Sugar + Geeks + DIY = CandyFab 4000

Ever played with sugarcube dice? They're easy to make, just use a marker to add the correct number of dots to the 6 sides of a suger cube and you've got yourself some tasty make-shift dice for those spontaneous office crap games, or lightning Monopoly rounds with your lab mates.
But what if you fancied a quick round of D&D? Your sugar cube dice won't let you roll for initiative, and your barbarian wouldn't be able to level up.
What do you do?

Well, if you happen to have a lot of sugar, a hot air gun and an old plotting machine lying about (and a few other components), you can create a fabricator that constructs 3-D images out of sugar. This couple did. And they plan to share this wonderful new technology with the world.

I've always wanted to eat a dodecahedron. Life is sweet.

Computer woow's

Ok in im gonna be harder to get a hold of for a while. No WoW or any other games for a while either. Teletran-1 is sick.

I have been having a bit of trouble with my computer for a few weeks. I have been trying to back up my data while i could. So here is the 411. First i was havening problems with uTorrent. When I tried to do long day downloads the torrent would fail after a while and my computer would lock up. This progressed to trying to read video files, when i tried to use windows media player my computer would begin slowing to a halt for no apparent reason. the CPU was not being over taxed and I had lots of free memory. Other programs like Media player Classic and winamp where still ok. Next My computer started freezing up when ever I left it running idle for 15 min or more. As long as I was using it, no problems but if I let it sit it would freez. Sometimes the crash was followed by the blue scree of death, the really nasty one XP has with the message "A problem has been detected and windows has been shutdown to prevent damage to your computer" followed my the core memory dump. Occationaly i would see a small error message about a failure to write to the hard drive. Oh and when the computer automatically rebooted after a crash it wouldn't boot off the HD until i did a hard shutdown.

Now I started backing up my data a little before this point but I had almost filled my 300 gig and a DVD only holds 4.7 gigs. Thought i had time. About 5 days ago, last Thursday to be precise my computer started freezing on the boot up. It would get to the login screen but when i typed in my PWD it would go to log me in and freeze during the log in process. Needless to say no more data is being backed up. So what is wrong? My first impression was that windows had some kind of horrible corruption in it, unknown virus ect... I can just see all my Mac loving friends commenting on that one. Now however I am beginning to believe it's a hardware issue. If we look at the 7 most common signs of hard drive failure we see several of my signs present.

I Have done a memory test using Memtest86 located on my Kubuntu live CD. Strangely enough Kubuntu will not boot up. If there was a HD problem it may be getting stuck on the HD detection and mounting part. I booted using an old version of Knoppix but i could not seed my HD. That is either a sure sign it's failing or the fact that it's an old version of Knoppix and does not have support for my SATA controller or NTFS. So I am downloading a new version of Knoppix and A new version of Kubuntu as well as this cool system matinance tool called the Ultimate Bood CD that has a lot of diagnosis programs on it.

I hate havening to diagnose these problems. It's not like a car where it's more obvious what's wrong. It would be a power supply issue, motherboard, SATA controller. Im pretty sure it's not processor based or memory as mem test would have shown that. I am borrowing an old HD from the lab and im gonna start trying to track down HD problems. Here is hoping It still works enough from me to rescue some of my data. I have a lot of pictures on there from my first year with Geneva that are not saved. Hope she has them too.

In regards to old TV shows becoming movies

With relation to my previous story I have just discovered that they are making a movie version of my beloved Get Smart. Ah agent 86 with his bumbling tomfoolery. Agent 99 my first boyhood crush, I think, I can't really remember. This is of course the problem with childhood images of things, they are never quite the same as an adult. I used to love scooby doo as a child but now i can't watch more than 3 min of the damn show without being throughly annoyed. How can they not see it's always a guy in a mask, and why is shaggy always so high. I hope this manages to live up to my childhood view of it.

More than Meets the Eye

Here is the problem with most movies based on my childhoods favorite characters. I have a great deal of difficulty dealing with the changes made when produced in movie form. They leave out things i think should be there (tom bombadil) or change characters from the way there where in the comic/cartoon/book (rogue). This generally takes away my enjoyment of the film. Probably one of the reasons i never liked the Lord of the Ring movies. The books are ingrained my my mind so strongly that i can't accept the movie for what it is. It's funny but I don't really have this problem with bad movie physics, I can usually ignore it unless it's so grossly horrible that it's simply imposable to accept what's going on (Wild Wild West). As long as it's set in a futuristic enough setting i can usually accept that science will find a way. Maby my job as a Physicist helps this along as i have seen amazing discoveries that would look like science fiction 100 years ago and understand that they are perfectly reasonable. When they use the term inertial dampeners in star trek i can say, ya ill buy that.

All that being said the live action transformers movie is Awesome. It's sheer awesomeness makes me want to cry at times. It was not my childhood cartoon. There where similarities but there where a lot more differences. i found that i had no problem ignoring all preconceptions about what the transformers where. Im not entirely sure why but however Michael Bay decided to do things there was just enough old transformers lore to make it transformers but not enough to trigger my internal defense responses. Megaton was not a gun but i did not care, in fact he was closer to his modified state Galvatron from later in the series and is transformed state looked an awefull lot like Cycloneus so I was satisfied. They used the same voice actor for Optimus Prime and although all the Autobots and Decepticons where different cars their personalities where very similar and i found myself really likening them. There where little links to the old series throughout and although starscreem was not treacherous and self absorbed his berating by megaton was eerily reminiscent of the series. From the beginning of the movie you just know there is going to be a final battle between Megaton and Prime and i was waiting for one line hopeing that he had the sense to put it in. Oh it was there but you will need to see the movie to know what I mean.

Tranformers.....See it or or you are not worthy to be reading this.

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On a second small note. the comp virus turned 25 today. If you think for a second you may realize this is before the first IBM came out. Yes that's right they very first computer virus was for a Mac.

Elk Cloner, which spread between Apple II computers via infected floppy disks, has the dubious distinction of the first computer virus¹ to spread in the wild. The malware is thought to be the work of Rich Skrenta, a 15-year-old high school student from Pittsburgh, who released it in July 1982.

-- http://www.theregister.com/2007/07/13/virus_silver_jubilee/

Take that Space Cyote

Detached From Reality

So on the latest transformers commercial they make the following statement.

Crittics say Transfromers is the most origional film of the year

Considering it's based of a cartoon from the 80's the film industry is in a sad state indeed.


On an unrelated note im being pressured from all sides now to join Facebook. I have been resisting for so long. Not sure how much longer I can hold out.

In This House we Obey the Laws of Thermodynamics

Ah here is a great example of what i was talking about a few posts ago. About how the media can inflate pseudo-scientific crap and make it seem real. Even worse how the media can report on "science" and not check it's facts or even know what they are reporting.

Two links if you will
The Introduction and the Explanation.

Ok so what's there first thing wrong with this, what should make you suspect this article. First off is the word "Perpetual Motion" since Energy can not be created or destroyed this is imposable. I'm not saying It does not rotate, im just saying it must be getting energy from somewhere, it's not free. The fact that he explains it as a violation of one of our most sacred laws instead of trying to actually explaining it, along with the fact that it's being demonstraighted in an art gallery, tells me he is not a scientist and has no training int he field what so ever. This puts the entire article into questions. Many links are broken, strange for a world changing breakthrough.

Now lets examine his explanation. lets just pick a line in general.

The law of conservation of energy has been very reliable for 300 years, however it’s missing one variable from the equation, and that’s time.

Now this is interesting because it's a partial truth. I even had to sit and think about this one for a sec. If you look up the laws of thermodynamics it is true that the first law does not explicitly have a time term in it. There are derivative however which means we are dealing with changes not absolute quantities and changes occur over time. While the law is not time dependant the individual terms such as the energy of the system could change with time. The law only states total energy will remain constant. If you do work on the system it will gain energy but what kind of work are you doing. He ignores this. If work is done by the earths magnetic field as he claims this work is time dependant so you introduce time into the equation. This is tricky and not everyone would be expected to know this. However if we look up conservation of energy we find the following.

the energy conservation law is a consequence of the shift symmetry of time; energy conservation is implied by the empirical fact that the laws of physics do not change with time itself

This basically states what is true now will be true tomorrow and was true yesterday. The fact that his machine behaves the same way every day never changing means the laws of physics all ways behave the same way. This can only be true if energy is conserved. This has been tested to a hight degree. Astronomers see light that was created billions of years ago and they have verified that the laws of physics where the same back then as they are now.

One final line from his article. This is the one that is clearly wrong and can be proven so easily. The fact that this is wrong should lead you to see that other things he writes are also probably wrong.

McCarthy explained to Silicon Republic that Orbo technology works on the basis that occurrences in magnetic fields do not happen instantaneously, and are therefore not subject to time in the way that, say, gravity is.

This is high school physics, building an electric motor. How does it work? Changing magnetic fields. In fact changing magnetic fields are well know. Its a branch of physics over 100 years old. If it violated conservation of energy we would have known by now. That's lie number one. lie number 2 is the bit about gravity. Think for a second, is gravity instantaneous? It's a good question and it's easy to think it is. lets think about this critically. what would happen if the sun where to explode or even disappear. We would stop orbiting it but when, what is the speed of gravity? The answer is that Einstein showed gravity propagates at the speed of light so if the sun disappeared we would not know for 8 min when we would see it disappear and be flung out of orbit at the same time. This is easy to find out with a little Google work and contradicts the authors claims in the above paragraph reinforcing the fact that this guys as no idea what he is talking about.

I hope this gives you some incite into pseudo science. As you can see it is easy to misinterpret seemingly scientific claims as being true, Especially when they are reported by media. many claims however can be questioned with a little common sense and a small amount of searching. I encourage all of you reading this to be a little skeptical about what you read about such fantastic claims. does this machine rotate, sure it does. Is it free energy, no, it comes from somewhere, most likely the earths magnetic field or some other component in the machine the inventor does not understand. I don't need to know how it works to know it does not work the way he claims.

Talking to Americans Just Went National

Ok so Geneva introduced me to this new show, "Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader". The premise is pretty obvious. It's like who wants to be a millionaire only they are being asked grade school questions and their life lines are children. I was amazed watching this show for 2 reasons. #1 was how little people seem to know once they grow up and #2 was how hard some of these questions are. They take the most obscure things from the curriculum. Question kids probably only can answer up until they as tested and them promptly forget.

Some questions are hard.....But not this one!