Anyone else nervous that they quote “miles per hour”, worried perhaps there’s a metric conversion they missed? I kid, JPL, I kid. I kid because I love.
Along those lines, nobody I talked to at JPL (way back when) thought this was funny
Category Archives: Tech
Shut Your Pot Hole!
So we were putzing around with different ideas and things we wanted to work with—and we were like, what’s a common, everyday problem all around the world that everybody hates?” explains 21-year-old team member Curtis Obert. “And we landed on potholes.” He and four other students decided on a non-Newtonian fluid as a solution because of its unusual physical properties. “When there’s no force being applied to it, it flows like a liquid does and fills in the holes,” says Obert, “but when it gets run over, it acts like a solid.”
Thar She Blows!
Shuttle flyby in the DC area this morning, so there were several of us on various (horizontal and flat) rooftops
Never even noticed the chase plane until I looked at the pictures.
What the Uck?
The Free Universal Construction Kit
The Free Universal Construction Kit … is a collection of nearly 80 adapter bricks that enable complete interoperability between ten popular children’s construction toys. By allowing any piece to mate with any other, the Kit encourages totally new forms of intercourse between otherwise closed systems — enabling radically hybrid Constructivist play and the creation of heretofore impossible designs.
To be clear: the plans are free, not the parts:
[T]he kit — put together by F.A.T. Lab and Sy-Lab — isn’t a physical product unto itself; it’s a set of 3D models suitable for use with Makerbot and other 3D printer systems..
The Plans, from “uck”
Where You Can't Toss One Down
Space station used for Ardbeg distillery experiments
Experiments using malt from the Ardbeg distillery on Islay are being carried out on the International Space Station to see how it matures without gravity.
Compounds of unmatured malt were sent to the station in an unmanned cargo spacecraft in October last year, along with particles of charred oak.
Scientists want to understand how they interact at close to zero gravity.
More About the Non-Race of Technology Adoption
I wish I’d seen this before the Boom-Box adoption story, because it ties in: The 100-Year March of Technology in 1 Graph, though the overlap of the technologies under discussion isn’t complete.
You can see the effects I previously mentioned, namely cost, infrastructure and quality of the new product — most adoption that requires infrastructure to be developed alongside sees a change in slope once you reach critical mass.
Some tidbits I find interesting: The depression and WWII dips, from the economic pressure of high unemployment and then “we’re building tanks, not cars/washing machines”, but that refrigerators and radio did not experience the same effect. Refrigerator penetration was low during the depression, so the well-off could still afford to adopt the technology and it does see a slightly slower increase during WWII but doesn’t drop. It was just that important of a technology. Radio was a source of cheap entertainment and got its start enough before the depression to be unduly hampered by it.
Another is the double-kink timeline of the computer. The first being around 1982, which would coincide with the first Macintosh computer, probably along with adoption of word processing machines in the business world. The second looks to be 1995, which is probably driven by Windows 95 being introduced.
The article also discusses the notion of what it means to be poor. I know there are those with the attitude that if you own a few gadgets, you can’t be considered poor, but I disagree. Having some disposable income at a few interval of your life, or being able to save a few dollars up to eventually buy something, does not move you from those ranks. Because of the way your surroundings develop, what was once considered a luxury becomes a necessity. Once upon a time cars were a luxury, then one car was middle class and having two was being well-off. But as having a car became the norm in most places, that economic reality helped drive things like the rise of strip malls, and suburban sprawl. The ubiquity of cars meant the ability to skimp on public transportation. The result is that cars are much more of a necessity, and the divide is now not simply owning a car or not, but whether/how often you can buy a new one, or whether you have to make do with an old beater of a car, and all the problems inherent in owning a less-than-reliable vehicle. Refrigeration is another example. At some point the adoption of electric refrigerators meant that selling blocks of ice was no longer viable and those businesses closed, which meant that iceboxes had to be replaced with refrigerators. It’s no longer a choice between the two, with one for the middle class and above and the other for the less fortunate.
Rube-y Goldberg Tuesday, World Record Edition, 2012
The Purdue Society of Professional Engineers team smashed its own world record for largest Rube Goldberg machine with a 300-step behemoth that flawlessly accomplished the simple task of blowing up and popping a balloon – setting the new world record for the Largest functional Rube Goldberg machine
They beat the record they set last year
I Didn't Know it was a Race
Guess What’s the Fastest-Adopted Gadget of the Last 50 Years
I think there are a few criteria to look at here, beyond the price of the new toys: the level of infrastructure for the device and the maturity/level of the quality during early adoption, among other barriers to adopt a new product. CDs, for example, represented a new format for music, but the quality was as good as it was going to get, and required no new infrastructure to deliver. Same for DVDs and video cassettes. Digital cameras did not deliver the quality to challenge film for quite a while — we had our Megapixel growth boom last decade — and the early cameras had other issues that detracted from the “film is free” advantage. Cell phones needed a network, and fax machines needed someone on the other end to fax to you — mass adoption required a critical mass.
Boom boxes? We already had tapes to play, no infrastructure was required, and the quality was pretty much as good as it would get. No hurdles to adoption.
Jump Frog, Jump!
Holy crap. This is from the same company that has developed the Big Dog and Cheetah robots,
Sand Flea is an 11-lb robot with one trick up its sleeve: Normally it drives like an RC car, but when it needs to it can jump 30 feet into the air. An onboard stabilization system keeps it oriented during flight to improve the view from the video uplink and to control landings.
The Plane! The Plaaaane!
45-foot paper airplane glides over Arizona desert
The plane, dubbed Arturo’s Desert Eagle, was 45 feet long with a 24-foot wingspan and weighed in at a whopping 800 pounds.
It was built as part of the museum’s Giant Paper Airplane Project, designed to get kids psyched about aviation and engineering.
After a few false starts, the plane was towed into the sky above the Sonoran desert on Wednesday afternoon by a Sikorsky S58T helicopter.