Chad's News

The linked article has some really neat jack-o-lanterns. The Spider-man one is good, but I think the Predator is the best by far.

Link: http://www.scifisquad.com/…

This photographer’s work is being shown at the most exclusive gallery of all: the Moon. Astronaut Charles Moss Duke left a family photo on the Moon during the Apollo 16 mission in 1972.

Link: http://gizmodo.com/…
(via digg)

This year’s Ig Nobel prizes were awarded on October 1st. It was a fairly weak field, but here are some of the better ones (see the linked article for the full list):

• Medicine: Donald L. Unger, of Thousand Oaks, California, USA, for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand — but never cracking the knuckles of his right hand — every day for more than sixty (60) years.
• Veterinary Medicine: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.
• Peace Prize: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.
• Chemistry: Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga, and Victor M. Castaño of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, for creating diamonds from liquid — specifically from tequila.

Link: http://improbable.com/…
(via Neatorama)

Here’s a neat chess set you can make from nuts and bolts. The instructions are in a flickr photo stream.

Link: http://www.flickr.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

The linked article lists 10 different ways to demolish a hard drive. Unfortunately, several of the methods don’t actually destroy the data, but they do incapacitate the drive and necessitate the use of special equipment to read what is left. For those that do wipe the data, item #3 (using a grinder) is probably the simplest, and item #10 (Thermite) is definitely the most satisfying. Also, I’m not sure that any magnet, no matter how powerful, is able to completely wipe a disk. Back in my military days, the only approved method for disposing of classified hard drives was to physically break the platters into pieces.

Link: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/…
(via Slashdot)

Long-time Chad’s News readers will recall this article about the extended quest to create viable colored soap bubbles. The product has finally been released and is known as Zubbles.

Link: http://dsc.discovery.com/…
(via naacal)

Interorbital Systems is selling satellite kits for the low, low price of $8000—this includes launching the satellite into a low-Earth orbit that will be maintained for a few weeks. The kit has quite a bit of pre-configured hardware and software, but you can send pretty much whatever you want as long as it meets the size and weight requirements. I’m thinking this would be a great way to make a marriage proposal.

Link #1: http://spacefellowship.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Link #2: http://interorbital.com/…

Physicist Richard Feynman explains the special design of train wheels that automatically corrects to keep the train on the tracks. It’s a simple and elegant solution.

Link: http://www.mentalfloss.com/…

When I was studying psychology, one of my books gave a classic example of how a shade of gray appears lighter or darker based on the shade of surrounding colors. I had to fold the page over to convince myself that the gray blocks were indeed the same. The linked article is an example of this phenomenon using colors, and it’s pretty unbelievable at first glance. The blue and green spirals are actually the same color. Both cases are examples of the fact that our perceptions (how the brain interprets its inputs) can be radically different from reality.

Note: in the example with the shades of gray, I used an image editor to extract pieces of the two squares, and they are indeed the same exact color, even though one looks black and one looks white. I dragged a piece of the “black” square over to the shadowed area and it changed color before my eyes. Amazing.

Link: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/…

Here’s an interesting concept. You know all the power that radio and TV stations use to broadcast signals over the airwaves—most of which just dissipates away? This prototype Nokia phone uses that energy to recharge its battery. The power isn’t very much and won’t necessarily keep the phone fully charged while being actively used, but it would at least make the battery last longer between “wired” recharges. Expect to see this technology go live sometime in the next 3-5 years.

Link: http://ca.tech.yahoo.com/…
(via digg)

Dealing with infinity is always an interesting proposition. For instance, if you have a line that extends to infinity in either direction, and you cut the line at an arbitrary location, then you have cut the line in half. And what is infinity divided by infinity? If I recall my college math classes correctly, it can be zero, infinity, or a real number, depending upon the relative size of the infinite values. And did you know there are different types of infinity? I never got very far into this, but mathematicians have defined at least two that I know of: countably infinite and uncountably infinite. And they’ve also proven that the set of real numbers between zero and one is uncountable.

The last paragraph is just a lead up to math in the Java programming language. Not only does it have a value that represents infinity, it has one that indicates the value is not a number (NaN), and it also allows for negative zero. (Here I thought the last I’d heard of negative zero was in ones’ complement arithmetic.) It gets weirder. For example, If two variables are equal to NaN, comparing them will return false. And -0.0 is equal to 0.0, except for a few operations where it has unexpected consequences. The linked article has all of the nuances, although it probably won’t mean much to non-programmers.

Thanks to Josh for this topic.

Link: http://www.concentric.net/…

The linked article details 15 design mistakes from the early years of personal computers.

Link: http://technologizer.com/…
(via Slashdot)