most beautiful land speed record vehicles
picks purely based on looks rather than actual speed
Category Archives: Tech
Looking Down at Those Who Looked Up
Ten ancient observatories spied from space
Image taken by GeoEye’s Ikonos satellite at 400+ miles above earth.
Who's the Fairest Helium Atom of Them All?
Smoothest surface ever is a mirror for atoms
Metal materials reflect helium atoms much better but are harder to bend precisely into the right shape. Now materials scientists from the Autonomous University of Madrid led by Amadeo Vázquez de Parga have combined silicon and metal to make what they say is the smoothest surface ever made.
They made the near-perfect mirror by coating a thin layer of lead onto a silicon surface. This is not straightforward, because when a very thin metal layer is deposited onto a flat silicon surface it usually forms an uneven coating of differently sized bumps that perform badly as a mirror for helium atoms.
That First Step is a Doozy
And they expect you to go head-first.
Practical, but not Practical
The practical joke arms race of Caltech, MIT and … UBC? Extreme Engineering
In this arms race, UBC is the third superpower. One of its most sophisticated feats also took place on the Lions Gate Bridge, in 1988. Electrical engineer Johan Thornton, now a contract engineer in his late 30s, decided that he wanted to make the bridge lights —all of them—blink. Thornton will only broadly describe the hack, but he hints that the low current of the bridge’s daylight sensor was crucial. For hours, people assumed that the blinking bridge lights were broken. Then the crew of a passing cargo ship reported that the pattern was Morse code: “UBC engineers do it again.”
I had no idea. I spent two and a half years at TRIUMF, on the edge of the UBC campus, but don’t recall hearing about any adventures in my time there.
Hint: It's Not a Verb
Sat-Nav wristwatches have been around since 1920.
OK, the idea of a small chart scrolling on one’s wrist is clever, but the “sat” part of “sat-nav” stands for satellite, as in artificial satellite. What artificial satellites are involved here?
Yes, I have a peeve about using acronyms and abbreviations where one obviously doesn’t know what the terms stand for. Like saying “Please RSVP,” “LCD display,” “ATM machine” or “PIN number,” though these are examples of pleonasms rather than the first example, which is merely incorrect. But I digress …
Original article has several pictures of interesting inventions.
Can a Robot Get Cabin Fever?
The Other Manhole Cover
Drilling Square Holes at Linearly Independent. All about the Reuleaux triangle and rotations thereof.
[I]t has the same maximum width regardless of how it is rotated. this property was thought to be only possessed by circles once and yet here’s a simple and apt counter example.
Constant width shapes can make great manhole covers, as no orientation of the cover will let it fall through the manhole. A few years ago Microsoft interviewers asked job applicants why manhole covers were round and this was thought to be one of the best answers.
Another more important property of constant width shapes is that they can rotate inside parallel lines.
Algorithmic Architecture
Algorithmic Architecture at oobject.
Algorithmic architecture uses computers to generate natural looking aperiodic forms that are are a revolutionary alternative to the extreme crystalline regularity of what has up to now been considered modern.
Linear Thinking on Energy
MPG vs GPM at Everyday Scientist
The take-away message is that we can’t do calculations like (1/a – 1/b) in our heads.
Update: more at sciencegeekgirl