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Curious Cat Science and Egineering blog full tag cloud
I think we might have another young engineering on our hands, with the right training 
She knows what she wants and isn’t stymied by constraints that would probably blind most of us to the possibilities (even if we were her size). Quite a fun webcast: the reactions of the people are great.
How To Beat The Claw Game - Watch more free videos
Related: Science for Kids - Fun Physics Game - What Kids can Learn - Sarah, aged 3, Learns About Soap - Ministry of Silly Walks - Robin Williams Saves the Day
From the excellent Piled Higher and Deeper comic strip by Jorge Cham, www.phdcomics.com. Like many of the best comics (Dilbert, xkcd) PhD is authored by an engineer: Jorge Cham got his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, and was a full-time Instructor and researcher at the California Institute of Technology.
Related: What Makes Scientists Different - The Joy of Work - Programmers
Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research. This is another awesome combination of technology, distributed problem solving, science education…
Essentially the game works by allowing the person to make some decisions then the computer runs through some processes to determine the result of those decisions. It seems the human insight of what might work provides an advantage to computers trying to calculate solutions on their own. Then the results are compared to the other individuals working on the same protein folding problem and the efforts are ranked.
This level of interaction is very cool. SETI@home, Rosetta@home and the like are useful tools to tap the computing resources of millions on the internet. But the use of human expertise really makes fold.it special. And you can’t help but learn by playing. In addition, if you are successful you can gain some scientific credit for your participation in new discoveries.
Related: Expert Foldit Protein Folder, JSnyder - Researchers Launch Online Protein Folding Game - New Approach Builds Better Proteins Inside a Computer - Phun Physics - Protein Knots
The site includes some excellent educational material on proteins and related material. What is a protein:
Spore is the hugely anticipated game from Wil Wright (the creator of Sims). In this webcast he discusses the science behind Spore. The creature creator was released this week and the full game will be released soon. Spore has been doing a great job marketing the product and they continue to do so with lots of material on You Tube including the Spore Ultimate Dance Contest.
The idea of the game is to design creatures that then go out into the world and interact and evolution takes it course. It looks very cool.
Related: Become a Computer Game Programmer - VirtuSphere - science gadgets and gifts - Awesome Cat Cam
Video of humanoid robot football (soccer) competition in German, April 2008. They are a bit slow but it sure looks like this is a fun area to watch the improvement of robot engineering.
Related: RoboCup 2006 - The Science of the Football Swerve - Robo-One Grand Championship - Toyota Robots
I first wrote about the Cool Cat Cam about a year ago. Next, I interviewed the cat cam engineer. And
a few months ago I posted some photos by Fritz the Cat. Now enjoy some video catcat webcasts: Fritz in Aktion mit Catcam mit Musik - Catcam Smaka takes photos/Video! - Cat wears spy camera, makes film - Mr. Lee CatCam im MDR Aussenseiter-Spitzenreiter And then order your cat cam.
Orangutan attempts to hunt fish with spear:
Cool. The photos is from a new book on orangutans, The Thinkers Of The Jungle, which also includes the first photograph of an orangutan swimming.
Related: Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation UK - Bornean Clouded Leopard - Savanna Chimpanzees Hunt with Tools - First Lungless Frog Found in Borneo - Chimps Used Stone “Hammers” - more fun posts on the blog
Building A Calculating Machine Using Lego Pieces by Andrew Carol
In the mid-19th century, people began to design machines to automate this error prone process. Many machines of various designs were eventually built but, the most advanced and famous of these was not. The Babbage Difference Engine.
Because of engineering issues as well as political and personal conflict the Babbage Difference engines construction had to wait until 1991 when the Science Museum in London decided to build the Babbage Difference Engine No.2 for an exhibit on the history of computers.
Babbage’s design could evaluate 7th order polynomials to 31 digits of accuracy. I set out to build a working Difference Engine using standard LEGO parts which could compute 2nd or 3rd order polynomials to 3 or 4 digits. I have built two generations of Difference Engines and am designing the third version now.
Related: Rubick’s Cube Solving Lego Mindstorms Robot - Lego Autopilot Project Update - Open Source for LEGO Mindstorms - Donald Knuth, Computer Scientist
fritz-cam by Fritz the cat:
Related: The Engineer That Made Your Cat a Photographer - Incredible Cat Cam - Mr. Lee CatCam - Leaping Tigress
See many more great photos by fritz at fritz-cam.
Once again I have created a group on the ESPN NCAA Basketball Tournament Challenge for curiouscat college basketball fans. To participate, go to the curiouscat ESPN group and make your picks.
This year we also have a second challenge, using sportsline, that rewards picking upsets. So those that enjoy the tournament please join the fun. The password for this one is cat
Go Badgers and Go Davidson,
New Zealand dolphin rescues beached whales:
The bottlenose dolphin, called Moko by local residents, is well known for playing with swimmers off Mahia beach on the east coast of the North Island.
…
Mr Smith said he felt fortunate to have witnessed the extraordinary event, and was delighted for the whales, as in the past he has had to put down animals which have become beached. He said that the whales have not been seen since, but that the dolphin had returned to its usual practice of playing with swimmers in the bay.
“I shouldn’t do this I know, we are meant to remain scientific,” Mr Smith said, “but I actually went into the water with the dolphin and gave it a pat afterwards because she really did save the day.”
Related: Polar Bears and Huskies - Female Sharks Can Reproduce Alone - Leaping Tigress - Deer Rescued 1.5 miles Offshore
Dino-Era Feathers Found Encased in Amber
Very cool. Related: Nigersaurus - Dinosaur Remains Found with Intact Skin and Tissue
Dinosaur Comics: “programming is for folks who are thrilled when a computer reminds them they’re missing a bracket or a semicolon”
Related: A Career in Computer Programming - Computer Game Programmers - Wanna Play Work (comic) - What Makes Scientists Different (comic)
Very cool. Get your Phun (2D physics software) for free. Phun is a Master of Science Theises by Computing Science student Emil Ernerfeldt.
Some other very cool stuff: Cool Mechanical Simulation System - Scratch from MIT - What Kids can Learn - Lego Autopilot First Flight - Awesome Cat Cam
And now for another something completely different: Robin Williams Saves the Day at TED When Tech Fails
That’s when a voice behind me spoke up, presumably a heckler, and began speaking loudly as if he were conducting a live news feed, joking that he was reporting live from TED
…
The crowd by then had realized it was Williams. Encouraged by their reaction, he continued reporting to some unseen BBC anchorman from his seat: “Well, they said they found the wire, but it’s not plugged in.”
Williams was then invited to take the stage and the crowd roared. He spent the next ten minutes or so riffing on Stephen Hawking (who spoke at TED earlier in the day from Cambridge, England) and the end of the universe — which will take place “exactly in one hour,” he said, looking at his watch.
He joked again about the technical glitch, indicating that although the BBC wasn’t working, audience members “with their phones are going, ‘I’m getting all of this!’” And it was true. Dozens of people were capturing the stand-up act on their phones.
He riffed about a new Apple product called the “iWhy?” and a few seconds later said he had just one question about the British royal family: “All that money and no dental plan,” he deadpanned, which got a lot of laughs and a few sympathetic nods toward the BBC presenter sitting behind him (who appeared to have perfectly fine dental hygiene).
He didn’t spare panelist Brin and Google, noting that if you walk into Google you see everyone in front of their computer sitting on exercise balls, “which I think is how they’re hatching new employees.”
Related: Macavity’s a Mystery Cat - Ministry of Silly Walks
Now back to your regularly scheduled science: Your Inner Fish
Jules Verne predicted cars would run on air. The Air Car is making that a reality. The car is powered by compressed air which certainly seems like an interesting idea. Air car ready for production:
The car is said to have a driving range of 125 miles so by my calculation it would cost about 1.6 cents per mile. A car that gets 31 mpg would use 4 gallons to go 124 miles. At $3 a gallon for gas, the cost is $12 for fuel or about 9.7 cents per mile. I didn’t notice anything about maintenance costs. I don’t see any reason why the Air Car would cost more to maintain than a normal car.
The air car was named one of Time magazine’s best inventions of the 2007.
Five-seat concept car runs on air
Related: The History of Compressed Air Vehicles - Car Elevator (for parking) - Electric Automobiles - VW Phaeton manufacturing plant
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