Drinking whiskey clear!
“Who is that that says it’s your conscience?” he cried, looking around with a constricted face as if he could smell the particular person who thought that. “Your conscience is a trick,” he said, “it don’t exist though you may think it does, and if you think it does, you had best get it out in the open and hunt it down and kill it, because it’s no more than your face in the mirror is or your shadow behind you.”
– Flannery O’Connor
Wise Blood
Researchers at Georgia Tech have come up with a way to pull electrical power out of thin air… sort of.
Basically, they’ve taken an ink solution containing silver nanoparticles and printed a grid onto paper or plastic (pic above). The grid pulls electromagnetic energy out of the ambient environment, providing around one milliwatt to a battery or capacitor… which is not a lot. However, the researchers hope to increase this to 50 milliwatts using advanced capacitors, and you can also use several such grids wired together to increase the yield.
The technology, which would be insanely cheap if scaled to production levels, has many possible uses, such as environmental sensors (to power seismographs in remote locations, for instance), or as part of a distress sensor (in life rafts or industrial applications, for instance), or to power RFID tags in commerce, or to power inexpensive (easily hideable and movable) bomb sniffers at airports, or even to power stress sensors underneath bridges, where solar power is not an option.
Read more about it here. Go Jackets!
Dear God!
If you’re not watching Community on NBC, this is what you’re missing!
Yes, this is a week late, but uh… better late than never and all that.
Happy “first” birthday, Neptune!
Our solar system’s last “real” planet (I’m still torn about Pluto) was discovered on September 23, 1846. Neptune is far too dim to be observed with the naked eye, so it wasn’t until the telescope was invented that it could even be seen. However, although it was observed by astronomer after astronomer, every last one of them thought Neptune to be a star (with “them” including Galileo, Jérôme Lalande and John Herschel). In 1781, British astronomer William Herschel discovered Uranus, and by 1846 it was clear that Uranus had some orbital oddities that could only be explained by the presence of another planet. Thus, Neptune is the only planet in our solar system discovered by mathematical means, not observation. Interestingly, Neptune’s massive moon, Triton, was discovered by English astronomer William Lassell just 17 days later.
Neptune is the forth largest planet by diameter and the third most dense in the solar system. It orbits the Sun at an average distance of 30.1 AU (astronomical units, the average distance from the earth to the Sun). It takes Neptune 165 years to circle the Sun, thus, if there were people on Neptune, they’d be celebrating the first year anniversary of when earthlings discovered their home.
Here’s a cool video from the BBC’s 1999 series The Planets about Neptune:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29wfzotaBIg
Even cooler, here’s a sound recording from the Voyager mission. This isn’t what the planet actually sounds like to human ears; it’s what the radio waves coming from Neptune sound like. And it’s really cool:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwnpXll_A_E
I love Neptune! It’s my favorite planet after earth!
I know several folks have found my site thanks to my Mad Men reviews, and I thought I’d give you guys a heads-up about a new show debuting this week that you might like.
It’s a six-part BBC series called The Hour. It’s set in a fictional 1950s British current affairs TV show. According to everything I’ve read, production values (costumes, set design) are supposed to rival Mad Men in authenticity. And, like our favorite show, The Hour is supposed to be a pastiche of actual people and events. For example, one of the characters, Bel Rowley (played by Romola Garai) is based on Grace Wyndham Goldie, the first female executive at the BBC, and a giant name in the history of British TV (although, as it so often happens on TV, Bel will look much more like Joan Holloway or Betty Draper than the real Goldie). And at least one actual event, the Suez Canal Crisis, will be featured on the show. Fans of The Wire will also be pleased that Dominic West will play one of the three main characters of The Hour.
Here’s the trailer for the series:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InILSU-ZV9M
The series is produced by Kudos, the production company that gave us Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, Spooks, The Fixer and Law and Order UK, so I have high hopes for the show. The Daily Mail has a good piece about the series (and about how the character of Bel is based on Goldie) here. Check out Wikipedia’s page on the show here. Check out the official BBC page for the show here.
The show airs on Tuesdays at 21:00 BST (16:00 EDT) on BBC 2. There’s a 99% chance the show will appear on torrent and cyberlocker sites in both XviD and 720p formats shortly after the show airs. If you prefer, you can use this guide to setting up your computer to use a British proxy server and watch the streaming version on iPlayer.
The show will also debut on BBC America on Wednesday, August 17, at 10:00 PM as part of their new Dramaville series. Even better, each episode will be introduced by Luther‘s Idris Elba! I could swear I read somewhere that shows aired under the Dramaville banner will not be edited for time; there will still be commercial breaks, but instead of cutting content to make a 58 minute BBC show fit into a 43 minute US timeslot, the show will run for 75 minutes with breaks added. I can’t verify this at the moment, so perhaps a reader can help.
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“Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.”
– H. L. Mencken
The game is simple: I post a picture of a movie location, you guess which movie it’s from. Hints will appear after the picture; highlight them to read. Using TinEye or Google in ANY WAY is cheating. There are no prizes, other than bragging rights. There are three pictures this week; we’ll start easy and get harder as they go along.
LOCATION #1 – For most guys in the 30-50 age bracket, this film EASILY ranks in their top 5.
HINTS (highlight to view): This scene is one of the most talked about in modern film history. This because of how the scene was shot, not the content. The scene (and its filming) are discussed in several other movies.
LOCATION #2 – Although set in one city, this film was mostly filmed in another. This is one of the few scenes that was actually shot in the story’s city.
HINTS (highlight to view): The film spawned not one, but two soundtrack albums. Combined, these two albums rank at #7 on the “best selling soundtracks of all-time” list. The film is set in the UK.
LOCATION #3 – I hope you can remember who lives here!
HINTS (highlight to view): This building is in Paris; the scene in which the building is used is also set in Paris.
Answers after the jump!
I hate to do this yet again, but here we go:
A cannon is a large gun, used in battles and on ships roughly between the Middle Ages and the American Civil War. Canon is a group of laws, customs and traditions. It comes from the “canon law” of the Catholic Church, but nowadays it usually refers to the accepted facts and mythology of a TV show, movie or video game, such as the “Star Trek canon”.
Dual means consisting of two parts, things or people, as in “she plays the dual roles of CEO and mother”. Duel, on the other hand, was originally a contest between two people using deadly weapons, as in “Alexander Hamilton challenged Aaron Burr to a duel”. These days, “duel” usually has a less lethal meaning, as in “the game was a duel between Peyton Manning and Tom Brady”.
To insure something is to take out a legal financial instrument against loss or damage. You probably insure your car, for example. To ensure something is to make sure that it gets done, as in to “ensure that the insurance check is in the mail”.
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