Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
Well the elusive iPhone has been captured, dissected and photographed and is now ready to be stuffed and mounted. Somewhere in the night time sky a star has gone out.
[via MAKE]
iPhone Disassembly
If your all keen on getting one of these marvels on modern telephony technology you may want to get the perfect book for any iPhone owner: 
The hipster hacker friendly micro platform known at the Chumby should be relaesed upon the public soon. Any day now. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe. I don’t code but I’d be willing to learn if I had one of these.
Astounding!
I personally think that this should be standard fare in a marching band. Just think of it for a second, it’s perfect. Loud enough to be heard over the roar of the crowd, easy to play (keyboard interface?), and it includes it’s own light show! Sure, it might take twenty people to haul the batteries around behind it but that is a small price to pay for something as spectacular as this.
And just think of it in a battle of the bands. Put one of these on the point of your formation and the competition will drop like flies. You might need to insulate the musicians that have to march near it but that would sort itself out I would think.
[via boingboing]
If you ever find yourself with a pile of wire and big transformers and can work with tools without killing yourself you might want to build a Tesla coil. What a Tesla coil does is transform low voltage low frequency (120V / 60 Hz) power into high voltage high frequency (5-1000 KV / 10-2000 KHz) power. It’s done by finely tuned coils and capacitors that resonate at the greatest efficiency. The results can be quite spectacular. The image I used for this entry is of a Tesla coil I shot a few years ago. It was pounding out a million volts of electricity and producing a dazzling display of sparks. The coil was about three feet high and the breeze made by the charge was downright amazing.
The guys at Deep Fried Neon have all the info that you will need to get started in the wonderful hobby.
This is just so disturbing that I don’t know what to say. I’d like to think that it’s a work of parody but I know it’s not. The Twin Cities Creation Science Association posted a lengthy list of projects that kids have asked about science fair projects. As far as I can tell there are a few real and quite valid science fair projects buried in there but to find them you have to skirt around quite a bit of foo. Discovering how glue works and if the position of the sun effects how tired we are sound valid to me but what is up with this question?
65. What affects skin color? Is one color better than another? What was God’s purpose in this?
Wow.
Actually, I’m surprised that they would even bother putting such a sham on when clearly the religiously correct answer to each and every one of the questions posed is "Because God wants it to be that way". Check your brains at the door and grab a book full of fairy tails before you sit down. Critical thought has little place in religion. In all honesty, the whole debate over ‘is there proof of god’ (your choice of deity, there are many to choose from) strikes me as being like arguing over what Gandalf the White would have done at the battle of Waterloo. You see my point? Mixing fantasy with reality makes for a good read but hardly helps you understand how things work.
[via Pharyngula]
TCCSA – Twin Cities Creation Science Association
It looks as if the dream of a solid state laptop is almost here. SanDisk, makers of mighty fine memory products (I use them in my digital camera) have introduced a 64GB solid state flash drive in a 2.5 inch SATA version for portable computers and knowing that the public’s hunger for music players will never be slaked, a 1.8 PATA version for things like, gee, I don’t know, iPods? It’s a short leap to the iPhone from here. 64GB of storage would be just fine for most people on a laptop. Even if it wasn’t the .11 millisecond reaction time and less than a watt power dissipation will make using these an easy move.
Electronista | SanDisk intros 64GB flash drive for notebooks