Journal entries in 'Random Crap I Found On The Internet' for August, 2005

Scientists in Singapore have developed a battery that derives its electrical energy from urine. It's used in small urine tests such as for diabetes. That's genius; it is powered by the substance it's testing, so it needs no external power source.

Now if they can just develop a version that is powered by poop, I'll never have to buy gasoline for my car again.

While doing an unrelated Google search, I came across this article about the way McDonald's is paying hip-hop artists to mention the Big Mac in their songs. The article mentions that the strategy was used earlier by Seagram's Gin, who got Petey Pablo to mention it in their song, "Freek-a-leek" (I am impressed with the thoughtful and poetic way they managed to work it into the song: "Now I got to give a shout out to Seagram's Gin/Cause I'm drinkin' it and they payin' me for it"). How can any artist retain their credibility with such overt marketing in their songs? I realize modern hip-hop tends to focus on commercial success, but in the world of rock, the artists live with the constant spectre of being branded a "sellout" looming over their heads. Changing their musical style slightly can often be enough to release the hounds. The hip-hop scene must be an alien world indeed if rappers can be as overtly commercial as that without losing their fanbase (Freek-a-leek reached #2 on the Billboard hip-hop chart, which I would not consider a scathing rejection).

I can't tell what the guy's name is, but there's some really cool photography on this website. In particular, his high speed photography section is really interesting (be sure to check out the Water Figures). Some of the pages haven't been translated from German, but even on those pages you can appreciate the pictures. I like that on most pages he talks about the setup he uses to obtain his results.

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A new bit of AI has been developed which can teach itself new languages. You feed it some text, and it analyzes its structure looking for patterns, and thus learns the language's grammar. Once it has learned it, it can produce new, meaningful sentences in that language. That's a very cool use of two of my big interests—artificial intelligence and linguistics. I couldn't find any more information about this project aside from the single webpage linked above, but I'll have to see if more turns up, because I'm very interested in learning more about how it works. In particular, I wonder how it addresses the issue of vocabulary.

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I love how NASA tends to release full-resolution versions of all of their images. I guess when the government is paying for your bandwidth, you can afford to do that kind of thing. Here's a particularly cool shot from the current shuttle mission. The link goes to the full-res, 3mb image on NASA's servers. In case the URL changes or the image is taken down, I saved a smaller version on my own server here (470kb).