Here is some science you should know about.

NASA has taken 3D printing to a whole new level by using electron beams to print titanium parts. --via Gizmodo

Normally an aircraft builder might start with a 6,000-pound block of titanium and machine it down to a 300-pound part, leaving 5,700 pounds of material that needs to be recycled and using several thousand gallons of cutting fluid used in the process.

With EBF3 you can build up the same part using only 350 pounds of titanium and machine away just 50 pounds to get the part into its final configuration. And the EBF3 process uses much less electricity to create the same part.

Canon, Nikon and RED have been coming out with some amazing new cameras lately. Just don't expect them to blow up a mule as a demonstration.

Looking forward to Windows 7? At least one study shows it's not that much faster than Vista on current hardware.

Have you ever wondered what people are doing with film cameras now that digital is the same quality or better for a reasonable price? It turns out one photographer was willing to sacrifice his film camera for this picture (right). Luckily, he only ended up sacrificing his lens.

With the number of new-hire zombies we've had in our data center this week. I'm glad we'll have a white paper we can use to make sure our DR plans include the inevitable.

You know all about Saturn's rings, right? You remember how they disappeared for a while when Saturn was edge-on to us? Well, there's a new ring in town and it's a little bigger than the others.

-- Photo Copyright Ben Cooper

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Sure, you've seen this illustration of the difference between serial and parallel processing:

But have you seen this illustration of Marilyn Monroe?

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An optomistic project silks 1,000,000 spiders to create 44 square feet of spider-silk cloth. 96-strand threads made from silk extracted from golden orb weavers with a modern copy of a turn-of-the-century machine make a strong, elastic material. The project took four years and only yealded 1 square foot of cloth per 23,000 spiders. It's not practical for large-scale production, but it sure is cool.  -- Wired

The search for water on the moon is over. Hydrogen from solar winds may have bonded to the oxygen in lunar dust to form water but whatever the cause, it's there. Next step: figure out how to harvest it. -- io9

Studies on gender differences are easy to misinterperet. A recent study of gender and religious affiliation concludes that women are less skeptical than men. But really, did they ask the question they were trying to answer? -- Almost Diamonds

If you're going to start an avalanche and then get stuck in the snow and then get rescued a few minutes later, you might as well record it for the rest of us to watch. -- Gizmodo

The smell of death is not just a metaphore. Scientists have isolated compounds that act as universal bug repelents. "Hey, something here is dead. And it's us!" -- Science Friday

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Do you have eight minutes? Good.

Sit down, turn up the volume, press play, and slip into an animated world of somnambulistic narration, captivating animation, and a story about smokey hookas and smoking hookers. Get ready for the bohemian behemoth, post-midnight soiree.

The Cat Piano from PRA on Vimeo.

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On Friday, I attended an event on the east bank of the University of Minnesota campus, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to stop at the bookstore and pick up a copy of Snow Leopard. Over the weekend, I discovered a few things that I thought I'd share.

Installation
Gizmodo called it 'a move that can only be described as showing off.' Snow Leopard can complete it's installation even if you accidentally (or intentionally) shut down the computer during the upgrade. In another impressive move, the installation runs for about 20 minutes before the first restart. During that time, the dashboard app still works fine, so if you want to see the calendar, check your stocks, or do basic math with the calculator, you still can. It restarts once part way into the installation and then again once the installation is complete. There are a few background tasks, most notably the Spotlight metadata importer, that will slow down the computer for a little while after the upgrade. After that, you're good to go.

Speed
With every release of OS X since os 10.0, the system has gotten faster. The one exception to this was 10.5. My guess is that they spent a lot of time porting the system over to Intel x64 hardware while keeping support for x86 and PowerPC chips. With OS 10.6, they took the time to optimize all that code and remove support for the older PowerPC CPUs. Unfortunately, that leaves me with four systems that I can't install 10.6 on, but it also means that the newer machines see a performance boost once again.

Secure Empty Trash
Emptying the trash Securely has been an option in OS X at least since Leopard and, since I work with some sensitive data that I try not to have on my hard drive, I turned that option on. After upgrading to Snow Leopard, I've found that emptying the trash takes significantly longer (despite the improvements I mention above). I wonder if the definition of 'secure' has changed from 10.5 to 10.6. I have heard that it now follows DoD procedures and overwrites the file seven times. I might just rely on disk encryption to speed things up a bit. We'll see.

File Vault
Speaking of disk encryption... I've had some trouble with File Vault in the past. Preferences like firewall settings and my default browser wouldn't get saved correctly due to some permission or file location issue with the encrypted disk image. That all seems to be fixed now because Firefox has reliably been my default browser after every reboot. I spent quite a while discussing this issue on the Apple support forums and it's good to see that they finally fixed it.

1080p
I use a Mac Mini as my DVR and video player at home. It's connected to my 1080p LCD television via a Mini-DVI to HDMI adapter and for some reason never supported 1080p output, only 1080i. I had suspected that this was a problem with the video adapter not being dual-link. With the upgrade, I can now select 1080p as the display resolution. Not a huge improvement, but really a bonus in the home entertainment category. I paid for all those pixels after all.

Cisco VPN Support
A welcome addition to the OS is native support of Cisco IPSec VPN connections. That means I can delete my 3rd-party Cisco VPN client. It also means that I get the convenience of a menu bar icon to connect to VPN and the seamlessness of support that keeps my applications from complaining that their IP address has changed. Groupwise used to crash horrifically if I changed IP addresses while it was open and the Oracle Calendar client used to complain loudly.

Parallels 3
Unfortunately, Parallels 3 is non-functional under Snow Leopard. On the other hand, the only reasons I was using Parallels was for a couple of web applications that didn't work under Firefox or Mac OS and now also don't work under Explorer 8 and isolating my VPN connection... see above on that. Parallels says they're working on enabling support, but they've had quite a while to release an update and Snow Leopard is actively blocking the application from starting up. Parallels 4 works fine, so this sounds more like a matter of forced obsolescence to me. Fortunately, the free Virtual Box from Sun has no problems.

SSH-Agent
I make dozens of ssh connections every day to support Linux, Solaris and AIX servers. (Oh Windows, why hast thou forsaken me?) In order to streamline the process, I use a passphrase-locked ssh key to authenticate with the servers to avoid using my two-factor keyfob. This is still two-factor authentication because the ssh key is something I have and the passphrase is something I know. SSH-agent is a tool that unlocks the key with your passphrase and then keeps it unlocked for the next time you need it. It's automatically enabled in the new version of terminal.app so I only have to enter my passphrase once. And as long as my screen locks properly, it's still secure.

Developers
I am amazed at the number of developers who are still relying on 32-bit support in the OS. This upgrade has been coming for over a year and has been available to developers for months, so there's been time to release updates for  64-bit compatibility, but there are still a number of Preference Panes that require restarting System Preferences in 32-bit mode to run them. I haven't seen any updates coming through to take advantage of Grand Central for parallel processing either, but I'm confident that both will happen before OS 10.7 comes out and drops 32-bit support completely.

Quicktime X
I like the fact that Quicktime now has built-in support for screencasting and iSight recording, but I probably won't use either one of those any time soon. The new look is nice, especially the way the title bar of the window fades out for a bezel-less effect while playing a video. Unfortunately, Quicktime now looks like it was designed by a different company, since the rest of the OS still has the brushed-steel theme going on. Update: Under the same category of mismatched interface elements, the context menus for the dock are white on black and the context menus for everything else are black on white.

Finder/Dock
The Dock has some new functionality, like grouping minimized windows under the application icons and integrating with Exposé more closely. The long-click that Apple has always used on the dock will work well if they ever produce a touch-screen tablet running OS X rather than the iPhone OS. I use the Spaces multiple desktop manager to expand my screen real estate and I'd like to be able to use the flip and cube transitions that are built into quartz to switch spaces, which didn't happen in this upgrade, but that's just eye-candy.

So... a few things don't work any more. More things work better. I guess that means Snow Leopard is exactly what I'd expect from an OS upgrade.

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Most people don't really understand the concept of the Big Bang. Here it is in two minutes and twenty seconds:

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So... I'm a fanatic do-it-yourself-er in some areas. Food is one of the areas. I brew beer, I grow herbs in the kitchen window, I kill large animals and butcher them...

I've been thinking a lot about adding carbonated water and soda to the list. I love a good gin and tonic but modern/American tonic water is sweetened, which isn't exactly traditional, and I've heard that homemade is far better, if a little time consuming. There's also a whole world of root beers and ginger ales out there that would be possible with a little carbonated water. I really don't want to buy carbonated water though. Tonic water and soda are bad enough, but just water with bubbles? Nah. A rechargeable seltzer bottle would also give me a second reason to buy a CO2 system.

There are several sources of selzer bottles online, but finding one with a shrader valve is another story. There are bunches of poorly described bottles on Ebay, but I wanted to know what I was getting. So I contacted one popular manufacturer of seltzer bottles to see if they made or were aware of such a thing.

Hi, I'm looking for a seltzer bottle that I can recharge from the CO2 rig I use for kegging beer. Do you have or know of such a product?

I was quite happy when I got a response back from the owner of the company. But I didn't stay happy for long.

You need to support the economy and buy our 8g CO2 cartridges, do cheap out on us.

With grammar and customer service like that, they're going to go a long way.

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Since the November 2008 elections, conservatives have been feeling bit of disillusionment over the results and their subsequent relief from duty in Washington. This is a great opportunity to learn about debate techniques and tactics that may help them to win over new supporters for Sarah Palin in 2012. I'll go over a few of them here:

Start the debate with a lie

Yeah, those senior citizens are really agitators. They don't want the end of life counselin.

Your opponent has researched all manner of subjects formally and informally. He or she is knowledgeable on every possible point of debate ... except one that you have made up out of whole cloth. There is no way that they can be prepared to respond to something they have never heard about before, so be sure to surprise them with the biggest, most damning lie you can think of. It's even better if there's some small truth buried in that lie. For example, you could take real words and phrases out of a bill like "consultation" and "end-of-life" (preferably out of order) and make up a definition for it like "death panel." They'll be so confused they'll won't be able to respond and, once they've figured it out, they won't be able to say anything because nobody wants to use the word "lie" in a public debate.

Continue with words, not phrases

Have you read it and heard Barry just take a pill quote

When your opponent tries to tell you you're mistaken about "end of life counseling," just say some words. Use words that sound like you're trying to say something so your audience will just think they didn't quite hear you, but they'll think your opponent is stupid for not understanding what you said. This also raises your opponent's blood pressure by signaling to them that there is no hope for intelligent conversation any more.

Make references to a respected organization

Yes, it's in there - every 5 years or so the elderly get such converstation[sic] in the bill. Sickens me. AARP is about to lose a lot of members for their stance regarding this version of health care reform.

Respected organizations have influence regardless of which side of the debate they're on. If you can demonize people who agree with your opponent, you're reinforcing your opponent's demonic nature. In this case, you've also suggested that a large group of citizens already agree with your lie by suggesting that they disagree with your opponent's supporter. If that sentence is hard for you to follow, don't worry, just take it on faith.

Move the goalposts and lie again

Colleges are ripping us off and is[sic] to expensive.

Public sub has allowed the lib colleges to jack prices up at all our expense. This cycle keeps growing at all our expense. Sticking to bill to the people who would be hiring them after schooling.

Wow U need to diversify your info portfolio I am in a university foundation board big guy.

Moving the goalposts is a well-known strategy that, like nuclear warheads, has no effective counter. Every time your opponent gets close to showing you their faulty version of reality, bring up another aspect of reality you've been denying. This will keep their overly complicated mind working on many things at a time, allowing you to sit back and think about what you'll make up next.

Take your ball and bat and go home

No more name calling please. ... if u don't like it don't read it. Just turn me in to the nazi-like snitch govt website like a good comrade

The best way to tell someone who has the audacity to point out that you're lying and denying reality is to call them a name caller while calling them names. They'll be too busy trying to work through the hypocrisy of your statements to get to the core of what you're saying. That will make sure they won't have a decent response ready until you've unfriended them on Facebook. Because really, anyone who disagrees with your lies can't be a friend.

These tactics are sure to win over the opposition to your point of view. Once you've ignored the opposition, you won't know anyone who doesn't support Sarah Palin.

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James May of TopGear got an amazing opportunity to see black sky without a rocket engine. It's 10 minutes long, but worth every second.

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I was recently asked 'What makes a photograph fine art?'

To me, any object that transcends itself in communicating has become fine art. A photograph is just a photograph until it is an outstanding photograph.

Henri Cartier-Bresson arguably took a lot of dull snapshots with his new 35mm camera but many of the shots, at least of the ones we get to see, pull me into them and tell me more about the scene than just what the camera saw; they also tell me what the photographer saw. That is fine art.

Man Ray took photographs without a camera and created imagery through pattern and texture that transcends the paper media on which it is printed. His use of old techniques mixed with new to create modern design was revolutionary. That is fine art.

Edward Weston created photographs that confused the nature of shape and juxtaposed sensuality and mundanity. If it's a fruit that looks like a nude, it's a Weston. If it's a nude that looks like a fruit, it's a Weston. That is fine art.

Fine art tends to be non-commercial, but much commercial artwork rises to the level of fine art. Fine art can be simple or complex; detailed or vague; urban or natural; nude, clothed or devoid humans. It can tell a story, explore shape or form or color or tone, challenge our intellect or remind us of childhood. This list could go on forever.

In the end, the question is completely subjective and one person's fine art is another person's trash. Andres Serrano's 'Piss Christ' was railed against by Christians who felt he was maligning their faith. They were angered that the National Endowment for the Arts rewarded him with a $15,000 prize because they felt it was blasphemous rather than artistic. Ironically, one of the recognized purposes of art is to illicit an emotional response, which this certainly did.

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