Skyehaven’s Cool Thing of the Day

Once upon a time, a baby learned to breakdance and became an Internet star. I introduce to you the next generation of child dance prodigies: the boy in the red shirt!

Some scientists from IBM have imaged a part of nature that none of us have ever seen before: a single molecule. It’s not just the simple beauty that arrested me, though. It’s the fact that we’ve managed to figure out a way to image something that’s one million times smaller than a grain of sand. And that, in order to do it, they had to replace the tip of their instrument with one molecule of carbon monoxide.

That’s right. To get a picture of a single molecule, scientists had to make an instrument just one molecule wide to measure it. Um…wow?

Spend some time making music. I need to figure out how to record my beautiful creations to share them with friends. And I need to figure out how to record my monstrous mistakes so I can share them with my enemies.

They’re not really moving, but they seem to be.

Most of us bibliophiles have been there, especially those of us who are sci-fi/fantasy types; we’ve fallen in love with a series. Maybe we found it at book one some lonesome October night and have been waiting anxiously for the next installment. Perhaps we were lucky enough to discover the series after a few books had been written and now the wait for the next is becoming excruciating. Some authors are very good at setting a schedule and keeping to it (one book a year in each series, come hell or high water. Thank you Jim Butcher!). Others not so much (12 years between books 3 and 4. Jean M Auel has been nominated for the hall of shame). Those of us who love George R R Martin have been waiting a bit. Some are getting so frustrated that they’re writing screeds to Neil Gaiman. As Neil pointed out so eloquently, and John Anealio put to music, George R R Martin is not your bitch.

Who knew when the Wii came out that those miraculous little Wiimotes could be used for so many cool things. Granted, the whole idea of playing a video game with a wireless controller that responded to movements was pretty darned revolutionary to begin with. The fact of the matter is, techno-geeks have since been doing things with Wiimotes that perhaps only they could imagine. You might call it Wiimote meets Star Trek. The Star Trek franchise is the only place I can think of where we even dared to imagine that we might be able to feel a hologram.

Check out Cool Cosmos! This is a stellar find, if you’ll pardon the pun, from the male half of this duo.

If the charge on this robot lasted just a smidge longer, it would definitely be on my DO WANT list.

A new classical music composer has come on the scene in Lithuania, and his soloist has crept into my heart like a thief in the night — a cat burglar, if you will.