How to stop car thieves? “If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude.”
Math, Science & Technology
Weird science
More questions than answers in this:
“A person or persons at the same US Geological Survey Lab in Lakewood, Colorado have been discovered faking scientific results. According to a report from the Office of Inspector General (OIG) at the US Department of Interior, the thimblerigging didn’t happen only once or twice, but in many multiple instances and over a long course of time.
“In what appears to be a monumental effort at deception or malfeasance or just plain laziness, between 1996-2008 and again between 2008-2014, somebody or some bodies at the Energy Geochemistry Laboratory purposely gave out wrong results from a mass spectrometer (used to identify the chemical constituents in a sample of material).” — Report: This Government Lab Has Been Faking Data for Years, by William M Briggs
Content editable
but not this content
Chuck Pergiel, looking into text editors, found “a bit of html code that will turn an empty tab on your browser into a text editor.” It’s the HTML contenteditable Attribute. I didn’t know there was such a thing, but it seemed like it might be handy, so I opened up my homepage in Vim and added a link. It works just as advertised.
Charles Wheatstone’s Polar Clock
Charles Wheatstone’s Polar Clock tells time by locating the plane of polarization of light from the sky.
Links
- Why does the date of Easter move about so much?
- Before the resurrection: Four Immediate Results of Jesus’ Death on the Cross
- Chuck Pergiel gets it: Chuck Key. I wish more people understood things like this.
Synthesizing video
“This system instantly edits videos to make it look like you’re saying something you’re not.”
Imagine the uses:
- Special effects
- Electioneering
- Propaganda
- Psychological warfare
- Individual psychological manipulation
You could know it was a fake, and the visual image would still have its effect.
Mechanical computer
A Navy training film from 1953 about the fire control computer:
It’s probably inaccurate to say that Americans today are less intelligent than they were sixty years ago; probably, but maybe not.
UPDATE 14 March 2016: See the Norden bombsight.
The Wankel rotary engine
Broken Promises of the Wankel Engine, by Adam Fabio
All designs are good for some applications and bad for others. It seems those the Wankel is bad for include (so far) general-purpose automobiles.
What to do with a floppy drive
Utility poles
If you’ve looked up at one and thought, “what the heck is that? what are they doing now?” you can begin by reading A Field Guide to the North American Utility Pole, by Dan Maloney.
