NASA photo of the day

Here:

Sunset over South America

Manufacturing Cool Stuff

The Washington Post's Thomas Heath tours Prototype Productions, Inc. in Northern Virginia:

Until recently, the company was a boutique manufacturer. Other companies and universities and the government would come to PPI with plans and schematics and say, “Can you build this?”
For that, PPI earns a fee. Sometimes, it takes equity in return for its manufacturing. It owns pieces of eight other companies.
PPI is one of the most offbeat companies I have written about.
Co-owners Joe and Italo Travez, brothers born in Ecuador, have built PPI over two decades into a think tank for engineers.
Their business plan for the past two decades has been “have a really cool place with really cool people.”
It’s cool, all right.
I felt like I was walking into a Brookstone store when I took a tour of PPI’s 30,000-foot Ashburn headquarters recently. The company has another 20,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Rockville.
One wing had tables strewn with a super-engineered Patriot missile rocket nozzle housings, thumbprint readers and a model for something called a Zipnut for the International Space Station. A white board had phrases such as “Hubble telescope” and “driver vision enhancement” scrawled on it. A nearby wall had photos of the solar-powered car one of PPI’s engineers drove across sunny Australia. There was a deconstructed rifle in its various parts.

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: Lasers could replace spark plugs in car engines, at the BBC:

A team from Romania and Japan has now demonstrated a system that can focus two or three laser beams into an engine's cylinders at variable depths.
That increases the completeness of combustion and neatly avoids the issue of degradation with time.
However, it requires that lasers of high pulse energies are used; just as with spark plugs, a great deal of energy is needed to cause ignition of the fuel.
"In the past, lasers that could meet those requirements were limited to basic research because they were big, inefficient, and unstable," said Takunori Taira of the National Institutes of Natural Sciences in Okazaki, Japan.

Spark plugs only ignite the fuel mixture very near the spark gap

"Nor could they be located away from the engine, because their powerful beams would destroy any optical fibres that delivered light to the cylinders."
The team has been developing a new approach to the problem: lasers made of ceramic powders that are pressed into spark-plug sized cylinders.
These ceramic devices are lasers in their own right, gathering energy from compact, lower-power lasers that are sent in via optical fibre and releasing it in pulses just 800 trillionths of a second long.
Unlike the delicate crystals typically used in high-power lasers, the ceramics are more robust and can better handle the heat within combustion engines.
The team is in discussions to commercialise the technology with Denso, a major automobile component manufacturer.

Earth Day Image

From NASA:

Alaska’s Susitna Glacier

Textile Orchestra

Via the Dish, a Brazilian textile plant set to music:


Valsa das Máquinas, Paramount Têxteis from grafikonstruct on Vimeo.

How the Brain Changes Time

The New Yorker on brain research by David Eagleman (via Ritholtz):

The brain is a remarkably capable chronometer for most purposes. It can track seconds, minutes, days, and weeks, set off alarms in the morning, at bedtime, on birthdays and anniversaries. Timing is so essential to our survival that it may be the most finely tuned of our senses. In lab tests, people can distinguish between sounds as little as five milliseconds apart, and our involuntary timing is even quicker. If you’re hiking through a jungle and a tiger growls in the underbrush, your brain will instantly home in on the sound by comparing when it reached each of your ears, and triangulating between the three points. The difference can be as little as nine-millionths of a second.
Yet “brain time,” as Eagleman calls it, is intrinsically subjective. “Try this exercise,” he suggests in a recent essay. “Put this book down and go look in a mirror. Now move your eyes back and forth, so that you’re looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye again. When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location. But here’s the kicker: you never see your eyes move.” There’s no evidence of any gaps in your perception—no darkened stretches like bits of blank film—yet much of what you see has been edited out. Your brain has taken a complicated scene of eyes darting back and forth and recut it as a simple one: your eyes stare straight ahead. Where did the missing moments go?

The question raises a fundamental issue of consciousness: how much of what we perceive exists outside of us and how much is a product of our minds? Time is a dimension like any other, fixed and defined down to its tiniest increments: millennia to microseconds, aeons to quartz oscillations. Yet the data rarely matches our reality. The rapid eye movements in the mirror, known as saccades, aren’t the only things that get edited out. The jittery camera shake of everyday vision is similarly smoothed over, and our memories are often radically revised. What else are we missing? When Eagleman was a boy, his favorite joke had a turtle walking into a sheriff’s office. “I’ve just been attacked by three snails!” he shouts. “Tell me what happened,” the sheriff replies. The turtle shakes his head: “I don’t know, it all happened so fast.”

Very interesting.  When I crashed out the Focus this winter, time moved very slowly.  I thought at one point that I wasn't actually going to hit the pole I had seen coming because it seemed like it was taking too long.  I hit it a little later. Very hard.  I was still going about 30 or 35 when I hit it.  It seemed like I was doing 10.

Free Trade and the Near Extinction of the Buffalo

A pile of American bison skulls in tht mid-1870s (Image via Wikipedia)

Olaf Storbeck on an interesting study from M. Scott Taylor about the extinction of the American Bison:

Never before in the history of mankind had humans destroyed so much nature in such a brief period of time. Over about 15 years, the American bison was hunted to extinction. Up to 1870, 10 to 15 million bison had been living in the American West. Less then two decades later, about 100 animals remained.
For more than 100 years academics have been looking at the causes of this tragedy. Until now, most researchers blamed the American army, the failure of the federal government and the triumph of the railway.
However, all these explanations fall short, as M. Scott Taylor, an economics professor affiliated with the University of Calgary, shows in a fascinating paper.
According to Taylor, the most important driver of the extinction of the American bison was technical innovation, globalisation and unfettered capitalism.

Yet one more example of the effects of unregulated capitalism run amok in the second half of the 19th century in the United States.  Republicans seem to consider this the golden age of America, but I think we are better off with a regulated economy, provided the regulations aren't routinely undermined.

Severstal Reinvests in American Steel Mills

Fortune Magazine features photos from the River Rouge steel mill, formerly part of Ford's massive historic River Rouge facility.  Severstal is modernizing that facility and their mill in Columbus, MS. 




A suited-up blast furnace operator prepares to retrieve a sample of molten iron as it's being tapped from the "C" blast furnace, which was rebuilt in 2007.

 


The exit of the basic oxygen furnace vessel, where molten pig iron is poured, after processing, into a transfer ladle vat.


 Overall, pretty cool.  I'll probably come back to the Rouge plant at some point.

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's Link: Video: Robotic Swiss Quadrocopters hold Their Own At Tennis, at POPSCI.  As the story relates:

Quadrocopters are already accomplished piano players and Kinect-assisted navigators. Now they are playing tennis.
ETH Zurich's Flying Machine Arena hosted a quadrocopter tennis match, involving a human-robot volley, a doubles match and an impressive robot-to-robot juggling act. The robots were outfitted with tennis rackets, allowing them to fly toward the ball and return a human's serve. Watch it below.
Mark Müller, Sergei Lupashin and Raffaello D'Andrea conducted this experiment, part of ETH Zurich's ongoing project examining adaptive high-performance maneuvers. The team was also responsible for teaching a quadrocopter to play a Christmas carol last year.

Here's the video:

35 Amazing Aerial Photos

Here via the Dish:

Location: Center-Pivot irrigation, Maan, Jordan

Steel Making

The Aurora

Via the Dish:


The Aurora from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.

NASA photo of the Day

From Friday:

Auroral Substorm over Yellowknife
Image Credit & Copyright: Kwon, O Chul (TWAN) Explanation: Intense auroral activity flooded the night with shimmering colors on February 24, captured here from a lodge near the city of Yellowknife in northern Canada. The stunning sequence (left to right) of three all-sky exposures, taken at 30 second intervals, shows rapid changes in dancing curtains of northern lights against a starry background. What makes the northern lights dance? Measurements by NASA's fleet of THEMIS spacecraft indicate that these explosions of auroral activity are driven by sudden releases of energy in the Earth's magnetosphere called magnetic reconnection events. The reconnection events release energy when magnetic field lines snap like rubber bands, driving charged particles into the upper atmosphere. Stretching into space, these reconnection events occur in the magnetosphere on the Earth's night side at a distance about 1/3 of the way to the Moon.


Tomorrow's picture: naturally so

Hulett Iron Ore Unloaders

Information on the Hulett Iron Ore Unloaders which showed up in the intro to Major League:

The Huletts were invented in 1898 by George H. Hulett, who was born in Conneaut, Ohio, but grew up in Cleveland. The Huletts were revolutionary at the time, greatly speeding up the process used to unload lake ore carriers. According to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History: “They could completely unload a ship in 13 hours. Earlier, the same task had taken nearly a week. In their years of service, it is estimated that they unloaded some 100 million tons of material.”

The use of the Huletts spread to other areas around the Great Lakes, with many of them around Lake Erie in the Ports of Cleveland, Conneaut, Ashtabula, Huron, Toledo, and Lorain. The Huletts also played a big part in the development of the iron ore industry – and other related industries – in Ohio. Huletts were not suited for use near ocean waters, due to the rising and falling tides.

The Huletts became increasingly obsolete in the 1980s as the Great Lakes fleets converted to self-unloading ships. Cleveland last used a Hulett in 1992.

Even more here and here.

The Last Action Hero

Via Balloon Juice, the Badass of the Week:

But Hideaki Akaiwa still wasn't done yet.
Now, I'm sure you're wondering what the fuck is more intense than commandeering a wet suit, face-punching a tsunami and dragging your wife of two decades out of the flooded wreckage of your home, but, no shit, it gets even better. You see, Hideaki's mother also lived in Ishinomaki, and she was still unaccounted for. I think you all know where this is going.
First, Hideaki searched around the evacuation shelters and other areas, looking for his mom among the ragtag groups of survivors who had been lucky enough to flee to higher ground. She might have escaped, and he needed to find her. Now. He ran through the city like some post-apocalyptic action hero, desperately trying to track her down, but when a couple of days went by without any sign of her, he knew what he had to do. The water had only receded a few inches by this point, the rescue teams weren't working quickly enough for his tastes, and Hideaki Akaiwa fucking once again took matters into his own hands – rushing back into the waterlogged city looking for his mom.

Read the whole thing, it is amazing.  Saving your wife and your mom, not a bad accomplishment.

Supermoon Photo gallery

From NASA: