Telling Time the Hard Way

Here is a robotic clock. Fully functional, accurate, interesting for a minute, but not very practical.

Quotable

"Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant." Robert Louis Stevenson

Orange Juice Truths

OJ is heavily processed and heavily engineered. In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn't oxidize.

Then it's put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for over a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it's ready for packaging, companies, such as Tropicana, hire flavor companies to engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh. These are orange-derived substances, essences, and oils. Flavor companies break down the essence and oils into individual chemicals and recombine them. Most concentrate (even Tropicana) comes from Brazil, not Florida.

People think not-from-concentrate is a fresher product, but it is not and sits in storage for quite a long time.

BTW - Minute Maid is owned by Coca-Cola. Tropicana is owned by Pepsi.

Speaking of Breakfast

When it comes time for my birthday, I hope someone keeps this web site in mind. It is a bacon-of-the-month club gifts.
How better to tell that certain someone that you are thinking of them every month of the year. Bobby Flay's father bought him a one year subscription. Bacon is almost as good as potato chips. OK, OK, sorry. I just had to do it.

Inspiring Words

The Latin root "spir," which means "to breathe life into," is found in words like inspiration, respiration, spirit, and perspiration.

Speaking of Inspiring

Here is the latest effort to mimic the human brain on a chip.
A collaboration with neurobiologists and contributions of 15 scientific groups from seven different countries, the group is trying to recreate the three-dimensional structure of the brain in a 2-D piece of silicon. The current prototype can operate about 100,000 times faster than a real human brain.

The FACETS group now plans to further scale up their chips, connecting a number of wafers to create a superchip with a total of a billion neurons and 1013 synapses. Roomba has been eclipsed.

Awesome miniature Railroad

It takes about 4 minutes to watch this video, but the view is truly amazing. Leave it to the Germans to outdo themselves once again. You might even get sidetracked by the steampunk robots like I did (the link is on the left of the video). They are becoming popular again.

Google Tip

Do you get as frustrated as I do when searching and Google comes back with sites and articles that are years old? Try typing inurl:2008 or whatever year you like, at the end of the words and it will come back with results for that year only, example: computers inurl:2008.

If you want to see the results for different years, you can type: computers view:timeline and it will come back with this on the top of the page.

You can then click on any of the years and only the results for those years will be displayed.

BTW use quotes if you want to find a particular phrase or string of words. If I used my name without the quotes it would find many extraneous things for tom and many other shubnells. By using the quotes around both names, I limit the search to only me.

P E T A

I am a member and you can become a member, too. It stands for People Eating Tasty Animals. You don't eat meat when it turns green, because it will make you sick, so why would you eat anything that starts out green.

Toothbrush Fountain

Here is a novel idea from Amron Experimental.

This is a toothbrush that redirects water to your mouth so you don't need a glass or get your hands wet. They are cheap at $1.18. I bet the kids would love this. Of course my first test would be to see how far it would shoot.

HDTV

I have noticed the price of HDTVs has actually been going up since about January. Went to a number of web sites and verified that it has quietly been happening. Another thing I have noticed is that 50" sets are conspicuously missing and 52" sets are replacing them.

Guess the price wars and slashing has hurt the retail market too much, they are sneaking in higher prices. They probably haven't read 'good business 101, what not to do during a downturn'.

BTW - Visio is now the second largest shipper of HDTVs in the US. Do you think selling through Sam's and Costco might have something to do with it.

More Nano

The diameter of a red blood cell is about 7,000 nanometers.