I Love Mechanics

Hi guys. My student organization is holding an alternative class room learning experience on August 18. If you're a UP student be sure to come! 

You've probably heard of them in the news, Nissan Leaf, Tesla Roadster, BMW i8. Electric cars once the domain of technological speculation are flooding the market and poised to distrupt the way we transport ourselves.

Apparently the magnitude of the Death Star's gravitational acceleration is saved as a constant in the Android SDK.

"Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."

  -Thomas Jefferson on Patents.

You can read Jefferson's full quotation here.

He wasn't exactly against patents but believed that a  society can still be innovative even with lax or no patent laws. I'm posting this quotation in light of recent developments in the mobile space like the Lodsys patent trolling of small iOS developers, the threat of an import ban on HTC phones, and the danger Google faces in the acquisition of Nortel patents by rivals.

The way I see it these events are sending a chilling message on the future of innovation. Historically patent (and even copyright) laws have been pretty lax. Now however the draconian system in which they're enforced and the fact that a lot of patents tend to be vague/general are leading us into the Dark Ages of creativity, what Lawrence Lessig calls the permission culture.

I'm not totally against patents but as an aspiring engineering student I feel that we as a society should review and revise current patent laws in order to protect inventors and developers without voiding the chance of the many to build upon the works of others. Ideas are and should be free to flow.

-Richard Feynman

First post for this school year. 

Hey guys, sorry I haven't posted much stuff lately. Summer vacation started here a few months ago and I decided to take a break from posting and just relax (read: playing video games all day).

But I can't be like that today. School has just recently started and I gotta shift to back to geek gear. And since I'll be taking a lot of interesting engineering subjects, I'll try to make a tech post that isn't a reblog.

This complicated array of lasers is what allowed physicists to achieve a Star Trek like teleportation sequence on a special packet of light called the Schrödinger's-cat state. This particular wave of light oscillates both up and down at the same time and place (just like Schrödinger's cat, which can be both dead and alive). 

Scientists were able to teleport this special packet of light by destroying it at one end and rebuilding it at the other end using an entangled pair of particles as a facilitator.  

Dr. Octopus Lives

Thomas Edison: The key to my success? None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes.

Nikola Tesla: Just like searching for a needle in a haystack, intellectual laziness.

Thomas Edison: Spare me that nonsense. You think you're so much of a genius with all your smarts. Well, genius is not just about brain power. You also need hard work. True genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.

Nikola Tesla: Mr. Edison, a little theory and calculation would have saved you ninety per cent of your labor.

Thomas Edison: Screw you.

Thomas Edison: Your ideas are splendid, but they are utterly impractical.

Nikola Tesla: The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. His work is like that of the planter — for the future. 

Thomas Edison: (silence)

Nikola Tesla: Mr. Edison you think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

This is a fictional conversation (or argument) between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla based on their quotations about technology, creativity, and each other. The two electrical geniuses have been fighting each other for years, in many different fields, and even at the personal level.

NASA's Plasma Spray-Physical Vapor Deposition (PS-PVD) vaporizes ceramic powders using an extremely hot plasma flame (at 10,000 degrees Celsius). The vaporized ceramic is then condensed onto a surface to form a super thin ceramic coating, which can be used to protect heavy duty engines.