June 15, 2009
optimisto: Plastic takes thousands of years to decompose — but 16-year-old science fair contestant Daniel Burd made it happen in just three months. The Waterloo, Ontario high school junior figured that something must make plastic degrade, even if it does take millennia, and that something was probably bacteria. (Hey, at between one-half and 90 percent of Earth’s biomass, bacteria’s a pretty safe bet for any biological mystery.) The Record reports that Burd mixed landfill dirt with yeast and tap water, then added ground plastic and let it stew. The plastic indeed decomposed more quickly than it would in nature; after experimenting with different temperatures and configurations, Burd isolated the microbial munchers. One came from the bacterial genus Pseudomonas, and the other from the genus Sphingomonas. Burd says this should be easy on an industrial scale: all that’s needed is a fermenter, a growth medium and plastic, and the bacteria themselves provide most of the energy by producing heat as they eat. The only waste is water and a bit of carbon dioxide.

optimisto:

Plastic takes thousands of years to decompose — but 16-year-old science fair contestant Daniel Burd made it happen in just three months.

The Waterloo, Ontario high school junior figured that something must make plastic degrade, even if it does take millennia, and that something was probably bacteria.

(Hey, at between one-half and 90 percent of Earth’s biomass, bacteria’s a pretty safe bet for any biological mystery.)

The Record reports that Burd mixed landfill dirt with yeast and tap water, then added ground plastic and let it stew. The plastic indeed decomposed more quickly than it would in nature; after experimenting with different temperatures and configurations, Burd isolated the microbial munchers. One came from the bacterial genus Pseudomonas, and the other from the genus Sphingomonas.

Burd says this should be easy on an industrial scale: all that’s needed is a fermenter, a growth medium and plastic, and the bacteria themselves provide most of the energy by producing heat as they eat.
The only waste is water and a bit of carbon dioxide.

TX TwoPot hardware editor for Yamaha TQ5 and TX81Z  (via dalasv)

I got that FM synth I posted about a while back.

Data Center Overload

azspot:

As James Hamilton of Amazon Web Services observed recently at a Google-hosted data-center-efficiency summit, there is no Moore’s Law for power — while servers become progressively more powerful (and cheaper to deploy) and software boosts server productivity, the cost of energy (as well as water, needed for cooling) stays constant or rises.

More evidence for my argument against the Singularity. There’s a lot more interesting info in the full article.

simonlarsen:

Banksy.
June 13, 2009

The Outfield - Your Love (via lewisdavid2)

Hellz yes.

OMG This has been lost in my house for two years! So funny!
OMG This has been lost in my house for two years! So funny!
June 12, 2009
Hammer Pants Dance (HD) (via AETV) via DJ Douggpound
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Tuvan Throat Singing, auto-tuned.

It’s actually pretty impervious to auto-tune. The dramatic shifts that you hear are only because I kept adjusting the key setting. If I left it in one key, you could hardly even hear the effect. ANOTHER REASON TO FREE TIBET?

personalhomepage:

Jib Kidder - Windowdipper

nickdouglas:

stryker:

The inimitable Mills has discovered Tuvan throat singing. My favorite Tuvan song is from an album called “Fly, Fly My Sadness,” a collaboration between Mongolian throat singers and The Bulgarian Voices.

I was driving when I first heard this song and almost had to pull the car over at 1:20. Wish I could post the audio instead of a crappy youtube vid, because this video sounds like crap and also omits a breathtaking outro.

The “crap” version is still pretty moving. Buying now.

I was wondering the other day what would happen if you put Tuvan throat singing through auto-tune. Anyone care to do the experiment for me?

Update: I did it myself.