Science / Tech

With The Daily Show on a summer break, I began to search for some other TV content to fill time. Naturally, I wandered over to PBS to see what they had. I came across this fascinating documentary entitled, "Secrets of the Samurai Sword." The documentary does a good job of explaining the cultural, spiritual, and scientific aspects of the Samurai sword. It's quite fascinating that even though 1,000 years ago, the Japanese swordmakers didn't understand the science behind their craft, but were able to create such effective weapons.

If you go to the 33 minute mark of the video, they do a live demonstration of a katana blade in the hands of a grandmaster swordsman. An archer fires an arrow directly at the grandmaster, and the grandmaster is able to defend himself by cutting arrows out of the air. Here's a clip of it:



Another interesting aspect of samurai swords is how they are rated. The more bodies a sword can cut through in one stroke, the higher quality the sword is. There's talk in the video about legendary five body blades which are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If you jump to the 46 minute mark, they go over the meticulous work required in polishing finished swords. They use whet stones to polish the swords, and the stones can go for thousands of dollars. The sword polisher spends ten days polishing these swords.

I'll end with a passage from the Samurai honour code.


[Update] For Canadians who want to watch this video, you can watch it here.

Couple weeks ago, I had to pleasure of attending Yahoo! Labs' Big Thinkers Series, featuring Dr. Lawrence Lessig. His talk was entitled, "Innovation Corruption," aka what is wrong with Congress.

Here's a short intro to the talk:


His ideas help explain some of the present problems that face America:

• Why is our Internet speeds slower than the rest of the world?
• Why did we bailout Wall Street in the financial crisis?
• Why do we have an obesity epidemic?

And there's much much more. I thoroughly enjoyed the talk.


Enjoy.

I came across this clip from Discovery Channel's Time Warp. It's a table saw that will not cut your fingers if you accidentally make contact with the saw blade. Quite remarkable.

I was pretty shocked when I saw this article on Pentagon: Insurgents intercepted drone spy videos."


I find this shocking that the military was using unprotected communications to transmit video feeds from drones. That's valuable intelligence information being broadcasted.

I think as the US military depends more and more on unmanned vehicles, the more incentive it will be for enemies to exploit this. Imagine if adversaries could jam control signals to these unmanned vehicles, the vehicles may just crash. An even more troubling problem would be if adversaries could hack into these drones, and take direct control of them. It's worrisome because some of these drones carry weapons.

Currently quite bogged down at work, so short blog posts for the next little while. I watched this 20 minute documentary tonight entitled, "Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground" which traces how electronic waste from the West is ending up in developing nations.

Here's the quick synopsis:


It's pretty shocking to watch the environmental/public health damage that is being caused by our tech toys.



Enjoy

Just came across this interesting article on Wired Magazine entitled, "American Vice: Mapping The 7 Deadly Sins." They basically calculate the instances of these sins per capita (eg Lust - Number of STD cases reported per capita) and plot them on a map of America. The results clearly show a huge concentration of sin around Florida, California, and the East Coast, whereas the Midwest has very low rates of sin. Perhaps there is some truth that there are two Americas

As you may know, I generally dislike cellphones. Talking on a cellphone while driving is even more concerning. However, texting while driving takes it to the next level, and I'm disturbed when I see that happening.

In either case, I came across a game simulation from the New York Times that measures how well you multitask while driving and texting. It's called, "Gauging Your Distraction."

Every time I come back to Victoria, I get a little shocked when I see people on their cellphone while driving because this practice has been banned in California. Then, a couple seconds pass, and then I remember that it's legal here.... for now.

Enjoy.