Thursday, October 12, 2006
Welcome to the Future, Again.
Some of the latest technology currently in development:
The PHaSR. The Personnel Halting and Stimulating Response weapson was developed for providing a non-lethal method in crowd control and immobilizing attackers by shooting low-powered laser beams that induces a temporary blinding effect on targets. Sadly, it has neither 'disintegrate' nor 'frag' settings. (link)
The BLEEX. The Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton is basically a device designed to help soldiers carry all their stuff for miles and up hills and not get tired. It's still not quite Starship Troopers yet (the book, not the movie), but it's getting there. (link) But, it would cool to be used in conjunction with...
The Gryphon. The ESG Personal Flying Wing is a device to allow airborne paratroopers to be deployed in safer airspace and glide in to their designated target. (link)
The Bionic Arm. Claudia Mitchell lost her arm in a motorcycle accident, and has received a bionic arm that actually responds to her thoughts. If she thinks, "close my hand", it does. They did this by essentially rewiring the nerve endings that used to go the arm into a small patch on her upper chest where contacts on the bionic arm can pick up electrical impulses and translate them into actual movements of the arm. She is the fourth person to receive one of these prototype arms. (link)
The Teleporter. Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark has successfully teleported a small quantity of matter a distance of half a meter. While this doesn't sound all that impressive compared to the transporters of Star Trek, this is first time a macroscopic object composed of trillions of atoms has been successfully teleported - prior to that, the best they could do was one atom at a time. (link)
Labels: science/tech
Thursday, August 24, 2006
"I'm sorry, we no longer have a planet called 'Pluto'..."
This week, the International Astronomical Union has stripped Pluto of it status as a planet, by redefining planet as "a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a ... nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit."
What?! Who are these guys in the IAU? I didn't vote for them, I know that. I'm sure the Plutonians aren't going to take this lightly either - pretty soon I'm sure we'll see them dressed up like Native Martians at the spacedock while throwing our shipments of Earth tea out the airlock.
A couple of weeks ago, they'd even proposed adding three more planets to the Solar System:
But instead of adding Ceres, Charon, and UB313 (aka Xena), they threw them out along with Pluto, classifying the whole lot of them as "dwarf planets", leaving our Solar System with only eight planets:
Whatever.
Labels: science/tech
Sunday, April 09, 2006
Don't miss the 2005 MIT Time Travellers Convention!
That's right, you only need one such convention. In the words of host Amal Dorai, "The convention was a mixed success. Unfortunately, we had no confirmed time travelers visit us, yet many time travelers could have attended incognito to avoid endless questions about the future." Or maybe as Tina Fey suggested: "too bad people from the future already know the party sucked."
Info is as follows:
MIT Time Traveler Convention
May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC)
(events start at 8:00pm)
East Campus Courtyard, MIT
3 Ames St. Cambridge, MA 02142
42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W
(42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees)
RSVP not required for time travellers, but some sort of proof is.
Or you can always visit the original Destination Day in Perth:
Destination Day
12 Noon (UTC/GMT + 8 hours)
31st March 2005
Forrest Place, Perth 6000, Western Australia
31° 57' 7" , 115° 51' 32"
(31.9522 , 115.8591 in decimal degrees)
(In both cases, I suggest you compensate for the Earth's orbit and spacial drift.)
Physicist Stephen Hawking has suggested that we can know that time travel is impossible because we haven't met any time travelers from the future, assuming that a time traveler would actually want to visit Stephen Hawking.
And while I'm at it, here's three words you won't see together:
Calvinist Time Traveller. haha
Labels: geek stuff, science/tech
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Would you like to go... faster?
Enter Harry Egger, the fastest sportsman on earth, who reaches his speed without external power. He is 33 years old and comes from Lienz in East Tyrol, Austria (and not Malaysia, as you might think). Last winter, Harry got in a savvy scientific super skiing space suit and went down a crazy-go-nuts ramp attached to a giant Red Bull can in France (once again, not in Malaysia), achieving a speed of 154 mph. A parachute comes out of his bottom so he can slow down and not end up crashing into the kitchen of the ski lodge, which would get soup and hot chocolate everywhere. (www.speedski.com)
Labels: science/tech
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
How to become a robot.
One of the staple cliches of scifi is to transfer a person's consciousness to a computer (especially one in a robot), but the question remains, is this robot actually the person, or is just a copy of the person? The same argument is often applied to the transporter device in Star Trek: is the person stepping out of the transporter simply a copy of a person that was destroyed on a distant transporter platform? What is self, and what is the soul attached to?
Personally, I think the way to do it is to gradually replace living brain tissue with artificial components until nothing is left except the artificial computer brain, which can then be extracted from the body and placed in a robot body with the strength of five gorillas (alternatively, the organic brain can be placed in a robot until the conversion is complete).
Anyway, now we're a step closer. Here's a Fox News story about some researchers that glued a rat brain cell and some snail brain cells to some microchips (as seen in above photo):
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,189323,00.html
Labels: geek stuff, science/tech
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
"That's no moon..."
Oh, wait, nevermind. Yep, that's a moon. Mimas, in orbit about Saturn.
Link to NASA website: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA07639
"That's no moon..."
It's a space station. Except, it's in the wrong movie. Dunyayi Kurtaran Adam, or as we call it in the States, Turkish Star Wars, is a remarkably bad movie made in Turkey in 1982 that uses random clips stolen from Star Wars and random clips of actual NASA rockets to serve as its own visual effects, many of which are realized by just having footage of some guy with a motorcycle helmet sitting in front of screen that has Star Wars clips playing in the background. Yikes.
To watch some clips of it on IFILM, go here:
http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2645732?htv=12&htv=12
To read a fun review of it, go here:
http://www.thewavemag.com/pagegen.php?pagename=article&articleid=22122
Labels: geek stuff, science/tech
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Happy Pi Day!
Have some pie! Have some pineapple! Hit a piñata!
(read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_day)
Labels: science/tech
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Recent Discoveries
New Animal Resembling Furry Lobster Found. A team of American-led divers has discovered a new crustacean in the South Pacific that resembles a lobster and is covered with what looks like silky, blond fur, French researchers said Tuesday.
Read more - http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060308/ap_on_sc/france_new_crustacean_3
The Lethargic Nosebleeds. A "performance art group" that I was a part of in high school. I recently found the old video of us butchering "Sunshine of Your Love" in the talent show. It's truly awful. Click here to watch the video on YouTube.
Labels: science/tech
Thursday, June 16, 2005
The Dangers of Bread Use.
This article is quoted from an unknown source:
____________
Research on bread indicates that:
1. More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread users.
2. Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.
3. In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever, and influenza ravaged whole nations.
4. More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread.
5. Bread is made from a substance called "dough." It has been proven that as little as one pound of dough can be used to suffocate a mouse. The average American eats more bread than that in one month!
6. Primitive tribal societies that have no bread exhibit a low incidence of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, and osteoporosis.
7. Bread has been proven to be addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and given only water to eat begged for bread after as little as two days.
8. Bread is often a "gateway" food item, leading the user to "harder" items such as butter, jelly, peanut butter, and even cold cuts.
9. Bread has been proven to absorb water. Since the human body is more than 90 percent water, it follows that eating bread could lead to your body being taken over by this absorptive food product, turning you into a soggy, gooey bread-pudding person.
10. Newborn babies can choke on bread.
11. Bread is baked at temperatures as high as 400 degrees Fahrenheit! That kind of heat can kill an adult in less than one minute.
12. Most American bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between significant scientific fact and meaningless statistical babbling.
In light of these frightening statistics, it has been proposed that the following bread restrictions be made:
1. No sale of bread to minors.
2. A nationwide "Just Say No To Toast" campaign, complete celebrity TV spots and bumper stickers.
3. A 300 percent federal tax on all bread to pay for all the societal ills we might associate with bread.
4. No animal or human images, nor any primary colors (which may appeal to children) may be used to promote bread usage.
5. The establishment of "Bread-free" zones around schools.
____________
It's been said that there are Lies, Big Lies, and Statistics. It's just hard to discern them if you're loafing around.
Labels: science/tech
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
I can see my church from here...
Okay, wow, Google Maps (maps.google.com) has some totally high-powered satellite maps. I think I can see Smedly's truck. Anyway, watch out - Big Brother Google is watching, haha.
Labels: science/tech
Monday, February 21, 2005
"This medication may cause dizziness, insomnia, and diarrhea."
Yes! That's my favorite combination! I love going to the doctor!
Labels: science/tech
Monday, May 17, 2004
Introducing MURPs™ — Mobile Urban Residential Places!
We have taken the concept of PODS (Portable On-Demand Storage) and developed it for residents. For less than $1000, you can purchase your own Mobile Urban Residential Place (MURP™), a complete room for you to live in. While sealed from the environment, MURPs™ have central heat/air connections and are wired for electricity, phone, and broadband internet. By installing one of these into a MURP™-compatible house or apartment block, you can enjoy all the conveniences that you would experience in a normal room, but! if you have to relocate, don't worry about packing! Just call our MURP™-Movers and they will move your entire MURP™ to your new residence and reinstall your room into your new MURP™-compatible house. Imagine! Moving without packing! And everything will be just as it was, except in a different place. All the convenience of an RV, with all the solidity of a house.
Q: How will the MURP™-Movers treat my stuff?
A: You should probably tie everything down. We assume no responsibility for broken items, assuming we don't wreck our truck along the way.
Q: What if my new house/apartment isn't MURP™-compatible?
A: Oh, come on now... EVERY new house is MURP™-compatible.
Q: I think you're making all this up.
A: Duh. I'm a cartoon character. MURPs™ are as real as me.
Labels: science/tech
Thursday, April 22, 2004
There's an article on Slashdot about the longevity of CD-ROMs – some people are afraid that they may not actually last decades on end as the manufacturers have said, and so are exploring alternative storage methods.
Such as converting the file to a string of 1s and 0s and making some form of hardcopy, like an optical code or punching holes in cardboard, haha. And of course, posted comments descended into goofiness. One guy suggested encoding it into the DNA of cockroaches. But my favorite was this, by a clever individual named Burpmaster:
"Better yet, take the entire string of ones and zeros and convert it to a single large number. Place a decimal point at the beginning of the number. Next, you need a stick and a knife. Taking the number you calculated as a fraction of the stick's length, very carefully make a cut that distance away from the end of the stick.
Now you have your file stored on a nick on a stick!"
Genius! That one made me laugh a lot.
Labels: science/tech
Thursday, April 15, 2004
BREAKING NEWS!
Dateline: 1945
Nazi scientists use alien technology against Allies!
That's right, folks – this artist's rendition of a Nazi flying saucer proves it! I discovered this image while doing research on the Internet – and if it's on the Internet, it must be true! Right?
(posted by Jerry the Killer Donut)
Labels: science/tech
Monday, April 12, 2004
BREAKING NEWS!
Dateline: 1977
Japanese vessel dredges up remains of plesiosaur!
It is true? Are plesiosaurs still living amongst us today? Or at least amongst our fish? Is it truly a plesiosaur, or is it just a rotten shark as the narrow-minded scientists claim? Is the same species of creatures that populates Scotland's famous Loch Ness? The same leviathan that Job apparently was not able to put on a leash for his daughters? We may never know – the remains were thrown back into the depths of the very ocean from whense it came – thanks, no doubt, to the same vast global conspiracy that...
No, they are watching. I must say no more.
Plesiosaur or shark?
Or something even more sinister...
(posted by Jerry the Killer Donut)
Labels: science/tech
