Photos of giant offshore wind farms demonstrate a startling investment in wind power:

Wind Power

Also described in this video:

Here’s a look inside:

Even NYC is getting into wind, with Mayor Bloomberg proposing windmills all over the city:

Blowin’ In The Wind: Bloomberg’s Green Energy Plan

Mayor Bloomberg is proposing a “green” plan that has the potential to drastically change the New York City skyline and shores. It’s part of his effort to make New York the most energy efficient city in the nation.

Video on this page describing the plan: Bloomberg taps wind power

For more info see How Wind Power Works

The Best Photos Of The 2008 Olympics Part 1

The Best Photos Of The 2008 Olympics Part 2

The Best Photos Of The 2008 Olympics Part 3

[See previous photos]

NASA is doing its first tests on the parachutes for Orion’s command module, and things didn’t go very well:

What was supposed to happen: the pallet should have come out (it did), and a set of positioning chutes should have deployed to get the mock-up in the right orientation for the test (they did). But then the whole thing comes undone because the deployment was not complete. In an ideal test case, there would have been 8 chutes that deployed in sequence to land softly. But the mock-up is oscillating so much that nothing really works.

According to this page, NASA offers this explanation for what went wrong:

All but one of the 18 parachutes inflated (10 to get the mockup in the proper position; eight on the mockup). The parachutes that extract the mockup from the vehicle inflated and performed correctly. The pyrotechnics that separate the mockup from the pallet it sits on inside the plane successfully fired. However, the programmer chute that gets the mockup facing the correct direction and slows it down to the correct speed did not inflate when it was deployed. The engineering team will be looking into why that is.

[See previous Doesn’t Work]

What was it like landing on the moon? This video has a nice recreation of that event showing all the different things that went wrong:

[See previous question]

This article discusses the Triton 1000 personal submarine:

Triton 1000 Personal Sub

They are small - 1.8 meters high, 3.0 meters long and weighs 3000 Kg. They aren’t cheap however. Neiman Marcus lists the Triton 1000 for $1.44 million:

NM Gem Triton 1000 Submarine

It gets you thinking about other personal subs that might be available. This video shows a number of them:

For more info see: U.S. Submarines

The Eternal Value of Privacy

Or, the rebuttal to “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?”

[See previous MYT]

Fat into muscle - how to turn a beer gut into a six-pack - “The promise of turning a beer gut into a six-pack has been raised from two studies into the link between fat and muscle…”

CEO of Major Bank has ID Cloned and Bank Account ‘Raided’ - “Andy Hornby, who has held his senior position with the bank since Halifax and the Bank of Scotland merged in 2006, is said to have had his accounts frozen after an impostor managed to withdraw over £7,000 ($14,000) in a single day….”

It’s A Magnet! It’s A Semiconductor! Wait … What Is It? - “The semiconductor silicon and the ferromagnet iron are the basis for much of mankind’s technology, used in everything from computers to electric motors…”

How Plastic Foil Could Power the Future - “Swim suits that mimic shark skin are not the only high-tech pool materials to be found at the Beijing Olympics. The National Aquatics Center, or “Water Cube,” is surrounded by a light-weight polymer foil that significantly reduces the energy that goes into construction…”

Engineer becomes successful artist after stroke rewires his brain - “A former engineer who was disabled and living on benefits has turned his life around - after a stroke rewired his brain and turned him into an artist…”

Google’s search secret: It gets rid of you - “And although countless tech pundits will chime in and discuss exactly why Google has been able to run roughshod over its competition, few will point out one basic fact that is too often overlooked: Google search is designed to get rid of you as quickly as possible…”

Science ABC: The Horizon Problem - “The truth is despite the fact that there are some solutions that would partially (or even totally) explain the issue, there is no satisfactory explanation to this Big Bang related topic…”

The Madden Curse - Is it Real or Coincidence? - “The Madden Curse basically goes like this, whoever is on the cover of Madden, that athlete will not have a good year on the football field. Some people really believe that the Madden Curse is real. Although most athletes acknowledge that being on the cover of Madden is an honor, none of them will speak on the legitimacy of the Curse…”

Behind the Scenes: Blindfolded for trip to Gaza rocket factory - ” Revered as freedom fighters by many here, reviled as terrorists in the West, the PRC, just one of the many Gaza based militant groups, has been involved in countless rocket attacks on Israel and the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit two years ago…”

Phelps Frame-By-Frame - The advantage of one extra stroke

It Ain’t That Hard, Folks. Make Better Cars. - “Jay Leno’s highly opinionated take on how to fix Detroit…”

New game enemy takes a solid day to defeat - “The developers of the online role-playing game Final Fantasy XI seemingly borrowed a page from the Emmy-winning South Park episode “Make Love, Not Warcraft” by updating the game with one of the longest - and most physically grueling - video game fights ever…”

[See previous IR]

Sometimes a river will form a “standing wave”, and people have learned to surf on them:

Although this looks similar, this is not a standing wave:

Instead, pumps are shooting jets of water up an incline ramp. In a standing wave, there is no ramp.

So what is a standing wave?

A standing wave can occur when a fluid like water switches from laminar flow to turbulent flow. In laminar flow, the water moves efficiently at high speed. When the laminar flow breaks and goes turbulent, the water slows down and stacks up (the same amount of water moving at a slower speed has to be deeper). You can see especially in the first video how the water flow is smooth and fast in front of the wave. That is laminar flow.

It’s interesting both because its a world record, but also because you can see how its made:

Manufacture The Shortest Sports Car of The World

See also:

[See #40]

15 Images You Won’t Believe Aren’t Photoshopped

#15 is especially impressive. Here are some different views:

[See previous photos]

…and amazing:

Crazy Badminton - For more funny movies, click here

[See previous Funny]

Certain bacterial are able to move around in their environments using a mechanism called a flagellum. The flagellum moves using a flagellum motor. The motor is made of proteins assembled at the cell wall, as is the flagellum. It is powered by chemical reactions. This makes it one of the most amazing biological structures ever. It also makes it a pawn in the debate between creationists and evolutionists.

This video shows you just how amazing the motor is:

Here’s a little bit about the debate:

For more info see: How cells work

USB 3.0 is still a ways off, like 2010. But it will offer a maximum speed of 4.8 Gbit/second, about 10 times faster than USB 2.0. This would also make USB 3.0 faster than SATA at 3.0 Gbit/second.

Everything You Need to Know About USB 3.0, Plus First Spliced Cable Photos

See also:

Revealed: USB 3.0 jacks and sockets

For more info see How USB Works

“A trip in time to the year 2000 and beyond. See the robots, machines and cities of the future, and then travel to the stars.” Here is what the future looked like to the authors of this book in 1979:

The Usborne Book of the Future

Not a lot of this has come to pass yet, so it is still futuristic today.

[See previous BFTP]

How do the diving cameras work at the Olympics? How do they follow the diver so precisely and then go underwater? Here’s the answer:

Now Diving: Sir Isaac Newton

This video shows the camera in action:

[See previous question]

This article delves into something we often take for granted - trust:

How impostors like Clark Rockefeller capture our trust instantly - and why we’re so eager to give it to them

This quote gets at the crux of the problem:

Reconciling trust with selfishness has been a challenge for at least a generation of social scientists. One of the most influential formulations was laid out in a short paper by a Harvard biology graduate student named Robert L. Trivers in 1971. Trivers hypothesized that the sort of advanced cooperation that allowed people to build pyramids, fight in phalanxes, and hold quadrennial elections had emerged out of what he called “reciprocal altruism,” a basic “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” instinct. The evident benefits of cooperation had ensured that a package of human emotions evolved to encourage it. Trust was one of them, but so was guilt, which discouraged us from cheating in collaborative situations, and moral outrage, which galvanized the community to punish anyone who did cheat.

The interesting fact of human existence: “The default is trust until there’s a reason not to.”

The article goes on to explain how con men take advantage of this tendency, as well as other characteristics that create a feeling of trust:
- Certain facial features are more trustworthy than others
- Mimicry helps humans to trust other humans
- We can send “honesty signals” through body motion

This study is particularly revealing:

One of the landmark studies on influence was done in 1965 by the Ohio State psychologist Timothy Brock. In it, shoppers at a paint store were approached by a research assistant who offered them advice on what type of paint to choose. He told half of the shoppers he approached that he had recently bought the same amount of paint that they were looking to buy, he told the other half he had bought a different amount.

By and large, the first group took his advice, and the second did not. Something as trivial as buying the same-sized bucket of paint, Brock argued, can forge a bond with a total stranger.

In other words, it doesn’t take much to earn initial trust.

Complete instructions for creating an illuminated keyboard:

[See previous DIY]

How much trouble will video game designers go to to create realistic faces? The answer is, “a lot!”, as you can see in this video:

And the result of this type of work? Check out the video on this page:

Lifelike animation heralds new era for computer games

Extraordinarily lifelike characters are to begin appearing in films and computer games thanks to a new type of animation technology…

[See previous question]

Doctors and Things That Happen

[See previous Funny]

“Millionaires are purchasing entire ecosystems around the world and turning them into conservation areas. Their goal? To stop environmental catastrophe”:

Save the planet? Buy it

Here is one example:

Buying-up Eden - Chile

[See previous TIM]

A reader writes in with this question - “At our local pool, the lifegaurds go around in the afternoon with these little vials testing the water. What are they testing for?”

Any pool needs to have some kind of sanitizing system to keep the water clean. “Clean” water in this case means that bacteria levels are low to prevent disease and that algae can’t grow. The most common system that people use is chlorine added to the water. So the lifeguard is usually checking three things in the water:

1) The amount of chlorine in the water

2) The pH of the water

3) The alkalinity of the water

If you don’t have enough chlorine, you risk bacteria and algae problems. The chlorine test gives a chlorine reading in parts per million. A reading around 1 ppm is typical.

The pH of the water controls how well the chlorine can do its job. 7.0 is neutral water. With a pool, you try to keep the water around 7.2, which is the same level found naturally in tears. This page provides a nice description of what happens when pH gets out of whack.

The alkalinity measures the amount of bicarbonate buffer in the water. Here’s a good description: Total Alkalinity.

Here’s how to test:

Another good question - what causes the “pool smell”? It’s actually a bad sign when you can smell the water. Here is a good description of the problem:

Chloramines: Understanding “Pool Smell”

Can chlorine cause breathing problems?

Chlorine, Swimming Pools, and Breathing Problems In Swimmers

Here is one first-person account of an experience with homeland security at JFK:

At JFK Airport, Denying Basic Rights Is Just Another Day at the Office

Let’s imagine that there is a legitimate need to detain large numbers of people who are arriving at JFK from foreign countries. The system described in the article is clearly horrible. As a “first impression” of the United States, it is disastrous. How might we design a system that is at least neutral - not evil, and not luxurious, but neutral? What might the system look like?

1) Clearly the system would understand basic human needs. There would be clean and easily accessible restrooms.

2) There would be a way to purchase food and drink, and a way to accommodate people who don’t have cash for those purchases.

3) People would receive a piece of paper, or there would be posters on the wall, that explain how the system works and what is happening.

4) There would be a system that lets you understand your wait time and your progress through the process. This could be as simple as giving each person a number, and then calling numbers in sequential order.

5) Wait times would be minimized. The process would have sufficient resources to handle typical load on a day to day basis. 15 minutes might be considered a reasonable maximum wait time.

6) People who have questions would be able to ask them, and get polite answers.

If an American citizen were traveling to a foreign country and needed to be detained in customs at that country, would we expect any less than this?

Athlon Vs. Atom: Duel Of The Energy Savers : AMD Athlon 64 2000+ At 8 Watts - “With the development of the Atom processor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Atom , Intel introduced a totally new chip design that consumes very little energy. AMD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices had to strike back, and did so by clocking down its Athlon 64 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon_64 , employing the K8 micro architecture, down to the lowest possible frequency of 1 GHz. The Athlon 64 2000+ runs with a core voltage of 0.90 volts and uses just 8 watts. As a result, the CPU easily operates without a fan. If you drop the 8 W Athlon 64 into a motherboard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motherboard based on the 780G chipset, then the system hits power consumption numbers that, in our measurements, are below Intel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Corporation ’s Atom desktop solution….”

Yang Peiyi, You’re Not Ugly; They Are - “It’s a story we all know by now. Yang Peiyi was preparing for what was supposed to be the performance of her little life. Fifteen minutes before she was to sing “Ode to the Nation,” and as four billion tuned in to watch the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympic Games, Yang Peiyi was told she’d been replaced….”

Synthetic Molecules Could Add Spice To Fight Against Cancer - “Seeking to improve on nature, scientists used a spice-based compound as a starting point and developed synthetic molecules that, in lab settings, are able to kill cancer cells and stop the cells from spreading…”

WPI working on roads as solar collectors - “Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute have just done a batch of research that they hope will help turn the world’s roads into cheap collectors of solar power…”

Wireless Heatmap - “I wrote an application to generate a wireless (802.11) heat map based on signal strength. The reason for it was to find the best place/area (for my laptop) to be with the highest signal strength…”

Giant of Internet Radio Nears Its ‘Last Stand’ - “Pandora is one of the nation’s most popular Web radio services, with about 1 million listeners daily. Its Music Genome Project allows customers to create stations tailored to their own tastes. It is one of the 10 most popular applications for Apple’s iPhone and attracts 40,000 new customers a day…”

Talking To ‘Pirates’ - “A few days ago I posted a simple question on my blog. “Why do people pirate my games?”. It was an honest attempt to get real answers to an important question…”

What They Teach you at Harvard Business School: My Two Years Inside the Cauldron of Capitalism by Philip Delves Broughton - “So off he went to Harvard Business School (HBS), where a coveted MBA represents the “union card of the global financial elite”. Harvard MBAs run the World Bank, the American Treasury, General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Procter & Gamble. Even George W Bush is an alumnus. To some indefinable extent, Harvard MBAs run your life…”

10 Futuristic User Interfaces - “we present 10 recent developments in the field of user experience design. Most techniques may seem very futuristic, but some of them are already reality…”

15 Astonishing Real-Life Applications of Nanotechnology: Artificial Intelligence and Beyond - “Rapid advances in the exciting field of nanotechnology are allowing us to shrink everyday objects to previously-unimaginably small dimensions…”

Bad hair days may soon be over, say scientists - “A way to banish split ends, lifeless locks and “bad hair days” could come from an analysis that reveals the secret of silky hair…”

Western Digital working on 20,000 RPM Raptor - “According to several sources close to the hard drive industry, Western Digital is working on a 20,000 RPM Raptor hard drive to combat the increasing pressure from SSD manufacturers…”

Lexus Nuaero Concept is Straight Out of Starship Troopers - “Does one reach for a camera or a can of RAID when the Lexus Nuaero concept pulls into the driveway?”

[See previous IR]

The YAL-1A Airborne Laser provides “boost phase defense”, meaning that it can destroy a missile during it’s boost phase, shortly after launch. It is a giant airborne laser system mounted inside a highly modified 747.

[See #52]

L.I. Developers Plan 35-Story Indoor Ski Mountain

From the article:

Developers on Long Island are moving forward with a plan to build a $2 billion resort featuring a 35-story indoor ski mountain.

Riverhead Resorts officials on Thursday are giving the town of Riverhead a nonrefundable $2 million payment to begin the process of environmental, engineering, energy and other reviews for the project planned at a former Navy site 75 miles east of New York City.

What might an indoor ski resort look like? There have been resorts like this in Dubai and Japan for many years, so we can easily find examples. This is what the run looks like at Ski Dubai:

The Ski Dubai site offers these statistics:

- 22,500m² covered with real snow all year round – (equivalent to 3 football fields)

- Temperature maintained at a comfortable -1º to -2º

- 85 meters high (approximately 25 stories) and 80 meters wide

- 5 different runs of varying difficulty and length, longest run of 400 meters

This page has a nice cross section showing the basics of the structure and the snow-making process

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerates two beams of protons to nearly the speed of light. Each beam contains only protons, but because they are moving so fast these protons contain tremendous energy. One beam might have the equivalent energy of a ton of TNT.

So, when you are done with an experiment, or if something isn’t working quite right, how do you stop the beam? Here’s the answer

CERN to Start Up the Large Hadron Collider. Now Here’s How It Plans to Stop It

[See previous question]

You can learn a programming language without downloading any compilers or setting anything up:

The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Programming on the Web

The best part:

Program right now in your browser: You can edit and run any of the examples directly in your browser. No downloads or software installs, ever.

It’s a nice little tutorial package for the beginner.

[See previous LS]

Airborne is a packet of bubbly vitamins that at one time claimed to cure the common cold. Unfortunately, those claims were so overstated that the company has been sued many times:

Airborne Coughs Up Millions to Settle Suit

No, you cannot cure cold with vitamins. Or at least not these vitamins. Here’s a funny review of the Airborne problem:

[See previous doesn’t work]

How to Make 4 Alternative Fuels at Home: Goodbye, Big Oil!

Here’s a quick introduction to making your own biodiesel:

See also:

- 7 Next-Gen Biofuels to Drive Beyond Gasoline

- Leaves, Twigs, and Bark: Cheap Biofuel Alternatives?

[See previous DIY]

Nothingness of Space Could Illuminate the Theory of Everything - “When the next revolution rocks physics, chances are it will be about nothing—the vacuum, that endless infinite void. In a discipline where the stretching of time and the warping of space are routine working assumptions, the vacuum remains a sort of cosmic koan. And as in the rest of physics, its nature has turned out to be mind-bendingly weird: Empty space is not really empty because nothing contains something, seething with energy and particles that flit into and out of existence…”

Microsoft Enviroment video reveals datacenter server numbers and power consumption? - “It’s probably safe to bet that all of Microsoft’s online operations doesn’t run off a single server in the basement of Gates’ house (on the other hand Apple’s MobileMe might actually be running in Jobs’ basement), so how many servers do Microsoft actually have? Microsoft never says and no one seems to know for sure except the few numbers thrown around including a notable “10,000 new servers a month“, however, a recent promotional video produced by Microsoft’s Environmental Sustainability group may have accidentally spilled the beans…”

The Lotus Omnivore: A Piston Engine That’ll Eat Anything - “Lotus Engineering, in collaboration with Jaguar, is starting up a project they’re calling “Omnivore,” a task which, if successful, could see traditional internal combustion engines go the way of the dodo. Lotus is planning to meld the two-cycle engine with new technologies — direct injection and a variable compression ratio — to create an engine able to run on almost any fuel…”

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/08/hyperion-uranium-hydride-nuclear.html - “The Hyperion Power Module (HPM) was conceived at Los Alamos National Laboratory and licensed to New Mexico-based Hyperion for commercialization under the laboratory’s technology transfer program. Inherently safe and proliferation-resistant, the HPM utilizes the energy of low-enriched uranium fuel in a technology unlike any other currently in use or in development…”

Police Turn to Secret Weapon: GPS Device - “Police said they soon caught Foltz dragging a woman into a wooded area in Falls Church. After his arrest on Feb. 6, the string of assaults suddenly stopped. The break in the case relied largely on a crime-fighting tool they would rather not discuss…”

Behind the Scenes: Fast and the Furious - ” Craig Lieberman joins Matt Farah on Garage419 to discuss what happens behind the scenes while shooting Fast and the Furious. Craig goes into the technical details of how the cars performed their stunts in the movie and what we should expect from the 2009 release of Fast and the Furious 4…”

reCAPTCHA: Awesome Use of Wasted Time That Works - “CAPTCHAs, those hard to read images web sites sometimes ask you to enter before submitting form data, can be an effective way to combat spam, but they’re also tremendous time sinks. Each day on the web people are confronted with a whopping 200 million CAPTCHA images, and deciphering them consumes 500,000 hours. The reCAPTCHA system makes brilliant use of that time to put people to work reading scanned text that optical recognition software (OCR) had difficulty in understanding…”

Dutch police, FBI rein in large botnet - “Botnet created by a teenager relied totally on social engineering to spread and at one time had as many as 150,000 machines worldwide…”

DNC Warehouse “Concentration Camp” Uncovered By Reporters - “Cells topped with barbed wire to be used to hold protesters rounded up in mass arrests…”

The Brain Unmasked - “New imaging technologies reveal the intricate architecture of the brain, creating a blueprint of its connectivity…”

A ‘Frankenrobot’ with a biological brain - ” Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon’s primitive grey matter was designed at the University of Reading by scientists who unveiled the neuron-powered machine on Wednesday…”

Startup Has E. Coli Pooping Black Gold - “DailyTech previously covered startup LS9 Inc.’s efforts to genetically engineer microbes to produce synthetic fuels. After initial efforts to genetically modify both yeast and bacteria to produce long-chain hydrocarbons, they have since focused their efforts on a particular common bacterium — E. Coli…”

Why We’re Failing in Math and Science - “Last week, Robert Bruce Thompson, author of An Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, wrote a guest blog post on makezine.com, Home Science Under Attack, which told the sad story of how a retired chemist was arrested and his lab confiscated because he was doing experiments…”

Top 10 Most Anticipated Movies of 2009 - “The IMDB.com has 3,496 upcoming films listed for 2009. Taking in to account that about 70% of those will be pushed back, cancelled or buried away and never heard from again. From the remaining 30% I have picked what I believe to be the TOP 10 Most Anticipated Movies of 2009…”

Bill Nye Goes to the Bathroom in “Stuff Happens” Premiere - “Back when we were tooting our own collective Discovery Communications horn about the launch of the first TV channel dedicated to green living, Planet Green, we gave you a brief glimpse of the new series Stuff Happens. Now that the start of the 13-part series is drawing closer, here’s a bit more about what you’ll be seeing…”

Amazing 5,000-year-old skeletons laid on bed of flowers found in Sahara - proving desert was once green and lush - “A tiny woman and two children were laid to rest on a bed of flowers 5,000 years ago in what is now the barren Sahara Desert…”

Intel readies new remote PC access function - “Programs that let people remotely access files on their PCs are already on the market, but those computers must be left turned on to allow access to files. Remote Wake will allow access when people put their PCs in “sleep” mode, thereby conserving energy, the newspaper reported…”

Teleportation? Very Possible. Next Up: Time Travel. - “In science fiction movies like Stargate and Contact, wormholes connect distant points in the universe, allowing people to travel from one spot to another in far less time than the hundreds or millions of years required to make the trip at the speed of light, the greatest conventional velocity. Einstein’s general theory of relativity suggests the possibility of wormholes—literal shortcuts through space-time caused by the curvature of the universe itself. But do wormholes really exist, or are they figments of mathematics?”

[See previous IR]