The weather this past weekend was very nice, so both afternoons were spent geocaching. Some bushwacking required.
Monthly Archives: March 2009
The Romans, in Syria, with a Lead Pipe
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?
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.
Time Lapse
No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Annihilate!
Lasers Provide Antimatter Bonanza
Hui Chen and Scott Wilks of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and their colleagues now report that they have generated copious amounts of positrons with intermediate energies–in the range of a million electron-volts. They fired picosecond pulses with intensities of around 1020 watts per square centimeter from the Titan laser at Livermore’s Jupiter laser facility onto millimeter-thick gold targets. Positrons were produced via the “Bethe-Heitler” process, in which part of each laser pulse creates a plasma on the surface of the target, and the remaining part of the pulse then blasts electrons from the plasma into the solid. Next, the electrons are slowed down by gold nuclei, an interaction that generates gamma-ray photons. The gamma rays then interact with more gold nuclei and transform into electron-positron pairs.
Physics in Art
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.
From the "You Can't Make This Up" Files
Pub evacuated after Monty Python prop mistaken for grenade
[A]fter nearly an hour of analysis bomb experts realised that the cause of the scare was in fact a copy of the “Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch” used by Eric Idle to slaughter a killer rabbit in the 1975 film Monty Python And The Holy Grail.
Thank goodness nobody said, “Ni!”
News of the Weir
Google Earth reveals fish trap made from rocks 1,000 years ago off British coast
[M]odern technology has revealed this ancient fish trap, used at the time of the Norman Conquest.
They didn’t actually find it on Google Earth, but the image was there
Although it was only recently spotted on aerial photographs, an armchair archaeologist could have discovered the trap on Google Earth.
Google said the V-shaped structure has been visible on its collection of satellite and aerial photos since at least December 2006.
Sure enough, if you point Google Earth to the right spot, you can see it. Use these coordinates:
N 52° 06.550 W 004° 42.450
Works in Google Maps, too
Recognition
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.