If you were to travel 2000 years into the past, how useful would you be in jumpstarting technological advancements? This 10 question quiz will help you figure out your technological usefulness. If you do poorly on the quiz, as most people likely will, then just let that inspire you to study up more on how things work and where raw materials come from.
I got 8/10. I don’t know engines and I didn’t know how to vulcanize rubber.
I’m pretty sure it’s pronounced “Wesley-Ann”.
Victor: You NEED to remember to put the GPS in your car.
Me: No. I’m not using it anymore.
Victor: Why not?!
Me: It’s trying to kill me.
Victor: *
Me: Remember last week when I had to go into town and I got the driving instructions from mapquest and you made me take the GPS as a back-up but then halfway there the GPS is all “Turn left now” and I’m all “No. Mapquest says to go straight” and it’s like “TURN LEFT NOW” and I’m all “No way, bitch” and then she’s all sighing at me like she’s frustrated and she keeps saying “Recalculating” in this really judgey, condescending way and then she’s all “TURN LEFT NOW!” and then I’m all freaked out so I turn left exactly like she says and then she’s all “Recalculating. Recalculating.” and I’m like “I DID EXACTLY WHAT YOU SAID TO DO. WHAT’S WITH THE TONE, WHORE?”
I got my mom a GPS unit for her car last Christmas, and she makes similar comments about the tone and meaning of “recalculating.” She doesn’t think it’s trying to kill her, though there’s a funky map anomaly we noticed, where the directions were to turn left and then immediately turn right and left again, when you were just supposed to go straight. (It’s at the light just before you go North over the bridge into Rexford, NY on Rt 146). Hadn’t really considered that it might just be a conspiracy.
Oh, and there’s this, too.
Pancake sorter
EGNOS ‘Open Service’ available
EGNOS is the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service, which looks to be the European equivalent of WAAS, the Wide-Area Augmentation Service. Ground stations and geostationary satellites give corrections to GPS satellite position, timing and atmospheric time delay, which improves the positioning … if your receiver is compatible.
Satellite positioning and timing errors correspond pretty directly to positioning errors, so constant updating reduces errors. The atmospheric delay is a variable; if you have two frequencies you can figure out the ionosphere delay (it’s dispersive, so having two frequencies give two delays) but commercial GPS units only currently use 1 frequency; this will change with GPS III.
It’s only a model.
Found one of these in our group’s mailbox one recent morning.
Building a Model Block IIR(M) Satellite
Best result with titanium and space-hardened electronics heavy card stock.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Persistence, Jury-Rigging, and Ingenuity Against All Odds
A Malawian youth, whose family could not afford his school tuition, learns some physics and builds a windmill to generate electricity for his village.
William scoured trash bins and junkyards for materials he could use to build his windmill. With only a couple of wrenches at his disposal, and unable to afford even nuts and bolts, he collected things that most people would consider garbage-slime-clogged plastic pipes, a broken bicycle, a discarded tractor fan-and assembled them into a wind-powered dynamo. For a soldering iron, he used a stiff piece of wire heated in a fire. A bent bicycle spoke served as a size adapter for his wrenches.
An assassination attempt, with emphasis on ass: the bomb was concealed in the orifice of choice for concealing items. I’d say convenient orifice, but it’s probably not all that convenient.
The bomb couldn’t be that big, and water (being a large fraction of the human body) isn’t very good shrapnel.
While the assassination proved unsuccessful, AQAP had been able to shift the operational paradigm in a manner that allowed them to achieve tactical surprise. The surprise was complete and the Saudis did not see the attack coming — the operation could have succeeded had it been better executed.
We know this wasn’t The Onion because there is no remark about how hindsight is 20-20, mention of a thorough probe of the incident, or talk of a push for new security measures. Or discussion of market penetration of security technology. (Oh, strike that last one. They say it here)
Via Schneier, who cautions us not to tell the TSA.
Someday.
But not because of this.
Movie Theaters Will Fry Us All with Infrared to Stop Pirates
Fry us all? Oh, please.
Sharp, at the request of Japan’s National Institute of Informatics, has developed a method to ruin the camcorder footage shot by pirates in movie theaters. By placing mega IR lights behind the screen (which are invisible to the human eye, of course), the light can tunnel through tiny holes that are already in screens for the passage of sound.
CCDs are sensitive to IR, which is why there is usually a filter in place (unless you remove it). But the filter isn’t perfect, so adding more IR should screw up the picture. Until someone figures out that they can put another (perhaps better) IR filter on the lens. Oh, crap, did I say that out loud?
Bonus picture (I know Matt did this already, but I finally had my camera at a place with an electric stove). The burner was still black to the naked eye when this image was recorded.
Hopper, that is
Military robot ‘hops’ over walls
Most of the time, the shoebox-sized robot – which is being developed for the US military – uses its four wheels to get around.
But the Precision Urban Hopper can use a piston-actuated “leg” to launch it over obstacles such as walls or fences.
The ad in the video is longer than the video, but it’s worth the 30 seconds. The slow-motion replay really needs the bionic sound effect from The Six Million Dollar Man to complete the experience.
Scientists working on behalf of NASA built a device to simulate variable levels of gravity. It consists of a superconducting magnet that generates a field powerful enough to levitate the water inside living animals, with a space inside warm enough at room temperature and large enough at 2.6 inches wide (6.6 cm) for tiny creatures to float comfortably in during experiments.