Cavalcade of Mammals

True Courage
Commandments for Using PICs
NYT tribute to Eugenie C. Scott
Chris McCandless, who’s death in Alaska was described in “Into the Wild” was likely killed by a neurotoxin, beta-N-oxalyl-L-alpha-beta diaminoproprionic acid, known as ODAP. HOW CHRIS MCCANDLESS DIED POSTED BY JON KRAKAUER, The New Yorker, Sept 2013
11 questions to see if libertarians are hypocrites
Catching the stars: Roger Angel is one of the world’s most brilliant and audacious engineers. Could he design the next energy revolution? by Lee Billings
7 Ancient Writing Systems That Haven’t Been Deciphered Yet
End run options to avoid the the US debt-ceiling
Steampunk coffee shop (SA)
MakerJuice selling reasonably priced UV curable resin
Fossils at Mazonia-Braidwood State Fish & Wildlife Area
GeodeFest, held in September
Copper Bracelets and Magnetic Wrist Straps do not work for Rheumatoid Arthritis. Richmond et. al., 2013. PLoS ONE
Costs of Obamcare (ACA) on fast food businesses: 0.5% of sales, 3 cents / sandwich. Benefits: higher productivity and reduce absenteeism and turnover, workers get their hepatitis and other communicable diseases treated, flu shots and other vaccinations

A case study of “disorganized development” and its possible relevance to genetic determinants of aging. Walker et. al. Mech Ageing Dev. 2009 May;130(5):350-6. PMID: 19428454
Delayed development syndrome (Brooke Greenberg from Reisterstown, Maryland; Gabrielle Williams of Montana; Nicky Freeman of Australia)
How An Engineering Toy For Girls Went From Kickstarter To Bestseller
Barrayar dreaming
Dolphins are not super intelligent
Bradley Manning and the Two Americas by Quinn Norton
Smallest geome: Nasuia deltocephalinicola. 112,000 base pairs. 137 protein-coding genes.
Two sleeps, sleep pattern before electricity
Mac speed comparisons

Boulder County DA Stan Garnett clears all 17 suspected illegal voters

Last month, Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler gave Boulder County District Attorney Stan Garnett a list of 17 names, all suspected of voting in the November election despite being non-citizens.

Those names were among 155 people identified statewide as possible illegal voters.

But an investigation by Garnett’s office found that all 17 people were citizens and were able to easily verify their status, the district attorney said Wednesday.

Related: Common Cause page on Voter Supression and Secretary Scott Gessler

FBI ignored plot to assassinate Occupy protesters
12 Very Real Voter-Suppression Tactics
Electro-Permanent cargo gripper
Electropermanent Magnetic Connectors and Actuators: Devices and Their Application in Programmable Matter by Ara Nerses Knaian
ALNiCo magnets
Sand resonance pattern video
MEAM waterjet, senior design project, 10k psi
Nothing About Abortion in the Bible
Iodine’s effect on IQ test scores–15 pts in iodine-deficient areas
Replacing Samsung SGH-T679M Digitizer
Silicon Valley (and the history of toxic waste)
Makers of Things
Human vestigial tail
A hundred proofs the Earth is not a Globe
History of Inequality
The Tea Party’s paranoid aesthetic by Kim Messick

Allpaths-LG genome assembler
ELM327 interpreter chip provides an RS-232 (serial) interface to ODBII car network
About universal basic income
Catsup tank video
Article on a CBO report on tax breaks
CBO report: The Distribution of Major Tax Expenditures
in the Individual Income Tax System
We Already Tried Libertarianism – It Was Called Feudalism by Mike Konczal
Spiders do not Bite
Perspective on Institutional Secrecy and Leaks
High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society by Carl Hart
Books to read: The Invention of Religion by Alexander Drake
Books to read: Euclid’s Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace by Leonard Mlodinow
ChildbirthConnection.org evidence-based information on pregnancy

Solar panels could destroy U.S. utilities, according to U.S. utilities By David Roberts, source pdf
Article about the 2012 Chicago teachers strike and the school bus driver strike in NYC this year
Competing theories of the genetics of the Jews. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.
Watch making project blog
Glasswing Butterflies

CSS element browser support
BatchPCB is now OSHPark
Sharps and Flats by John Nevil Maskelyne (1894)
Octopus intelligence
Potoo
Illegal surveillance on US activists continues
Wingnut rumors: Will the IRS hire 16,500 new agents to enforce the health care law?

Micro movement sensing

Use the orientation sensor in a cell phone to monitor small regular movements. For example, the movement due to the heart beat. It might be possible to measure breathing movement. It may also be possible to measure anomalous movements–tremors, the sway due to microadjustments involved in standing.

Also, if the heartbeat moves a phone to a noticeable degree, does this make cell phone photos blurrier? If so, add heartbeat detection to the camera app–have pictures be snapped between heartbeats.

Basically, orientation data would be collected, and a frequency analysis done to detect the freq and amplitude of the movements. I don’t know how fast the orientation can be polled. If it is too slow, it may be possible to use intermittent polling at precise times to identify the frequency of movements.

Shadow boxing

A related use would be as a shadow boxing app. This would clearly be better as a wrist strap standalone device, but might work as an app. Hold the phone in a hand (or strap it firmly to the wrist), and follow the movements of the hand/arm, recording punches and the speed of them. The user would indicate the hand being scored in setup, and then as hands are switched, the punching of the two could be compared. Groups of friends could play together to see who can punch the fastest or do the most punches in 30s.

Spectrophotometer

This app would run simultaneously on two phones. One phone would display bands of pure red, blue, and green. A sample would be placed across one half of the bands. The second phone would take a picture of the first phone. Image analysis would compare the brightness of the control and sample covered regions and calculate absorbance in the three channels. Cell phone displays are either OLED or IMOD. There are a range of displays used in phones, so this would never be super accurate without calibration. The OLED displays seem to have fairly narrow spectrum pure colors while the iphones have broader colors.

This could be used either as an exploration tool–test substances and record spectra, or reference data could be used to make guesses at substances.

Or you could use a diffraction gratings and make a real spec.

State and local tax rates
Marine nudibranches
Big farm in a Chicago warehouse
Conspiracy theory poll results 2013
Study of patents effect on innovation, expected results found
On Ezra Klein’s mea culpa on the Iraq War
Magazine review of sleep technology: modafinil, armodafinil, Transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS), and TMS are the best yet
Niumbaha superba a rare African vespertilionid bat reclassified. Badger-striped!
Bunny Huang’s open source radiation detector $799 from Medcom, and the bGeigie Nano kit, $450
Vaccine story
Anti-vaccine track record

1) Calculate object heights using the orientation sensor. Walk off (or use Google maps, or GPS) the distance to an object, then use the angle of base to top and trig to determine height.

–I checked The Play Store, and there are 2-4 apps that already do this.

2) Cute baby / ugly baby. Have people submit pics of babies, other users score them. A lowbrow app. Mostly used by friends or random passersby taking pictures of babies and submitting them. The app could also show the cutest / ugliest babies locally, by state, by country. Easy to implement. Definitely should be a pay app.

Weight and Mortality
Updated list of Illinois makerspaces/hackerspaces:
Little Bits Workshop in River Forest, Illinois
Wanger Family Fab Lab at the Museum of Science and Industry
Makerspace Urbana in Urbana, IL (webpage broken) See here
Pumping Station: One in Chicago (north side), IL
Workshop 88, Glen Ellyn, IL
Deficit down 50% since 2009, national press ignores the story
40% of American workers make less than 1968 minimum wage adjusted for productivity gains
A guy building a CNC, posted a SLA7078 stepper driver
Google doodle for Nicolaus Copernicus’s 540th birthday
Hail Columbia!
Our Current Economic Mess, Explained With Headlines
Inexpensive GPS, Mini GPS u-blox B39 PCI-5S
Brasilian birds background audio
DIY high voltage capacitors
Gibberish Asian Font Mystery Solved

Improved Synthesis of Graphene Oxide. Marcano et al., AC Nano. 2010
Effectiveness of vaccines, graphic
2003 Iraq invasion timeline