Gadgetopia

10 impossibilities conquered by science: This article is about a lot of things that science has done, but the last one is something we’ve discussed at least twice before: teleportation.

What’s interesting are the comments. The commentors are a highly educated bunch, and they’re fixated on the teleportation angle, and they returned to the same point we’ve discussed: are you (1) transported whole, or (2) destroyed and recreated?

This is important, because if you’re destroyed and recreated, what happens to your soul? What happens to any non-physical aspects of your…being?

Without an assumption that thoughts are not bult on a physical base, we are still left with the problem of how to transport this no physical entity (someones soul?), something that I am not aware has been tackled by science.

The real question is …. Would you be happy to destroy yourself on the understanding that some new entity will be recreated at some time in the future that thinks it is you, and thinks exactly like you do?

Read the comments — it’s interesting how something straight out of science fiction like teleportation brings up some solidly religious and spiritual questions.

This is from a comment I made on my own post in 2005:

Being a Christian, I believe we have a spirit apart from the body and the physical brain. So I guess there’s a religious aspect. I don’t think you can “create” life, so you can’t just duplicate me in another spot. I may be a correct biological creature, but I would never be Deane.

Meet the Disintegrator: 24 barrels of rubber band minigun madness: Truly, without question, the greatest rubber band gun ever made in the history of the world.

Unlike your dinky little six-shooter, this model boasts a 288-band capacity and 40-round-per-second firing capability, making it one of the most dangerous weapons to remain unbanned by the TSA.

You have to watch the video.

Karla, our creative director, bought a new leather coat.

Yesterday, she pulled a slip of paper out of the pocket — it’s scanned and re-produced above (click here for a larger version). It looked like it was ripped from a notebook, and the letter was hand-written in ballpoint pen.

In short, it looks like more than your average “Inspected by #8” note.

We’re trying to harness the power of the Internets and all its tubes to try and translate the note above. What does it say? We don’t even know what language it’s in and there’s a 50% chance it’s upside down in the image.

What’s Your Meme IQ?: I didn’t go through the whole list (it’s long), but I can say through the first 30 or so, there were only two I hadn’t heard of.

We here at memelabs spend quite a bit of time on the internet and one of our favorite things to do is pass around funny memes that we come across. We thought it would be fun to put a list of some of our favorites.

This lent itself perfectly to a quick pop quiz. So take a look at the list below and see how many you recognize

First jet powered Birdman flight: This guy is one of the pioneers of those “flying suits” — the skydiving outfits with wings and webbing that skydivers use to glide.

Well, one day he smoked some crack and got the idea to strap jet engines to his legs, just to see it he could maintain altitude given sufficient thrust. Turns out, he could.

[…] after attaining normal bird-man flight, Visa requested full power from the engines, which responded smoothly in horizontal acceleration. After checking the altimeter several times, it was apparent that there was no appreciable loss in altitude for this period of time.

Visa next changed his angle of attack by redirected the thrust and changing his body position to attain vertical climb. This caused a loss in horizontal speed, and stalled (the body?). Recovering from the stall was made easy because of the agility of the human body to change flight profile easily. A few more attempts at this exercise yielded the same result.

Here’s the video, though the jet-powered guy takes off (literally) from the camera guy pretty quickly once the jets are turned on. I imagine the U.S. military probably watched this video with some interest.

Next thing you know, someone’s going to strap jet engines to a bike. Oh, wait…

Ever wonder what would happen if you threw a ball out the back of a moving vehicle at the same speed the vehicle was moving? I have — my little brother & I argued about this when we were kids, but Dad would never let us try it. Some Japanese guys had the same question in mind, and went as far as setting up a pretty sophisticated experiment involving a truck and a pitching machine, made a video of it & put it up on YouTube for our edification.

The ball does pretty much what I thought it would — it falls to the pavement. No rips in the space-time continuum, no vacuum vortex sucking the contents of the vehicle out the back, or anything else my brother thought would happen. Just a tad disappointing. I half hoped he was right.

But after seeing that video, what I really want to know now is why the driver was wearing a helmet but the guy riding in the back of the truck wasn’t. Hmmm…

from haha.nu

Japanese Tetris: I have to say these were four of the most entertaining minutes of my life.

The Japanese have taken Tetris to an all new level of awesomeness using real people and cut out silhouettes in moving walls. It makes sense when you see the video.

Yeah, I know. It has very little to do with Tetris.

Interview with “Switcher Girl” Ellen Feiss: Does anyone else remember Ellen Feiss? She made the most memorable of the Apple “switcher” ads about five years ago.

I loved her ad. It was hysterical. Well, she’s in her first year of college now, and she made a movie last year. This is a good interview with her to catch up on what all happened since that ad hit the Internet.

Macenstein: So, that “beep, beep, beep” story was 100% true? How soon after your dad’s PC “ate” your paper did you force him to get you a Mac?

Ellen: The story is true, the 15-page paper was about the history of Chinatowns in America and I wrote it for my 8th grade history class. My parents bought my sister and I the G4 to share the next year.

This part is interesting:

Macenstein: I read that after the Apple ads aired, Apple sort of advised you to not try to capitalize on your celebrity, and sort of fade away. Why do you think that was?

Ellen: A multinational company obviously doesn’t want to be associated with weed. Their instructions made me want to capitalize on it though.

T9onym: This strikes me as insanely dorky.

A T9onym is a word that shows up on mobile phones that have T9 text entry that is equivalent through T9 to other words. T9onyms appear by pressing number keys while in T9 mode. For example, Bus and Cup are T9onyms.

Indirectly via Kottke.

NG BBS - How do you pronounce pwned?: Good conversation about something I’ve often wondered. I’ve never said it outloud (for fear of mispronouncing it), but in my head, it’s “powned,” like “owned” with a “p.”

Sadly, there’s no hard answer, I guess.

There is no uniform way to pronounce “pwn” as it is most often encountered in text. The two most common pronunciations are (p??n) (rhymes with “soon”) which comes from pronouncing the “w” as in Welsh ,and(p?n) (rhymes with “moan”)

Ryhmes with “moaned” is my official declaration. Thank goodness — I can take Cory’s class now.

Instructables has a cool article on using your PC’s screen saver to control the stuff on your desk. That is, once your screen saver flips on, your lamp, radio, and desk heater can all turn off automatically, and turn back on again when you’re back from lunch.

I tend to leave my computer on all the time. It’s a combination of laziness and need. I sit on line quite a bit, and the kids use it as well. I don’t think I’m unique here.

The article gives some good tips (and even code) on how to hook in to the parallel port on your PC. I’d recommend using a USB parallel port out on a powered USB hub (not plugged directly in to your PC) for an extra margin of safety. But only because I don’t like buying new computers.

Via Hackaday.

YEAH, I KNOW IT’S A LITTLE LATE IN THE DAY TO RECOGNIZE IT, BUT TODAY IS INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY. SO HIT THAT CAPS LOCK BUTTON & LEAVE IT THERE FOR THE REST OF WHAT’S LEFT OF THE DAY.

Or not. After all, it’s your keyboard.

What are the chances of a million-dollar ‘Deal’?: A neat statistical/mathematical analysis of the game show “Deal or No Deal.”

$131,477 [is] the average of the 26 briefcases. Statisticians call this the “expected value” — what you could expect to win, assuming the banker always offers a deal equal to the average of the remaining cases.

Payphone Warriors: This sounds like a fun hacker-esque game played on the streets of New York:

The streets of 2030’s New York remain the only venues not under the thumb of the monolithic corporations. The streets are, as was in times even less bleak than these, the domain of gangs. Manhattan’s three major hacker gangs (the Phone Phreaks, the Jack-point Jockeys, and the Alley Amps) have developed black-market technology that enables them to jack into the phone network though the payphone nodes, and redirect the payment deposited into that phone into their own coffers.

Here’s an article about an actual episode of the game. Sounds like fun.

Each time you claimed a phone by calling the prescribed number and registering your claim, a computerized voice would inform you that your claim was recognized, tell you which phones you controlled and then tell you how many points you had. But several players later said they’d wished that it had also told you what place your team was in.

I wonder what software they have behind this.

Sounds like fun. A little Matrix combined with Escape from New York.

Maxim, U.S.A. on MAXIM ONLINE: Maxim Magazine took their cover of Eva Longoria, blew it up to about 100 ft., and laid it on the ground just outside Las Vegas. Then they photographed it from space in a promotion with Google Earth.

If you don’t have Google Earth, there’s a flash animation at the link which zooms into the image from orbit.

(And if you’ve never heard of Maxim, then get out more. Also understand that the link may include many scantily-clad females.)

… or, “Hey, let’s start a flame war!”

Jason Kottke posted a little tidbit that the Linux evangelist in me will simple not leave lie:

If you had a job scheduled to run between 2AM and 3AM Sunday morning on a Windows server, and you observe Daylight Savings Time, it didn’t run. If you had a cron job scheduled on your Linux box, it ran at 3AM.

Now, both of these approaches have pluses and minuses. You could argue that, since 2:30 never happened, a job scheduled for that time shouldn’t run. Also, if you had dependent jobs (DL logs from server at 2:10, kick off stats parser at 2:40), something probably got monkeyed up.

Still, for 95% of all cases, the Linux approach is probably the best in this case. You’re running things at that hour because you don’t want to do them during the daytime, not because you have to run them at an exact time. And, if you’re writing time-dependent cron jobs, you’ve probably already had trouble without the help of Daylight Savings.

So, points for Linux. I just imagine a bunch of Windows sysadmins reading this right now thinking, “Oh man, what runs between two and three?!”

I know what I’ll be doing tonight.

NOVA: The Great Robot Race
The mettle of the world’s most sophisticated thinking machines is tested in a contest that pits artificial intelligence against unpredictable terrain.

Link. And if you miss it tonight, you can see it online tomorrow.

Another point of interest from the NOVA link; Google is providing “major funding for NOVA”. The AdSense & AdWords business must be good.

At least according to benchmarks done by the guys who were able to pull of the trick of getting XP to run on the MacBook Pro. Now ain’t that a kick in the pants!

Of course, the question of why you’d want to run a second-rate OS like XP on a MacBook remains to be answered. But at least we know it can be done, and done well.

via The Register.

While watching Lost tonight, ABC ran a promo ad for a new show called American Inventor

American Inventor is the biggest search for the next great invention with wide consumer appeal… A panel of expert judges will narrow down the initial entries to a group of finalists, who will each be given $50,000 to develop their product, refine it and take it to the next level. This is a show that’s going to make the American dream come true for one person — taking his/her idea, vision and creativity and helping to turn it into a mass produced product that will be in every American home — but in the end it will be up to America to call in and vote on which invention is worthy of the one million dollar prize.

Looks to be kind of an American Idol for geeks. The product in every American home? I kinda doubt that’ll happen. But I plan on tuning in anyway.

I read this great little tidbit at the bottom of a hack-a-day roundup article:

i recently used desitin as a substitute to thermal compound in an “el cheapo” generic aircooling system (mega or omega) when the wax that came with it failed to work.

[…]

It worked, the darn thing didn’t go further down from 69 degrees celsius and it went down to a maximum of 52 when doing heavy work.

Iit works because thermal compound (the white one) is made with zinc oxide… desitin is 40% zinc oxide.

What a brilliant super-geek dad (I assume he’s a Dad - the single folks are still trying to remember where they’re heard of Desitin). I would go so far as to say I’ve been paying the thermal compound guys $5 per tiny tube of what turns out to be plain ol’ baby crack spackle.

This actually explains a lot. I’ve always suspected that my son is somehow overclocked.