2012 Annual Question

The Epidemic of Obesity, Diabetes and "Metabolic Syndrome:" Cell Energy Adaptations in a Toxic World? "Metabolic syndrome" (MetSyn) has been termed the "Epidemic of the 21st century." MetSyn is an accretion of symptoms, including high body mass index (weight-for-height), high blood sugar, high blood pressure (BP), high blood triglycerides, high waist circumference (central/visceral fat deposition), and/or reduced HDL-cholesterol, the so-called "good" cholesterol. Epidemics of Obesity and diabetes are intertwined with, and accompany, the meteoric rise in MetSyn. The prevalent view is that MetSyn is due to a glut of food calories ("energy") consumed, and a dearth of exercise energy expended, spurring weight gain—an "energy surfeit"—with the other features arising in consequence. But this normative view leaves many questions unanswered: Why do elements of MetSyn correlate? The customary "explanation" also creates paradoxes. · Ultra low-calorie or low-fat diets · Fasting, skipped meals

How Speeding The &Most Important Algorithm Of Our Lifetime& Could Change This Modern World | Fast Company - StumbleUpon Last week at the Association for Computing Machinery's Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) a new way of calculating Fast Fourier Transforms was presented by a group of MIT researchers. It's possible that under certain situations it may be up to ten times faster than the current way we do these. At this point you are probably wondering: What the hell is he talking about? Let me explain, because improving these three little letters--FFT--may change your life. Here's a quickie explainer: Fourier transforms are a mathematical trick to simplify how you represent a complicated signal--say the waves of sound made by speaking. They work by reducing the complex wave pattern to a simple and pretty short list of numbers that, when run through the system again, result in a very good approximation of the original signal. How so? So calculating FFTs up to ten times faster is a big deal. It's almost impossible to scope how enormous an impact this new FFT technique could have.

Impressive LEGO Wall Divider The genius men at NPIRE, a small agency in Hamburg, Germany have truly stuck to their philosophy: “Work and Live.” It took over a year to complete their LEGO wall divider, and it was definitely worth the precious time and effort. In addition to their daily duties, they worked on this project. Of course, cleaning up the office would have been easier, but that’s not living. “That would be clean but dull, not creative at all,” they say. The impressive wall is made of their personal LEGO bricks from childhood in addition to 80 brand new packs. NPIRE's website via [Design Made in Germany] Kinect RGB+Depth Filmmaking at the STUDIO for @creativeinquiry #fitc Golan Levin was invited by the FITC conference to answer a series of “Ask Me Anything” questions posted by Reddit visitors. At the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Golan’s video was created by Fellows James George and Jonathan Minard, artists-in-residence researching new forms of experimental 3D cinema. Their work explores the notion of “re-photography”, in which otherwise frozen moments in time may be visualized from new points of view. Despite the sometimes wildly moving camera, the video was in fact shot with a stationary Kinect-like depth sensor coupled to a digital SLR video camera. This experiment developed out of concepts and collaborations born at Art && Code, a conference on 3D sensing and visualization organized by Golan’s laboratory, the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University. Watch the interview below. In addition, James with Alexander Porter will also host a workshop with the title “RGB+Depth filmmaking”.

Raptitude.com – Getting Better at Being Human CreativeApplications.Net | Apps That Inspire... Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived Additional notes from the author: If you want to learn more about Tesla, I highly recommend reading Tesla: Man Out of Time Also, this Badass of the week by Ben Thompson is what originally inspired me to write a comic about Tesla. Ben's also got a book out which is packed full of awesome. There's an old movie from the 80s on Netflix Instant Queue right now about Tesla: The Secret of Nikola Tesla. It's corny and full of bad acting, but it paints a fairly accurate depiction of his life. The drunk history of Tesla is quite awesome, too.

Visual Trace Route Tool - Find, Track, and Map the Route to an IP Address Awaiting IP trace initialization. The visual tracert tool displays the path Internet packets traverse to reach a specified destination. The tool works by identifying the IP addresses of each hop along the way to the destination network address. To get more specific info about an IP address you can use this IP tracer tool from IP-Tracker.org. The estimated geophysical location of each hop is identified using MaxMind's GeoIP database. Concerning trace routes The Internet is a large and complex aggregation of network hardware connected together by gateways. Every time a host forwards a packet, it decrements the TTL value of the packet by one. A “trace route” works by increasing the TTL value of each successive packet sent. Unfortunately for those performing trace routes, sometimes hosts will just drop the last packet and not return a destination unreachable response. It is important to note that Internet Protocol (IP) does not guarantee that all the packets take the same route.