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Blogsnapper at 06:09 pm
Fascinating tale about 2 students enlisted to see how hard (or easy) it was to make a nuke -
How two students built an A-bomb… It’s one of the burning questions of the moment: how easy would it be for a country with no nuclear expertise to build an A-bomb? Forty years ago in a top-secret project, the US military set about finding out. Oliver Burkeman talks to the men who solved the nuclear puzzle in just 30 months.
…the two amateurs were ironically aided by information published as part of President Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program, which spread word of the benefits of non-military nuclear power around the world. And Atoms for Peace was only the most prominent example of a fad for everything nuclear that propelled a huge amount of technical detail into the public domain.
Eventually, towards the end of 1966, two and a half years after they began, they were finished. “We produced a short document that described precisely, in engineering terms, what we proposed to build and what materials were involved,” says Selden. “The whole works, in great detail, so that this thing could have been made by Joe’s Machine Shop downtown.”
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Posted by Blogsnapper at 06:09 pm
This custom designed robotic system was intended for a vineyard in order to build a wall of 20,000 bricks that had to be precisely arranged in a programmed manner in order to control the amount of air and sunlight that passes through to the plants. Each brick sits on a different angle than the next to create the right spacing in the wall.
Non-Standardized Brick Facade, via AITDW
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Posted by Blogsnapper at 06:09 pm
Don’t give up on the stacks of your local library as a source for project ideas. “Low Tech: Fast Furniture For Next To Nothing” was last printed in 1984, but it was well worth a browse.
4 of my favorite projects:
Bike seat / frame to barstool. Kind of obvious when you see it, huh?
I’m not sure why, but I find the giant-hand-holding-hose incredibly appropriate.
PVC piping becomes an easy shelf.
Kitchen retrofitted with corrugated plastic / metal cabinet covers. Stove is on rollers and powered by propane.
Low tech, high ingenuity!
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Posted by Blogsnapper at 05:09 pm
Sculptor Alan Bennett created this compounded Klein bottle for the Science Museum in London -
This is one of a series of glass Klein bottles made by Alan Bennett in Bedford, United Kingdom for the Science Museum, London. It consists of three Klein bottles, one inside another. A Klein bottle is a surface which has no edges, no outside or inside and cannot properly be constructed in three dimensions. In the series Alan Bennett made Klein bottles analogous to Mobius strips with odd numbers of twists greater than one.
- Klein bottle, 1995-1996 [via Neatorama]
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Posted by Blogsnapper at 05:09 pm
Paperforest points us to this excellent article about pop-up book design in the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) newsletter. The article, by artist and paper engineer Ray Marshall and artist Wilson Swain, is about their book, The Castaway Pirates - I’ve seen this book, it’s complicated and awesome. The article starts on page 10 of the newsletter.
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Posted by Blogsnapper at 05:09 pm
A free album of music created with KORG’s Nintendo DS synth software is now available courtesy of MP3death.us
- KORG DS 10 Synthensizer compiliation
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Posted by Blogsnapper at 05:09 pm
Typically a ring flash is about 4 inches across and it easily fits around the camera’s lens. Well, this is no ordinary ring flash. This DIY flash is completely scalable so it can actually fit around the object to be photographed, even a person!
The Ring Flash / Ring Light is a unique light source since it gives you a hard light but because the light comes from all around the lens the only shadow is a darkened halo around a subject, but the subject it self is uniformly lit.
Make your own Ring Flash
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Posted by Blogsnapper at 05:09 pm
This is a really interesting Arduino project that involves manipulating stereo sound so it appears to move in a virtual 3-dimensional space. There is a lot of interesting information in the forum and the code can be found here.
The effect is so sharp, you can tell the difference between center, ten degrees left of center and ten degrees right of center. I was so surprised, I thought it might be due to wishful thinking, so I turned off the stereo volume adjustments… even with just the delay and no change in the volume between left and right, you can hear the sound move from side to side. What’s even weirder is that if you listen to just one side, the sound stays the same.
Read more about Manipulating perceived position of sound
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Posted by Blogsnapper at 05:09 pm
This might be a good quick fix when you need a second or third light source and you don’t want to buy another stand. It’s a really simple build that can make a big difference when it comes to lighting your work.
Read more about making a Super Cheap Umbrella Stand
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Posted by Blogsnapper at 05:09 pm
