Nuke ’em
Have you ever wondered what would happen if a nuclear bomb goes off in your city? With Google’s Maps framework and a bit of Javascript, you can see the outcome. And it doesn’t look good.
Category Archives: Tech
Someone Who Shouldn't Get a Blackberry
Anyone who doesn’t get why this is considered a ‘wireless’ device.
Everyday Scientist: wireless memo book
You’ll notice that if you flip through it fast enough, it even plays movies.
Curse You, Nonlinearity!
Complexity and connectivity, and the problems they can cause. And the notion that “too big to fail” might mean “too big to be allowed to exist.”
Much like the power grid, the financial system is a series of complex, interlocking contingencies. And in such a system, the biggest risk of all – that the system as a whole might fail – is not related in any simple way to the risk profiles of its individual parts. Like a downed tree, the failure of one part of the system can trigger an unpredictable cascade that can propagate throughout the entire system.
[…]
[W]e tend to overlook a fact that should be obvious – that once everything is connected, problems can spread as easily as solutions, sometimes more so. Thanks to globally connected transportation systems, epidemics of disease like SARS, avian influenza, and swine flu can spread farther and faster than ever before. Thanks to the Internet, e-mail viruses, nasty rumors, and embarrassing truths can spread to colleagues, loved ones, or even around the world before remedial action can be taken to stop them. And thanks to globally connected financial markets, a drop in real-estate prices in California can hurt the retirement benefits of civil servants in the UK.
Brought to You via Gliese 581
ApolloPlus40 – Tweeting the Apollo 11 Mission
Nature News twitters the Apollo 11 moon mission as it happened — 40 years on. Followers can read about technical milestones, political challenges, and related events in the space race starting today, just over a month before the 40th anniversary of the first lunar landing.
(Gliese 581 being a system, with a planet, about 20 light-years away, which would account for the 40-year delay)
In the Zone
Fast Food Apple Pies and Why Netbooks Suck
I have no horse in this race, or a smartphone for that matter, but any explanation of “the zone of suck” using fast-food apple pies is worthwhile reading, IMO.
Monarch Burger went to the trouble of making their apple pie look like a slice of homemade apple pie. While it seems appealing in its photo on the menu, it sets up a false expectation. It may look like a slice of homemade apple pie, but it certainly doesn’t taste like one. Naturally, it flopped. Fast-food restaurants are set up to be run not by trained chefs, but by a low-wage, low-skill, disinterested staff. As a result, their food preparation procedures are designed to run on little thinking and no passion. They’re not set up to create delicious homemade apple pies.
Tom, Dick, Harry & Friends
Harry and friends, at least. oobject: 12 of the worlds most fascinating tunnel networks
Wheel … of … Falkirk!
These caissons always weigh the same whether or not they are carrying their combined capacity of 600 tonnes (590 LT; 660 ST) of floating canal barges as, according to Archimedes’ principle, floating objects displace their own weight in water, so when the boat enters, the amount of water leaving the caisson weighs exactly the same as the boat. This keeps the wheel balanced and so, despite its enormous mass, it rotates through 180° in five and a half minutes while using very little power.
Short time-lapse video of the wheel in action
Smile. People Will Think You're Up to Something.
As if It Needed to, Virginia Bans Smiles at the DMV
DMV officials say the smile ban is for a good cause. The agency would like to develop a facial recognition system that could compare customers’ photographs over time to prevent fraud and identity theft. “The technology works best when the images are similar,” said DMV spokeswoman Pam Goheen. “To prepare for the possibility of future security enhancements, we’re asking customers to maintain a neutral expression.”
People smile for their driver’s license photos? I have four different photo IDs handy, and I’m not smiling in any of them. The last time I got a photo taken for a passport, the guy operating the camera asked if I wanted it taken again, before he printed it out. My face was centered and my eyes were open, so my response was, “It’s a passport photo” (i.e. not a portrait). He replied that he had a lot of customers ask for a re-shoot because they felt the photo wasn’t very flattering. At which point I would say: I refer my honourable friend to the reply that I gave some moments ago (British Parliament. C-Span. Catch the fever.)
The fraud mentioned above is duplicate licenses — they match your photo with those already in the system. And your name and address, I presume, if they are attempting to eliminate identity theft.
Tracking the Roomba
Tracking that oh-so-elusive beast, the Roomba. Roomba’s Path Revealed
I set up a photo camera in my room, turned out all the lights and took a long-exposure shot of my roomba doing it’s thing for about 30 minutes. The result is a picture that shows the path of the roomba through it’s cleaning cycle, it looks like a flight map or something. It really hits every spot!
Rotating Out of the Imaginary Plane
Commentary: Let’s get real about alternative energy
Lots of good stuff, including some tips that quantify some suggestions for efficiency,
Take, for example, the idea that one of the top 10 things you should do to make a difference to your energy consumption is to unplug your cell-phone charger when you are not using it. The truth is that leaving a phone charger plugged in uses about 0.01 kWh per day, 1/100th of the power consumed by a lightbulb.
This means that switching the phone charger off for a whole day saves the same energy as is used in driving an average car for one second. Switching off phone chargers is like bailing the Titanic with a teaspoon. I’m not saying you shouldn’t unplug it, but please realize, when you do so, what a tiny fraction it is of your total energy footprint.
as well as putting the alternative power generation options into perspective. Fossil fuels are used because they have a high energy density and they are transportable. Alternatives will have shortcomings.
There’s also a comment about hydrogen — one must realize that hydrogen is a storage medium, not a source. i.e. you have to make hydrogen, so hydrogen = battery
Before I close, I would like to say a few words about the idea that “the hydrogen economy” can magically solve our energy problems. The truth is that, in energy terms, today’s hydrogen-powered vehicles don’t help at all. Most prototype hydrogen-powered vehicles use more energy than the fossil-fuel vehicles they replace. The BMW Hydrogen 7, for example, uses 254 kWh per 100 km, but the average fossil car in Europe uses 80 kWh per 100 km.