Links to cool places or things.
There are 1,524 posts filed in Check It Out (this is page 111 of 153).
Our political leaders like to brag about protecting us from terrorists, yet yesterday an actual terrorist walked away a free man yet again. Luis Posada Carriles, who carried out multiple bombings through his past work as a CIA agent, was acquitted of immigration fraud in court yesterday.
The feds have no trouble locking up people who pose no threat to anyone, like Bradley Manning, but can’t seem to keep the cuffs on actual terrorists like Carriles, a man who boasts about the blood on his hands.
I was sorry to hear that Google passed on North Carolina for its Google Fiber project. Kansas City, Kansas won out.
I hope it had nothing to do with the animosity our state’s current leadership has shown towards high-speed broadband, but you never know.
After a careful review, today we’re very happy to announce that we will build our ultra high-speed network in Kansas City, Kansas. We’ve signed a development agreement with the city, and we’ll be working closely with local organizations, businesses and universities to bring a next-generation web experience to the community.
via Official Google Blog.
Update 9:26 PM: All hope may not be lost for NC after all.
Here’s a nice guide to repairing CFL bulbs yourself!
I don’t know about you, but I’m so used to the paradigm established by old-style incandescent bulbs that when one of my CFL’s “blows out,” it doesn’t even occur to me that I might be able to repair it in the garage. Or at least, it didn’t until I saw this page from Pavel Ruzicka, which does a good job of explaining the general principles of operation of CFL lamps and gives great details about their most common failure modes. Apparently, replacing a single capacitor will often do the trick. [via Hack a Day]
via Make: Online | Circuitry, Anatomy, and Repair Tips for Common CFL Lamps.
Meet Jake Barnett, a 12-year-old math prodigy from Indiana who is already blazing new trails in science.
“We were in the crowd, just sitting, listening to this guy ask the crowd if anyone knew why the moons going around Mars were potato-shaped and not round,” she recalls. “Jacob raised his hand and said, ‘Excuse me, but what are the sizes of the moons around Mars?’ “
The lecturer answered, and “Jacob looked at him and said the gravity of the planet . . . is so large that (the moon’s) gravity would not be able to pull it into a round shape.”
Silence.
“That entire building . . . everyone was just looking at him, like, ‘Who is this 3-year-old?’ “
via Genius at work: 12-year-old is studying at IUPUI | The Indianapolis Star | indystar.com.
Fascinating.
Speaking at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in California, MIT professor Daniel Nocera claims to have created an artificial leaf made from stable and inexpensive materials that mimics nature’s photosynthesis process.
The device is an advanced solar cell, no bigger than a typical playing card, which is left floating in a pool of water. Then, much like a natural leaf, it uses sunlight to split the water into its two core components, oxygen and hydrogen, which are stored in a fuel cell to be used when producing electricity.
With a single gallon of water, Nocera says, the chip could produce enough electricity to power a house in a developing country for an entire day. Provide every house on the planet with an artificial leaf and we could satisfy our 14-terrawatt need with just one gallon of water a day.
via Artificial Leaf Could Be More Efficient Than the Real Thing | Wired Science | Wired.com.
Internet pioneer Paul Baran died over the weekend at the age of 84. Baran’s packet switching technique provided the foundation of today’s Internet.
I find it amusing that AT&T told him it would never work.
In the early 1960s, while working at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif., Mr. Baran outlined the fundamentals for packaging data into discrete bundles, which he called “message blocks.” The bundles are then sent on various paths around a network and reassembled at their destination. Such a plan is known as “packet switching.”
“Paul wasn’t afraid to go in directions counter to what everyone else thought was the right or only thing to do,” said Vinton Cerf, a vice president at Google who was a colleague and longtime friend of Mr. Baran’s. “AT&T repeatedly said his idea wouldn’t work, and wouldn’t participate in the Arpanet project,” he said.
via Paul Baran, 84, Dies – Helped Pave Way for Internet – NYTimes.com.
The News and Observer ran my opinion piece on municipal broadband today:
Don’t block broadband
BY MARK TURNER
Published in: Other ViewsRALEIGH While farm life has never been easy, at one time it was significantly harder. In the mid-1930s, over 97 percent of North Carolina farms had no electricity, many because private electric companies couldn’t make enough money from them to justify running the lines.
Aware of the transformational effect of electrification and recognizing the need to do something, visionary North Carolina leaders created rural electric cooperatives, beating passage of FDR’s Rural Electrification Act by one month. Through the state’s granting local communities the power to provide for their own needs where others would not, over 98 percent of farms had electricity by 1963, and our state has prospered.
Continue reading
This is the best layman’s description I’ve seen of the physics taking place inside the crippled Fukushima Daiichi reactor.
Following the events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors in Japan has been challenging. At best, even those present at the site have a limited view of what’s going on inside the reactors themselves, and the situation has changed rapidly over the last several days. Meanwhile, the terminology involved is somewhat confusing—some fuel rods have almost certainly melted, but we have not seen a meltdown; radioactive material has been released from the reactors, but the radioactive fuel currently remains contained.Over time, the situation has become a bit less confused, as cooler heads have explained more about the reactor and the events that have occurred within it. What we’ll attempt to do here is aggregate the most reliable information we can find, using material provided by multiple credible sources. We’ve attempted to confirm some of this information with groups like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy but, so far, these organizations are not making their staff available to talk to the press.
At some point, legislators — Republicans and Democrats — might want to wake up to the fact that an ongoing battle over high-speed Internet has nothing to do with party, political ideology, or being pro- or anti-business.
It has everything to do with the urban-rural divide in North Carolina.
Any legislator from a rural community who favors a bill that would restrict municipal-owned Internet systems is voting against his or her constituents and against the ability of his or her community to recruit and retain business.
via The Daily Reflector.
Yikes. I’m with the Japanese who think that this situation is far more dire than officials have been letting on.
Tokyo Electric Power said Tuesday that after the explosion at the No. 2 reactor pressure had dropped in the “suppression pool” — a section at the bottom of the reactor that converts steam to water and is part of the critical function of keeping the nuclear fuel protected. After that occurred radiation levels outside No. 2 were reported to have risen sharply.
“We are on the brink,” said Hiroaki Koide, a senior reactor engineering specialist at the Research Reactor Institute of Kyoto University. “We are now facing the worst-case scenario. We can assume that the containment vessel at Reactor No. 2 is already breached. If there is heavy melting inside the reactor, large amounts of radiation will most definitely be released.”
via Workers Strain to Retake Control After Blast and Fire at Japan Plant – NYTimes.com.
