I found the paper for this project on my door Monday morning, and it made going into my office a tad more suspenseful.
It also makes me wonder when the robots will be combined with the technology that runs the carnivorous clock.
Category Archives: Tech
Next: To the Poultry Farm So I Can See Hot Chicks in My Area
A Review of the iPhone Infrared Camera: The FLIR One
The FLIR One is an infrared camera attachment for the iPhone (5 and 5s). It comes with a case so you can snap it on your phone. Once it’s on your phone, you can take awesome IR pictures
My FLIR One has arrived, and I have gotten my new phone. Unfortunately, I have no sim card (yet) and the phone won’t work without it (a detail the Apple sales person forgot to mention, grrr) … and customer service of my mobile provider has not gotten back to me about how to get a card. The internet has not been particularly helpful in this regard (though apparently if I were in Australia or the UK I’d be all set, because those are the search results that keep popping up)
I hope eventually I’ll have IR pictures to post.
A Song Should Be Just Long Enough to Reach the End
Why Are Songs on the Radio About the Same Length?
I think there are a lot of reasons, one being that radio stations are not services that play music for you — their business is to air advertisements and use music as one of the hooks to get you to tune in. So long songs would not tend to be selected if they would keep them from airing ads, and that may be enough in the evolution of rock-era songs to keep most of them short. I think Rhett’s gone off on the wrong path by looking at this in terms of how much music you can get on a 45 rpm single.
There’s probably a lot more to this. Writing longer and keeping it interesting without repetition has to be hard, especially if you’ve gotten into a habit of a certain style. I remember seeing an interview with members of The Who (I think it’s in “The Kids Are Alright”) where Peter Townshend says, in relating how Tommy was written, that “rock songs are 2:50 by tradition” and then got the idea of writing a longer theme as a series of short songs.
But this animated gif of the action of a needle on a record is worth the price of admission.
You Can't Beet This. It's 24-Carrot Gold.
Lettuce See the Future: Japanese Farmer Builds High-Tech Indoor Veggie Factory
Shimamura turned a former Sony Corporation semiconductor factory into the world’s largest indoor farm illuminated by LEDs. The special LED fixtures were developed by GE and emit light at wavelengths optimal for plant growth.
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By controlling temperature, humidity and irrigation, the farm can also cut its water usage to just 1 percent of the amount needed by outdoor fields.
300th Anniversary of the Longitude Act
Maritime museum finds time for celebration of Harrison’s sea clocks
The exhibition marks the 300th anniversary of the Longitude Act, passed in 1714, which established the Longitude Board and offered a vast £20,000 prize to anyone who could solve the problem of measuring longitude at sea. It includes the actual act of parliament, passed in the last weeks before the death of Queen Anne, on display for the first time.
The story of John Harrison, the carpenter and self-taught genius clockmaker who invented a series of ever more accurate clocks and then a cabbage-sized watch that solved the problem, but never got the full prize from the board, inspired Dava Sobel’s bestselling book and film, Longitude.
This is the reason why my job (making atomic clocks — real clocks) is a navy job — precise navigation requires precise time. The transition to GPS hasn’t changed that fact. Poor navigational ability is costly:
In a storm in 1707, when an entire British fleet was driven onto the rocks at Scilly believing they were safely out at sea, more than 1,400 sailors drowned.
Oh, Behave!
…unless that robot is operating properly, which means ketchup has been weaponized.
Let's Get Small
Pardon the absence; I’ve spent some time at a DARPA meeting reviewing progress on work being done under the umbrella of DARPA’s efforts to shrink the hardware for devices related to position, navigation and time, known as MicroPNT. I can’t write about any of the details, which is unfortunate because some of the science and engineering is amazing, but you can get an overview of the program and learns some of the particulars:
Expert Advice: The Chip-Scale Combinatorial Atomic Navigator
Basically DARPA has identified that portable navigation devices that aren’t tied to GPS are important, and are pushing smart people to think about the problem. The program goals are aggressive and each stage progressively so, and they expect the failure rate to be high. But the people involved are scientists, so they understand that research doesn’t always pan out. Such programs allow scientists to try risky things to see if they pan out, and even in failure things are learned.
Listening to all of these talks and visiting the posters has been quite draining.
Monday’s post now seems quite timely, as that seems to be a European effort along these same lines.
Quantum Certainty
Quantum positioning system steps in when GPS fails
The mention that this is based on laser-cooled atoms, with no further details, is a tad frustrating. In grad school I worked on a laser-cooled atom interferometer, which could be used as an inertial sensor. In principle, at least, since the device I worked on was relatively big; the vacuum system was an “L” that was at about a meter in the short dimension and there was a large optical table to generate the laser light. There is more than one way to build such a device, though, and these processes can be made much smaller with engineering effort, so the lack of detail is disappointing.
I Hope This isn't a Scam
This Nigerian College Student Built a Wind- And Solar-Powered Car From Scraps
I’ve run numbers for a solar-powered car before, when someone had proposed just popping solar cells on a car and thinking that would be viable. It won’t work. It’s not really close, so even with a head start of charging the battery up, I have to wonder what you’re going to get.
Gasoline has an energy density of around 120 MJ/gallon. Let’s convert this into units used in electrical systems: 1 kW-hour is 3.6 MJ, so a gallon of gas is a little over 30 kWh of energy. Electrical systems are much more efficient than internal combustion, so let’s assume we only need 10 kWh of electricity to do the work of a gallon of gasoline (which also might require things like regenerative braking). Comparing to a 30 mpg gasoline engine, this is 3 miles/kWh, which is about what commercial electric cars are getting.
According to maps I found, solar insolation in the US is highest in the southwest, peaking above 5 kWh/m^2/day, and I think that assumes your panels track the sun to keep it perpendicular to the panel. The solar panel on the car looks to be about 2 square meters, so we can get around 10 kWh with a full day’s charge — we can replace about a gallon of gas. Nigeria’s insolation is higher, so let’s multiply this insolation by 2, but the claim is that this happens in 4-5 hours, so maybe that’s a wash. And the panel doesn’t track the sun, so this is probably generous.
Can you get around town in something like that? Sure. You can go 30 miles in a day on a charge, plus whatever charging you get as you’re out and about. But then you’ll have a depleted battery, and wouldn’t be able to do this every day since you can’t charge it at night. Unless you’re going under 10 mph and it’s always sunny, this can never be a “charge-as-you-go” system without an order-of-magnitude improvement somewhere.
There’s also this, which sets off the skeptic alarm in a much stronger fashion:
Not only did Oyeyiola install a giant solar panel on top of the Beetle; he also inserted a wind turbine under the hood. As Preston explains, that allows air to flow into the grill while the car is moving, subsequently turning the turbine’s rotors and charging the battery at the back of the car. Oyeyiola also built a strong suspension system to deal with the weight of the battery itself.
Unless this is just a really poor description of something else, it sounds an awful lot like a perpetual motion machine — using the wind generated by your motion to charge the battery. Realistically, such a device should drain the battery faster, because it can’t be 100% efficient.
Even a Tie is a Win
Could This 3-D Printed Cast Really Heal Bones Faster?
Having endured plaster and fiberglass casts in my youth (when my ego, overestimating my limited athletic ability, was writing checks my body couldn’t cash), I can say that even if the ultrasound part of this is not effective, having a cast where the limb can “breathe” would be a huge win, in terms of bathing and accessing itchy areas.