Gadgetopia

Global Astroid Protection Society: These guys get my vote for most awesome domain name ever.

The Global Asteroid Protection Society is a group of individuals and corporations who wish to protect their assets from possible asteroid impacts.

[…] We strive to use modern and advance technologies to keep our properties safe because we believe that after investing much capital into our properties we must protect those properties to the best of our ability, no matter what is thrown at them.

Browse the Artifacts of Geek History in Jay Walker’s Library: Jay Walker is living the dream. My entire home is 2,800 sq. ft., and he has a 3,600 sq. ft. library inside his.

Walker’s house was constructed specifically to accommodate his massive library. To create the space, which was constructed in 2002, Walker and architect Mark Finlay first built a 7-foot-long model. Then they used miniature cameras to help visualize what it would be like to move around inside.

My dream room. Hands down.

The last house standing: To all those people rebuilding after Ike, please take a cue from these people.

Pam and Warren Adams rebuilt their home in February 2006 after Hurricane Rita destroyed it the previous year. Hudspeth said that the couple hired a contractor to build a home that could withstand a Category 5 hurricane. Warren Adams watched over every step of the construction to make sure it was done correctly.

Or build a concrete dome house. We blogged about that years ago, and it’s still going strong.

Last night, Sioux Falls, SD, experienced a rather weird and rare weather phenomenon. It’s called a Convective Heat Burst.

My wife and I woke up at about 4 a.m. this morning to the sound of high winds and tree branches hitting the roof. I looked out the back window & saw that a large branch had fallen, so I went out to check to see if there was any damage. Stepping out the back door was like walking into a sauna — hot!

Thankfully, there wasn’t any damage to our house — the large branch had fallen between our house and the neighbor’s garage — but there were small branches everywhere. The wind died down shortly afterward, and I could feel the temperature dropping while I was out there. It was strange; really strange.

Today I went digging around on the Internet to see what I could find out; the local news station had a blurb on their website about it, and Wikipedia has a page on it (even updated with last night’s event; how about that!)

Meteorologists don’t know exactly what causes a heat burst; they theorize that rain hits a pocket of dry air at about 10-20,000 feet and quickly evaporates. The evaporating moisture causes the air to become more dense than the surrounding air, which causes it to descend rapidly, compressing that air mass, and the compression causes the temperature of the air mass to rise. When that mass of air hits the ground, you get high winds and hot, dry air.

How hot? Last night, the air temperature went from 72°F to 101°F in a matter of minutes, then back down just as quickly. According to the Wikipedia entry, a heat burst occurred in Brazil in 1949 causing the temp to jump from 100°F to 158°F in two minutes!

I had never even heard of a heat burst before, much less experienced one, so in a way I’m glad for the large branch laying in my yard; if it weren’t for that I wouldn’t have been outside at 4a.m. to experience the heat; if it weren’t for that I wouldn’t have been curious enough to go looking for the reason behind that and the wind accompanying it.

Awake patient reads aloud during brain surgery: An amazing account of brain surgery done like the patient is awake and reading a book. The doctors do this to “map” regions on the brain. They stimulate areas one-by-one with an electric probe, and if the patient’s reading falters, that tells them something.

The mapping alone took a couple of hours. Based on the information entered into a computer during mapping, the “hot spots” or risky areas, were displayed on a monitor. Once mapping was complete, Cohen took a paper list of groups of letters that represented basic brain functions, such as expression and movement.

With a pair of scissors, a nurse cut out the letters that corresponded to Mather-Licht’s “hot spots.” Cohen then placed the lettered pieces of paper directly on Mather-Licht’s brain, distinctly identifying the areas of risk. Once those were marked, he opened the brain’s outer membrane and, layer by layer, removed the tumor. Mather-Licht felt no pain — the brain itself has no pain receptors.

What happens when you crap in outer space?: This is a two-minute video by a guy from the Canadian Space Agency discussing how you go to the bathroom in outer space. It ends with an explanation of what shooing stars might be that’s worth knowing

Up and Then Down: This is a fascinating article about all aspects of elevators. It’s set amid the story of a guy who got stuck in an elevator for 41 hours, but it touches on things like elevator phobias, the social aspects of elevators, and — more interestingly — the logistical aspects of how elevators work.

Elevator logistics, it turns out, have some serious theoretical issues to resolve.

There are two basic elevatoring metrics. One is handling capacity: your aim is to carry a certain percentage of the building’s population in five minutes. Thirteen per cent is a good target. The other is the interval, or frequency of service: the average round-trip time of one elevator, divided by the number of elevators. In an American office building, you want the interval to be below thirty seconds, and the average waiting time to be about sixty per cent of that. Any longer, and people get upset.

Having elevators work well is not a trivial thing:

The Bronx family-court system, for example, was in a shambles last year because the elevators at its courthouse kept breaking down. (The stairs are closed, owing to security concerns.) This led to hour-long waits, which led to missed court dates, needless arrest warrants, and life-altering family strife.

Even more interesting is the psychology of how humans place themselves in elevators:

Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die.

This makes me remember a really funny SNL skit with David Schwimmer that I thought was subtly brilliant (pictured at top).

Schwimmer was in an elevator, and people kept coming in and standing…oddly. For instance, he stood in the middle when he was by himself, then dutifully moved to the corner when other people got in. But those people didn’t stand in the opposite corner as expected — they stood right next to him in his corner. In another instance, the only other passenger turned around and faced the back of the car. Schwimmer hesitated for a moment, then did the same.

It was fascinating in that it revealed some of the ingrained psychological and social frameworks we deal with daily and don’t even realize. I can’t find a video of it, but here’s a transcript of the skit, which includes the picture from this post.

New in mortuary science: Dissolving bodies with lye: Don’t read this before lunch.

Since they first walked the planet, humans have either buried or burned their dead. Now a new option is generating interest — dissolving bodies in lye and flushing the brownish, syrupy residue down the drain.

[…] The coffee-colored liquid has the consistency of motor oil and a strong ammonia smell. But proponents say it is sterile and can, in most cases, be safely poured down the drain, provided the operation has the necessary permits.

I think it would be weird to not exist like that. With burial, you have a body. With cremation you have ashes. With this, you have…nothing. You get turned into liquid then spread throughout the sewer system.

It was like you never existed. There is no physical record of you left.

Dubai Architecture-: We’ve talked before about the insanity that is Dubai. This is a simple page of captioned images of the things currently going in and planned for Dubai. It’s astonishing.

I’m waiting for a bubble to burst over there. You can’t sustain this level of development forever.

Turning physics on its ear: Could this be a perpetual motion machine, finally?

[…] they have demonstrated the Perepiteia to a number of labs and universities across North America, including the University of Virginia, Michigan State University, the University of Toronto and Queens University.

“It’s generally always the same reaction,” says Heins. “There’s a bit of a scramble on the part of the observer to put what they’re seeing into some sort of context with what they know. They can’t explain it. They don’t know what it is.”

This happens every now and again — someone swears they’ve created perpetual motion. Eighteen months ago, it was a company from Ireland..

We’ve discussed perpetual motion before and, strangely, how it relates to religion.

Wind power growth gusts strongly in USA in 2007: We drove from Sioux Falls, South Dakota to Cedar Rapids, Iowa a couple weeks ago, and the landscape was just littered with windmills — there were hundreds of them.

U.S. wind power grew 45% in 2007, the sharpest rise since the 1980s, […] The industry installed 5,244 megawatts in 2007, accounting for 30% of all new electricity-generating capacity, […]

I’ve always found windmills to be visually relaxing. Those big blades, turning slowly in the wind. I just love looking at them.

Snorting a Brain Chemical Could Replace Sleep: I will volunteer for this test. I hate sleep. There has to be a loophole.

A nasal spray containing a naturally occurring brain hormone called orexin A reversed the effects of sleep deprivation in monkeys, allowing them to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests.

[…] Both Twery and Siegel noted that it is unclear whether or not treating the brain chemistry behind sleepiness would alleviate the other problems associated with sleep deprivation.

I hate having to sleep so much that I asked my coworkers once if “just a little bit of meth would be so bad.” I was only half-kidding.

Boston’s $14.8B Big Dig finally complete: I can’t believe it’s finally coming to an end. All that’s left now are the lawsuits.

Officially, Dec. 31 marks the end of the joint venture that teamed megaproject contractor Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff with the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority to build the dizzying array of underground highways, bridges, ramps and a new tunnel under Boston Harbor — all while the city remained open for business.

The project was so complex it’s been likened to performing open heart surgery on a patient while the patient is wide awake.

I’ve driven the Big Dig. It makes you feel like a prairie dog — you run in underground tunnels, just popping up above ground long enough to get your bearings, then you’re back down again.

There’s a nice sidebar in the article that shows all the construction techniques that were invented to make the Big Dig work. One of my favorites:

Tunnel Jacking: Part of the project called for a tunnel extension under an active Amtrak railroad. Project managers realized the soil was so unstable that the rail lines could collapse. Engineers built a gigantic concrete box open on both ends, froze the soil using hundreds of rods and nudged or jacked the box under the railroad a few feet at a time.

The Mechanical Battery: This is a really great article on flywheels, which are the sleeping giant of energy storage. I’ve heard bits and pieces about them for years now, and it’s fascinating to think that a disc could spin at 100,000 rpm for years just waiting to be asked to discharge its energy.

A flywheel-based battery, on the other hand, can reach energy densities 3-4 times higher, at around 100-130 watt-hours per kilogram. Unlike the battery, the flywheel can also store and discharge all that energy rapidly without being damaged, meaning it can charge up to full capacity within minutes instead of hours and deliver up to one hundred times more power than a conventional battery. Ancient Egyptian potter’s whee. lWhat’s more, it’s unaffected by extreme temperatures, boasts an efficiency of 85-95%, and has a lifespan measured in decades rather than years.

‘Natural orifice’ surgery has tongues wagging: Medical science is doing some scary cool things with remote manipulation. This is an article about how doctors are removing gallbadders by running tools down through patients’ mouths, or — in the case of women — up through their, uh, lady parts.

The thought of having the gallbladder extracted through the mouth or, in women, the vagina, is enough to send some patients fleeing. But by eliminating an external incision, proponents say, the approach promises to reduce pain and speed recovery.

[…] [The doctor] snaked a narrow tube called a flexible endoscope down Masterson’s esophagus and into her stomach. Working with tiny tools inserted through the tube, he cut a hole in her stomach, about a quarter-inch wide, to reach her gallbladder.

Can you image the tolerances those tools are built to? How do you keep something that precise working that well at that distance and with that many twists and turns between both ends?

More importantly, didn’t we see something like this with Arnie in “Total Recall” or Keanu in “The Matrix”? Arnie pulled something lodged in his brain out through his nose, so I suppose that’s the next frontier.