Iridient: Bursting Soap Bubbles
Captured with High Speed Flash Units, the images show soap bubbles in the moment of bursting.
Category Archives: Tech
I Know Your Face
What happens if you write software that generates random polygons and the software then feeds the results through facial recognition software, looping thousands of times until the generated image more and more resembles a face? Phil McCarthy’s Pareidoloop. Above, my results from running it for a few hours. Spooky.
prosthetic knowledge shows an image resolving
This is a cautionary tale of science, that you shouldn’t make a priori assumptions about results. If you assume that a noisy signal is a face, then you’re going to see a face.
This is reminiscent of some pseudoscience from so-called ghost hunters recording voices, in something called EVP (Electric voice phenomena). You record a tape and then filter the noise, keeping anything that sounds like a voice. Which is what you get, for the same reason as seeing the faces.
Toys in the Office: DIY Edition
I have an airzooka air cannon as part of my office armament, and it does an admirable job of shooting projectiles of air. However, one of my colleagues had expressed an interest in upping the ante, so we took it upon ourselves to make one using a 5-gallon bucket.
We followed the general path of the steps outlined in an instructable, though we substituted light-duty bungee cords for the elastic.
Cutting out the end of the bucket is a tad messy with all the plastic shavings. In cleaning up my clothes I employed a version of a trick we used in the navy when getting ready for an inspection — a few windings of tape on your hand, sticky-side out, does a good job at grabbing lint. Or plastic shavings.
Another deviation from the basic instructions was that since we used bungee cord, we drilled holes in the bucket for the anchor end, and zip-tied the other ends together, having removed the hooks. That also allowed us to use 3 lines.
The handle is temporarily an optics post. The bucket is just strong enough for it, so we need to add a second layer of something to shore that up and put both a proper handle on the body and a proper grip on the elastic. No metal, though, since a failure of some sort could be very bad news if this became a slingshot. We should be ready for our picnic next week.
The Google Oxbow Incident
Years ago when Google Earth first added the time-slider tool, which makes my entire blog possible, I realized that one of the best uses for this tool would be for tracking geomorphological change. I, and others like me, had found various changes like landslides and sinkholes, but the evidence pointed to an opportunity for more undiscovered geographical features. I theorized that the most elusive of these was the formation of an oxbow lake.
…
I contacted my colleague and showed him my discovery. He agreed, this was without a doubt the formation of an oxbow lake on the Brazos River!
Can't Wait for "Dawn of the Flick II"
Dawn of the Flick: The Doctors, Physicists, and Mathematicians Who Made the Movies
Today, we know that persistence of vision does not work like the progenitors of film thought it did (the retina does not retain images like Dr. Paris and others theorized), and many movies are filmed in 3-D and displayed on screens that are sometimes five stories tall. But as the technology of moving images has progressed and the group experience of attending a film has gotten increasingly sophisticated, a parallel trend has emerged, namely, to permit anyone to watch anything, anywhere, on a tiny cell phone. Curiously, this medium that was once limited to the single viewer appears to be circling back to that one-at-a-time format. The irony is not lost on Balzer. “It’s a very interesting loop,” he says, pun intended.
Paul Bunyan's Bobcat
A Stopped Clock That's Right Four Times a Year
A sundial that spells out the equinoxes and solstices.
Putting the Right Spin on It
Infinite-capacity wireless vortex beams carry 2.5 terabits per second
Actually, it’s not spin. It’s the other angular momentum, pork the orbital variety.
These twisted signals use orbital angular momentum (OAM) to cram much more data into a single stream. In current state-of-the-art transmission protocols (WiFi, LTE, COFDM), we only modulate the spin angular momentum (SAM) of radio waves, not the OAM. If you picture the Earth, SAM is our planet spinning on its axis, while OAM is our movement around the Sun. Basically, the breakthrough here is that researchers have created a wireless network protocol that uses both OAM and SAM.
I couldn’t get a mental image of how you’d do this, but I think that’s because I was thinking about individual photons, and I don’t see how to get a photonic orbital angular momentum state. But this is data transmission, which can be analog, or even of it’s digital a “one” is made up of a bunch of photons, i.e. it’s classical.
So I grabbed the paper I could (an earlier one that demonstrated the effect, and to which I had access). Here’s what the antenna looks like
The light being sent will have a different phase depending on what part of the antenna is transmitting it, which gives you the vortex. 3 GHz signals have a wavelength of 10 cm, so that’s probably gives you the scale of the depth of the slice in the parabolic dish.
This technique is likely to be used in the next few years to vastly increase the throughput of both wireless and fiber-optic networks.
I think this is overly optimistic. It’s going to take time to make this robust for data transmission and then you have to deploy the technology. And fiber-optics? I don’t see how this would work in a fiber (a less forgiving environment to good polarization, which is likely to cause problems here), but I also don’t see it as being necessary. I don’t think fiber is as clogged as the RF spectrum is, and you can always add more fiber if you need to.
Gaga for Giga
ScienceShot: Get Ready for Gigapixels
98 cameras in an array, taking a picture simultaneously which are the stitched together.
[The camera] captured enough detail to read the fine print on signs as much as two blocks away
You Can Call Me Al
It takes far less energy to recycle an aluminum can than to make one from scratch – recycling 40 Aluminum cans is the equivalent of saving a gallon of gasoline. One problem is that not all of the can is Aluminum.
[R]ecycling the cans turns out to be harder than it looks, because the basic soft drink or beer can is actually made of two kinds of aluminum. The bottom and sides are made from an aluminum sheet that is strong enough to be stamped into a round shape without tearing. For the top, which must be stiff enough to help the can retain its shape and withstand the bending force when it is opened, can makers blend aluminum with magnesium.