The folks down at Streamsage have been working on this for a while now. They are working on an index of NPR, last I heard. They do video and audio; a search retrieves the relevant clips of video. It works really well, apparently. This will be a fantastic boon for universities who have all kinds of lectures on video with no way of knowing where to find the information a student needs.
It is exactly the attributes of drinking, lying, gambling (cheating?) that make foreigners and other people "untouchable" to a higher caste Hindu. Perhaps NASA should specify that they are looking for orthodox Brahmins.
A wonderful little company based in DC already has this technology working today. Streamsage just starting taking its first customers. They're focused on working with groups with large media archives. Imagine searching for information in all the classes at a school or all the meetings in a business. It's a great thing.
A paper recently published in Physical Review Letters outlines how it is possible to make optics that are not diffraction limited using negative index of refraction materials. If this material were made into a lens of the appropriate shape, it would be possible to resolve features much smaller than diffraction limit.
The minimum angular separation of two sources that can be distinguished by a telescope depends on the wavelength of the light being observed and the diameter of the telescope. This angle is called the diffraction limit.
One reason that telescopes must be made huge is that the the diffraction limit decreases with wider telescopes.
Optics made using a negative index of refraction do not experience the diffraction limit. A telescope only need be made large enough to capture sufficient signal.
The advent of the water dam and the diversion of water for irrigration purposes has shifted water toward the poles of the earth. Just as a figure skater brings in her arms to spin faster, our planet would spin faster if the moment of inertia is decreased in this way. Someone has claimed to actually calculate this effect. It was an article on the back of the main section of the New York Times a few years back.
I've long loved the idea of flywheel cars but have always worried about the gyroscopic effects.
Consider a car with a flywheel in it. If the flywheel lies in the horizontal plane, its axis of rotation (and, thus, its moment of inertia) is vertical. If such a car were to turn on a flat road, nothing would happen. But if this car were to drive onto a ramp, the flywheel acts like a gyroscope and would cause the car to violently turn to the left or right.
Likewise, if the flywheel is oriented so that the axis is horizontal, any turn to the left or right would cause the car's nose or rear to pluge into the ground. The exact direction would depend on the direction of rotation.
What am I missing in this account? Am I simply wrong to think that the precessional force would be so strong? I haven't checked any numbers for myself, so it could be that the effect is sufficiently weak. Indeed, the bus that was described in the article didn't seem to flip over. Of course, it was just using the flywheels as temporary storage for acceleration in combination with hybrid power (right?). So perhaps its flywheels are smaller than the ones I'm envisioning as replacements for the batteries in modern purely electric cars.
The solution that I see is to place two counter-rotating flywheels right next to each other so that the total moment of inertia is zero. There would be tremendous stresses on the support structure for the flywheels, but the sum moment of inertia is zero.
Slashdot Mirror
The folks down at Streamsage have been working on this for a while now. They are working on an index of NPR, last I heard. They do video and audio; a search retrieves the relevant clips of video. It works really well, apparently. This will be a fantastic boon for universities who have all kinds of lectures on video with no way of knowing where to find the information a student needs.
It is exactly the attributes of drinking, lying, gambling (cheating?) that make foreigners and other people "untouchable" to a higher caste Hindu. Perhaps NASA should specify that they are looking for orthodox Brahmins.
Tom
A wonderful little company based in DC already has this technology working today. Streamsage just starting taking its first customers. They're focused on working with groups with large media archives. Imagine searching for information in all the classes at a school or all the meetings in a business. It's a great thing.
A paper recently published in Physical Review Letters outlines how it is possible to make optics that are not diffraction limited using negative index of refraction materials. If this material were made into a lens of the appropriate shape, it would be possible to resolve features much smaller than diffraction limit.
The minimum angular separation of two sources that can be distinguished by a telescope depends on the wavelength of the light being observed and the diameter of the telescope. This angle is called the diffraction limit.
One reason that telescopes must be made huge is that the the diffraction limit decreases with wider telescopes.
Optics made using a negative index of refraction do not experience the diffraction limit. A telescope only need be made large enough to capture sufficient signal.
This is old news.
The advent of the water dam and the diversion of water for irrigration purposes has shifted water toward the poles of the earth. Just as a figure skater brings in her arms to spin faster, our planet would spin faster if the moment of inertia is decreased in this way. Someone has claimed to actually calculate this effect. It was an article on the back of the main section of the New York Times a few years back.
Tom Kornack
I've long loved the idea of flywheel cars but have always worried about the gyroscopic effects.
Consider a car with a flywheel in it. If the flywheel lies in the horizontal plane, its axis of rotation (and, thus, its moment of inertia) is vertical. If such a car were to turn on a flat road, nothing would happen. But if this car were to drive onto a ramp, the flywheel acts like a gyroscope and would cause the car to violently turn to the left or right.
Likewise, if the flywheel is oriented so that the axis is horizontal, any turn to the left or right would cause the car's nose or rear to pluge into the ground. The exact direction would depend on the direction of rotation.
What am I missing in this account? Am I simply wrong to think that the precessional force would be so strong? I haven't checked any numbers for myself, so it could be that the effect is sufficiently weak. Indeed, the bus that was described in the article didn't seem to flip over. Of course, it was just using the flywheels as temporary storage for acceleration in combination with hybrid power (right?). So perhaps its flywheels are smaller than the ones I'm envisioning as replacements for the batteries in modern purely electric cars.
The solution that I see is to place two counter-rotating flywheels right next to each other so that the total moment of inertia is zero. There would be tremendous stresses on the support structure for the flywheels, but the sum moment of inertia is zero.
Tom Kornack