This is a visual guide to lock picking in comic book format. This guide is easier to read than the classic MIT Guide to Lock Picking.
Locksport International is proud to provide a simple, visual guide to lock picking. It is our hope that beginners will find this useful in learning the basic skills of picking pin tumbler locks.
Wired has posted an article that explains why lithium-ion batteries explode, and what might replace them in the future.
But such technical excuses sidestep the fact that flammability and heat intolerance are long-standing problems that have plagued Li-ion batteries since they were invented almost 30 years ago. And as devices have gotten smaller in size but richer in features, things have only worsened. Forced to produce more energy in less space, Li-ions die faster (as early iPod owners found when their batteries wore out long before their players did), and their propensity for thermal runaway greatly increases.
An article on how some early, extremely high-speed photographs were taken.
During the early days of atomic bomb experiments in the 1940s, nuclear weapons scientists had some difficulty studying the growth of nuclear fireballs in test detonations. These fireballs expanded so rapidly that even the best cameras of that time were unable to capture anything more than a blurry, over-exposed frame for the first several seconds of the explosion.
Before long a professor of electrical engineering from MIT named Harold Eugene “Doc” Edgerton invented the rapatronic camera, a device capable of capturing images from the fleeting instant directly following a nuclear explosion. These single-use cameras were able to snap a photo one ten-millionth of a second after detonation from about seven miles away, with an exposure time of as little as ten nanoseconds. At that instant, a typical fireball had already reached about 100 feet in diameter, with temperatures three times hotter than the surface of the sun.
This site has a large collection of articles on how various things are manufactured.
How Products Are Made explains and details the manufacturing process of a wide variety of products, from daily household items to complicated electronic equipment and heavy machinery. The site provides step by step descriptions of the assembly and the manufacturing process (complemented with illustrations and diagrams) Each product also has related information such as the background, how the item works, who invented the product, raw materials that were used, product applications, by-products that are generated, possible future developments, quality control procedures, etc.
Another nice collection of optical illusions.
»Optical illusion« sounds pejorative, as if exposing a malfunction of the visual system. Rather, I view these phenomena as bringing out particular good adaptations of our visual system to standard viewing situations. These adaptations are »hard-wired« into our brains, and thus under some artificial manipulations can cause inappropriate interpretations of the visual scene. As Purkinje put it: »Illusions of the senses tell us the truth about perception« (cited by Teuber, 1960).
I can’t even imagine how you would design a folding sequence that takes 40 hours to complete.
These days patterns requiring more than 100 steps are common. Some of that competitive acceleration is due to Lang, who transformed the art by writing a computer program that can generate the blueprint for ultracomplex origami sculptures. Even with digital assistance, figuring out the sequence of folds that will create a beetle and all its ornaments is a mathematical problem of staggering complexity. Still, the reigning champion of intricate origami is a 23-year-old Japanese savant named Satoshi Kamiya. Unaided by software, he recently produced what is considered the pinnacle of the field, an eight-inch-tall Eastern dragon with eyes, teeth, a curly tongue, sinuous whiskers, a barbed tail, and a thousand overlapping scales. The folding alone took 40 hours, spread out over several months.
This is a video that temporarily messes with your vision if you stare at it long enough. Very cool.
OK at first I definitely thought this was going to be one of those stare in the center and turn your speakers up maze scare things. But turns out it’s actually legit and kinda cool. Stare in the center and after a minute look away. You will hallucinate!
These things make my skin crawl.
When it comes to parasites, it’s all about perspective. You may call a lifetime of growing and feeding off another organism lazy, but we call it opportunistic. In fact, these life-sucking go-getters have managed to carve out some of the most ingenious survival strategies in the world. By some estimates, parasites outnumber free-living species nearly four to one. So show some respect. After all, mooching isnt’ as easy as it looks.
This is a monumental announcement for astronomers and physicists. NASA has observed dark matter for the first time! This has huge implications for our understanding of the universe.
Dark matter and normal matter have been wrenched apart by the tremendous collision of two large clusters of galaxies. The discovery, using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes, gives direct evidence for the existence of dark matter.
“This is the most energetic cosmic event, besides the Big Bang, which we know about,” said team member Maxim Markevitch of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
These observations provide the strongest evidence yet that most of the matter in the universe is dark. Despite considerable evidence for dark matter, some scientists have proposed alternative theories for gravity where it is stronger on intergalactic scales than predicted by Newton and Einstein, removing the need for dark matter. However, such theories cannot explain the observed effects of this collision.
Does this sound like a good idea?
A mix of bacteria-killing viruses can be safely sprayed on cold cuts, hot dogs and sausages to combat common microbes that kill hundreds of people a year, federal health officials said Friday in granting the first-ever approval of viruses as a food additive.
Inventgeek has a fascinating project that uses a webcam and a small radiation source from common household fire alarms to visualize radioactive decay. This could have applications as a source of entropy for a true random number generator.
I started this project with more of an idea of creating a system that would visualize Cherenkov radiation via webcam utilizing a Gamma radiation source and heavy water in some heavy lead shielding to produce the tell tale bursts of blue light. Perhaps hook it up to the LCD window kit system we did and display it on the windowed screen. When I decided to ramp up the project and also was experimenting with other types and sources of radiation for the project I stumbled across a myriad of new ideas for possible systems with some far reaching and profound results. While this write-up is just discussing in detail the implementation of this apparatus for ones personal amusement via screensaver, there are other far reaching possibilities for this system I will discuss later in the article.
Check out this image of the tip of a tungsten needle. You can see the individual atoms!!!
A field ion microscope (FIM) image of a very sharp tungsten needle. The small round features are individual atoms. The lighter colored elongated features are traces captured as atoms moved during the imaging process (approximately 1 second).
Here’s a nice, clear flash tutorial on how you might visualize from 0 all the way up to 10 dimensions. However, the tutorial concentrates on temporal dimensions rather than spatial dimensions.
In string theory, physicists tell us that the subatomic particles that make up our universe are created within ten spatial dimensions (plus an eleventh dimension of “time”) by the vibrations of exquisitely small “superstrings”. The average person has barely gotten used to the idea of there being four dimensions: how can we possibly imagine the tenth?
Just what is going on here? It’s a mystery why this illusion persists long after the afterimage is gone.
It is called the McCollough Effect, and was originally described by Celeste McCollough in a paper in Science in 1965. It has been the focus of on-going investigation ever since.
The effect typically lasts for hours, or even overnight. The duration can be changed by the consumption of coffee and other psychoactive drugs. One paper found that it is stronger in extroverts than introverts, and might be a reliable test for extroversion.
The precise cause of the effect is unknown, and currently under investigation. It is not a simple case of fatigued neurons: there are neurotransmitters involved and appear to be responsible for the long-lasting nature of the effect.
This incredible bird has the ability to mimic other sounds it hears, including artificial sounds like a camera with a motor drive, a chainsaw, and a car alarm.
In April 2006, to celebrate naturalist David Attenborough’s 80th birthday, the public were asked to vote on their favourite of his television moments. This clip of the lyrebird was voted number one. A Lyrebird is either of two species of ground-dwelling Australian birds, most notable for their extraordinary ability to mimic natural and artificial sounds from their environment.
This is an interesting essay written by a chronobiologist on modern sleep patterns.
Sleep is one of the strongest human needs… While I am not advocating ditching modernity, cutting off electricity and going back to the old sleep pattern, we still do not know enough about sleep in order to make the 24-hour society work for us without too much in the way of health consequences.
