Category Archives: Link of the Day

Toy gas fired missile and launcher assembly – Patent 6055910

Read the abstract of this patent carefully.

A toy gas-fired missile and launcher assembly whose missile is composed of a soft head and a tail extending therefrom formed by a piston. The piston is telescoped into the barrel of a launcher having a closed end on which is mounted an electrically-activated ignitor, the air space between the end of the piston and the closed end of the barrel defining a combustion chamber. Joined to the barrel and communicating with the chamber therein is a gas intake tube having a normally-closed inlet valve. To operate the assembly, the operator places the inlet tube with its valve open adjacent his anal region from which a colonic gas is discharged. The piston is then withdrawn to a degree producing a negative pressure to inhale the gas into the combustion chamber to intermix with the air therein to create a combustible mixture. The ignitor is then activated to explode the mixture in the chamber and fire the missile into space.

Ahem.

[tags]Patents[/tags]

Click here to download the patent.

Check out Re-Imagineering

I must admit: I haven’t a clue as to how the whole Disney-acquires-Pixar thing is going to work out, but I do know one thing: it’s probably good that John Lasseter will be helping out on the whole theme park thing for Disney. The one thing that the Disney parks seem to have suffered from over the last couple of decades is story and imagination, and I can’t help but think that JL will bring a fresh (and desparately needed) perspective on the Disney theme parks.

Along that line, try checking out the Re-Imagineering blog. Their charter?

A forum for Pixar and Disney professionals passionate about the Disney Theme Parks to catalog past Imagineering missteps and offer up tenable practical solutions in hopes that a new wave of creative management at Imagineering can once again bring back the wonder and magic that’s been missing from the parks for decades. ‘

Amen brothers. I actually really like Disneyland and even like California Adventure, but they fall well short of the promise of Walt’s original vision, and the commentators on this blog have practical, thoughtful discussions of how the parks could retain their original charm and glory. I’m adding it to my daily read list.
[tags]Disney,Pixar,Imagineering,Disneyland,Disneyworld[/tags]

Tick destroying rover

Courtesy of hack-a-day comes this awesome story of a student project to make a robotic rover whose purpose is to eradicate ticks.   It basically follows a buried underground wire along the perimeter of the property, all the while releasing carbon dioxide gas.   Ticks are apparently attracted to the CO2, anc collect along the course, and then the ticks are sprayed with Permethrin.  Since the hill behind my house is literally teaming with ticks, I think it’s a darned cool idea, although I suspect their rover would find climing my hill to be rather challenging.

[tags]Science,Mad Science,Hack[/tags]

Aztec + Lego

It’s a strange fact that any two words (or interests) that you might have will eventually find a webpage that illustrates them both.  Of course, every geek in the universe likes Legos, and a couple of years back I made an aborted stab at learning something about Mayan hieroglyphics.   I didn’t think I’d find a webpage that harmonizes the two, but check out Dunechaser’s Blocklog for his Aztec Minifigs.

Addendum:  Wikipedia on Mayan hieroglyphics, PDF of Introduction to Maya Hieroglyphs by Kuttunet and Helmke, or How to Read Maya Hieroglyphs by John Montgomery.

[tags]Maya,Lego[/tags]

National Archive movies available on Google Video

Via Ars Technica is the announcement that many films from the National Archives will be made available via Google Video.  Their pilot program had 104 videos, consisting of many newreel clips from WWII, documentaries about the formation of the national parks service, and documentaries from Nasa including the 1969 documentary The Eagle Has Landed, documenting the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon.   Good stuff.

[tags]Google Video,National Archives,Public Domain[/tags]

Maps for ipod, the Juan Buhler way…

San Francisco Courtesy of Google MapsJuan Buhler (former SIGGRAPH sketch chair, current Pixarian, and cool street photographer) sent me a link to his cool idea for using the video ipod to store maps. He realized that the thumbnail viewer in his iPod video displays six thumbnails in each row of his video iPod, so he stitched together a map of San Francisco from Google Maps that was 6 times the native screen resolution of the video iPod, (6×320=1920).   He then used the Python imaging toolkit to break the big map up into columns of six pictures using the Python Imaging Library, and loaded them onto his video iPod.  Now, he can quickly scroll through the map of San Francisco, and bring up individual maps at the native resolution.

What a cool idea!

Addendum: I did something kind of similar a couple of years ago with Python and the Terraserver.  You could basically convert latitude and longitude into a collection of urls, and then download the tiles from the Microsoft Terraserver and stitch them together, allowing you to create pictures like this one of San Francisco.

[tags]iPod Hack,Juan Buhler,Google Maps,Google Maps Hack[/tags]

Lay Siege to Your Enemies!

Trebuchet

Feel the need to lob tennis balls at those who oppose you? Try checking out these rather nice plans for a small trebuchet. With such a mighty seige engine, none dare oppose your military might!

Seriously though, these things are:

  • interesting mechanical devices
  • fun to play with
  • and excellent for tossing water balloons.

Unless of course, you get hurt, in which case you didn’t hear it from me.

[tags]Trebuchet[/tags]

I’m on the way out…

Find out how popular your name has been over the years.  “Mark” seems to have peaked in popularity in the 1960s, while my dad’s name “Vernon” probably peaked back in 1918, and now is all but extinct.  Forget about some of my other uncles names: like Clarence, Virgil (never really popular, even in its heyday) and Merle.  My uncle Wayne would have scored highly, but even his name is, well, on the wane.  Overall, diversity of first names seems to have been declining steadily since the 1950s.   Interesting.
[via Flutterby!]

LEGO Technic Difference Engine

Lego Difference Engine

Need I really say more? An implementation of Babbages Difference Engine, capable of evaluating 2nd and 3rd order polynomials with two or three digits of precision. Needs some video demonstrating it in operation, but wow.

Bonus links:

Double bonus: my favorite Babbage quotation

On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Triple bonus coverage: The British Museum of Science and Industry manual on setting up their Difference Engine to do real calculations.
[tags]Lego,Babbage[/tags]