Category Archives: Tech
Buckets of Watch
Quartz of them, at least.
Back from vacation, delayed a little by Snowpocalypse 2010 II: The Wrath of James Caan (It’s NOT Snowpocalypse 2010; that was the storm in February). I didn’t know how much snow the DC area would get and it seemed foolish to drive in during the storm or just as the cleanup were to begin. (And the part of abandoning my mom with whatever snowfall was there. That would have been bad). Turns out that DC got almost nothing — it had all melted by Wednesday evening — and Niskayuna got around 6″ (an amount easily handled), though you didn’t have to travel too far to find pockets which had gotten a foot or more, especially up in the hills. Further south and east got dumped upon. My route back, which was inland (Rt 88 to 81 to 15 to the beltway), was all clear.
So here’s a video about how a quartz watch works, which I found via fine structure
Navy Drops 18th Century Technology in Favor of 19th Century Technology
It’s not just the guns that are going electromagnetic.
Full Electromagnetics Ahead! EM Naval Launcher Test Successful, Will Replace Steam
Propelling a 5 ton jet to liftoff speed over short distances has been the key to US Naval success for 50 years and the reason why their aircraft carriers are unique. Their steam “catapults” allowed fast enough acceleration for launch.
It was a good run, but it’s time to run out of steam.
The Navy made history Saturday when it launched the first aircraft using the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, or EMALS, technology.
There’s a video at the link, but it’s anticlimactic; acceleration is acceleration. If you watch, I recommend skipping the first 1:50; it’s all boring character development and plot dead-ends that have no bearing on the story line.
Rectangular Like Me
It’s a World of Black Rectangles
“How is it that so many different things made in so many different ways end being black rectangles?” Mr. Grcic asked. “They can be extremely elegant and sophisticated, or very basic, but they are such strong and powerful parts of our lives that it is impossible to imagine a world without them.
Speaking of black rectangles,
“They remind me of the black monolith that the ape-men discover outside their cave in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.”’ It stands for knowledge and faith that they don’t understand, but recognize and respect.”
Oh, you mean this one?
You Autocomplete Me
A map of the US, filled in the the Google “Autocomplete” feature.
I Calculate That It's All Greek to Me
Via Cocktail Party Physics: the unbearable lightness of LEGO (with some good detail and history to be found there), a LEGO™ reconstruction of the Antikythera Mechanism.
How (and why) they did it. The “why” part works on a lot of geeks.
Schadenfreude
I doubt we’re going to go through the same Sturm und Drang as we did with the iphone and “antennagate,” but I see that HTC’s newest phone has an antenna issue when you hold it a certain way.
HTC was one of the choir who had chastised Apple, saying that “The reception problems are certainly not common among smartphones,” and essentially saying Apple screwed up.
Bwahahahahaha!
Stonecutters Call 312
What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York
The 311 system has proved useful not just at detecting reliable patterns but also at providing insights when the normal patterns are disrupted. Clusters of calls about food-borne illness or sanitary problems from the same restaurant now trigger a rapid response from the city’s health department. And during emergencies, callers help provide real-time insight into what’s really happening. “When [New York Yankees pitcher] Cory Lidle crashed his plane into a building on the Upper East Side, we had a bulletin on all of our screens in less than an hour explaining that it was not an act of terrorism,” Morrisroe says. After US Airways flight 1549 crash-landed in the Hudson in 2009, a few callers dialed 311 asking what they should do with hand luggage they’d retrieved from the river. “We have lots of protocols and systems in place for emergencies like plane crashes,” Morrisroe explains, “but we’d never thought about floating luggage.” This is the beauty of 311. It thrives on the quotidian and predictable—the school-closing queries and pothole complaints—but it also plays well with black swans.
Now My Rabbit Ears Are All Wet
Pump-Powered Antennas Could Replace Metal Communications Arrays with Fountains of Saltwater
What they came up with is little more than an electromagnetic ring and a water pump. The ring, called a current probe, creates a magnetic field through which the pump shoots a steam of seawater (the salt is a key ingredient, as the tech relies on the magnetic induction properties of sodium chloride)
I think they meant “stream.”
Life in Free Fall
Life aboard the International Space Station
The space station has a permanent crew of six, so the arrival of new faces is a cause for celebration. That said, even the most welcome visitors can cause havoc if they are inexperienced. There is a subtle art to moving around without crashing into anything – or, more annoyingly, others – knocking computers, equipment and other objects off the walls to which they are attached with Velcro pads. One serving shuttle pilot confessed to leaving a wake of laptops and other vital belongings behind him the first time he tried to fly from one room to another. “When you first turn up, you are like a bull in a china shop,” he said. “I had no idea where to put any of it back.”
In time, people hone the skill and can fly down the length of the station, straight as an arrow, without touching anything, except with their fingertips. People sit in mid air, tapping away at a computer, with only a toe hooked under a wall strap to anchor themselves. Then, with a flick of the hand, they’ll float up to another computer and carry on typing there. Getting from one place to another is all the more difficult because up and down (and so left and right) have no absolute meaning. The ability to form a mental map of the space station – and then rotate it in 3D to suit your perspective – is a priceless skill for an astronaut.