Category Archives: Video
Jump Frog, Jump!
Holy crap. This is from the same company that has developed the Big Dog and Cheetah robots,
Sand Flea is an 11-lb robot with one trick up its sleeve: Normally it drives like an RC car, but when it needs to it can jump 30 feet into the air. An onboard stabilization system keeps it oriented during flight to improve the view from the video uplink and to control landings.
The Plane! The Plaaaane!
45-foot paper airplane glides over Arizona desert
The plane, dubbed Arturo’s Desert Eagle, was 45 feet long with a 24-foot wingspan and weighed in at a whopping 800 pounds.
It was built as part of the museum’s Giant Paper Airplane Project, designed to get kids psyched about aviation and engineering.
After a few false starts, the plane was towed into the sky above the Sonoran desert on Wednesday afternoon by a Sikorsky S58T helicopter.
Check Out That Pecker!
I’ve had trouble getting decent shots of woodpeckers before — they’ve had a tendency to move around to the other side of the tree or move along if I got close. This time I maxed out the optical zoom on my camera (advertised as 20X) and used the “digital zoom” (trading resolution for additional closeup) for about an extra factor of two and steadied myself against a tree. The bird wasn’t always in the frame for the whole shot as a result, but there’s a bit of footage from which to choose; at 210 fps, this clip represents only about 4 seconds of elapsed time.
Scamming the Tourists
This has nothing to do with the earth rotation and the Coriolis force. It’s purely for the suckers.
Here’s the trick: notice how he pours the water into the basin on each attempt. You don’t see it for the original one; it’s been sitting there for a while and has settled while he does the little demo with the compass and probably some more lecture. But he pours the water off-center for the next two experiments, so there is already some rotation of the water, and the result is exactly the direction you’d expect from the pour. When he pours on the left side of center, it drains clockwise, and when he pours on the right side, it drains counter-clockwise.
One, of course, should do this with both pour techniques in the same location to be a real experiment.
The Ol' Switcheroo
The bit about how the speed of light being constant was established before Einstein was born refers to Maxwell’s equations, according to which electromagnetic radiation has to travel at the same speed in all frames. Physicists eventually realized the light and EM waves were the same thing. This is something that isn’t always stressed in the teaching of the development of relativity, and one might get the impression that the postulate of c being invariant was just a guess.
Good Morning, Moon
From year to year, the moon never seems to change. Craters and other formations appear to be permanent now, but the moon didn’t always look like this. Thanks to NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we now have a better look at some of the moon’s history.
Coordinate Transformation: People Jumping
A rope, jumping people.
Ice Ice Baby
The thing just exploded very close to our zodiac! Or should I say imploded. And it spitted out big chunks of thousands year old ice to our heads… Crazy!
Vaguely reminiscent of Atlantis blowing up in The Spy Who Loved Me
How Much Would You Pay for the Universe?
Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson’s remarks at Senate Commerce hearing on the future of our space program