Cool Pics Archive #18

To paraphrase Ford's famous marketing line: "Microsoft Research has a Better Idea..." at least when it comes to the presentation of the periodic table. According to Mohd Abubakr, the table can be improved by arranging it in circular form where it gives a sense of the relative size of atoms. The closer to the center of the chart, the smaller the atom. Maybe he never saw this Mayan format periodic table.

10/12/2009

Bureaucracies are great... if you are a bureaucrat. For the rest of us, they are an impediment to progress. This is the FCC Rulemaking Flow Chart constructed by Mitchell Lazarus is part of his "Radio's Regulatory Roadblocks" article in the August 2009 Spectrum. It is very well written and insightful - well worth your time to read. To be fair, the innate crippling rest momentum of bureaucracies does also help to prevent radical policies from getting whisked into being under the cover of darkness.

9/14/2009

From a collection of images called "Inside Ball Aerospace" is this photo of the WorldView-2 satellite owned by DigitalGlobe. It will be used by Google Earth and other companies to provide images with resolutions down to 1.8 m (probably better resolution for sale to the DoD & other 3-letter agencies). There is also an 800-W speaker array for subjecting components to acoustic rigors of launch vehicle loads; it surely puts your system to shame.

8/17/2009

It was during this speech to Congress, on May 25, 1961, that U.S. President John F. Kennedy threw down the gauntlet, "First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish." The rest, as they say, is history.

7/20/2009

 

Recognize anyone in this photo? If so, then you are either an avid historian of the American Radio Relay League, or have been involved with the ARRL for over half a century, when these guys would have been seen at events and in publications. This is the Board of Directors, circa 1917. The guy in the middle is founder Hiram Percy Maxim. Note the phone on the table.

10/19/2009

Is that Dennis the Menace you see standing there watching his friend on a teletype

machine, or is it perhaps someone even more famous? Take a look at the house the little guys lives in now. It has an amenity or two that your and my house does not have yet.

9/21/2009

Here is the first 3-D map of the Earth's electrical conductivity. It is yet another example of previous firmly-held beliefs being upset. Subducting plates are comparatively colder and should be less conductive; however, conductivity in these areas may be enhanced by water drawn downward during the subduction process. Many scientists thought that tectonic plates are not likely to carry much, if any, water deep into the Earth's mantle, but it is the simplest explanation.

8/24/2009

There was a time when atom smashers could be contained within the walls of a reasonably sized building and operate off of a city's grid power. One of the first large-scale projects, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Bevatron was a mere 135 feet. Today, it takes many miles (km) of underground tunnels to contain them (Large Hadron Collider). Bevatron, built in

the early 1950s for $9.5M ($76M 2008 dollars), is now slated for destruction to free up real estate. LCH costs €3.5B ($5B). Lots of good pics.

7/27/2009

 

The old axiom, "Careful what you wish for... you might just get it" comes to mind when reading a story titled, "Beware the Reverse Brain Drain to India and China." For over a decade, people have been complaining about foreign students studying at U.S. universities and then staying here to work rather than return to their native lands. Now, they are returning in droves, taking our knowledge resources with them. This California license plate sums it up.

10/26/2009

From 4 million to 400 million broadband subscribers in 10 years. This adjustable map illustrates how broadband has spread across the face of the Earth. Surprisingly, in 1999 Canada had the greatest number of subscribers per capita. In 2009, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland (yes, Iceland) lead the way. Today, even the terrorist regions are well-connected (they benefit from your labor while causing you to have to arrive 2 hours early and remove your shoes at the airport).

9/28/2009

Making x-ray images of common items is entertaining as well as informative. When I worked for RFMD, my friend Jeff Walker ran the x-ray machine that I used to help non-destructively "discover" how competitors accomplished their product assembly tricks. He had a knack for extracting intricate details that other operators could not. Often, I could reverse engineer LTCC substrates and other minute structures with enough detail to ascertain how things worked. Here are some slick images that remind me of the kind of cool stuff we used to do.

8/31/2009

Lithium (Li) might just be the oil of the 21st century. If you follow the hype, transportation of the future will be dominated by electric vehicles whose energy source will be batteries based on Li. Lithium is considered environmentally and medically friendly - at least for the end users (for production farm workers, not so much). Chile and Bolivia have been referred to as the Saudi Arabia of Lithium due to their enormous reserves and relative ease of extraction. Currently, about 30k tons of Li is produced annually, with a market price of about $1/lb. That equates to $179/bbl at liquid Li's density.

8/3/2009

 

The only not-totally-bad thing about being unemployed at this point in history is that there is no stigma attached when seeking new opportunities. When the "real" unemployment rate is well into the double digits, there are a lot of highly qualified people out there who have been idle through no fault of their own. Companies who have never had layoffs are now finding themselves stressed to where people have to be let go for the sake of the company. It is an ugly chart.

11/2/2009

Project on Emerging Technologies (PEN) created this map of nanotechnology activity in the U.S. There are more than nanotech 1200 companies, universities, and government agencies just in the U.S. The top 3 sectors for companies working in nanotech (>200 entries) include materials, tools and instruments, and medicine/health. Interestingly, a lot of the effort is going into determining the potential health hazards of nanotech.

10/5/2009

 

The model emblem of Government Motors' new Hybrid 2Mode  series of vehicles has a PCB as the filler of the "H." The continuously-variable, electronic transmission integrates a motor that runs off a 300 V battery bank when loads are light and speeds are low. Still, city fuel usage is only around 15 mpg best case, so is the added complexity and expense justified? I'm not buying it - literally and figuratively.

9/7/2009

This might appear to be a photo of NASA's astronaut cadre mooning (an apt term for NASA) the camera, but it is not. The lineup of butts is actually a collection of molds made for custom-fit seats to provide optimal comfort to candidates of the Mercury space flight program. That is how things were done back in 1959, in preparation for Alan Shepard's Mercury 7 suborbital flight in 1961. I assume better methods are used now.

8/10/2009