Robots/remotes designed like animals.
A hummingbird:
Darpa’s latest, Cheetah-Bot, and the article includes a peek at Atlas, which looks like a terminator, from the neck down.
Category Archives: Tech
Have You Checked the Woodworking Lately?
A while back I linked to a hidden door picture gallery and mentioned
When my dad remodeled our attic into a bedroom (for me) he put up some bookcases and mounted one on hinges, so you could access the crawlspace.
Having a bedroom in the attic was good for freaking out some of the freshman girls in art class when I was a senior in high school — When a Stranger Calls (“have you checked on the children/the call is coming from inside your house!”) had come out over the summer, so mwuhahahaha, but the real fun was when I was younger, because of the hidden door and the crawl spaces.
Here’s the bookcase set, creating a crawl space behind it:
And here, opened a little bit:
Opened further; the cutout for the electrical receptacle in each bookcase is covered with a one-way mirror, so you can see into the attic if the crawlspace light is off:
Here’s the handle for opening, so it’s not super-secret, but I have no complaints. It wasn’t meant to be hidden from The Hardy Boys (or Nancy Drew). It was meant to be easily opened by kids, so mission accomplished.
The play area behind the bookcase was comfortable for a couple or three ~10-12 year-olds, but the crawl space runs the length of the house, and there was a smaller version on the other side, where the wall connects to the ceiling at a lower point. Add in a chair and a blanket, and it made for a great tunnel system for playing The Great Escape (or Hogan’s Heroes, or Stalag 17, depending on the mirth quotient you wanted to assign the bad guys. Hey, we were 10-ish.)
Ah, but that’s not all. We go downstairs to the fireplace. My dad covered up the fireplace mantlepiece to make some stealthy shelf space. The black molding covers up the seam.
Here’s the right side; the left side is functional as well:
(The vases on the upper right, on the regular shelf, were his work as well; he did a lot of wood-turning/woodworking projects.)
Holy Home Projects, Batman!
The Bat-Pole activator-type switch as a DIY project. (Batman had Shakespeare, not Beethoven) If only I had a workshop.
Ah, memories of my youth. I know that many Batman comic book aficionados never liked the campy TV series, but I loved it. I’ve searched and found bat phones for sale, too, but the amount I’m willing to drop on one does not exceed a hectobuck, which is a bit of a Biff! to the midsection of my desire. (Hmmm … maybe for Christmas … that’s how I got my Maltese Falcon statue …)
The Non-Physics of Rockets
Space Stasis: What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation.
The development of rockets — driven by war and the invention of nuclear weapons, and the relationship the story has with recent economics and innovation.
The above circumstances provide a remarkable example of path dependency. Had these contingencies not obtained, rockets with orbital capability would not have been developed so soon, and when modern societies became interested in launching things into space they might have looked for completely different ways of doing so.
Before dismissing the above story as an aberration, consider that the modern petroleum industry is a direct outgrowth of the practice of going out in wooden, wind-driven ships to hunt sperm whales with hand-hurled spears and then boiling their heads to make lamp fuel.
She Sells CSACS Down by the Seashore
And they are only about $1500. Chip-scale atomic clock approaches performance of modules
Which applications need a CSAC, with GPS-based clocks so available and prevalent? First, there are applications where the GPS-based timing may not be accurate enough. But there are also many applications where GPS is unavailable, such as underwater exploration, underground drilling, geophysical research, and EMI shielded rooms. There are also in-the-field military situations where GPS and all EM waves are deliberately jammed by patrols, to prevent remote triggering of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), yet there is a need for precise communication-equipment synchronization among combat teams.
Knowing, with some precision, what time it is also helps in acquiring a GPS signal, too. The advantage of a soldier not having to stand out in a field for a minute or so while a GPS receiver acquires a signal and gives coordinates is left as an exercise for the student.
I’ve seen some, up close and personal; they’re pretty cool. In fact, we had a prototype and I took a picture of it with my novelty dime (3″ diameter) to make it look really small.
The State of the Web
The Oatmeal: The State of the Web, Winter 2010 (oh, so North-Hemisphere-centric)
Spot Welding Has Nothing to Do with Dogs
Cocktail Party Physics: welding: a matter of life and death.
The arc works on the same principle as spark plugs: electrons build up on the tip of the electrode. Charges of the same type want to be as far as possible from each other, but there’s only so much space on the tip for the charges to sit. When the electrons reach a critical concentration, they are so repulsed by each other that they jump through the air gap to get away from each other. Once in the metal that you’re trying to join, the electrons are free to move around and maximize their distance from each other.
I learned a little about how to arc weld when I was young — my neighbor had a machine, and many odd bits of iron got welded together for practice.
Lego Letterpress
[T]hese two graphic designers have put Lego to yet another wonderfully off-label use by constructing a working letterpress printer out of the bricks. By clicking smooth Lego tiles into place on plastic baseboards and inking the plates, they create handmade prints with an 8-bit aesthetic.
Tweedle Beetle Battle
Last week Rhett introduced me to Hex Bugs, and I had to go out and buy a starter kit. Rhett’s thing is taking video and doing physics analysis. Mine is slow-motion:
The bugs vibrate, as you might be able to tell, and the angled legs give them a forward motion bias from the shaking. They even go up an incline of ten or 20 degrees. I tested three bugs in the hallway, where they were free to roam; one had a tracking bias clockwise, another anti-clockwise, and the third ran pretty straight. The legs appear to be silicone, so it’s not easy to change how they are bent (elastic deformation) to see if you can change that.
There are other form factors as well. More on that as my wallet is drained.
Not Affiliated with the Ministry of Silly Walks
23 – Walking Truck of General Electric in 1966, whose legs reproduced the movements of the driver by servomechanisms, could walk at 8 km/h and carry loads of 250 kg on huge obstacles. It was a fine performance in an age where computers hardly existed.