How much electric power does a Google search take?

"A single Google search takes about as much power as turning on a 60-watt light bulb for 17 seconds, and server farms now use at least 1.5% of the world's electricity."

"One minute of streaming YouTube video consumes 0.0002 kWh of energy, which is about the same amount of energy your body uses in eight seconds."

http://techland.time.com/2011/09/09/6-things-youd-never-guess-about-googles-energy-use/

Truck Scales: How They're Made

I like this show, and this was a particularly interesting episode. A huge truck scale with 50-foot steel beams uses a tiny strain gauge chip (seen at 1:54) smaller than a fingernail to measure the weight. The scale is so accurate that the additional weight of a worker shows as 140 additional pounds above the test weight of 10,000 pounds (seen at 5:24-8)



-Tom.

Coffee-grounds-filled robotic trunk: Jamming Grippers Combine to Form Robotic Elephant Trunk

http://m.spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/jamming-grippers-combine-to-form-robotic-elephant-trunk

A cheap way to get many degrees of freedom of movement with 3 motors - jamming (vacuuming air out of a section full of coffee grounds) a proximal segment makes a distal segment move laterally when the outer string is tensioned.


Not unlike this German invention where inflation, rather than deflation, controls the arm.



https://youtu.be/86G9DLJEagw
"the jamming-based gripper’s good performance with almost any object, including a raw egg or a coin – both of which are notoriously difficult for traditional robotic grippers – are what sets the device apart from other grippers."   https://newatlas.com/universal-robotic-gripper/16729/
-Tom.

Ax vs Ask

In Chaucer's day, it was correct to say 'axe' or 'aks' which has persisted in today's Ebonics vernacular.
http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/138663.page


-Tom.