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Audio/Video Funny

Baby Jedi

Baby Jedi

Because sometimes even geeks have kids.

It looks like she has some experience with this weapon. The force is strong in her.

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Around The Web Audio/Video

Super Mario A Capella

Super Mario A Capella

Someone just found a way to make me find A Capella very compelling.

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Audio/Video Funny

Conversation With 12 Year Old Self

Conversation with my 12 year old self

This is one of those brilliant ideas that you can’t help but ask yourself “why didn’t I think of that?”

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Around The Web Audio/Video

North Korean Kids Playing Guitar

North Korean Guitar Kids

And in today’s absolutely creepy propaganda we have some North Korean kids playing guitar. The robotic looks on their faces is terrifying. But I must say they are talented for their age. I can’t imagine what sort of effort it would take to get a child with that small fingers (and attention span) to play like that. Hard to tell if there’s any faking since you never see enough the kids close enough at the same time.

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Apple

The iPad In Star Wars

StarWars Tablet Computer

It dawned on me today while watching “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace” that George Lucas actually featured a surprisingly iPad like device. It was used by Shmi Skywalker, Anakin’s mother (left) and Queen Amidala (right) to watch the podrace which occurred over a larger terrain than spectators could see. It was wireless, thin, and roughly the same form factor, but with handles. In theory if licensing weren’t so complicated we could watch sports like that today at stadiums.

Interesting to note that even in a world where interplanetary travel is almost trivial, a tablet computer is thicker than the iPads we have today. Then again the timeline was “a long time ago”. What an amazing world we live in when you can beat George Lucas’s imagination in a mere 15 years.

Capture © 20th Century Fox

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Audio/Video Funny

Four Handed Guitar

Four Handed Guitar - Katy Perry - Firework

It’s Friday and I wanted something not serious to end the week of two Mondays (Independence day midweek made Thursday a Monday to me). I won’t spoil it, but you likely won’t guess the song based on the screenshot. The guitar playing is neat. The vocals they throw in is a bonus. For those who don’t know the song, you can find the original one here.

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In The News Tech (General)

Air France Flight 447

Air France Flight 447 is the most puzzling crash since TWA Flight 800 because it just doesn’t make sense for the pilot to pull back and increase the angle of attack if they believed they were in a stall situation.

The NY Times reports:

The report offered an answer to a central puzzle: the consistent and aggressive “nose up” inputs by the pilot at the controls, which added to the loss of lift. Pilots are normally trained to point the nose of the aircraft down in a stall to regain speed.

The report said that the readings being gathered by the automated flight director — which uses cross hairs superimposed over an artificial horizon to indicate the required positioning of the plane — would have resulted in repeated calls for the plane’s nose to be lifted.

Popular Mechanic had a breakdown of the cockpit transcript a few months ago with this little tidbit:

02:11:03 (Bonin) Je suis en TOGA, hein?
I’m in TOGA, huh?

Bonin’s statement here offers a crucial window onto his reasoning. TOGA is an acronym for Take Off, Go Around. When a plane is taking off or aborting a landing—”going around”—it must gain both speed and altitude as efficiently as possible. At this critical phase of flight, pilots are trained to increase engine speed to the TOGA level and raise the nose to a certain pitch angle.

Clearly, here Bonin is trying to achieve the same effect: He wants to increase speed and to climb away from danger. But he is not at sea level; he is in the far thinner air of 37,500 feet. The engines generate less thrust here, and the wings generate less lift. Raising the nose to a certain angle of pitch does not result in the same angle of climb, but far less. Indeed, it can—and will—result in a descent.

Another seemingly valid explanation, though still puzzling that a pilot would try that at that altitude. Ultimately the end result was tragic:

By now the plane has returned to its initial altitude but is falling fast. With its nose pitched 15 degrees up, and a forward speed of 100 knots, it is descending at a rate of 10,000 feet per minute, at an angle of 41.5 degrees. It will maintain this attitude with little variation all the way to the sea. Though the pitot tubes are now fully functional, the forward airspeed is so low—below 60 knots—that the angle-of-attack inputs are no longer accepted as valid, and the stall-warning horn temporarily stops. This may give the pilots the impression that their situation is improving, when in fact it signals just the reverse.

So the final lesson is that they didn’t know how to fly the aircraft without the fancy computers, or at least forgot how to do so under pressure. Scary. Technology is great at assisting humans or replacing humans. However when ill equipped and prepared humans think they know better bad things can happen. This is why training is important.

This goes well beyond aviation. Knowing how/why things work, even when it’s computerized is important. Even more so when many lives are at stake.

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In The News

Higgs Boson Found

It’s quite possible (five sigma likely to be exact) that the above image is documentation of perhaps the greatest physics achievement in our lifetime, the observation of Higgs boson. The Daily Mail quite nicely summarized today:

The discovery fills in the last gap in the ‘standard model’ of physics – proving Einstein right, and possibly leading to new technologies built on our understanding of the particle.

Glad they didn’t wait for me to get started on this.

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Around The Web Audio/Video

Call Me Maybe

Call Me Maybe

The “Call Me Maybe” meme is becoming slightly old but some of the parodies are either quite good, or just outright amusing. For the unacquainted Carly Rae Jepsen did the original (the end of the video is kinda funny). A bunch of parodies followed including Justin Bieber, Selena, Ashley Tisdale, Jimmy Fallon, Miami Dolphins Cheerleaders (best looking of all the parodies), Tay Zonday (Chocolate Rain guy) and Barack Obama (that took time).

I think my favorite is the above gorilla variant simply because it shows the insanity of it all.

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Software

Windows 8 Pro Upgrade Is Surprisingly Cheap

In an interesting move Microsoft announced it will sell Windows 8 Pro upgrades for $39.99 at least initially. Windows 7 Pro upgrade is about $150. It’s a huge price cut. Also noteworthy is that you can upgrade from one of the more basic versions of Windows 7 to pro. Microsoft also reduced the number of editions down to 4.

Given Apple has been doing under $30 for upgrades, it was only a matter of time. However in Apple’s case, the software is an accessory to the hardware. In Microsoft’s case, they don’t sell hardware. My bet is they are hoping the OS will be the platform to which users engage with Microsoft services.

This is somewhat ironic given Windows 7 was a modest upgrade (technology wise) from Vista. Windows 8 is a complete rethinking and a much bigger investment. The pricing is inverted.

This is Microsoft’s big move to not be marginalized by the internet into the “expensive software that you don’t really need to run a web browser”. Microsoft just kept themselves relevant. The question however is can they make a business out of this strategy?