News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
This one’s got me stumped. If any Chad’s News reader knows the answer, please post it in the comments. Here’s the question:
If you choose an answer to this question at random, what is the chance you will be correct?
Thanks to Josh for this topic.
Link: http://i.imgur.com/…
Tomorrow, May 20th, we will have an annular solar eclipse. An annular eclipse is one where the moon isn’t quite big enough to block out the entire sun, so the maximum eclipse has a ring of sun showing around the moon. The tail end of the eclipse will be visible in the Southwestern United States at around 7:30pm Mountain Time. Unfortunately for those of us in Colorado, it appears that we’re going to just miss it. The maximum eclipse is at 5:53pm MDT, when the eclipse shadow will be somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. The linked article has pictures showing where and when the eclipse will be visible—the times are in UTC, which is 6 hours ahead of Mountain Daylight Time.
Thanks to Josh for this topic.
Update: The path shown in the linked article is where the ring eclipse will be visible. A partial eclipse can be seen from a much larger area. So if you know how to safely view an eclipse, you should be able to see the partial eclipse from much of the Western United States.
Update #2: Josh writes: “I was doing some online research and apparently http://events.slooh.com/ is doing some sort of broadcast of the eclipse from various locations along the line of annularity (via Huffington Post)”.
Link: http://www.hermit.org/…
We’ve all seen it in The Matrix, where Neo is able to download fighting skills. Well now researchers have found that this is actually possible, in a limited sense. They were able to transfer a skill by using neurofeedback on an unskilled brain so that the brain activity matched that of the skilled person.
Thanks to O.Roy for this link.
Link #1: http://www.fellowgeek.com/…
Link #2: http://www.popsci.com/…
Mining asteroids has long been a staple of science fiction. Now an effort is underway to make it a reality, by a company named Planetary Resources. Admittedly, the mining will take some years to actually occur, and the first asteroid will be smaller than 50 meters. And the asteroid won’t actually be from the asteroid field that’s between Mars and Jupiter. But still…. What I find interesting is that this is another example of technology solving our sustainability problems—asteroid mining has the potential to bolster the limited resources we have here on the planet Earth.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
Many modern computer monitors have such a high resolution that things like icons and text are getting too small to read without reducing the overall resolution. And what’s the point of having a high-resolution monitor if you can’t use it at its maximum resolution? The situation is further complicated by the fact that today’s LCD monitors have a native resolution at which they look the best, and if you lower the resolution to make things larger, you may degrade the quality of what you see. Microsoft is aware of this issue and has created the DPI Scaling tool to fix it. The tool allows you to tell Windows to increase the size of text and graphical elements. The linked article explains it in more detail and gives instructions on how to use it under Windows 7, but DPI scaling is available as far back as Windows XP (it’s part of the advanced display settings).
