mcX’s posterous

BUG gives you all the tools you need to build your dream gadget—a collection of programmable modules you can easily snap together and program to make any device you want. Best of all, it’s open source.

The scene: A rigorous intro-level survey course in biology, history, or economics. You're the instructor, and students are crowding the lectern, pleading for study advice for the midterm.

If you're like many professors, you'll tell them something like this: Read carefully. Write down unfamiliar terms and look up their meanings. Make an outline. Reread each chapter.

That's not terrible advice. But some scientists would say that you've left out the most important step: Put the book aside and hide your notes. Then recall everything you can. Write it down, or, if you're uninhibited, say it out loud.

Two psychology journals have recently published papers showing that this strategy works, the latest findings from a decades-old body of research. When students study on their own, "active recall" — recitation, for instance, or flashcards and other self-quizzing — is the most effective way to inscribe something in long-term memory.

Yet many college instructors are only dimly familiar with that research. And in March, when Mark A. McDaniel, a professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis and one author of the new studies, gave a talk at a conference of the National Center for Academic Transformation, people fretted that the approach was oriented toward robotic memorization, not true learning.

Good advice that I find to work for me.

The thing to realize is that most people are nerds and rejects, to some degree. A kid on my floor is jacked to all hell, plays the sax in marching band, and has a cute girlfriend who plays video games with him. My most-terrific roommate is listening to 99 Luft Balloons in the original German, plays Pokemon, and is generally an athlete-and-business major all-American package. Most people realize this. The only people who don’t are the self-conscious uncool people, who decide that they weren’t fated to be popular, who make that a central point of their existence. In their minds, only they have the keys to dweebiness, and nobody else is allowed in for fear that they’ll corrupt the precious balance of nerdery. They become elite in the worst way possible. And because people who are socially capable enough to realize this false dynamic tend to be scorned upon within the group, it means that nerds bond together around their least socially capable members, which perpetuates the problem.

I don't know how much I agree with nerds being elitist...

Where Alpha exceeds, is in the presentation of its "search" results. When asked for how many internet users there are in Europe, for example, Alpha returned not just the total number, but also various plots and data for every country (apparently Vatican City only has 93 Internet users).

Another query with a very sophisticated result was "uncle's uncle's brother's son." Now if you type that into Google, the result will be a useless list of sites that don't even answer this specific question, but Alpha actually returns an interactive genealogic tree with additional information, including data about the 'blood relationship fraction,' for example (3.125% in this case).

Rember the silent caterpillar drive from the movie The Hunt for Red October? The caterpillar drive was a fictional magnetohydrodynamic propulsion system. Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) propulsion is a means of using electrical current, instead of a noisy propeller, to push a ship through the water.

Surprisingly enough, a working example of this futuristic drive system is quite easy to build. Assuming that you've got the materials handy, you can build one in about a minute. You'll need a strong magnet, two pieces of thick copper wire, a little dish of warm water, salt and pepper, and a regular battery.

Navigating the ever-changing landscape of Internet slang and chatspeak is essential to creating effective tweets, instant messages, and text messages. Students will practice using emoticons to create powerful dialogue and to establish dramatic irony. They'll learn to gracefully integrate complex expressions into their IM writing, substituting the trite LOL ("laughing out loud") and "meh" (the written equivalent of a shrug) with more-advanced expressions like BOSMKL ("bending over smacking my knee laughing") and HFACTDEWARIUCSMNUWKIASLAMB ("holy flipping animal crackers, that doesn't even warrant a response; if you could see me now, you would know that I am shrugging like a mofu, biotch"). Students will be encouraged to nurture their craft, free of the restraints of punctuation, syntax, and grammar.

I'm helping out at this Biorobotics Lab!!!

15 April 2009—This week at an arsenal in Huntsville, Ala., defense researchers are testing a new high-power microwave (HPM) bomb—one that creates an electromagnetic pulse capable of disabling electronics, vehicles, guided missiles, and communications while leaving people and structures unharmed. The tests mark the first time such a device has been shrunk to dimensions that could make it portable enough to fit in a missile or carried in a Humvee or unmanned aerial vehicle.