While in Sydney I saw An Inconvenient Truth. The Sydney thing is relevant because I got to enjoy an extra shot of self-righteous pleasure. An entire cinema of Aussies gasped in shock when it was pointed out that Australia hadn’t ratified the Kyoto Protocol.
I found the movie very interesting. The presentation is beautiful and I found Al Gore engaging as a speaker. Because I am up to my eye balls in a lot of this info now days, it wasn’t a terribly shocking movie… but I thought the parallel he makes with smoking was very insightful.
Anyways I found this over at umami, the Futurama trailer to the movie… very funny:
I wish we had more movies of this sort of format… I’d happily pay the price of a cinema ticket to see an interesting lecture.
Two senior National MPs are now blaming the Exclusive Brethren for the party’s election loss - and the support of the religious extremists is dividing its caucus.
One is economic development spokeswoman Katherine Rich - the other is Don Brash’s deputy Gerry Brownlee.
…
National is now desperate to distance itself from the group. Rich told the Star-Times on Friday that she believed the Brethren had cost the party the election, saying the whiff of association was off-putting to voters.
“My gut feeling is that their all-male line-up, in that famous Brethren press conference, made many women voters wonder just what their conservative vision for New Zealand was, and tipped the scales in favour of Labour.”
Good to see that some real critical thought is being put into the true cost of consorting with the religious right.
Listening to: Music In My Mind (Soul Avenderz Remix) - Craig Obey
As I have mentioned before one of the most shocking things about the war in Iraq is the fact that it has left so many young kids mangled. I’m glad to see that there is something good emerging from the human carnage… research into limb re-growth and progress in the area bionic limbs. From Wired:
The two groups are sharing $7.6 million in grants for a year to find a way to give humans salamander-like abilities. According to Army Medical Command, 411 soldiers who fought in Iraq and 37 in Afghanistan are amputees as a result of combat wounds. If preliminary research is successful, the scientists could receive more funding for up to four years.
Mitchell, who lives in Ellicott City, is the fourth person — and first woman — to receive a “bionic” arm, which allows her to control parts of the device by her thoughts alone. The device, designed by physicians and engineers at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, works by detecting the movements of a chest muscle that has been rewired to the stumps of nerves that once went to her now-missing limb.
Found this over at NewScientist. Allow me to introduce the “emdrive”… a shaped cavity that traps microwaves and uses them to generate a net force in one direction:
Key is the fact that the diameter of a tubular cavity alters the path - and hence the effective velocity - of the microwaves travelling through it. Microwaves moving along a relatively wide tube follow a more or less uninterrupted path from end to end, while microwaves in a narrow tube move along it by reflecting off the walls. The narrower the tube gets, the more the microwaves get reflected and the slower their effective velocity along the tube becomes. Shawyer calculates the microwaves striking the end wall at the narrow end of his cavity will transfer less momentum to the cavity than those striking the wider end (see Diagram). The result is a net force that pushes the cavity in one direction. And that’s it, Shawyer says.
Hang on a minute, though. If the cavity is to move, it must be pushed by something. A rocket engine, for example, is propelled by hot exhaust gases pushing on the rear of the rocket. How can photons confined inside a cavity make the cavity move? This is where relativity and the strange nature of light come in. Since the microwave photons in the waveguide are travelling close to the speed of light, any attempt to resolve the forces they generate must take account of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. This says that the microwaves move in their own frame of reference. In other words they move independently of the cavity - as if they are outside it. As a result, the microwaves themselves exert a push on the cavity.
The thing that stops me from whipping out the “anti-crank-handle spray is this (and to be honest… the fact that physics was never my strong suite):
This raises another question. Why haven’t physicists stumbled across the effect before? They have, says Shawyer, and they design their cavities to counter it. The forces inside the latest accelerator cavities are so large that they stretch the chambers like plasticine. To counteract this, engineers use piezoelectric actuators to squeeze the cavities back into shape. “I doubt they’ve ever thought of turning the force to other uses,” he says.
One of the best explanations of RSS I have ever seen and a fabulous example of great documentation:
I have always been a huge fan of employing a writer in a technology firm as early as possible… and this is a great example of the power of getting that sort of person on board.
Listening to: The Color of the Fire - Boards of Canada
The Telsa guys have posted a presentation about the overall efficiency of various power systems (an area that really interests me at present). But MAN! Ugly…. dear god! Get a visual designer on the task guys. Why water down such a great message with terrible visuals?
I am delighted to see that Jay-Z is back in the studio and is due to release a new album before the end of the year…
“It was the worst retirement, maybe, in history,” Jay tells EW. “I believed it for two years.”
Some of his loosed-lipped friends — including Timbaland, Pharrell Williams and Kanye West — started to let the cat out the bag weeks ago, saying they were involved in the project.
