Keep Them Shutters Rolling, Rawhide!

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Gav shows you how insanely quick the inside of a DSLR camera moves when it takes a picture, by filming it at 10,000 fps.

Camera filmed is a Canon 7D.
This video is a good demonstration of how a rolling shutter works.
Shot with a Phantom Flex at 10,000fps

$mart

(yay! internet finally restored!)

Why 50 million smart meters still haven’t fixed America’s energy habits

The upshot: Right now, smart meters aren’t waking Americans up and making them conscious of their energy use — because they aren’t being paired with what behavioral research shows us is needed for that to happen.

This is the story of why the smart meter revolution has, thus far, fallen short — and how we can better use one of the most pivotal innovations in the electricity sphere to save energy, cut greenhouse gas emissions and save a lot of money.

I can vouch for the notion of immediate feedback being an important component to changing behavior — something that’s discussed in the article. My new-ish car tells me my instantaneous gas efficiency and reminds me of things that I know but would not necessarily be thinking about, such as how wasteful it is to romp on the gas when speeding up, or how hitting the brakes means you are bleeding away your kinetic energy as heat. So it’s modified how I drive — smaller accelerations. Less gas when speeding up and coasting to slow down, when it’s appropriate to do so. So I can see how this would work for home energy use, too.

Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na, Boom Boom

Sodium’s explosive secrets revealed

The explosion, say Pavel Jungwirth and his collaborators at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, is not merely a consequence of the ignition of the hydrogen gas that the alkali metals release from water. That may happen eventually, but it begins as something far stranger: a rapid exodus of electrons followed by explosion of the metal driven by electrical repulsion.

Neat. It’s not the hydrogen reacting with air that causes the alkali to explode. That reaction doesn’t cause more surface area to be created as the reaction unfolds, so it can’t “accelerate”

Video in the link, including slow-motion views of the explosion.

It Was Good

Let there be light! Celebrating the theory of electromagnetism

There was also another controversy raging at the time, concerning the nature of light. It was known that light travelled through space with a finite speed, rather than leaping instantaneously from its source to our eyes.

But no-one knew, a century-and-a-half ago, what light was actually made of.

Most physicists agreed it travelled through space as a wave but they didn’t know what these light waves were made of, and they didn’t know how they got from one place to another. Maxwell was about to solve all these mysteries.

3D, but not Greased

3D Lightning

Having two pictures of the exact same lightning bolt lets you do something pretty amazing; reconstruct its path in 3D. In this case because the precise location and elevation of the photographers isn’t known this is slightly more art than science, but it is still fun!