Shall i know how many DFT require to conduct stout knife test on coating over hot dip galvanized pipe and what is acceptance criteria?
Will Avatar Be This Generation’s Star Wars? | The Intersection
A few days ago I changed my facebook photo to feature Neytiri, a central character from James Cameron’s much anticipated new film Avatar. Displaying an ‘avatar‘ as my avatar seemed funny, but to my surprise, several ‘friends’ emailed puzzled over the switch. And while a simple facebook pic requires no explanation, it’s good reason to bring up the movie, which looks visually
spectacular with an intriguing story to boot. Over at The New Yorker:
James Cameron’s “Avatar” is the most beautiful film I’ve seen in years. Amid the hoopla over the new power of 3-D as a narrative form, and the excitement about the complicated mix of digital animation and live action that made the movie possible, no one should ignore how lovely “Avatar” looks, how luscious yet freewheeling, bounteous yet strange. As Cameron surges through the picture plane, brushing past tree branches, coursing alongside foaming-mouthed creatures, we may be overcome by an uncanny sense of emerging, becoming, transcending—a sustained mood of elation produced by vaulting into space.
I’m very much looking forward to the premiere and extremely curious to see how Cameron and his team imagined this other world called ‘Pandora’ and its Na’vi inhabitants. What can I say… the science geek in me just loves the possibilities! There’s already a community blog and lots of enticing reviews around the interwebs.
While I don’t catch many films this days, you bet I’ll be buying tickets for Avatar in 3D. Who’s with me?
TV Armor Review: Better Than a Broken TV, I Guess [Review]
TV Armor is a clear, acrylic shield for your LCD or plasma set. You know, for if your little Hellspawn thinks that pounding a GI Joe against the television is funny.
The Price
$150 as tested, for a 40-42" screen.
The Verdict
If you had a very nice TV and a very naughty child, I could see the appeal of TV armor.
The hardest part of installation is pulling the plastic film off the TV armor itself. Once that's done, you stick a few felt adhesive pads on the back, then set the armor directly over your television (it hooks from the top).
Even without the straps, I found the shield extremely well-balanced. That is, before I proceeded to bang the crap out of it with my remote. I basically tried to stab my Samsung to death with a blunt DirecTV remote. And I failed (which was a good thing).
While I'm not sure it could withstand a brick coming straight at it, TV Armor didn't flex enough to contact my TV's real glass screen at all during my remote test. However, the armor wasn't left completely unscathed. Some of the remote's plastic left little spots on the screen (and items like keys are sure to scratch the surface). But, I guess if you were investing in the product, you'd want it damaged rather than your TV.
As for glare and general watchability, it roughly doubles reflections coming off the screen. I found the sacrifice adequate, though depending on your precise lighting situation, results may vary. (The glare off a fully open window can get pretty intense at certain angles.)
So it's your call. But if I may be as bold as to suggest, for $130, the money spent on TV Armor could buy a lot of Ritalin and child muzzles. [TV Armor]
Solid construction
Minimal effects on overall image quality
Once it scratches, does that defeat the point or completely justify the device?
Increases glare moderately
Global warming Information is Beautiful | Bad Astronomy
The Information is Beautiful site is really wonderful; David McCandless presents information, well, beautifully, using graphics with accompanying text. It’s a great way to take complicated, contentious issues and simplify them, making them easier to understand.
This time, he’s taken on global warming, creating what to me looks like a well-balanced presentation, fairly representing the arguments. While this probably won’t change anyone’s minds on its own, it is a handy tool to show some of the arguments.
Tip o’ the ice core to my big sister Marci.
New Super-Earth: Hot, Watery, and Nearby | 80beats
And the exoplanet count marches on. A few days ago astronomers announced they had found a handful of new planets around sun-like stars, some only 29 light years away. Now, in a study published today in Nature, a team led by David Charbonneau unveils a new super-Earth that’s hot, watery, and only 2.68 times the size of our own world.
The planet currently bares the name GJ 1214b, and while Charbonneau says it’s probably not habitable (because of the 400-degree Fahrenheit surface temperature), it’s not too far off the mark. Geoffrey W. Marcy, a planet hunter from the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an accompanying article in Nature that the new work provided “the most watertight evidence so far for a planet that is something like our own Earth, outside our solar system” [The New York Times].
Despite the heat, the astronomers say, their new planet most likely holds a lot of water. By determining the new world’s mass and size as it passed in front of its star, the researchers could calculate its density: one-third that of Earth. Because water has a much lower density than rock, astronomers figured that the “most plausible scenario is a planet made mostly of water, with a significant atmosphere,” says Charbonneau. So despite its high temperature, GJ 1214b’s high atmospheric pressure and relatively low density mean liquid water could exist there after all [TIME].
Finding GJ 1214b didn’t take a giant telescope or a space observatory like NASA’s Kepler mission. The team used an array of smaller telescopes on an Arizona mountaintop, and project called MEarth. Relatively dim, relatively close stars were favored because the planet’s dimming effect would be more noticeable than it would be with brighter, bigger, farther-out stars [MSNBC]. One of Charbonneau’s graduate students noticed the blip as the planet passed in front of its star, and it didn’t take long to confirm the find: GJ 1214b orbits its M-dwarf star once every 38 hours.
Related Content:
80beats: Meet the New Neighbors: Earth-Like Worlds Orbiting Nearby Stars
80beats: A Profusion of Planets: Astronomers Spot 32 New Worlds Around Distant Stars
DISCOVER: How Long Until We Find a Second Earth?
DISCOVER: The Inspiring Boom in Super-Earths
DISCOVER: Space Scientist: Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler
Image: David A. Aguilar/CfA
Power Factors and AC Motors
Hello,
Our plant manager has been charged with improving our power factor. It is currently about 73% and we would like it to be 88% since we get nailed with a monthly penalty if we don't. Currently, we cycle our motors so they shut off after 15 minutes if there is no demand. Most of the
BlackBerry Internet Service Outage Kills Email On Virtually Every Carrier Nationwide [BlackBerry]
BlackBerry's BIS email servers have apparently shit the bed, big time: users across the country (and in Canada too!) are reporting that while internet services in general work, email has been out all morning. Berry havers: what say you? [CrackBerry]
I Want to Play Raytheon’s Air Traffic Control Game for the iPhone [IPhone Apps]
Raytheon's love for the iPhone doesn't stop at One Force Tracker—their awesome real time battlefield positioning application. They are also releasing a really cool looking game that would make fans of Flight Control drool.
The Vectoring and Separation advanced learning game is designed to simulate New York City's Islip airspace, giving air traffic controllers an opportunity to test the waters of one of the busiest flight zones in the planet. It was developed as part of their contract with the FAA to develop their Air Traffic Control Optimum Training Solution over the course of ten years, which is why you and I would never get the opportunity to play it.
Energy-Efficient LED Traffic Lights Are Backfiring In a Deadly Way [LEDs]
Oops. It appears that old fashioned, power hungry incandescent lights have one major advantage over LEDs—they get hot enough to melt snow. Unfortunately, cold weather cities are discovering this glaring oversight the hard way.
Obviously, if the lights are not melting snow, motorists are going to have trouble seeing the signals after a storm. So far, this problem has resulted in dozens of accidents and at least one death. Solutions are being tested in several states that range from weather shields to heating elements to water-repellent coatings. In the meantime, city crews must continue to stay on top of the problem and dust off the lights by hand. [Yahoo]
AT&T Has Spent Less on Network Construction Every Quarter Since the iPhone’s Launch [Attfail]
If you like your links hyper, here is that AP story, AT&T's financial sheet [PDF], and the post in which Fake Steve Jobs originally pointed out this disparity. Namaste.
Where Are All You Climate “Skeptics” Coming From? | The Intersection
Discover is a science magazine. DiscoverBlogs is a science blogging site. And as far as I can see, pretty much everybody here accepts the well established scientific consensus on global warming, which is that it is real and human caused.
Whenever I blog about the matter, though, there is always a cascade of denialist/skeptic comments, frequently of enough magnitude to overwhelm the pro-science commenters. That cascade has been particularly pronounced as I’ve blogged more and more about “ClimateGate,” but it has been a smouldering fire for a long time. And as far as I can tell, although we have gotten some anti-climate science links, such as from Morano, they are not sufficient to explain the phenomenon.
So here’s my somewhat befuddled and honestly, generally curious question–and I really don’t have an answer to it–do a lot of regular online readers of Discover doubt the science of global warming? Or, alternatively, are a lot of the “skeptics” that we’re getting here non-regular readers who are coming from elsewhere for some reason?
The Economics of a Free Google Phone [Google]
We've all been a little breathless over the idea of The Google Phone, and that everything could change (some of us, anyway). But, wait, you say, Google can't just give away a phone like that. Well, they could.
Let's just start with the numbers. Google has a gigantic $22 billion pile of cash. Just sitting there. It had profits of $1.64 billion last quarter, on revenues of $5.94 billion. It has a lot of money.
Now let's look at the Nexus One. There aren't any good cost breakdowns of the closest phone to it, the Droid, but iSuppli's teardown pegged the iPhone 3GS at a build cost of about $180 to build about six month ago, so it's not a bad assumption that today, the Nexus One would run around $200, maybe a little more. Selling the Nexus One direct to consumers at cost—in other words, the exact same amount it costs Google to build them—by definition costs Google nothing. Even if Google were to take a massive $100 hit on every phone to sell them at $200 (or less) and wanted to push 5 million of them, it would cost Google $500 million. That's a pretty tiny of chunk of $22 billion. I mean, Sergey Brin spends millions on companies without Eric Schmidt even noticing. Point being, Google, even in the most drastic scenario, doesn't need a phone company to subsidize the Google Phone.
Now, let's look at how Google makes all that money, considering all the crap they give away for free, like email, finding stuff for you, browsers, turn-by-turn navigation and, lately, operating systems. Advertising. $5.75 billion of its revenues—97 percent—came from advertising. Whenever you go on the internet, essentially, Google makes money. It's why they give away all that stuff, because, they want you online a lot.
So, that doesn't quite explain why Google would want people to have a Nexus one that badly. Until you look at stuff like Morgan Stanley's 424-page tome, 'The Mobile Internet Report,' which says things. Things like mobile internet will be "at least 2x size of Desktop Internet" and that smartphones will beat out notebook and netbook shipments next year. And remember that by purchasing AdMob, Google became the biggest mobile advertiser on the planet (that's with just 24 percent marketshare, meaning they have plenty of room to grow and conquer). It works out even better for Google if you're using an Android phone, because it's completely tethered to Google services, driving you to the internet that much more. (Both on your Android phone and your big computer.) Bottom line: More people using smartphones, especially theirs, going on the internet, makes Google money not just immediately, but long term, since you're not going to go back to a dumbphone.
And that's not even considering some of the more offbeat rumors or speculation, that'll it be subsidized by ads built into the phone, or go full-blown VoIP (Google just bought a VoIP company called Gizmo5) instead of voice plan, on top of using a weird online rebate through Google.
We're just saying, it's totally reasonable Google can sell the Nexus One for cheap, without help from the carriers, and it's not so crazy even, for Google to give it away, just like turn-by-turn navigation. That's what might be worth getting a little breathless about.
Dell Pranked After Announcing Layoffs, Now Selling Computers for $10 [Broken]
Dell announced plans to fire 16% of its workforce, or 700 people, by June 2010. And right around the same time, Dell mysteriously started offering deals like a 3.2GHz dual-core Xeon PC for $10.99. Coincidence?
Of course, if cheap PCs aren't your thing, no problem. Dell's still got you covered. Maybe you'll be interested in a $4,000 Laser USB Mouse. It promises Windows 7 compatibility. And a power adapter will set you back just $709.99.
Correlation isn't causation, but it seems, well, possible that at least one disgruntled employee decided to tweak a few prices here and there to cause havoc. Now whether or not it's your duty, in interest of helping a fellow man down on his luck, to scour Dell for unnoticed deals and place futile orders quickly...that's your call. [SlickDeals and DailyTech via CrunchGear]
Man Puts Rocket Launchers On His Motorcycle
From Neatorama:
YouTube user jairust mounted bottle rockets on his motorcycle. He writes: Before you comment on safety remember that they are made of cardboard and balsa wood. You can buy them at walmart, they don't have explosives in them, any sharp tips, no metal, and nothing t
Iraqi Militants Hack $4.5m Predator Drones With Windows Shareware [War]
Today, in terrifying things about the world: Iraqi militants have been able to intercept video feeds from the Predator surveillance drones with a simple Windows app. To rephrase, an iconic symbol of our military superiority can be foiled for $26.
The software, as far as I can tell, is a simple data-leeching utility. With a satellite dish and a few parameters (Packet IDs and transponder codes, which you can evidently scan for) you can tap into downstream data feeds, and essentially recording whatever data is transmitted to (specific) other users on a satellite network. How the insurgents got the proper parameters for predator drone, I have no idea—but apparently it's not that hard. Says a senior defense official:
There did appear to be a vulnerability. There's been no harm done to troops or missions compromised as a result of it, but there's an issue that we can take care of and we're doing so.
If twelve-year-olds can encrypt their torrent downloads, I think it's a reasonably fair expectation for the US military to be able to encrypt mission-critical data transmissions, the insecurity of which could kill people. (Or, alternatively, the security of which ensures that that we can kill people. Someone's got to die, right? Right? Right.)
Also worrying: reports that the new Battleship iPhone app has, due to a small programming error, destroyed most of the Navy's pacific fleet.
At the time of posting, SkyGrabber's website is down. [WSJ]
Way More D&D on the Microsoft Surface [Surface]
The last clip was a tease. But here we see lots more sample footage as some brave Carnegie Mellon students make D&D play on the Microsoft Surface. Don't you dare pretend you're too cool for this. [Surface Blog via Kotaku]
Nerd Bling: 13 Gift Ideas for the Geek Who Has Everything | Discoblog
Picture 1 of 13
Bling doesn't have to be all about the jewel-encrusted dollar signs. The flashy pieces of jewelry in this slide show don't advertise how many ounces of gold you can afford, but instead proclaim that you've got a fine appreciation for geek chic.
If you're still looking for a holiday present for that nerdy someone in your life, browse through the offerings here. For example, take these microscope (not to say microscopic) earrings—they're perfect for a night off from the lab, when it's time to toss away the lab coat and safety goggles.
Gravity Satellites Show a Huge Groundwater Loss in California
From Discover Magazine | rsslist:
Groundwater levels around the country have been sinking as wells for drinking water and irrigation pull water out of aquifers faster than they can naturally recharge. Now, using gravity-measuring satellites, NASA and California researchers have doc
160-Year-Old Soup Can Shows Arctic Explorers Were Slurping Lead
From Discover Magazine | rsslist:
It's amazing what artifacts you can find buried in the ice. (No I'm not talking about that leftover turkey that's been in your freezer since last Thanksgiving. Though if you consider that an historical find, more power to you.) Last month Discob
Continental Finally Bringing Wi-Fi to 21 Planes Next Spring [WiFi]
They're a little late to the party, but Continental will soon be offering wireless internet on some flights. Starting in Q2 2010, 21 of their Boeing 757-300s will be outfitted with Gogo, the same service used by American, United, Delta, and AirTran. The planes travel mostly domestic routes, and a Wi-Fi connection will start at $4.95. Better late than never, guys! [SlashGear]
