spacecowb0y

Crayon Physics Deluxe is a sequel to the popular freeware game Crayon Physics. Or you can think of it as the game I would have created if I would have had more than 7 days to do it. Way more than 7 days. More like 7 months or 17 months.

Anyway Crayon Physics Deluxe is a 2D physics puzzle game, in which you get to experience what it would be like if your drawings would be magically transformed into real physical objects. Solve puzzles with your artistic vision and creative use of physics.

You can read more about the game from my blog. Also you can test the original prototype which is freely available. But please understand that the prototype isn’t a demo version of this game and doesn’t reflect the quality of Crayon Physics Deluxe.

First introduced in 2005, the Rip Saw is about to hit the market with a $200,000 price tag. The custom-built UGV can hit 0-60 in 3.5 seconds, go 80 mph, and can maneuver over any surface or terrain a tank can. And the video is pretty good; watch as it drives through a barn as if it were the cardboard boxen your handset came in.

The privately-funded Rip Saw was first built by the Howe brothers for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. Though the Rip Saw didn't win, its video certainly turned some heads, enough to find funding to build more than one. I normally don't get too excited about military shit like this, but any machine that can obliterate an wood shack with ease and turn donuts on snow wins my heart. Check out the 2005 teaser vid to see what i mean.

It may not be much to look at, but PC Microworks' new 17-inch Black-Hawk XR5 laptop certainly looks like it has the specs to get the job done, including room for three SATA 300 hard drives and a pair of NVIDIA's new Geforce Go 8800GTX graphics units in SLI mode. Otherwise, you can expect a range of configurable options, including your choice of Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad processors, up to 4GB of 800 MHz DDR2 memory, and an optional Blu-ray burner, to name a few. Look for this one to start shipping sometime next month, with PC MicroWork's default system setting you back $2,779 (although some of those aforementioned options will cost you considerably more than that).

Google's new calculator is a fun diversion, with several undocumented new features. Here's a few.

- How long can you play a 30GB iPod without repeating a song? Answer: 18.2 days
- How much hard drive space does one hour of 128kbps MP3s consume? Answer: 56.25 megabytes
- How many seconds in a decade? Answer: 315,569,260
- 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit in Celsius? Answer: 37 degrees
- How many feet in a smoot? Answer: 5.58 (via Ryan)
- What's the answer to life, the universe and everything? Answer: 42
- What's the answer to life, the universe and everything multiplied by the speed of light divided by three teaspoons? Answer: 8.51523871 × 10¹⁴ m^-2 s^-1
- What's the speed of a Delorean going back in time? Answer: 47,600,819,200 m³ kg/s⁴ (via Cam)

For 65 years, this Second World War fighter had lain hidden under the surface of a beach where it crash-landed.

Just a short distance above it, holidaying families have built sandcastles, strolled and swum, all unaware of its existence.

But now the P-38 Lightning has re-emerged after freak weather conditions caused the sands to shift and expose its rusting frame.

The U.S. aircraft - with its distinctive "twinboom" design - was discovered on the North Wales coast, but the location is being kept secret in case it is targeted by looters.

Its remains were spotted by a family in July, but it was thought to be an unmanned drone used for aerial target practice from the 1950s.

However, a local aviation enthusiast recognised it from a newspaper photo and contacted a group of U.S. aircraft historians.

The Lightning has been identified using its serial number and other records. It was built in 1941 and reached Britain in 1942 before flying combat missions along the Dutch-Belgian coast.

It was flown by Second Lieutenant Robert F. "Fred" Elliott, 24, from North Carolina.

During a gunnery practice mission on September 27, 1942, a fuel supply problem forced him to make an emergency landing on the nearest suitable place - the Welsh beach.

His belly landing in shallow water sheared off a wingtip, but he escaped unhurt.

Unfortunately, less than three months later, the veteran of more than ten combat missions was shot down over Tunisia. His plane and body were never found.

The recovery group plans to collaborate with British museum experts in recovering the nearly intact but fragile aircraft next spring.

The English language is under assault by stupid people who use words they don't understand, and is defended by pompous asses who like to correct those people. We're not sure who to side with.

So, here are some words that you'll see used incorrectly on a daily basis, and a helpful guide as to just how big of a dick you'd have to be to correct people on it. We have also included many pictures of these words being read by women with large boobs.

Ironic
People think it means:
Any kind of amusing coincidence.

Actually means:
An outcome that is the opposite of what you'd expect.

So, if a porn star moved to Virgin, Utah, that would be ironic. If the same porn star bought a house in Boner Knob, Montana that would not be ironic.

Should you care?
We realize this is a technical point. But, it's almost worth taking a stand because the word has been abused to the point that it can mean anything.

"She always said she wanted to marry a dentist! And then she married Bob, who is a dentist! Isn't that ironic?"

"I went on my cigarette break, but there was a No Smoking sign! Isn't that ironic?"

"I just pooped in your aquarium! Isn't that ironic?"

We have to draw the line somewhere, don't we?

Pristine
People think it means:
"Spotless" or "as good as new."

Actually means:
"Ancient, primeval; in a state virtually unchanged from the original."

It's therefore perfectly possible to have a pristine mountain of fossilized brontosaurus shit, but if you were to buff that mountain to a lustrous shine, it would no longer be pristine.

Should you care?
The meanings are close enough that correcting somebody sounds like grammar Nazi hair-splitting. That's a shame, because there were lots of words that mean "clean" but none that have the exact same meaning as "pristine."

If you use pristine correctly yourself, you probably won't land yourself in too much trouble, unless someone buys your "pristine" house on eBay without realizing that it's an authentic 14th century dung hovel complete with never-been-used plague rats.

Bemused
People think it means:
Mildly amused.

Actually means:
Bewildered or confused.

If you were to say "I was bemused by your dead baby joke," you wouldn't be saying the joke was funny. You'd be saying that you completely failed to understand it. You were following the story up to and including the bit about the trowel, but you'd lost the thread way before the Ku Klux masturbation climax.

Should you care?
It's hard to blame people for getting this one wrong, the word just sounds like it means, "sort of amused." We blame the people who originally invented the word. You should probably let the new meaning take over unless, you know, you're a dick.

An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.

Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).

In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. "Being poor sucks," Lisi says. "It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month."

Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.

Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.

The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego.

He has high hopes that his new theory could provide what he says is a "radical new explanation" for the three decade old Standard Model, which weaves together three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay.

The reason for the excitement is that Lisi's model also takes account of gravity, a force that has only successfully been included by a rival and highly fashionable idea called string theory, one that proposes particles are made up of minute strings, which is highly complex and elegant but has lacked predictions by which to do experiments to see if it works.

Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says "I think our universe is this beautiful shape."

What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8.

Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"

What Lisi had realised was that he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8's 248 points. What remained was 20 gaps which he filled with notional particles, for example those that some physicists predict to be associated with gravity.

Physicists have long puzzled over why elementary particles appear to belong to families, but this arises naturally from the geometry of E8, he says. So far, all the interactions predicted by the complex geometrical relationships inside E8 match with observations in the real world. "How cool is that?" he says.

Now that they're out, we bet you're wondering about the performance of that pair of mid-range, ATI Radeon cards announced this morning. According to TG Daily and just about everyone else, the Nvidia GeForce 8800GT is still the best performing midrange graphics card on the market (for a few bucks more, if you can find it). But if you like the performance of the Radeon HD 2900 XT, you'll be happy with your lower priced, but similar performing Radeon HD 3870 according to HotHardware. They go on to call the HD 3850 "quite strong" when compared against mid-range cards like the Radeon 2600 XT and GeoForce 8600 GTS. In fact, Custom PC says that the 3850 "blows both of these cards away." Thanks to the new 55nm manufacturing process, both cards kept power consumption, temperature, and noise levels "way down" in comparison. Lots to love from the benchmarking gang. Only thing left to do now is to track them down for that $179 and $219 MSRP.

pathogen @ Nov 15th 2007 12:41PM

Yes but will it tell us the way to candy mountain?

So, what we can expect from a tube amplifier worth US $55,000 per pair? Obviously, an unrivaled blend of power and performance. The NAT Audio Magma tube amplifier is billed as the most powerful single-ended tube amplifier on the market. It throws 160 watts of pure power in the 10-10,000 Hz range. To blast this power, Magma makes use of three different tubes, the 6N1P-EV, the 6N30P-DR, and the Eimac 450TH. The powerful amplifier utilizes an unusual direct-heated NOS amp design that runs into a DC-coupled all-tube circuit. Other salient specs include a low global feedback configuration with damping factor of 20, power supply resulting to over 500 joules of energy storage. Weighing at 88 lbs, the NAT Audio Magma tube amplifier is perfect for those who are addicted to very, very loud music.

Free DVD MP3 Ripper can extract audio from DVD, VCD/SVCD and MPEG (MPEG-1, MPEG-2) files into MP3 which can be played in MP3 Players. The program is a freeware and does not contain any form of malware, including but not limited to: spyware, viruses, trojans and backdoors.

A dramatic, pendant lampshade, shaped into a classic image of guilt and morality. From a distance, The Fall of the Damned appears to be an organic and intricately textured ornament. Upon closer inspection it is revealed as a mass of naked bodies, reminiscent of Dante and Rubens, fused together in agonizing beauty.

The amazingly complex shape of this limited edition lampshade was made possible via the help of Materialise's MGX technology. Using innovative 3D printing, digitally created designs are 'printed' with a laser, adding layer upon layer until an intricately detailed piece is formed.

A young New Zealand inventor has found a solution to the unpalatable problem of a can of warm beer - a device that turns a tepid beverage into a cold drink within seconds.

And the portable gadget, which has a cooling capacity almost four times that of regular ice with the advantage that it doesn't water down your drink, could spell the end of lugging a heavy chilly bin to the beach.

The penny dropped for Kent Hodgson, a 22-year-old student from Albany, while having a few quiet ones around a barbecue with his mates early this year.

"We brought along a box of beers which was warm so we put them in the freezer to cool them down.

"I thought how cool would it be if we could replicate that. I mean, no one likes warm beer or a diluted drink and I was inspired."

Mr Hodgson calls his invention Huski, which is among the 30 exhibits from top graduates of Massey University's Auckland School of Design at the three-day Design Exposure 2007 beginning today at Britomart Pavilion.

He explained the rapid cooling beverage process he mastered as being "extremely simple".

"You have plastic cooling cells which are pressed down into the dock which houses the liquid carbon dioxide. The liquid CO2 expands and is pressurised into dry ice in the base of the cooling cells ... in a moment.

"You then pop it into your drink and then proceed from there as you normally would."

With a surface temperature of minus 78.5C, dry ice has a cooling capacity almost four times that of the same amount of regular ice.

"The cooling power is almost instant and is utilised for several minutes and it doesn't dilute the drink like ice would," said Mr Hodgson.

One canister can fill thirty 330 ml bottles at a cost of 7c each, which makes it an ideal alternative for those who don't want to lug around a chilly bin during the summer.

Mr Hodgson said he was looking at patenting the Huski, which he expects to retail at around $50.

Need to kill the data on a hard drive you have lying around but don't wanna bother hooking it up to a PC? Wiebetech's pocket-sized eRazer plugs directly into lonely hard drives and genocides whatever naughtiness you have have etched into it at a rate of 35MB/s, leaving a 250GB hard drive scorched earth in under two hours.

There are two versions, both the latter of which meets DoD HDD sanitation specfications: The $99 Standard hooks up to IDE drives and performs a single pass, while the $150 pro model jacks into SATA drives and sports a multi-pass mode for the super paranoid.

Panasonic's newest Toughbook Y7, T7 and W7 are designed to combat the Homer in you: that is, they're for people who work with sensitive data yet are prone to dropping laptops, spilling drinks and generally messing stuff up. Forget accelerometers, the hard drives in this can take a serious hit at 2.5 feet and on 26 different axes. The LCDs, typically shatter-prone glass, can survive a one-foot drop without cracking. As far as proofing against the inevitable beverage malfunction, the Toughbook can take over six ounces of liquid continuously, meaning if you spill half a can of soda on that sucker, you can pour an equal amount of water through there to flush out the bad stuff. Just pour slow: if the drain backs up, you can still cause damage.

All three systems sport a 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, between 1GB and 2GB of RAM, Bluetooth, an SD card slot and a shock-mounted 80GB hard drive. They are all mobile broadband "ready," which means integrated antenna and Mini PCI slot for the wireless WAN card of your choice.

These tough little buggers are still mainly geared toward military and industrial customers, but if you are interested, pricing is on the high side: roughly $2,400 for the Y7, and around $2,100 for the W7 and T7.