Linkage I run across
How brilliant is this idea? Using air to create a force field to keep water off of you. Designed by Je Sung Park & Woo Jung Kwon, it’s essentially an invisible umbrella. Nothing to poke people with when walking down a crowded street, nothing to break when it’s windy out. Presumably it will be nearly or completely dry when you get indoors so no need to store away a wet umbrella.
Even if you were never curious about Salvador Dalí’s mustache, it’s still interesting to know about it from the man himself. I had no idea this video existed until today. The Name’s The Same is apparently a game show that aired between 1951 – 1955 on ABC.
Via: Open Culture
This is a really cool performance, and uses a Tesla Coil. It’s a great performance to put on at night.
I was reading Austin Mayer’s blog post on shuttle orbiter re-entry when this piece struck me:
After de-orbit burn, the shuttle heads for the atmosphere at 400,000 feet, 17,000 miles per hour, and 5,300 miles away from Edwards. (Yes, you are landing in the Mojave desert and you are starting your landing approach West of Hawaii). Not a bad pattern entry, huh? In reality, the autopilot flies the the entire 30-minute re-entry, and the astronauts do not take over the controls of the shuttle until the final 2 minutes of the glide. The astronauts COULD fly the entire re-entry by hand, but it is officially discouraged by NASA. The reason is obvious… these speeds and altitudes are way outside of normal human conception, so our ability to “hand-fly” these approaches is next to nil.
In the history of Shuttle missions (the 100th mission has just come to a close as I write this), the real space shuttle has been hand-flown for the entire re-entry only ONCE, by an ex-marine pilot, as I understand it, who was ready for the ultimate risk and challenge.
A few minutes of research suggests this was Joe Engle a retired U.S. Air Force Major General and a former NASA astronaut. The Wikipedia entry credits him as “the only astronaut to have manually flown the shuttle through reentry and landing”. It should be noted however that he flew Shuttle Enterprise, and from 25,000 feet to landing. He didn’t re-enter the atmosphere from space. That however doesn’t diminish the task. He flew what was likely the worlds heaviest and untested glider successfully by hand. An absolutely insane task, and succeeded!
Washington Post has an interesting piece on DuckDuckGo. It’s a pretty interesting approach to taking on a giant. In many ways it reminds me of how Mozilla took on Microsoft in the browser wars.
Here’s an interesting paper (PDF) on Double Entendre Identification, in particular “that’s what she said“. It’s pretty interesting and likely one of the only places you’ll ever read about noun, adjective and verb sexiness.
The Internet Archive is a really cool org. They recently announced they have archived ten petabytes of cultural material. 1 Petabyte = 1,048,576 GB. Think about that for a moment. Humanity is creating and exchanging data at an alarming rate. In just a few more years this number will unquestionably be dwarfed.
This data will be of value in the future to analyze how the Internet impacted society today. We’ve yet to develop the tools to really parse data that big for things that aren’t quantitative.
This college professor knows how to make class entertaining. This was well done and well executed. Clearly some time was spent on perfecting this. Timing is spot on.
Baseball at 5,000 FPS is pretty interesting stuff:
Davies says the camera is a Vision Research v642, which shoots high-def video and is regularly used to cover baseball games. But last night’s was specially modified by a company called Inertia Unlimited to shoot at an extra high frame rate and customized to use a Canon 200 mm 2.0 lens that allowed for an extra stop or two of light.
Physics of Baseball has a few GIF’s demonstrating just how awesome this really is. I’d love to see this demonstrated even beyond baseball. I’d imagine Football, Soccer, also being quite interesting to see. A kick at that speed and detail for example.
Pretty cool records recently declassified. From ExtremeTech:
The aircraft, which had the code name Project 1794, was developed by the USAF and Avro Canada in the 1950s. One declassified memo, which seems to be the conclusion of initial research and prototyping, says that Project 1794 is a flying saucer capable of “between Mach 3 and Mach 4,” (2,300-3,000 mph) a service ceiling of over 100,000 feet (30,500m), and a range of around 1,000 nautical miles (1,150mi, 1850km).
Looks a lot like the Avrocar in many respects. I wonder how many UFO reports in that era were perhaps manned or unmanned tests of this aircraft. I’d imagine it’s possible that while this is now declassified, the US Government still isn’t going to admit to what degree it was tested.