Hacker war drives San Francisco cloning RFID passports
Using a $250 Motorola RFID reader and antenna connected to his laptop, Chris recently drove around San Francisco reading RFID tags from passports, driver licenses, and other identity documents. In just 20 minutes, he found and cloned the passports of two very unaware US citizens.
Meet the watercone, which is a passive system to produce clean water. The technology was developed a few years ago, but was just licensed for mass production
A couple of reviews and discussions about My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture by Susan D. Blum
The book, about to appear from Cornell University Press, is sure to be controversial because it challenges the strategies used by colleges and professors nationwide. In many ways, Blum is arguing that the current approach of higher education to plagiarism is a shock and awe strategy — dazzle students with technology and make them afraid, very afraid, of what could happen to them.
Doppler effect reversed by metamaterial
This latest research takes the principles of negative electromagnetic refraction and applies them to acoustic vibrations. Here the parameters to be made negative are material density and modulus, the latter relating to a material’s elasticity. Until now engineers have only created metamaterials with either of these properties, but Kim and colleagues have successfully combined them to create the world’s first “double-negative” acoustic metamaterial (arXiv:0901.2772v2 ). Their acoustic tube is constructed from thin membranes under tension fed by a carefully controlled air flow, and this manages to create a negative phase velocity for sound travelling through.
Very cool.
When my dad remodeled our attic into a bedroom (for me) he put up some bookcases and mounted one on hinges, so you could access the crawlspace.
It’s only a model (shh!) and spiders have eight legs, but … crap. Call Jim West and Artemus Gordon.
Here’s a shocker – the film wasn’t shot in Punxsutawney at all. Instead, Woodstock, Illinois was used. Punxsutawnians (I don’t know if that is what citizens of Punxsutawney are really called or not) were very upset by this at first, but later understood that perhaps their beloved town wasn’t quite Hollywood-worthy. For instance, the Punxsutawney had no town square, whereas Woodstock’s town square made for a very iconic, small-town feeling. Several scenes from Planes, Trains and Automobiles was also filmed in Woodstock.
Water is blue … because water is blue
Actually, water is quite a transparent liquid, but not perfectly transparent. All substances to a certain degree absorb light, and as a consequence, the intensity of a beam of light spreading through matter drops exponentially with distance, as described by the so-called Beer-Lambert law. Pure water appears transparent because it takes a distance of the order of metres to reduce by half the intensity of light passing through it. And, what is most important for the apparent colour of water, the absorption depends on the wavelength of light, hence colour.
And, as it turns out, heavy water isn’t blue.
Riddle me this, Batman. Physics Riddle — Of Rope and Wood at Morning Coffee Physics
[H]is data suggest that a lack of opportunities for unstructured, imaginative play can keep children from growing into happy, well-adjusted adults. “Free play,” as scientists call it, is critical for becoming socially adept, coping with stress and building cognitive skills such as problem solving. Research into animal behavior confirms play’s benefits and establishes its evolutionary importance: ultimately, play may provide animals (including humans) with skills that will help them survive and reproduce.
Most of my childhood play was unstructured. Decent-sized back yard, and a dad who resisted the urge to yell at us when we trampled it. (There were several patches where grass did not grow for about 12 years, from all the foot and bike traffic.)
I also live by the adage It’s never too late to have a happy childhood
(though I would never describe my childhood as being unhappy)