Mechanical engineers, or pretty much every other kind, develop solutions for new problems. In this case a pancake company wanted to automate its production. Put a few engineers together to design a conveyor system, a robot and some software with a few sensors, and voilà:

via www.boingboing.net

Also, I want to express my gratitude to the Internet. It had many very informative pages and videos on how to build my very own PC from scratch, which I plan to do in a few months. I’m also learning that the internet is slowly becoming the venue for most of my shopping; most stores I visit never have the product I need (or if it’s clothing, in my size), and they offer to order it for me, when I could to the exact same thing from their website. This is both good and bad. I’m skipping out on heavy traffic to go shopping, but I only get to see a photo of what I’m spending X dollars on.

Against my conscience, I caved; I bought an iPod Nano for running. Ugh!

Edit: Haha. I just realized that this post is doubly funny

I want to form an opinion on the use of radar to prevent bats from colliding into windmills (it does so by literally microwaving their heads). Then there’s Canada’s nuclear reactors, that help create the medical isotopes desperately needed in a new global shortage. Harper wants us to stop making them. At least those who live near the reactor won’t be needing the isotopes as much (a large proportion of people who live near them get cancer).

I also want to know more about issues when it comes to intellectual property, aside from the obvious music/game/movie industry piracy issues. For example, I want to form an opinion on doctors fighting patents on methods of metabolite level observation.

I want to explore the moon, learn more about the new stage in human evolution, and I wish to learn more about autism.

I’m also really interested in biomimicry, and the development of countermeasures for modern weapons. But alas, I have to get back to work—as much as I would liked to be bathed in a soothing green light.

Light is both energy and mass at the same time. Light can fall; that’s why black holes are named that way—surrounding light gets sucked inside.

In 2005 it was predicted that there was an attractive and repulsive force component to light. They have since discovered the attractive force, but have only now discovered the repulsive force.

I say all this, hoping I still have your attention. If I do, you may be interested in the other discovery I made today.

In the 1960’s, a young man by the name of Bill Gates stumbled on those same lectures and loved them as much as I. Since then, he has purchased the rights to the video of his lectures and has posted them online for free, in what is called Project Tuva. The catch is that you have to download the video player required to see all that is to be seen on the website of Microsoft Research, Silverlight. It is hardly an inconvenience, as it is a 10 second download, and a quicker install, and very much worth your time, if you are interested.

Now you may watch the lectures, in excellent quality, with great extras that are still unobtrusive. I’m not in marketing, but if there was any trick I knew to get people to at least watch the first of the lectures, then I would do it.

If I got a single person to watch even a single lecture by having posted this, it would be worth far more than my time and effort. It just may lead to someone starting think about light a little bit more.

(click to zoom)

I think it would look great next to my only other poster, one of Albert Einstein:

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."

That way, I could upload in people’s minds whatever it takes to fully appreciate, say, Richard Feynman. Everything from his lectures to when he tells the story about his (hilarious) stint at Los Alamos. Once you get to know how funny, kind and brilliant this man is, then you can fully appreciate chats like these:

But then again, such a machine could just as easily corrupt many people’s minds if false information were purposely forced upon them. I think it would have more of an impact than the Atomic Bomb on our entire race.

This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man- made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second – a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

[...]

The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each.

In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second.

I still think it would be difficult to survive way back in the past though. Thy’d all think I was some wich doctor and would kill me. Hell, they killed a man who said the earth was round.