Time Travel has been one of those science fiction themes that has been the MOST captivating. Not just for me, but for millions of people. I think the “what if”s are probably the most intriguing. What if I could get a message to someone… what if I could find out what happened …. Would those things even be possible, ethical? Up until now, it’s been more of an intellectual exercise, but I’ve been doing some reading on the subject and there is a very real possibility that time travel would be physically possible. Of course, physics classes for years have talked about how travel into the future should be possible. Simply travel away from the earth at near light speed and then back at near light speed. You will have only aged slightly while much time will have passed on earth. But, realistically traveling into the future isn’t as enticing as traveling into the past. We’re ALL traveling into the future one day at a time on the slow path. Here’s how one could travel into the past….
Tag: light
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Nvidia video cards
I’ve been looking at a new video card lately (X-Plane…) And am certain that many people are confused by Nvidia’s product lines of late… Here’s a nutshell idea…. They’re currently using 4 digit product numbers – like 7300, 7800, 8300, etc…. I found this breakdown in zdnets talkback…
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Help me Obi-Wan… – 3d images in the air…
Display technology has come a long way, but the 3d holographic display that is so recognizable in hollywood special effects in movies like Star Wars have just not been anything within the realm of possibility. I recall seeing one display that used fog to shine the light on, but that was two dimensional (although you might could do 3d…) Using lasers though Japanese researchers have created brilliant dots of light in the air that can be the components for an image. The technology is certainly early in development, but it reads as though they are cooking air into plasma with the lasers and the molecules give off light in the process. There’s a lot of popping and crackling and I suspect you could have severe discomfort if you accidentally tripped over the device…. Looks neat though.
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Do it yourself Macro Photo studio
I don’t know where to file this, but it was interesting to me…. this how-to walks you through a cheap way to make good closeup photos… Basically they have you construct a light tent from a card board box (cut large openings in the sides and use white tracing paper to diffuse the light and posterboard for backgrounds.)
The idea here is that for those good closeups of small items being bathed in light is the ideal, but a direct flash usually is not good, diffuse light is the ideal and this setup does nicely.
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Unidentified Green lights in the night sky….
Well… there was a news story a few days back about a pilot that had seen a strange orange light in the night sky near Chicago I think and claimed that the light was “not of this world”. It was later found out that it was likely a military flare (suspended by a parachute.) (Reportedly those flares put out 2 million candlepower..) Then LAST night on the local news there was a mention of people calling in reporting a green light in the sky. Today it’s all over the local news….
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RFID Passports
Looks like RFID passports are coming very soon for the US. It was probably just a matter of time, but in light of some of the risks in the current implementation, I thought it might be delayed. The most disturbing of the security risks (as if cloning of a passports rfid is not concerning…) is the possibility that the unshielded rfid could be used to trigger the detonation of an explosive. Since RFID is relatively short range, this means that it would be possible for terrorists to target Americans specifically by using an RFID trigger that was looking for the specific earmarks of a US Passport.
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Sony Handycam DCR-DVD405
Well, the Sony Handycam DCR-DVD405 that I ordered from Amazon has arrived today (ordered the 5th of July, arrived the 11th with the “slow boat” free shipping option.) I’ve had it long enough to charge batteries, set time and do a few still pictures and a few short video clips. So, these will be my initial impressions, and I’ll likely follow up later with further thoughts/experience/etc. This was certainly not a small purchase for us and I spent quite a bit of time narrowing down choices. I really wanted a dvd based recorder. The idea of having it already in a format that we could archive was a real plus there. Yes, I might pull it onto the computer for editing, but life will be much simpler if I don’t HAVE to….
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Lexar Jumpdrive Firefly recall
USB thumb drives seem fairly simple, nothing hazardous…. but Lexar has recalled several models of the Firefly series as well as the JumpDrive Secure II, 1GB model. The affected Firefly sizes are… 256MB, 512MB, 1GB and 2GB. They apparently have a “risk of burns to consumers and property damage.” I would assume the risk is ONLY when they’re plugged in to a USB port. I wonder if it has to do with the circuit for the LED light. USB provides 5 volts power and LED’s can be quite particular about getting the exact voltage needed. In a LED circuit you usually have a resistor to bleed off the un-necessary voltage. Once I built a light with about 18 white LED’s and I ran into a “design failure” in my first attempt (didn’t take into account the wattage rating for the LED.) and so the first mockup had a smoking resistor.
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Qemu 0.8.1 (with kqemu 1.3.0pre7)
While I was testing out the “single cut and paste” linux vnc remote desktop sharing script and x11vnc binary…. I spent a fair amount of time booting up livecd’s n qemu to test various distributions/ages of linux setups to see how compatible things were. I had not checked in at the qemu site in quite a while (a few months), but there was a new version out… in fact, I think 0.7.1 is what I was running previously, so I missed 0.7.2 and 0.8.0… Anyway, I’m running 0.8.1 now and I compiled kqemu as well (now at 1.3.0pre7)…. wow qemu has made great strides (with kqemu) since 0.7.1 ….
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Wow, impressive comment spam storm
But perhaps you are not as powerful as the emporer has foreseen…. I just skimmed the stats and saw an abornmal spike in traffic over the last hour, so being curious…. I checked the server logs and saw trackback post after trackback post, all different Internet Explorer versions. It doesn’t seem to be the same ip address repeating, but several. (Could it be a bot net?) Anyway, not much time here to investigate on that. Fortunately though, the trackback spam defending jedi akismet has been holding it’s own quite well with the onslaught. This is frankly the biggest trackback spam storm I’ve seen EVER which makes me curious as to why I came up on the radar…