Doctor Who on floppy drives

Delia Derbyshire, the woman who made the iconic arrangement of Ron Grainger's theme tune to Doctor Who, would have been 75 this week. Her arrangement was the first work to be made with entirely electronic means, so it's perhaps appropriate that this tribute is also entirely electronic... albeit on floppy drives...

The Flavorwire article about Delia - one of many online articles which featured the above video - also linked to a short video showing Delia's creative process. Watch that clip, embedded below, and tell me she wasn't a badass at what she did:

Delia Derbyshire, we salute you!

TARDIS for sale or rent...

It's inevitable, when you have a talent contest, especially something like Britain's Got Talent, that there are going to be... unusual acts. For example, why haven't they buzzed off that snarky so-and-so who sits at the end of the panel each week?


Well, this is definitely unusual: Martyn Crofts appeared on BGT with a saucepan on his head, and - without any electronic wizardry - proceeded to parody "King of the Road" as a Dalek.

And, sure enough, that nasty man on the right-hand end of the desk still needs buzzing off...


Thanks to BoingBoing for sourcing that little nugget!

Doctor Who's Sonic Screwdriver: Now a thing

Anyone who's a fan of the classic 1960s-2000s British sci-fi Doctor Who will know of the sonic screwdriver, a wondrous device capable of being anything from a lockpick to a Whovian equivalent of Star Trek's tricorder. It has served the Doctor (and presumably the other Gallifryeans - when they were still around) very well over his many incarnations.

And, of course, there have been countless fan-built - and commercially-built - replicas. But now, intrepid scientists* at Dundee University in the UK have created an ultrasound device - which, in the press release, they have actually called a sonic screwdriver - that uses a helical beam of ultrasound to turn objects.

Having a quick nose through the press release, I notice that the beam is made of up several helixes. If you've played Portal 2, the ultrasound beam would look probably look a bit like an Aperture Science Excursion Funnel - if you could see it.

The Aperture Science Excursion Funnel - what the sonic screwdriver beam might look like, if you could actually see the thing. (Picture credit: The Half-Life Wiki.)

But the boffins at Dundee Uni aren't doing it because they're fans of the show - this bad boy is a proof of concept which, the scientists say, could be applied to non-invasive ultrasound surgery, amongst other things.

I just hope the BBC doesn't sue for the use of the name. And... anyone building a TARDIS?


Story source: The Mary Sue, who got it from The Beat, who got it from the BBC. Now all we need is for another website to reference Sense Deprived as a source, and we're good to go!


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* I have to admit that I've never heard of scientists who aren't intrepid, although given infinite diversity in infinite combinations, they must exist...