Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.
[ Be sure to check out the Does Not Equal Cafepress store for webcomic merchandise featuring Canadians with geometrically-shaped heads! ]
A nice and accurate replica of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine was built in California last year and is now on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.
Not newsworthy, but if you’ve never seen this machine in action, the short video is well worth a look. It’s fun to listen to it clatter, and to watch the helical patterns it makes.
National Public Radio did a story this morning:
The Difference Engine fills half a gallery and stands taller than most men. It’s 5 tons of cast iron, steel and bronze woven together from 8,000 distinct parts. Though it looks like it could be a sculpture, the machine is essentially a giant calculator. Tim Robinson, a docent at the museum, says it’s “the first automatic calculating machine.”
This engine — made from 162-year-old designs — doesn’t have a power pack; it has a hand crank. Robinson works up a sweat as he turns it. “As long as you keep turning that crank, it will produce entirely new results,” he says.
Most importantly, the machine produces accurate results. In Babbage’s time, England reigned over a vast global empire. To navigate the seas, captains used books filled with calculations — but these equations were all done by fallible human minds.
What if, indeed.
[Image: kalleboo]
The bodies of vehicles need to be strong, but manufacturers also need to cut holes in them, for cable routing.
Working together with a number of partners including Volkswagen, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology IWU in Chemnitz have come up with another way to make holes in press-hardened steel bodywork. Dr. Verena Kräusel, head of department at the IWU, explains: “The new method is based on electromagnetic pulse technology (EMPT), which was previously used primarily to expand or neck aluminum tubes. We’ve modified it to cut even hard steels. Whereas a laser takes around 1.4 seconds to cut a hole, EMPT can do the job in approximately 200 milliseconds — our method is up to seven times faster.”
Another advantage is that it produces no burr, thus doing away with the need for a finishing process. Stamping presses become superfluous, and no costs arise from the need to replace worn-out parts.
I confess I didn’t know this was already being used to cut aluminum. It might be part of the workaday grind to some, but there’s something sf-nally satisfying about using electromagnetism to cut through metals.
[Image: Plexiglass zapped with electricity from Wikimedia Commons via Ethan Hein]
Yet again, the line between science fiction and real life gets thinner, and another of our stories gains a slightly prophetic edge. Richard Kadrey’s Twitter stream alerted me to an article at The Guardian about a therapeutic process whereby traumatic memories can be rewritten or edited in order to make them less debilitating… without the use of drugs. I’m no psychologist, but it reminds me a little bit of the aversion therapy approach:
… 20 volunteers sat in front of a computer screen on which squares of different colours appeared. When blue squares flashed on the screen, they received an electric shock to the wrist.
The next day, the volunteers were shown blue squares again to reactivate the memory. Sensors placed on their skin showed that the images caused the participants to sweat as their stress levels rose.
To erase the memory that linked blue squares with pain, the volunteers were put through “extinction training” which involved flashing blue squares on the screen without the accompanying electrical shocks.
When the volunteers were retested a day later, the fear associated with the squares had gone, but only in participants whose memories were rewritten soon after their fear was reactivated…
In other words, expose the subject to the traumatic memory trigger minus the trauma soon enough after the event, and you can prevent lasting problems. Perhaps this sort of process would be useful for lessening the impact of post-traumatic stress in military personnel on active service? Either which way, it’s reminiscent of Marissa Lingen’s “Erasing The Map”, published here back in February of this year… though Marissa’s story saw memories being deleted rather than edited
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Sometimes, there is joy to be had in simplicity… in particular, simplified history. Continue reading The Future is the Past: Assassin’s Creed II
