Swans on Tea

Sat-nav for flappers
Sat-Nav wristwatches have been around since 1920.
OK, the idea of a small chart scrolling on one’s wrist is clever, but the “sat” part of “sat-nav” stands for satellite, as in artificial satellite. What artificial satellites are involved here?
Yes, I have a peeve about using acronyms and abbreviations where one obviously doesn’t know [...]

15 wall climbing robots

Drilling Square Holes at Linearly Independent. All about the Reuleaux triangle and rotations thereof.
[I]t has the same maximum width regardless of how it is rotated. this property was thought to be only possessed by circles once and yet here’s a simple and apt counter example.
Constant width shapes can make great manhole covers, as no [...]

Algorithmic Architecture at oobject.
Algorithmic architecture uses computers to generate natural looking aperiodic forms that are are a revolutionary alternative to the extreme crystalline regularity of what has up to now been considered modern.

MPG vs GPM at Everyday Scientist
The take-away message is that we can’t do calculations like (1/a - 1/b) in our heads.
Update: more at sciencegeekgirl

Large Hadron Collider nearly ready at The Big Picture. 27 photos.

Oregon approves what will temporarily be the largest land-based wind farm in the world. 909 MW peak power.

Whilst scurrying through the intertubes, I ran across a post entitled Should We Ban Physics? at Overcoming Bias.
At the recent Global Catastrophic Risks conference, someone proposed a policy prescription which, I argued, amounted to a ban on all physics experiments involving the production of novel physical situations - as opposed to measuring existing phenomena. [...]

DelFly Micro Air Vehicle Weighs Just Three Grams
The ‘dragonfly’ has a tiny camera (about 0.5 grams) on board that transmits its signals to a ground station. With software developed by TU Delft itself, objects can then be recognised independently. The camera transmits TV quality images, and therefore allows the DelFly II to be operated from [...]

If You Have a Problem, Ask Everyone
A clearinghouse, of sorts, for unsolved problems, open to anyone who wants to try and solve them.
The idea that solutions can come from anywhere, and from people with seemingly unrelated work, is another key. Dr. Lakhani said his study of InnoCentive found that “the further the problem was from [...]

By gorilla, of course, I mean inverted pendulum. The answer is: anywhere it wants in the middle of a tall building.
It’s a tuned mass damper for stabilizing the Taipei 101 skyscraper, and the link includes a video taken during the May earthquake.

Analogy web clock.
via The Long Now