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Strange Attractor
Strange Attractor episodes
- Episode 33: It’s just a telly in front of your eyesWhat is virtual & augmented reality?
- What is virtual reality? (Explain That Stuff!)
- How augmented reality works (How Stuff Works, Tech)
- 'That VR Joint': The virtual reality place we visited on our excursion
- Virtual reality (Wikipedia)
- Augmented reality (Wikipedia)
- Beyond Pokémon Go: Augmented reality is set to transform gaming (New Scientist)
- Flight Radar 24: An app with an augmented reality function - point your phone at the sky to see which planes are flying by (iTunes)
- Star Walk: An app with an augmented reality function - point your phone at the night sky to see which stars & planets are there (iTunes)
- 'Playtest': Season 3, episode 2 of Black Mirror - explores augmented reality gaming (IMDb)
- A night landing at LAX using a 'head-up' augmented reality display in a plane cockpit (YouTube)
- The biggest challenges left in virtual reality, according to Oculus (TechCrunch)
- Flume
- The 'soma holiday' from Brave New World (GradeSaver)
- Oculus
- Facebook closes its $2bn Oculus Rift acquisition - What next? (The Guardian)
- The Cortex podcast where they go to Facebook HQ & use the Oculus (Relay FM)
- The VR goggles for Samsung phones by Oculus (Samsung)
- 7 movies you can experience in virtual reality (Observer)
- 'The entire history of you': Season 1, episode 3 of Black Mirror - where everyone has a memory implant recording everything they do (IMDb)
- 'Job Simulator': The game Lucy played & burnt the bacon
- 'Space Pirate Trainer': The shooting game we played
- 'Holopoint': The archery game we played
- We used the HTC Vive goggles (HTC)
- Africa by Toto (YouTube)
- The HTC Vive goggles are ~$1,400 at the moment (JB Hi-Fi)
- What is rendering? (Wikipedia)
- Can virtual reality cut the cord? (MUO)
- Oculus is working on a cheaper, wireless VR headset (The Verge)
Cheeky review? (If we may be so bold)- It'd be amazing if you gave us a short review...it'll make us easier to find in iTunes: Click here for instructions. You're the best! We owe you a free hug and/or a glass of wine from our cellar
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47 min - Episode 32: You make a big thing smallerHow is music & video compressed & streamed?
- How MP3 files work (How Stuff Works, Tech)
- The 'Mother of the MP3': Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega was used to develop the MP3 (Wikipedia)
- Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega (YouTube)
- What is an MP3 & who was behind it? (Wikipedia)
- MP3s were officially released in 1993, but drew on research from as far back as 1894 (Wikipedia)
- A list of other non-MP3 digital audio formats (Wikipedia)
- 'Ogg Vorbis' is an alternative audio format (Wikipedia)
- 'FLAC' is another alternative audio format (Wikipedia)
- How competing audio formats were standardised into the MP3 (Wikipedia)
- Internet Standards Organisations (UniForum)
- If you want to include MP3s in your products, you may need to pay licensing fees as they're intellectual property like any other invention (MP3 Licensing)
- Licensing, ownership & legislation around MP3s (Wikipedia)
- The 'standards' comic Johnny mentioned (xkcd)
- Material Girl by Madonna (YouTube)
- A diagram of the structure of an MP3 file (Wikipedia)
- Ziploc.com
- Evolution of the MP3 player (PC World)
- The first generation classic iPod: "1,000 songs in your pocket" (Wikipedia)
- Old iPods are selling for as much as $90,000 (Mashable)
- The famous comment Johnny was talking about where some nerd says that the newly invented iPod is "lame" (Slashdot)
- The Book of Eli (IMDb)
- How Hollywood gets its old-school tech (The Ringer)
- How does audio compression work? (Wikipedia)
- What an uncompressed versus a compressed song looks like in different file formats (Wikipedia)
- A discussion about why you can't compress with irrational numbers like pi (ars technica)
- Another discussion about why you can't compress with irrational numbers like pi (Encode)
- What is bandwith in computing? (Wikipedia)
- Neil Young's 'high definition' music player: PonoPlayer (Digital Trends)
- Don't buy what Neil Young is selling (Gizmodo)
- What is streaming media? (Explain That Stuff!)
- JPEG compression: What it is, when to use it & when not to (a.k.a. Joint Photographic Experts Group) (Learning & Memory)
- All about GIF (a.k.a. Graphics Interchange Format) (Wikipedia)
- All about TIFF (a.k.a. Tagged Image File Format) (Wikipedia)
- All about PNG (a.k.a. Portable Network Graphics) (Wikipedia)
- What is the difference between JPEG, GIF & PNG? (University of Surrey)
- Destructive vs non-destructive editing (SLR Lounge)
- Africa by Toto (YouTube)
- Spotify vs Apple Music: Is there a difference in sound quality? (C|NET)
- What happens when you watch a YouTube video? A nice, simple explanatory clip (YouTube)
- How does internet radio work? (How Stuff Works, Tech)
- What is buffering? (Bandwidth Place)
- What is buffer? (WhatIs.com)
- What is caching? (WhatIs.com)
- Bhuja! Strange Attractor's current snack of choice (Majans)
- Where are you from? Send us a postcard! Strange Attractor, c/ PO Box 9, Fitzroy, VIC 3065, Australia
Review us!- Hey lovely listeners, give us an iTunes review & we'll send you a prize - Click here for instructions then get in touch
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1 hr 6 min - Episode 31: The universe is made of danderWhat's outside our solar system?
- Where does the solar system end? (ABC, Australia)
- Where in the universe is Voyager? The surprising showdown over where our solar system ends (TIME)
- What defines the boundary of the solar system? (NASA)
- Live tracking: Where are the Voyager probes now? (NASA)
- Voyager 1 is travelling at ~17 km/second (Wikipedia)
- It's believed that Voyager 1 is either in interstellar space or pretty close to it (the heliopause) - that's the furthest we've sent anything (Wikipedia)
- In about 30,000 years, Voyager 1 will have passed through the Oort Cloud & in 40,000 years it will pass within 1.6 light-years of the star Gliese 445 (Wikipedia)
- The infamous 'pale blue dot': Earth as seen by Voyager 1 from 6 billion km (Wikipedia)
- What is the heliopause? (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
- What is the heliopause? (Southwest Research Institute)
- The heliosphere: A proper sciencey paper (Max-Planck-Institut für Aeronomie)
- What is the Kuiper Belt? A belt of icy bodies beyond Neptune (Cosmos, Swinburne University)
- What is the Oort Cloud? A hypothesised belt of icy bodies in the far reaches of the solar system (Cosmos, Swinburne University)
- Voyager 1 & 2 spacecraft flight paths (The Planets Today, Vimeo)
- Could the Voyager, Pioneer & New Horizons probes eventually be caught by the gravity of another star & start orbiting that star? (Quora)
- What is a galaxy? (NASA)
- Galaxies & how they're formed (NASA)
- The Milky Way galaxy (NASA)
- Hubble’s high-definition panoramic view of the Andromeda galaxy (NASA)
- All about the Andromeda galaxy (EarthSky)
- Elliptical galaxy facts & definition (Space.com)
- Spiral galaxy facts & definition (Space.com)
- Estimates on how many solar systems & galaxies there might be in the universe (University of Cambridge)
- How many solar systems are in our galaxy? (NASA)
- Do all stars have solar systems? (Dept. of Physics, University of Illinois)
- How did our solar system form? (HubbleSite)
- Are we really all made of stardust? Yep (Phys.org)
- How are stars formed? (Science, How Stuff Works)
- Population I stars (younger) tend to be in the discs of spiral galaxies & made of heavier elements (Hyperphysics, Georgia State University)
- Population II stars (older) tend to be in globular clusters & the nucleus of galaxies & made of lighter elements (Hyperphysics, Georgia State University)
- Main sequence stars on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (Hyperphysics, Georgia State University)
- Interactive Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (Las Cumbres Observatory)
- Black holes come in 3 varieties: Stellar, supermassive & intermediate (Space.com)
- Into a black hole: A lecture transcript from Prof. Hawking (Stephen Hawking)
- Journey into a black hole (HubbleSite)
- The escape velocity for Earth is ~25,000 miles/hour or 40,000 km/hour (Wolfram Alpha)
- A list of escape velocities for the planets, moons, sun & solar system (Wikipedia)
- A list of the gravity values for all the planets compared with Earth (NASA)
- Definition of massive: "Having relatively high mass" (The Free Dictionary)
- How do black holes work? (Science, How Stuff Works)
- Black hole jets can influence star formation in galaxies by dispersing & heating interstellar gas (Phys.org)
- What happens when 2 black holes collide? You get gravitational waves like the one LIGO detected in 2015 (LIGO)
- Exoplanets are planets outside our solar system (Space.com)
- How long does it take for a star to ignite at birth? Not long, but the first photons of light may not escape for thousands of years (Reddit)
- First sun, then planets: The formation & evolution of the solar system (Wikipedia)
- Solar system formation (Windows 2 the Universe)
- What's the difference between comets & asteroids? (EarthSky)
- What is an orbit? (NASA)
- A list of solar system objects by orbit (Wikipedia)
- There are >8,000 artifical objects orbiting Earth (National Geographic)
- How can one say that gravity is a very weak force, when all the planets & stars are rotating around due to gravity only? (Quora)
- How can galaxies collide if the universe is expanding? (ABC, Australia)
- What is a galaxy cluster? A group of hundreds to thousands of galaxies, believed to be the largest gravitationally-bound structures in the universe (Wikipedia)
- What fuel does Voyager 1 use? (Slate)
- Live tracking: Where is Halley's comet now? (The Sky Live)
- What is Halley's comet (& its tail) made of? (Wikipedia)
- Halley's comet completes an elliptical orbit around the sun every ~76 years (Wikipedia)
- The difference between meteoroids, meteors & meteorites (Meteorites Australia)
- What causes a shooting star? (Wonderopolis)
- How do you shield astronauts & satellites from deadly micrometeorites? (Smithsonian)
How does the space station avoid meteors? (Reddit)
Where are you from? Send us a postcard! Strange Attractor, c/ PO Box 9, Fitzroy, VIC 3065, Australia
Corrections- Johnny meant 'elliptical' galaxies, not globular (Cosmos, Swinburne University)
- A globular cluster is a spherical collection of stars that orbits a galactic core as a satellite (Wikipedia)
- To go into orbit, a body must still reach escape velocity, but it must be directed away from a planet & then it follows a curved path (Wikipedia)
Cheeky review? (If we may be so bold)- It'd be amazing if you gave us a short review...it'll make us easier to find in iTunes: Click here for instructions. You're the best! We owe you a free hug and/or a glass of wine from our cellar
Click to subscribe in iTunes
1 hr 2 min - Episode 30: I'm not the special dog mutantFrom vinyl to MP3 - how is media recorded?
- Music was made truly portable on 1 July, 1979, with the release of the Sony Walkman (Time)
- What is analogue recording? (Wikipedia)
- What is digital recording? (Wikipedia)
- Meet the 'telegraphone' & 'magnetophon', advancements in sound recording that never quite took off (Wikipedia)
- The new £5 note can play vinyl records (The Telegraph)
- The Voyager golden record (NASA)
- Playing a record with a pin & paper cup (YouTube)
- The 'compact cassette' tape was released by Philips in 1962 (Wikipedia)
- Transvision Vamp, Velveteen (Wikipedia)
- A timeline of audio formats: From 1860's 'phonautogram' to 2012's 'Opus' (Wikipedia)
- CDs were invented in 1982 (Wikipedia)
- A resource for some of the main ways we've recorded audio since olden times (Recording History)
- The history of the 8-track tape (Recording History)
- How recording tape was made, circa 1955 (Recording History)
- How is sound recorded onto magnetic tape? (HyperPhysics, Georgia State University)
- Johnny's old radio station, Wear FM, is now called Sun FM (Wikipedia)
- Video Home System, or VHS, analogue video recording, circa 1976 (Wikipedia)
- VHS 'please rewind' stickers appear to be making a comeback (Cafe Press)
- Analogue versus digital signals: What do they look like? (BBC, GCSE)
- Analogue versus digital technology & sampling (Explain That Stuff!)
- Generation loss: When stuff becomes crapper after you copy it (Wikipedia)
- A (slightly cheesy) but simple explanation of analogue versus digital sound waves (YouTube)
- Digital audio tape, or DAT (Webopedia)
- Digital audio tape (Wikipedia)
- The Hateful Eight: An explainer on 70 mm film (Nerdist)
- Lodestsar Pinot Gris (Naked Wines)
- Digital sound recording uses binary code, i.e. 1's & 0's (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
- How to count in binary (Instructables)
- How to 'play back' a picture of a sound wave (Griffonage-Dot-Com)
- What is sampling rate? (Wikipedia)
- The science of sample rates: When higher is better & when it isn’t (Trust me I'm a scientist)
- The Running Man, circa 1987 (Wikipedia)
- Explanation of the 44.1 kHz CD sampling rate (Columbia University)
- Music, not sound: Why high-resolution music is a marketing ploy (Kirkville)
- How audio compression works & can you really tell the difference (MUO)
- MP3 or lossless: See if you can hear the difference with this test (LifeHacker)
- A decade of iTunes singles killed the music industry (CNN Money)
- The impact of digital recording on the music industry (The Bionic Sisters)
- The effects of digital music distribution: A graduate school research paper (Southern Illinois University Carbondale)
- Jean Michel Jarre playing the laser harp wearing asbestos gloves (YouTube)
- How CDs work (How Stuff Works, Electronics)
- How CD & DVD drives work (Explain That Stuff!)
- The compact disc, or CD, was co-developed by Philips & Sony (Wikipedia)
- You can buy blank vinyl albums for $20 (Amazon)
- What is modulation & demodulation in a modem? (Quora)
- Digital to analogue conversion, or DAC (Whatis.com)
- What is a digital to analogue converter? (Wikipedia)
- Digital Versatile Disc, or DVD (Wikipedia)
- What is the difference between CD, DVD & Blu-ray discs? (Quora)
- LaserDisc (Wikipedia)
- LaserDiscs were like comically large CDs: Watch this guy insert his into a player (YouTube)
- LaserDisc FAQ (Disc Dude)
- What is Blu-ray? (Wikipedia)
- Why is the CD 74 minutes long? (Gizmodo)
- The great Blu-ray versus 'high-definition optical disc' format war of 2006-2008 (Wikipedia)
- The VHS versus Betamax format war (The Conversation)
- What was Betamax? (Wikipedia)
- The set list from the Dire Straits Gateshead Stadium concert, 13 June 1992 (setlist.fm)
- A flicker of remembrance of the Dire Straits Digital Compact Cassette promotion Johnny mentioned (Steve Hoffman Music Forums)
- The Digital Compact Cassette, or DCC, circa 1992 (Wikipedia)
- What is a MiniDisc & how does it differ from a CD? (How Stuff Works, Tech)
- An homage to the MiniDisc (Minidisc.org)
- The future of audio technology (The Inquirer)
- The future of audio recording, as predicted in 1998 (Turing Machines)
- How MP3 files work (How Stuff Works, Tech)
Lossy compression (Wikipedia)
Where are you from? Send us a postcard! Strange Attractor, c/ PO Box 9, Fitzroy, VIC 3065, Australia
Corrections- Conventional DVDs use 650 nm red lasers, CDs use 780 nm near-infrared lasers & Blu-rays use 405 nm blue lasers (but it's actually in the violet range) (Wikipedia)
Cheeky review? (If we may be so bold)- It'd be amazing if you gave us a short review...it'll make us easier to find in iTunes: Click here for instructions. You're the best! We owe you a free hug and/or a glass of wine from our cellar
Click to subscribe in iTunes
1 hr 3 min - Episode 29: It's not like on Star WarsA quick tour of our solar system
- Limits of Humanity: The observable universe goes on for light years & we'll only ever see 0.00000000001% of it (Kurzgesagt, Devour)
- Powers of Ten: The classic video from 1977 that explains the scale of space (YouTube)
- Riding Light: Travel with a beam of light in real time through our solar system (Vimeo, Alphonse Swinehart)
- A beautiful planet (IMAX)
- The Total Perspective Vortex: The machine from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that makes you feel so insignificant it will crush your soul (Hitchhiker Wiki)
- We need different types of telescopes to 'see' the different types of waves in the universe: radio, infrared, visible, X-ray, gamma (NASA)
- Telescope to seek Earthlike planet in Alpha Centauri system (The New York Times)
- The BoldlyGo Institute: Private space exploration (Boldy Go)
- Pluto is 7.5 billion km from Earth (Space.com)
- Live tracking: Where is Halley's comet now? (The Sky Live)
- Live tracking: Where are the Voyager probes now? (NASA)
- Voyager 1 is travelling at about 17 km per second (Wikipedia)
- It's believed that Voyager 1 is either in interstellar space or pretty close to it - that's the furthest we've sent anything (Wikipedia)
- NASA's 'eyes': Cool website where you can track all sorts of space things (NASA)
- The Deep Space Network: Live tracking of probes & stuff by telescopes on Earth (NASA)
- In about 30,000 years, Voyager 1 will have passed through the Oort Cloud & in 40,000 years it will pass within 1.6 light-years of the star Gliese 445 (Wikipedia)
- What is the Kuiper Belt? A belt of icy bodies beyond Neptune (Cosmos, Swinburne University)
- What is the Oort Cloud? A hypothesised belt of icy bodies in the far reaches of the solar system (Cosmos, Swinburne University)
- It would take about 6 months to drive to the Moon at 95 km/hour (Science Focus)
- Apollo 11 took 3 days, 3 hours & 49 minutes to reach the Moon (Reference.com)
- What if Apollo 11 failed? President Nixon had a speech ready (Space.com)
- A moon is any natural satellite orbiting another body - planets, dwarf planets, asteroids & Kuiper Belt objects can all have moons (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
- Earth's moon's name is the Moon (caps M), it's also sometimes called 'Luna' (Wikipedia)
- Earth potentially has 18,000 moons, depending on your definition (Space.com)
- A star is a big exploding ball of gas - the Sun (caps S) is the name of Earth's star (Qualitative Reasoning Group, Northwestern University)
- When to capitalise the 'E' on Earth (Grammarist)
- The 'controversial' 2006 definition of a planet states: "a planet is a body that orbits the Sun, is massive enough for its own gravity to make it round & has 'cleared its neighbourhood' of smaller objects around its orbit" (Wikipedia)
- Pluto was stripped of its planet status in 2006 (New Scientist)
- Formation & evolution of the solar system (Wikipedia)
- How are planets formed? (Phys.org)
- Planets form in zones: The terrestrial (rocky) planets closer to the sun & the jovian (gassy) planets further out (LASP, University of Colorado)
- Order of the 8 planets in our solar system (Space.com)
- How was the Earth formed? (Space.com)
- What is a gravity well? (Qualitative Reasoning Group, Northwestern University)
- Where did Earth get its water? (Cosmos)
- Where did Earth's water come from? (livescience)
- What is the Goldilocks Zone & why does it matter in the search for ET? (ABC, Australia)
- What is Neptune made of? It's an icy, slushy, gassy planet with a rocky core (Space.com)
- Basics of orbital mechanics (NASA)
- What are Kepler's Laws? They describe the motion of planets across the sky (HyperPhysics, Georgia State University)
- An exoplanet is a planet that orbits a star other than our Sun (Wikipedia)
- 5 ways to find an exoplanet (NASA)
- If Planet 9 is out there, it tilts our solar system (The New York Times)
- What is Jupiter made of? It's very gassy, mostly hydrogen & helium, & we don't know if it has a solid core (Space.com)
- The Juno probe aims to unlock the secrets of Jupiter - it's currently orbiting & will crash into it in February 2018 (NASA)
- Juno has had a glitch, but is mostly ok (The New York Times)
- What is Mercury made of? It's a dense little nugget with a neglible atmosphere (Space.com)
- What is Venus made of? It's a hot, rocky planet (Space.com)
- Was Venus the first habitable planet in our solar system? (The Guardian)
- Venus spins very slowly, in the wrong direction (The New York Times)
- "Venus’s climate is strongly driven by the most powerful greenhouse effect found in the solar system" (European Space Agency)
- Carbon dioxide absorbs & re-emits infrared radiation (Center for Science Education)
- Predator's infrared vision (YouTube)
- What is Mars made of? It's very dusty & rocky, with a thin atmosphere (Space.com)
- NASA confirms evidence that liquid water flows on today’s Mars (NASA)
- They reckon Mars was warm & wet about 4 billion years ago (NASA)
- Exploration of Mercury: We've only sent 2 probes, 1 in 1973 & 2004, but there's another set to launch in 2017 called 'BepiColombo' (Wikipedia)
- List of solar system probes: We've been busy (Wikipedia)
- How the atmosphere affects our planet (Softpedia)
- The gas giants (Wikipedia)
- What is Saturn made of? It's pretty gassy, mostly hydrogen & helium (Space.com)
- How long do footprints last on the Moon? Potentially as long as the Moon (Space.com)
- Origin of Jupiter & Saturn: New theories on formation of gas giants (The Daily Galaxy)
- The case for Saturn being able to float on water (Universe Today)
- The case against Saturn being able to float on water (Wired)
- Planets & dwarf planets can have moons, & there are currently 182 identified in our solar system (Wikipedia)
- Mecury & Venus don't have moons (Windows 2 The Universe)
- Mars' moons are Phobos & Deimos; Jupiter has 67 moons, including the 4 that Galileo discovered; Saturn has 62; Uranus has 27; Neptune has 14, NB: Some moons are still awaiting official 'moon status' confirmation (NASA)
- Galileo made his own telescope & discovered 4 of Jupiter's moons in 1610, which got him into trouble with the Catholic Church (BBC)
- Saturn has some very cool moons, including the beautiful Enceladus with its icy gesyers (Space.com)
- Our moon is pretty big by moon standards (Windows 2 The Universe)
- How the Moon formed: Violent cosmic crash theory gets double boost (Space.com)
- Our solar system gets pretty chilly out past Mars (NASA)
- What might the sun look like from other planets? (Futurism)
- NASA's 'Pluto Time' shows how bright it is on dwarf planet (Space.com)
- Pluto may have clouds (The New York Times)
- Chemical properties of methane (Wikipedia)
- Methane is quite common in the outer solar system (University of Oregon)
- Ceres is a dwarf planet (Wikipedia)
- Charon is the largest of the 5 known moons of the dwarf planet, Pluto (Wikipedia)
- Pluto's unusual orbit (Smithsonian)
- You need a telescope to see Pluto (EarthSky)
- The hypothetical planet, Vulcan (Wikipedia)
- Gravity Probe A helped figure out relativity (Wikipedia)
- Gravity Probe B helped figure out the curvature of space-time near Earth (Wikipedia)
- Why did we land on a comet? (Mental Floss)
- Røde microphones
Corrections- Woops! Lucy did bad maths: Light would travel a little over 1 billion km in 1 hour, not 65 billion km...so not as far as Pluto (Wolfram Alpha)
- Apparently we may have photographed an exoplanet: This is the first photo of a candidate 1,200 light-years away (Science Alert)
- More than 1,300 Earth's would fit inside Jupiter (NASA)
Cheeky review? (If we may be so bold)- It'd be amazing if you gave us a short review...it'll make us easier to find in iTunes: Click here for instructions. You're the best! We owe you a free hug and/or a glass of wine from our cellar
Where are you from? Send us a postcard! Strange Attractor, c/ PO Box 9, Fitzroy, VIC 3065, Australia
Click to subscribe in iTunes
1 hr - Episode 28: God knows what's happening in thereHow do computer programs work?
- How do computers work? (Explain That Stuff!)
- What is a computer program? (Wikipedia)
- How does a computer program work? (Dummies)
- How do computer languages work? (The Linux Documentation Project)
- How does coding work? (code conquest)
- How Java works (How Stuff Works, Tech)
- Readings Bookshop: The beautifully programmed website Johnny was talking about (Readings)
- Icelab: The people who programmed the lovely website (Icelab)
- Dyson vaccuums: An example of putting thought into something that sucks & making it better (no pun intended) (Dyson)
- What is an algorithm? (Wikipedia)
- What is a computer algorithm? (How Stuff Works, Tech)
- An algorithm for making a cup of tea (Aristides S. Bouras)
- What are heuristics in computer science? (Wikipedia)
- Alan Turing: Creator of modern computing (BBC, iWonder)
- What is a Turing machine? (University of Cambridge)
- Why do computers crash? (Scientific American)
- The Mac spinning beach ball of death (The X Lab)
- The Windows hourglass wait cursor (Wikipedia)
- The history of Microsoft Word: Version 1.0 was written by two guys in 1981 (Wikipedia)
- Microsoft Word 1.0 for Macintosh screenshots (Knubbel Mac)
- Microsoft makes source code for MS-DOS and Word for Windows available to the public (Microsoft, TechNet)
- What are abstraction layers? (Wikipedia)
- Programming language (Wikipedia)
- High-level programming language (Wikipedia)
- Which programming languages does Google use internally? (Quora)
- Microsoft Word was apparently written in Visual C++ (MYCPLUS|COM)
- There are hundreds of computer languages, which one you pick depends on what you want to achieve (Wikipedia)
- A comparison of programming languages (Cprogramming.com)
- Why are there so few female prgrammers? 'When women stopped coding' (NPR, Planet Money)
- Computer programming used to be women's work (Smithsonian)
- What is an 'event' in computing? (Wikipedia)
- Impress your friends & colleagues: Translate anything into binary code! (binarytranslator.com)
- Computer language interpreters (Wikipedia)
- What is machine code? (Wikipedia)
- A picture of binary code (factfile)
- A picture of hex code (hexblog)
- What is an operating system? (Wikipedia)
- Unix & Unix-like operating systems (Wikipedia)
- The Unix philosophy: 'Create small modular utilities that do one thing & do them well' (How-To Geek)
- What is a Rube Goldberg machine? (Wikipedia)
- What is recursion? (Wikipedia)
- What is a 'library' in computing? (Webopedia)
- What is a 'library' in computing? (Wikipedia)
- What is a driver? It's another kind of interpreter that helps you 'drive' a particular piece of hardware (Webopedia)
Corrections- LARGE DISCLAIMER: At the end when we talk about Amazon, it might be another company that Johnny was thinking of. I can't find evidence that they've banned meetings, just PowerPoint (Moving People To Action). We'll post a link when we figure out where this information came from & if it was about a different company. For now just think of it as 'Company X' who have implemented a freakin' great idea
- This is potentially the source for the above, a long read but interesting (Stevey's Google Platforms Rant, Steve Yegge)
Cheeky review? (If we may be so bold)- It'd be amazing if you gave us a short review...it'll make us easier to find in iTunes: Click here for instructions. You're the best! We owe you a free hug and/or a glass of wine from our cellar
Click to subscribe in iTunes
1 hr 2 min - Episode 27: A short(s) noticeBye bye Strange Shorts
We've decided that we're not massive fans of our 'every other week' Strange Shorts experiment, so we're unceremoniously killing it off.
We'll be back next week, and then regular as clockwork every other Friday, with a full size full on full sugar full moon full of beans Strange Attractor!
4 min - Episode 26: The rainbow of energyWhat are colours?
- What is colour? Just different wavelengths of light...mental (Wikipedia)
- Visible light (NASA)
- The visible spectrum (Wikipedia)
- What is electromagnetic radiation? (livescience)
- Spectral colours (HyperPhysics, Georgia State University)
- What wavelength goes with a colour? (NASA)
- Rabbit & Spaghetti Shiraz (Naked Wines)
- This is your brain on nature (National Geographic)
- Your colour red could really be my blue (livescience)
- How my friends described colours to me when I couldn't see (li.st)
- How colours get their names (livescience)
- Colour vision in humans & other species (Wikipedia)
- A nice overview on rods & cones (HyperPhysics, Georgia State University)
- How do we see colour? (livescience)
- Photoreceptor cells (Wikipedia)
- Bayer filter mosaics: How red, green & blue is arranged on our screens to complement our colour vision (Wikipedia)
- Theory of colours (Wikipedia)
- Newton & the colour spectrum (Web Exhibits)
- Newton's theory of light: His experiment split white light through a prism to make a rainbow, then recombined it through another prism to make white light again (The Star Garden)
- Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Caravaggio Foundation)
- Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd (Ultimate Classic Rock)
- Red light is just a photon of a certain energy: The wavelength of red light is 650 nm, blue is 475 nm & green is 510 nm (Montgomery Blair High School)
- Can you hear colour? Some people with 'synesthesia' claim to be able to (livescience)
- What is synesthesia? (Scientific American)
- Human ears respond to frequencies of sound between about 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz (Wikipedia)
- Human eyes respond to wavelengths of light between about 390 nm to 700 nm (Wikipedia)
- What is infrared light? It's just below (longer than) the wavelength of visible red light, so humans can't see it (Wikipedia)
- Infrared waves (NASA)
- Night vision goggles 'extend' your vision into the infrared (Wikipedia)
- Humans give off infrared radiation (Science Questions With Surprising Answers)
- The longest waves are 'radio waves', further along than infrared - they're still photons of energy, we just can't see them (livescience)
- Radio waves (NASA)
- Shorter waves than blue are 'ultraviolet' (UV), they're at a shorter wavelength/higher energy than we can see (NASA)
- What is ultraviolet light? (livescience)
- Do rainbows have ultraviolet bands & infrared bands? (Physics StackExchange)
- Shorter waves than UV are X-rays, they're at a shorter wavelength/higher energy than we can see (NASA)
- The shortest waves are 'gamma waves', they're still photons of energy, we just can't see them (NASA)
- We need different types of telescopes to 'see' the different types of waves in the universe: radio, infrared, visible, X-ray, gamma (NASA)
- Mantis shrimps & bees can see UV light (Catalyst)
- The absorption spectrum of water: There's an interesting dip right at the wavelengths of visible light (Wikipedia)
- The absorption spectrum of water (London Southbank University)
- Transparency of water in the visible range (HyperPhysics, Georgia State University)
- Some creatures are 'pentachromats', i.e. they have 5 different types of colour receptors in their eyes (Wikipedia)
- What is melanopsin? (Wikipedia)
- Melanopsin probably evolved ~1 billion years prior to cone cells: These receptors independently gauge the amount of blue or yellow incoming light & route this information to parts of the brain involved in emotions & the regulation of the circadian rhythm (livescience)
- Someone who is colour blind is missing 1 or more of the 3 sets of colour-sensing cones (Wikipedia)
- How we see colours: Light absorption, reflection & transmission (the Physics Classroom)
- Sunderland claims the first stained glass in England (BBC, Radio 4)
- Sunderland National Glass Centre
- Visible light & the eye's response (the Physics Classroom)
- You can't mix all the colours & get white paint (Reference)
- Why does mixing every paint colour produce grey not white? (Physics StackExchange)
- White light is all of the frequencies of light (Reference)
- The colours of light (Science Learning)
- Colour: Travels through the paintbox - the book Johnny mentioned (Victoria Finlay)
- Photodegradation, "the alteration of materials by photons of light", is why colours fade (Wikipedia)
- Photodegradation & photostabilisation of polymers: A proper sciencey paper (SpringerPlus)
- Some answers to the question 'Why does colour fade when left in sunlight?' (Reddit)
- What is ink? (Wikipedia)
- What are dyes? (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
- Why are plants green? Because they absorb red light & reflect green light from the sun! (UCSB ScienceLine)
- More detailed answers to why plants are green (ResearchGate)
- Blue sky & Rayleigh scattering (HyperPhysics, Georgia State University)
- Goat moisturing lotion (The Goat Skincare)
- A history of inks, dyes & pigments (World of Chemicals)
- People have been dyeing fabric indigo blue for 6,000 years (The New York Times)
- Effect of light exposure on paintings (National Gallery of Art)
- What is oil painting? (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
- Pigments used by different artists, including Caravaggio (Pigments through the Ages)
- Printed photos fade, but so too can photos saved to disk! (Bloomberg)
- Cultures see & name colours differently (BBC, Future)
- Newton & the indigo controversy (Wikipedia)
- Italian, Russian & Hebrew has 12 basic colour terms (English has 11) & they distinguish blue & azure (Wikipedia)
- Colour naming: Azure is distinct from blue in Russian & Italian, but not English (Wikipedia)
- Eskimo words for snow...could be a myth (Wikipedia)
- How many words do the Inuits have for snow? (The Guardian)
- What’s in a colour? The unique human health effects of blue light (Environmental Health Perspectives)
- This article suggests penguins can see violet, green & blue, but not red (National Wildlife Federation)
- This is what I was trying to explain to Johnny, quite poorly, "...even if you perceive the sky as the colour someone else would call 'red', your blue sky still makes you feel calm", because of the 'blue' frequency of the light (livescience)
- Where are you from? Send us a postcard! Strange Attractor, c/ PO Box 9, Fitzroy, VIC 3065, Australia
Corrections- The human retina contains ~120 million rod cells, not 15 million (Wikipedia)
Cheeky review? (If we may be so bold)- It'd be amazing if you gave us a short review...it'll make us easier to find in iTunes: Click here for instructions. You're the best! We owe you a free hug and/or a glass of wine from our cellar
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55 min - Episode 25: Strange Shorts #6, Happy International Podcast Day!What is Strange Shorts?
An experiment in time management.
Turns out, releasing a weekly podcast to our exacting standards, plus attending conferences in Sydney for International Podcast Day, is pretty time consuming. We also have some top secret new ideas for Strange Attractor, so we need to steal back some hours.
So every other week we’re releasing a short episode with a few tasty treats. Stuff we forgot to cover in the big episodes, important corrections or cool facts we found while doing the show notes.
Of course, if we’re contacted by any benevolent benefactors in the meantime (Hi Elon!), we’ll quit our jobs and return to making weekly hour-long episodes.
Let’s see how it goes. Tweet @strangepeas with any feedback or questions you’d like answered!
15 min - Episode 24: The red pants that I rejectedHow does online tracking and advertising work?
- Popping the publishing bubble: A great overview about what the iOS 9 ad blockers mean for online advertising (Stratechery)
- Data collection by loyalty programs (Choice)
- How supermarkets get your data & what they do with it (The Guardian)
- Online tracking systems, how do they work (NewFangled)
- Tracking the trackers: What are cookies? An introduction to web tracking (The Guardian)
- Online tracking: If they are watching, should you watch too? (NewFangled)
- A large tracking investigation (The Wall Street Journal)
- Don't track us (Duck Duck Go)
- I'm being followed: How Google, & 104 other companies, are tracking me on the web (The Atlantic)
- Facebook isn't free - it has made you its product (Computerworld)
- The decline of newspapers (Wikipedia)
- The Age
- The Herald Sun
- Newspaper Death Watch
- The future of print: Newspapers struggle to survive in the age of technology (Harvard Political Review)
- Newspapers' ongoing search for subscription revenue: From paywalls to micropayments (The Conversation)
- The data are in: Newspapers aren’t going to get enough digital subscribers (Mumbrella)
- Apple Pay
- PayPal
- Elon Musk & PayPal (Wikipedia)
- Are micropayments a viable way to support the news business? (The Conversation)
- LaterPay, a German payment infrastructure company, offers micropayments with a twist (NiemanLab)
- Is downloading really stealing? The ethics of digital piracy (The Conversation)
- Stranger Things (NetFlix)
- Here's how much Apple Music is going to pay artists (Business Insider, Australia)
- Real-time bidding: What the bots run around doing behind the scenes before an ad appears on your screen (Wikipedia)
- Behavioural networks: A quick summary of what happens from cookie collection to the ads you see (Mike On Ads)
- An explanation of cookie matching & real-time bidding (Mike on Ads)
- "An ad exchange is a technology platform that facilitates the buying & selling of media advertising inventory from multiple ad networks" (Wikipedia)
- What is an ad exchange (Marketing Land)
- A discussion about typical cuts made during bidding in online ad exchanges (Quora)
- The DoubleClick ad exchange (Google)
- The Like button (Wikipedia)
- Likejacking: A form of 'clickjacking' where someone hijacks your Likes (Wikipedia)
- Court rules against the use of Facebook's Like button: Shopping site accused of violating German privacy laws (DailyMail, Australia)
- How to stop Facebook from tracking you (Business Insider, Australia)
- Is every browser unique? Results fom the Panopticlick experiment (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
- Panopticlick: Test your browser's ability to protect you from online tracking...Lucy failed badly (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
- Wall Street (Wikipedia)
- Pauline Hanson (Wikipedia)
- Safari's ad blocker: "Blocks all annoying ads & supports websites by not blocking unobtrusive ads by default" (Apple)
- A discussion about why we keep seeing targeted ads after we've bought the thing (Quora)
- Targeted ads after I buy something are really annoying (Brad Ideas)
- Loyalty cards help build a profile on you: The store nerds who know everything about you (news.com.au)
- The Woolworths 'rewards' loyalty card (Woolworths)
- Hmm...interesting: The Commonwealth Bank now has a 'loyalty app' where you can conveniently store all your loyalty cards in the one place...close to your bank account details (CommBank)
- How Target figured out a teen girl was pregnant before her father did (Forbes)
- What is big data? (Forbes)
- 20 facts about big data (Forbes)
- How big data can be useful for businesses (Business.com)
- Why big data is a big deal (Harvard Magazine)
- An example of an Australian data company (Quantium)
- An example of an American data company (Ghostery)
- Kim Dot Com
- Proximity marketing: "The localised wireless distribution of advertising content associated with a particular place"...very 'Minority Report' (Wikipedia)
- Is your smartphone broadcasting your movements when you shop? (Naked Security)
- Convenience or security: You can't have both when it comes to Wi-Fi (TechRepublic)
- At Starbucks, data pours in. But what to do with it? (Advertising Age)
- Is Wi-Fi at Starbucks safe? (Forbes)
- The search engine that doesn't track you (Duck Duck Go)
- Google Maps has been tracking your every move: Google works better because it tracks you...creepy but handy (Junkee)
- Tom Hanks (Wikipedia)
- The most expensive Google AdWords keywords in the US are 'San Antonio car wreck attorney', for USD$670.44 (Quartz)
- The most expensive Google AdWords keywords in Australia include 'Life insurance co.', for AUD$150.30 (The Website Marketing Group)
- The 100 most expensive keywords on Google: Infographic (webpagefx)
- Google has its own ad exchange: Google DoubleClick AdX (Google)
- Google AdWords charges on a pay-per-click basis (Word Stream)
- We use Blubrry to vaguely track our listenership, but it tells us very little (Blubrry)
- Gold 104.3 FM: Play Africa by Toto goddammit! (Gold 104.3)
- Minority Report (Wikipedia)
- Philip K. Dick (Wikipedia)
- Where are you from? Send us a postcard! Strange Attractor, c/ PO Box 9, Fitzroy, VIC 3065, Australia
Corrections- Not really sure if highly targeted ads cost more per click...this post from Facebook suggests the more 'relevant' you make your ad to your target audience, the cheaper it will be (Facebook Business)
- Further to above: How much do I have to pay on Facebook? (Qwaya)
- Further further to above: 6 factors that drive up the cost of your Facebook ad conversions (AdEspresso)
Cheeky review? (If we may be so bold)- It'd be amazing if you gave us a short review...it'll make us easier to find in iTunes: Click here for instructions. You're the best! We owe you a free hug and/or a glass of wine from our cellar
1 hr 2 min
About Strange Attractor
From the publisher's feed
An unscripted conversation between Johnny Noble and Lucy Butcher about sciencey stuff over a wine/s/s/s. And the occasional wasabi pea.
At least one of us stumbles home having learned something new and interesting. After listening to this podcast, we hope you stumble off with something new too.