Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz, the two men who helped kick off the fun in the first place, are back, claiming a new record for the longest distance traveled in a car powered by Diet Coke and Mentos: 239 feet.
No, that doesn’t seem very far to us, either, though Mark II of their machine is a marked improvement over Mark I. The Mark II vehicle is more aerodynamic and seems to have less mass than its predecessor, which positioned the rider way out in front over a bicycle-like contraption. That said, we think Grobe and Voltz do even better… especially since they used just half the fuel this time ’round.
With an 11″ latex balloon filled with helium, it will carry its own weight of about 10g; with a 14″ balloon, he reports, “it has a payload capacity for a miniature camera.” The thrusters are driven by subminiature R/C servos that have been stripped down to bare motors with dangling circuit boards and potentiometers. A tiny 80 mAh lithium-polymer battery is the heaviest single component at 2.5g.
Of that, planetary scientists are certain, which leaves them puzzling over what could be producing methane gas detected in the thin Martian air. Methane molecules are easily blown apart by ultraviolet light from the Sun, so any methane around must have been released recently.
Could the gas be burbling from something alive? Cows, after all, burp methane on Earth. Other creatures, including a class of micro-organisms that live without oxygen, also produce methane.
Many scientist (and the goofball who wrote the NYT article) are so desperate to make the jump that if there is methane on Mars, then, obviously life must have been there at ‘one time’ as well.
One big problem with this so called hypothesis are planets in our solar system known as the gas giants. Both Neptune and Uranus contain significant amounts of methane in their respective atmospheres. Jupiter and Saturn also have some amounts of methane gas in their atmospheres as well.
Instead of water, as on Earth, Titan’s cycles of precipitation, evaporation and cloud formation involve hydrocarbons such as methane and ethane, which at the extremes of cold on Titan pool as liquids in thousands of lakes around its north and south poles.
Indeed, scientists estimate that Titan holds hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth.
This is a really interesting chart that correlates taste in music to SAT scores:
Virgil Griffith, popularly known for the Wikipedia Scanner that detects where the Wikipedia edits are coming from, maintains another very interesting project that maps musical tastes of college students with their intelligences levels (determined by their SAT score).
The x-axis represent the SAT score while the colored boxes indicate the music genre and the artist / composer.
Of course, SAT scores are not a direct measure of intelligence, but it is a directional indicator.
As John Battelle of Federated Media notes, the urgency of this goal was communicated by CEO Larry Page when he changed the compensation scheme at the search behemoth — in one of his first moves as the new chief executive — to create incentives for staffers to try harder at making Google’s social efforts a success. Battelle says in talks with Googlers over the past while, it has become obvious that Larry Page “is obsessed with Google+,” and that for the Google co-founder, the new social network has become the core of what he wants the company to become: namely, Google as “the operating system of your life.”
This push to integrate all the different Google services (GMail, YouTube, Picassa, Doubleclick, ITA Travel, Zagats and on and on) using Google+ as the common thread connecting these disperse products can lead to some serious privacy issues.
And that brings up another tricky aspect for Google: if my activity through Google+ starts to influence everything that Google does, including search and search-related advertising, how will it keep from stepping over the kinds of privacy boundaries that have caused Facebook so much difficulty? The number of Google Circles that I appear in has already started showing up in search results, and the things that I give a +1 to are affecting my search as well. Tying all that to my real name and my Google+ posts is another step down the road towards a potential personal privacy debacle.
I’m so glad one of Google’s core philosophy’s is “you can make money without doing evil” so this new push to become the operating system of your life shouldn’t be a cause for anyone’s concern. Right?
To adjust the periodicities of (two or more electrical or mechanical devices) so that the periods are equal or integral multiples or fractions of each other.
Demographic contrasts between China and India will become more pronounced in the coming decades, and these differences hold implications for the countries’ relative economic prospects. China’s population is larger than India’s, but India’s population is expected to surpass China’s by 2025. China’s population is older than India’s and beginning to age rapidly, which may constrain economic growth, whereas an increasing percentage of India’s population will consist of working-age people through 2030, giving India an important demographic advantage.
The report expands on this idea:
Reflecting this changing age composition, the two countries will experience different patterns in the percentage of population that is of working age (customarily ages 15–64). In China, this percentage peaked in 2010, at 73 percent, and is beginning to decline; by 2035, it is expected to fall to 60 percent. By contrast, India’s working-age population as a share of the total population is gradually increasing. From its 2010 level of 65 percent, the percentage of people of working age is expected to increase gradually; to crest at about 68 percent around 2030 — the same year that India will surpass China on this statistic; and then to decline slowly.
Demographic Dividend or Drag? What These Differences Imply for Each Country’s Future Economic Prospect
When a growing share of a country’s population reaches working age, conditions may be ripe for that country to reap a “demographic dividend” — that is, to realize income growth and savings because a higher proportion of its population is able to contribute to the economy. From this standpoint, for the next several decades, China’s demographics will not be more favorable for supporting economic growth than they are now. A high ratio of working-age people to dependents contributed significantly to China’s economic growth in the past two decades, but China’s proportion of working-age people is at its peak and will soon begin to decline.
Moreover, China is now entering an era when its rapidly aging population — leading to rising ratios of dependents to workers and rising health costs for the growing cohort of elderly — could constrain economic growth. Savings rates may fall as a larger fraction of the population begins to use savings for retirement, thus reducing the flow of private capital into investments, while the government also diverts more of the budget from public investment to pension and health payments. In addition, the elderly in China (as well as in India) traditionally rely on family members to care for them in old age. If adult children divert more of their time and money toward taking care of their elderly parents rather joining the modern labor force, the forecasted rates of economic growth may not materialize.
In India, by contrast, the demographic window of opportunity is still wide open. India will have an important demographic advantage — an increasing percentage of working-age people — that will produce favorable conditions for a demographic dividend until around 2030, when the ratio of working-age people to dependents is expected to peak.
Washington, D.C. – The U.S. Department of Energy today announced that Philips Lighting North America has won the 60-watt replacement bulb category of the Bright Tomorrow Lighting Prize (L Prize) competition. The Department of Energy’s L Prize challenged the lighting industry to develop high performance, energy-saving replacements for conventional light bulbs that will save American consumers and businesses money.
The DOE press release goes on to discuss the performance of Phillips new LED bulbs’ performance with respect to its lifetime hours, performance at temperature extremes, performance in humidity. One aspect the DOE’s press release does not cover is light quality. This is because the ‘harsh’ and slightly blueish light emitted from LED’s that are great for the piercing daytime running lights used on newer cars create unpleasing lighting in your living room.
The reason LED lighting in a home, or any interior application, is unpleasing is because LED light is monochromatic, meaning an LED only emits a narrow wavelength of light (color). Unlike a traditional incandescent bulb that emits a true white light (made up of the entire visible spectrum of light) a white LED is either a combination of red, green and blue LED’s or a blue LED coated with yellow phosphorus.
Did you know there is no such thing as a white LED chip? “White” LEDs (packaged devices) start with a blue LED chip, also referred to in the LED industry as a blue “pump”. Then a yellow-based phosphor is applied over the blue chip – refer back to Figure 1. This combination of colors makes use of a phenomenon known as metamerism which occurs when our eyes and brain perceive two different but complementary colors as “mixing” to “create” a third complementary color. When the blue light shines through the yellow phosphor it is down-converted into what we see as white light. Blue LED chip + yellow-based phosphor = white light.
This tricking of the eye into seeing white light creating the harshness and blueish tint of the light emitted from white LED’s. White light from incandescent bulbs don’t have this problem. I’ll let Bill Nye explain…
The DOE is handing out a $10 million prize to the electronics giant Phillips Co. for creating a light bulb consumers aren’t asking for and don’t want. And, when consumers do purchase them, they will be unhappy with the light provided.
One final point. If white LED’s can perform in an automotive application (vibration, environmental extremes, voltage fluctuations, humidity, life testing etc.) why is the DOE retesting the LED’s?
The winning Philips product excelled through rigorous short-term and long-term performance testing carried out by independent laboratories and field assessments conducted with utilities and other partners. The product also performed well through a series of stress tests, in which the product was subjected to extreme conditions such as high and low temperatures, humidity, vibration, high and low voltage, and various electrical waveform distortions. The Philips L Prize winning product was also required to have a useful lifetime of more than 25,000 hours, compared with 1,000 to 3,000 hours for the products these highly efficient bulbs are intended to replace.
The call map reveals some interesting connections based on phone calling patterns. Some states merge like Kentucky and Tennessee or North and South Carolina. California splits into a northern and southern region. Illinois drops the southern half of the state and merges with eastern Wisconsin.
Next, looking at a map based on SMS (text messaging) patterns shows several variations to the call map.
click for a larger version
First off, notice how California, based on SMS patterns, is now split into three regions and the Georgia / Alabama alignment based on phone calls has split based on SMS patterns.
With the U.S. manned space program grounded following the last mission of the space shuttle, the Russian Soyuz spacecraft is the only avenue into space for NASA astronauts. And, in an unprecedented arrangement for NASA, U.S. taxpayers will now provide the Russian government with the extra cash it needs to build a new-generation manned vehicle to replace the 40-year-old Soyuz.
Just as in 1993, when the Russian space agency suddenly found itself in the driver’s seat of the stalled U.S.-led space station program by providing crucial elements of the outpost from their own stillborn Mir-2 project, Moscow space officials can again hardly believe their luck. The retirement of the U.S. space shuttle before its replacement is ready means a lucrative deal for Russia to transport all crews to the International Space Station in the next several years.
However, as the Russian space agency’s officials are celebrating this windfall, the leaders of the Russian space industry are far from resting on their laurels—they are pushing ahead with plans for a new spacecraft and launcher.
One more example of the government spending money with nothing to show for it.
