"Free air" holograms are coming!

Everyone that has ever seen a "holodeck" from Star Trek wants to experience one. Just about all future Scifi movies show interactive, three dimensional displays, from Iron Man, to Star Wars, to Star Trek.

I thought we were getting close when I encountered virtual, laser projected keyboards and it looks like we are just about there!

You should watch this video of laser plasma holograph. It is incredible!

Isn't science awesome! Here is another video showing this and other forms of "free air" holograms.

CA Energy Officials, the stupid it burns...

 Solar-Powered California Warned to Unplug for August Eclipse.

State energy officials are warning residents to click off all lights they don’t need and unplug all electrical appliances when 62 percent of the sun disappears over Los Angeles during a partial solar eclipse that is expected that day.

Nobody is warning of blackouts. But then again, nobody knows what will happen.

“When the sun goes away, so does the energy that powers our renewable solar panels. If millions of Californians turn off appliances and power strips to unplug from the grid during the eclipse, we can let our hard-working sun take a break,” said Michael Picker, president of the California Public Utilities Commission.

There is just so much stupid on display here. Some of it industry wide and some of it local.

First, I am so tired of folks using the phrase "renewable solar panels". The panels are NOT renewable. they had to be manufactured just like all other "man made things" and that took material and energy. They are not like trees that if left alone will grow and reproduce. Solar panels don't make themselves nor do they make more on their own.

Second "let our hard-working sun take a break"? Really? So the "California Public Utilities Commission president" does not understand that a partial or even total eclipse doesn't put out the Sun nor does it make the Sun go away, it just blocks our Earthly view of it for a time (and location) due to the moon passing between the Earth and Sun? If he actually knows all this [but let us not assume anything] and he is using this phraseology due to his understanding of the Lao Angeles population and their intelligence, that might be even worse.

Lastly, so they don't have ANY idea of if there is enough stand-by energy to run the city while the eclipse is taking place? Really? Isn't knowing the energy reserves and the availability of surrounding area backup power [I don't know, like] his friggen job as president of the Utilities Commission? Or is that too "mathy" for California?

DNC has ID-10-T problem

DNC finds out / realizes that their email server was hacked and has been penetrated so they change the access password (good) and email it to everyone using the very email system that was hacked (very bad).

You can't make up stuff like this. If you tried, you would be told it was too absurd to be true.

The climate change consensus

Watch this video...

Also what the video does not discuss is that NO ONE denies that the climate is changing. That is what weather does, it changes from day to day. Where the various controversies reside are:

1. How much actual influence has man had on the global weather compared to what nature can do on its own (compare say the most recent Mt. St. Helen eruption of air-born particulates and CO2 discharges with that estimated to be caused by man).
2. Who is to say what the world's "ideal" weather is? Is it what the weather was like 5000 years ago or tomorrow? Who gets to decide which is best and best for whom?
3. If environmentalists were serious about reducing fossil fuel use (to save the planet) they would be promoting more nuclear power, but they are not. If we reduce our usage of fossil fuels, that lost energy must be made up somehow. Wind, solar, etc. will not close that energy gap. Nuclear power is the only way (today) to replace the energy lost by reducing/eliminating the use of fossil fuels. Any environmentalist that is not for nuclear power is not serious.
4. If "man made climate change" is really as dire as Al Gore, DiCaprio, and and all of these other "celebrity" environmentalists say it is, why are they NOT doing their part to help? Why are they constantly jet-setting all around the globe instead of appearing by Skype? If they were serious about wanting to save the planet and if things were really so dire, they would never fly by plane again. Al Gore would sell his house that consumes over $30K a year in energy and live more like George Bush.

They don't do that though, in part because they are "better" (i.e. morally superior because they CARE) than you and I. Due to their fight for the planet, they have earned the right (in their minds at least) to have a carbon foot print that is larger than some small towns. As with most socialists and/or fascists, they always think that they will wind up in charge and as George Orwell famously wrote, "Some animals are more equal than other animals".

Mechanical computers

This [compiled] set of videos explains how mechanical computers work. These videos are fantastic! They were produced in 1953 to explain the workings of mechanical computers used in fire control computers (aiming the guns) on ships. The concepts are universal and the detailed explanations on how the different gear configurations operate is top-notch!

Enjoy!

The blackest material in the world just got even more black

Back in 2014, a team of British researchers made headlines for producing the blackest material known to science. Called Vantablack, the material was so black, it absorbed all but 0.035 percent of visible light, which means to our eyes, it was borderline invisible. Now the blackest material ever made is even more black, with the inventors announcing that no spectrometer in the world is powerful enough to measure how much light it absorbs.

Most Ideal Liquid Ever Seen Is a Quark-Gluon Plasma

Perfect liquids, Wang explains, have the lowest viscosity-to-density ratio allowed by quantum mechanics, which means they essentially flow without friction.

One difficulty in using a jet as an x-ray of the quark-gluon plasma is the fact that a quark-gluon plasma is a rapidly expanding ball of fire—it doesn't sit still. "You create this hot fireball that expands very fast as it cools down quickly to ordinary matter,"

Only under extreme conditions, such as collisions in which temperatures exceed by a million times those at the center of the sun, do quarks and gluons pull apart to become the ultra-hot, frictionless perfect fluid known as quark-gluon plasma.

Over the past few years, researchers from the JET Collaboration have developed such a model that can describe the process of expansion and the observed phenomena of an ultra-hot perfect fluid. "This allows us to understand how a jet propagates through this dynamic fireball," says Wang.

"The determined values of the jet transport coefficient can help to shed light on why the ultra-hot matter is the most ideal liquid the universe has ever seen," Wang says.

Einstein refrigerator

The Einstein–Szilard or Einstein refrigerator is an absorption refrigerator which has no moving parts, operates at constant pressure, and requires only a heat source to operate. It was jointly invented in 1926 by Albert Einstein and his former student Leó Szilárd and patented in the US on November 11, 1930.

How neat is that! A refrigerator with no moving parts.

Also.

And here...

Auditory illusion

Now this is really cool. It is called a Shepard scale and you have to hear it to understand. It appears to constantly rise in tone but never end.

Here are some other examples that play longer. Amaze your friends!

ShepardRisset-Up

ShepardRisset-Down

ShepardRisset-Up-Reverb

ShepardRisset-Down-Reverb

This is indeed cool!

Volcano Light Show (via instapundit)

Lawn Chair Flying

Looks like a fun way to spend the day. Glad to see he was greeted with friendly town's folks and not police and FAA.

Myth Busters will need to take a second look as they did an episode on lifting a lawn chair with balloons and if I remember correctly, they called it busted. They used standard sized balloons whereas this fellow used large ones. Could make all the difference as there would be less balloon to lift weight by going with the larger balloons.

Just great, now there will be a run on watermelon!

Found in the flesh and rind of watermelons, citrulline reacts with the body's enzymes when consumed in large quantities and is changed into arginine, an amino acid that benefits the heart and the circulatory and immune systems.

"Arginine boosts nitric oxide, which relaxes blood vessels, the same basic effect that Viagra has, to treat erectile dysfunction and maybe even prevent it," said Bhimu Patil, a researcher and director of Texas A&M's Fruit and Vegetable Improvement Center. "Watermelon may not be as organ-specific as Viagra, but it's a great way to relax blood vessels without any drug side effects."