Xeeban’s Musings

Okay all you coffee buffs out there. Want to try one of the rarest and most expensive coffee in the world? Then you might want to check out Kopi Luwak. This is basically ferret poop roasted and brewed up real nice. Seriously!

Check it out.

The animal responsible is the Common Palm Civit, a marsupial found in Indonesia, where the coffee comes from.

If anyone has tried this coffee, let me know how it was!

This is a very cool article about cellular automata and music.

Take computers, mathematics, and the Java Sound API, add in some Java code, and you’ve got a recipe for creating some uniquely fascinating music. IBM Staff Software Engineer Paul Reiners demonstrates how to implement some basic concepts of algorithmic music composition in the Java language. He presents code examples and resulting MIDI files generated by the Automatous Monk program, which uses the open source jMusic framework to compose music based on mathematical structures called cellular automata.

Facinating stuff!

Army scientists and engineers have developed a liquid body armor.

The key component of liquid armor is a shear thickening fluid. STF is composed of hard particles suspended in a liquid. The liquid, polyethylene glycol, is non-toxic, and can withstand a wide range of temperatures. Hard, nano-particles of silica are the other components of STF. This combination of flowable and hard components results in a material with unusual properties.

“During normal handling, the STF is very deformable and flows like a liquid. However, once a bullet or frag hits the vest, it transitions to a rigid material, which prevents the projectile from penetrating the Soldier’s body,” said Dr. Eric Wetzel, a mechanical engineer from the Weapons and Materials Research Directorate who heads the project team.

Reminds me of when I was a little kid playing with water and corn starch. The paste poured and your finger sank into it if you did it slowly. But fast movement made the stuff pretty rigid. Looks like the same concept here, but much more advanced.

Some links to scientific articles about this:

• Advanced Body Armor Utilizing Shear Thickening Fluids
• The ballistic impact characteristics of Kevlar woven fabrics impregnated with colliodal sheer thickening fluid

No Limits, a german website has a program that simulates rollercoasters. People from all over the world have used this program to simulate almost all of the worlds rollercoasters in every detail. Want to know what the ride in Disney’s California Adventure is like? Load it up and take a ride! Its very cool, and kind of scary how much content people have produced for it.

The Demo Scene (link may not work) has always facinated me. Programmers gather to produce very compact, very cool programs that show off graphics and music in as little code as possible. The stuff produced is often less than 64k in size, but has enormous amounts of content. Its mind blowing when you see it and realize that there is only 64k of code running these things.

This group has some pretty impressive demos. They have recently released a First Person Shooter (ala Quake) that runs on less than 100k of code. Damn.

Okay, this is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while. Robots that can play soccer. No just the basic game, but they can do things like hand stands, get up from the ground, hang their heads in shame. Take a look at the little movies that are on the site. Sweet stuff!

Here is a sample: one of the robots doing a handstand.