Every time I get a chance to watch one of our finance folks over at MobiTV wield a spreadsheet, I learn some new tricks. Those financial analysis folks steeped in the arcane features of Excel seem to be able to make the software package produce ever more astounding and useful models of increasingly complex systems.But this one takes the cake. Check out this really cool implementation of a 3D graphics rendering engine. IN EXCEL! Peter Rakos over at Gamasutra outdid himself.This image and video pair shows the rendering system using a simple display that colors the native Excel spreadsheet cells as the calculations are being performed.This image and video pair shows the same program using the Microsoft Office Graphics Abstraction Layer to do the rendering instead of using writes to the spreadsheet cell.Even better, some of the spatial layout and cell computation models of spreadsheets turn out to be very useful in designing and presenting very compact and elegant representations of the rendering pipeline. This design and layout in the 2-D spreadsheet grid is massively easier to see and understand than all the simple linear text files that I coded up in my college graphics course. ...

Matthias Wandel has developed a fantastic mechanical binary adding machine using a simple series of cascaded chutes to store numbers and perform carries through mechanical toggles. Don't miss the video embedded below to see it in operations.Ingenious!More details can be found on his web site: www.Woodgears.ca along with all manner of interesting contraptions.

Last weekend, my wife and I took the kids to the Maker Faire, where I ran into some folks from MIT's Lifelong Kindergarten group. I would have to say that of the whole Maker contingent, they were showing the most refined educational tools of the bunch, kits and software to teach young children how to program.The Scratch programming environment (download Scratch for free here) was designed to eliminate the requirement that a programmer understand code syntax and grammar before being able to do anything useful. The main tool here was to devise a simplified language encapsulated in graphical blocks with shapes that only fit together properly when slotted in the right order and positions.The software package includes mechanisms for a host of graphically interesting drawing, sprite control, and audio effects, as well as a built-in mechanism for code sharing and community building. Don't miss the project pages to check out all the cool code a host of kids have already written.One thing that I particularly about the Scratch system is that they have included a physical interface component called the Scratch Board, that allows children's programs to interact with the real world with sensor blocks, buttons, sliders ...

From TechEBlog, check out this 5 MegaByte hard disk from 1956.

I first found this image on Chet Ramo's Science Musings blog, and just stopped to look at it for a while. (click on the image to view a high resolution version.)At first glance, it doesn't really look like a snowflake. In actuality, it is an image of several snowflakes of differing conformation (I counted about eight different varieties) that have been sputter coated with platinum at a very low temperature (in order to make them conductive) and then imaged with a Scanning Electron Microscope equipped with a low temperature stage. The resulting gray-scale image formed by the electron beam was then digitally colored just as the old black and white movies have been "colorized" to result in the above "false color" image. Here's a picture of the specific unit that was used to take this image.Check out more details on the equipment here, and the original source of the snowflake crystals images here, and here.

For those of you that dream of one day owning your very own X-34 Land Speeder, the Force is indeed with you, for there is new hope that such a levitating craft might actually be possible.There is an interesting article in the September issue of New Scientist that describes a new type of not-quite-rocket engine that uses a novel closed microwave resonant cavity with a geometry that exploits relativistic frames of reference to generate thrust without actually expelling anything.At first blush, the idea would seem to violate what we know about Newton's laws and the "equal and opposite reactions" that have historically driven traditional rocket engines. But according to this theoretical paper by Roger Sawyer, Einstein's rules of relativity can be exploited to generate thrust without a traditional propellant. The general idea is that the momentum transfers calculations between the trapped resonating microwaves must be done in the photons' frame of reference. When you work out the math around the truncated cone cavity shape, you end up with thrust in the cavity's frame of reference despite the fact that nothing is emerging from the cavity.European scientists are generally skeptical, but the initial laboratory tests have ...

Or, How to Make Your Camera Work More Like Your EyesAnyone who has ever tried to snap a few photos with a modern camera has probably felt the frustration that the camera often fails to get the exposure quite right, with things that you can see clearly either washed out and over-exposed, or invisible in the shadows. The intrepid among you may have even gone so far as to turn the switch to manual, only to discover that it is really hard to do too much better than the automatic system. You end up with these types of exposure-bracketed images: The sky detail is only visible in the lower exposure (faster shutter speed) and the building detail is only visible in the higher exposure. And yet when you look directly at the scene, everything is clearly visible to the naked eye. The reason for this is that through an amazing combination of the iris' aperture dilation, and the logarithmic response of the photo-receptive neurons in retina, the human eye automatically adapts to an incredibly broad range of illumination intensity as it scans across ...

Throughout kindergarten and elementary school, I pretty much took my educational environment for granted. In fact, one of the first times I ever thought my school was really cool occurred about halfway through the fall semester of seventh grade algebra when our teacher, Mr. Lunsford, showed up one day in 1977 with a short paperback manual for a WANG 3300 Mini-Computer. (here is a link to the actual manual!, and some press clippings from the type of the device's first commercial availability),After a short 45 minute introduction to programming in BASIC, he escorted us hormone-hyped junior-high kids upstairs through the packs of upperclassmen to the third-floor computer lab. It was a rather small room with a window a the far end, filled with nervous students hovering over what looked like strange chattering typewriters on steroids. It didn't seem all that groundbreaking at first, but when realized you could program ANYTHING into the machines, it became difficult to tear me away from the place. When I found out that we were to be allowed open and generally unsupervised access to the lab during study hall so that we could nominally work on our algebra programming assignments, I ...

I'm always a sucker for nifty data visualization hacks and I particularly enjoyed these globe projections from the San Jose Technology Museum.Life Expectancy Life expectancy is a core factor in the human development index. With 82 years Japan has the highest life expectancy. All 35 countries at the bottom of this list are located in sub-Saharan Africa; their citizen's average life expectancy is between 52 and 39 years.Mountains of DebtPollutionDark red circles indicate oil spills and gray-shaded areas indicate sea pollution and land pollution from chemical fertilizers. Shown is only a small part of the entire pollution spectrum in 1988. At an average of every three months this globe becomes obsolete due to yet another major oil spill.Satellite Blind Spots The public service Landsat System has blind spots over territory and time. However, personal satellites may soon be purchasable for about the price of a Mercedes, and space junk is increasingly hard to track.Check the web site above for hundreds more!

I finally got around to browsing through the most recent issue of Make magazine (vol. 6) this evening. Make really is one of my favorite magazines that explores all sorts of science and technology hobby and hacking projects, tools, techniques, and the hackers who make them. I strongly recommend the magazine to any individual or school interested in fostering innovation or interest in science and technology.Much to my surprise, when I reached page 176, I found an ad for a reprised version of the very toy my father gave me in the late 1960s that first triggered my interest in computing, and a later realization of the importance of mathematical abstraction applied to real physical systems, and how you can use real physical systems to perform mathematical computations. Ultimately, it led to my Ph.D research in computing with physical systems 25 years later.The Digi-Comp 1 was Mechanically operated plastic computer made by E.S.R. in 1963, and sold for $6, though I seem to remember getting the toy when I was around eight or nine years old in 1974. At first, I didn't really get what my father was so excited about. I was more interested ...