Play with gravity to make music

Just as I thought I was going to get more work done... I came across a site I feel compelled to blog about: Kepler's Orrery. This site generates music based upon gravity equations while showing balls bouncing around and interacting with objects.
You have to try it to understand how cool the music is, but this picture will give you a taste of the visuals. Amazing!

Crowd Farms

I just read about a cool concept - a crowd farm. A crowd farm could take the energy of people in a crowd catching a train or enjoying a rock concert and turn mechanical energy produced by their movement into electricity. This could work by having blocks of floor that move against each other as people move over them.

Apparently Thomas Edison was way ahead of us on this one, with a turnstile in front of his house that pumped water into his holding tank. The possibilities are endless for creative use of mechanical energy generated by movement. Why not put bored or exercising people to work generating power?

After a quick Google search, I see that a gym in Hong Kong is already powering part of its lighting systems in this way, the Japanese are testing a similar application for use in a train station, and merry-go-rounds in South Africa help pump water to rural areas. When I first heard about the one laptop per child project, I recall that they were planning to have hand cranks and pull strings to generate electricity for the laptops, and that often the towns that do currently have a desktop would have a bike to power them.

I can see the future of gyms, playgrounds, and public transit stations just waiting for the right people to promote this. I wonder if Google has thought of integrating some of these ideas into their carbon-neutral plan...

GrandPerspective - Your files visualized

Today, I wanted to find out how I had already used more than a third of my relatively new MacBook Pro's 120 gigabyte hard drive. I decided to seek out a nice way to visualize my file system. GrandPerspective turned out to be the resolution of my quest.

You can see from the visualization and the labels I added that the largest chunk was of course, the 10 or so gigabytes I have allocated for Windows Vista. The next largest chunk was my first iMovie project - a video of myself using a coworker's paper prototype. Most of the rest was simply system files and applications, Adobe and iWorks being some of the larger chunks. I suppose it is about what I expected, but I am happy in any case that it appears I have a while before I should worry about filling up the whole thing, whether it be with applications, documents, or media.

All things considered, it is useful and quite pretty. Reminds me of a square version of the Sierpinski fractal I made once. I'll post more about fractals another time.

We live in a Fast Food Nation (sadly)

I took a nice break from work last week to spend time with family and friends, and I also had time to finish both Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Turkle's Life on the Screen.

Fast Food Nation was a genuinely informative look at the fast food industry overall. If I weren't already a vegetarian, it would have me seriously rethinking my lifestyle. As is, it has convinced me to never support McDonald's in any way, if at all possible; I won't even buy the veggie burgers that are surprisingly served at the one in Fairfield, Iowa. (I will admit to eating a Burger King veggie burger in an airport once.)

Fast food is all about low wages, unsafe working conditions, frozen foods created and reheated on assembly lines, corporately owned farms, and of course, profit, profit, profit. None of this is entirely new to me, but it helps that I have actually read much of what I consider to be evidence of the unethical nature of most fast food places. There were a few potential signs of hope for a better fast food future, however. The successful chain In-N-Out Burger still peels and cuts its own potatoes for fries, never freezes its food, uses no preservatives, and pays decent wages, making it a better option for the ethical consumer than many alternatives. Another flicker of hope lies in the potential for public demand for change; McDonald's does respond to bad media, as in the case of meeting Greenpeace's demands for better sandwich packaging by finally changing to paper wrappers.

Overall, definitely a well researched and informative book that I would recommend, especially to those who frequently consume fast food. Seeking to understand economic choices that we make in our every day lives is an important part of becoming an ethical consumer.

I'll post again later about Turkle's book for those more interested in the HCI side of my rambling blog.

Currently reading: Shadow of the Hegemon by Orson Scott Card (Sequel to Ender's Shadow and I suppose Ender's Game.)