Feb 10
Finally (well from 2005), a study from MIT on the Effectiveness of Aluminum Foil Hats. Worth reading the whole thing to get a sense of the detail involved, but it’s all right there in the abstract 
Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government’s invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.
Technorati Tags:
conspiracy, tinfoil, fun, technology
Feb 10
Fun to watch once or twice. Please, no one take this as a lesson in how to design a site using flash. Please.
Technorati Tags:
flash, fun, webdev
Feb 10
Britannica blog’s posting on The Problem of Data Storage points to how complicated archiving and retrieving things in the digital age has become. Before it was enough to preserve tablets or paper — now this is greatly complicated by the various digital formats that house our data and how the formats themselves are subject to disuse (in many cases making the enclosed data unavailable as well). PDF is a glimmer of hope; we shall see how it holds up to the test of time.
As anyone who has tried to migrate data from an ancient floppy can tell you, retrieving that information, though only 25 years old, is no easy task. (The floppy disk itself is a nearly extinct medium, for that matter.) The mere difficulty of retrieving old data provides the rationale for Adobe’s now-standard PDF (portable document format), documents that can be read and printed across any operating system. What is more, Adobe developers maintain, “ten years from now, and into the future, users will still be able to view the file exactly as it was created”—meaning that fonts, layout, and illustrations are locked into the document and cannot easily be changed, unlike documents created with standard word processing software. (For more, see Adobe’s white paper “PDF as a Standard for Archiving.”)
On a larger scale this reminds me of the excellent book The Clock Of The Long Now by Steward Brand, that covers designing (and documenting) a clock that works on a massive scale and is intended to run for thousands of years.
Technorati Tags:
archiving, britannica, history, ideas, storage, longnow
Feb 10
Wired has a brief article that shows just how far high speed photography has come in the last 120 or so years. We’ve gone from the (then miraculous) 6 millisecond (10^-3) shutter speed of the galloping horse in 1887 to the current 110 attoseconds (10^-18) image of electron drift. Amazing stuff.
The photo that they have of a nuclear blast reminds me of an electron microscope image of some nasty virus/mutagen. It really is a fractal world.
Technorati Tags:
digitalimaging, history, photography, technology
