Category Archives: Tech

Getting Your Scorecard

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Wrong Tomorrow

When someone makes a prediction, people post it to the site along with a brief description and a URL. We monitor it and change its status to true or false when appropriate.

They want significant, empirically testable predictions made by public figures, that have no more than a five-year horizon. Topics (thus far) are politics, technology, and finance.

Research has shown that experts make predictions at a rate worse than chance. This site exists in order to hold people and media outlets accountable for pretending to see into an unpredictable future.

And despite being often-wrong, they keep at it. And people still listen to them and cite them as authorities.

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One Giant Measurement for Schoolkids

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School kids measure distance to the Moon

The students analysed an mp3 recording of the conversation between Neil Armstrong on the surface and ground control in Houston in which he utters his famous “one small step” speech. The recording is available on the NASA website.

They noticed an echo on this recording in which sentences from Earth are retransmitted via Armstrong’s helmet speaker through his microphone and back to Earth. They used the open source audio editing program Audacity to measure the echo’s delay

It Only Seems Like an April Fool's Post

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But it ran in the Mar 31 issue. Report: cosmonaut grumbles about space bureaucracy

Squabbles on Earth over how cosmonauts and astronauts divide up the space station’s food, water, toilets and other facilities are hurting the crew’s morale and complicating work in space, a veteran Russian cosmonaut said, according to an interview published Monday.

Gennady Padalka told the Novaya Gazeta newspaper as saying space officials from Russia, the United States and other countries require cosmonauts and astronauts to eat their own food and follow stringent rules on access to other facilities, like toilets.

Doing Nothing for Fun and Profit

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Think Negawatts, Not Megawatts

Paying big users to cut demand when capacity is strained.

10 percent of all US generating capacity exists to meet the last 1 percent of demand. Utilities paid EnerNOC $100 million last year simply to stand at the ready—insurance, in effect, against the inevitable days when every AC unit is humming.

I expect some companies who participate will install their own systems. Energy at the place of use, or distributed energy, doesn’t tax the grid because it isn’t being sent anywhere. I wonder if/when fuel cell technology matures, if this isn’t an ideal application. Generate hydrogen from cheap electricity at night, use it at peak times when electricity is expensive and/or you’re being bribed to reduce your demand.

The Romans, in Syria, with a Lead Pipe

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The Ancient World’s Longest Underground Aqueduct

It turns out the aqueduct is of Roman origin. It begins in an ancient swamp in Syria, which has long since dried out, and extends for 64 kilometers on the surface before it disappears into three tunnels, with lengths of 1, 11 and 94 kilometers. The longest previously known underground water channel of the antique world — in Bologna — is only 19 kilometers long.

Wanna Buy It?

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The Makers of Things at Rands in Repose.

Building the Brooklyn Bridge.

With the caisson on the riverbed, it’s time to push it another 45 feet into the riverbed in search of bedrock. Workers did this through the continued application of stone to the top while workers in the caisson dug out the riverbed with shovels, buckets, and, when necessary, dynamite. There was nothing resembling an electrical grid, so there was nothing resembling modern lighting in this watertight pine-tarred box, which was slowly descending through the floor of the East River. There were no jack hammers, so when they hit rock, they used small amounts of dynamite to crack these rocks. In a pine-tarred box, at the bottom of a river, mostly in a very wet dark.

Interesting comment:

When Brooklyn and New York’s population was booming at the end of the 19th century, the best way to get to and from Brooklyn was via ferries. As solutions were considered, I’m sure there were those who simply thought, “More boats!” These ardent defenders of the status quo were not engineers — they were the business. Their goal was not to build something great, but to make a profit.

It should be obvious, but when you ask people with a stake in it, you are going to get a biased answer. The application of this nugget to today’s economic situation is left as an exercise for the diligent student.

Physics in Art

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Machines that Almost Fall Over

A system of sculptures that is constantly on the brink of collapse. My intention was to capture and sustain the exact moment of impending catastrophe and endlessly repeat it.

While at rest, or with the hammer slowly moving, the pieces stay upright because the center-of-mass is located somewhere over the base. The key is to make sure the impact doesn’t change that.

Also, there’s Conversation Piece

Film editor Walter Murch, who edited many of Francis Ford Copolla’s films, developed a theory about edits while working on The Conversation (1974) He noticed that in many cases, the best place to make a cut was when he blinked. Subsequently, Murch wrote about the human blink as a sort of mental punctuation mark: a signifier of a viewer’s comfort with visual material and therefore, a good place to separate two ideas with a cut.
This sculpture is a physical test of Murch’s principle. I watched The Conversation while wearing a custom device that recorded the pattern of my blinks during the film. Using this information, I created a display in which the left mallet taps out the paattern of my blinks, while the right mallet taps out the pattern of Murch’s edits. When the two match up, the cymbal chimes for success.

Beat notes, sort of.

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Recognition

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OCR Terminal

What is OCR Terminal?
OCR Terminal is a free online Optical Character Recognition service that allows you to convert scanned images and PDF’s into editable and text searchable documents. It accurately preserves formatting and layout of documents.