Posted by Benjamin Roudenis on May 29, 2010 0 comments
Version 1.0 of the STIX Fonts was released May 24, 2010. The initial set of 23 OpenType fonts is now available for download.
Version 1.1, which will include fonts packaged for use with Microsoft Office applications, is scheduled for release by the end of 2010. Version 1.2, which will include Type 1 fonts for use with LaTeX, will follow in 2011.
The mission of the Scientific and Technical Information Exchange (STIX) font creation project is the preparation of a comprehensive set of fonts that serve the scientific and engineering community in the process from manuscript creation through final publication, both in electronic and print formats. Toward this purpose, the STIX fonts will be made available, under royalty-free license, to anyone, including publishers, software developers, scientists, students, and the general public.
The STIX mission will be fully realized when:
Fully hinted PostScript Type 1 and TrueType font sets have been created
All characters/glyphs have been incorporated into Unicode representation or comparable representation and browsers include program logic to fully utilize the STIX font set in the electronic representation of scholarly scientific documents
By making the fonts freely available, the STIX project hopes to encourage the development of applications that make use of these fonts. In particular, the STIX project will create a TeX implementation that TeX users can install and configure with minimal effort.
Posted by Benjamin Roudenis on May 26, 2010 0 comments
At the University of Oklahoma, researchers captured unprecedented high-resolution radar data during the May 10, 2010, tornadoes using one of the most advanced weather radars in the world.
“This unique polarimetric data set is likely to reveal new discoveries about tornado genesis and severe storms for years to come,” said the Director of OU’s Atmospheric Radar Research Center, Robert D. Palmer.
Palmer’s team is currently processing the data using advanced techniques developed at OU and preparing it for distribution.
“The close proximity of the tornadoes to the OU radar has produced data with fine details of the storms never seen before with any radar.”
Located on the OU Research Campus within walking distance of the National Weather Center, the C-band, polarimetric, research weather radar known as OU-PRIME (Polarimetric Radar for Innovations in Meteorology and Engineering) was built to provide OU students and faculty with a platform for research and education in the field of radar meteorology.
Posted by Benjamin Roudenis on May 23, 2010 1 comment
Scientists in China have succeeded in teleporting information between photons further than ever before. They transported quantum information over a free space distance of 16 km (10 miles), much further than the few hundred meters previously achieved, which brings us closer to transmitting information over long distances without the need for a traditional signal.
Quantum teleportation is not the same as the teleportation most of us know from science fiction, where an object (or person) in one place is “beamed up” to another place where a perfect copy is replicated. In quantum teleportation two photons or ions (for example) are entangled in such a way that when the quantum state of one is changed the state of the other also changes, as if the two were still connected. This enables quantum information to be teleported if one of the photons/ions is sent some distance away.
In previous experiments the photons were confined to fiber channels a few hundred meters long to ensure their state remained unchanged, but in the new experiments pairs of photons were entangled and then the higher-energy photon of the pair was sent through a free space channel 16 km long. The researchers, from the University of Science and Technology of China and Tsinghua University in Beijing, found that even at this distance the photon at the receiving end still responded to changes in state of the photon remaining behind. The average fidelity of the teleportation achieved was 89 percent.
Posted by Benjamin Roudenis on May 21, 2010 0 comments
BBC published an interview with a video game developer named Lazlow, who offered these interesting comments:
Our games are not designed for young people. If you’re a parent and buy one of our games for your child you’re a terrible parent. We design games for adults because we’re adults. There’s a lot of kids games out there that we’re not interested in playing. Just like you enjoy watching movies and TV shows with adult themes and language and violence that’s the kind of thing we seek to produce.
Later he continues:
If you tell a gritty crime drama with violence and profanity and call it The Sopranos you’re handed a load of awards to put up on the shelf. You do the same and call it a video game and you’ll have certain organizations up in arms.
Posted by Benjamin Roudenis on May 12, 2010 0 comments
Darryl Carpenter came up with the idea of using hay to soak up the oil spill from the ocean, while driving to a job site last Monday. The next minute he was on the phone with sub-contractor Goodson to ask: “Can you fill a large pan with water and oil, then grab a handful of hay and stir it in? Strain out the hay, then call me back and tell me what’s left in the pan.
Eureka! Carpenter had found a solution. Goodson called back elated to say: “You’re not going to believe how this works!” The hay had soaked up all of the oil in the pan. The water looked clear again. The Walton County Sheriff’s real-time video confirms this.
Donald Sensing at Sense of Events says the numbers just don’t work when you factor the area covered by the oil spill and volume of oil in the water. Visit his webite to see the math.
Posted by Benjamin Roudenis on May 10, 2010 0 comments
Shooting lasers at the sky can make the germ of a raincloud, a new study shows. In an experiment that smacks of science fiction, scientists used a high-powered laser to squeeze water from air, both indoors and out.
. . . . .
“This is the first time that a laser was used to condense water from both laboratory experiments and from the atmosphere,” says Jérôme Kasparian of the University of Geneva, a coauthor of the study. The work appeared in the May 2 Nature Photonics.
. . . . .
“It’s just like when you take a shower with hot water — it’s very humid in your bathroom, but it’s not raining,” Kasparian says. Water droplets need a surface to condense on, like a mirror in a bathroom or a speck of dust or pollen in the atmosphere.
. . . . .
Kasparian and his colleagues tested this idea by shooting a high-powered infrared laser into a cloud chamber. The laser shot extremely short pulses of intense light, which each carrying several terawatts — or a trillion watts — of energy.
The view fogged up immediately. Droplets about 50 micrometers in diameter formed first, and grew to about 80 micrometers in diameter over the next three seconds. “The effect in the cloud chamber was very spectacular and visible by bare eye,” Kasparian says. “We expected an effect, definitely. But that magnitude was pretty much a surprise.”
Next, the researchers took the laser out in the backyard to try it on the sky. They rolled the laser, called “Teramobile” for its terawatt power and its mobility, onto the lawn behind the physics building at the Free University of Berlin on several nights in the fall of 2008. The clouds, if they formed, would be too distant to see with the naked eye, so the team used a second laser to confirm the cloudy view.
“It also worked quite well in the free atmosphere,” Kasparian says. “That was quite surprising, and a very good surprise.”
Posted by Benjamin Roudenis on May 8, 2010 0 comments
The TAP3 can be used as a personal music player (by plugging in your headphones to the device), plays in ordinary compact cassette players, and can be connected to your computer and loaded with more songs via mini-USB (the device’s lithium-ion battery is also charged this way).
TAP3 is hand-finished with a yellow stripe, the sleeve inkjet printed, scored and hand cut, and the outer case is made from 100% recycled polypropylene in Scarborough.
Each device is numbered and constructed to order.
The TAP3 device comes with the dadahack album TAP3 pre-loaded on a custom 2gb SD-card.
Posted by Benjamin Roudenis on May 3, 2010 0 comments
A semisubmersible drilling platform called the Deepwater Horizon located about 50 miles southeast of the Mississippi Delta experienced a fire and explosion at approximately 11 p.m. CDT on April 20. Subsequently, oil began spilling out into the Gulf of Mexico and efforts to contain the spill continue today. NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellite imagery has captured the spill in between cloudy days.
On April 29, the MODIS image on the Terra satellite captured a wide-view natural-color image of the oil slick (outlined in white) just off the Louisiana coast. The oil slick appears as dull gray interlocking comma shapes, one opaque and the other nearly transparent. Sunglint — the mirror-like reflection of the sun off the water — enhances the oil slick’s visibility. The northwestern tip of the oil slick almost touches the Mississippi Delta.
Credit: NASA/Earth Observatory/Jesse Allen, using data provided courtesy of the University of Wisconsin’s Space Science and Engineering Center MODIS Direct Broadcast system.
Posted by Benjamin Roudenis on May 2, 2010 0 comments
There are two parts to Martin Skelly’s Playlist Player: the player, and the record box containing five different colored covers. Once the playlists are chosen and synced to the player with a memory stick, the user customizes the outside of the sleeve with artwork of their choice. It could be photos of a memorable night or person or typed and hand drawn tracklists. Once the record is placed on the player, the music begins and the outer ring of lights illuminates. As the playlists plays rings of light visible through the translucent record move towards the centre of the disc, like a needle tracking on a record. These lights represent time and not the number of tracks, meaning your music must be enjoyed from start to finish with no distractions like the temptation to skip tracks, fast forward or rewind.
The design comments on digital music and the instant and all-too-often unfulfilling ways that we interact with it. “It’s easy to add lots of music onto iTunes, but hard to navigate it effectively and set aside the time to respect and love your music,” Skelly says. “Digital music can be rushed and tracks skipped far too easily.”
