April 21st 2009
Daylight-savings clock
The Ora ilLegale clock tips to one side for an excessively elegant solution to the minutely irritating problem of daylight savings time, but it has to eliminate all its numbers to do so.
Archive for April, 2009
April 21st 2009
A new way to make methanol?
April 20, 2009 Scientists at the Singapore-based Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) have made an unprecedented breakthrough in transforming carbon dioxide, a common greenhouse gas, into methanol, a widely used form of industrial feedstock and clean-burning biofuel. Using “organocatalysts”, researchers activated carbon dioxide in a mild and non-toxic process to produce the more useful chemical compound.
I don’t really get this. The article says noting of the energy involved in the whole process… how then can anyone tell this is a breakthrough? I can imagine this (kind of) reaction taking place, but the important part is the energy efficiency, is it not?
April 20th 2009
Cold Fusion… back again?
Is cold fusion back again? Could is really be true? :-)
it would, of course, be absolutely stunning if it where true… For now, I keep my fingers crossed…
April 20th 2009
Oops….
Preparing for English-speaking visitors, a restaurant in China recently ran its name through an online translator and purchased and mounted a large sign. So far, so good. But sometimes the web is congested and server lookups fail. And then, if English isn’t your thing…
April 16th 2009
Solar power beamed down from space
The agreement calls for the utility to purchase 200 megawatts of electricity once the company starts beaming power down from Earth orbit beginning in 2016
This seems to be very good news… it would give us a new and apparently cheap source of renewable energy!
April 15th 2009
Perfect example
I’m always having trouble explaining to people why I don’t readily believe in anything outside the ‘normal’ scientific boundaries. There are a lot of crackpot-theories out there… including Intelligent Design, Morphic fields, anything, it would seem, that has pictures of dolphins anywhere on the site (or pyramids, in multiple colors!) :-), etc, etc.
The argument I’m mostly trying to make, is that because ’science’ in general achieves such astounding results, most of it must be true at least some degree. If Masaru Emoto where to predict, to some accuracy, anyway, the shape of the crystals of water, he might have a point…
I thought of all this as I read this article:
Quote:
Lately, though, string math has helped explain a couple of surprising experiments creating ‘perfect liquids’ at cosmic extremes of hot and cold.
Admittedly, I don’t understand all of it. But if a theory is this accurate at predicting results… it must be true at some level!
April 9th 2009
Spectaculair images from outer space…
Nice example: Earth setting on the moon…
More can be found here.
Some amazing pictures can be found there.