First off, Happy Birthday Canada! Your faithful and intrepid science reporter (me!) is a very proud Canadian, and loves his country very much. If he could, he would give his country a hug, and buy it a beer.

Patriotic squee aside, it’s SCIENCE TIME!

First off, in the world of very bleeding edge computer hardware, IBM has successfully worked out the bugs in phase change memory (PCM) and has a demo that has been running for five months now, so they are pretty sure they got it down.

PCM is a way of storing information by exploiting the way that the electrical resistance of some materials changes when its state changes. In this case, the material is a form of crystal that has a very high resistance when in a solid, crystalline form but a much lower resistance when uncrystallized and amorphous.

So the information would be stored via changed the state of zillions of little crystalline cells.

Well, so what? The upshot of all this technicality is that if you can get PCM working, you get a form of non-volatile memory (keeps its information even without power, like Flash memory) that has incredible speed and information density.

This could lead to a whole host of super fast high capacity devices that could kick off a computing revolution. Imagine computers that boot instantly! Then again, they have been promising that for a while.

And of course, this being bleeding edge stuff, we are a long long way from practical applications.

But hey, the future is looking pretty cool!

Going even further out onto the bleeding edge into where it possibly borders onto the lunatic fringe, we have the guy behind video game on demand system OnLive claiming, in a casual and offhand way, that he has a brand new wireless communication technology that violates the laws of physics.

What do you think of that, Scotty?

Exactly. Ye cannae deny the laws of physics, laws of physics, laws of physics!

Now the frustrating thing is that this dude, Steve Perlman, did not call a press conference, hand out smartly designed and highly detailed press packets explaining it all, and then announce this particular scientific revolution with a full presentation and a thorough Q and A session afterwards.

No, he just let it drop in the middle of a longer presentation about something else, like it was no big deal and he could not imagine it causing a fuss.

“Oh, and by the way, I have a new wireless technology called DIDO that would completely revolutionize the way wireless data transfer works, using towers that are no bigger than a router and allowing every user in a tower’s range to use the tower’s full speed at any time, all while going right through objects that would normally block wireless reception. Moving on. ”

According to the eggheads, what he is proposing is not exactly impossible, but it flies in the face of what is known about how wireless works right now, and so they are rating it as “not bloody likely”.

I just like the idea of casually dropping some scientific bombshell while talking about something far more dull and prosaic and technical.

“Interesting side note, I obtained the level of detail on these slides of the wing patterns on the Lower Delta Swamp Moth by inventing a photographic technique that slows down light till it goes backwards in time. Now moving on to the Upper Delta Swamp Moth…. ”

Finally, moving on beyond the lunatic fringe to that sacred island of honor and madness known as Japan, we have…. yes, you guessed it, kids…. something really amazingly creepy.

In this case, it’s a hyper realistic robot mannequin designed to let dental student practices on something that looks human in a creepy ass way and actually realistically winces and yells in pain.

And oh yes…. there is video.

I love the narrator’s voice. It’s distinctly Japanese sounding, and yet his English is perfectly clear and easy to understand. It’s the perfect balance.

Oh, and fun fact : in order to get a really realistic mouth, tongue, and jaw for their robot dental patient, the makers of the robot had to turn to the people who are the current world leaders in such things : the makers of hyper realistic “love dolls”.

That explains why it’s a female patient. I bet hyper realistic male sex dolls are a decade behind in sophistication due to perceived lack of demand.

Not that I would want one. Not unless they make one that can also engage in intellectually stimulating conversation with me after.

Got a great big basket of video type goodness to strew in your wake, my loyal and immaculately groomed readers, and so with just a tiny bit more ado… on with the show!

Ado. Ado. Ado.

First up, what happens when you stick 300 harmonicas to a Mini and go for a drive?

You get a rather nifty little ad for the Mini.

I don’t know, though. The sound said harmonicas are making in the ad is suspiciously clear and clean and pleasant to the ear. My experience has been that these things never turn out as euphonious as you might want them to. Actual flowing air is highly turbulent, after all, and turbulence means chaos and chaos almost never sounds good to the human ear. Music is beautiful in part because of its unnatural perfection, and that is more or less the antithesis of natural chaotic system sound.

So I call shenanigans on that little clip. I bet they strapped the harmonicas on, got something really appalling out of them no matter what they did, and finally gave up and just got Philip Glass to come in and compose something that sounded sort of like what they had hoped the thing would be like in the first place.

Next up : Hey kids, LETS GET WEIRD WITH SCIENCE!

And by weird, I mean “let’s do irresponsible things with powerful forces just because it’s cool. ”

Plus, the accent totally works for a clip like this, don’t you think? I feel like I have just done a really fun science “experiment” with one of the likely lads from Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels.

But mostly, it’s just cool. Like, Mythbusters cool. I love how the oxide just…. disappears. It doesn’t burn, it doesn’t glow, it doesn’t even make much smoke. It just….. zaps off there in a neat and orderly fashion.

When you think about it, that is the one way to make sure the sensitive data on your CD or DVD cannot be recovered after you throw it out, because all other methods leave something behind. Smashing, melting, crushing, you name it, in theory, the data is still there, more or less.

But with this method…. it’s gone, daddy, gone.

Thanks, Violent Femmes!

Sticking with the “extreme fun with science” angle, you just have to see what the Slo Mo guys have been up to with their high speed cameras lately.

Does that kick ass, or what? The fact that the balloon wouldn’t pop right away turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because the footage of him bouncing off the thing looks almost better than the original desired result. The way it undulates and ripples is mesmerizing, and almost obscene, in an abstract way.

Now let’s kick this blog rockin’ with a little piece by an obscure little artist you may or may not have heard of… he’s just an honest up and coming lad from smalltown California, and I think you will be hearing a lot from this sincere and petulant young man in the future.

Here, making his big time debut, is Alfred “Weird” Yankovic! (canned applause)

You are still not entirely in my good graces, Conan. Your new show is largely a snooze (why couldn’t it have been as good as its promos?) and you have a lot of nerd-bashing bad karma to work off before I can consider you to be out of the red.

But having Weird Al come in to write and perform the “lyrics” to your show’s theme helps. I worship the Al, for he is the Lord of All Comedy Geeks (he is Of Us, and he Rules Us), and so pretty much anything involving him will please me, and the song he did is fun too.

But you ain’t out of the woods yet, Conan. Not until your show gets funnier, anyhow.

Let’s keep the music rolling with this bittersweet and poignant number from some heartfelt fellows who want to explain a thing or two to the ladies.

It’s called Nice Guys Finish last. Hold on to your heartstrings, fellows, they are going to get tugged.

Don’t act like it’s not true, ladies. I know enough nice, sweet, sensitive straight boys who have been completely plowed under by some asshole who treats girls like shit and gets more tang than all the world’s astronauts to doubt it in the least.

Face it, what you say you want is nothing like what you actually reward with sex. And actions mean a hell of a lot more than words.

So don’t be surprised at all the “asshole guys” out there, and act amazed that someone would DARE to treat a woman that way.

It’s simple psychology : you get more of what you reward.

Finally, a link to a great site I stubmled across recently.

It’s called I Love TV Intros and it has a HUGE repository of the openings of a whole whack of North American television shows.

It is the perfect thing if you feel like rummaging around in the attic of your mind and finding memories you didn’t even know you had of shows you only barely remember.

You never know what you will find up there!

I suggest starting with the decade of your childhood.