Flock Cameras Map

Flock Cameras

Via Detroit Steve

Telescreen

Stolen entire from Schneier on Security:

A Video Screen That Is Also a Camera

Amazing:

Researchers from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, however, managed to create a new type of pixel that can simultaneously do both. This hypercharged pixel, called a Fourier pixel, can generate and sense arbitrary light fields and tap into a pixel’s full potential for carrying information by manipulating light’s intensity, oscillation phases, and polarization. The team reported its findings in a paper published yesterday in Nature.

We are one step closer to 1984 technology:

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.

Paper.

Hydrogen Embrittlement

Steel Absorbs Gas Like a Sponge
Steve Mould

I've known about hydrogen embrittlement for a long time, but I had no idea that carbon and methane were involved. I don't think Steve ever mentions the term 'hydrogen embrittlement'. You have to excuse Steve for his horrible pronunciation of methane, he calls it ME-thane. I dunno, maybe all Brits do that. Anyway, Steve's video is pretty great. He ties several bits of esoteric technology together to tell this story.

At the tale end of the video (14:50) he tells an amusing story about AI scams. That leads into at ad. I don't get any spam calls. My phone tells me it's a spam call, so I just reject the call. Don't know how accurate it is.

Video from U. S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board:

Animation of Explosion at Tesoro's Anacortes Refinery
USCSB

Marathon - Anacortes Refinery, Washington State

Chemistry & Physics

DSA - This New Technology Could Disrupt ASML and Intel
42 Index

DSA stands for Directed Self Assembly which involves polymers fitting themselves to structures laid down by conventional photolithography. I suspect this is what my neighbors are working on.

Technocracy

Technate of America

Technocracy was a political movement in the USA in the 1930s that aimed to put technologists in control. Technology is not yet in total control, but it certainly has us fenced in with roads, powerlines, train tracks and prison walls. Bombthrower got me started.

Technocracy Rally, Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, California

Technocracy Inc. has a website, but the above picture is almost the entire content.

Surgery Notes

St. Vincent's Hospital Now

Wrote most of this three months ago just after my hip joint replacement surgery. Taken me this long to get around to finishing it.

Most of the people I saw were pretty women with a variety of personalities. Connected with some, did not connect with others.

Nurse Jerri thinks I sound like Kevin Costner.

New Operating Room

Remodeled operating room. Last time I was here the surgery center and the operating room were all very industrial looking like something out of Star Wars. This time it was all soft pastels like a modern doctor's office.

St. Vincent's Hospital Ten Years Ago

Remodeled exterior. When we arrived, I walked out of the parking garage and saw this big, shiny, new building (top) and I thought 'this wasn't here before'. Turns out they just put a new facade over the old one (above).

Aisles in new garages are narrower than in the old one which is why I prefer to park in the old garage, even though I have to walk a hundred yards farther to the hospital entrance.

Masimo Root Patient Monitoring and Connectivity Platform

Numerous connections while I am lying in bed after surgery:

• Intravenous line
• Electronic pulse monitor
• I think there was an oxygen level monitor as well, but I don't recall where that one was connected to me. Might be combined with the pulse monitor. The other end was connected to a fancy looking machine that didn't seem to do much (above).
• Warm air hose connected to hospital gown
• inflatable bladders wrapped around my lower legs to reduce the chance of blood clots and / or cramps. The ran on a cycle of about a minute - Inflate on one leg, then deflate, then repeat for the other leg. Funny thing was I noticed when it was inflating on my left leg (the surgery leg), but I had to pay attention to notice it on the right leg.
• How many times did they take my blood pressure? I wouldn't be surprised if they measured it dozen times.
• remote control for the TV. Not connected to me, but it was tied to the bed so I would be able to retrieve it. Not a problem until they started changing beds on me.
• There was nothing on there that I was the least bit interested in watching. Or listening to.
• The controls for the bed were built into the hand rails, so they didn't need to be disconnected or reconnected.

None of these connections were a problem until the gals from Physical and Occupational therapy showed up and wanted me to get out of bed. I suspect a lot of this was just protocol. Problem is I don't know how sick I am. I could be well on the healthy side of the hill, but then again I could be walking on a knife edge where one little glitch could send plunging into the abyss. So I didn't complain other than to commiserate with the njurse who had to struggle with warm air hoses. I don't think I needed any of it, but if I was just a little older and/or feebler, they could have been important. The last thing the administration wants to hear about is a catastrophic outcome to a routine procedure. Or a complaint from a Kevin that his feet are cold.

Analog versus Digital Recording

The Real Reason Why Analog Recording Is Better
Freaking Out With Billy Hume

Microwave Oven

1976 Amana Radarange RR-4DW vintage microwave oven
AtomicSpaceJunkVideo

California Bob reports:

This brings back memories. Uncle Eddy brought us one of these from Cleveland. We left Ohio in 1976, so I guess that made him an "early adopter," makes sense as he was fascinated by gizmos. Though very out of character for him to buy anything new. Especially odd cos I seem to recall these were selling for $300 at the time.

I don't recall ours having the "defrost" switch.

I also recall buying my first microwave around 1988 -- I went into a Target and was stunned to see Korean Goldstars selling for like $90.

When we moved into the basement a couple of years ago to get out of the way of the big remodeling, we bought an Emerson microwave from Freddies for about $100.

Resurrecting Old Tape Recordings

How a beef jerky machine saved a lost 1980s dance music classic from oblivion!
creativeplanets

That's the problem with all this new fangled technology, it can't stand the test of time.We should be carving our records in stone, the way the ancients did it, and we have their records, don't we?

Creative Planets has a video of the restored song. You have to go to YouTube to watch it as they have disabled embedding on other web sites. Twerps.

Ribbons of Glass

Corning Glass Ribbon Machine, 1928

Saw this image on Construction Physics and the title intrigued me, so off to Google I go, and look what I found:


The Ribbon Machine: A Corning invention that revolutionized how lightbulbs were made
Corning Incorporated

This machine is 75 feet long. While this particular machine has been retired, there are similar machines still in use. Worldwide, annual light bulb production is around two billion bulbs, a substantial portion these days are LEDs.

Pago Pago

This Is CRAZY! AI Reality Generation on Quest 3 IN REAL TIME!
DiscoVR Tetiana

A Meta Quest 3 Virtual Reality Headset came to me from a friend who didn't want it. Some things have happened and now it's time to put up a post, so I'm looking for a video that will demonstrate just what this thing can do. This is the shortest one I found.

Meta Quest 3 Virtual Reality Headset

I had no interest in it, so I decided to put it up for sale on Ebay. I've got a a bunch of stuff that I would like to get rid of, and if I could sell it on Ebay, that would be great, and I thought selling this headset would be a good way to get my feet wet in the Ebay world.

My post wasn't up for long before I started getting offers. One offer came in that looked pretty good, but by the time I got around to looking at it, it had already expired. Evidently timed offers are now a thing. Whatever. Eventually, like after a week, or so, the headset sold for $300. Cool!

Pago Pago

Now I have to ship it, so I print the labels, take it to UPS to get it boxed up. They take it and pass it to the post office. Somewhere along the way I look at the address. The buyer is in Pago Pago which is half a world away in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean. However, since Pago Pago is in American Samoa, you can mail packages there. Cost of shipping was like $13. I think the cost of boxing it up was like $20.

The idea that you could mail this box halfway around the world for a pittance struck me as miraculous. I was so blown away that I neglected to insure the package. But now it's packaged, labeled and on its way.

Pago Pago Post Office

It's going take a week to get there, but that's okay. However, a month goes by and it still hasn't shown up, so I file a lost mail report with the Post Office. A week later I get a notice that the buyer wants their money back. So maybe it was all an illusion and you can't really send mail to Pago Pago.

I go around and around with Ebay trying to get this deal sorted out. A couple of day later I get a notice that Ebay has refunded the buyer of out of their own pocket. The next day I get a notice that the package has finally arrived and Ebay sends me my money. Kind of weird, but it seems to have worked out.

Pago Pago

Resurrecting an old Hydrofoil

Testing my RARE flying military boat
Luke McFadden

I've seen other videos from Luke, mostly about making repairs on his small commercial fishing boat.

Previous hydrofoil post.

Tinfoil Laser

Building A Simple High Voltage Nitrogen Laser (Ft. StyroPyro + giveaway)
Plasma Channel

I do not know whether this develops enough power to do anything useful, but it is pretty amazing since there is no vacuum chamber and there are no mirrors. The video is 4 years old, so the contest is over and done with. No prizes for me or you.

More Fun with Plumbing

Vermeer Navigator Horizontal Directional Drill

The day after my last plumbing catastrophe I got a card from the city telling me I'm using too much water. Okay, it's not a horrendous amount, maybe one unit (100 cubic feet) more than normal for this time of year. I'm a little sensitive to this kind of thing since I had a irrigation leak a few years ago that cost me $400, so I go looking for a leak, but I'm not finding anything. Turn off the water to the irrigation system and to the house and water meter is still ticking over at the rate of about one-sixth of a gallon a minute. That's 6 gallons an hour, which is like 150 gallons a day, which is 4500 gallons a month which is like 600 cubic feet, or 6 units. Better put a stop to this. So I called a plumbing company to find the leak.

Guy from 3 Mountains Plumbing shows up, bright and cheerful but he isn't going to find the leak, he's not even going to look for it. Fixing a leak in an underground water line is a waste of time, his solution is to simply replace it with a new line, for $10,000. Yowzir!

I didn't like that answer, so I called Cornel's Plumbing. Guy shows up and he's telling us the same story, and the same price. 

Okay, but where's the leak? So I call Leak Locaters to find the leak. I was curious about this because my lawn man tells me they inject Xenon gas into the line and use mystery equipment to find the leak. Well, I gotta see this and the $350 price tag looks like small change compared to what the plumbers are telling me. He shows up with a big van and connects a hose to the water line. There is no fancy gas - he simply pumps the line full of air and then listens for it. He's got some fancy probes from Siemens that he jams in the ground and then uses to listen for air escaping from the water line. He doesn't have to look too hard because we can hear it coming up through the river rock that is right next to the house. I didn't take a picture of the probe because I thought I would surely be able to find it on the web, but I must not be holding my mouth right because I found nothing.

I am slowly adjusting my brain to the idea of forking out ten grand for what should be a two dollar repair, but surely someone has a different option, so I call a third company - 1-800-Plumber+Air. Zori shows up, takes one look at the situation and tells me the same story. He also gives me an estimate to simply do the repair - $2500, but he doesn't recommend it and there is no warranty. 

The problem apparently is that the water line is PVC and it's 30 years old. It's past its use-by date. If I was a younger man I might have tried to tackle it myself, but I'm an old man and I know it would probably take me a month of Sunday's to do it myself, so I tell Cornel's to go ahead and replace the line. (my wife liked Cornel's guy best).

Dirt Vacuum

Four guys show up Monday morning with four trucks and two trailers loaded with equipment. They start with excavating the irrigation valve complex using a dirt vacuum. 

Irrigation Valves

The boxes enclosing the valves were entangled in roots from the surrounding vegetation so they used a sawzall to clear out the roots. 

RIDGID 21893 SR-20 SeekTech Lightweight and Utility Line Receiver/Locator

They used a fancy Ridgid gizmo to get a closer reading on where the underground utility lines are, which is kind of important because all our utilities are underground here - gas, water, power and telecom.

Digi-Trak Falcon F5 Detector

Then they used the Vermeer machine (top) to drill a hole under the driveway and into the crawlspace under the house. They used the Falcon F5 to monitor the drill's position. Once they have the drill all the way in, they hook up the new PEX water line and drag it back through the hole and out to the water meter. Now they repeat the process to run a new line to the irrigation valve complex. Now it's a simple matter (ha. as if.) to connect up the new lines. 5 PM and they are all done.

I filed a claim with my homeowners policy today. We shall see if they send me any money.

The detectors are expensive. The Ridgid probe is like three grand and the Falcon is over ten grand.

Update 2 weeks later - homeowner's insurance paid. The adjuster I talked to seemed really happy that there wasn't any water damage. With a water leak inside the house, I imagine the bill could have been more like a hundred grand instead of just ten.

Igloo White

DARPA's Little Secrets That Changed The World
Curious Droid

Methinks the American defense industry has been going wild for two long. I dunno but I suspect much of that $35 trillion debt we are carrying was incurred to pay for all the wars we've been involved in since WW2.

Infiltration Surveillance Center (ISC) at NKP RTAFB

Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base

Lockheed EC-121 Warning Star

Lockheed OP-2E Neptune of VO-67

Lots of stories about Igloo White out there.

Smartwatch

Samsung Galaxy Watch 4

I have atrial fibrillation (commonly called afib). My heart beat is irregular and sometimes very fast. That's what put me in the hospital 20 years ago. They gave me some drugs and my heart slowed down, but it's still irregular. I'm still taking the drugs. Seems like I am getting worn out more easily these days. It could just be because I am getting old, but rumor has it that some of these drugs might be slowing me down. I wanted to see if my heart was always being flaky, or whether it might sometimes revert to a normal rhythm, so I looked at heart monitors. I was looking for one that could record my heart beat for extended periods, but the more I looked, the less I found. Lots of Smartwatches offer heartrate monitoring, but most of them are for people with normal heart rhythms, you know, exercise fanatics. This Samsung watch will record a rudimentary electro-cardiogram which is step up from simply counting the number of beats. It was only $70, so I thought I would give it a shot.

Samsung 30 second ECG

The watch makes the recording, sends it as a PDF to my Samsung smartphone via Bluetooth, I 'share' it via email but don't send it. Now the mail is in my gmail drafts folder. Open this message on my desktop, download the file to my computer. Open the file, take a screenshot, edit it to remove the extraneous noise and then insert it in this blog post.

I have made a half a dozen recordings and they all show an irregular heartbeat.

Then I come across this cool video on YouTube:

Your Smartwatch is even more incredible than you think
Steve Mould

1969 Vinyl LPs

Steppenwolf - Magic Carpet Ride (Version 1969)
DiscoBar80

Hoo boy, ain't heard this one in a while. I was a senior in high school when this came out. From Wikipedia:

Steppenwolf were a Canadian-American rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1967. The group was founded by singer/rhythm guitarist John Kay, keyboardist Goldy McJohn and drummer Jerry Edmonton, all formerly of the Canadian band the Sparrows. Guitarist Michael Monarch and bassist Rushton Moreve were recruited via notices placed in Los Angeles–area record and musical instrument stores.

Steppenwolf sold over 25 million records worldwide, released seven gold albums and one platinum album, and had 13 Billboard Hot 100 singles, of which seven were Top 40 hits, including three top 10 successes: "Born to Be Wild", "Magic Carpet Ride" and "Rock Me". Steppenwolf enjoyed worldwide success from 1968 to 1972, but clashing personalities led to the end of the core lineup. From 1980 to 2018, John Kay was the only original member involved, having been the lead singer since 1967. The band was called John Kay & Steppenwolf from 1980 to 2018. In Canada, they had four top 10 songs, 12 top 40 and 14 in the top 100.

LP Storage

Reminds me that a friend of mine and I went to visit another friend. We were in a room and along one wall were cabinets full of vinyl records. It was maybe half as tall as the cabinet in the picture, but is was at least as long, maybe longer. Whatever, it was big. I don't think I have ever seen such a large collection all concentrated in one place. I don't think there was any purpose to our visit. We were just stopping by to say hello. It didn't occur to me till much later, like ten years ago, that that pile of records represented a small fortune. Say there's 30 disks in each cube, times six cubes long by four cubes high by $4 per disk is like $700. And this was back when gold was $35 an ounce and used car cost $100. Scale that $700 up to today's value and it comes to $70 grand. I suspect that the reason I didn't attach any significance to this is that such a large concentration of money was an alien concept (beware! here there be monsters!).  I didn't attach any significance to it at the time, but I squirreled that memory away and kept it, and 50 years later I pulled it out and realized what it was.

Via The Village Hemorrhoid

Update a week later. Corrected the price of an LP.

Lindybeige Goes To Sheffield

Ancient power-hammers and the city that put steel in the world
Lindybeige

Lindybeige is a character. I like the way he ties multiple subjects together: history, geography, economics, technology and even working conditions. From 6:55 to 11:20 he talks about his sponser. It's a little long, but entertaining. At 11:55 we have this line:

"gravity is kept switched on at all times"

Map of the Don Catchment showing the River Don, the city of Sheffield, and the distribution of weirs.

P-61 Black Widow

The Most Chilling Plane of WW2
Only Planes

This night fighter airplane was developed almost entirely during WW2. It only came into service in the last year of the war. It was the first American aircraft to carry its own intercept radar. Only 700 were built, unlike the 10,000 or so of each of the models of conventional fighters built by both all countries.

Black Widow Radar Origins

In August 1940, sixteen months before the United States entered the war, the U.S. Air Officer in London, Lieutenant General Delos C. Emmons, was briefed on British research in radar ("Radio Detection And Ranging" as it was then known), which had been underway since 1935, and had played an important role in the nation's defense against the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain. General Emmons was informed of the new Airborne Intercept radar (AI for short), a self-contained unit that could be installed in aircraft, and operated independently of ground stations. In September 1940, the Tizard Mission traded British research, including the cavity magnetron that would make self-contained interception radar installations practicable, for American production.

Anode Block of Original Cavity Magnetron
About 10 centimeters in diameter

The Tizard Mission

The Tizard Mission, officially the British Technical and Scientific Mission, was a delegation from the United Kingdom that visited the United States during World War II to share secret research and development (R&D) work that had military applications. It received its popular name from the programme's instigator, Henry Tizard, a British scientist and chairman of the Aeronautical Research Committee, which had orchestrated the development of radar.

The mission travelled to the U.S. in September 1940 during the Battle of Britain. They conveyed a number of British technical and scientific secrets with the objective of securing U.S. assistance in sustaining the war effort and obtaining the industrial resources to exploit the military potential of these technologies, which Britain itself could not fully use, due to the immediate demands of other war-related production.

Referring to one such British secret, a device known as a resonant cavity magnetron, American historian James Phinney Baxter III later wrote, "When the members of the Tizard Mission brought one to America in 1940, they carried the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores." The mission also opened up channels of communication for jet engine and atomic bomb development, leading to the British contribution to the Manhattan Project, and catalyzed Allied technological cooperation during World War II.

US Navy Experimental Hydrofoil Project

This Ship Could Fly: What Happened To The Plainview?
Mustard

I remember hearing about this back when I was kid though my information was a bit sparse. I always wondered what happened to this project. Well, now I know.

The big thing I got from this video is you can design dynamically stable hyrdofoils, or you can design one that is not stable and then add a computer to constantly adjust the foils. A stable design seems like the way to go. By adding a computer you are just asking for trouble. Problem was, the stable design wasn't suitable for the Navy's purposes.