Category: Science

Eyestilts

eyestilts

Now when haven’t you wanted to be able to see thing from the perspective of a giant? These clever guys built a device that tricks your brain into thinking that your eyes are about ten feet apart and not the normal 2.5 inches. The effect is enhance the stereo effect and ‘shrink the world’. You can do the same thing with a camera by taking two photos of the same thing (it has to be large and far away) from two points that are separated by a few feet. But looking at photos isn’t the same as seeing it in real time with your own eyes, you lose a lot of the coolness.
Building one of these and putting it near the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls and charging a quarter for a look would make you rich.

eyestilts

Space Travel via Gravity Tunnel

SmallTug

This is great news, if the fuel cost of going between points in our solar system can be reduced there should be a greater incentive to commercialize it.

ANDREWS SPACE OF SEATTLE has awarded SpaceDev a contract to design a small spacecraft to travel through a gravity tunnel – part of the InterPlanetary Superhighway or IPS, a route that eats up less fuel than normal trajectories – to the moon, for the very first time ever.

Small spaceship to fly through gravity tunnel

The SpaceDev web site also has a lunar lander program that you can try out if your running Windows. Looks ok, think of the classic lunar lander game but with 3D graphics.

Dermal Nanotech Display

Dermal Nanotech Display

I’m first in line and no cuts! Won’t be out for the Christmas rush but when it is you can bet that people will be lining up for them. Just as a way to tell time it would be super handy. And lets not even mention the possibility of moving tatoos.

a “programmable dermal display” in which a population of about 3 billion display pixel robots would be permanently implanted a fraction of a mm under the surface of the skin, covering a rectangle 6 cm x 5 cm on the back of the hand. Photons emitted by these pixel bots would produce an image on the surface of the skin. This pixelbot array could be programmed to form any of many thousands of displays.

Visualizing the Future: Dermal Nanotech Display

Rocket Cam

rocket cam vid

Here is another great site with home made rockets and video cameras, two great tastes that go great together! 🙂
Not totally sure what type of camera they used but they put it under the nose where the chute would be deployed. This seems to reduce the amount of spin that has shown up on other rocket cameras. Its pretty cool, makes me want to go out and buy a rocket.

Rocket Cam

The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 by Popular Mechanics

These books are a wonderful read, cover to cover you will find contraptions and ideas for solving all sorts of problems of every day life.
Many of them may have been practical years ago but are now jaw dropingly weird, but they will still make you knock away the cobwebs in your brain and appreciate the cleverness of these books.
Volume one is available from Project Gutenberg as a free download (its over 500 pages long!) as it’s now out of print but volume three you can buy from Lindsay’s Technical Books (a goldmine of almost forgotten information can be found there!). It would be worth looking for volume one on eBay just because having a nicely bound book is a heck of a lot better than a stack of papers held together with binder clips.

The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 by Popular Mechanics
The Boy Mechanic: Volume 3 from Lindsay Books