Largest model rocket ever launched

Steve Eve  built a replica of the Saturn V rocket and launched it successfully this week. Guinness Book of World Records has recognized it as the largest model rocket ever launched.

for comparison, here is a picture of the actual Saturn V.

Blowing up satellites in orbit is a bad idea

Specially when even orbiting specks of paint can punch a hole in the shuttle. The following image shows the growing space debris in orbit around earth over the last 50 years. From Wired.  [Link]

Space debris is an increasing problem. Johnson noted that from the 1960s until the past year, orbital debris had increased linearly, despite advances in decreasing the amount of debris left behind per trip to space. But recently, a Chinese missile test on a satellite and the collision of two satellites in orbit, sent the amount of space debris up considerably. The satellite collision alone increased the risk to the upcoming May shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope by 8 percent.

That complicated an already unusual mission. The Hubble Space Telescope, orbiting at 340 miles above Earth’s surface, has a far more densely crowded space debris environment than the ISS. The orbits near 560 miles are the most crowded with junk.

We already know small impacts occur regularly during shuttle flights. Wired Science obtained the Hypervelocity Impact Database last month, which revealed that in the 54 missions from STS-50 through STS-114, space junk and meteoroids hit shuttle windows 1,634 times necessitating 92 window replacements. In addition, the shuttle’s radiator was hit 317 times, actually causing holes in the radiator’s face sheet 53 times.

Robot attacks, injures man in Sweden

This is what happens when manufacturers neglect to incorporate the three laws of robotics in their control software :)

A Swedish company has been fined 25,000 kronor ($3,000) after a malfunctioning robot attacked and almost killed one of its workers at a factory north of Stockholm.

Public prosecutor Leif Johansson mulled pressing charges against the firm but eventually opted to settle for a fine.

"I've never heard of a robot attacking somebody like this," he told news agency TT.

The incident took place in June 2007 at a factory in Bålsta, north of Stockholm, when the industrial worker was trying to carry out maintenance on a defective machine generally used to lift heavy rocks. Thinking he had cut off the power supply, the man approached the robot with no sense of trepidation.

But the robot suddenly came to life and grabbed a tight hold of the victim's head. The man succeeded in defending himself but not before suffering serious injuries.

"The man was very lucky. He broke four ribs and came close to losing his life," said Leif Johansson.

Music Piracy circa 1897

If you think piracy is a new trend and it did not exist before internet, think again. This old article from New York Times clearly shows that this despicable practice has been going on for a lot longer. And who would do it other than those pesky Canadians. [Link ( pdf)]

From Google Labs: Similar Images

Google Labs has released a new product called similar images. You start searching  for images using words as usual. As the results for image search are displayed, a new option “Similar Images” shows up under some of the images. As seen below it really works (well, most of the time anyway). [Link]

Nice Biking Action

This video starts slow, but quickly becomes too awesome for words…

Brain-Twitter Interface

Has this gone too far? Anyway, with this typing speed, the crucial event will probably be long in the past before the tweet gets sent :)

Total Recall

Wired has an article about Piotr Wozniak who has been researching for decades how we remember things, and how we forget them over time (logarithmically, as he found out). The software that he has developed provides a reminder schedule for each individual user in order to dramatically increase the “data retention”. Effectively, his software predicts a future state of the user’s memory and reminds him to re-enforce the knowledge at just the right time. [Link]

Piotr Wozniak's quest for anonymity has been successful. Nobody along this string of little beach resorts recognizes him as the inventor of a technique to turn people into geniuses. A portion of this technique, embodied in a software program called SuperMemo, has enthusiastic users around the world. They apply it mainly to learning languages, and it's popular among people for whom fluency is a necessity — students from Poland or other poor countries aiming to score well enough on English-language exams to study abroad. A substantial number of them do not pay for it, and pirated copies are ubiquitous on software bulletin boards in China, where it competes with knockoffs like SugarMemo.

SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It's too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.

Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person's memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains. But for Wozniak, 46, helping people learn a foreign language fast is just the tiniest part of his goal. As we plan the days, weeks, even years of our lives, he would have us rely not merely on our traditional sources of self-knowledge — introspection, intuition, and conscious thought — but also on something new: predictions about ourselves encoded in machines.

Move aside Segway! Legway is here …

Over at instructables, a full guide is now available on how to make your own 1 human power (hp) segway :)  [Link]

A self balancing, human powered, steampunk styled, Segway. All you need is a brave self balancing human. This is the ultimate green vehicle for all you eco conscious steampunkers. Is that an oxymoron? I made this out of mostly found materials. This was my first steampunk styled build. Any good suggestions on making it look better will be incorporated as long as the materials are cheap and easy to find. I have been calling it the Legway in reference to the propulsion method. Yes, I know about those Lego self balancers of the same name.

TED: Bonnie Bassler on how bacteria communicate

Bonnie Bassler describes some results from research that shows active communication between bacteria using chemical means of expression. Very interesting application near the end of the talk. This may lead to anti-bacterial treatments that reduce (or eliminate) the risk of multiple drug resistance evolution in the target bacteria.

In 2002, bearing her microscope on a microbe that lives in the gut of fish, Bonnie Bassler isolated an elusive molecule called AI-2, and uncovered the mechanism behind mysterious behavior called quorum sensing -- or bacterial communication. She showed that bacterial chatter is hardly exceptional or anomolous behavior, as was once thought -- and in fact, most bacteria do it, and most do it all the time.

The discovery shows how cell populations use chemical powwows to stage attacks, evade immune systems and forge slimy defenses called biofilms. For that, she's won a MacArthur "genius" grant -- and is giving new hope to frustrated pharmacos seeking new weapons against drug-resistant superbugs.

Yet another ridiculous patents collection

Talk about  “unrestrained creativity” …

 

Half Wit

Patent awarded: 2005
Patent says: "Most types of protective head gear or helmets cover and protect the entire or majority of the user's head. For many activities that require protection of the head, maximum protection is desirable. However, there are some activities where only some protection is desired."

 

Quick Draw Call

Patent awarded: 2004
Patent says: "No one of the devices actually known allows the possibility of quickly and easily setting the cellular telephone to its use condition and then as well quickly and easily setting it back to rest."

Lots more Here.

15 years of anti-piracy warnings

Guardian has a collection of some really funny anti-piracy ads. Actually, some of the ads are funnier than a lot of paid content :)  [Link]

• The Market, 2006: More hard-hitting scare-mongering from FACT, in an ad that uses a seemingly innocuous market scene to show how piracy funds drugs, guns and people trafficking. Additional warning - buying legitimate DVDs may fund Guy Ritchie's ongoing film-making efforts.

How the Internet Got Its Rules

Stephen D. Crocker wrote the first RFC (Request for comment) 40 years ago for what would later become the internet. In this article at NY times he describes the humble efforts of a few academics to define the rules using which computers could talk to each other over a network. RFC’s are, till today, the format for collecting and reviewing ideas that end up in the standards for internet. Interesting read … [Link]

We thought maybe we’d put together a few temporary, informal memos on network protocols, the rules by which computers exchange information. I offered to organize our early notes.

What was supposed to be a simple chore turned out to be a nerve-racking project. Our intent was only to encourage others to chime in, but I worried we might sound as though we were making official decisions or asserting authority. In my mind, I was inciting the wrath of some prestigious professor at some phantom East Coast establishment. I was actually losing sleep over the whole thing, and when I finally tackled my first memo, which dealt with basic communication between two computers, it was in the wee hours of the morning. I had to work in a bathroom so as not to disturb the friends I was staying with, who were all asleep.

Still fearful of sounding presumptuous, I labeled the note a “Request for Comments.” R.F.C. 1, written 40 years ago today, left many questions unanswered, and soon became obsolete. But the R.F.C.’s themselves took root and flourished. They became the formal method of publishing Internet protocol standards, and today there are more than 5,000, all readily available online.

But we started writing these notes before we had e-mail, or even before the network was really working, so we wrote our visions for the future on paper and sent them around via the postal service. We’d mail each research group one printout and they’d have to photocopy more themselves.

Skimmers: Reader Finds Card Skimmer On Bank ATM

Be warned … [Link]

This past weekend I went to use the local WaMu ATM to get some cash money. When I walked up to the ATM something struck me as funny…I couldn't quite put my finger on it but the card reader didn't look right, like it wasn't completely attached. I grabbed and pulled at the card reader and, lo and behold, it came off! It was actually a card skimmer attached to the ATM over that actual card reader. On the back there is a battery, flash memory card, and a mini USB port – it was set up so that ATM cards would first go through the skimmer and then into the ATM itself so you'd never know the difference. Fortunately I'd seen a news story about this sort of thing a couple of years back and have been paranoid ever since.

Watch out when you go to use an ATM!

EV watch: Segway Car

After the runaway success (heh) of the Segway personal transporter, GM has partnered with Dean Kamen to bring us the Segway car. It has a lithium-ion battery, a range of ~55 km and a top speed of ~55 km/h. I won’t say it is good looking (because the video below will prove me wrong anyway) but it is compact, plus it has two sets of small wheels to cushion your fall if the Amazing Algorithms^TM fail when you hit a speed bump or a pothole. It looks like a prototype, the final version will hopefully be fully enclosed to keep the elements out.

The website contains a lot of info but not much about the price. Given the history of Segway, they are probably just trying to spare us the shock. [Link]

Onlive: Cloud Gaming!?

Onlive, a new service launched recently, claims the ability to render game consoles (and pc games ..) obsolete. How? Server farms in the cloud running doing all the hard work and returning rendered video back to your PC or TV.

Crude definition of Lag/Latency:  It is a measure of how much delay you see between performing an action (mouse click) and seeing the response (innards of your enemy) on the monitor. Depending on who you ask and the type of the game in question (FPS, strategy) the “playable” lag is less than 10ms to less than 100ms.

Three sources of latency can be easily identified in the Onlive service:

1. Video compression: Onlive says that they can perform this in less than 1 ms.
2. Hardware:  To live up to the promises they will need some serious number crunching capabilities in what I can only imagine to be huge server farms with super duper GPUs. However, since it is possible to buy this with money we accept that Onlive can do this.
3. Network latency: Assuming a normal broadband connection, this issue is potentially a deal breaker. There is no ISP that will guarantee that kind of QoS over sustained periods of time.

During the following video of their inaugural press conference/demo, a lot of time has been dedicated to the video compression and hardware problems but not so much on latency (except briefly in answer to a question from audience at 35:25).

So, is Onlive promising something they cannot deliver? If you live in the US, you can sign up for the beta program this summer and find out. Me, I’ll believe it when I see it.