And today the nerd in me comes out in flying colors…
Lego is soon to release the new Millenium Falcon… the flagship (so to speak) of their Star Wars colelction. At 5195 pieces it is the biggest Lego set ever. It is bulit to minifig scale so that the little Lego people can sit inside. The ship itself is over 3 feet long!
Christmas is 9 months away!
You start saving… I’ll start being good!
Kevin H Knuth
Albany NY
This post was written by keV on February 12, 2007
I stumbled across a demo for the Reactable on YouTube. The reactable is a multi-user eletro-acoustic instrument that has a tangible tabetop interface developed by “Interactive Sonic Systems” team is working in the Music Technology Group at the Univeristat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona Spain.
Objects of varying shapes are placed on a translucent table. A videocamera underneath the table images the objects, which represent musical entities that interact with one another. A projector projects dynamic images onto the table that allow the user to visualize the electro-acoustic interactions among the set pf objects. By moving, or rotating objects, their properties can be modified.
Here are links to their three demos:
Reactable Demo 1
Reactable Demo 2
Reactable Demo 3
Kevin H Knuth
Albany NY
Posted under Acoustics, Inventions, Music
This post was written by keV on February 11, 2007
Lauren, a student in my star systems class stopped by today and told me that she had read an article about moonquakes. In the period from 1972 and 1977 the seismometers recorded quite a bit of lunar seismic activity.
There are four kinds of moonquakes:
1. Deep moonquakes (about 700 km below the surface) probably linked to tidal forces from the Earth.
2. Vibrations from the impact of meteorites.
3. Quakes caused from surface thermal expansion as the sun rises after two weeks of cold lunar night.
4. Shallow quakes from about 20-30 kilometers below the surface.
The last batch are the troublemakers. In the time from 1972 to 1977 there were 28 of them, with some as strong as 5.5 on the Richter Scale! The second problem is that the moons rigid crust (not having been weakened by water) rings like a bell. These large quakes last on the order of 10 minutes!!
This has serious implications for the construction of a Moon Base!
Especially since they are considering the rim of Shakleton Crater on the south pole of the Moon, since it is always sunlight. However, they have no seismic data from the region, so its not clear how much of a problem moonquakes could be.
Kevin H Knuth
Albany NY
Posted under Astronomy, Exploration, Geology, Research
This post was written by keV on February 6, 2007
Today our Physics Department had the pleasure of a visit by Lucas Parra who spoke to us about his recent work in Brain-Computer Interface. During our visit he told me something quite remarkable. I had known that the processing time of the human auditory system was actually different than the processing time of the human visual processing. This leads to some difficulties when one tries to imagine how the brain connects a visual stimulus to a sound stimulus. However, Lucas explained that the audio-visual asynchrony for speech is actually variable with the brain able to tolerate auditory delays up to a couple hundred milliseconds without the subject noticing the time difference.
I looked into this and found a paper by Grant, Wassenhove, and Poeppel titled “Discrimination of Auditory-Visual Synchrony“, which describes that time delays in the auditory stimulus with respect to the visual stimulus of -40 milliseconds to 240 milliseconds were not noticed by the subject. Apparently a visual speech stimulus (lips moving) and its associated auditory speech stimulus do not have to be so precisely timed for a person to perceive them as synchronous.
When you think about this, you realize that our perceptual processing must be this way. Light travels about one million times faster than sound. More specifically, light travels about 1 foot per nanosecond, whereas sound travels about a foot a millisecond. If a person is 20 feet away from you, the sound is delayed by 20 milliseconds with respect to the visual stimulus. This effect is more pronounced when the subject is 100 feet away, which leads to a 100 millisecond delay. To accomodate the slow speed of sound with respect to the speed of light, and the fact that sound sources can be located at varying distances from the perceiver, the brain must be able to accomodate sound delays on the order of hundreds of milliseconds. This reasoning explains why the brain works this way. However. it now remains to explain how this dynamic processing is implemented.
Last, the time delay in the other direction (-40 milliseconds) can be understood by realizing that a speech syllable is on the order of 40 milliseconds in length. Since a syllable is a basic unit of speech sound, it would make sense that some processing time on the order of the duration of a syllable needs to be accomodated.
Kevin H Knuth
Albany NY
Posted under Neuroscience, Research
This post was written by keV on February 3, 2007
