Category Archives: Tech
The Power of Prefab
I suspect not being surrounded by other buildings helped. In my own experience of having helped get a building built, it was made clear to me that logistics is a huge component of the process. Here you can see that the identical nature of the floors allows for teams to work in parallel. While floors are added above, the interior is worked on below.
Now they want to build the world’s tallest building in just 90 days.
BSB chief executive officer Zhang Yue (张跃) said the company plans to break ground on Sky City in November 2012, and that the tower will be completed in January 2013.
The Sorting Hat Does Some 'Shrooms
From The Far Side to Jurassic Park to Reality
Driving without a Blind Spot May Be Closer Than It Appears
It’s not hard to make a curved mirror that gives a wider field of view – no blind spot – but at the cost of visual distortion and making objects appear smaller and farther away.
Hicks’s driver’s side mirror has a field of view of about 45 degrees, compared to 15 to 17 degrees of view in a flat driver’s side mirror. Unlike in simple curved mirrors that can squash the perceived shape of objects and make straight lines appear curved, in Hicks’s mirror the visual distortions of shapes and straight lines are barely detectable.
(Yeah, I know that the “objects are closer than they appear” gags were on the passenger side, which does have a curved mirror)
Reminiscing About Dialup
The Mechanics and Meaning of That Ol’ Dial-Up Modem Sound
Of all the noises that my children will not understand, the one that is nearest to my heart is not from a song or a television show or a jingle. It’s the sound of a modem connecting with another modem across the repurposed telephone infrastructure. It was the noise of being part of the beginning of the Internet.
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This is a choreographed sequence that allowed these digital devices to piggyback on an analog telephone network. “A phone line carries only the small range of frequencies in which most human conversation takes place: about 300 to 3,300 hertz,” Glenn Fleishman explained in the Times back in 1998. “The modem works within these limits in creating sound waves to carry data across phone lines.” What you’re hearing is the way 20th century technology tunneled through a 19th century network; what you’re hearing is how a network designed to send the noises made by your muscles as they pushed around air came to transmit anything, or the almost-anything that can be coded in 0s and 1s.
Falling Up
Corrosion is Our Friend
An Interview with Stella Bridger
Q: How often do people get locked in vaults?
A: More often than you’d think and bank PR departments would like.Usually the victims are children or seniors. Grandpa is busy examining the contents of his safe deposit box at closing time when a bank employee only performs part of the vault-closing procedure. Some vaults are L-shaped or there may be alcoves or obstructions inside, so it can happen if the closer doesn’t “walk the vault” as well as call out to possible occupants.
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Q: Do you ever look inside?
A: I NEVER look. It’s none of my business. Involving yourself in people’s private affairs can lead to being subpoenaed in a lawsuit or criminal trial. Besides, I’d prefer not knowing about a client’s drug stash, personal porn, or belly button lint collection.When I’m done I gather my tools and walk to the truck to write my invoice. Sometimes I’m out of the room before they open it. I don’t want to be nearby if there is a booby trap.
And people do put booby traps in safes.
Is Secrecy Worth It?
A tale of openness and secrecy: The Philadelphia Story
The former Manhattan Project scientists who founded what would eventually become the Federation of American Scientists were adamantly opposed to keeping nuclear technology a closed field. From early on they argued that there was, as they put it, “no secret to be kept.” Attempting to control the spread of nuclear weapons by controlling scientific information would be fruitless: Soviet scientists were just as capable as US scientists when it came to discovering the truths of the physical world. The best that secrecy could hope to do would be to slightly impede the work of another nuclear power. Whatever time was bought by such impediment, they argued, would come at a steep price in US scientific productivity, because science required open lines of communication to flourish.
At the University of Pennsylvania were nine scientists sympathetic to that message. All had been involved with wartime work, but in the area of radar, not the bomb. Because they had not been part of the Manhattan Project in any way, they were under no legal obligation to maintain secrecy; they were simply informed private citizens. In the fall of 1945, they tried to figure out the technical details behind the bomb.
This basic problem hasn’t gone away. The conflict between the desire for secrecy and progress’s need for communication is still there.
Which Way is Up?
I wrote about the KOH etch of Silicon some time ago. Lots of things are made of Silicon.