X-Ray specs! $9.99

It’s ironic (and unrelated, and NSFW) that earlier this morning I saw a blog post of an “x-ray” camera (trick photography), and now I read an article (not even dated April 1st… I checked!) that says peeling scotch tape gives off X-rays. Like, a rather lot of them. So maybe those x-ray specs advertised in the back of the comic book could be made for real after all…
I’m just curious why it needs to be done in a vacuum chamber. What difference should that make? And why was anybody peeling scotch tape in a vacuum chamber to begin with, much less monitoring for x-ray radiation while doing so?

Uno: the dual-wheeled motorized unicycle

I can’t decide if it looks cool, or silly. A little of both, most likely… leaning towards the silly with a current top speed of 15 MPH (and estimated final top speed of 40 MPH). With all the style and half the axles of a typical “crotch rocket”, Uno is still a two-wheeled vehicle technically. They’re just really close together. I can’t help but wonder if maybe some silly legal requirement is the reason for there being more than one wheel. Possibly it’s also a feature so that the motorcycle has stability while parked (it sits on the 2 wheels plus the foot rest).

Seam Carving

I wrote about a month ago about an incredibly cool new image editing technique that will allow you to creatively resize without distorting important elements, or allow you to selectively remove elements. Now from the same source, I learn that there’s a Gimp plug-in for this, as well as a stand-alone application (Windows, Linux, whatever). Check it out.

Update: The Gimp plug-in seems fairly worthless. I’ll give the stand-alone a try sometime in the next week…

A cloud of nano-batteries

Ball lightning is descirbed as a cloud of nano-batteries. I haven’t had a chance yet to read the paper (pdf), but I read the summary, and this is very cool. Of course, it’s not the first time scientists have explained ball lightning as being an aerosol, but it seems we are now closer to understanding exactly how this aerosol functions. It will be interesting, I’m sure, to see what inventions and advances spring from this knowledge in the years to come. There’s a rather obvious military use for this, but what else? Energy storage for the automobile of the future? Will they be able to do a slow discharge of the energy, or will it always be an explosive release? Can I safely incorporate ball lighting into my haunted house at Halloween?

The next big thing in “photoshopping”

I found a Youtube video via an Ubuntu developer’s blog that demonstrates “image retargeting” technology. Basically a hybrid between crop and scale that allows you to resize an image without distorting the main points, and without wholesale removal of columns/rows of pixels. It can also be used in some very impressive ways to remove items from a picture, or to bring things far apart closer together (or vice versa). I would love for this to be in the next version of Gimp, but I’m not holding my breath. I didn’t hear or see any mention of a product for this tech yet, unfortunately.

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Why going to Mars is a good idea.

I read an article yesterday about the end of a 4 month long “Mars Mission Simulation”. Unfortunately, I also read some very negative comments about it from other readers. So I’d like to share with you why I think a Mars mission is a good thing.

To start with, I’ll respond to the “why don’t we focus on Earth” crowd. Aside from the obvious answers that: a) we do conduct scientific missions that are Earth-centric, and b) politics plays a major role in what Earth-centric science gets funded, space oriented missions provide a lot of Earth-centric value. This simulation alone was valuable in the following ways:

1. Studying the response of permafrost on Earth to global warming
2. Learning how to minimize environmental impact (essential on Mars, but important here)
3. An improved understanding of how our bodies can adapt to different wake/sleep cycles (when the crew simulated the length of Martian days during the arctic 24-hour days)

Past space exploration has helped us on Earth with everything from Tang and a better ink pen to vast improvements in communication technology and a better understanding of what cosmic events may threaten our continued existence. Space is a cornucopia of science, both in getting there and in being there. Not to mention cable TV, cell phones, and weather forecasts, which rely on… satellites!

I could go further and talk about the limited life of our planet (do you really think we can live here forever, or do you just not care about future generations after you die?) and the possibility of harvesting valuable natural resources off-world, but I’ll leave that to the true space geeks.

Fashionable body armor

SciFi.com is reporting today on a new polymer made by the company d3o, which promises to deliver a huge amount of impact protection in a small and flexible package. I’m drooling over the possibility of turning this stuff into my SCA armor, but the d3o website isn’t very promising, as it talks about March 2007 as though it were still in the future. Still something worth keeping my eye on… and hoping it won’t be too expensive. This could be sewn right into some landsknecht garb, and I could by stylin’ and safe on the battlefield. That is, if the product live up to the hype.

The importance of being cool

When I got my new motherboard and CPU a while back, I also had to get a new “cooling unit”. Back in the old days (you know… a couple years ago) I don’t recall there being such a thing as a “cooling unit”. You had a heat sink, and you had a CPU fan. They were separate, and you had to put them together. Things don’t work like that anymore. So I did some looking around, and found some incredibly fancy cooling units for some fairly fancy prices. I finally settled on one that was relatively cheap, yet still looked formidable. The picture online doesn’t do it justice. This thing is monstrously large.
So I’ve gone from a single-core Athlon 64 to a faster (read: hotter) Athlon 64 with 2 cores (read: twice as hot as that). On the old single-core, with a heat sink and a fan, I was running a temperature that varied wildly between 38 and 54 degrees celsius. 60 degrees, I learned the hard way, is the temperature at which the computer (supposedly) shuts down automatically to protect components from damage. Except, when my old heat sink got clogged with dust and overheated, my comupter didn’t shut down, it just let out a piercing whine to warn me of the danger. A piercing whine which I couldn’t hear at the time it went off, which may have been as much as 2 hours before I did hear it and manually shut my computer down. After that, I opened the case up and removed a lot of lint from the heat sink, and blew compressed air into everything to get the dust out, but it was too late. The damage was done.
Surprisingly, on the new CPU with the cooling unit, my temperature is 22 degrees celsius. That’s it. No range of temperatures. I turn the computer on, it’s 22. I check my e-mail: 22. I view all my webcomics: 22. I play Guild Wars: the fan kicks on (did I mention the fan on this cooling unit is normally off?) and I stay at 22. This is a seriously fantastic cooling unit, that I recommend to everybody (except, when I went to link it, I discovered it’s no longer available). So many people put a lot of thought into the “bigger” components, like CPU and graphics card, but (like me, previously) ignore the “smaller” things like keeping those components at a happy temperature. Do yourself a favor. Check your CPU temp. If it’s running high, get a better fan. It might cost $40, but it’ll save you hundreds.

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TV, stipped to the core

Sony is condensing old TV shows, like “Charlie’s Angels,” “T. J. Hooker,” and “Starsky and Hutch” down to just 5 minutes per episode. Inspired, no doubt, by the YouTube generation, which has virtually zero attention span and wants their content in bite-sized chunks. Of course, Sony isn’t a front runner on this. Bunnies have been condensing feature films down to 30 seconds for some time now.

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HDTV receiver and network device

I’ve been working for a while towards getting my home into the HDTV age. HD is a much sweeter picture than standard definition TV. The problem is, it’s expensive. HDTV sets are expensive. Fortunately, most computer monitors are HD capable. The challenge with computers is to get an HD receiver. Now I have found HDHomeRun… a standalone receiver that can accept two different input sources, and output the signal over a standard home network. With built in Linux support, this look like a good choice for me, and the price is in the affordable range of $150-200. It comes with instructions for setting up MythTV (think Tivo), so I never need to fiddle with a VCR again. And no monthly Tivo fees.

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