Rachel Simmons: Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls
The Best American Travel Writing 2007 (The Best American Series)
Michael Tucker: Living in a Foreign Language: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Love in Italy
Anderson Cooper: Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival
These two videos show a robot with an absolutely amazing ability to respond to the environment and maintain its balance on uneven and changing terrains. My favorite part is around 2:03 when it frolics, yes, frolics. What next?
(BigDog is being developed by Boston Dynamics with help from Foster Miller, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the University Concord Field Station as a tool for military and police use.)
Take a look at how it responds to ice at 1:32. Unbelievable.
"The topography and beauty of the Orion Nebula like never before. Based on data obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope..." (source)
Another fascinating and otherworldly discovery from the deep ocean...check out this underwater lake.
February 20, 2008 - San Francisco
Pictures of the lunar eclipse as seen from my roofdeck in Cow Hollow. The last shot is the dark sky under the full eclipse.
"[NASA] is predicting that "the moon will probably take on a vivid red or orange colour during the total phase" because there have not been any recent gas and dust emissions which block the sunlight and cause "dark" eclipses."
See estimated times for the eclipse here.
(2007 eclipse take in Germany, Winfried Rothermel/Associated Press)
A small bit of inspiration in color that lives -
A handful of the amazing creatures nature has produced...
It's difficult to process scale a world that has reached a population of over 6.6 billion and this video does a poetic job providing some perspective.
(On a side note, the song in this is one of my favorites by Gary Jules - a sad but beautiful cover of "Mad World" by Tears for Fears)
An amazing new service, now available to everyone...
23andMe is a web-based service that helps you read and understand your DNA. How does it work? You submit a saliva sample using a home kit, pay $999 and get information about yourself, based on your DNA, in 4-6 weeks. Results tell you...
Exciting is the opportunity to get a window into the very foundation of ourselves. Unsettling is what might show through that window and how that information could affect how we walk through life. In either scenario, it's still amazing to see technology like this come to our own doorsteps. To think that the double helix of DNA was only first discovered in 1953, and we now have home DNA testing available to all individuals... what other amazing things are to come?
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