I think having a network-enabled microwave is lame. However, I think there are some places where it *could* make sense to invest in home automation: intelligent control of heat and lighting. If you have sensors that tell the computer where people are (and some adaptive software so it learns where they generally tend to be and go at different times) and have zone heating/AC, it's possible you could save a lot of money. At my old house we quite rarely used the downstairs and one room, so we closed them off and closed the heater vents to them, and reduced our heating costs by about 20%. Likewise, intelligent lighting control would mean if nobody's in the room the light automatically turns off, or for areas that are often used, dims to 10% with a rapid-on if a person walks through. Since this is the field in which I work, I might as well add a few numbers: we're trying to do this for parking lot and street lighting, specifically using dimming to a fraction of full lighting, and somewhat intelligent prediction of where people are heading so we can just crank up the relevant lights, and are claiming municipalities can reduce their power costs by 30% based on studies we've had done. We hope it'll be even higher than that, but we feel pretty confident in the 30% claim, given that 80% of the lights will be using 80% less power about 65% of the time.
Things like auto-opening drapes, autoadjusting lighting, stuff like that. Ever wished someone would just sell something like that?
I can't speak with any authority on your other topics, but the auto-adjusting lights, at least, will be in your friendly local hardware store within 2 years (or I'll be out of a job.) The question is: will you want to pay for it? Contemporary LED lighting (my field) is moving strongly into ambient light detection and (semi) intelligent lighting, and there are bulbs going on the market right now that even offer closed-loop color quality correction, so they not only turn on and off based on room lighting, but guarantee a lighting color throughout their lifetimes by using multiple colored LED's that vary based on measurement. (They're weird to work with because the color output from the bulb changes drastically if you hold a white sheet of paper up to the light, as compared to a piece of dark fabric, although the reflected color looks just about the same... which is the whole point.)
However, they cost about 10x what current lightbulbs cost, and it's an open question whether customers are going to actually spend more money for their lights. As brought up elsewhere in this thread, it's not that home automation is expensive per se, but that in order to apply it throughout a house, you could be changing 50-200 fixtures, outlets, and bulbs, and then it becomes cripplingly expensive.
I've heard a lot of people make the claim that the Internet is less interesting than it used to be, because there are less people making webpages about peanut-butter-flavored roller skates, but I wonder if that's true. I think it's more an issue of dilution: there are 100x as many people online as there were 10 years ago, and almost all of them are boring mundane people making boring mundane webpages, so the interesting (and, in my judgment, *useful*) pages are just much harder to find. But for all the people who *want* to read about the latest celebrity mishap, the Internet is probably becoming *more* useful. Speaking as someone who has more than my share of weird micro-interest webpages online, and has since 1996, I'm getting consistently increasing traffic and when I do a search on the sort of subjects my pages are about, I find consistently increasing numbers of similar pages, but neither the interest nor the other pages are increasing at anywhere nearly how quickly the Internet as a whole is increasing. I figure we're just getting lost in the noise, which is fine as long as the info is still out there. However, if people have evidence that the little weird quirky pages are actually disappearing, rather than just getting swamped, I'd love to hear about it.
In Iceland they served horsemeat at breakfast buffets.
That wasn't as weird as broiled puffin, though.
But the weirdest of all was in the big Reykjavik flea market where people were selling whale-on-a-stick, basically whale jerky with a skewer through it.
That was my first thought a year ago, when Iceland was going bankrupt: Google should buy the whole place. They have nearly free power because of all the hydroelectric, the ambient temperature is low, they have gobs of smart engineering and IT people looking for work, and Icelandic women are really hot.
Some of these just write themselves: Toy Story? Snow White & The Seven Dwarves? Beauty and the Beast? Lady and the Tramp? I can't improve on stuff like this.
For what it's worth (since I live in Denver and read the Westword every week) the problem is that a reviewer should have a recognized medical condition for which a doctor has prescribed medical marijuana. The previous reviewer had an injured back for which he'd gotten a prescription but A: he was already writing other stuff for Westword, and B: he doesn't actually smoke, so he questioned whether he was a good fit long-term. As such, they're looking for someone who fits the job better.
While at some point it may be possible to release some of this information in pubic form it would be quite a monumental effort to go through the vast amounts of internal documents and repurpose them for external consumption.
I wonder how far back that particular typo goes, although I'm too lazy to find out. Regardless, it's a funny mental image.
The capacitor lifetime depends on the design and what shortcuts the manufacturer took. Old-fashioned dry caps, stuff like mica and ceramics, should last for hundreds of years. Modern ultra-high-capacity electrolytic caps are often rated for less than 2000 hours -- one year, at 8 hours a day. (Now, by 'lifetime', what they mean is that after that time, it will have less than 50% of its original ability to hold charge.) Here is a page discussing what environmental and duty characteristics will shorten an electrolytic cap's lifetime. There are some really fabulous manufacturers out there, including chemi-con and particularly nichicon, but there are also some *horrible* manufacturers, whose caps will burst into flame. I've seen a number of these, especially about 2 years ago when apparently someone got the wrong formulation for the electrolyte and a bunch of companies started cranking out caps based on that, which died really quickly.
Basically, as is so often the case, the caps that don't really have that great an energy density have long lifetimes and great behavior across a wide range of temps, but the current crop of good energy density caps often show temperature dependent behavior and short, temp-dependent lifetimes.
Depends on the concentration. It's the primary colorant for bruises, which as you've probably seen cover a pretty broad spectrum of colors depending on how much is there.
One of the final breakdown products of hemoglobin is carbon monoxide, which we produce constantly since red blood cells only live a few days and after they die, their contents are cut up to recover the iron. We only produce one molecule of CO per hemoglobin, so it's very tiny overall quantities. But, since we make it, it's not too surprising that our systems have optimized to cope with it in those same small quantities. The other main constituent of the broken-down porphyrin ring, bilirubin, is what makes feces brown.
Her dad was an electrical engineer at Hewlett Packard. People are *very* good at compartmentalizing, when what they believe conflicts with their paycheck.
Very true. But surely there had to be some rationalization about how the E-meter worked, assuming he had ever bothered to look at it enough to realize it was just a wheatstone bridge. I mean I rationalize the supposed conflict between geology and the Book of Genesis by saying it was speaking of metaphorical "days", not literal ones. Or was it just a matter of never questioning the Church's magic device?
Ya know... I've grown up surrounded by engineers: father, all his friends, several girlfriends, most of my current friends, most of my jobs, and it's been my experience that engineers are among the absolute best at compartmentalization, because they're suspicious of theory. They're fundamentally practical people. As a result, they have an easier time convincing themselves that something is valid, even if it contradicts something else, if the 'something else' is something they haven't actually experienced. It's related to that old saw about how people who don't believe in anything will fall for everything. One of my dad's coworkers, who went to CalTech, at least had the intellectual honesty to come to the conclusion that his belief that the Bible was literally true was in contradiction with his engineering and science background, so he threw away all his books and got a job as a preacher. He turned his back on science because he felt like he had to. But I know lots of people who are very bright, who have advanced degrees in what I consider fairly hard sciences, who also believe in things I think are loopy. Just this morning I was listening to a PhD in electrical engineering tell me that if I were allergic to a compound and he put that compound in a bottle, I couldn't lift it up because my muscles would be too weak. Seriously, that's what he said. Don't get me wrong: I'm not anti-religion, and I'm not calling religion loopy. I'm calling the type of belief in religion, and many other things (often including science) that I see in many people, loopy.
Total agreement about conditioning: yikes.
It's not really clear why we were dating, in fact, aside from hormones. (And, uh, she bit me in preschool and that gave us something to talk about? I guess?)
Does there need to be any more explanation for hormones to at least go out on some dates? Though the biting thing is funny. I once had an administrative assistant bite me. I will admit I was affected in a way that could be called "allured", though also "frightened".:)
Well, since I was, y'know, 4 at the time, I'm not sure there was anything in the way of rational thinking, but yeah, later on, that did kind of come back as a "HUH. Interesting..." brain process.
Do this - publish your idea in the most obscure way possible.... I kid you not - this is advice I've had from multiple patent attorneys. It protects your idea, and is nearly free, without much chance of tipping off your competitors.
How does this protect your idea? IANAL, but it's my understanding that a public disclosure immediately invalidates your non-US patent rights, and starts a one-year clock ticking on the filing period for a US patent. The obscurity of your disclosure may prevent others from learning of your idea, but not disclosing it at all will have the same effect; neither method will prevent others from utilizing the idea, should they learn of it.
It helps protect your idea because if it's published, you have a lesser chance of becoming the next Robert Jacobsen, who wrote an open-source java software package that a sleazy company used to build their product upon, patent, and then sue Jacobsen for infringing on their patent. So far they've won tens of thousands of dollars from him, as well as the tens of thousands he's spent defending himself, although he seems to be winning the latest round of lawsuits.
Her dad was an electrical engineer at Hewlett Packard. People are *very* good at compartmentalizing, when what they believe conflicts with their paycheck. But, yeah, there were a lot of contentious discussions, because I suck at keeping my mouth shut. Scientologists have a holy war on about aspartame, and I have a couple degrees in biochemistry, and that was definitely a topic that was avoided after the first discussion, as was the mode of operation of e-meters. My contention that the reason Scientology is all crazy about how "psychiatry kills!" as her mom had painted across the side of the family minivan, was just because Scientology was scared of anyone who could reverse what Scientology did to people's critical thinking skills, also didn't go over so well... It's not really clear why we were dating, in fact, aside from hormones. (And, uh, she bit me in preschool and that gave us something to talk about? I guess?)
By the way, I've been around wild penguins in a couple of places and they weren't really that stinky as long as there were only a dozen of them wandering around on the shore. I think it's the problem that there were at least tens of thousands on the little island near where my friend was working. He said there was no discernable *island*, that it was just an enormous pile of poo, and people questioned whether there was actually an island left under there.
It *might* be possible to combine this with an ablative short-pulse laser, so you hit the area with a quick laser pulse, which will remove something less than one cell-depth of tissue, and then analyze the resultant burst of materials. Problem with that is lasers are sufficiently destructive it might be hard to find much useful stuff in the debris, compared to the non-micro-destructive materials released via electro-cautery. But mass spec is pretty amazing in its sensitivity. Since nobody else has yet talked about this, what a mass spectrometer does is it relies on molecules that have been fragmented. It uses an electric field to accelerate the fragments that are charged, and shoots them past a magnet. The deflection is a function of the mass. By varying the electric field strength, you can select for what mass you want to have hit the detector, and with computer processing of the results, you can do a surprisingly good job of figuring out what's in the mix based on knowing how things generally break up and the comparative weights of common organic chunks: if you see something of atomic weight 44 you presume you just found a propyl group ((CH3)2CH-) and so forth. So I think it's entirely possible they could make this into something that only does microscopic damage at any one point.
Of course, then I think it'd be nice to hook it up to an x/y scanner and have a computer do the work, so it'd just scan back and forth, and drill in wherever there's a problem until there's no longer a problem: a real-time version of current Mohs Surgery that they use for removing skin cancer while minimizing adjacent tissue damage/removal.
The person I was thinking of, when I wrote that, is one of the most amazingly relaxed and mellow people I know. He spent two winters down there and he said the stink of penguins, particularly of penguin poo, was the worst smell he'd ever smelled in his whole life. He didn't go back a third winter purely because of the stink.
Don't like replying to my own post, but I'm still irritated and have more to rant about. A simple wheatstone bridge isn't of much use because it's an absolute measurement, and the system, if calibrated for testing people in Italy, where they're more likely to be sweaty, hot, and irritable, would have a lot of issues testing people in the Antarctic, where nobody's sweaty and probably people are generally somewhat calmer. There is an adjustment knob, traditionally, of a 1M or thereabouts pot on one of the other legs, but the user has to keep moving it to keep the meter on-scale. It *would* actually be useful to hook this thing to a microcontroller with an A/D and a D/A so that the uC could control the amplifier gain, because that way you could have the thing record your sweat record over time and do some useful adaptive prediction with it. Then *maybe* you could actually detect that the person was suddenly unusually tense and cut off trading (although maybe he's just watching porn in another browser window.) But the entire idea of sweat being a great predictor of behavior is weak. I taught my 6 year old brother how to push a so-called lie detector needle around to wherever he wanted it, and when I was briefly dating a Scientologist, I thoroughly unsettled her and her family by being able to move the meter needle from one peg of the meter to the other, back and forth, while having a nice pleasant conversation. Which is to say, once you have played with one for a little bit, it's easy to fool, and even with a uC doing monitoring and analysis of your past stress history, a couple weeks of experimentation and you could easily false-negative it when you need to and go ahead and do that unwise trade.
You'll note I didn't recommend saving money by buying them on Ebay, because apparently Ebay refuses to allow them to be listed. I wonder if Google Marketplace has any? Not going to search from work but I am curious, now.
Dunno why they'd have to invent something to do this: it's been known for almost 200 years. Build a Wheatstone Bridge with your body as one of the four legs of the bridge, and measure across the middle. I was building these when I was 10. Add a transistor to drive a meter and you have most of a Scientologist's E-meter. Use this as the input to an analog input channel of an Arduino and interface it via RS232 or USB to your computer and you can easily write something to automatically log you out of e-trade or whatever. I'm not really sure where the innovation is here, although Philips usually comes up with great ideas. I guess you could use a sparkfun xbee unit to make it wireless, since anything that contains the word "wireless" seems to be patentable these days, but that just makes me even more irritated.
You sure about that? The microcontrollers I work with at work claim, in their documentation, that they're hardware-locked and once the fuses are blown, it's permanent, as do the claimed OTP count-down and configuration memory locations in Dallas one-wire chips I've been working with. It'd be interesting if they're actually just NVRAM: that'd give us some other options than the FIB stuff we've been talking about doing.
About a month ago, my girlfriend and I rode our bikes on the Cour D'Alene Bike Trail, that crosses the Idaho panhandle. The whole site is a toxic waste dump -- it was the old railway from a mine to a mill, and the entire length of it was contaminated with all sorts of nasty things. It's 130 km long, and it wasn't an option to just dig up a 130km long by 3 meter wide by 3 meter deep chunk of land. So what they did was they poured a bunch of clay on the top, and then put a nice fat layer of concrete and asphalt over that, and called it a bike trail. It's a fantastic bike trail, all out in the middle of nowhere, incredibly beautiful. It's a great use of land that was messed up a hundred years ago.
Because I'm a malcontent, I've done some research on other toxic waste sites (before we found out about the CDA trail) and found that in the city where I live, Denver, there are almost a dozen EPA Superfund sites, so I have a training ride I call the Toxic Waste Ride that goes through five of them. Again, it's a great ride, out in the middle of nowhere. But the fun part is all the houses that have been built on/over several remediated Superfund sites: it's enjoyable, in a sick way, to tell people that they're living beside a radioactive waste dump, for instance. I do go on to explain why it's safe to live next to a carefully contained radioactive waste dump, but it's still funny.
Search for Gerald Bull and read abut his super-gun project.
Or the German V3 built in 1944, that used sequential timed explosions to get greater velocity with lower jerk, and was intended to launch shells 200 km.
They should have at least thrown in a couple grams of blow.
Yeah, that was my second thought, after trying to figure out how to fit hookers in a shrink-wrapped package with an indefinite shelf life. Though I guess they could be inflatable hookers, "bring your own blow".
Ditto the battling between the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss over directional control of aircraft: the Wrights came up with an innovative idea to use wing-warping to allow aircraft to do coordinated turns by allowing the pilot to simultaneously roll the aircraft via wing-warping, and yaw the aircraft using the rudder, giving it the ability to turn smoothly and controllably. Glenn Curtiss and others promptly invented the aileron, which allows for roll control without having the wing warp, at which point the Wrights sued everyone they could manage to sue, for infringing on their patent for roll control on aircraft, and the ensuing legal fights kept American aviation at a standstill for a crucially important decade in the development of aviation technology. It took Congress to get the Wrights to back off, and they only finally did because WWI was on the horizon and the US didn't have a single plane worth beans in comparison to the un-stifled European fighters and bombers.
Slashdot Mirror
I think having a network-enabled microwave is lame. However, I think there are some places where it *could* make sense to invest in home automation: intelligent control of heat and lighting. If you have sensors that tell the computer where people are (and some adaptive software so it learns where they generally tend to be and go at different times) and have zone heating/AC, it's possible you could save a lot of money. At my old house we quite rarely used the downstairs and one room, so we closed them off and closed the heater vents to them, and reduced our heating costs by about 20%. Likewise, intelligent lighting control would mean if nobody's in the room the light automatically turns off, or for areas that are often used, dims to 10% with a rapid-on if a person walks through. Since this is the field in which I work, I might as well add a few numbers: we're trying to do this for parking lot and street lighting, specifically using dimming to a fraction of full lighting, and somewhat intelligent prediction of where people are heading so we can just crank up the relevant lights, and are claiming municipalities can reduce their power costs by 30% based on studies we've had done. We hope it'll be even higher than that, but we feel pretty confident in the 30% claim, given that 80% of the lights will be using 80% less power about 65% of the time.
Things like auto-opening drapes, autoadjusting lighting, stuff like that. Ever wished someone would just sell something like that?
I can't speak with any authority on your other topics, but the auto-adjusting lights, at least, will be in your friendly local hardware store within 2 years (or I'll be out of a job.) The question is: will you want to pay for it? Contemporary LED lighting (my field) is moving strongly into ambient light detection and (semi) intelligent lighting, and there are bulbs going on the market right now that even offer closed-loop color quality correction, so they not only turn on and off based on room lighting, but guarantee a lighting color throughout their lifetimes by using multiple colored LED's that vary based on measurement. (They're weird to work with because the color output from the bulb changes drastically if you hold a white sheet of paper up to the light, as compared to a piece of dark fabric, although the reflected color looks just about the same... which is the whole point.)
However, they cost about 10x what current lightbulbs cost, and it's an open question whether customers are going to actually spend more money for their lights. As brought up elsewhere in this thread, it's not that home automation is expensive per se, but that in order to apply it throughout a house, you could be changing 50-200 fixtures, outlets, and bulbs, and then it becomes cripplingly expensive.
I've heard a lot of people make the claim that the Internet is less interesting than it used to be, because there are less people making webpages about peanut-butter-flavored roller skates, but I wonder if that's true. I think it's more an issue of dilution: there are 100x as many people online as there were 10 years ago, and almost all of them are boring mundane people making boring mundane webpages, so the interesting (and, in my judgment, *useful*) pages are just much harder to find. But for all the people who *want* to read about the latest celebrity mishap, the Internet is probably becoming *more* useful. Speaking as someone who has more than my share of weird micro-interest webpages online, and has since 1996, I'm getting consistently increasing traffic and when I do a search on the sort of subjects my pages are about, I find consistently increasing numbers of similar pages, but neither the interest nor the other pages are increasing at anywhere nearly how quickly the Internet as a whole is increasing. I figure we're just getting lost in the noise, which is fine as long as the info is still out there. However, if people have evidence that the little weird quirky pages are actually disappearing, rather than just getting swamped, I'd love to hear about it.
That wasn't as weird as broiled puffin, though.
But the weirdest of all was in the big Reykjavik flea market where people were selling whale-on-a-stick, basically whale jerky with a skewer through it.
That was my first thought a year ago, when Iceland was going bankrupt: Google should buy the whole place. They have nearly free power because of all the hydroelectric, the ambient temperature is low, they have gobs of smart engineering and IT people looking for work, and Icelandic women are really hot.
Better yet, lets have some indecent ones!
Sleeping Booty
Sinderella
Dumpo
A-lad-din'
Poke-her-hontas
Some of these just write themselves: Toy Story? Snow White & The Seven Dwarves? Beauty and the Beast? Lady and the Tramp? I can't improve on stuff like this.
For what it's worth (since I live in Denver and read the Westword every week) the problem is that a reviewer should have a recognized medical condition for which a doctor has prescribed medical marijuana. The previous reviewer had an injured back for which he'd gotten a prescription but A: he was already writing other stuff for Westword, and B: he doesn't actually smoke, so he questioned whether he was a good fit long-term. As such, they're looking for someone who fits the job better.
While at some point it may be possible to release some of this information in pubic form it would be quite a monumental effort to go through the vast amounts of internal documents and repurpose them for external consumption.
I wonder how far back that particular typo goes, although I'm too lazy to find out. Regardless, it's a funny mental image.
Basically, as is so often the case, the caps that don't really have that great an energy density have long lifetimes and great behavior across a wide range of temps, but the current crop of good energy density caps often show temperature dependent behavior and short, temp-dependent lifetimes.
Depends on the concentration. It's the primary colorant for bruises, which as you've probably seen cover a pretty broad spectrum of colors depending on how much is there.
One of the final breakdown products of hemoglobin is carbon monoxide, which we produce constantly since red blood cells only live a few days and after they die, their contents are cut up to recover the iron. We only produce one molecule of CO per hemoglobin, so it's very tiny overall quantities. But, since we make it, it's not too surprising that our systems have optimized to cope with it in those same small quantities. The other main constituent of the broken-down porphyrin ring, bilirubin, is what makes feces brown.
Her dad was an electrical engineer at Hewlett Packard. People are *very* good at compartmentalizing, when what they believe conflicts with their paycheck.
Very true. But surely there had to be some rationalization about how the E-meter worked, assuming he had ever bothered to look at it enough to realize it was just a wheatstone bridge. I mean I rationalize the supposed conflict between geology and the Book of Genesis by saying it was speaking of metaphorical "days", not literal ones. Or was it just a matter of never questioning the Church's magic device?
Ya know... I've grown up surrounded by engineers: father, all his friends, several girlfriends, most of my current friends, most of my jobs, and it's been my experience that engineers are among the absolute best at compartmentalization, because they're suspicious of theory. They're fundamentally practical people. As a result, they have an easier time convincing themselves that something is valid, even if it contradicts something else, if the 'something else' is something they haven't actually experienced. It's related to that old saw about how people who don't believe in anything will fall for everything. One of my dad's coworkers, who went to CalTech, at least had the intellectual honesty to come to the conclusion that his belief that the Bible was literally true was in contradiction with his engineering and science background, so he threw away all his books and got a job as a preacher. He turned his back on science because he felt like he had to. But I know lots of people who are very bright, who have advanced degrees in what I consider fairly hard sciences, who also believe in things I think are loopy. Just this morning I was listening to a PhD in electrical engineering tell me that if I were allergic to a compound and he put that compound in a bottle, I couldn't lift it up because my muscles would be too weak. Seriously, that's what he said. Don't get me wrong: I'm not anti-religion, and I'm not calling religion loopy. I'm calling the type of belief in religion, and many other things (often including science) that I see in many people, loopy.
Total agreement about conditioning: yikes.
It's not really clear why we were dating, in fact, aside from hormones. (And, uh, she bit me in preschool and that gave us something to talk about? I guess?)
Does there need to be any more explanation for hormones to at least go out on some dates? Though the biting thing is funny. I once had an administrative assistant bite me. I will admit I was affected in a way that could be called "allured", though also "frightened". :)
Well, since I was, y'know, 4 at the time, I'm not sure there was anything in the way of rational thinking, but yeah, later on, that did kind of come back as a "HUH. Interesting..." brain process.
Do this - publish your idea in the most obscure way possible. ... I kid you not - this is advice I've had from multiple patent attorneys. It protects your idea, and is nearly free, without much chance of tipping off your competitors.
How does this protect your idea? IANAL, but it's my understanding that a public disclosure immediately invalidates your non-US patent rights, and starts a one-year clock ticking on the filing period for a US patent. The obscurity of your disclosure may prevent others from learning of your idea, but not disclosing it at all will have the same effect; neither method will prevent others from utilizing the idea, should they learn of it.
It helps protect your idea because if it's published, you have a lesser chance of becoming the next Robert Jacobsen, who wrote an open-source java software package that a sleazy company used to build their product upon, patent, and then sue Jacobsen for infringing on their patent. So far they've won tens of thousands of dollars from him, as well as the tens of thousands he's spent defending himself, although he seems to be winning the latest round of lawsuits.
By the way, I've been around wild penguins in a couple of places and they weren't really that stinky as long as there were only a dozen of them wandering around on the shore. I think it's the problem that there were at least tens of thousands on the little island near where my friend was working. He said there was no discernable *island*, that it was just an enormous pile of poo, and people questioned whether there was actually an island left under there.
Of course, then I think it'd be nice to hook it up to an x/y scanner and have a computer do the work, so it'd just scan back and forth, and drill in wherever there's a problem until there's no longer a problem: a real-time version of current Mohs Surgery that they use for removing skin cancer while minimizing adjacent tissue damage/removal.
The person I was thinking of, when I wrote that, is one of the most amazingly relaxed and mellow people I know. He spent two winters down there and he said the stink of penguins, particularly of penguin poo, was the worst smell he'd ever smelled in his whole life. He didn't go back a third winter purely because of the stink.
Priorities, my man, priorities.
Don't like replying to my own post, but I'm still irritated and have more to rant about. A simple wheatstone bridge isn't of much use because it's an absolute measurement, and the system, if calibrated for testing people in Italy, where they're more likely to be sweaty, hot, and irritable, would have a lot of issues testing people in the Antarctic, where nobody's sweaty and probably people are generally somewhat calmer. There is an adjustment knob, traditionally, of a 1M or thereabouts pot on one of the other legs, but the user has to keep moving it to keep the meter on-scale. It *would* actually be useful to hook this thing to a microcontroller with an A/D and a D/A so that the uC could control the amplifier gain, because that way you could have the thing record your sweat record over time and do some useful adaptive prediction with it. Then *maybe* you could actually detect that the person was suddenly unusually tense and cut off trading (although maybe he's just watching porn in another browser window.) But the entire idea of sweat being a great predictor of behavior is weak. I taught my 6 year old brother how to push a so-called lie detector needle around to wherever he wanted it, and when I was briefly dating a Scientologist, I thoroughly unsettled her and her family by being able to move the meter needle from one peg of the meter to the other, back and forth, while having a nice pleasant conversation. Which is to say, once you have played with one for a little bit, it's easy to fool, and even with a uC doing monitoring and analysis of your past stress history, a couple weeks of experimentation and you could easily false-negative it when you need to and go ahead and do that unwise trade.
You'll note I didn't recommend saving money by buying them on Ebay, because apparently Ebay refuses to allow them to be listed. I wonder if Google Marketplace has any? Not going to search from work but I am curious, now.
Dunno why they'd have to invent something to do this: it's been known for almost 200 years. Build a Wheatstone Bridge with your body as one of the four legs of the bridge, and measure across the middle. I was building these when I was 10. Add a transistor to drive a meter and you have most of a Scientologist's E-meter. Use this as the input to an analog input channel of an Arduino and interface it via RS232 or USB to your computer and you can easily write something to automatically log you out of e-trade or whatever. I'm not really sure where the innovation is here, although Philips usually comes up with great ideas. I guess you could use a sparkfun xbee unit to make it wireless, since anything that contains the word "wireless" seems to be patentable these days, but that just makes me even more irritated.
You sure about that? The microcontrollers I work with at work claim, in their documentation, that they're hardware-locked and once the fuses are blown, it's permanent, as do the claimed OTP count-down and configuration memory locations in Dallas one-wire chips I've been working with. It'd be interesting if they're actually just NVRAM: that'd give us some other options than the FIB stuff we've been talking about doing.
Because I'm a malcontent, I've done some research on other toxic waste sites (before we found out about the CDA trail) and found that in the city where I live, Denver, there are almost a dozen EPA Superfund sites, so I have a training ride I call the Toxic Waste Ride that goes through five of them. Again, it's a great ride, out in the middle of nowhere. But the fun part is all the houses that have been built on/over several remediated Superfund sites: it's enjoyable, in a sick way, to tell people that they're living beside a radioactive waste dump, for instance. I do go on to explain why it's safe to live next to a carefully contained radioactive waste dump, but it's still funny.
Search for Gerald Bull and read abut his super-gun project.
Or the German V3 built in 1944, that used sequential timed explosions to get greater velocity with lower jerk, and was intended to launch shells 200 km.
They should have at least thrown in a couple grams of blow.
Yeah, that was my second thought, after trying to figure out how to fit hookers in a shrink-wrapped package with an indefinite shelf life. Though I guess they could be inflatable hookers, "bring your own blow".
Ditto the battling between the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss over directional control of aircraft: the Wrights came up with an innovative idea to use wing-warping to allow aircraft to do coordinated turns by allowing the pilot to simultaneously roll the aircraft via wing-warping, and yaw the aircraft using the rudder, giving it the ability to turn smoothly and controllably. Glenn Curtiss and others promptly invented the aileron, which allows for roll control without having the wing warp, at which point the Wrights sued everyone they could manage to sue, for infringing on their patent for roll control on aircraft, and the ensuing legal fights kept American aviation at a standstill for a crucially important decade in the development of aviation technology. It took Congress to get the Wrights to back off, and they only finally did because WWI was on the horizon and the US didn't have a single plane worth beans in comparison to the un-stifled European fighters and bombers.