The energy problem and the interplay between basic and applied research
Category Archives: Tech
Slow Toys at Play
Trying out the new camera on some of the toys in the office. The trebuchet and the Zero blaster.
Both filmed at 420 fps.
Not Inherently Naughty
littleBits is an opensource library of discrete electronic components pre-assembled in tiny circuit boards. Just as Legos allow you to create complex structures with very little engineering knowledge, littleBits are simple, intuitive, space-sensitive blocks that make prototyping with sophisticated electronics a matter of snapping small magnets together. With a growing number of available modules, littleBits aims to move electronics from late stages of the design process to its earliest ones, and from the hands of experts, to those of artists, makers and designers.
You Just Made the List, Buddy
Adobe Updater popped up on my computer this morning, telling me to update Acrobat, and for once this didn’t happen while I was actually using the program or my browser — it seems to usually check only when the program is in active use for maximum inconvenience. So I installed the patch, and descended into hell. Once the updater was done, it re-launched the program, which was suddenly possessed. Besides the head spinning, pea soup spewing and saying, “your mother sews socks that smell,” it proceeded to open every goddamn pdf file on my computer. OK, not strictly true — it stopped when it reached 50, because that’s the limit on open files. But when I clicked on the error message, it just came up with another one, because it was continuing to try and open more files. Killing and relaunching the program just repeated the experience.
After Googling and being unable to uncover any instance of this happening (so there’s no posted solution), I tried to contact Adobe through their website. They want you to register for online help, and this requires that you opt-in to their spam.
There’s no way to say “don’t contact me.” Screw you, Adobe. I’ll reinstall.
Time Sink
I’ve long since passed the point when celebrating a birthday is a big deal — the last party I had was for #30, where we all dressed in black to mourn the passing of my youth. Fortunately the rumors of its death were greatly exaggerated (at least the behavioral part). But I used this year’s birthday as an excuse to buy a high-speed video camera (Exilim EX-FH20). It arrived a few days ago and I’ve been playing with it a lot. Soon, perhaps, I’ll actually install the user’s manual from the CD and read it.
So expect some postings of things gratuitously shot in slow-motion, with no real point to them (in stark contrast to so many of my posts) other than some thing shot in slo-mo look pretty cool. I suspect that many of my belongings will end up broken, but that that the destruction of my property will be exceeding well-documented.
Here is an early attempt, lighting a match in a candle flame, at 1000 fps.
We're Gonna Make a Fortune
The testosterone channel
Now, Shooting Random Stuff
Visualize This
A chess simulation, which shows you the moves that the computer is contemplating.
An easy way to evaluate the game in a given moment is by calculating the total value of all the pieces left on the board. These values vary with position, but in the most basic calculations a pawn is given one point, bishops and knights three points each, rooks five points and queens nine points. The points change depending of the position of a particular piece and how the pieces are coordinated. This means that an advanced pawn is worth more than one that’s still in the starting square and that a cornered bishop is worth less than out in the open. The importance of position is something chess has in common with both backgammon and most games for poker. Another similarity is the importance of thinking ahead.
Braaiiins
Darpa: Heat + Energy = Brains. Now Make Us Some.
The idea behind Darpa’s latest venture, called “Physical Intelligence” (PI) is to prove, mathematically, that the human mind is nothing more than parts and energy. In other words, all brain activities — reasoning, emoting, processing sights and smells — derive from physical mechanisms at work, acting according to the principles of “thermodynamics in open systems.” Thermodynamics is founded on the conversion of energy into work and heat within a system (which could be anything from a test-tube solution to a planet). The processes can be summed up in formalized equations and laws, which are then used to describe how systems react to changes in their surroundings.
Sorry, Wrong Model
Extreme Ultraviolet Laser Challenges Einstein
No, not really. (Any headline that implies that Einstein might be wrong is invariably incorrect — these are things that have been tested for 100 years)
In the new study, the physicists shot xenon atoms with FLASH, an x-ray laser that uses intense photons in the extreme ultraviolet energy range, about forty times the energy of visible light. The xenon atoms lost a whopping 21 electrons at once, which indicates that it was hit by 50 photons simultaneously. Not only that, but the first electrons to pop off were from an inner region of the atom, like if you peeled an onion starting with the second layer.
Here’s the thing: there are situations where you look at E&M interactions classically. If you put a large electric field around a material, you can ionize it; even though E&M interactions are explained by virtual photons, this is a case where classical physics works out just fine, and a high-intensity laser has a large electric field. Another case is a FORT (far off-resonant dipole force trap), where the intensity profile of a focused laser gives an electric field gradient.
So ionizing 21 electrons is pretty cool, but one needs to be careful in how one phrases these “challenge to Einstein” headlines. You have models of light that are wave-like and particle-like, and you use the model that works. The lesson of the photoelectric effect is NOT that light always exhibits particle properties.