Tracking that oh-so-elusive beast, the Roomba. Roomba’s Path Revealed
I set up a photo camera in my room, turned out all the lights and took a long-exposure shot of my roomba doing it’s thing for about 30 minutes. The result is a picture that shows the path of the roomba through it’s cleaning cycle, it looks like a flight map or something. It really hits every spot!
‘Lone’ longitude genius may have had help
The story of John Harrison the “lone genius” who solved the problem of finding longitude at sea is in urgent need of a rewrite.
Discoveries made during repairs to Harrison’s first successful “sea clock” – completed in 1735 – suggest that others contributed to his pioneering timepieces. “Harrison is always cast as a self-taught lone genius pitted against the establishment. The truth is, that is a great over-simplification,” says horologist Jonathan Betts of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, London.
I think the idea that equating “lone genius” with “never talked to anyone about their work” is quite a reach. It’s been a while since I read Longitude, but I don’t recall having the impression that Harrison never sought out others to learn things. At what point are you no longer working alone? If you have a bottle-washer? If you don’t smelt your own brass?