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.

Diet Soft Drinks Linked to Risk of Heart Disease - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/health/research/diet-soft-drinks-linked-to-risk-of-heart-disease.html


-Tom.

Voice algorithms spot Parkinson's | Digg Topnews

http://m.digg.com/newsbar/topnews/voice_algorithms_spot_parkinson_s_1


-Tom.

All-Carbon Solar Cell Harnesses Infrared Light | CleanTechnicaCleanTechnica

http://cleantechnica.com/2012/06/22/all-carbon-solar-cell-harnesses-infrared-light/


-Tom.

Wheat vs corn in a global warming future

"Wheat production generates less than half the fossil-fuel emissions of corn and returns 63 percent more protein."

""The digestibility of unprocessed corn to humans isn't very high," says Jerry Hatfield, a plant physiologist with the USDA. "We have to put it through processing of some sort, whether that happens in a factory or an animal." Set those problems aside, and a deal-breaker remains:modern corn is more sensitive to heat than any other major crop, and attempts to create drought- and heat-resistant corn through genetic modification are still unproven."

"Jones searches for drought-, disease- and flood-tolerant wheat strains that were grown in Washington a century ago (and which fell out of favor because they didn't consistently produce large yields) and breeds them with modern, high-yield varieties. Farmers sow the resulting seeds and, at the end of the season, collect the seeds from the best-performing plants to use for next year's crop. In as little as eight years, this process creates new wheat strains. And in a 2010 test in Washington's Douglas County, one of these new wheat strains outperformed all 59 competitors, including entries from genetic-engineering giants Monsanto and Syngenta"

http://m.popsci.com/science/article/2012-06/adapting-three-top-crops-hotter-planet

Self-cooling soda can

http://westcoastchill.com/


-Tom.

Who's making plug-in electric vehicles - up-to-date list

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_production_plug-in_electric_vehicles

And the timeline for hybrid vehicles:
http://www.hybridcenter.org/hybrid-timeline.html
-Tom.

The 6 Creepiest Lies the Food Industry is Feeding You | Cracked.com

http://www.cracked.com/article_19896_the-6-creepiest-lies-food-industry-feeding-you.html


-Tom.

The Earth Harp

A giant harp with strings dozens of yards long. He barely touches the strings so the sounds must be highly amplified.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ-hukZW8Sk&feature=youtube_gdata_player


-Tom.

Lose yourself in your work.

flow, the notion developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced "me-high chick-sent-me-high"—perhaps the most fun name to say, ever). This Hungarian-American psychologist holds that there is a very satisfying state of mind that occurs when one is totally absorbed by an action. ... One might experience flow while painting a complex landscape or painting the front porch...

Its commonness is why we have so many phrases for this pleasant state of existence: being in the zone, losing ourselves in our work, being on the ball, in the groove.

http://m.popsci.com/science/article/2012-05/guess-whats-cooking-garage?page=1

Doug's reading list of classics

 Some of you have asked me for a list of books that would be appropriate for 7^th and 8^th Grade English Literature students (and for parents who might wish to reacquaint themselves with the classics). The canon is so rich and diverse that this just scratches the surface, but it's a start:

 

Emily Bronte—"Wuthering Heights";   Alexander Pope—"The Odyssey";   Jonathan Swift---"Gulliver's Travels";   Charles Dickens---"Oliver Twist" or "Bleak House";   

Isak Dinesen---"Out of Africa";   Thoreau---"Walden";  

 E.M. Forster---"A Passage To India";  Rudyard Kipling---"Captains Courageous";   

Virginia Woolf---"To the Lighthouse";   Anthony Trollope---"Barchester Towers";  

Willa Cather---"O Pioneers!" or "My Antonia";   

William M. Thackeray---"Vanity Fair";   George Eliot---"Middlemarch";   

George Orwell---"Animal Farm" or "1984";   

Ernest Hemingway---short story collections, "In Our Time" or "Men Without Women", or "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" or "A Moveable Feast" or  "The Sun Also Rises" or "A Farewell To Arms";  

Mark Twain---"Huck Finn";    

Jane Austen---"Pride and Prejudice";  T.H. White---"The Sword in the Stone";   Herman Melville---"Typee";  

 Joseph Conrad---"Heart of Darkness";   Oscar Wilde---"The Importance of Being Earnest" or "The Picture of Dorian Grey";  

John Steinbeck---"The Red Pony" or "Of Mice and Men";   

Walt Whitman---"Leaves of Grass";  Robert L. Stevenson---"The Strange Tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" or "Treasure Island";   

William Shakespeare---"The Sonnets" or "Romeo and Juliet" or "Macbeth" or "Julius Caesar";  

Theodore Dreiser----"An American Tragedy";  

P.G. Wodehouse---"My Man Jeeves";  H.G. Wells---"The Time Machine";  Evelyn Waugh---"A Handful of Dust";  

A selection from the poems of Longfellow, Tennyson, Dickinson, Larkin, Keats, Plath, T.S. Eliot, Hardy, Frost, Burns, Emerson, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Blake. 

Well, that's a beginning.  Happy reading and regards,  Doug 

Ambitious amateurs

"America has always been a place of ambitious amateurs." "They've started to form 'synbio' clubs in the way radio enthusiasts did in the early 1900's, or computer programmers did in the 1970's or robotics amateurs in the '00's."
From an article 'Garage Biology' about a new breed of garage tinkerer that is making scientific advances in their garage.

http://m.popsci.com/science/article/2012-05/guess-whats-cooking-garage

-Tom.