A mechanical writer

A video of a 240-year-old mechanical doll, and automaton, which writes. Amazingly complex, and even to some degree programable. Thanks to Jim.

Journey of the Guitar Solo

SawStop

I saw this in the recent remake of Arthur (which isn't as bad as I feared, pretty good actually).
3,000 people US people per year loose fingers to saws! Ten per day (not ten fingers, ten people. Probably more fingers).
The machine feels the electric change if a body touches the blade and stops. The reaction time is amazing.
I know I wouldn't let my kids play with a table saw which didn't have this feature.     :-)

Projection art and big robot arms

[Thanks to Bert]

I recommend clicking through and catching the big version.

UK phone contract

Is a mobile phone bill still typically $70 in the US?
Here in the UK things are sometimes crazy. A friend of mine got a new phone with a 12-month contract, and get this: it's a Samsung 19300 Galaxy S III. It has HD screen and everything. And she gets free UK calls, unlimited texts, and 100MB of data... all for about $25 a month!
That's just crazy! Why the heck did I spend $700 when I bought a Galaxy Note SIM-free?

High-rez, 5-inch screen. Good camera. Etc. Apart from my slight dislike for Android, this is a beautiful phone.
I love the new phones with 5-inch screens for reading (and web surfing, video, etc). Apple is shooting themselves in the foot by not making one.

Update:
Bruce said:

Mobile bills in the US are still that high or higher.
I got my S3 last April and love it. Its a GSM and I took it to Eastern Europe with me, switched out the SIM and was up and running. 4G was everywhere, so I had good internet the whole time.
I used it as an e-reader and took lots of photos of the grandkids. 
It seemed to do everything I needed and saved me having to carry three other devices, an e-reader, a camera, and a pad/tablet for e-mail. In today's restricted carry on environment, that was a big help. Security ignored phones, but gave laptops and pads close looks.

Just so!
I always want reading material with me. Which means an iPad Mini at least, which means I need to bring a bag, and keep an eye on that continually. A 5.2-inch phone would need that the majority of the time I would not need that.

--
I'm trying to update the software in my G Note 1. But it refuses to do so without a SIM. So I'm trying to put in my SIM card, but it seems that the sim-to-micro-sim adapter is stuck in the slot inside the Note! Durnit.

"Pirate catcher"?

You know who you are... if you have been downloading Game Of Thrones illegally, this is what will come after you! (Well, it can cover 600 miles of land with a good run-up.)

The article calls it "pirate catcher". But I doubt the US gov would use serious money mainly to handle the pirate problem. But I admit it's a stimulating thought. I dislike problem handling with force, but I have have an even worse dislike for pirates. A friend of mine, a young Chinese woman, came to Denmark as a child. At one point, she and her mother was a long time on a refugee boat. They were hit by pirates. After they had stolen all they could, they - get this - the pirates poured gasoline on all the food. Man, that's nice people.

Early birds

I just got my first Christmas catalogues... in September! Arrgh.
I remember when people used to complain when xmas started in November.

How lenses work

This is a commercial Canon video, but it is beautifully made (especially if you click on the youtube logo and select a large size), and it tells a lot of things about how lenses work that few people know. Of course it's not educational in nature, it just flies over the basics.



... BTW, it seems to me that the "ideal lens" would only have one element. But this would require some amazing technology which we surely don't have yet. I wonder when, if ever, we will get that? Perhaps nanotechnology will be involved.

Update:

Ol' Ben said...
But Eolake, I doubt you would want to shoot all your pictures in "ideal" light! Since electromagnetic waves of different frequencies follow slightly different paths through the lens, a single lens will ALWAYS show some chromatic aberration (rainbow rings) ... unless you are using a fully monochromatic filter or lighting setup. Black-and-white film/sensors won't fix the problem, since the image is already messed up by the time it gets to the focal plane. You have to have a series of lenses, each one offsetting the aberrations from the others. 


I didn't say it had to be a glass lens! :-)

Seems some flourites have almost no Chromatic abberation.
We may one day make a synthetic material which is entirely free of any abberation at all.
Or gather the light with a magnetic field, or what do I know?

Or the "lens" is a 9-molecule thick film consisting of translucent nanobots which working together can make a super fast super-zoom weighing next to nothing. Perhaps it can even enhance the light almost noiselessly, so the entrance pupil can be very small.
That ain't gonna happen this week though!

What do we want? A simple camera! When do...

I've talked about this in the past. But the 500-pound gorilla of photo blogging is now also proselytizing for it, so maybe it'll happen. A simple camera.

With a thousand cameras on the market, why isn't there one which does not overwhelm one with more choices than the cockpit of a jet? It's nuts.

Kate Melua - The Closest Thing To Crazy

It's a strange world. As an example, I can't get away from "Lady Gaga", she is friggin' everywhere. But now I suddenly hear of Katie Melua. Apparently she's been at top of the sales charts in UK and Europe in the past decade, and I swear I never heard of her!
OK, sure, I don't listen to radio or watch pop music shows, but like I said, it has not prevented an over-abundance of Gaga to permeate.

Jae Lee's Batman/Superman

If you're an old comics fan who's been waiting for something interesting to happen again, it may be your lucky day.
Granted, I'm not even half way through the first issue of the newly super-evolved Jae Lee's Batman/Superman series, but I've never seen anything like it. And even the writing by Greg Pak (who I didn't know) is so edgy it cuts.
And it's even, as far as I've seen so far, fresh, which is the hardest thing after 70 years of both series, and hundreds of creators.

Modern vision of trailer for Holy Grail

Hehe. I have long thought that trailers for thrillers are tiresome and silly. Every little detail is over-dramatized until the knob falls off.