Fifth paragraph of the article, Simon. /biggerpedantthanalmostanyone

And, coincidentally, it tastes exactly the same as Kraft Singles!

Sensible investigators sometimes do take action when someone tells them they've got a "psychic" intuition about a crime.

The action the investigators take, though, is to check out the alleged psychic. Because it's possible that the actual reason why they know something about the crime is that they, or someone they know, committed it.

Found it on Google Maps. It looks like a big ol' construction site, but the road layout and the (substantial!) buildings already in place match the maps on the official site.

Note that this is actually just a fishing scale - I've got one just like it. But it's not overpriced, so what the heck.

Fish scales quite nicely fill the gap between small things you need to weigh on a precision balance and big things you can just stick on the bathroom scales.

Well, that's all right, then :-)!

Oi. That's my picture of my Curta that's on my shelf in my house.

At least link to the blog post, you Google-Images-usin' bandit!

I really can't tell which ones are cats and which ones aren't.

Yeah - it's like the "Human/Bear Security Trade-Off"
( http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/security_is_a_t.html )
in which it is observed that "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."

Make a CAPTCHA that a bot can't crack, and you've made a CAPTCHA that many humans can't solve either . Or, at least, a CAPTCHA that many humans won't bother trying to solve, on account of how they just wanted to use your Web site, not test their intelligence.

You probably didn't even hook up the actineutral transconductor, you n00b.

Actually, the large size of modern flash devices, plus wear levelling that spreads activity out over the entire device, means that even if a 4Gb device will only survive for 100,000 write cycles, you can probably write to it for half a year non-stop without any errors:
http://www.dansdata.com/flashswap.htm

Since these devices usually last for more write cycles, and even swap-disk use doesn't mean non-stop writes, it's reasonable to expect at least a few years of service from a modern CompactFlash card being used as a system disk.

There are considerable other problems with cheap adapters like the ones linked to above, though. A simple pin adapter connects a CF card directly to the ATA bus, which means the card needs to support UDMA transfer modes AND report itself as a "fixed disk" for it to be usable as a general purpose Windows boot device. Most cards fall at one or both hurdles. More expensive adapters presumably get around this problem.

This is actually a spinthariscope; a speck of radioactive material sits on the other side of a zinc sulfide screen that glows when alpha particles hit it.

So what you see is not some effect of radiation hitting your retina (which actually wouldn't stimulate it at all), but harmless visible-light photons, and not too many of them, either. It has been observed that even though you need completely dark-adapted eyes to see the feeble display from a spinthariscope, it's pretty amazing that you can see anything at all.

While it's fun to think of "atomic heat" as coming from a slab of white-hot plutonium mounted inside the robot, I think you'll find that what the Mechanix Illustrated writer actually meant was heat from an electrical element, which was to be POWERED by the too-cheap-to-meter atomic plants that they envisaged sprouting all over the States.

Since this was the January 1957 issue of MI and they were promising valet robots and jet cars by 1965, though, I think this may set some kind of new record for how soon some ridiculous techno-prediction was supposed to come about.

(Then again, "singularity" fans now seem to be trying for that record every day.)

Would it be completely insane to pack some lightweight AA-powered greyscale-screen Z80-CPU device for text input, so you could keep your main laptop powered down when you're just writing stuff?

If you need proper Internet access all the time then this idea fails, but if you can see yourself just writing for an hour or two with no need to check a Web site or e-mail, and if you can easily move what you'd written from the lightweight device to the real computer, then this could definitely solve some problems.

There are several old AA-powered notebook machines with decent keyboards that can only hook up to a modern computer via a serial cable (Amstrad NC 100, TRS-80 Model 100/200, Apple eMate 300, old AAA-powered Palms plus an add-on keyboard), but there are also modern versions with USB and/or WiFi connectivity. AlphaSmart are the biggest brand today, I think.

See also: Laptop Magazine trying to use a Dell XPS M2010 in normal laptop situations.

There is something very Rod Lord about that schematic, isn't there?

Cadmium is quite poisonous, and a lot of old NiCd batteries end up in landfill, from which the Cd slowly leaches.

(I think NiCd recycling programs also have a higher-than-usual likelihood of being boondoggles of the "only Chinese people get poisoned, so who cares?" type.)

NiMH batteries do not have any cadmium in them. Instead, their negative electrode is usually a mixture of rare earths and some other low-toxicity metal. The worst you're likely to find in them is nickel, which is not a serious pollution issue.

It would, of course, be physically impossible for this device to deliver a whole cup of boiling water in three seconds. It's a 240V-market product (perhaps there's a 120V version too), so if it drew the full standard-appliance maximum of ten amps, it could have a 2400-watt heater.

But to heat a whole cup of room-temperature water to boiling takes something in the order of 75000 joules. Doing that in three seconds would require 25000 joules per second. A joule is a watt-second; 25000 watt-seconds per second is 25000 watts. More than ten times the maximum power the QuickCup could possibly actually draw.

Three seconds of 2400-watt heating will give you 7200 joules of energy. That's only enough to raise the temperature of eight fluid ounces of water by a little more than seven degrees Celsius.

(I mentioned this in a recent blog post about an allegedly miraculous water-boiling device.)

Companies like, say, Sony, would be selling that Battlestar Galactica paper with all of the corners cut off at a 45 degree angle. And that'd drive the Apple iPaper fans nuts.

This post prompted me to finally finish a post I've been meaning to write for a while:

The Six Ugliest Space Lego Sets

If you want a cheap blast of caffeine, I recommend you buy a bottle of caffeine pills. Ten bucks will get you at least a hundred 100mg pills, maybe a hundred 200mg ones. Then you can get the bitter caffeine-eating over with in two seconds and move on to some chocolate that actually tastes good.

(Remember, kids: Caffeine pills are The Coffee You Don't Have To Get Up To Make!)

As mentioned above, display of the swastika (and other Nazi-stuff, like the famous salute) in Germany and Austria is actually permitted for "scholarly" purposes. For some reason, this includes films like the Indiana Jones series, which clearly do not actually depict real events or have any particular educational value.

Swastikas on anything aimed at children, though, are Right Out. So there are no swastikas allowed in computer games or on models of any kind, be they Lego or quarter-scale R/C Bf 109s.

The ban also applies to realistic depictions of violence, which is why German versions of computer games have things like "robot" enemies that leak black "oil" when damaged, in place of humans with red blood.

The toaster is one of the standard objects, like chairs and teapots, at which every design student seems to have a shot. I presume that many of them have to design a toaster as part of their coursework.

Most of the toaster redesigns, like most other "design concepts" for small devices, are horrendously unmakeable. I feel like writing a ranting essay almost every time I see one of these things. And this time, I will.

I concur with George57l on the main problem with this particular design. There's no way that the bread can feed through fast enough to still be evenly warm when it's done.

If all you care about is delivering a certain amount of energy per unit area of bread then you can just wind the element temperature up arbitrarily (mains power amperage permitting...), and crank up the feed speed to match. Bingo, a piece of bread that's been exposed to the required number of joules in five seconds flat.

But beyond a certain point, this will give you cold bread with a layer of charcoal on the outside, not toast. A cake that's meant to bake for one hour at 200 degrees will not be just as good if you give it 15 minutes at 800.

This device proposes that the bread actually be in physical contact with the heating plates on either side, which would seem to me to be an absolute guarantee that a singed surface and uncooked bread underneath would be the best you could hope for. You can make toast under a grill, but you can't make it in a frying pan.

Oh, and the rack that receives the allegedly toasted bread is not heated. So if the toast isn't cold and leathery when it comes out of the heating elements, it bloody soon will be.

(The toast-rack is an English invention whose purpose is to allow everyone to enjoy the kind of toast that the upper classes got when Cook made breakfast in the kitchens in the East Wing, and then Butler carried it to you, at a dignified pace, down a quarter-mile of stairs and hallways.)

And as if that weren't enough, the bleeding drive mechanism inside this toaster includes a "rubber band". When that starts slipping, your toast will catch fire.

The one-sided drive-wheel design also looks as if it'll stick - and, again, probably start a fire - if it tries to deal with a slice of bread that is not even in thickness.

And, as you say, the Toast-O-Lator did it first, and is even cooler than those automatic toasters in which the bread slowly descends, like Faust into Hell, then rises back up just as slowly when the bimetallic strip clicks.

More practically, "conveyor toasters" are normal equipment for commercial kitchens that need to make more toast than you can get from just a couple of battleship Dualits.

Conveyor models have large heating elements between which the bread passes relatively slowly, so that it actually toasts, instead of just burning. They're much more like an industrial conveyor oven than like this "sheetfed scanner" design.

And they work very well, because they don't have heating elements or drive wheels in contact with the toast, are completely insensitive to bread thickness or alignment, and do not deliver the toast to a vertical storage unit specially designed to convection-cool it to room temperature in 30 seconds.

The product page says it only draws five amps (it couldn't draw a whole lot more without popping the cigarette lighter fuse), which means this thing's going to be trying to grill a sandwich with a grand total of 69 watts. Only sixty, if the engine isn't running.

For comparison, normal two-slice sandwich makers (this one is a one-slice) have a power rating of at least 700 watts.

So even if this thing's very well thermally insulated, you can expect it to take five times as long to make a sandwich as a mains-powered unit would - which probably means about 25 minutes.

Since it only costs twenty bucks, I think it's safe to say that it won't actually be that well insulated. So you could be waiting an hour. Or possibly forever.

Asimov included driverless cars with positronic brains in a few stories. "Sally" is probably the most notable.

I, too, vaguely remember a story with robot cars still carrying their dead passengers - but I think they did it deliberately, when they decided to go rogue and join the car packs roving the open freeways.

I recall the cars preferring to develop an "exhaust defect" to do in the passengers quickly and quietly. It's so unseemly if you leave them scrabbling and screaming for days. They leave your upholstery in a terrible state.

Missourians want grownups running the state

You know, like Matt's father, Roy, who's so grown-up and practical that he just can't wait to nuke Iran.
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/48672/
But he's just one of the grown-ups the good people of Missouri have elected, who's been safely parked in the invisible and un-influential position of House Minority Whip. So don't you worry about him.

Oh, and needless to say, Matt himself is 100% behind that very mature and adult, and completely not contradicted by every single study, approach to sex education: Abstinence!
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/07/11/missouri-governor-signs-anti-choice-bill-from-sanctuary-of-baptist-church/

These little speakers are much nicer looking than most kits, and there's nothing at all wrong with using a single small widerange in a speaker; the results can sound a lot better than you'd think.

The claim that these speakers actually have 55Hz-20kHz response, though, has to be nonsense. The Thiele-Small specs for the little 85mm wood-cone wideranges are on JVC's Japanese site:
http://www.jvc-victor.co.jp/car/products/woodcone/cs-wd85/index.html

Their resonant frequency is specified at 130.7Hz, which is about on par for a driver this small. It is extremely difficult to get response significantly below the drivers' resonant frequency out of a speaker, so it's basically impossible for these ported boxes to have any significant response below 100Hz.

You'd be surprised how good such speakers can sound for a lot of music, but if you want any real bass at all you absolutely must add a subwoofer.

You're probably right that they're pricey, but they don't have to be terribly expensive, because (like a lot of other LED lights) they're not very powerful.

The PDF "cutsheet" says that the four foot "tube", which is the same size as a 40 watt fluoro, only has eight LEDs in it. It also says that the LEDs are Luxeon K2s, so that'll only be three watts per LED unless they're overdriving them, for a total of 24W.

The very newest and shiniest Cree and Seoul Semiconductor LEDs now have lumens-per-watt figures that're better than compact fluorescent lamps, and up there with a lot of straight fluoros. K2s are a bit older and not quite as good, though, so the total light output of these tubes is probably only about half that of an equivalent fluoro.

There are a number of other factors, of course. Ordinary straight fluoros emit half of their light upwards into a not-nearly-100%-efficient reflector, for instance; all of the light from the LED "tubes", in contrast, goes down.

Oh, and it would appear that the LED lamps aren't actually drop-in replacements for standard tubes. They're the same size and shape, but note the box next to the tube in the picture - that's a replacement for the fluorescent ballast, because the LED tubes apparently have "low voltage wiring", instead of the current-limited mains voltage that runs fluoros.

And fair enough, too - an LED lamp able to run from a standard fluoro ballast (and not get blown up by the "starter" kick...) would be a fairly perverse item. But that knowledge doesn't make rewiring your roof any more fun.

(A more common example of this problem is the compact fluorescent replacements for halogen downlights. They run from mains voltage, which is good; simple, and more efficient. But if you want to use them, that means you can't just plug them into sockets that 12V downlights were running from a moment ago. You have to go into the roof and rip out the downlight transformers, and then you have to put stickers in the sockets or something that warn people not to plug 12V lights in there any more.)

It's more of a Marshall class, if you ask me.

I'd feel dorky for knowing that, except that I know somebody, somewhere, has already ordered one of these things. That person's own dorkiness shines so brightly that none of the rest of us are even visible any more.

Fuckin' beryllium is actually irrelevant to the no-sparks-permitted issue. Beryllium copper is no more sparky than pure copper, but the alloy is much harder than pure copper (you can make springs out of beryllium copper; there's one in my special knife for killing major world leaders), and so it's more suitable for use in tools.

Beryllium is also very poisonous, though. This isn't an issue for most beryllium-copper tools, since you can't get a significant beryllium dose even if you spend your lunch breaks licking your BeCu pliers. But a sledgehammer probably makes some shavings in normal use, and inhaling those would be bad.

It's also no big deal if a sledgehammer's made from a relatively soft alloy, since it has no high-torque parts or cutting edges, and nobody cares if its faces become uneven.

The slightly old Nova documentary "Search for a Safe Cigarette"...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/cigarette/
...contains considerable interesting information about alternative nicotine delivery systems. They've always been a hideous market failure, but there have been a few generations of them, and the current models - even in 2001, when the documentary was made - are apparently quite good.

The tobacco companies just still haven't found a way to persuade people to buy them.

(The whole documentary is Torrentable from your favourite hive of scum and villainy.)

where he didn't wear them was in public, because he wasn't an asshole, and Burning Man had not yet been invented.

...and I presume he also didn't want the sun to catch them just right and set his nose on fire.

I've got a Donegan Optical Optivisor...
http://www.doneganoptical.com/optivisor.php
...for close work. It's bulkier than the glasses type, but it's easier on the eyes and doesn't hang heavy lenses off your ears.

Quite cheap, too.

I think the railroad carts are actually "handcars", no T:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handcar

upon opening, i discovered four long batteries about the diameter of a D battery.

Those are "F" sized cells. I think you'll find that all alkaline lantern batteries contain them.

I wouldn't be surprised if some carbon-zinc ("super heavy duty") lantern batteries had F cells inside them as well.

If any of you would like an actual link to that letters column of mine, it's here :-).

It's hard to see how big these sails are expected to be, but unless the tiny capsules on the corners are meant to be the size of Manhattan, they're probably far, far too small to get more than a tiny fraction of a newton of push from the feeble solar wind.

(Just as well, too, or the solar wind would have blown our planet out into the freezing night long ago.)

The text also makes reference to "tacking like a sailboat in the wind", which would be completely impossible. Sailing craft can tack only because they're sitting on water and have a keel, which makes it much easier for the boat to move forward than for it to move sideways.

No equivalent of the keel can exist in space, so solar sails just go where the solar wind pushes them, with a pushing force determined by the distance from the sun and the cross-sectional area the spacecraft presents to the solar wind.

(None of this applies, of course, in the case of solar sails made by ancient Bajorans.)