Force of Nature: Artist Puts Petal to the Metal for Electrifying Images
Buelteman’s technique is an elaborate extension of Kirlian photography (a high-voltage photogram process popular in the late 1930s) and is considered so dangerous and laborious that no one else will attempt it—even if they could get through all the steps.
Innovation — science and engineering — is the key to a sustainable economy.
Lately, there has been way too much talk about minting dollars and too little about minting our next Thomas Edison, Bob Noyce, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Vint Cerf, Jerry Yang, Marc Andreessen, Sergey Brin, Bill Joy and Larry Page. Adding to that list is the only stimulus that matters. Otherwise, we’re just Russia with a printing press.
Gigapan collection of electron-microscope images of an ant
Gigapan: Ant – Eutetramorium mocquerysi
This Gigapan is part of the NanoGigaPan project. Which is working to take high resolution images of very small things.
More at the Nano Gigapan blog
Also ant-related Mr. Ellis, Ant mega-colony takes over world
[I]t now appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony.
I, for one, welcome our new ant overlords, and want to disavow any connection with the Nano Gigapan pictures. I’m just the messenger.
Carnivorous Clock eats bugs, begins doomsday countdown
This prototype time-piece from UK-based designers James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau traps insects on flypaper stretched across its roller system before depositing them into a vat of bacteria. The ensuing chemical reaction, or “digestion,” is transformed into power that keeps the rollers rollin’ and the LCD clock ablaze.
So when the machines become sentient, they will already be carnivorous. All we can do now to compound the problem is to make sure they have a taste for human flesh.
Tim Allen has apparently rewired somebody’s toaster
Those which involve duct tape, and those which do not.
Someone needs to start an experimentalist version of this (if it does not already exist) — lab kludges
Apparently “Swan flu” is a common search term, supposedly a mistake by people researching swine flu, but I think we know what’s really going on.
You don’t have the flu. You’re just hot for this blog.
One nit:
Created as the ultimate spy plane, the SR-71, which first took to the air in December 1964, flew reconnaissance missions until 1990, capable of hurtling along at more than Mach 3, about 2,280 miles per hour—faster than a rifle bullet—at 85,000 feet, or 16 miles above the earth. It is the fastest jet-powered airplane ever built.
Mach 3 is about 2280 mph … at sea level. But it varies with density altitude, so at 85,000 feet, it’s about 2000 mph. The speed of sound, i.e. Mach 1, is not a constant of nature — it’s defined by the conditions (as opposed to the speed of light, which is c in a vacuum)
Via Fine Structure, The World’s Greatest Physicists (as Determined by the Wisdom of Crowds)
Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury at the University of California, Los Angeles, have come up with a way of ranking physicists by equating their achievements with their fame as measured by hits on Google.