Kid Proofing the Home Theater

Here's some good ideas from the guys at Wired.

I need to work on a few of these myself.  I'm afraid to say that right now my Sony SXRD TV and all my gear is inhabiting an old coffee table I painted black - not the most kid proof of furniture.  Of course, I take the approach that it is better to house-proof the kids than kid-proof the house, but 1 and 4 year olds are mighty curious.  The worst part is that the TV is upstairs where they also spend a lot of time playing.  And as they grow older and can play by themselves, the possibility of something bad happening to the electronics and kids will go up.  So, looks like I'll have to get off my duff and fix this.  Thanks to Wired, now I have a good idea what to do.

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It's about time

We've been needing this for years.

One of the U.K.'s top nuclear officials said today that she was told the U.S. will okay plans to build the first nuclear power plants since the accident at Three Mile Island nearly three decades ago. Lady Barbara Thomas Judge, chair of the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority, said that the chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission informed her that the NRC will approve three applications for new nuclear reactors that it's currently considering.

One of them is for the Shearon Harris plant just down the street.  Of course, it will be another three years before the paperwork necessary for the approval is even ready.  Not to mention the actual approval and building.  If it is ready before 2020 I'll be surprised.

It's also interesting to note the recurrent mentions of the Three Mile Island incident, as well as the Chernoybl accident.  And, of course, they had to mention global warming and climate change.  But, if that demagoguery is going to get us some cheaper, cleaner energy, then I am willing to put up with it for now.

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Killing pain - with mirrors?

Just goes to show you how little we know about the brain.

Dr. Jack Tsao, a Navy neurologist with the Uniform Services University, was looking for ways to help soldiers like Paupore (who lost a leg in Iraq). He remembered reading in graduate school a paper by Dr. V.S. Ramachandran that talked about an unusual treatment for amputees suffering "phantom limb pain," using a simple $20 mirror.

The mirror tricks the brain into "seeing" the amputated leg, overriding mismatched nerve signals.

Here's how it works: The patient sits on a flat surface with his or her remaining leg straight out and then puts a 6-foot mirror lengthwise facing the limb. The patient moves the leg, flexing it, and watches the movement in the mirror. The reflection creates the illusion of two legs moving together.

The brain thinks that it is actually moving both legs, and seeing 'success' from the mirror, interprets the leg as existing.  But, it isn't getting any pain information from the leg, so everything must be OK and the phantom pain goes away.  That is just crazy.

It seems like every time we think we are getting a handle on what goes on in the brain something like this pops up.  It strains the imagination to think about what we will learn over the coming decades.

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High Tech Salvage

Wired has an amazing story about a salvage crew rescuing a car carrier off the coast of Alaska (Warning:  includes language you would expect from a salvage crew off the coast of Alaska). 

Having been in the Navy, I am semi-familiar with what they do, but I did not realize how much they rely on computers and 3d modeling.  The salvage team takes a computer expert with them to the salvage site in order to build an exact 3d replica of the ship so that they can model the effects of pumping out water, or moving water around in the tanks.  This way they can re-float the ship with the least amount of work possible.

As the Ship's Diving Officer on a submarine, I was responsible for making sure that the sub had the proper amount of ballast on board.  Ideally, a sub, once submerged, should have neutral buoyancy, meaning it does not tend to sink or float.  This can be very difficult if the sub has been in port for a while, taken on stores, added more people, pumped out tanks, loaded weapons, or anything else that can change the weight of the boat.  Now I'm jealous - all I had to calculate all this was an Excel spreadsheet.

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Building a new box - Part 2

Click 'more' to see the build.  Here's a picture of my helper to get you started.




more...

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Building a new box - Part 1

For Christmas I built myself a new computer.  I had been struggling along with a Pentium 4 that I had built years ago and decided it was time to upgrade.  Plus, this was a good time to do it as the new Intel Core 2 Quads were reasonably priced and nVidia had finally released a decent video card in the $200-$250 range.  I do my fair share of gaming, as well as some 3d design and modeling, so I needed something that could handle the graphics load.  Also, I wanted to try my hand at overclocking, so I picked parts with those requirements in mind while keeping an eye on the bottom line.


more...

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The good the enemy of the better?

I thought we already had a catch phrase for this, and that phrase is 'group think'.

This is a problem that has troubled the business world, and their have been techniques developed to help prevent it.  Take brainstorming for example.  The traditional way to brainstorm is to get a piece of chart paper or find a whiteboard and start writing down everyone's thoughts on a given topic.  The problem is that people get focused on what others have said and stop thinking for themselves.  What is already written on the board becomes the sum of the knowledge of the group, although there is more still sitting in people's heads - they just don't know it because they are focused on what has come before.

In order to prevent this, brainstorming has become a private/public affair.  First, write down privately what your thoughts are on a topic.  Then everyone reveals what they have written.  This removes the tendency to get focused on one idea, and allows more of the 'problem space', as the article puts it, to be explored.  After the public round, you may repeat the process, as the revelations may have kicked off other ideas in people's minds.

And, this is why large corporations keep design bureaus in several different countries.  They can share new ideas, but don't have the interconnections necessary to get caught up in group think.  For example, in addition to chip design in the U.S., Intel also has a design bureau in Israel.

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The Navy of tomorrow

Is going to have some pretty cool toys to play with - especially this one.

So, this thing has a range of 200 miles, and the projectile reaches speeds of 8000 feet per second.  My question is, how do you control it?  That has to be a lot of G forces generated when that thing launches.  Can a GPS module handle it?  And what about whatever moving parts are necessary to keep the projectile on target?  How do you keep them from being sheered off?  A 200 mile range is great, but it's useless if you can't put ordinance on target. 

There is some speculation that some kind of sabot round would be used, and I think that makes a lot of sense.  A sabot is essentially a missile in a missile.  It was originally designed to defeat tanks, where the external sleeve would expend itself on the tank's armored shell, blowing a hole in it that the inner projectile would slide through so it could explode on the inside.  In this case, the sabot would be used during the launch, ablating and expending itself during acceleration, leaving the internal missile unharmed and able to complete it's mission.

via Hotair

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Ray Tracing - the holy grail of 3D gaming

I think TG Daily is being a little short sighted here.

The work this guy is doing is amazing.  I have been playing around with ray tracing and photo-realistic images since POV-Ray 1.0.  During college, I would create a scene and set it rendering before I hit the rack - with the hope that it would be done in the morning.  Now, much more complex scenes can be done in real time.

Anyway, ray tracing, like most physics algorithms, require a massive number of parallel computations to be performed.  This can be done in multi-core CPU's.  It could also be done in the graphics processor.

Both nVida and ATI (AMD) have released programming modules to use their graphics card as general purpose massively parallel calculators.  They are both also looking at how their GPUs can be used for physics calculations.  I think I see some synergy here.  What if you did that ray tracing on the 128 stream processors in a nVidia 8 series graphics cards instead of on a measly 8 CPUs?  If the frames per second truly scale with the number of processors, then it should be no problem.  Plus, look at something like the Cell processor in the PS3.  It already has 8 cores, and the Cell can be scaled quickly to 16 or 32.

With the combination of these two trends, I would say the future of 3D gaming is looking bright.

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My next car

Will have to be one of these.

I first saw the Dodge Viper in person at the Naval Academy in 1991 when Dodge had brought one to the yard for an engineering conference.  I already owned every car magazine that I could find that had an article on this luscious roadster in it.  Of course, at $50k it was a little out of my price range (Midshipman pay was $543 a month).

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