Category Archives: Tech

Orders of Magnitude

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I have lots of work to do, and no time to do it in.  But for the last 15 minutes I have been scrolling the mouse wheel back and forth on this web site.  I saw this on Metafilter and it’s fascinating.  The idea is to give you some idea of the relative size of objects, from an electron all the way up to the estimated size of the universe.  It’s so cool.  Click on some of the things to get a brief description.

It’s on the Nikon camera website and it’s called Universcale. Man that’s a cool webpage.

Enjoy.

Body Hacks

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Yesterday I read the most amazing article on Wired, I have been talking about it to everyone, and probably boring them to tears with it.  It talks about the advanced research projects going on for the American military, finding ways to make their soldiers stronger, tougher, etc.  The best part is it’s not anything even that creepy, but really logical hacks that have incredible results.

For instance:  they have a glove that acts like a radiator for your body, cooling you when you are hot, but also heating you up when you are cold.  The results of weight training with this thing are incredible.  The lab tech who is working on the project used to do 100 pullups in his normal workout.  After he started using this thing to cool down in between sets, he went from 100 to doing over 600 reps in just 3 months time.  It turns out that our muscles tire because of overheating, not because of any sugar use or acid buildup.  The biologist started using the glove and after four months did 1000 push ups on his 60th birthday.  Incredible stuff.

The glove is just one of their tricks, so go and read this article, it’s just so cool.

Recycling garbage into energy

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I saw a very cool article the other day about how a process exists to basically vaporize garbage into atoms, with the byproducts a molten-glass slurry and a gas that be used to produce hydrogen. In other words, it’s one of those things that sounds too good to be true. Anyway, if it does turn out that it’s reasonable it would change the world.  Landfills would produce energy and cities wouldn’t have garbage problems anymore.  It’s definitely a great dream, if it works.  Check it out.

Wilson and Angie should be happy with it, anyway.

Spam names are better than real names

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I have been meaning to write something about this for a while now. I have long noticed that of the small amount of spam I actually get in my inbox, the wonderfully inventive spammers have really been stepping it up on the sender names. The quality is certainly increasing, even if it only seems to be a random dictionary pairing, it’s still making some pretty funny combinations.  Here’s a small sample from my very own inbox over the last few days.

Nonalcoholic T. Cliffhangers
Steamies M. Necktie
Indemnified T. Less
Cephalus Welcome
Will U. Embankments
Barreled K. Tolerates
Constitutionality C. Irresolute
Minutiae L. Stooge
Refurnishes F. Astuteness

I am particularly fond of Steamies M. Necktie, but if we (heaven forbid) have any more children, I will definitely be naming he/she Minutiae.

Ze’s Wii

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If you say that title three times fast, it sounds Spanish. It’s a good thing there’s no possible way that could be mis-interpreted, cause this is a family blog, mister.

Wilson got his high speed installed a couple of days ago and he was catching up on watching The Show with Ze Frank. He reminded me that I hadn’t seen any for a few weeks and I had them on my iPod already so I was catching up myself. I saw this one about Ze playing with his Wii and it’s very very good, even if you don’t get the wonderful sophomoric puns, which I personally thought were hilarious.

Enjoy.

He’s got wood.

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A very cool article on Wired today about a company that specializes in underwater logging. Apparently there are significant forests (estimated to be $50 billion worldwide) that are currently underwater due to hydro dam projects. Anyway, the story goes into how the actual logging process is basically the only guilt-free logging in the world since there is no habitat problem, no greenhouse problem, and not even any noise produced. It’s a brilliant idea, really and this guy deserves the heaps of money he is undoubtedly going to make. The process is nice and geeky too, with an underwater, chainsaw wielding-remote controlled robot. The pilot guides the robot to the tree, staples large floaties to the logs and then cuts them down with an 8 foot chainsaw. So cool, and environmentally friendly.

I can still remember getting completely creeped out by the huge amount of fallen logs visible at the bottom of Clayton Lake as a kid.  It was a tangled mess of logs fallen every which way, and it seemed to be just waiting to trap a swimmer’s foot.  Or at least to my 14 year old self.  This company doesn’t bother with logs that can be seen from the surface, but rather with still standing trees in over 150 feet of water.