Category Archives: Tech

A-12

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The Secret Film of the CIA Supersonic Spy Plane’s First Flight

After Lockheed Aircraft completed “antiradar studies, aerodynamic structural tests, and engineering designs,” the CIA gave the green light to produce 12 aircraft on January 30th, 1960. It was called the A-11 at the time. Lockheed engineer Clarence L. Johnson was the main designer, who was responsible for the U-2. Despite Johnson’s experience, many were skeptical at first and, after months of drawings and wind-tunnel model testing, they were not convinced this beast could fly.

The Lumen is Looming

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Coming in 2011: New Labels for Light Bulb Packaging

Under direction from Congress to re-examine the current labels, the FTC is announcing a final rule that will require the new labels on light bulb packages. For the first time, the label on the front of the package will emphasize the bulbs’ brightness as measured in lumens, rather than a measurement of watts. The new front-of-package labels also will include the estimated yearly energy cost for the particular type of bulb.

This will allow one to make an easier comparison of bulb’s brightness, but it should be noted that lumen is the unit of luminous flux, which is the brightness as perceived by the human eye. The eye’s efficiency peaks at about 550 nm, and tapers off at the red and blue ends of the spectrum, and the lumen compensates for this. In other words, it’s not the actual amount of visible light energy given off, it’s how bright it looks. This is a trick used in the past by laser pointer manufacturers, when they started coming out with shorter-wavelength (i.e. redder or non-red) devices. Because the eye was more sensitive, they appeared brighter, even though the power was actually smaller. 1 mW of green can be as bright as ~5 mW of red, depending on the exact wavelengths involved.

Design

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I found another site that has a slightly more complete answer for how the “fridge of the future” is supposed to work. Nano bio robots upconvert IR into visible light, and send it out of the system. (No, it doesn’t. We call this magic, when we’re in a charitable mood. At other times what we call it involves the biology of used food, sometimes incorporating a male bovine)

But I’ve already said all of that.

The other thing that bothers me about this is that it’s part of Electrolux’s Design Lab competition, and I think they should be embarrassed to have included it. Design is not just aesthetics. If something serves no other function than to evoke a response based on how it looks, it’s art. We like art because it’s pleasing to the eye, or it arouses a certain emotional reaction, or make you think (or some combination thereof). But this wasn’t an art competition. It was a design competition, ostensibly meaning you want the best design. Design brings with it an additional requirement: it has to work.

Design incorporates a lot of things, and it’s not like experimental physicists are routinely mistaken a great designers. We tend to swing to the other end of the spectrum; if it works, who cares what it looks like? We’re the only ones who are going to use it, so why make the controls intuitive? Our experiments typically involve duct tape, parts held together with bits of wire and cables everywhere, and few labels. If you want design, you need to talk to an engineer — s/he will make it work, and do so in a more efficient fashion, put it in a box and make it (somewhat) easier to use. We than measure the quality of design by the attractiveness of the package and the level of user-friendliness, and great design is hard because you are trying to optimize for multiple variables, with often conflicting constraints — one demand might be that it’s small, but another requirement needs it to be big, etc. It’s hard to do all that. But the unspoken part of all of this is that the box has to do what it’s supposed to do — if it doesn’t meet spec, we tend to get mad and demand it be fixed, or give us our money back.

So an item that can’t possibly work can’t be an example of good design. It shouldn’t even get in the door.

I'll Huff and I'll Puff

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… and I’ll push this little red button

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To be fair, the “house” of bricks is more like a wall, and without mortar. Pigs may make houses out of straw and sticks, but they follow building codes, dammit.

Puts my Airzooka to shame, though.

The Refrigerator of the Futurama

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Zero-Energy Fridge Uses Gel to Preserve Food

No, I don’t think it does. All of the links I found eventually lead back to an Electrolux design competition, which is short on detail. I think “design” here is code for “engineering a bonus but not necessary”

The closest I could find to an explanation of how it works is this:

The zero-energy concept relies on a biopolymer gel that uses luminescence to preserve food items.

I think they dropped the “which hasn’t yet been discovered,” because cooling something to below ambient temperature requires energy. Those ornery laws of thermodynamics are quite insistent on this. And the sad thing about the discussions on tech sites I’ve read is that the main focus is on the goo and whether it would really be odor-free and not sticky, with very little mention of it relying on magic to work.

But it’s easy for me to get a mental image of Fry reaching into a glob of green goo and pulling out a can of Slurm.

UPDATE (6/22): found this

Bio nano robots absorb heat (infrared radiation) and emit it in the visible spectrum – luminescence. In addition, they protect from ultraviolet radiation that can damage the products.

No, they don’t. While it is possible to combine low-energy photons to emit higher-energy ones, the real process does not violate the second law of thermodynamics.

Potato Chips vs Clean Energy Technology

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Gates, venture capitalist Doerr issue warning about America’s future

Of the top 30 new energy technology companies worldwide that produce batteries, solar technologies and advanced wind energy, only four are headquartered in the United States, Doerr said.

“It’s very sad that Americans spend more on potato chips than we do on investment in clean energy R&D,” said Doerr.

Gates said more federal research spending is needed to spur investment in clean technologies. “The incentives aren’t there to make it happen,” said Gates.

The Greens of Summer

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flickr: Locals and Tourists

Using geotagging to determine what tourists photograph vs what the locals photograph.

Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more).

Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).

Yellow points are pictures where it can’t be determined whether or not the photographer was a tourist (because they haven’t taken pictures anywhere for over a month). They are probably tourists but might just not post many pictures at all.

Google in Freefall

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Google Gravity

This apparently does not work in IE, though finding that some functionality doesn’t work in IE is not all that surprising.

Even after the gravity kicks in, you can still type in the search window.

SEO Codswallop

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DF: Tynt, the Copy/Paste Jerks

I’ve picked at this nit already, but Gruber explains what’s going on when you get the annoying “read more” blurb when you copy/paste from certain sites (which also apparently sends analytics back to a server too, to report on what was copied). It’s all due to a company named Tynt.

It’s a bunch of user-hostile SEO bullshit.

Everyone knows how copy and paste works. You select text. You copy. When you paste, what you get is exactly what you selected. The core product of the “copy/paste company” is a service that breaks copy and paste.

…

Whatever their justification for using Tynt is, I’ll bet it involves repeated use of the phrase “biz dev”. All they’re really doing is annoying their readers. Their websites are theirs, but our clipboards are ours. Tynt is intrusive, obnoxious, and disrespectful. I can’t believe some websites need to be told this.

A pox on thee, Tynt.