Chinese DIY Inventions

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Chinese DIY Inventions

One visible sign of China’s recent economic growth is the rise in prominence of inventors and entrepreneurs. For years now, Chinese farmers, engineers, and businessmen have taken on ambitious do-it-yourself projects, constructing homemade submarines, helicopters, robots, safety equipment, weapons and much more. Some of the inventions are built out of passion, some with an eye toward profit, (some certainly safer than others), and a few have already led to sales for the inventors. Gathered here are recent photos of this DIY movement across China. [39 photos]

Some of these are pretty cool.

The Power of Thermodynamics

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Short, but dramatic.

It gets hot, the rails want to expand but since the rails are clamped down to the ties, nothing can happen…until the ties start sliding. The rails are apparently welded together, and there must be a good reason for doing this and not leaving an expansion gap every so often — rails weren’t always welded. It may be that a gap causes problems for higher speeds. Or maybe it’s as simple as shorter lengths of rail being too easy to steal, and the disaster that ensues when a train encounters a missing rail.

OK, wikipedia tells me maintenance is cheaper and it allows for higher speeds and a smoother ride. Plus they mention flash butt welding. Tee hee.

Pay Lots of Attention to the Scientists Behind the Curtain

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One of the things I think about from time to time is the uneven representation of scientists, and physicists in particular — how often a biology/life sciences person is portrayed as representing a generic scientist, and within physics, how often particle physics is offered up as being representative of all physics. I think part of that can be gleaned from following the money. (In the US, federal funding (pdf alert, table 2) for life sciences is about half of all research spending at more than $30 billion. Physical sciences clocks in at under $6 billion) The other part comes from the sexiness of the work. Particle physics is big bucks and large collaborations, and is played up when the media latches onto “god particle” phrasing, or someone screws up a timing calibration and the shimmering spectre of superluminal neutrinos appears. Stories that can be written and appeal to people without too much of the gory detail of the actual physics appearing.

I am not alone in this thinking. Backreaction: What do “most physicists” work on?

The field I work in myself, quantum gravity, is among the over-represented fields. If you believe what you read, the quest for quantum gravity has become the “holy grail” of theoretical physicists all over the planet, and we’re all working on it because the end of science is near and there’s nothing else left to do.

Bee breaks down the numbers and finds

[This] tells you that “most physicists” don’t even do high energy physics, certainly not quantum gravity, and have no business with multiverses, firewalls, or “micro-landscapes of black holes”.

An Unfortunate Coincidence

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I read Joe Hanson’s post The Evolution of Tyrannosaurus rex this morening (i.e. yesterday, relative to this appearing) about the correction of the posture of Mr. T as depicted in various media over the years.

[T]he tail-dragger myth persisted, and in 1988’s The Land Before Time (which, let’s face it, is where most of us first formed our images of dinosaurs) Sharptooth was frustratingly upright

I remember thinking that I’m not going to face it, because it’s quite possible our first glimpse of dinos, including an upright T. rex, was (as it was for me) in a movie was as a stop-action clip made possible by the wizardry of Ray Harryhausen.

And, later in the day, it was announce that Ray had passed.

So here’s a video, which includes an upright, posturically-incorrect, rexie, along with similarly-depicted Allosaurs, Ceratosaurs and Sceraptosaurs.

[A] compliation of every Ray Harryhausen animated creature in feature films, presented in chronological order.

Read the complete creature list at http://www.harryhausen.com

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The Chladni Plate? Mmmm, That Sounds Good.

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Physics demonstrations: Chladni patterns

A metal plate, supported by a post in its center, is vibrated at a single frequency by use of a mechanical driver. For most frequencies, nothing at all happens; when certain special frequencies are hit, however, standing waves appear on the plate, driving the sand away from the points of large vibration to the points of no vibration. By varying the frequency of oscillation, we can find a large number of the so-called resonance frequencies and their accompanying patterns, which become increasingly complex and beautiful as we up the rate of oscillation.

I Wonder if They Called "Bank Shot"

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Scientists Bounce Laser Beams Off Old Soviet Moon Rover

Neat.

One thing that I don’t quite get is this:

a laser beam naturally loses its intensity with distance

If they mean that it spreads out, then it depends on where the beam is focused. Using a beam focused on the moon, (or at twice that distance so the return beam was still converging) would probably be hard, and definitely be an incredibly silly way to do the experiment, since a small beam means you’d have to know precisely where the target was. Using a beam that was expanding (unless you have a laser that has a kilometer-scale beam output) is the right way to do it, so you’re forced by expediency into using an expanding beam with it’s decreasing intensity, but that’s not the same as saying it’s inherent to the laser.

If the claim is something else, then I don’t get it at all.

The Horror, The Horror

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The nightmare of any and every PhD student writing his or her thesis: My laptop was stolen with all my thesis work on it.

I was so paranoid about the lab catching fire and destroying my thesis that I had it on two computers and had about five backup copies. On floppy disks, which was the style of the times, at least one of which was always at home. If the whole science building imploded, I would have a copy that was at most one day’s worth of writing or set of revisions out of date.

Also, having grown up and done high school and college papers in an era before word processors (ask me about my fun with carbon paper!), I am quite aware how much time I saved being able to write my thesis on a computer.

No Time to Lose

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An upcoming symposium, Time for Everyone

“Time for Everyone” is a unique opportunity to learn about the origins, evolution, and future of public time from some of the foremost authorities in many branches of time measurement. From its natural cycles in astronomy, to its biological evolution, to how the brain processes it differently at various stages of life and under different circumstances, to how we find it, how we measure it, and how we keep it, this symposium will explore many facets of this fascinating subject of unfathomable depth. The program has been designed for a diverse audience and the speakers carefully chosen not only for their knowledge, but also for their ability to bring their subjects to life.

Not surprisingly, I’ve met a number of the speakers and heard a few of them give talks (or parts of talks). That list includes Sean Carroll (Arrow of time), Tom Van Baak (amateur “time nut” who did the gravitational time dilation experiment I mention at the end of this post), Geoff Chester (Public Affairs Officer here at the Observatory), and Bill Phillips (Nobel Prize in ’97 for laser cooling and trapping) who is giving the keynote at the banquet.

It’s in the next fiscal year, so the probability of getting to go is not identically zero.