Back on March we showed you Michael Blake’s musical interpretation of pi just before Pi Day. He’s back at it again, turning another mathematical constant to music, just in time for Tau Day (6.28).
Tau (?) equals 2? or 6.28… For this video, Blake uses only the first 126 digits.
What do you think, Geeks? I love the toy piano’s tinkly little noise. If you want to download What Tau Sounds Like, you can do that here.
Cable boxes and DVRs consume more power over time than a fridge, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. The stat is something of a stretch when you look at the details, but does under-pin a more important point for manufacturers.
Despite some headlines, the NRDC fridge comparison doesn’t refer simply to a set-top box, but rather a combination of a “typical” receiver box and a separate DVR, both of which are HD compatible. It also means using a new fridge-freezer that has earned the ENERGY STAR rating. In these circumstances, the TV boxes use a combined 446 kWh per year, compared with 415 for the fridge.
So for those of you with an old fridge, low-energy TV equipment, or a cable service that has the receiver and DVR in a single unit, the fridge is still using more power.
Precise figures aside, the important point is that TV boxes use more power over the course of the year mainly because they are usually operating continuously. Roughly two-thirds of all energy consumed by boxes comes when the user isn’t watching TV and the box isn’t recording a show. That leads to the somewhat counter-intuitive conclusion that overall a DVR consumes more power than a TV screen. (The New York Times puts it even more powerfully: unused TV boxes across the country use more power than the entire state of Maryland.)
The main point the NRDC makes in response to these numbers is to highlight the fact that, as a generalization, US manufacturers produce set-top boxes in a way that means they consume the same, or almost as much, power when not in use. It contrasts this to some European manufacturers and TV service providers who ship boxes that by default switch into a low power-state when not in use, for example after a certain period without any remote control activity, issuing an on-screen warning before switching down.
The problem is that when the box comes back to full power, it can take a minute or more to become fully active and responsive, particularly if there are a lot of channels and a lot of information required for the electronic program guide. One manufacturer notes having such features available in its boxes but has been asked to disable them by US service providers.
And by way of full disclosure, although I have such features available on my DVR, I have them switched off simply because adding yet another audio-visual box to my collection was enough of a tough sell to my wife without having to convince her that waiting up to a minute to be able to watch TV after switching on was an acceptable compromise!
deviantART user ferret42 has a small series of deviations featuring the holy grail of geek mashups: Star Wars plus Lord of the Rings.
Check out the rest of his work on deviantART.
Cosplayer Giorgia Vecchini does Elektra, the Marvel Universe’s most fearsome kunoichi.
Elektra has mastered many Japanese combat forms, including posing with her sai in shallow water. (Does this count as Sui-ren?)
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"Arwen works at the Rivendell Fair-Trade Coffee Shop because of course she does."
Noelle Stevenson is kind of my hero right now. The Broship of the Rings is exactly what it sounds like–a modern take on LotR featuring hipsters, bros, and an unfortunate fixie accident. Check it out on How Are You I’m Fine Thanks.
Say goodbye to the days when we all knew dinosaurs were cold-blooded wonderlizards who lazed about trying to warm up in the midday sun. U.S. and German scientists have developed a technique for accurately measuring the body temperature of dinosaurs. The study of 11 fossilized sauropod teeth reveal that the Brachiosaurus ran a toasty 38.2ºC (about 100.8ºF) while the Camasaurus, a slightly smaller but related sauropod, tipped the mercury to 35.7ºC (96.3ºF).
So what does this mean? John Eiler, a professor of geology and geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and co-author of the study, weighs in on the implications.
“It’s reasonable to surmise that their enzymes were working efficiently, because they were at a temperature that we know that animal enzymes operate efficiently at and therefore they should have been more vigorous,” he said. “What we don’t know is whether they had the metabolic machinery to regenerate energy efficiently the way mammals and birds do, and therefore have endurance.”
Given this kind of development in dinosaur biology, I think it’s clearer all the time that we barely understand anything about our favorite prehistoric creatures. Of course, every big breakthrough like this puts us one step closer to a pet miniature Stegosaurus, and I’m all for that.
