As energy prices soar and consumers turn to the Sun for their power, opportunistic thieves are cashing in on the new market by dismantling and reselling solar panels.
“I wouldn’t say it’s pervasive, but it’s going on,” California Solar Energy Industries Association executive director Sue Kateley told the Contra Costa Times in August. According to UK paper the Guardian a rash of thefts in California has led one wag to coin the term ‘grand theft solar’
But still pretty neat. A 15+ minute video of someone making vacuum tubes by hand.
Proton Therapy – Cost and Benefit
[T]he current question on whether patients do benefit from it better than conventional, less-costly treatment.
‘Proton therapy’ was one answer to the “what good is it?” question of physics when I was working at TRIUMF, and explaining the benefit of basic research wasn’t an option.
Proton therapy is the use of protons to destroy tumors or cancerous cells in a way that is more targeted than other treatments like chemotherapy or EM radiation; I can’t really get into the medical subtleties (dammit, Jim, I’m a physicist, not a physician!). EM radiation will attenuate as it goes onto the body, so if the target is below the surface, you’ll get more energy deposited in the healthy tissue in front of the target. Charged particles lose energy, by ionizing atoms or molecules, in proportion to their speed — faster moving particles don’t spend much time interacting with a given atom — and so as they slow, they are able to deposit more energy. This compounding effect means they deposit a large fraction of their energy in a small region, and the penetration depth where this occurs can be tuned, as it’s proportional to the incident kinetic energy.
So you do far less damage to the surrounding healthy tissue. The question, in Zapperz’s link, is whether that translates into an overall better response of the patients, and a cost/benefit analysis.
Here is a somewhat more detailed explanation of the physics, including a dose vs depth graph for EM, protons and protons with a modulated energy source to spread out the Bragg peak. Protons have an advantage over electrons for this type of treatment: because they are much more massive, they have a much greater tendency to forward-scatter and reach the target.
OK, so Microsoft has come out with it’s “I’m a PC” ad, and it’s supposed to be a counter for the Apple “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads. Except it isn’t.
John Gruber at Daring Fireball sums it up pretty well
The high concept of Apple’s long-running “Get a Mac” TV campaign is that the characters portrayed by John Hodgman and Justin Long are personified computers. It’s right there in the opening lines of every ad in the series: “Hello, I’m a Mac.” “And I’m a PC.” Hodgman is not “Windows”; Long is not Mac OS X. They are not representative or average PC/Mac users. They are computers.
I thought everyone got that. I was wrong.
Another reason I think these ads work: While I think the Apple ads are effective in pounding in one message (Macs are more dependable than PCs), I don’t believe they’ve been effective at convincing people that users of PCs are losers. Why? Because, at the end of the day, we all love John Hodgman, the “I’m a PC guy,” way more than the straight-man hipster dude who plays “I’m a Mac.”
Hodgeman isn’t a “PC guy.” He’s the computer! There are some ads that point out that Windows runs on Macs! The point isn’t that Windows users are losers, or that people using Windows aren’t doing anything cool. It’s that maybe you could do even more with a computer that gave you a better user experience.
But that’s not the point of writing this post. It’s this:
Microsoft’s ‘I’m a PC’ Ads Created On Macs
Flickr user LuisDS found that metadata on the creative copy of the “stereotyped PC user” and other photos appearing on Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” website revealed that they were produced using Macs running Adobe Creative Suite 3.
[…]
When LuisDS checked on the photos again this morning after publishing the metadata details on Flickr last night, he found that Microsoft has scrubbed the revealing details from the work, an effort that also resulted in the 272 KB photo ballooning to 852 KB.
I’m writing this because my irony meter exploded and I’m waiting for the smoke to clear so I can fix it. Bwahahahahaha!
“So the sweaty fingerprint impression you leave when you touch a surface will be high in salt if you eat a lot of processed foods -the higher the salt, the better the corrosion of the metal.”
Dr Bond added there was therefore an indirect link therefore between obesity and the chances of being caught of a crime. “Other research has drawn links between processed foods and obesity and we know that consumers of processed foods will leave better fingerprints,” he said.
Atomic flippers seek tiny ball for pinball fun
Two “flippers” made from pairs of platinum atoms are made to move back and forth by firing electrons at them. All that is missing is the ball, says Harold Zandvliet at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.
Despite the light-hearted description of work, the team says its device is an important advance in atomic-scale engineering.
“This pinball machine elegantly shows that even on the scale of a few atoms, a device can be constructed that only operates if an external signal is applied,” Zandvliet told New Scientist.
Beware the time-eater: Cambridge University’s monstrous new clock
The monster momentarily stops the turning dial with its foot to mark the minutes, shown as blue LED lights shining through slots. It was originally conceived by Taylor as a literal interpretation of the grasshopper escapement invented by his hero, the Georgian clockmaker John Harrison whose fabulously accurate mechanisms solved the problem of establishing longitude at sea.
Another h/t to Caroline