After seeing a wonderful automaton exhibition at the San Francisco Airport a few weeks ago, I was delighted to see an article on the Maillardet automaton at the Franklin Institute in today’s New York Times. The Maillardet automaton’s motions are controlled by dozens of slowly rotating brass disks. These disks contain all the data necessary [...]
Archive of posts tagged technology
What’s New in the Magic Lantern Research Group?
Currently the ‘Magic Lantern Research Group’ is the most extensive online resource on the Magic Lantern, made available by Kentwood Wells and housed on ZOTERO. The Magic Lantern Research group is a library and bibliography of resources for magic lantern research. The resource can be accessed at http://www.zotero.org/groups/magic_lantern_research_group. Best viewed with Mozilla Firefox since ZOTERO fluently works [...]
Article: Fish known as wrasses are found to use tools
Giacomo Bernardi, an evolutionary biologist at UC Santa Cruz, reports that on a recent diving expedition to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef he discovered and filmed a wrasse, called an orange dotted tusk fish, using an underwater rock as an anvil to smash a clam’s shell and allow it to devour the flesh inside. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/28/BASB1LAPG2.DTL#ixzz1ZMnMb8kh ==> [...]
FYI: Babbage Analytical Engine designs to be digitised
The Science Museum in London has agreed to help by digitising the mathematician’s original plans. Eventually the images will be used to create a full working model of the Analytical Engine. Conceived in the late 1830s, it foreshadowed the modern computer revolution by more than a century. Babbage’s many notepads and sketch books are currently held in the [...]
