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I suggest continually refreshing, so when it happens you'll be the first to know. There's also this live webcam of the LHC that you could watch constantly and is actually not even close to as boring as watching paint dry. So how might the LHC destroy the world? It could create mini-black holes that gobble everything up. What do I want to see happen? Giant Pokemon coming out of a tear in the space-time continuum.
When I think of boardgames I generally only think of Monopoly, Candy-land, Chutes and Ladders, Yahtzee, Clue, Dungeons & Dragons , and Scattergories. But I recently found that there is a underground boardgame culture hosted on sites like boardgame designers forum and boardgame geek. The most popular type of game is of the D&D variety (hardcore nerds play D&D, super hardcore nerds make a D&D variant), but there are way more games than I ever imagined. I guess the videogame designers of yesteryear were boardgame designers and these websites keep that culture alive. The images below are from a game called Nih'ki : The Crystal Core War.
Sweet. This video only shows hovering on the ground, but hopefully this wacky Australian can get Ken to fly soon. As cool as this thing is, the real deal is sooooooooo much cooler. The Martin Jetpack, as its called, is supposed to cost about $100,000, but I imagine that it will be available to fly at resorts and the like, as a much cooler alternative to a jet ski.
An armamentarium is a collection of resources available for a certain purpose. This is often applied to a doctor's toolkit of knowledge and medical devices. However, the root word, armament, suggests that an armamentarium is a collection of available weapons. So what's the best weapon ever? Nuke? Stealth Fighter Jet? Nah. I think this thing and a few beers could turn the tide of any war.
Cars. Bridges. Buildings. Humans. Dogs. Clothes Hangers. You get the idea, no exceptions. I firmly believe this, and I cannot be reasoned with. Won't the people in the buildings get crushed? Not if its done right. Duh. Why does my clothes hanger need to be collapsible? So that the necks of your T-shirts don't stretch, fray or bacon. MJ doesn't wear bacon necked T-shirts, so neither should you. But the real point of this post is that there exists a park bench that unfolds into a picnic table! CollapSIRs rejoice! And collapMADAMs too, I guess.
And metaphysically speaking, we're all constantly collapsing probabilities of potential futures into the reality we perceive :)
Gallium is a metal that has a melting point just above room temperature (about 86F) so it can be easily cast into a bunch of different objects. However, those objects wouldn't last very long, because unlike M&M's, gallium will melt in your hand. Over the ages people have found that a gallium teaspoon makes for a nice parlor trick, as shown below.
On a morbid note, there have apparently been instances of people being poisoned by trick spoons like this, but if you're dumb enough to drink something that melted your spoon, you might just deserve it.
I had an interesting thought today: if fast food is supposed to be fast, why are humans making it? Couldn't a robot do it faster and more precisely? Could there McDonald's vending machines where I can customize my order? Then I could isolate myself further and not have to talk to anyone but still get my freshly thawed Mickey D's.
Well, someone else, nango17 on youtube, had the same thought in 2009, but he/she actually used Lego mindstorms to create a hamburger robot. It's kinda slow and imprecise, but it's still exactly what I was looking for.
These are just some cool simulations of crowd flow. The narrator is pretty good, so I'm not going to attempt to reiterate what he says. But it basically shows models for the behavior of dense crowds of people. The campsite simulation of 100,000 people looks astoundingly like Bonnaroo. An it's really cool to see people flowing like a fluid.
This video is kind of ridiculous (supercomputers have better things to solve), but it shows hows science permeates through just about every aspect of society.
Simply put, golf balls have dimples to decrease the drag on them as they fly through the air. This allows them to go further. YAY! More technically, the air next to the ball stays connected the ball for longer, so air is shed from the back of the ball rather than the top of the ball. The vacuum that is created behind the ball is therefore reduced. So, essentially, the ball is being sucked backward less. Also, because the ball has backspin, lift is generated because of an increase of pressure underneath the ball and a decrease of pressure above the ball.
Sadly, asymmetric golf balls like the Polara (shown below) have been banned from tournament play (but graphite-shaft-gigantic-titanium-alloy-head clubs haven't been?) which I think should be considered aggression against golfer-aerodynamicists. And I want to make a happy face golf ball with cute dimpled cheeks.
The movie "Limitless" has a viral marketing campaign that is pretty awesome. They posted a YouTube video of a nerdy looking Asian guy in Time Square who was showing off an invention that allows him to take over any screen that it comes close to. The invention then plays a video that an iPhone 4 sends to it on any video screen. This video is pretty obviously fake for those well versed in electronics, but it's generated quite the buzz on YouTube. There is a companion follow up video that lets you know it's a Limitless marketing campaign because the Asian guy says a drug called NZT has allowed him to think of this device. From the one trailer that I've seen, "Limitless" looks like an interesting concept for a movie, especially because I would love to get me some brain 'roids. They'd totally help me ace my Analytical Dynamics test tomorrow, but lets hope I don't need NZT to do that.
A Dyson sphere, not to be confused with a Dyson vacuum ball, (which is actually cooler than I originally thought) is a theoretical mega-structure in outer-space that often consists of encompassing a star within a sphere that is lined with photovoltaic panels on the inside. How might this be accomplished? Mechanically impossible, as stated by Freeman Dyson himself. But the thought that he really wanted to convey was bunches and bunches of satellites independently orbiting around a star and harvesting its photonic energy. To build something like this is not as absurd as it might sound, it'd just be kind of hard to coordinate all the satellites and to make sure that the electronics required to run a satellite are well protected from radiation. Cool to think about.
All things in moderation, my friends. It's amazing how alcohol affects the body and how a little can be good for you, but a lot causes your body to deteriorate more quickly than you might think. As with every other aspect of life, consistency is necessary to cause any harm (or any benefit). I think this may be a sobering picture for those who drink, and an enlightening picture for those that think alcohol is the devil's blood. I've never encountered anything that lies firmly on the end of any spectrum, and alcohol is no different.
Also, I really don't want kidney stones or gallstones. They sound quite painful. So I guess it's okay to err on the large consumption side. ;)
I was never very good at making playing card houses, and I was always okay with that because no one is really good at it, right? I mean a house of cards is often used as a metaphor for something fragile, so it was okay for my attempts to be fragile. But this guy, oh this guy, he's figured how to make the fragilest of fragile stand strong. His name is Bryan Berg and he's a professional cardstacker, architect, world record holder and just all around crazyperson, which is to be taken as a compliment, because crazypeople are the only ones that actually get things done. This video is of the Chinese Olympic Village, which is just a little bit absurd.
If only pokemon cards had illustrations like these I might have been inspired to be a cool artist, rather than a boring engineer. Oh well, at least I'll never go hungry. I think. Whatever the case, these are some sick drawings of the only characters ever than can only say their own names. Their limited vocabulary was made up for by their super special awesome fighting moves! Oh, what I would give to be a kid again. I literally couldn't stop saving the images to my computer, they bring back such wonderful memories.
Those sparks are 12ft long! More like lightning, really, but either way those things could make an unlucky plumber very crispy. The tesla coils are seven feet tall which really puts the massiveness of this construction in to perspective. There are no speakers in this setup, and the sound is coming just from the electricity ripping through the air. Just like how thunder is the result of lightning, but on a much smaller scale. Pretty amazing if you ask me. I am always awed at phenomena of sound from electronics, especially when it come to transistors and how when designing a computer the noise that the transistors make is taken into consideration. The conversion of electrical energy to mechanical sound energy is just fascinating.
On a crazy note, I can't wait until we can control the weather and are able to make every thunderstorm sound like a symphony orchestra of the gods. Or a hip-hop beat.
Sorry, kid. I generally don't watch sports much anymore, but I used to play more than my fair share of basketball, and I still hit the courts occasionally. This kid, however, hit the court a little to hard, more precisely, he hold on to the rim a little too long. I do applaud his bunnies (as I also used to high jump), and I think he learned his lesson. The only time it is truly acceptable to break a backboard is if three conditions are met: 1) You dunk on a man, 2) add injury to insult by letting the shards fall on the dunkee, 3) you do not injure yourself. However, there is one grand exception that supersedes these; you are Michael Jordan. The second video shows all four. Sorry, European men in short shorts.
A cube made from LEDs and animated? Amazing. Hopefully in the future 3D TV's will be made out of something closer to this than what is currently available. There are instructions on instructables.com if you feel the desire to make one of these for yourself, I for one, am adding this to my list of things to build. It is supposed to take about four days for two people to build it, and another five days to program, but they provide software if you want it. This is an 8x8x8 LED cube, so there are 512 LEDs total, which are run by computer software that switches them on and off. Some of the patterns that this thing can make are absolutely stunning, like fireworks and waves and rainfall. Genius.
This gear ring actually moves! I'm generally not a fan of jewelry (I'm a dude), but this thing is pretty sweet. It would give me something to play with at all times, but I just wonder if the skin on my other fingers would ever get caught in the teeth. And I hope when it gets dirty (as it inevitably will) it doesn't seize, but it is made from stainless steel so there are no worries about it rusting. All in all, a very neat idea that I would actually wear, for a reasonable price. Check it out at Kinekt Design.
Microfluidic devices are really cool because at the micrometer length scale forces like surface tension have a greater effect than forces body forces like gravity. This makes the flow in these channels have very low Reynolds numbers, so the flow is generally laminar, and thus mixing occurs very slowly. The Foch Lab likes to set colorful microfluidic displays to classical music. Enjoy!
That's quite a sesquipedalian word. For those of you that don't know, a sesquipedalian word is a long word, which makes sesquipedalia an auto-logical word, meaning that it describes itself. But that's a story for another day, today I want to talk about science. There's this really sweet video of a water-in-air bridge that can from when two water reservoirs have a large voltage placed across them and the reservoirs are pulled slightly apart. Take a look!
