Sounds like another reason to keep traveling with a few black plastic garbage bags and some duct tape in my bag. I try to sleep as much as I can on those long flights. A window without a shade sounds like hell. Luckily, I come prepared for that kind of stuff.

The Spanish have prototype hot salt heat storage systems that collect solar heat and store the energy by melting salts, typically NaCl and KCl. They use the hot salt to produce steam that drives a generator. Salts can be melted and cooled repeatedly, but there are still a lot of scaling issues for powering cities.

I tried Photiosity (for the Mac) and it didn't work quite as well as this on the sample given, but I just used its default settings. It's possible that a little tweaking might have improved the quality. It's only $4 at the App Store, so it's an inexpensive way to play around with deblur technology. I've put the…

If I remember correctly, the US did have satellite intelligence coverage using on some of the early spy satellites, but did not want to confirm their existence, so the US ordered cover U-2 flights to get the pictures that JFK presented.

These have been around since at least the early 1960s. We used them on one of the boring walls in our apartment's foyer.

Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte's last computer program worked something like this, except it used a Sylvania tablet for input and drew its output on an ARDS. It started by echoing and saving what the user drew, then it switched over and started replaying relocated subsets of the saved data and pressure info. It…

There's a very good book on this called Darkness at Night by Edward Harrison. It goes through the history of the problem and its solution. Interestingly, Edgar Allen Poe actually got it right.

Interestingly one of the big reasons the car designers wanted to get rid of the steering wheel was that it was dangerous in accidents. Now, steering wheels are made of plastic and contain a life saving airbag. Back then, they were plastic covered metal wheels mounted on a metal post aimed at the driver's chest. More…

A three strikes rule would be better. Three bogus take down requests and you lose the right to issue any more take downs for a year.

Wow, I can't even start to figure this thing out. I keep clicking "and NNN replies" and replies randomly appear. It's like playing Tetris. The previous system was bad because each click only showed a handful of comments, so after three or four clicks I usually punted. No one was going to read all the comments if it…

Substitute butter for the Crisco. That stuff is foul. Maybe a lot of this precision stuff is to compensate for chemical ingredients.

Weird. I've been amazed at how resilient most cake recipes are. I never bother with sifting before measuring, premixing dry ingredients or leveling teaspoons and all that stuff, and everything comes out great. One time I had the cake baking for five minutes before I realized I had forgotten to add the baking powder,…

There was Josh Rafofsky's The Girl in the Picture back in '04. He made a silent movie and rented a local silent movie house to present her with his proposal. He said he was taking her to a Buster Keaton flick, but we know about that. (For a bit more http://www.internetvideomag.com/videos/drama_103.htm)

Also, for a good George Dantzig story, see http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp

The simplex algorithm is also used for collision detection to find out if an arbitrary convex polyhedron is touching a surface. There's probably a version of it in a number of surprising places.

The idea from Project Icarus back in the 70s was to deflect the asteroid, though not one as big as Texas. When a nuclear weapon is detonated near an asteroid, the heat and other energy shock and vaporize the surface leaving a huge crater. The impulse from the rocks, gasses and slag ejected by the explosion changes the…

Right now they can make tweezers out of light, but they can't apply a lot of force. They're built from light interference and standing waves. I don't think the energetics make sense, at least from the current point of view, but that's the closest we've come to a light saber or force shield, for that matter.

Sounds like Iran. You used to be able to get the Shah's private stock golden caviar, complete with the official seal on it. Supposedly, this stuff wasn't available for sale, but, hey, this was Iran.

It brings back the memories. Of course, Telstar may have lowered communications costs, but the satellite everyone remembers, after Sputnik and Echo, of course, was TIROS, the weather satellite (launched April 1, 1960). No one made international phone calls or leased channels for video feeds, but we did watch the…

Wow, I lucked out. I had a Weber years ago, and when it was time to upgrade I just bought a new one with a little table and automatic cleaning system. It doesn't have the charcoal storage bin, but that isn't a problem on our patio. The table is really useful.