“Another Jacques de Vaucanson joint. In 1739 he stole the hearts of children and immature adults alike with the drinking, quacking, and defecating Digesting Duck. The small automata would appear to eat kernels of grain and then the audience was allowed to watch as the kernel travelled through the cross-section of the duck’s abdomen; following it to the end when a green substance would drip out of the duck’s asshole. Awesome. “ http://www.toplessrobot.com/2009/06/the_7_greatest_robots_of_the_early_modern_world.php
“When the NASA Mars Science Laboratory rover lands on Mars in 2012, it will face a unique obstacle: With an Earth weight of nearly a ton (compared to about 400 pounds for previous Mars rovers) and a Mars weight of about 750 pounds, it is too massive for any existing space parachute. So to cushion its fall through the thin Martian atmosphere (which is less than 1 percent as dense as Earth’s), NASA engineers had to come up with something really big. The new parachute opens to a diameter of 52 feet, making it twice the size of any parachute ever flown beyond Earth.” http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4320989.html
“Yuri Baturin is the only cosmonaut authorized to speak with reporters. He has cotton-white hair, tinted glasses and the calm presence of a man who, after two voyages into space, has lost the capacity to worry over details. You ask him about the Russian program and prepare yourself for exuberance.
Instead, Baturin pauses and sighs.
“This is a very difficult and painful question, because it’s not very proper to criticize your own government, especially in a foreign newspaper,” he says. “But our politicians who talk about the space program don’t understand a thing about it. I state today that Russia does not have a real space program.”" Link.
“One day, she was going to pilot one of those ships – leave behind these dingy hallways where kids peddled black pharma and her sister peddled something else to the extros looking for “sensual entertainment.” She imagined how her ship would look, its sleek edges ruddy with the light of nebulae as she brought fresh fruit to the moons and ore back home.” See link and link for more.
Always good to know “how the wind does blow”. This is a map from the nuclear tests, not from potential attacks. But if there was an attack… would you be prepared like the people below? I don’t think most people are. This is some scary shit, hope it never happens.
Since the site’s content has been moving steadily from a higher ratio of images to news stories than what we began with, I ‘ve decided we need an image gallery system to display all of our images for your viewing pleasure. It’s up and running with the NextGEN gallery plugin for Wordpress. I’ll probably be setting up a cronjob to sync newly posted photos to the gallery, since right now the process is manual and I’m too lazy to do that all the time. You can see the image gallery by clicking the “bumpaddled photos!” link at the top of the site page.
Yes, here is an awesome write up of a tour through an active nuclear power plant in Russia. Here are my favorite pics, but see this link for the full article.
“Dell today extended its more exotic cooling options to the XPS 625 and XPS 630. The two now have the option of replacing their fan-based cooling with an Asetek liquid cooling system that reduces the noise of the system while simultaneously increasing the possibilities for overclocking the main processor.” Link.
The Nazis were of course mass murderers, but they also were the most advanced and innovative engineers at the time. Many of their WWII technology came over to the USA – rather, we took their scientists – and enabled us to nuke Japan and then throw down fisticuffs to the Soviets in the Cold War. Thanks Nazi Germany! More pics here.
The world of The Lawnmower Man is finally here! Or at least it will be soon. Progress on using brain-wave activity to control a video game character is advancing quite well.
“Research laboratories around the world have been working on technologies which let people “jack in” to computers directly from their brains, including Cyberkinetics, whose BrainGate system is currently undergoing trials. “We are able to pick up electrical activity on the scalp and take the brain activity into a C# signal-processing engine which analyses those signal in real-time and makes a decision which of the two boxes the player is looking at.”By “tuning” into the boxes on either side of a huge screen in turn, the frog-like virtual character, Mawg, was balanced and walked across a tight-rope.”" More if you click here.
As per usual, whenever apple releases a new bit of hardware you can assume that it will cost more than the competition without adding significant value (unless you are running osx). Well, today is no different as they release the new version of their Xserver 1U rack server. It’s also the only server model they make – their attempt at saying “no one needs anything other than a 1U form factor because we know our shit and our shit smells great”, or something along those lines.
Anyway, here’s the beautiful silver server we would all want, but will never buy. Sorry Apple, Sun Microsystems gets my money when it comes to hardware. Full story if you click here.
Please don’t let it be so! Apparently, people in the know are saying that Google would want Twitter because of their new real-time tweet search engine that was recently released. Seems like a bad reason to spend upwards of $250 million.
“The engine now makes it possible for users to search for keywords and phrases used by people they follow on the site, and the ability to “save” search results. Experts say the search engine poses a threat to Google’s dominance in traditional Web search and is appealing dueto the potential for a real-time search, where a user could get a sense of what is being said about a particular topic instantly. Google’s Web crawlers work very fast, but lag behind real time by at least several minutes.”
I’ve always loved the steampunk movement. I like the melding of 1800s technology with the current computer age. It brings to mind the art direction from the BioShock game. The only problem is tht I suck at designing anything even moderately interesting when it comes to this kind of art. I leave that to the dedicated types – the guys that design the machines in the following images. Dark Roasted Blend has a whole series of these. Even more images can be found here. Well done sirs, well done.
Tons of cool retro-tech pictures from Dark Roasted Blend, we have old Russian nuclear datacenters, dual gramophones, and typist banks. Click here for the full set of pictures.
I don’t know why they would want to do that. I’d prefer that they buy them out and then destroy the codebase, burn the servers, and let everyone cry their microblogging eyes out. Anyway, full non-story right here.
“While the original story asserts with fairly firm authority that a deal is as good as done — “We don’t know the price but can assume it’s well, well north of the $250 million valuation that [Twitter] saw in [its] recent funding,” TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington states — Swisher tells a drastically different tale. In actuality, her report indicates, Google and Twitter have been holding only “product-related discussions” about search-related issues. “It was very preliminary … and that was that,” one of her sources says.”
Cell phones used to be awesome. They used to be rare. They used to be fun to use. Now we have app stores, obnoxious ringers, people that use the internet on their phones when they have company around. Kids sending 15,000 texts per month. I remember when cell phones were actually just phones and you were happy to even have a signal anywhere. Back when 30 minutes of talk time a month was $100.
There were a lot of awesome phones. Check them out here: linky link.
Seriously, don’t think about all of the outages they’ve had in the last year. Why? Because they have just been added to the emergency response network. Why? Because people are just not thinking clearly.
““Twitter is not just about what you had for lunch any more,” said a FEMA spokesperson. “It’s about choking on what you had for lunch and being able to call for help — even when you can no longer speak.”” – click for more.
I’ve always wondered if it was ok to wear a face mask at the office, and now I really know what I want to wear in the cube farm. Once again, awesome inventions from Japan.
I like USB, it’s a great technology for connecting various peripherals and every OS and manufacturer offers it on their computers. We’re even to the point where computers don’t come with PS2, parallel ports, or serial ports anymore. Wow, USB rules. We even have USB-2.0 which supports transfer speeds of 480Mbit/sec. Wow!
“It looks like the world’s first rotary hydrogen vehicle will soon be available for lease, courtesy of Mazda… Premacy Hydrogen RE relies on a hydrogen rotary engine to create the electricity that powers the motor. The system is said to boost the fuel range of the vehicle to around 125 miles, twice the range of the RX-8 Hydrogen RE, and maximum output is 110 kilowatts.”
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