…behind every one of these dumb warning labels. One that no doubt goes down in the annals of stupidity.
[Via Geek Press]
Category Archives: Technology and Society
A Tribute
…to human ingenuity. A web site devoted to kludges.
[Afternoon update]
Heh. From comments: “Submit Ares I.”
Turning Off The R&D Spigot
Congratulations LaserMotive
It looks like they just won almost a million dollars in the power beaming contest.
I sure hope that the administration will request a lot more money for Centennial Challenges, and Congress grant it. Tomorrow’s award of the NGLLC prizes at the Rayburn Building would be a good opportunity to make the point that, dollar for dollar, they put to shame anything else that NASA is doing, Constellation most of all.
Bad News On The Swine Flu Front
A cat has come down with it:
The 13-year-old cat apparently caught the virus from one of the people living in the house, the group said in a statement. It has recovered and does not appear to have infected anyone or anything else.
If it can mutate to do that, it may be able to mutate to do nastier things. Hope the vaccines can keep up.
The Earth Is Not Habitable
…to first order, any way. Some thoughts from Charlie Stross.
Thoughts On Improving Baseball
This one is a good idea, but the technology is wrong:
Balls and strikes should be determined by lasers (only those we can spare from volcano-lancing, of course). There’s no excuse for allowing the imprecision of a home-plate umpire in the 21st century.
It’s not just imprecision — it’s subjectivity. But I’m not sure how lasers would work. The strike zone varies from batter to batter (e.g., different knee and shoulder heights, and stance). I think it would be better to put in miniaturized GPS-type transponders in the balls, shoulders and knees of the uniform, and have a computer determine whether it was a ball or strike. The one in the ball would obviously have to be capable of enduring high impact… You could get adequate precision if you put a lot of transmitters in the stadium. It would also be used for ruling fouls, homers, whether the throw beat the slide, etc. It would be nice to get fallible humans out of the loop as much as possible.
The same would apply to football. Put one in each end of the ball, and an array on the players’ uniforms. There would no longer be much dispute as to where to spot, whether or not it is a first down, whether it broke the plane of the end zone, etc.
A Warning Shot
…it’s just the latest one:
On 8 October an asteroid detonated high in the atmosphere above South Sulawesi, Indonesia, releasing about as much energy as 50,000 tons of TNT, according to a NASA estimate released on Friday. That’s about three times more powerful than the atomic bomb that levelled Hiroshima, making it one of the largest asteroid explosions ever observed.
However, the blast caused no damage on the ground because of the high altitude, 15 to 20 kilometres above Earth’s surface, says astronomer Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario (UWO), Canada.
Brown and Elizabeth Silber, also of UWO, estimated the explosion energy from infrasound waves that rippled halfway around the world and were recorded by an international network of instruments that listens for nuclear explosions.
Emphasis mine. We get hit a lot more often than people realize. And we’ve been very lucky so far that none of them have hit populated areas.
Frankenstein Thoughts
A New Route
…to nano-self-assembly. I think that there will be multiple ways to skin that cat.