced” shadow system where you could really isolate how stuff are going to look when it’s in the shadow or not, nothing physically correct, but pretty controllable.
Composed by beatmaker and fledgling coder Dale Chase, Coder Girl is a funny little piece of nerdcore rap that we’d like to dedicate to all the coder girls out there!
A few priceless lines:
Darn! I never thought coder-speak could sound so dirty!
It was a great time to be alive, to watch history being made. President Kennedy said it in 1962 at Rice University.
We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.
By Jimmy Rogers (@me)
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
If you’ve ever written a blog post or made a website, one of the most onerous tasks is finding good graphics without copy protection. Text-only content is generally frowned upon because the increased popularity of the internet has somewhat “raised the bar” for the average blogger. Readers expect some sort of layout.
Well fear not, Google has FINALLY come around and, according to the Google Blog, offers Creative Commons search within Google Image Search. Other search services for CC have been created in the past (such as the one provided by Creative Commons itself), but many bloggers prefer using Google’s simple Image Search. Now the only question is: How does it work?
Try it and you might get something as cute as this (a CC image)!
After testing out the service a little bit, I find it a little lacking. The search results don’t seem as robust as other searches for CC I’ve tried in the past. I’m guessing that like most new Google things, this will eventually work better than the rest, but right now they are still fleshing out their algorithm. I still anticipate that this will be a GREAT tool for bloggers all over!
[“Red squirrel with pronounced winter ear tufts in the Dusseldorf Hofgarten” image from Ray Eye, Wikimedia Commons, CC]
[Via MUO]
I used to think that the 90’s was one of the best decades ever… now… I’m not so sure anymore.
Drug-resistant bacteria kills, even in top hospitals. But now tough infections like staphylococcus and anthrax may be in for a surprise. In the following video presentation, Nobel-winning chemist Kary Mullis, who watched a friend die when powerful antibiotics failed, unveils a radical new cure that shows extraordinary promise.
We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.