It would be an instantaneous science crime for me to not blog this paper NMR Imaging of the Honeybee Brain which was published in the Journal of Insect Science circa 2003. Not only because Kieran, my temporarily missing Jacks of Science co-author studies such insects obsessively and not only because I'm working full-time right now on some MRI software but because those brain volume renderings are wildly awesome. Come to think of it, you're better off going here to read the paper because it includes hot bee brain videos as well. Unfortunately, no Bee Brain Boat videos but it's probably for the best.

 Found this at Revising MRI blog while googling Fourier tranforms. Nice find!

In further celebration of the greatest holiday of the year I've compiled a terrifying collection of scientists graves. A lot of cool scientists were cremated but many have extravagant tombs which seal them safely 6-feet below us, hopefully preventing or at least delaying a mass zombie scientist attack. (See Zombie Stephen Hawking post for what to expect).Boltzmann's grave is probably my favorite and clearly shows how terrifying of a zombie he would be. If my body can't be rocketed into space after I die then I'd like a nice stone bust of me making a mean face. Not to mention a nice equation including my own mathematical constant.Karl Schwarzchild currently rests peacefully under a ridged black planet. I'm guessing it was the closest thing to a Black Hole they could put on a grave stone.Charles Darwin was buried at Westminister Abbey along with great people like Newton. Note the lack of an elaborate stone Darwin reclining on The Origin of Species surrounded by monkeys below the word Evolution.Here's Newton's grave, widely popularized by a Da Vinci Code riddle. Note the reclining statue of Newton resting on his famous books surrounded by winged boys below the Goddess of Astronomy.Since it's an equal rights zombie invasion female scientists like Rosalind Franklin should also be feared.Gauss has a great grave and I'd definitely like to calculate the flux through it. I wouldn't be surprised if there were mysterious magnetic fields emitting from below ground on Halloween night.Max Planck's grave is a solid concrete monolith, much like his work in quantum theory. How appropriate.Don't worry about Niels Bohr, he's sealed under an owl.R.I.P. Gregor Mendel!Richard Feynman and his wife have a modest grave their thirst for brains will be anything but modest.

Well, it's about time. Children across the world finally have a reason to ask for a PS3 for Christmas this year: Science.

Just look at the top rated games on metacritic right now, the top rated game is Elder Scrolls and its been available for a full year already on Xbox360 and PC. What else, NHL 08? Essentially the same game as NHL 95 for Super Nintendo except you can see the beads of sweat roll down the goalies face. Well if you really want to see sweat roll down a face, take a look at this, then look in a mirror because you're face is bound to be sweatin' with joy:Your eyes aren't deceiving you, its an 8-node rackmounted PS3 cluster. As you can see, researchers finally realized that the only decent game to play on PS3 is Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Scientific Computation. So finally some gamer scientist caught on and realized they could get some serious Cell Processing power for some non-serious amounts of grant cash.

How about I stop talking and just paste a million links I just uncovered on Google about these juicy clusters.

Papers / Guides

• Limitations of the PlayStation 3 for High Performance Cluster Computing
• The Potential of the Cell Processor for Scientific Computing
• A Rough Guide to Scientific Computing On the PlayStation 3
• IBM's An Introduction to Linux on the PS3

Clusters

• Terrasoft's Original PS3 Supercomputer for Bioinformatics (3000 square foot facility with 128-node PS3 cluster, wtf?)
• PS3 Gravity Grid for Astrophysics (the 8 nodes pictured above)
• Frank Mueller PS3 Cluster for (8+1 nodes) for Computer Science
• Distributed and Embedded Systems Lab PS3 Cluster for Computer Science

And if you do happen to have a PS3 lying around at home, blow the dust off and get going on the science! PS3 Grid is waiting for you to compute some molecular dynamics! And I almost forgot Folding@Home for PS3 as well.

First I missed Cafe Scientifique, then, before I knew it I'm missed the Toronto Zombie Walk! Thankfully I haven't missed Halloween because there is just enough time to throw out my sexy devil costume and start gathering the necessary materials for the ultimate terror of the netherworld: Zombie Stephen Hawking.

Take a look at the video below for an example of a decent ZSH execution.

Well, here's my step by step guide to being a Zombie Stephen Hawking for Halloween.

1. Obtain A Wheelchair. This is definitely the hardest part of the costume to acquire. If you know anyone who has a disability or you are conveniently disabled yourself, then you are in the clear. Don't be afraid to talk to the elderly. If you aren't ready to commit to that, I know I'm not, try checking your local Yellow Pages for "Medical Equipment and Supplies, Wheelchair Rentals, Hospital Equipment, etc". If you can't get a wheelchair consider zombify-ing a more able bodied scientist.
2. Obtain Hawking-esque Clothing. Stephen Hawking has been spotted in many comfortable garments so you are pretty flexible when it comes to clothes. A thrift store suit would be my personal choice, but I wouldn't turn away a nice wool knit over a collared shirt with some wool pants. Just make sure to ask the thrift store clerk how hard it is to get blood stains out of your garments. Don't forget that Stephen Hawking wears glasses, and not those retarded black plastic-framed ones, but classy thin-framed gold ones.
3. Obtain a Voice Synthesizer. This step requires the most technical know-how. Right off the bat, carrying a laptop around with your costume is an easy solution, plus you can check your email. Remember that a sinister black Macbook would appropriately compliment the zombie aesthetic much more than a glistening shiny Dell (which happens to be scary enough as is).

   On a Mac, open up System Preferences > Speech > Text to Speech and then select the System Voice "Fred". I simply checked the box "Speak selected text when key is pressed" and set it to something like Command+Shift+S. Then I opened up a Text Edit document and wrote up something like "Brains, Brains, I don't need your knowledge, I'm just hungry" or "At the beginning of the universe was the Big Bang, at the end of your universe will be a Big Crunch...of your brain".

   A similar approach can be taken on Windows using the Vista Ease-of-Access narrator or XP's Control Panel > Speech > Text to Speech feature. The best part about using a laptop is being flexible and typing new phrases on-the-fly. Be creative, for example: "In a Blackhole, No One Can Hear You Scream... unless you scream out Hawking Radiation, good luck with that".

   The problem with the laptop method is that the computer speakers are too quiet. Consider equipping your computer with a set of external speakers and mounting them on the wheelchair, especially for a louder Halloween party environment.But carrying around a laptop is not always ideal wandering around at night in strange neighborhoods. You can prerecord some phrases using an online text-to-speech generator like the one at AT&T labs. The problem with that site is that the voices are too smooth and uncharacteristic of Stephen Hawking. Either way, generate phrases and burn them to a CD for play in a discman with speaker set-up for a robbery-free night.

4. Zombify. There is no limit to how wounded and how hideous of a Hawking you want to be. Just follow some of the zombie guides on the internet but remember to be tasteful because you don't want people to lose sight of the fact that you are a distinguished British astrophysicist. You'll definitely need fake blood to splatter across your clothes and to drip on your wheels to leave nice wheel trails of blood.
5. Obtain Friend. Unfortunately, Stephen Hawking cannot wheelchair himself around, if you dare choose to wheel yourself you will ruin the illusion and therefore ruin the costume. You need to find someone willing to push you from door to door or from bar to bar. There's no easy way to do this one. Obtaining a friend can take years of tedious "listening" and "sharing emotions" but if you join Facebook and start looking up people from your highschool whom you barely know, you might be able to find someone twisted and desperate enough to help you. Who knows, you may even find a cute girl to dress up as Stephen's sexy zombie nurse / zombie wife, Elaine Mason!

And that's all there is to it! Click Google Ads if you liked the guide and post some possible Zombie Stephen Hawking quotes in the comments. I like: "Read my new best-seller, A Brief History of Time that it takes to consume your flesh".

Children looking at a globe at the Ontario Science Centre, Toronto  (1985, from Archives of Ontario)

I really feel like I'm missing out when I the browse the calendar of free science events in Toronto put together at Easternblot. Since Kieran and I were too busy discussing serious business matters yesterday, we happen to miss an interesting Cafe Scientifique. I don't even dare to sift through all the wild events on University of Toronto's events listings because theres just so much to keep track of! The least I could do would be to goto the "Beyond the Visible Universe: Dark Clouds, Galaxy Collisions, and the Origin of Stars" lecture today. It's entirely open to the public.

Although, there are many other interesting sciencey things to do in Toronto other than going to public lectures. For the younger folks, the Ontario Science Center has a regular event called Sci-Fri with cool DJs and issues to discuss with peers.

But what about a more sophisticated Friday night of fine dining? Toronto has you covered when it comes to the fine art of molecular gastronomy at Colborne Lane. I haven't eaten there, but I can only imagine that it tastes a lot like chemistry. Of course, it's a bit expensive compared to all those free events listed on the events calendar, but the tasting menu looks very interesting!

One of Toronto's greatest failures in scienceyness would be the lack of a Planetarium. Not even the Science Centre can provide some astronomical entertainment but I have my fingers crossed for some possible new ventures into Toronto's planetarium scene.

What about places to watch sciencey films in Toronto? For a wide assortment of documentaries the Brunswick Theatre would be the place to be. They have been regularly featuring the controversial BBC doc Intelligent Design War on Science throughout the year. But, if ol' Brunsie isn't enough for you, an international film festival called Planet in Focus is running from October 24-28 which is sure to inspire some environmental awareness in us all.

Don't forget about sciencey theatre. For example, at the Robert Gill Theatre, The Source of Gravity by Justin Blum, is a play about " A physicist is torn between family and career" which has been running from October 17-21.

All in all, Toronto's culturally pretty sciencey even without a planetarium so get outside and be part of it!

There's just so much buzz about Radiohead's album In Rainbows being released online that I just had to release my own In Rainbows Mix simultaneously. It's a straight half hour of psychadelic optics, so throw it in your iTunes, turn on visualizations and trip out!

Download the mix here(20mb) or stream it with this:

1. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Blue Turning Gray // Peter Pan Records Presents Learn about Colors - Side A [0:00]
2. Walt Disney - Wonderful World of Color [1:12]
3. Broadcast - Colour Me In [1:45]
4. Disney Records - Wonderful Eyes [3:52]
5. Dr. Octagon - Blue Flowers // Dorothy Collins - How Many Colors Are There In The Rainbow? [4:25]
6. Dead Prez - Look Around [6:36]
7. Supertramp - Child of Vision // J-Live - Live-Audio Visual (Acapella) [8:33]
8. Zero 7 - Seeing Things // Tom Glazer & Dottie Evans - Ultra Violet and Infra Red [14:14]
9. Blockhead - Coloring Book [16:10]
10. Hot Chip - Colours // Hot Chip - Colours [17:42]
11. Disney Records - The Spectrum Song [20:25]
12. 4th Pyramid - Light this Beat On Fire [21:40]
13. The Whatnauts - Why Can't People Be Colors Too [22:06]
14. Edan - I See Colours [23:23]
15. The Dells - I Can Sing a Rainbow/Love is Blue [25:24]
16. DiY - Firenze - Orange is Orange // Rainbow Brite - Starlite Rainbow Brite [26:28]
17. Lupe Fiasco - Tilted in Any Colour You Like [28:18]
18. Peter Pan Records Presents Learn About Colors - Side B [31:37]

I'm a fan of Wired's comprehensive list of The Best Unlikely Movie Scientists. In an attempt to discover more hilare gems of this nature I turned to IMDB's hot new keyword system to classify movies. What I inadvertently stumbled upon was the coolest keyword possible second only, in number of titles, to the de facto standard movie scientist.

It takes a lot of prowess and cunning to play a convincing scientist in a box office hit. Pictured above is the truly versatile actor Rainn Wilson playing a science teacher in The Last Mimzy.

1. Apply obscure math knowledge to something practical like economics.

That's all there is to it! The secret to a wealth of cash baskets is simply to contribute less to the scientific community and more to the money-making community!

Popping up for the first time in the mid-90's when we were all to busy with grunge music and seinfeld, this field has been gaining momentum ever since. It even has a cool buzzword nickname: Econophysics. It just rolls off the tongue so much better than Thermoeconomics. For even greater detail, a thorough document was recently submitted to arXiv for an upcoming entry in the Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science.

If you haven't already read the "Wikipediarticle" or the paper above, or given up on both because they have too many big words, it's all about Statistical Mechanics. Physicists and mathematicians love to use statistics to study of motion of a mass of particles. Along the way some broke physicist, down on his luck, finally connected the dots to the economic world and came up with a killer get-rich-quick-scheme. Well, it may not have made him rich, but it certainly spawned an interesting discipline of study.

So how are particles and dollar bills alike? Well, in nature we have the the law of conservation of energy which states matter cannot be created or destroyed. A similar law of conservation of money is argued in Dragulescu et. al. I did notice that the paper doesn't take into account the common practices of printing counterfeit money or the amount of dollar bills burned by magicians worldwide per second, but it does clearly state that the conservation of money is between individual transactions (a closed system).

The beauty of these parallels is that all the years of work physicists have spent pouring time into understanding the energies and distributions of particles can be applied to the monies and money distributions across the world.

And subsequently the lifestyles of the rich and scientific will be the hottest celebrity gossip of tomorrowland. All in all, thanks goes to the arXiv blog for pointing all this out to me because my financial future is now perfectly secure.

Where the hell are all the chemistry articles geysering out of Jacks of Science that I dream about so often? Well, it looks like I won't have another restless sleep tonight because I've encoded about 8-9 bad ass chemistry posts into song form in this hot new mix.

Download the turntable of elements mix here(28mb) or stream it with this:

1. Switchfoot - Chem 6A // Alchemist - Bring it On (Instrumental)[0:00]
2. Apathy - Chemical [0:53]
3. Mu-Ziq - Caesium // Dj BC - Powers of Kryptonite [1:50]
4. Lemon Jelly - Elements // Justice League of America - Metamorpho The Element Man Song [3:45]
5. Blackalicious - Chemical Calesthenics [5:38]
6. Luke Vibert - Radioactive // Large Professor - Radioactive // Dorthy Collins - Ice Is a Solid [8:48]
7. Public Enemy - Bring The Noise (MF Doom Monosodium Glutamate Remix) [12:10]
8. MF Doom - Monosodium Glutamate // Tom Glazer & Dottie Evans - What Is Chemical Energy? [13:02]
9. U.N.K.L.E. - Chemistry // Tom Glazer & Glazer & Dottie Evans - What Is Chemical Energy? [13:50]
10. Alan Braxe and Fred Falke - Palladium // Golden Records - Hydrogen and Helium // Tom Lehrer - The Elements [16:52]
11. Queens of the Stone Age - Better Living Through Chemistry // Thomas Dolby - She Blinded Me With Science [20:50]
12. Rush - Chemistry // Frank Cardulla - The Mole // Frank Cardulla - Strong Acids and Bases (part 1) [23:50]
13. Golden Records - Hydrogen and Helium // Tragically Hip - Silver Jet [27:42]
14. George Cromwell - Organic Chemistry [29:26]