Challis Hodge’s UXblog

Interesting post on Cabel’s Blog LOL about the demise of URLs and the rise of Search. He just returned from Japan having noted a dramatic shift from URLs to search terms on outdoor advertising. Makes plenty of sense given the lack of quality URLs and the proliferation of .extensions! Seems especially interesting for short term campaigns where a unique phrase could win near-term then poull out as the competition tried to cut in.

You might remember that Google announced it’s solar energy project in October of 2006. The project was projected to offset roughly 1/3 of Google’s peak electricity use at their headquarters in Mountain View (Googleplex). That would be the equivalent to the electricity requirements of approximately 1,000 average California homes.

At the time of this posting Google had produced 9,993 kilowatt-hours of electricity from the sun during the previous 24 hours. To date they’ve installed roughly 8,200 panels on 8 buildings and 2 carports. That’s about 90% of their plan.

Makes me think. OK, lets do some quick math.

So, divide the 4,104,900,000,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity we use annually in the U.S. by 365 days and we get 11,246,301,370 kilowatt-hours per day.

Divide 9,993 kilowatt-hours by 10 buildings at Googleplex. That’s roughly 1,000 kilowatt-hours per building. Now, for kicks lets multiply that by the roughly 3,000 Walmart stores and we get 3,000,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity.

Quickly divide the U.S. consumption by the potential electricity generated on top of the Walmart stores and that tells us we only have to repeat the process 3,800 times and we’ve covered the electricity needs in the U.S.

Of course the math here is basically meaningless but for one point. It shows us that alternative solutions are not inconceivable. These are numbers and orders of magnitude we can all grasp and understand.

So my suspicions are confirmed. The government did create Halo as a pre-draft training tool. ;-)

Darpa, the Pentagon’s wide-eyed research arm, is betting big on “metamaterials” — composites that can seemingly-impossible new properties, thanks to their molecular structure. But even for Darpa, and even for metamaterials, this seems like a long shot: a $15 million program to build shoot-through, one-way-invisible, self-healing shields for soldiers in urban battlefields.

Metamaterials are already showing promise, as the building blocks to real-life invisibility cloaks; that’s because the composites let electromagnetic waves flow around them, instead of reflecting ‘em back. Darpa’s “Asymmetric Materials for the Urban Battlespace” program goes way, way beyond mere invisibility, however.

from wired

Scientists in Taiwan have bred the first fluorescent pigs–at least the first green through and through. The transgenetic pigs are possible thanks to the genetic material from jellyfish. These pigs are green from skin right to organs. Shine a blue light on them and they glow like, well, like a jellyfish. Who new?

Taiwan is not claiming a world first. Others have bred partially fluorescent pigs before; but the researchers insist the three pigs they have produced are better.

They are the only ones that are green from the inside out. Even their heart and internal organs are green, the researchers say.

Scientists intend to use the green pigs to study human disease. Because the pig’s genetic material encodes a protein that shows up as green, it is easy to see.

So if, for instance, some of its stem cells are injected into another animal, scientists can track how they develop without the need for a biopsy or invasive test.

Microsoft believes the demand for consumer, research, and military robots will grow significantly–and it wants to own the market, with Microsoft Robotics Studio (MSRS) and the Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE).

MSRS is a visual programming environment, similar to the LabView-based software provided with LEGO’s Mindstorms NXT kit. It allows users to drag and drop box-like symbols for simple, low-level behaviors and services (such as accessing a sensor) and string them together to create complex robotic programs.

MSRS also uses the AGEIA PhysX physics engine, which powers many PC games, to provide a visual simulation of the robot and its environment, complete with realistic friction, drag, gravity, and other factors.

The “Antikythera mechanism,” calcium-encrusted bronze mechanism found 102 years ago amid the wreckage of a cargo ship that sunk off the tiny island of Antikythera in 80 BC, has recently been identified as the world’s oldest computer. Hidden inscriptions reveal the complex collection of cogs, wheels and dials were once used to map the motions of the sun, moon and planets.

Scientists studying the mental processes of chess grandmasters have uncovered clues that suggest how people become experts in other fields as well.

Their evidence reveals that chess grandmasters rely on large amounts of stored knowledge of game positions. Some scientists have theorized that grandmasters organize the information in chunks, which can be quickly retrieved from long-term memory and manipulated in working memory.

To accumulate this body of structured knowledge, grandmasters typically engage in years of effortful study, continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond their competence. The top performers in music, mathematics and sports appear to gain their expertise in the same way, motivated by competition and the joy of victory.

What’s fascinating here is the suggestion that experts are made not born when we tend to think just the opposite.

Satellite images captured under a pioneering program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) provide powerful evidence that the government of Zimbabwe has destroyed an entire settlement and relocated thousands of residents as part of a campaign against political opponents.

The images, analyzed by the AAAS staff, show two views of the settlement of Porta Farm, located just west of the Zimbabwean capital of Harare. The first, an archived image from June 2002, shows an intact settlement with more than 850 homes and other buildings; an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 people lived in Porta Farm at the time.

The second photo, taken by satellite on 6 April this year, shows that the settlement has been leveled.