Clever use of technology
Tuesday, August 29, 2017
Concrete Tent
-looks very useful for disaster relief, provided you can get trucks and water in to the site.
Sunday, August 27, 2017
Saturday, August 26, 2017
Smarter every day
A few interesting episodes of the "Smarter Every Day" series
How we locate where a sound comes from:
How an arrow bends in flight
Challenging someone who learned to talk backwards
Great explanation of the stresses inside glass starts at 3:26 in
Riding the backwards bicycle
Thursday, August 24, 2017
Bruce Cockburn - interviewed about his guitar technique
"The thumb drone or an alternating bass. You sort of have one or the other and Mississippi John Hurt was a great source of direction, I guess would be the way to put it, because of the beautiful and simple way he used to put the melody over the alternating bass. I mean he just played the melody of the song, and that was like no body else I had heard, it wasn't just licks, it was the actual melody. That sort of opened up a whole new thing and because of my interest in Jazz and other types of music that all got added in so when you take that same sort of right hand technique and apply it to a more complex musical approach you end up with something like what I do."
Monday, August 21, 2017
Computer - Morphing Studies looking at facial beauty
Beauty -
Babies prefer to look at faces that are attractive, not just symmetrical
Facial Aesthetics: Babies Prefer Attractiveness to Symmetry
"Infants as young as 4 months showed similarity with adults in the ‘aesthetic perception’ of attractiveness"
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1068/p230823?id=p230823&Evolving Attractive Faces Using Morphing Technology and a Genetic Algorithm: A New Approach to Determining Ideal Facial Aesthetics
Univariate analysis identified nasal width, eyebrow arch height, and lip thickness as being significantly correlated with attractiveness scores.
Also
Johnston VS. Mate choice decisions: the role of facial beauty. Trends Cogn Sci. 2006;10:9–13
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16311066Attractive Faces Are Only Average
we digitized samples of male and female faces, mathematically averaged them, and had adults judge the attractiveness of both the individual faces and the computer-generated composite images. Both male (three samples) and female (three samples) composite faces were judged as more attractive than almost all the individual faces comprising the composites.http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1990.tb00079.x
Beholding beauty: How it's been studied
Tuesday, August 15, 2017
Saturday, August 12, 2017
How To Keep Mice Out Of Your RV
Physical barriers will discourage the mice from entering. What is the best barrier to keep mice out? Hands down, the best barrier is plain old steel wool (The wood stripping steel wool not the pots and pans cleaning wool). Mice will not chew through steel wool. This can be purchased at any hardware store.
The best way to apply the wool is to plug up any holes or areas where the mice enter with the wool and then seal that area off. Then on the outside of your RV, try to see how the mouse entered. If you can find any holes or nooks where they entered, plug it up with the steel wool as well.
Using Smells and Noises
Some of the most common scents to use are Irish Spring Bar Soap, peppermint oil, mothballs, dryer sheets and pine needle oil or spray. These scents can be place strategically around your coach ward off the pests. Keep in mind that scents are just a deterrent and mice are crafty. You need to make sure the scent is fresh, well placed and that you follow up with a physical barrier.
Thursday, August 10, 2017
Feeding frenzy of fish trapped against the shore
Wow, I've never seen footage like this. I've seen IMAX movies of this from underwater, but not from above.
-T
Lightweight Aprons EXPOSED – Views from an Interventional Suite
Interesting: current standards don't check the various wavelengths of radiation, and don't check both narrow beam and wide beam, and don't test for absorption of fluorescence radiation generated within the absorptive material itself.
Sunday, August 6, 2017
Bridge settlement prevention idea
I was intrigued to run across your 2008 study regarding a question I've had for a while.
Road bumps after bridges: in my long cross-country drives, I can't help but notice that every bridge over a creek or road or railway, no matter how small the bridge is, tends to develop a small depression in the road right as the road material transitions from bridge back to highway. With the equivalent of ten-thousand pound rubber hammers hitting them thousands of times a day, and the pliability of asphalt, they become accentuated over time.
Do you think a flexible bladder full of, say, vegetable oil, could be placed where the depression inevitably occurs, and could be pumped back up to bridge level as the depression worsens? It would have to contain an environmentally friendly liquid that didn't freeze, in a bladder that could withstand the high pressure needed to raise the road and wouldn't be damaged by traffic vibrations, burrowing rodents, earthquakes and so on. But the amount that they would need to raise the road might be merely an inch or two if it was caught early before traffic pounded the depression too deep.
Perhaps the answer you'll give me is that the cost would be way more than just filling the depression and re-paving periodically when it gets bad.
Your study found that "geosynthetic reinforced fill" and "flowable fill (controlled low strength material)" were more expensive and didn't help. Bridges needed 5-7 foot-deep "granular foundation" to prevent subsidence.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://wisconsindot.gov/documents2/research/00-13bridgesettlement-b.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwj7gKLS1sPVAhVK2mMKHfGNAK8QFgglMAA&usg=AFQjCNFNEUD5q21AhmPXvfkREw3t2iuCqA
-Tom Elwood
"Cheap and easy door latches with a golf ball"
-I thought you'd like this simple approach. Might be useful somewhere! Here worked out all the details, like cutting out exactly 115 degrees of the PVC pipe.
Saturday, August 5, 2017
Friday, August 4, 2017
Traveling with an instant translator - "ili"
-handheld, one-way translator, doesn't require WiFi or data.
Thursday, August 3, 2017
How Prosciutto is Made
Very cute film about how an Iowa couple came back from Italy and made prosciutto their dream, to the tune of 500,000 pounds of it a year.
Wednesday, August 2, 2017
Good movies 2017
"Gifted" - a sweet story and incredibly young actress, and a story that probes deeper than you'd expect into whether it's right to push a prodigy exclusively into what they do best.
Lion: even though you know how it's going to end, it really draws you in. The child actor in that one was superb also. A glimpse of the different value of life when there are an oppressively large number of poor people that the system can't handle.
"Gold" with Matthew McConaughey. A compelling human tale and a rags-to-riches roller-coaster ride. You can tell they worked on the script for years. Subtle twists and turns and foreshadowing.
"St. Vincent." It has heart, it's a good but predictable moral tale, and a great lineup of actors. Perfect role for Bill Murray.
McKinley Climactic laboratory
"[McKinley] figured it would be more effective and efficient to create weather on demand and test under controlled conditions at one-tenth the cost. In September 1943, the cold test program moved [from Alaska] to the easily accessible...Florida Gulf Coast"
"Most electrical [hardware] is happy when it's cold, not when it's hot."
"It can take...around 12 hours to drop the chamber's mercury to minus 40." - p65 Popular Science July '17
http://www.popsci.com/climate-lab-indoor-weather-testing
http://www.popsci.com/climate-lab-indoor-weather-testing
Tuesday, August 1, 2017
Fix Traffic Forever
Rotaries reduce deaths, metered onramps reduce congestion and accidents, and the "diverging diamond interchange," which reduces the number of points of conflict.
Traffic explained, with cartoons... And why autonomous driving vehicles will solve it:
https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE
How B52's were designed
How does an old airframe like the B-52 (last produced in 1963) overcome metal fatigue ...
Very interesting little article describing, in the latter half, how this mighty plane was designed in a few all-night sessions in a hotel.
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