List of inventors killed by their own inventions
Thomas Andrews (1873 – 1912) died with 1,516 others when his innovative, “unsinkable” design for the RMS Titanic proved to be much more sinkable than he had anticipated.
Category Archives: Tech
The Speed of Information
Kottke: The speed of information travel, 1798 – 2009
The included link is chart showing the time it took for news of various events to reach London, and the resulting speed of that information. Kottke adds a couple of present-day data points to that.
[W]e’re not accustomed to news taking days or even hours to go around the world now, and even when reading history you usually get the impression that events were known immediately. (The dramatic speeding up of news reports around 1880 was a result of the invention and deployment of the telegraph.)
Certainly anyone growing up now, with access to twitter and the like, will have some difficulty appreciating this.
I think it’s easy to forget that it also takes time to gather information, especially for complex events. We have virtually instant access these days with electronic communication, but instant access to what? You can tell me that X happened, but then there’s a whole lot of dead air to fill while you figure out what the details were, and we shouldn’t forget that bad information travels just as fast.
Blown Up, Sir!
I don’t recall how the conversation arrived on the topic, but I was explaining that one could use explosives to tenderize meat to some colleagues recently, and had to go find the story on the interwebs. And so I share with you:
Ka-Boom! A shockingly unconventional meat tenderizer
The idea of bombing meat came to Long some 30 years ago, while he was floating in his backyard pool. A mechanical engineer at Lawrence Livermore (Calif.) National Laboratory, he worked as an explosives expert on the design of triggering mechanisms for nuclear weapons. He was very familiar with conventional explosives and the shock waves created when they go off.
“My body has about the same density as the water,” he observed, “so if somebody threw a bomb into my pool, the shock waves should go right through me.” He started thinking about what those shock waves might do to his muscle — or to a piece of steak. To find out, he recruited friends for an experiment at a privately owned explosives testing site a few miles away.
They sliced a piece of tough beef in two, bagged half of it in plastic, and dropped it into the bottom of a 50-gallon paperboard drum of water. Then they suspended conventional explosives in the water and retired to a nearby bunker. From there, they watched in safety as a television displayed the ensuing detonation.
“The drum totally disappeared. There were just little pieces of paper fiber all over,” Long recalls. The meat, ejected to the side of a nearby hill, was missing for fully 15 minutes.
Once the treated meat had been retrieved, Long cooked it, along with its untreated counterpart, on a grill he had lugged to the site. The unshocked meat proved “so tough you could hardly chew it,” Long says. “But the one we shocked — it was delightful, as tender as a $10 steak in those days.”
This article is a decade old, but Long has been busy. He has several patents relating to the process.
Today's PSA
Uncertain Principles: The Delete Key Is Your Friend
Look, people: the delete key is your friend. There is no need to send every bit of the exchange on to new people. If you’re only responding to the most recent email, do us all a favor and delete the rest of the quoted text. If you’re forwarding something on to a new audience, delete everything but the most essential part of the message. We don’t need to see all the deliberation that went into the decision to forward: just send the key message.
This is especially important when you use a free email system that tacks on twenty or more lines of crap at the end of the email, and all you’ve added is “LOL.”
My Turf
Built onFacts: Time and Navigation
Matt gives a brief summary of time and navigation. There’s one point that he glosses over, and it’s something that a lot of GPS summaries gloss over, to the point that they are misleading.
All a GPS satellite does is eternally broadcast two continuously updated pieces of information: its position and the time on its atomic clock. Knowing that light travels at about 1 foot per nanosecond, we can calculate how far we are from the satellite to the foot, as long as the GPS clock is accurate to the nanosecond and we have a receiver that can handle such a precise signal.
Actually you can’t do this unless you have a synchronized clock, and unless you’ve done this already, in order to synchronize the clocks properly you have to know … [wait for it] … the distance to the satellite. Many of the explanations of GPS completely miss this little tidbit. If you haven’t got a synchronized clock, and all you have are the GPS signals, you need four satellites to find your position. In practice four may not be necessary, because if you know your approximate position on the earth and have a topographic map, you can get the elevation from that, in which case three satellites is sufficient to get your position, to some level of uncertainty.
A Tom of Swifties
All Sorts: A Linguistic Experiment
All Sorts is a collection of collective nouns that may or may not have found their way into the Oxford English Dictionary. If you think that a charismatic collective is far superior to a dullard ‘bunch’ or ‘flock’ then this is the place for you.
It culls them from tweets, grabbing anything that is of the form “a this of thats”
a theory of scientists
a pratfall of clowns
a radiation of physicists
a melting pot of ukrainian nuclear physicists
a rant of bloggers
an array of geeks
I think tensor of geeks is better, but the only way to submit suggestions is to tweet. Alas, I don’t tweet. So I leave it to someone else to fix this, or proffer a test tube of chemists, or a thrust of geologists, or whatnot. (or a what of knots)
Yeah, There's a Blog for That
A picture gallery and a tribute to all the fantastic cat-ladders of the world.
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Right now the website contains approximately 730 pictures.
That's not a Gun. This is a Gun.
Modern MechaniX: Secrets of the Mystery Gun that Shelled Paris (Jun, 1930)
A scan/reprint of an article describing the “Paris Gun” used during WWI, firing from 75 miles away. (The text appears to have been scanned/OCR-ed, from some of the typos in it)
Now that the rest of the story can be told, consider the guns themselves: There was a barrel 120 feet in length, approximately twice as long as the biggest guns built to that time—so long, in fact, that the end had to be supported in the air to keep it from bending down and being shot off by its own shell. In fact, that very thing happened to the first of the guns tested at the German proving ground, for the barrel bent a full inch under its own weight.
Next they fired a shell 75 to 80 miles or more, over a total trajectory ranging from 90 to nearly 100 miles.
To do that the shell was shot 24 miles above the earth, higher than any man-made thing, save possibly a small sounding balloon, had ever penetrated. At that extreme height the shell traveled through what was almost a vacuum, at a temperature of far more than 100 degrees below zero.The shell, traveling at an average speed of 30 miles a minute—or sixty times as fast as the usual legal rate for automobiles — took three minutes to complete its aerial flight of 90 miles. It remained away from the earth so long, in fact, that the old world revolved on in space while the projectile was away, so the gunners had to aim a half mile east of the target in order that the target might be there when the shell arrived to hit it.
Ice to See You
NY Times: For Winter Games in Vancouver, Ice Isn’t So Easy
“You can’t just go out there and make ice,” said Hans Wuthrich, in charge of the surface at the newly built curling arena, where the final step is a delicate spritz of scientifically configured water droplets strong enough to alter the course of 44 pounds of sliding granite.
The five ice specialists, each with deep Canadian ties, have extensive experience from previous Olympics. On behalf of ice, they helped design new locales and the upgrades to existing ones. They toured Vancouver’s water-treatment plants to study their product’s key ingredient. They ponder every ice-dooming possibility.