Healthy Mouse Batteries?

My mouse has been bothering me. I persist in using a mouse tethered to my computer via the umbilical cord because I try not to use batteries. Batteries are just plain toxic. But, I confess, the tail of my mouse gets in the way. It gets tangled up and sometimes it has to be shoved out of the way or the mouse runs over its own tail. Poor thing.

I know, small potatoes in the name of being Green. Everywhere I look we are switching to wireless mice so the time may come soon when my mouse dies with a small squeak (or not) and I cannot replace it with anything but the tail-less version. So I have been researching batteries. In general, throughout my living space I use rechargeable batteries. Fewer heavy metals and other noxious chemicals go in the landfills. But eventually they do go in the landfills. And as the following site describes, though they beat normal batteries hands down, even a rechargeable battery is on some level bad news:

http://www.greenbatteries.com/aa-battery-faqs.html

The page claims that NiMH (Nickel-Metal Hydride) rechargeable batteries are environmentally friendly but this is true only by comparison to the other rechargeables. Although the disposal hazard is reduced because there is no (highly toxic) Cadmium in NiMH batteries, the site neglects to mention that there can be significant environmental degradation from current mining practices and processing of the base components.

What is a mouse user to do...

I found something really cool... How about a living mouse! No, I'm not suggesting you train a furry creature to let you hold it and scoot it around on the table with an antennae of some sort attached to it. PETA would probably be on *my* tail really fast - with justification. (Besides, you know what mice like to do besides eat)

Not yet ready for prime time, but MIT is at work on a virus-driven battery!  What a totally cool idea. The viruses "create a cathode by coating themselves with iron phosphate and then grabbing hold of carbon nanotubes" (full article below). Cool. I think. It gives new meaning to "reach out and touch someone".  Now if we all had these little critters powering our mice just think of the good it would do for the environment. I could get rid of my umbilical tail. And then maybe we could replace the battery in my laptop as well?

I wonder what viruses they use...

In the interests of science I am currently looking for a friend who would like to test one under my supervision as soon as they become available.


Article:
http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/1802467/mit-team-touts-sci-style-virus-battery

Publications page: http://belcher10.mit.edu/publications/

What CS Gains From Interdisciplinary Computing

Following up on last night's post about the reasons why many people engage in interdisciplinary computing work, I'd like to briefly list off some examples that came out in our meeting discussion today. At one point we decided to get specific and share examples of how the computer science discipline has directly benefited from interdisciplinary collaborations.

Here are some of them, written as close to verbatim as I could take notes on the fly. I'm certainly not expert in many of them, so anything I say that is missing an important or interesting piece hopefully someone will chime in and amplify for me. However! this is a classic facet of interdisciplinary collaboration - no one individual can know multiple fields at the same depth and accuracy. That is part of why it is such productive work!

The Folding at Home project involves experts in bio-medicine, distributed computing, bio-technology, high performance computing. As the site implies, computer science has been stimulated in HPC (high performance computing), algorithm development, networking, and simulations. We have expanded boundaries of computational understanding in all these areas.

Distributed computation not only in that project but in other very large scale projects has pushed the boundaries of computational efficiency to new levels as we develop the necessary algorithms to tackle ever more seemingly intractable problems, that are not necessarily so intractable.

Online auctions. I missed the intro to this conversation, but when I picked up, the discussion was about the movement from manual to electronic auctions requiring a change in how economists worked on what turn out to be NP-hard problems. Computer science theory is making advances so that these auctions can function properly. I could use someone helping to fill me in on what I missed in this conversation because it sounds very interesting!

Working with the film industry has driven both the development of 3D graphics and User Interface development. Many of the "old" rules of thumb (meaning circa early 90s) no longer apply and computer science has stepped up to revamp our understanding of what we can do with graphics at very fundamental levels. User Interface theory and application has evolved right along with it. For example, imagine how far we have come from Star Wars  (1977) to  Toy Story (1995) to Avatar (2009).

These advances in computer science from interdisciplinary work with the film industry in turn spurred development on the side of GPUs (Graphic Processor Unit), which were then deployed in so many areas of computing from games to simulations and beyond that they cannot be easily itemized.

Music downloads - the virtually ubiquitous desire to stream music in one form or another, has led to advances in basic streaming technologies and support algorithms that now are used in far flung applications such as digital image processing in medicine and transfer of image data (MRIs for example) to medical service providers on short notice across long distances. There was mention specifically of recognition algorithms as a subset of algorithms that have advanced, - I could use some supplementary information on this one!

Just a few ideas to whet your appetite. Speaking of appetite, I may not have one for a week. Two days of intense cognitive load and equally intense gastric load have left me with wonderful memories and a bit of a tummy ache. Brings a new meaning to "Brain Food".

Stunned by Programming Beauty in Biology

I am agog. Stunned. Speechless (a rare thing). Caught in an endless loop "wowwwwwww" moment.

I was going to write today about something else but that something else got abruptly shoved off into oblivion after a friend sent me a link to a New York Times article with the most lovely video of computer generated cellular biology in it. It is perhaps programming at the most lovely I have seen (ok, I'm drooling).

So, away with the planned topic and here is a link to the article on molecular animation and be sure to watch the video about half way down.