Marvellous MRI music vid

Hooray for CNET!  not only do I use them whenever I’m looking at new tech to buy, but they’ve also pointed me at an extraordinary music video. British musician Sivu (James Page) spent 2-3 hours holed up in an MRI machine at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London for his new single, ‘Better Man Than He’. […]

Competition for Wellington infographics makers

This post is aimed at those of you who make infographics, or are interested in them, or know someone who does/is. Think of it as a spreading of the word… On Feb 16th, Contribeauty (‘turning data into design’) and Pledgeme.co.nz (NZ’s own version of Kickstartr) are going to be holding an infographics competition. The second […]

A very kitchenesque CT scanner

From awesomely-educational website Hack A Day comes a particularly wonderful,  if oddly gruesome, piece of science/tech hacking.   Mad chap Ben Krasnow has built a ‘build something mad on your kitchen table’-type version of a CT scanner. CT scanners, as you will remember, take X-rays of an object and then put them all together to […]

More microscope pr0n winners announced

I’ve posted before about the Nikon Small World’s microscopy/photography competition. Today, however, focuses on another Maker of Excellent Photographic Equipment - Olympus. For the last 10 years (says the website), Olympus has been sponsoring an international microscopy (i.e.photographing things with a microscope) competition - The Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition - and this year’s winners have […]

Your LinkedIn profile, visualised

Data visualisation site/service visual.ly has just announced, in concert with Kelly Services, the release of a new Create feature. As I’ve previously mentioned, visual.ly allows one to create a number of prepackaged infographics, and this appears to be the newest one - the ability to plug in your LinkedIn profile and get an infographic out. […]

RIP Patrick Moore - thank you for the wonder

Sir Patrick Alfred Caldwell-Moore, CBE, FRS, FRAS, the self-taught (i.e. amateur) astronomer who inspired millions to look upwards at the heavens, has died aged 89.  Sir Patrick Moore. Credit: The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/aug/31/small-ask-young-readers-questions   From the Telegraph obituary: …Sir Patrick Moore, who has died aged 89, became better known than any of the academics in his field […]

Google+ rolls out Google Communities

Well, earlier today (depending on where you are, of course), Google+ started rolling out Google Communities. The service is brand new, so I don’t have much of an opinion about it yet.  I’ve just joined a makers/hackers/engineers/artists community, as these are things I think are cool and I reckon it’ll be a really interesting example […]

Amazing Mad Men smoking/drinking data visualisations

The visual.ly website is a great place to watch for infographics and data visualisations of all sorts*, and a recent one, brought to my attention by excellent publication Fast Company, is particularly boggling. In the words of its creators, it’s Analysis of characters’ bad behaviours in the TV Series Mad Men during the first season […]

DeSTEMber is here!

A quick note, today, to make sure that you all, dear readers, are aware of and following/taking part in #deSTEMber. What is it, you ask?  Well, the Google Science Fair peeps have teamed up with girlstart, with the stated aim being to get people more actively interested in STEM (science, technology, engineering, maths). It’s going […]

Sorting algorithms explained through folk dance

Yep, you read that correctly. This morning, I was introduced to the video below - quick-sort as demonstrated through Hungarian folk dancing. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywWBy6J5gz8[/youtube] Hell, even the youtube _comments_ are saner and less nonsensical, so this has GOT to be geeky stuff. It’s also, of course, a very good, and clear, explanation of what’s going on, […]