Rain room lets you walk between the drops:

The Rain Room, an exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London, is a room from whose ceiling torrential rain falls. However, a series of 3D cameras are used to track where people in the room are, and it selectively stops the rain such that you effectively walk between the drops.

Random International invites you to experience what it’s like to control the rain. Visitors can choose to simply watch the spectacle or find their way carefully through the rain, putting their trust in the work to the test.

More than the technical virtuosity necessary for its success, the piece relies on a sculptural rigour, with the entire Curve transformed by the monumental proportions of this carefully choreographed downpour and the sound of water.

Random International: Rain Room

(via Kottke)

1820 advice on how to beat the blues:
Excellent advice for maintaining a positive outlook. From the wonderful blog, Futility Closet.

A letter from Sydney Smith to Lady Georgiana Morpeth (right), Feb. 16, 1820:

Dear Lady Georgiana, — Nobody has suffered more from low spirits than I have done — so I feel for you.

1st. Live as well as you dare.

2nd. Go into the shower-bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you a slight sensation of cold, 75° or 80°.

3rd. Amusing books.

4th. Short views of human life — not further than dinner or tea.

5th. Be as busy as you can.

6th. See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you.

7th. And of those acquaintances who amuse you.

8th. Make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely — they are always worse for dignified concealment.

9th. Attend to the effects tea and coffee produce upon you.

10th. Compare your lot with that of other people.

11th. Don’t expect too much from human life — a sorry business at the best.

12th. Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy, sentimental people, and everything likely to excite feeling or emotion, not ending in active benevolence.

13th. Do good, and endeavour to please everybody of every degree.

14th. Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue.

15th. Make the room where you commonly sit, gay and pleasant.

16th. Struggle by little and little against idleness.

17th. Don’t be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice.

18th. Keep good blazing fires.

19th. Be firm and constant in the exercise of rational religion.

20th. Believe me, dear Lady Georgiana,

Very truly yours,

Sydney Smith

Bacteriogoraphs of famous scientists in petri dishes:

Zachary Copfer is a microbiologist and artist who creates portraits of his favorite scientists from living bacterial emulsions in petri dishes. I find what he wrote here to be inspiring:

When I was an undergraduate perusing a degree in Biology, I found myself utterly mesmerized by what I was learning. Each day’s lecture brought to my attention new insights into the complex systems at work in the world around me. The more I learned, the more mystified I became. Science grew into a way for me to revel in the beauty of the universe. I began to better understand and appreciate my place among all of the other particles floating in space. After obtaining my bachelors degree, I began working as a microbiologist in a commercial lab setting. Quickly I began to lose sight of all that I had found romantic about science. Shortly after this disinfatuation of science, I began an adventure into the field of photography. Photography developed into my new method of inquiry. Everything that I had missed about science I rediscovered in photography. For me, the two seemingly disparate fields of study served the same purpose, a way to explore my connection to everything else around me. As a former microbiologist recently turned visual artist, I seek to create work that is less of an intersection of art and science and more of a genuine fusion of the two.

“Bacteria Portraits, Bacteriogoraphy” (via Smithsonian)
Previously: “Photosensitive bacteria art“

[The future is very strange these days. -egg]

http://m.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/11/india-orphan-google-earth-journey

Steve Jurvetson, on Rose’s Law for quantum computers:

If you are a nerd and you’re not following Steve Jurvetson on Flickr, you should correct that. Why? Posts like this one, in which the VC and tech-thinker explores interesting things in interesting ways. “Barring a fracture of physics, we may be able to build quantum computers more powerful than the entire universe within 3 years. They harness the refractive echoes of many trillions of parallel universes to perform a computation, unlike anything we have seen before.” Check out the full post, with annotations and more thoughts.

The music of the primes:

Little-scale offers music procedurally-generated from prime numbers. A “full version”, available for download, is 26 hours long. [Little-Scale]

Optical Drive to SSD Upgrade:

Replacing my laptop’s optical drive with a Solid State Disk (SSD) was one of the best decisions I’ve made in the past year. I have an aging early-2008 Macbook Pro. I say aging because the computer itself is in great condition, and while it is suitable for 90% of what I do on a daily basis, I found that when editing photos in Lightroom or when working in Photoshop or anything video related it would slow to a crawl. The first thing I upgraded was the RAM which I doubled from 4 to 8 GB (which I recommend to everyone with an aging computer), but it still left me feeling I could do more.
So six months ago I decided that the price of SSDs had fallen enough to warrant upgrading the hard drive in my computer. When I first started researching the process, I stumbled across a few people who had decided to replace their optical drive with an SSD drive that fits into a specially designed caddy. I realized I could count on one hand the number of times I had used my optical drive in the previous year, and even then it was most often to burn a DVD; something which has, for the most part, been replaced by cheap USB flash drives.
So I made the decision to ditch my optical drive, and replace it with a 128 GB Sandisk SSD and a specially made SSD caddy which screws into the optical drive’s slot. Overall the installation took about an hour of careful disassembly and reassembly. As far as tools, I used the previously reviewed iFixit 54-piece kit. After installation I was left with a naked optical drive which, as it happens, functions perfectly when used with the previously reviewed SATA/IDE to USB adapter. Now when I absolutely need to use the optical drive, I have one available. I decided not to pick up a case for the optical drive given that I rarely use it but they are available from One World Computing for about $40.
Installing an SSD was only the first step in the process, however. The really important part was installing all of my critical software and most frequently used files onto the new disk. To net the biggest bump in speed it helps to perform a clean install of whatever OS you’re using directly to the SSD. I noticed gains immediately as my computer started up in under 30-seconds compared to two minutes before. After install the whole system was incredibly responsive, and programs that used to bounce up and down in the dock for thirty seconds or more opened with a new found urgency. I really hadn’t expected the difference to be as significant, but I can safely say that booting with and using an SSD feels like using a brand new computer. Outside of the immediate gains in speed, SSDs also use less power when compared to their spinning brethren. Since my most frequently used programs were loading from the SSD I saw around a 30-40% increase in battery life (around an hour and a half depending on use).
Overall, the upgrade cost me around $150, and in return I netted what feels like a much much newer computer. I also have the benefit of redundancy in the form of two hard drives, which means that I have an on-the-go backup solution (I have since upgraded my original 250 GB HDD with a faster 1 TB HDD). And it only gets better as I have seen increasing gains as operating systems are optimized for SSDs (in the case of the newest version of OSX).

— Oliver Hulland
[Note: It’s impossible to keep up with the constant fluctuation of pricing for SSDs so always keep a look out for deals
(for example, the price of the drive I used has fallen $68 in the six months since installation). In addition, I have heard positive things about OWC’s Data Doubler which is a more convenient, albeit more expensive, package alternative to the DIY SSD replacement mentioned above. –OH]
Unibody MacBook Hard Drive Caddy Tray

$11

Available from Amazon
Manufactured by Brain Trade
Crucial M4 128 GB SSD

$99

Available from Amazon

Manufactured by Crucial
Note: If you know of something similar for non-Apple products, please let us know and we will update the review.–OH

#876; How to Lie: