Category: To be used for Evil

Aluminium foil hats are/aren’t dangerous

Tinfoil hats are bad?!?Well this isn’t good news for some people I’ve met… Some MIT students with access to loads of gear checked out the RF properties of some common aluminium foil hat configurations (Fez, Centurion, and the Classical) and discovered, much to the horror of nuts everywhere, that they can amplify frequencies used by government agencies:

The helmets amplify frequency bands that coincide with those allocated to the US government between 1.2 Ghz and 1.4 Ghz. According to the FCC, These bands are supposedly reserved for ”radio location” (ie, GPS), and other communications with satellites (see, for example, [3]). The 2.6 Ghz band coincides with mobile phone technology. Though not affiliated by government, these bands are at the hands of multinational corporations.

It requires no stretch of the imagination to conclude that the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the Government, possibly with the involvement of the FCC. We hope this report will encourage the paranoid community to develop improved helmet designs to avoid falling prey to these shortcomings.

 Thats right folks, the hats will let the secret beams into your head. I’m glad I don’t own any stock in Alcoa.

[via Engadget]

Aluminium foil hats are/aren’t dangerous

The Cult of iPod

Looks like there will be some new Apple porn at the book stores around mid November. It’s just amazing at how there’s a culture growing up around the Apple line of equipment. I wonder what is would have been like if it had happened to IBM. Would we have had mlillions of people gleefuly going through life batch processing data and wearing black ties and button down white shirts? Oh wait, I guess it did. Anyway, the Cult of iPod book should be a good read for anyone that enjoys the ‘Mac Lifestyle’.

The Cult of iPod Book

Vehicle piloted by a fish

Vehicle piloted by a fish

How cool is this? A camera detects the movement of the fish and steers the robot accordingly. This is right up there with the roach robot and the monkey controlled robot arm. This is not only a fish driven robot, but it is now the first time one of our finned friends can explore on its own the strange alien world of the ‘surface’. One small stroke for a fish, one giant leap for all fish-kind! (I smell a movie script in here somewhere…)

Vehicle piloted by a fish

Mythbusters – Rockets

Mythbusters

Tonight I saw an outstanding episode of Mythbusters. The myth was ‘did the Confederate army create a two stage liquid fueled rocket that was fired 200 miles’. Sounds cool but if you know anything about the history of rockets this is way on the incredible side. Anyway, the result of the build session was a hybrid rocket made from a paraffin and carbon tube that had nitrous oxide shot through it. All using technology that would have been available during the civil war. Well maybe the TIG welders were in short supply back then, but the N2O was made the traditional way at M5. They did however censor the ingredients so you can’t go out and get high from it. Oddly, they in trying to make liquid oxygen Grant heated up mercury oxide. I guess that’s safe to show because you can’t find mercury oxide at the local hardware store. Not that you should do that, you do get O2 but you also get mercury metal. Fun stuff by the way but real bad to have around the house if your not careful. BTW, I had about 1/8 cup of it decades ago. And yes, I did make a tiny bit of it from the decomposition of mercury oxide.
Anyway, it was a great episode to watch and makes me want to know what they used to make the N2O. The actual rocket used a commercially bought cylinder of N2O just to save time but if they had wanted to they could have done it on their own.
They also made gun cotton ( nitrocellulose ) in a kid safe way but that you can’t make a rocket out of, just things that go boom. And we don’t want that. Not that it’s hard to make, its actually pretty easy. You just take… Oh wait, I don’t want to tell you that do I. 😛