« ~Riddle me with glee.~ | Main | "Here, look at the monkey. Look at the silly monkey!" »
May 05, 2006
~It's revolution pushing through the loose pins~
"Honorificabilitudinitatibus" is a word. Who knew?
With honour.
We are in the arena of sesquipedalian words—those a foot and a half long, whose prime characteristic is their length rather than their sense or value.
Any word used by James Joyce (in Ulysses) and William Shakespeare (in Love’s Labour Lost) can’t be entirely dismissed from the canon of English, even though the former borrowed it from the latter, who in turn borrowed it from Latin. The only other person who seems to have used it, ever, was John Taylor, a Thames waterman known as the Water Poet, in the middle of the seventeenth century.
Dave's sells an incredible adjustable heat hot sauce with a high-tech pump spray. via
"They are made out of meat" is a short film based on the carnal sci-fi short story of the same name. via
MIT keeps track of the state of IP spoofing. via
Vicente Fox backed down on legalizing drugs for personal use in Mexico after pressure from you-know-who. via
A day after his office said he would sign the measure into law, Vicente Fox said yesterday he was sending the bill back to congress for changes to make it "absolutely clear" that the possession of drugs would still be a criminal offence.
Earlier yesterday, the US embassy said it had "urged Mexican representatives to review the legislation" after fears it would increase drug tourism from the US to Mexico.
Before there were satellites, there was Project West Ford, an attempt at bouncing radio signals off a ring of tiny copper needles dispersed in a Low Earth Orbit.
In May 1963, the US Air Force launched 480 million tiny copper needles that briefly created a ring encircling the entire globe. They called it Project West Ford. The engineers behind the project hoped that it would serve as a prototype for two more permanent rings that would forever guarantee their ability to communicate across the globe.
The project itself was a virtually unqualified success. Though the first launch ended in failure, the second launch went without a hitch on May 10th, 1963. Inside the West Ford spacecraft, the needles were packed densely together in blocks made of a napthalene gel that would rapidly evaporate in space. This entire package of needles weighed only 20 kg. After being released, the hundreds of millions of copper needles gradually spread throughout their entire orbit over a period of two months. The final donut-shaped cloud was 15 km wide and 30 km thick and encircled the globe at an altitude of 3700 km.
Copper Dipoles from Project West FordThe West Ford copper needles were each 1.8 cm long and 0.0018 cm in diameter and weighed only 40 micrograms. They were designed to be exactly half of the wavelength of 8000 MHz microwaves. This length would create strong reflections when the microwaves struck the copper needles, in effect making them tiny dipole anttennae each repeating in all directions the exact same signal they received.
The first attempt at remote communications using the West Ford belt was made on May 14th, 4 days after the launch. At this point, the dipoles had not completely spread out to fill their entire orbit so they were much more densely spaced than in their final configuration. Using two 18.5 meter microwave dish antennae, Project West Ford engineers managed to send voice transmissions between Camp Parks, California and Millstone Hill, Massachusetts. The voice connection was described as "intelligible" and was transmitted at a data rate of approximately 20,000 bits per second– about the speed of a 1992-era telephone modem. But as the needles continued to disperse to their final cloud, the data rate dropped off significantly, so much so that by June 18th only 400 bits per second could be transmitted. On July 2nd, the experiment was terminated. At this time, the tiny needles were spaced about 400 meters from each other.
Posted by Jon Rubin at May 5, 2006 10:18 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.ubiquit.us/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/138