Let’s say you own a big building full of valuable stuff. How do you make sure that the night watchman patrolling your factory floor or museum galleries after closing time actually makes his rounds? How do you know he’s inspecting every hallway, floor, and stairwell in the facility? How do you know he (or she) is not just spending every night sleeping at his desk?
If you’re a technology designer, you might suggest using surveillance cameras or even GPS to track his location each night, right? But let’s make this interesting. Let’s go a century back in time to, say, around 1900. What could you possibly do in 1900 to be absolutely sure a night watchman was making his full patrol?
Category Archives: Tech
It's Always Better with Lasers
Fastest Camera Ever Built Uses Lasers
Spoiler
The camera works by illuminating objects with a laser that emits a different infrared frequency for every single pixel, allowing them to custom-amplify a signal that would otherwise be too dim to see.
The Casimir Effect
The Casimir Effect and Nanomachines
In London’s terminology, the van der Waals/London/Casimir-Polder/Lifshitz interaction is a dispersion force, but it sounds far more exciting and mysterious when called “the Casimir effect” and described in terms of zero-point energy and quantum-mechanical vacuum fluctuations. Cranks find it fascinating and hucksters profit.
The Accidental Tourist Map
Using geotags on Flickr photos to create maps and identify popular tourist areas.
Small Step for a Man, and an Urban Myth for Mr. Gorsky
The 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing mission is still a few months away, but here’s the Apollo 11 image Library which has a lot of neat photos from the mission as well as documentation of the training, planning maps and PR pictures, too.
Making Tracks
record-breaking jet sleds and rooftops
Various test tracks around the world, starting with the aircraft carrier arresting-gear test facility. Check out the vanishing-point optical illusion, too, in the link.
The UnReagan Effect
Putting UP a big wall. 6,000 km along the Sahara.
BLDG BLOG: SAND/STONE
Clarifying the biochemical process through which his project could be realized, Larsson explained in a series of emails that his “structure is made straight from the dunescape by flushing a particular bacteria through the loose sand… which causes a biological reaction whereby the sand turns into sandstone; the initial reactions are finished within 24 hours, though it would take about a week to saturate the sand enough to make the structure habitable.”
If You're Going to Make a Robot, Why Not a Giraffe?
Laser With Controllable Polarization
To achieve the results, the researchers sculpted a metallic structure, dubbed a plasmonic polarizer directly on the facet of a quantum cascade (QC) laser. The QC laser emitted at a wavelength of ten microns (in the invisible part of the spectrum known as the mid-infrared where the atmosphere is transparent). The team was able to control the state of polarization by generating both linearly polarized light along an arbitrary direction and circularly polarized light.
Bacon: Is There Anything it Can't Do?
Constructing a bacon-plasma torch which can cut through steel. Ok, thin steel, but geez!
And, to balance the diet,
A cucumber makes an even better edible thermal-lance housing, since its outer rind contains the pressure of the very hot flame without burning up