Real Augmented Reality; Whack-a-Moon; Can Science and Religion talk?; Happy Labor Day

Augmented Reality Reality

A very interesting article in New Scientist describes how Eli Peli, an ophthalmologist and bioengineer at Harvard Medical School, has developed a pair of Augmented Reality specs to help people suffering from tunnel vision. The way I understand it, a tiny camera attached to the specs takes a wide-angle picture which is then processed to create something like a line drawing of the scene. This is then scaled down and superimposed over the wearer's field of vision, so that the tunnel-vision sufferer gets an overview of the wider scene. This allows the sufferer to locate objects outside their degraded field of view up to 75% faster.

Let's play Whack-a-Moon

Europe's SMART-1 probe is in orbit around the Moon, losing about a kilometre in altitude with each go-around and taking more and more detailed pictures as it gets closer to the surface. At the moment it's estimated that it'll hit sometime around 2:41am Central time Sunday but because its orbit is going to be a bit of a surface-grazer that could be off by up to five hours.

At the speed it hits there'll be enough energy released to create quite a flash, and because the craft has some unspent fuel aboard, there could also be a fireball at impact. If you have a good telescope or binoculars you may be able to see the result - the project scientists have estimated a flash of between 9th and 13th magnitude (so it won't be visible to the naked eye).

A bonus for Bill & Ted fans is that the impact point is estimated to be in the region of the Moon known as The Lake of Excellence, dude.

Can Science and Religion work together to save Humanity?

E. O. Wilson, the famous scientist and author, has put out a new book, "The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth". In it he argues that science and religion can and should work together to help avert our own extinction.

I hope he's right but I have to say that my experience of religious extremists leads me to believe that it really won't be that easy - there are too many fundamentalists who can't wait for the end of the world so that the worthy can be saved, and ready to help things along.

Labor Day misnomer

Why is it called Labor Day when most people won't be working? Anyway, this writer wishes all his readers a safe a happy holiday.