Slow-motion Lightning March 29, 2011
Posted by stuffilikenet in Awesome, Photography.add a comment
See how the first piece of the initial strike to touch down forms a complete circuit to the heavens and the earth’s charge all runs into it.
Science is so much cooler than religion, and so much more true.
Everybody Watch This (Seriously) March 29, 2011
Posted by stuffilikenet in Awesome, Video.add a comment
The Aurora from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.
DaVinci’s Dream Realized…For a Bird, Anyway March 25, 2011
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The SmartBird is an ultralight but powerful flight model from Festo.
Inspired by the herring gull, it can start, fly and land autonomously – with no additional drive mechanism. Its wings flap up and down, and can twist at specific angles using an articulated torsional drive unit. Completely awesome technology, based on nature original aerodynamics.
Festo makes other robotic devices based on natural models. I found their pneumatic muscle pretty fascinating, based on pulling against fibers rather than pressing against a piston.
It’s a hollow elastomer cylinder embedded with aramid(?) fibers. When it fills with air, it increases in diameter and contracts in length.
The use of the fluidic muscle enables motion sequences which approach human movement in terms of kinematics, speed, strength and sensitivity. The fluidic muscle can exert ten times the force of a comparably sized cylinder, is very sturdy, and can even be used under extreme conditions such as in sand or dust.
OK, now watch the video. That thing is the ultimate spy tool.
Ben Krasnow, Boy Genius March 24, 2011
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You may remember Ben as the guy behind the DIY LN2 generator, but here he has done a wonderful job in a considerably different field—then I checked his YouTube page and realized he does this all the time!
Amazing.
I feel like such an underachiever.
Flashcards on the Phone March 23, 2011
Posted by stuffilikenet in Awesome, Brilliant words.1 comment so far
Old-fashioned flashcards written on index cards have some disadvantages. You have to remember to keep the cards with you so that you can use them whenever you have some free time. And making copies to share is awkward. So, I finally found a JAVA flashcard application for Spanish vocabulary for my phone. It’s called StudyME, and I found it on Studystack (a free site dedicated to flashcardness for a bunch of different subjects. They have a lot more than Spanish language flashcards, and a bunch of different ways to use them, like games and quizzes).
To install the main program, copy studyme.jar to your MIDlets folder on your phone (using Activesync->Explore->My MIDlets). Download the flashcards (a filename ending in .jad) you want to study from http://www.studystack.com/Spanish. Select one from the list, go to the webpage containing it, click the icon "Apps" and go to that page. Click the StudyMe link which takes you down that same page to the StudyME description. In that section there is a button labeled "Get.JAD file" which will download that stack.
It will always be labeled "StudyME.jad", so save it with a name that describes the content, like "House words.jad", then put it in the same directory as studyme.jar. Open the .jad file in Notepad and change the line "MIDlet-Jar-URL: http://www.studystack.com/java-studysta/StudyME.jar" to read "MIDlet-Jar-URL: StudyME.jar". It should stop looking for a webpage when you do this, and use the copy in the MIDlets directory instead.
Things to know before you go further:
When you start the app for the first time, it will try to connect to the studystack webpage with the internet connection you have. Since we don’t pay for an internet connection this is not recommended. You will have one opportunity to tell it not to do this, so do it when it asks. You will have to tell it that you like this setting (referred to as "Keep the Application data and security settings?"" or something) next time the app is started.
Using the app itself is real straightforward. Follow the directions and you should be just fine.
Single-page News Feeder March 14, 2011
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Google Reader aggregates RSS feeds and Yahoo makes one too (the example is for 3D printing, which I Care About), but you can roll your own at Yahoo Pipes Aggregator (that link goes to the quick video tutorial) or at http://www.planetplanet.org/, which does about the same thing, but for RDF, RSS and Atom feeds, and there’s support for templating of any other kind of file formatting you can think of (if you are a programmer 
–but I digress).
Horse Badorties Goes Out March 14, 2011
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Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. –Ernest Hemingway, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," 1936
We decided to spend a few minutes analyzing our motives–something we often do when there’s nothing good on television. –Calvin Trillin, "A Day at the Spaces," 1977
But wait! there’s more at Esquire’s 70 Greatest Sentences, which I stumbled upon looking for that immortal epic “Horse Badorties Goes Out”, by William Kotzwinkle. He penned the immortal lines
“I am all alone in my pad, man, my piled-up-to-the-ceiling-with-junk pad. Piled with sheet music, piled with. garbage bags bursting with rubbish, piled with unnameable flecks of putrified wretchedness in grease. My pad, my own little Lower East Side Horse Badorties pad.
I just woke up, man. Horse Badorties just woke up and is crawling around in the sea of abominated filth, man, which he calls home. Walking through the rooms of my pad. man, from which. I shall select my wardrobe for the day. Here, stuffed in a trash basket, is a pair of incredibly wrinkled-up muck-pants. And here, man, beneath a pile of wet newspapers is a shirt, man, with one sleeve. All I need now, man, is a tie, and here is a perfectly good rubber Japanese toy snake, man, which I can easily form into an acceptable knot.
SPAGHETTI! MAN! Now I remember. That is why I have arisen from my cesspool bed, man, because of the growlings of my stomach. It is time for breakfast, man. But first I rnust make a telephone call to Alaska,
Must find telephone. Important deal in the making. Looking around for telephone, man. And here is án electric extension cord, man, which will serve perfectly as a belt to hold up my falling-down Horse Badorties pants, simply by running the cord through the belt loops and plugging it together.”
That, and so much more. Go read it. Remember, it was funny as hell when I read it in 1973—but then again, I was sixteen.
Text “redcross” to 90999 to Donate $10 March 13, 2011
Posted by stuffilikenet in Uncategorizable.add a comment
It’s necessary right now. It’s the cost of a few lattes.
