Wow, not only is the technical design on this portable coilgun impressive, but the whole thing looks completely badass. Check it out:
After 2 long years of on-and-off work my coilgun project is finally completed. For anyone who doesn’t know what a coilgun is, it’s a gun that fires a projectile with magnetic force instead of gunpowder. The projectile from this gun won’t kill a person, but the electrical energy stored in the capacitors is 78 times the lethal amount for human beings so this is no toy.
Have you ever wondered what would happen to your hand if you would put it inside the LHC while it’s running? The people from the Sixty Symbols project have asked the very same question to some of the LHC’s top scientists. Check it out:
Information technology makes you happy — and it’s not just because of earning more money. At least that’s the claim of a new report by the former British Computer Society.
The group, now known as “BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT” says its analysis shows the biggest beneficial effects are for women and new users.
The report (PDF), “Information Dividend: Why IT makes you ‘happier’?” looks at multiple studies around the world. It looks at the increased levels of life satisfaction reported by people using IT, discounting the effects of income and other well-being related factors.
While it might be assumed that tech is the realm of the well-off and well-educated, the report found that in most cases the most striking effects were among the lower paid. This pattern continued all the way down the income brackets, with the exception of the lowest (household income under £14,000/approx US$20,000). That may be because this category covers retired people that find computers less engaging.
There was also a clear gender divide, with women’s satisfaction increasing much more through IT use than men. The biggest distinction came in developing nations, which may be because women in local cultures are more likely to be in “socially controlled roles”, a restriction that doesn’t apply as much when they are online.
However, there was still a difference in developed nations. Some studies covered by the report suggest this is because women gain more from the social element of technology. Another difference was that with men, the more use of IT they had, the bigger effect it had on their satisfaction levels, whereas frequency of use wasn’t a significant factor with women.
The report also puts together a league table of “Information Well-being” that measures the life satisfaction benefits in 38 countries, adjusting the results for gross domestic product. Unsurprisingly that meant developing nations came off best, with Zambia listed as the place where IT has the biggest benefits for uses. China came at the bottom, which is almost certainly because of the tight restrictions on internet use.
Jeff at the Aplepi blog recently wrote an article flatly dismissing the lineup of peripherals designed to bring a keyboard interface to the iPad, in an article entitled: “Please, for the sake of advancing technology, just let the keyboard die already.”
Not because any specific peripheral was poorly made, but that “there are still plenty of folks out there who just don’t get Steve Jobs’ vision” [sic] of a peripheral-free computing device that operates solely out of the touchscreen.
At first I thought that it was borderline idiotic, especially coming from my background as a writer. The reason one might want a keyboard for the iPad is that touch typists work much more quickly entering in information by qwerty (or in rare cases, dvorak) keyboard. When I’m using an iPad, iPhone, or other similar touchscreen device, it takes me forever to write anything longer than a Google search term.
But then I thought – Jeff has a point. The iPad is not designed to be used with external input devices like keyboards and mice – because it is not, strictly speaking, designed to be a creative device. It is, in effect, an output-driven device, designed solely for consuming, rather than creating.
Indeed, it was Apple who once led the charge of creating computers designed to cater to creative people. Lately it seems that that the market is being abandoned for creating devices to cater towards passive people. There are plenty of musicians who own iPods, but they do not create music on an iPod; there are plenty of writers who own iPads, but they do not, as a general rule, write on the iPad.
A future defined by the iPad is in many ways, a huge step backwards. I don’t know what version number of the Web we’re on now, but wasn’t Web 2.0 – YouTube, Facebook, Blogging – defined by becoming a Web of creation and collaboration rather than of passive consumption?
So, what is the iPad really? In short, it’s a passive entertainment device. If you want to read something someone else has written, listen to music someone else composed, or watch a video someone else shot, the iPad is a portable, fun device.
This is not a criticism of the device; but to suggest that the iPad represents the future of computing as a whole (as Jeff at Aplepi’s provocatively worded title implies) sends chills up my spine as a content creator.
Today dear readers, we’ve got a quick question to ask you: Do you use your bank’s smartphone or cell phone app? If you do, can you tell us why, and if you don’t, why not? We’d love to hear about it, so be sure to let us know by leaving a comment in the comments section below. This post is part of an experiment we’re doing with a few blogs and the Six Apart community, so we’d really appreciate your participation. Thanks!
The BBC is reporting that Google has released a “Transparency Report” which shows censorship levels around the globe, releasing details about how often countries around the world ask for identifying user data or to censor information.
Currently, the United States leads the running in user information requests, with 4287 such requests, but Brazil leads in deletion of data at 398 requests from the period of January 2010 to June 2010.
If there is one flaw in the tools, it is that while you can sort by what part of Google’s services content was removed from, (Blogger, YouTube, Search, etc.) there’s no real way to tell why this information was removed. So, the things censored could be anything from “a super secret government conspiracy against you” to “kiddie porn.”
One interesting statistic – Google does not automatically comply with every request. Only 82.8% of removal requests were complied with in the United States. According to Google:
“When we receive a request for user information, we review it carefully and only provide information within the scope and authority of the request. We may refuse to produce information or try to narrow the request in some cases.”
Vladimir Skulachev, chief of the Bioenergetics Department of Moscow State University, claims to have developed a new pill that could stop the aging process in the human body. Apparently, the pill works as a super anti-oxidant and prevents oxygen from harming the body as it deteriorates.
Information technology makes you happy — and it’s not just because of earning more money. At least that’s the claim of a new report by the former 
Today dear readers, we’ve got a quick question to ask you: Do you use your bank’s smartphone or cell phone app? If you do, can you tell us why, and if you don’t, why not? We’d love to hear about it, so be sure to let us know by leaving a comment in the comments section below. This post is part of an experiment we’re doing with a few blogs and the Six Apart community, so we’d really appreciate your participation. Thanks!
