Most Important Satellites
Whether you realize it or not, you have likely used one or more satellites today. If you checked a weather report, watched CNN, or looked up directions on Yahoo Maps, you used one of the automated satellites orbiting the Earth hundreds of miles above your head.
Modern satellites are used for astronomy, communications, GPS, imaging, research, weather, and of course spy and military applications.
io9 has compiled a list of the most important satellites that make our modern life possible.
Incompetent Movie Robots
Hollywood knows that simply having a robot in a movie can double its potential audience. Movie robots typically possess the human abilities to think, reason, communicate and kill. Most of the time, however, these robots that look so cool on screen are really incompetent losers on the job.
For example, the Terminator movie asks us to believe that computers become sentient, launch a nuclear holocaust, then “demonstrating child-like frustration at having only murdered about 5.8 billion people, send a Terminator back in time to take out the most annoying human before he knows how to fight back.” Then a waitress and eventually her kid manage to outwit the clueless robot three times.
“That alone should be proof of the laughable incompetence of the grossly misnamed Terminator. But it gets worse. As witnessed in T3, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator has a little battery thing in his chest that basically acts like a nuclear device when he needs it to. Why didn’t the original, whilst crawling through the machines that eventually crushed it, just use that to kill Sarah Connor? We may never know.”
View Your Website as a Graph
View your website as a graph, using a special Java applet created by Fernando Luis Lara. The graph morphs in real-time as the applet parses your website. The source code is available.
At left is a graph of Net-Warriors.com. The dots are identified by color:
Blue - links
Red - tables
Green - div tag
Violet - images
Yellow - forms
Orange - line breaks and block quotes
Black - HTML tag
Gray - all other tags
Giant "Telescope" Links New York to London
After more than a century, the vision of Victorian engineer Alexander Stanhope St. George has finally been realized. Massive dirt-covered drill bits emerged from the ground–one by the Thames River near the Tower Bridge in London, and the other on Fulton Ferry Landing by the Brooklyn Bridge in New York–thus completing St. George’s transatlantic tunnel. Workers removed the drills and fitted both tunnel ends with identical Telectroscopes, allowing Londoners and New Yorkers separated by 3500 miles to view each other in real-time.
The Telectroscope is device that’s 37 feet long by 11 feet high and allows people on one side of the Atlantic to look into its person-size lens and see those on the other side via a recently completed tunnel running under the ocean. Think 19th-century Webcam or Victorian-age video phone.
In reality, the trans-Atlantic tunnel is a trans-Atlantic broadband network rounded off on each end with HD cameras. The Telectroscope itself was a fanciful idea that, according to St. George, resulted from a typo by a 19th-century reporter who misspelled Electroscope, a device used to measure electrostatic charges. “The journalist also misunderstood what it was about and wrote in the article that it was a device for the suppression of absence,” St. George said. “The accidental hope captured their imagination, and lots of people at the end of the 19th century thought it was a great idea.”
Microsoft Launches WorldWide Telescope
From the world of competitive astronomical websites (isn’t the Internet grand?) comes this new offering from Microsoft, WorldWide Telescope. Like others before it Microsoft’s new offering allows users to explore planets and other celestial objects. You can also view/track objects from any place on earth and in any point in time. Of course as you might expect from Microsoft there’s more going on than that. There is a lot of imagery from NASA including the Mars rovers, Hubble telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. There are also ‘tours’ set up by expert astronomers or you can even save your own ‘5 year missions’.
Like with Google’s ‘The Sky’ or the open source Stellarium users must first download the free WorldWide Telescope software from Microsoft (windows only).
WorldWide Telescope (via BBC News)
Interactive 360 Degree Panoramas
Interactive Panoramas (or VR Photography) is a relatively new media that creates a panoramic view that immerse the viewer ‘inside’ the image. This is far far more advanced than the kinds of panoramas you can make with your digital camera and stitching software. Using your mouse you can view from side to side or top to bottom and all points in between of some fantastic imagery taking by Interactive Panorama photographers from all over the world and collected and displayed by Hans Nyberg a commercial photographer in Denmark.
There are over 400 stunning interaftive images of every thing from the Oslo Opera House to Death Valley, from the Oscars to Carnival In Rio. A truly stunning collection in a format that’s as close as you can get to being there from your PC.
World’s Longest Domain Name
http://www.thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensomeandthensomemoreandmore.com/
claims to be the world’s longest domain name.
But this nifty site would disagree. It’s home for a list of the world’s longest things: http://thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com/long2.html
The longest legal domain names are 63 characters, not including the domain suffix .co.uk or prefix http:// and www. Of course you can have longer domain names if you add country extensions:
http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochuchaf.org.uk
which has 81 characters, but the actual domain name is still 63 characters. The unique thing about this name is that it is actually one real word, named after a Welsh village.
The longest overall domain address appears to be 263 characters:
http://www.thelongest…butwehadtodoitanyways.html
But apparently domain addresses can be much longer, like this one over 1700 characters:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1…&btnG=Search
On the other hand, check out one of the shortest domains in the world: oo.com
The Museum of Ancient Inventions
As part of their coursework students at the Smith College History of Science have replicated many of the coolest ancient inventions and set up a virtual museum so that you can learn all about them. The museum’s web page seems to have gone stagnant since 2001 but nonetheless there is a lot of good information and quite honestly in the realm of ancient history what’s another 7 years?
Although scientists don’t always agree on the more spectacular such as the ‘Baghdad battery’ nonetheless it’s interesting to see that not everyone was just sitting around waiting for the Industrial Age.
Physicist Says Time Travel Likely
Time travel? Teleportation? No problem, says renowned physicist Michio Kaku, who is creating quite a stir with his new book, The Physics of the Impossible.”
Kaku believes the following inventions may become reality within the next century: teleportation (already possible for subatomic particles); telepathy (with brain implants); invisibility (already prototyped using light-bending materials); laser guns (existing, but currently too power-hungry to be practical in battle); force fields; and the discovery of extraterrestrial life.
How To Build a WiFi Antenna From A Tin Can
We haven’t tried it yet but the Cantenna looks looks like a cool and cheap (under $5) way to extend the range of your WIFi network. And as a bonus you get to show off to your friends that you did it with the same container that your lunch came in. Cool beans!
You might think this is as simple as connecting a wire to a can but apparently there are some frequency vs can things to work out that require some calculation but fear not Greg @ Turningpoint has provided a handy calculator to help you get your can extending your WiFi network in no time.
