How the Internet blackout affected congressional support for PIPA/SOPA
Category Archives: Tech
Growing Furniture Out Of Plastic And Magnets
“Growing” Furniture Out Of Plastic And Magnets
The key secret ingredient is iron filings in the plastic.
Gifts from the Beyond Neutral Zone
New toy!
This is a hexbug larva, and yes, it looks a bit like a baby Ceti eel from The Wrath of Khan. It’s autonomous, so the redirection is happening on its own. What’s going on?
Little flashy infrared LED, with a sensor below it. (I used my IR webcam to film these shots). It’s intermittent, which I assume is to screen out any DC signal from background light and detect pulses in the same pattern.
Here’s the underside, where you can see the locomotion details. Not sure of the sex, though, or what happens when it grows up.
Lights! Camera! Action! Mostly Lights, Though
We had a film crew from the History Channel at the Observatory a few days ago, filming a segment for an upcoming special on inventions that changed the world. One of these is the clock, so naturally they wanted to speak to some people who could tell them about clocks. I showed them around the lab and they liked the setting a lot more than any of our operational clocks; they’re all nicely packaged up and quite boring. (One type — the hydrogen maser — is literally a black box, and the fountain physics package looks like a water heater.)
So they filmed a segment in our lab, and since I was there making sure they didn’t touch anything they shouldn’t be touching (they didn’t — they were quite well-behaved), they had me and one of my lab-mates stand in the background, pretending to work at one of the optical tables. We might end up on screen for ten seconds or so in the final cut.
Being geeks meant that we drooled a bit over the equipment that they brought. This is part of their lighting system, a bank of LEDs, which has the advantage over traditional equipment that it draws much less power since LEDs are much more efficient. This means they can run it off of a battery and not have to worry about whether there is an outlet nearby, and it also doesn’t heat up very much.
With the lights at full power it saturates the camera.
Turned down a bit you can see the LEDs a little more clearly.
Invisible Numbers
I’ve posted before on how liquid-crystal display (LCD) monitors emit polarized light (and can be birefringent), and some of the fun you can have with this, and everyone is probably familiar with other uses as well.
LCD’s don’t emit light by themselves; they rely on backlighting or on reflecting ambient light, which passes through a polarizer behind the display. In this short video we can see what happens with a calculator display when you take the top polarizer off:
We see nothing at all. The effect of the display is not visible to us, because we are not (very) sensitive to polarized light. When we put the polarizing screen in place, then we can see what’s happening — the display has a “zero” energized, which has a different polarization than the rest of the display and blocks the light that has passed through the display and been reflected and polarized. When we rotate the screen, the light is blocked from the rest of the display, and the light from the zero passes through. At an angle, light of each polarization makes it through, so you can’t see the digit at about 45º.
Relax, It's not a Puppy Pulley
[A] team of U.S., Dutch, and Belgian researchers have developed an eye tracking device called a “DogCam” to see what a dog actually looks at when it studies the subtle cues of its owner and its surroundings.
The scientists will also be able to see other dogs take the subject’s lunch money for looking like this.
2nd Objoke: the editor on the video should be Seymour Butz
Rube-y Goldberg Tuesday: OK Go Edition
A Visit from the Stork
Why doesn’t America like science?
The views that Bloomberg considers “mind-boggling” are not outliers, or not outside the coastal areas such as New York, where he resides.
But common or not, the spread of this sentiment is leaving many American scientists alarmed. Last month, New Scientist magazine warned in an editorial that science is now under unprecedented intellectual attack in America. “When candidates for the highest office in the land appear to spurn reason, embrace anecdote over scientific evidence, and even portray scientists as the perpetrators of a massive hoax, there is reason to worry,” it thundered.
Perhaps people think that new products and innovation are the result of the technology fairy, rather than application of the underlying science and that the technology works by magic.
They Didn't Take it to Cuba
CSM Exclusive: Iran hijacked US drone, says Iranian engineer
[T]his engineer’s account of how Iran took over one of America’s most sophisticated drones suggests Tehran has found a way to hit back. The techniques were developed from reverse-engineering several less sophisticated American drones captured or shot down in recent years, the engineer says, and by taking advantage of weak, easily manipulated GPS signals, which calculate location and speed from multiple satellites.
I’m pretty sure “weak, easily manipulated GPS signals” is a sphincter-clench-inducing phrase in some circles.
A Camera The Flash Would Love
First the good: The website.
We have built an imaging solution that allows us to visualize propagation of light. The effective exposure time of each frame is two trillionth of a second and the resultant visualization depicts the movement of light at roughly half a trillion frames per second. Direct recording of reflected or scattered light at such a frame rate with sufficient brightness is nearly impossible. We use an indirect ‘stroboscopic’ method that records millions of repeated measurements by careful scanning in time and viewpoints. Then we rearrange the data to create a ‘movie’ of a nano-second long event.
Unfortunately, there’s also this video (or, more specifically, the first few seconds of this video), which I saw before finding their site.
We have built a virtual slow-motion camera where we can see photons, or light particles, moving through space.
Prof. Raskar has whipped out (and abused) his poetic license: you cannot literally see photons moving through space. You only know light is there if it scatters into your sensor — if it is light that simply goes by you/it, you would never know it’s there. If you shine a laser out into space, you don’t see that light — you only see light that scatters back to you. Unfortunately, by leading off with that sound bite, I fear everybody who sees the video is going to be repeating that line: OMG, we can see actual photons moving through space!
What they have recreated is a way to visualize the photons or a wavefront moving through space. Which is no small feat and is very cool.
And I just saw that Rhett has a post up about this, with some details of how it works, and is also repulsed by the sound-bite. I don’t have a huge problem with the trillion fps claim, because they are pretty clear that this is a virtual, post-processed effect, where you are sort of combining strobe and stop-action to give you the result, with the caveat that the stop-action is static — this generally wouldn’t work if anything were moving.