Category Archives: Tech

Making Quite an Impression

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Lock picking with advanced foil impressioning

All you need to do now is put some turning pressure on the key and make small ‘up and down’ movements. The pins that are not in the correct position will bind and become stuck in the lock. These pins will push the tape in a little when the key is pushed upwards, and in the next round of ‘turning and rocking the key up and down’ these binding pins will keep pushing in the tape deeper and deeper until shear line is reached. The interesting thing is that once a pin reaches the ’shear line’ (opening position), it is no longer stuck and will not push in the tape deeper. The key will fit itself …

See the Music

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Record grooves under an electron microscope

It has CD pips, too, for those of you too young to remember what a “record” is.

But if you put a needle in the groove and moved them relative to each other, the needle would wiggle back and forth. Use a transducer to convert it to an electrical signal, amplify it and send it to a speaker (which would essentially do the reverse). The groove is a composite of all the waveforms of the song, added together.

On Top of It, Sort Of

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Feb. 9, 1870: Feds Get on Top of the Weather

It had been obvious for centuries that weather in North America generally moves from west to east, or southwest to northeast. But other than looking upwind, that knowledge was little help in predicting the weather until you could move weather reports downwind faster than the weather itself was moving.

The telegraph finally made that possible. The Smithsonian Institution in 1849 began supplying weather instruments to telegraph companies. Volunteer observers submitted observations to the Smithsonian, which tracked the movement of storms across the country. Several states soon established their own weather services to gather data.

Knowledge is power, but it doesn’t prevent mother nature from kicking our ass, as Snowmageddapocalypse 2010 has shown. Though we can at least try and prepare for how hard she’s going to kick it.

I didn’t know how many of them it was going to take to kick my ass, but I knew how many they was going to use. Ron White

Double Jeopardy Does not Apply

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Busted more than once.

Skulls in the Stars: Mythbusters were scooped — by 130 years! (Archimedes death ray)

About the same time, however, and in an earlier volume of the Proceedings, I found an article with the title, “On the burning mirrors of Archimedes, and on the Concentration of light produced by reflectors,” by John Scott. This article is also an investigation of a myth that would be tackled some 130 years later by the MythBusters! Apparently the 1870s-1880s were a good era for ‘busting!

The Reckoning is Dead, Jim

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Physics Buzz: Chicken Head Tracking

The technique – which you could generally call “tracking” but is also pretty much the same thing as “dead reckoning” (or is it ded reckoning?) – is utilized by aircraft and some car navigation systems. (I love it when “high tech” turns up in Nature.) The chicken’s body communicates its movements so well with her head, that she can almost instantaneously compensate for her movement of the lower body, and keep her head stationary in relation to her environment. To do this, her body has to have some fixed point, some center, and determine how far her bum has moved away it, then move her head an equal but opposite distance from it. Once again this requires very rapid communication, and then action, on the part of her body.

I Love the Internet

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Thursday afternoon I had the realization that I still had not purchased a shovel; my inner drive to get one after our last big snowstorm waned immediately after I dug myself out and went home on vacation. So it wasn’t until the latest storm was looming, along with the local ordinance requiring one to go to the store for a 24-pack of toilet paper, gallon of milk and loaf of bread, that I realized I needed to go shovel shopping. And that the odds of quickly locating one might be small.

But I realized the odds of a shove being found elsewhere were pretty good, and that the vendor might be able to ship the shovel to me quickly. Amazon to the rescue! Shovel in stock, overnight delivery available, shovel actually delivered less than 24 hours after ordering. Now all I have to do is wait for the snow to stop.