Scribd is like YouTube for books, except that watching videos online is better than reading books online. Don’t get me wrong, I did find a couple of posts to download that I quite liked.
Check out Jason Scott’s rather humorous and very astute first impression of Scribd.
Better than the light traveling through time experiment, is Tom Van Baak’s experiment in which he outfitted his family minivan with high-precision cesium clocks to demonstrate to his kids that they gained 22 nanoseconds of vacation time on their mountain road trip, compared with readings on clocks left back at home. Time travel in action.
As a collector of vintage and modern atomic clocks, I discovered it was possible, using gear found at home, to convert our family minivan into a mobile high-precision time laboratory, complete with batteries, power converters, time interval counters, three children, and three cesium clocks. We drove as high as we could up Mount Rainier, the volcano near Seattle, Washington, and parked there for two days. The trip was continuously logged with the global positioning system; the net altitude gain was +1340 meters.
Given the terrestrial blueshift of 1.1 × 10-16 per meter mentioned by Kleppner and integrating our altitude profile, we predicted the round-trip time dilation to be +22 nanoseconds. This is remarkably close to what we experimentally observed when, after we returned, the ensemble of portable cesium clocks was again compared with atomic clocks left at home.
This is a bit of old news, but it’s interesting.
Back in 2000 Scientists figured out a way to make a pulse of light travel faster than the speed of light. Wait until you hear exactly what they did; it might have been a few years ago but it will still blow your mind.
Scientists from the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, N.J did an experiment which caused a pulse of light, a group of waves with no mass, to come out the other side of a specially prepared chamber before it was even done entering.
From CBC News:
Inside a chamber, they changed the state of a vapour in a way that light travelling through it would travel faster than normal.
When the pulse of light travelled through the vapour, the pulse reconfigured as some component waves stretched and others compressed. As the waves approached the end of the chamber, they recombined, forming the original pulse.
The key to the experiment was that the pulse reformed before it could have gotten there by simply travelling through empty space. This means that, when the waves of the light distorted, the pulse traveled forward in time.
I’m not sure that it means anything in the grand scheme of things because they say they don’t know of any way to turn this phenomena into a way to carry data.
There have been countless times when friends or family have asked me to help them setup their home network. Something that comes in extremely handy is a list of default passwords for a huge selection of routers—hopefully including theirs, without which you might actually have to read an instruction manual.
Jason Scott has written a great article on Wikipedia’s latest controversy.
A popular editor of Wikipedia was hired by the Wikia company and in doing so revealed that he wasn’t a guy with some college degrees but in fact was a 24-year old kid from Kentucky. This made a lot of people unhappy, and in the ensuing discussions, Jimbo Wales and strongly alleganced Wikipedians have tried to downplay it, mostly because that position’s always worked before. It’s not working as well this time.
As an aside, I should mention that Jason’s site, ascii.textfiles.com has become a favorite of mine lately and I enjoy pretty much everything about it.
Update: Jimbo Wales has asked Essjay to step down. Jason Scott has a great follow-up.
Link rot. Here is the post from the Wayback Machine.
Confessions of a Mail-In Rebate Junkie is a collection of tips and tricks for making sure you collect on mail-in rebates. I liked reading about some of his more difficult rebate collections.
…[T]here is a high degree of universal frustration with the mail-in rebate process.
But that’s exactly what makes the mail-in rebate process so rewarding and exciting! The harder it is, the more discouraging it is for most people, and therefore fewer people wind up filing for or getting the rebates. And if fewer people get them, that means that the companies can afford to be more generous in the rebates that they offer—a bonanza for the true mail-in rebate warriors such as ourselves. So after years of climbing the rebate learning curve, I’ve decided to share my experiences, so that all of my fellow rebate junkies can benefit.
(Thanks Jackie)
“Congratulations, you’ve just won a trip to the Bahamas, Florida, or Cancun. Please press nine for further details.”
9.
“Hello, is this Jeff I’m speaking with?”
“Yes, this is Jeff”
“Hi Jeff, I’d just like to confirm…”
“oh, just a second, where are you calling from?”
“I’m calling from Orlando, Florida… oh um, mumble mumble travel agency”
“oh, ok…” whatever.
“Can I just confirm your phone number in case we get disconnected?”
“Well actually, your company has called my house before, and I’ve asked very nicely on several occasions to be taken off your list, but everytime I ask, I get hung-up on. Is there anyway you could please take me off your phoning list?”
“Oh, well actually because you’re in Cancun, I mean… um, Canada, the computer just dials the numbers and I have no way of removing them from the computer”.
“I see, well do you think it would be possible for me to talk to your manager and see if he or she could remove me from the list?”
“Actually, if I put my manager on, he won’t remove your number either, I’ll get in trouble and he’ll probably just hang up on you too.”
“Why do you work at a place that hangs up on people?”
“oh, I don’t know, it pays the bills—I guess. Have a good night.”
“Thanks, you too.”
Click.
If you’ve ever lost your dog, I’m sure you can totally relate to Heather Armstrong’s latest mishap with Chuck. This is some of her most heartfelt blogging to date.
This google image of a North Americian Indian is not too far from my parents place in Medicine Hat.
He’s listening to an iPod in Australia.
There is a video I saw today of a remote controlled airplane equipped with a camera broadcasting in realtime to the owner’s virtual reality goggles that made me green with envy.
It’s a do-it-yourself project, but I could easily imagine this would be popular if it were massed produced.
I’ve never actually flown a remote controlled aircraft before, but I understand learning how to land them is one of the most difficult aspects to becoming a good RC Pilot. I would assume that having a view from the cockpit would make things a lot easier.
Check out the video.