Four Sacred Mountains (R. Carlos Nakai - Song For The Morning Star)

"In contrast to the Judeo Christian religions which tend to celebrate people and events, and thus can be practiced anywhere, the Navajo religion is founded on relationships to specific places. The Navajo religion is defined by and cannot be separated from its relationship to specific geographical places. These sites are sacred because of special religious events which have occurred in that particular site.

The Navajo people believe that the Creator placed them on land between four sacred mountains: Blanca Peak in Colorado, Mount Taylor in New Mexico, the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona, and Hesperus Peak in Colorado.

According to their own history, the Navajos have always lived between these mountains. The Navajo people have been instructed by the Creator never to leave their sacred homeland.

The story of the creation of the Navajo people and their emergence onto their sacred homeland is recounted in a ceremony known as the Blessingway, which is the foundation of the Navajo way of life. Blessingway focuses on the story of Changing Woman, who is the inner form of the Earth through its seasonal transformations. She is the major deity for the Navajo. LINK: Youtube

More on this at the Link above.

Roombas Playing Pac-Man

(YouTube Link)

Three computer scientists at Colorado University programmed several Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners to act like Pac-Man and the ghosts which chase him. Jack Elston, Cory Dixon, and Maciej Stachura did so in order to demonstrate the unmanned aerial system that they are developing. Click on the link for more videos, pictures, and schematics for this project.

Link, Via: CrunchGear, Via: Neatorama

Spherical Robot Can Climb Over Obstacles

Spherical robots are nifty designs, and they have several advantages over their wheeled counterparts: they adapt well to all kids of terrain (even water) and are completely sealed, making them ideal for planetary exploration. The big sticking point (as it were) of spherical robots is that they tend to get hung up on obstacles. They move by changing their center of gravity, but they can’t shift their internal mass outside of their own diameter, which means that they have a finite amount of leverage to play with and therefore can’t get themselves over obstacles of a given height, no matter how much power their motors might output. LINK, Via: Youtube



Greg Schroll, a graduate student at Colorado State, has developed a spherical robot that uses gyroscopes instead of a movable mass for both drive power and steering. The gyros just have to sit there, and depending on which way they’re being spun, they exert torque on the robot to move it forward or turn it. The big advantage to this is that the torque exerted by the gyros increases as they spin faster, meaning that more powerful motor does increase the power of the robot, giving it the ability to literally jump out of holes:



Greg has been named one of Popular Science’s 10 Most Brilliant Innovators of 2009 for his work on this robot. LINK: Youtube

!!COLORADO COUPLE'S HOME INCLUDES FLAMMABLE TAP WATER!!

Natural gas leaks can make tap water flammable, as you can see in this Colorado couple's home. LINK, Via: Youtube

Giant Blue Bear Sculpture: Peek-A-Boo!

Photo: Elizabeth Thomsen [Flickr]

That’s "I See What You Mean," a 40-foot tall blue bear peering into the window of the Colorado Convention Center. The steel and fiberglass sculpture is created by Lawrence Argent:

The artist has described I See What You Mean as a stylized representation of native fauna. As the bear peeks inside the enormous facility at the conventioneers, displacement and wonder pique curiosity and question a greater relationship of art, technology and whimsy.

Link - Via: Pursuits: Elizabeth Thomsen and Super Punch, Via: Neatorama

Heavy Winds In Colorado

Recent heavy wind activity warrants this video of heavy winds in Broomfield, Colorado recorded from the corporate offices of Level3 Communications a couple years back, the last few days have been even worse that whats contained in the video. Current wind storms have been ravaging the foothills west of Denver and around Boulder again this year with winds clocked at up to 100 mph.

These people can barely stay on there feet and others can't. LINK