Daphne Oram

Interesting lady.

From Boing-Boing.

On The Border

Thanks to reader Bob, we have one more Wullenweber. This one on the Virginia/North Carolina border (the horizontal gray line is the border.)

This one looks like it's been converted into a secret squirrel site.

Or a Walmart.

Wullenweber Antennas

Sobe, Japan

These are very large arrays for high-frequency reception and direction-finding, mostly by governments. Here is the Wikipedia article.

All of the installations were originally super-secret, but most have been dismantled and only a few are left, all of them inactive.

In addition to RAF Credenhill in the previous post, these Wullenweber sites remain:

Chicksands, UK

Elmendorf AFB, Alaska

Misawa, Japan

Imperial Beach, California

This one has an interesting history. Built in Karamursel, Turkey, it was dismantled by the Turkish government in 1977 in retaliation for a U.S. arms embargo. That was 34 years ago and it's still easy to spot.

They're anachronisms now, but as this 1955 snapshot shows, security at Misawa was serious.

24 Terabits A Second

Three submarine fiber cables come ashore in Hermosa Beach, CA...

And make their way to this ratty-looking telephone pole. Notice the red spray-paint on the pavement: "Before you dig, call Miss Utility."

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Tesla Coil Car Theft Deterrent

h/t Snowflakes In Hell.

I think I may have seen one of these in the parking lot at the Dayton Hamvention, but it might just have been a humongous screwdriver antenna.

Happy Anniversary, Neptune!

Today the planet Neptune completed its first orbit around the sun since it was first observed on September 23-24, 1846.



Voyager 2 photographed Neptune's two faint rings in 1989, from about 3,000 miles altitude.

Neatorama.

Shock Wave Condensation Collars

A collection of beautiful and unusual pictures of the Space Shuttle, in The Atlantic.

Coincidence?

Screengrab from the New York Times:

Screengrab from Boing-Boing:
Notice the very curious misspelling of the word "imminent" in both articles.

I guess I can cancel my subscription to the NYT if they're going to cut-and-paste from Boing-Boing.

Fire Leapt From Their Telegraph Keys

It was the worst solar storm in history, the Carrington Event in 1859:

In addition, the geomagnetic disturbances were strong enough that U.S. telegraph operators reported sparks leaping from their equipment—some bad enough to set fires, said Ed Cliver, a space physicist at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in Bedford, Massachusetts.

NatGeo.

There's An App For That

A software defined receiver running on an iPhone 4.

Causation or Correlation

In the past thirty years or so, there have been more than two dozen research papers published in American medical journals "linking" guns with a) homicide, b) suicide, or c) injuries. But as even the New York Times recently admitted (amazingly enough!) there has never been any finding of a direct cause-and-effect relationship between gun ownership and elevated risk of homicide, suicide or injury. These medical studies led one critic (was it Dave Kopel?) to ask, "On what basis do the researchers recommend not keeping a gun in the house when they have not documented any increase in mortality or morbidity as a direct result of having done so?"

One of my favorite comparisons is to a (hypothetical) study to determine the causes of obesity. The researchers recruited a thousand voluteers who were overweight to participate in the study. One of the things that the researchers did was to look into the eating habits of the volunteers, and when they did, they found that many of them consumed large amounts of diet soda. Their conclusion? "Consumption of diet soda is a risk factor for obesity."

It's a "reductio ad absurdum" joke, of course. No one, especially a team of Ph.D.'s, would be stupid enough to fall for that.

Oh, really?

New research that links diet soda consumption with an increased risk of heart attack and stroke has doctors urging caution about the controversial and preliminary results.

According to a study of more than 2,500 people presented today as a poster at the American Stroke Association International Stroke Conference in Los Angeles, people who drank diet soda daily had a 61 percent increased risk of cardiovascular events compared to those who drank no soda, even when accounting for smoking, physical activity, alcohol consumption and calories consumed per day.

"This study suggests that diet soda is not an optimal substitute for sugar-sweetened beverages, and may be associated with a greater risk of stroke," Hannah Gardener of the University of Miami and her colleagues reported at the conference.

ABC News

A 500-bhp Fuel Pump

They say that a Bugatti Veyron consumes fuel at such a rate that you can actually see the fuel gauge move.

But the Veyron is like a Toyota Prius compared to the planned world land speed record car "Bloodhound":

Bloodhound's Falcon rocket will be the biggest hybrid (solid fuel propellant, liquid oxidiser) booster ever produced in the UK. Such is its scale, it will need a Formula One engine supplied by the legendary Cosworth group just to pump the oxidiser through the motor.

The Cosworth-Ford engine was the phenomenally successful powerplant that dominated Formula One racing starting in the late 1960's. It was a conventional 3-liter, four-cam, 32-valve V-8 that initially produced about 375-bhp. During its competition years the output was tweaked to 500-bhp.

And now it's going to be a fuel pump.

Turing, Enigma and Computing

Fascinating and entertaining lecture by Richard Buckland of the University of New South Wales, Australia.

Turnstyle

A super-minimalist turntable for your vinyl. Built-in speakers.

Neatorama.

Tom-Tom For iPhone 4

I've been using this app for iPhone 4 for about a month now. For the last two years I have been using Garmin Navigator on a Blackberry, which I really liked, in spite of its shortcomings.

In terms of the user interface, there's no comparison: the Tom-Tom screen is nearly triple the size of the Garmin, and sharper, too. The voice directions from the iPhone are better, too; much, much better. The Blackberry/Garmin voice directions are often punctuated with bursts of digital static, but the iPhone/TomTom voice directions are exceptionally good.

Note in the image above, in the upper left corner, the music symbol. This is the gateway to your iTunes player in your iPhone. If music is playing when the Tom-Tom speaks, it will gently dip the audio level while it reads the directions, then gently raise it back.

On the other hand, note the destination: Starbucks Woodbridge. The street address is 2447 Prince William Parkway. My location is indicated by the blue triangle and the checkered flag is my destination. And note that the Tom-Tom is directing me to take a sharp left turn, thru the guardrail, from the cloverleaf to the Starbucks. This is not good.

The Tom-Tom stores all of its maps inside the iPhone, so even if there is no phone coverage, there should be map coverage; I haven't tried it yet, but I will. Tom-Tom updates its maps pretty often, and you can select whether you want to download updates automatically, manually, or on a schedule. I've had it about a month and I've downloaded updates (maps and programs) three times.

The trip planning feature is great. It allows you to select alternatives by (among other things) avoiding certain roads; hint: avoid US270 and US68 to get from northern Virginia to Indianapolis without going thru Maryland - or, at least, avoiding it as much as possible.

Tom-Tom uses automatic reports from users to calculate real-time road speeds on highways and spot traffic jams: if the users on that road are consistently traveling at 15 mph, in spite of a speed limit of 55 or higher, Tom-Tom routes other users around that slowdown. On my way home from Indy, the Tom-Tom suddenly came alive and predicted a 50-minute delay and proposed an alternative; I pressed "Yes" and Tom-Tom directed me to take the next exit. Immediately, the two trucks in front of me began flashing their right-turn signals and got off at the same exit. I have no idea if they had Tom-Toms, but it sure looked likely to me.

Amazing Shot

During the solar eclipse on January 4th, a photographer caught this unusual image:

The big yellow ball is the sun, of course, and the black disk is the moon. In the lower right is a sunspot. But what's the speck in the upper left? Look closely. Resembles a TIE Fighter from Star Wars, no? It's actually the international space station, whooshing by at 17,000 mph at an altitude of 300 miles. Click on the pic for a much larger version, and details on how the shot was made.

via Neatorama.

Retirement Planning Using Time Travel

Neatorama.

Do Cell Phones Cause Pregnancy?

Correlation vs. causation. Interesting.

Boing-boing.

NASA Scientists Plan To Approach Girl By 2018

Girl said to be "not cold or lifeless".


NASA Scientists Plan To Approach Girl By 2018


The Onion.

Charts And Graphs

Very cool! One of the most effective graphical displays of highly complex data I have ever seen.

And look what happens to the life expectancy of Japan from 1940 to 1945 (@ 2:10). Wow!

h/t Og the Neanderpundit