Aliens Inc!

They are comming!!! Ya right. The Galactic Federation of Light will be here on earth on October 14th 2008. They will be hovering a very large ship (spanning several states) over Alabama for 3 days.



If by some miracle this is actually true and this event does actually happen, this ship should be visible to most of this side of the earth. I took the time to estimate what 'span several states' means. My little red circle in this drawing has a diameter of about 500km.



Randy found a website that shows sizes of spacecraft from Sci-Fi movies.
http://merzo.net/1mpp.htm
http://merzo.net/100mpp.htm

To put this into perspective, the GFL ship is 3 times larger than the death star, 833 times larger than the USS Enterprise.

The International Space Station is 80m and is the 2nd brightest thing in the night sky next to the moon. Something 6250 times bigger should be visible from everywhere.

Bring Your Guns To School Day!

A school in texas now has teachers carying guns. Being 30 minutes away from the nearest police station, they feel they need a closer deterrent to stop any possible massacres.

Good idea, as long as the teachers maintain control of their guns and dont result in any accidental shootings.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1612627.ece

Incredible Facial Animation

Imgae Metrics has stepped up their game once again with their latest released video of Emily.

She is a 3D model with such realistic animation, its hard to tell shes not real.

WTC Collapse from fire?

I dont think so. Given all the evidence, it is very easy to conclude that none of the three WTC buildings that collapsed could have even possibly collapsed in a fire.

Even if the tower was completely flooded with jet fuel, fire could not have collapsed the tower. The melting point of steel is 2750 degrees farenheit. The maximum temperature of burning jet fuel (mostly Kerosene) under optimal burning conditions is 1500 degrees farenheit. Average burning temperature of jet fuel (while in the engine, with compression) is around 800 degrees farenheit.

In order for this fire to have been capable of weakening structural steel, it would have had to be almost 2 times hotter than the maximum temperature of jet fuel. So either this plane was loaded with Hydrogen instead of passengers or this theory is total garbage.

Also the burning enviornment in the towers was far less than optimal. The amount of smoke billowing from the towers is evidence that the fires were starved for oxygen. There simply wasnt enough oxygen flowing into the building to fuel a 2750 degree fire.

Now even if the building had burned, it would not have collapsed strait down as it did. The steel would have warped and the load from the upper floors would have imbalanced the tower causing it to fall over.

Yet somehow, through some miracle of coverstory, TWO towers collapsed in this same completely impossible way? Then WTC7 collapsed a few hours later from fires as well?! Oh and the news of course reported WTC7's collapse 26 minutes before it actually collapsed. They even have it in the background as they are saying it is no longer there!?








Then you cant discount the many many many credible whitnesses that heard explosions on the ground. Im sorry, but an airplane on an upper floor causes huge explosions that can bring a skyscraper strait down without falling over? WTF? Who believes this crap?




Someone is lying...

Internet > China

Looks like the Chineese government did lie about He Kexin's name. And they tried to cover up all the information that would expose their lie. To bad they missed this one :)

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,407803,00.html

New Alternator?

I had another crazy idea on the way home from work yesterday. I am thinking that I want to experiment with a wind turbine on my car. The idea is the turbine could generate enough power to match or beat the electrical system demands all while adding less drag on the engine than the alternator currently does. The end goal would be to replace the alternator completely with a cheaper wind powered one and increase fuel efficiency of the motor.

There are a couple of unknowns that require experimentation.

1) Can I generate enough electricity using turbines to keep the battery charged? The system would need to be able to generate enough charge to handle the draw when the vehcile is stopped.

2) Do the fans required to generate the necessary electricity create more drag on the momentum of the car than the alternator does? If this is the case, the alternator is more efficient. I think if the fans are mounted on the front of the vehcile where there is already a 'wind wall' the engine is overcoming, there would be minimal additional drag added to the vehcile from the fans. The alternator currently adds alot of drag to the vehcile. It is directly siphoning torque from the engine as it is connected via belt.

3) The fan configuration and mounting is an unknown at this point. I bought a small 9" fan from wallmart last night for $10. I need to find a way to mount this to the front of my car safely. It will need to withstand the force of 100+mph winds blowing against it. I plan to test the fan as is on my car to see what the output of the fan is with the attached electric motor. If the output from it sucks, I will try building a new electric generator more suited to what Im doing.

Power Wheels

Emily and Annie both want the little power wheels vehicles. What kid doesnt, I remember I wanted them when I was a kid. These retail for $200 - $300 usually, on craigslist and KSL.com it looks like I may be able to find them for $50 - $150.

Looking at the quality of these vehciles, I immediately see that its really low. The wheels are plastic and the top speed is 1.5mph. While the low speed is 'safe', I walk faster than 1.5mph. I think we could go a bit faster than that. The plastic wheels are less than ideal since they dont grip anything and are hard to turn.

So Im thinking maybe I could get 2 of these used from people, then pimp them out. I would want to replace the wheels and the motor at least, I may also want to add a second motor and beef up the suspension for a smoother right at a higher speed. Basically the idea is to turn this into a tiny atv.

For the wheels maybe I could find some small scooter wheels or small atv wheels.

For the motor im thinking about designing and building an electric motor. The center pole of the motor would be the axle and would contain permanent magnet stators around the core. Around the core would be th electromagnets used to push/pull the magnets. There would be no transmission or drive train to contribute power loss, the torque would be pushed directly to the wheels on the front axle. If I did this to the rear axle as well, it would then become a 4wd vehcle and I could easily switch on and off each motor to drive with the front wheels, rear wheels, or both.

Wind Turbine

With my intrest as of late into alternate energy, It seems to me that I can do things to reduce my electric bill.

Where Im living now, we have really high winds. This seems a perfect fit for a wind turbine. These are pretty expensive to buy and difficult to setup. However they are very simple devices and may not be that hard to make.

http://www.mdpub.com/Wind_Turbine/index.html


I could also get some solar panels and use solar energy to help lower my bills as well. Solar panels are a bit expensive, but maybe one at a time until I meet my energy need. Also do I mount them stationary? or come up with a mount system that follows the sun for maximum exposure.


I also think I can put water turbines on the pipes in my house. These turbines would slightly reduce water pressure and turn it into electrical energy. I could be charging batteries while showering or doing dishes, etc. For this one I would need to build really small turbines, I havnt quite figured out how Im going to do this yet.

To the Moon!

The X-Prize is back again. This time they teamed up with google to offer over $30 million to the first team to successfully land a robot on the moon.

Now we can really see if the governement lied about going to the moon or not.

http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/

Engage the Cloaking Device!

Researchers at Berkley have created a mesh using nano fibers that actually bends light around it. This is essentially the 'cloaking' technology from star trek.

The reason we can see things is because light bounces off of them. Typically light from behind an object is blocked by that object. This material bends the light around the object so that it can be seen from the front side. So instead of seeing a painting on a wall, you would see the wall behind the painting. The light never hits the painting to be reflected and the light from the wall gets refracted around to the front of the painting. Effectively rendering the painting invisible.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7553061.stm

Can you imagine if people put these on their cars?

Tesla Coil Speaker

Wow this is pretty awesome.




What you are looking at here is a tesla coil resonating at the necessary frequencies to produce the audio representation of the music being fed to it. The sound you are hearing here in this video is produced by the electrical plasma itself, there is no other speaker!

Cure for Cancer

Some of you have heard me talk about this already, but I think I should put it on here for everyone.

It would seem that cancer may be a simple vitamin deficiency. The vitamin in question is vitamin B-17. Now this is just theory but there are plenty of people that say this stuff works. The FDA has said it does not work and has made it illegal to use/distribute.

http://www.naturalnews.com/023329.html

If anyone with cancer, or anyone at risk of getting cancer wants to try this out and let me know if there is any truth to it, I would appreciate it :)

Kabooom!!

Dont light matches at the propane depot!

Apparently a propane depo in Toronto exploded last night producing some major fireballs.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601082&sid=a7e0CSl8EsOs&refer=canada

The Little Old Lady from Pasadina

These two crazy old ladies drive right through the gate at area 51 without stopping!

Wonder what they do to people who actually cross that line?

Flight of the Navigator (Extended Version)

The beginning of this guys story sounds incredibly similar to The Flight of the Navagator. It then continues on into lunacy!

Galactic Federation of Planets

OMG OMG OMG! Why doesnt everyone know about this?!

Maybe because its sheer lunacy. Its actually really hard to tell if this guy is acting and just feeding us BS intentionally, or if he is completely dillusional and believes this garbage.

It starts getting really rediculous at about 1:20:00 into the video where he starts 'revealing' his mathematical PROOF of what is going on. ROFL!!

Obama Epiphany

It would seem that Obama was finally shown the light sometime mid/late friday. He reversed his previous position on oil drilling now pushing hard to allow oil drilling off the gulf of mexico, florida, and the eastern seaboard.

This is excellent news for everyone except McCain. McCains strongest point in this election so far has been his position on the problems of the economy. His economic plan is still quite a bit better than Obama's, but now at least both sides are going down the right path as far as energy is concearned.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080805/ap_on_el_pr/obama_energy

Larrabee

So it would seem that Intel is serious about joining the GPU market.

The idea of having one processor to do it all is interesting, but still seems a bit backward. This is the way computers were in the beginning. But somewhere around 1999 or so, computer graphics split off into its own world as 3D graphics became more popular. Isolating the rendering on a seperate chip, allowed games (and other apps) to really flourish. By combining these again into one chip, seeps like a step backward.

The logic bind the new Larrabee is that Intel can make a smaller faster chip that can do it all. Well thats great, but its still software based. History has proven that doing specific tasks in hardware is much faster than doing them in software. When you eliminate all the variables, you can create a highly specialized solution.

If Intel's chip can compete in the GPU space, it wont be long before NVIDIA and ATI follow suit and make similar dedicated purpose GPUs that will dominate the multi-purpose CPU/GPU. I really dont think Intel can win this battle with this approach.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3367

Rockband 2

I cant wait! (well I can, and I will)

This looks like a very good sequel. The setlist is awesome (still no Breaking Benjamin) and they are letting me use all my Rockband 1 songs in Rockband 2!

Heres the setlist (click the links for youtube vidoes):
Artist Song Title Decade
1. AC/DC “Let There Be Rock” 1970s
2. AFI “Girl’s Not Grey” 2000’s
3. Alanis Morissette “You Oughta Know” 1990’s
4. Alice in Chains “Man in the Box” 1990’s
5. Allman Brothers “Ramblin’ Man” 1970’s
6. Avenged Sevenfold “Almost Easy” 2000’s
7. Bad Company “Shooting Star” 1970’s
8. Beastie Boys “So Whatcha Want” 1990’s
9. Beck “E-Pro” 2000’s
10. Bikini Kill “Rebel Girl” 1990’s
11. Billy Idol “White Wedding Pt. I” 1980’s
12. Blondie “One Way or Another” 1970’s
13. Bob Dylan “Tangled Up in Blue” 1970’s
14. Bon Jovi “Livin’ on a Prayer” 1980’s
15. Cheap Trick “Hello There” 1970’s
16. Devo “Uncontrollable Urge” 1980’s
17. Dinosaur Jr. “Feel the Pain” 1990’s
18. Disturbed “Down with the Sickness” 2000’s
19. Dream Theater “Panic Attack” 2000’s
20. Duran Duran “Hungry Like the Wolf” 1980’s
21. Elvis Costello “Pump It Up” 1970’s
22. Fleetwood Mac “Go Your Own Way” 1970’s
23. Foo Fighters “Everlong” 1990’s
24. Guns N’ Roses “Shackler’s Revenge” 2000’s
25. Interpol “PDA” 2000’s
26. Jane’s Addiction “Mountain Song” 1980’s
27. Jethro Tull “Aqualung” 1970’s
28. Jimmy Eat World “The Middle” 2000’s
29. Joan Jett “Bad Reputation” 1980’s
30. Journey “Anyway You Want It” 1970’s
31. Judas Priest “Painkiller” 1990’s
32. Kansas “Carry On Wayward Son” 1970’s
33. L7 “Pretend We’re Dead” 1990’s
34. Lacuna Coil “Our Truth” 2000’s
35. Linkin Park “One Step Closer” 2000’s
36. Lit “My Own Worst Enemy” 1990’s
37. Lush “De-Luxe” 1990’s
38. Mastodon “Colony of Birchmen” 2000’s
39. Megadeth “Peace Sells” 1980’s
40. Metallica “Battery” 1980’s
41. Mighty Mighty Bosstones “Where’d You Go” 1990’s
42. Modest Mouse “Float On” 2000’s <--- They added this one just for Amanda
43. Motorhead “Ace of Spades” 1980’s
44. Nirvana “Drain You” 1990’s
45. Norman Greenbaum “Spirit in the Sky” 1960’s
46. Panic at the Disco “Nine in the Afternoon” 2000’s
47. Paramore “That’s What You Get” 2000’s
48. Pearl Jam “Alive” 1990’s
49. Presidents of the USA “Lump” 1990’s
50. Rage Against the Machine “Testify” 1990’s
51. Ratt “Round & Round” 1980’s
52. Red Hot Chili Peppers “Give it Away” 1990’s
53. Rise Against “Give it All” 2000’s
54. Rush “The Trees” 1970’s
55. Silversun Pickups “Lazy Eye” 2000’s
56. Smashing Pumpkins “Today” 1990’s
57. Social Distortion “I Was Wrong” 1990’s
58. Sonic Youth “Teenage Riot” 1980’s
59. Soundgarden “Spoonman” 1990’s
60. Squeeze “Cool for Cats” 1970’s
61. Steely Dan “Bodhitsattva” 1970’s
62. Steve Miller Band “Rock’n Me” 1970’s
63. Survivor “Eye of the Tiger” 1980’s
64. System of a Down “Chop Suey” 2000’s
65. Talking Heads “Psycho Killer” 1970’s
66. Tenacious D “Master Exploder” 2000’s
67. Testament “Souls of Black” 1990’s
68. The Donnas “New Kid in School” 2000’s
69. The Go-Go’s “We Got the Beat” 1980’s
70. The Grateful Dead “Alabama Getaway” 1980’s
71. The Guess Who “American Woman” 1970’s
72. The Muffs “Kids in America” 1990’s
73. The Offspring “Come Out & Play (Keep ‘em Separated)” 1990’s
74. The Replacements “Alex Chilton” 1980’s
75. The Who “Pinball Wizard” 1960’s
76. The Beatles "Yesterday" 1960's




I also plan to pick up the new Ion drum kit when it comes out: