So that’s what the bottoms of limpid pools look like. Scary eh?
Eye exam the other day. (My eyeglasses problem happened after I scheduled this, but before the exam. Come to think of it, I chipped a tooth right after making my dentist appointment. Note to self: do NOT schedule a urology visit.)
Retina scan from the doc’s new toy. I’d gotten scans before, from laser-safety examinations. They don’t actually make it any safer to work around lasers, they just give you a baseline so you can assess the amount of damage of you look into the big scary laser. The previous ones required dilation, which means you can’t drive (or do much of anything, really) for several hours. This one didn’t.
I just hope this doesn’t compromise the security of the Genesis Project.
Sure, it’s designed for restaurants, but there’s nothing stopping you from getting one. Other than the price tag, of course.
I’ve had liquid-nitrogen ice cream — we did it in grad school. It’s good. The fast freezing means you get small ice crystals, so it’s smooth, and the nitrogen just boils away. But it cost several orders of magnitude less to do it by hand.
In celebration of the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first use of the telescope, the International Astronomical Union and UNESCO have declared 2009 to be the International Year of Astronomy (IYA 2009). As part of a world-wide celebration of this event, the U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO) will be sponsoring a free-admission Open House on Saturday, 4 April, from 3:00 pm to 10:00 pm. During that time the Observatory’s telescopes will be open for inspection, scientists will explain the mission of USNO’s Master Clock, exhibits will display the Observatory’s history and present work, and local amateur astronomers will share views through their telescopes.
The event is planned regardless of weather, although predominantly cloudy conditions may limit observing activities. Additionally, heavy or persistent rain may result in cancellation. Be sure to watch the website for updates.
I’ll be there, helping out, meetin’ and greetin’. I announced this on the local geocaching bulletin board, since USNO time supports GPS, so I hope to hang out with fellow geocachers for a while (there’s actually a geocache at the Observatory, which normally requires you to take the public tour), and then I’ll probably be helping out with the Time Service display. If you’re in the area, come on by. If you can’t make it, you can still commemorate your nonvisit with a Navel Observatory shirt
Can’t vouch for all the statistics, but if they’re accurate, they represent some things to consider. I like the point about how we’re preparing students today for jobs they will eventually get but that don’t yet exist. However, the point
The amount of technical information is doubling every two years …
For students starting a 4 year technical degree this means that … half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study
is wrong.
First of all, it makes the mistake of equating technical study with simply learning facts, and that’s not accurate. Second, it implies that new information makes old information obsolete. While that may be true in some cases — technology often makes old technology obsolete — it doesn’t really happen that way. Sometimes new information is really new information, i.e. something we didn’t know before, and not “just” a better way of doing something. Relativity, quantum mechanics — these represented completely new areas of physics, but did not make the kinematics equations of a macroscopic object obsolete. Science doesn’t really devour itself that way; more often it expands. Third, it implies that students learn cutting-edge material in their first year, and that just isn’t widely the case, if at all. You start with the basics, and that never becomes outdated unless it was wrong to begin with. The cutting-edge material is more likely learned in advanced study, and at the end.
Most real crime stories are about how stupid most criminals are. Occasionally, though, you get the ingenious ones, though even here you see lapses — they got caught, after all.
The Genius pulled a custom-made slab of rigid aluminum out of his bag and affixed heavy-duty double-sided tape to one side. He stuck it on the two plates that regulated the magnetic field on the right side of the vault door and unscrewed their bolts. The magnetic plates were now loose, but the sticky aluminum held them together, allowing the Genius to pivot them out of the way and tape them to the antechamber wall. The plates were still side by side and active—the magnetic field never wavered—but they no longer monitored the door. Some 30 hours later, the authorities would marvel at the ingenuity.
Sounds like a movie plot (Schneier agrees), and I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes one. Maybe Hollywood can even do that without wrecking the story.
In energy storage, there has always been a trade-off between the amount of energy a material could store and how quickly you could discharge it. Batteries were pretty good at storing energy (although not nearly as good as oil), but getting energy into and out of them was tough. Ultracapacitors, and their cousins, supercapacitors, can deliver a lot of charge really quickly, but it takes 20 times more of their materials to store the same energy as a comparable battery.
The new battery material appears to solve that problem by creating a “fast-lane” for ions to move around the lithium iron phosphate material. By applying a special surface coating to the old material, they allow the ions to speed around the battery at rates that are nearly unimaginable.
As computer chips shrink ever smaller, the background flicker of electronic noise threatens to undermine the vital precision of digital processing. Unlike ordinary circuits, a newly designed digital circuit element only works properly when the noise level is sufficiently high. The circuit, described in the 13 March Physical Review Letters, is not only well-suited for noisy nanoscale operations, but it can also be changed on the fly to perform different logic functions–a property that could lead to reconfigurable computer processors.
