I never cared about the America’s Cup, which has always been a race for rich guys to compete against each other. But this article on the crash of Oracle’s radical 13-story, rigid-sail driven ship is fascinating from both engineering and failure analysis perspectives.
Post crash footage:
And here’s Mark 2 of the boat, back on the water and hydroplaning:
Like most Oracle products, the ship seems to need a large number of consultants to keep it operating…
Is your retroincabulator up to snuff?
Random Google auto-completes that amuse me:
All glory…
Today Apple became the most valuable publicly traded company of all time. Not bad for the once “beleaguered” company which has been declared dead more times than pretty much any other company.
Here’s a quick history of the company pre-iPhone:
And here’s a quick visual look at of a few of Apple’s computers over the years:
Microsoft discontinued the Zune (i.e., their unpopular iPod clone that, despite coming in brown and being able to “squirt” songs at other people) back in October of 2001. So why am I still getting the same braindead Zune-related comments spam I’ve gotten for the past two years?
“This is getting a bit more subjective, but I much prefer the Zune Marketplace.”
“The new Zune browser is surprisingly good, but not as good as the iPod’s.”
“Hands down, Apple’s app store wins by a mile. It’s a huge selection of all sorts of apps vs a rather sad selection of a handful for Zune.”
My theory is that someone out there sells a ScriptKiddie Comment Spamming Kit that includes pre-loaded Zune comments as the example payload text, and most spammers never bother to switch them out.
Now if I could just figure out why I keep getting comment spam promoting a washed-up rapper…
Flying robot quadrotors perform the James Bond theme:
This was done at Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science‘s Vijay Kumar, Daniel Melligner and Alex Kushleyev. The quadrotors are under computer control.
It’s not a particularly good version, but I’m sure they’ll have time to improve before the final enslavement of humanity. Now you’ll have to excuse me, I have to write a quadrotor heist novel…
(Hat tip: Derek Johnson)
Here’s another video that goes into more detail about how the locking works.
I don’t usually post videos that have already been on Fark, but this one was too cool not to:
I’d seen superconducting magnet demonstrations before, but never with the adjustable “locking” they demonstrate here.
Sort of humbling to consider he was only ten years older than I am.
Very few people can say they truly changed the world. He did.
And, in the interest of providing actual content:
And this seems appropriate:
And here’s his commencement address to Standford University in 2005: