Somewhat Useful Facts Thread

[limey BSc.]

At 35 letters "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" has the longest title of any Best Picture Oscar winner in history. It surpasses the record previously held by Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) which has 26.

[Armondikov]

At 35 letters "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" has the longest title of any Best Picture Oscar winner in history. It surpasses the record previously held by Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) which has 26.

Unless, of course, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (with 42) is really, really good.

[limey BSc.]

Today, LEGO celebrated it's 50th birthday!

[Senator]

[limey BSc.]

Somewhere in this thread (or maybe in another), a multi-point touch screen video was shown, and someone said it was impossible. Well, I have proof against that!

EDIT: Found a better one

[captain_obvious]

That was me limey mate ;)

The lead singer of XTC was andy partridge.

[Senator]

"They couldn't hit an elephant at this dista..."?Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick, U.S. Army, seconds before being fatally shot at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, May 9, 1864.

"No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris."?Orville Wright.

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"  ?H. M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.

"The telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." ?(Western Union internal memo, 1876)

[Armondikov]

Today, LEGO celebrated it's 50th birthday!

That explains Google's logo of the day. My Lego obsessed friends (myself included) were highly plussed

[Senator]

Nobody likes the cute castle... or tower... or castle... towered tower? It's not photoshop btw.

In other news. REPRAP
http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome


The REPRAP project concerns the construction of a 3D printer. Now if you don't know what a 3D printer you will probably find that as a factoid pretty impressive alone, they (also rapid prototyping machines) are printers which print layer layer (usually with plastic drops) 3d objects.

What is particular with the REPRAP project, is that it's objective is to create an "open source" 3D printer/cutter hybrid capable of ultimately working with glass and steel etc as well, and ultimately able to replicate itself, for a tiny cost.

This means that you'd get to buy one, and then only for the cost of the raw materials you could print your friends one and so on.

This is kind of nice, if you have the imagination to fully evolve this concept. Basically just imagine. Some time ago I was talking about the flexibility of Digitization where not only have all my CD/DVDs/Cassettes and soon, books have been replaced by digital "files", but can also by copied, pasted, merged, mixed, stretched, e-mailed, ctrl-z'ed, deleted, edited.

But when I go to a supermarket to buy a set of glasses, our world is still analog. I do not have the ability to get exactly the pair of wineglasses I want, eg, I might want one design but with a neck "2 cm" taller.

Well imagine most products being represented by digital parametric files then, to be send into a machine that only cares about the raw resources.
Files for glasses, files for clocks and gears, files for basic electronics (chips are not something that can be really printed because they go below the accuracy of a 3D printer, however most electronics is based on already in existance bulk components and already "parametric" in a way circuits). Imagine if you care share and edit all those files, reducing all idea and every design to the cost of it's raw materials.
Phillip Stark doing those overvalued alien citrus juicers for example? Screw him. You'd just download the file, buy the raw material alone and send it to the printer. Imagine a community, a neighborhood building a large scale one, a factory for every corner.

Two words:

Ferrari + Torrent

P.S. Yes, I realize that Trekkies might be a bit dissentisized to the idea because of the whole replicator thing, but there is a small difference between "wouldn't be nice if" and real, tangible, visible technology that can become reality within, say, 10 years. This belongs to the second.

[captain_obvious]

http://www.castlewales.com/caerphil.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caerphilly_castle
A castle in my home town.  Absolutely mahoosive! Among the biggest in europe, and 2nd biggest in england (2nd only to windsor castle)

[Senator]

It's the micky mouse machine.

Or... I guess, an acoustic radar.

[Armondikov]

3D printing has taken off quite dramatically recently. It's almost affordable to have a model of yours that you made in a computer printed. However, the quality of these "affordable" ones is fairly low. Give it 10 years though and you never know where it'll be, probably further ahead than we think it will.

[Senator]

And now a plug for my favorite, Organ 3D printing.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12679063



Step one: Get stem cell sample from the patient.
Step two: Grow in the lab, the type of cell needed. Arterial, Muscle, Neural, etc.
Step three: Fill printheads.
Step four: Print.

Forget those clone vats and growing stuff, too slow, messy, inefficient, inflexible, boring, in the future when we need transplants, we print them.

A Missouri professor took several types of chicken heart cells and 3D printed them into large sheets with cell-friendly gel. The cells took over from there, sorting themselves into working order. Then they began beating, just as a heart would.

Presented in an upcoming issue of Tissue Engineering, lead author, Gabor Forgacs says his new research ?shows that we can use multiple cell types and that we do not have to control what happens when the cells fuse together. Nature is smart enough to do the job.? The cells, by being set into a given structure, know what to do and where they should go. Still, researchers are many years away from actually being able to print organs on-demand.

Forgacs, previously reported by Wired, is a leading researcher in "organ printing." While the technology has a catchy name, other tissue engineering techniques have had greater success creating organ tissue. The promise of organ printing is that it could speed up the creation of artificial organs, or at least more realistic organ tissue that drug companies can test their proteins on.

Traditional tissue engineering uses a set structure to create organs, so it's like the old printing presses that needed to be typeset. Organ printing lays down its structure along with its cells, so it's faster like offset printing. The seminal research, led by Clemson prof Thomas Boland, tantalized the tech world by using refitted inkjet printers, although some researchers are turning to more expensive "cell aggregate friendly dispensing devices."

Forgacs is involved with a start-up called Organovo that aims to provide organ tissue to drug companies for pharmaceutical testing. As we've talked about before, the more realistic the test tissue topography is, the more likely that a drug that works in the lab will work in the real-world.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/11/printed-heart-c.html

(I think I may have posted this before, but it fits nicely into the whole 3D printing series)

[RCgothic]

It's like that scene from The 5th Element.

[Armondikov]

Wow...

But onto a really useless fact I have aquired. You can observe the Rabi frequency of deuterium by ramping the Lock Power of any standard NMR spectometer to the point where the magnetic levels of the lock signal saturate, essentially the same process as decoupling the deuterium from the spectra. The lock signal will then appear to oscillate temporarily at the Rabi frequency.

[captain_obvious]

It's like that scene from The 5th Element.

The one where ....leelou wasn't it? get's rebuilt from scratch?
I remember one other thing from that film... "Leelou Multipass!"

"the cat" is played in the UK version of red dwarf by    Danny John-Jules (also appeared in one of the blade films)

In one of the (unsucessful) Red Dwarf pilots in the US had Terry Farrell play "the cat"

[Armondikov]

The pilot wasn't that bad. Some of the original lines were pretty good, they just couldn't carry off the reused material at all. And the theme tune sucked huge hairy scrotum.

Danny John-Jules also appeared in Maid Marion.

[Senator]

[Armondikov]

I saw that one. Though environmentalists shouldn't get their hopes up, the kite just means that the engines need to work a little less, rather than switch off completely. Although it can save upto $500 a day or so (which can seriously add up). There are plans for bigger kites that should do more.

Another fairly useful fact: Engines on container ships aren't subject to any laws regarding suphur emissions.

[Weasel]

That wasn't someone doing some recreational para-sailing from the bow of that freighter?