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Comment: They don't care about real dangerous things (Score 4, Interesting) 289

Story: I walked into the Detroit airport a couple years ago while wearing the Video Coat. The nice TSA people marked my entire family's boarding passes SSSS. They inspected us thoroughly, including the eight 5 AH Chinese LiPo battery packs used to power the coat. These are the no-protection-board version with the factory connectors that let you plug two batteries together like BIG 9V batteries. They will happily put out 100 amps.

Had we been 'the type', we could have started four fires in the cabin that day.

Comment: Re:Year 15 here (Score 1) 177

by NixieBunny (#46159701) Attached to: At my current workplace, I've outlasted ...
I am in a similar situation, but only 12 years. The people above me are getting near retirement age, but lots of folks stick around until their seventies around here. I have a side business and work part-time, to keep the interest level up and reduce unreasonable demands on my time. And do volunteer work with high school kids, doing robotics. That's fun.

Comment: Hits the nail on the head (Score 2, Informative) 360

by NixieBunny (#46150815) Attached to: Why Games Should Be In the Public Domain
This article is so right! He has found a way to express something that's been bugging me for a long time. I love his comparison of a policeman to a song writer.

The other thing about copyright is that it's not the creative people who make money forever off of their own work, it's the corporations that manufacture the plastic discs who make the money forever off of the songwriters' work.

Comment: Re:They know your name anyway (Score 2) 140

by NixieBunny (#46147353) Attached to: Facebook Estimates Around 10% of Accounts Are Fake
I have a real account, and I manage a couple groups. One (a local bike ride) receives a steady stream of requests for new members to join the group. Half of these are fake Chinese or Indian accounts - it's obvious from their profiles. The rest are real local folks. I have no idea how that maps into the total number of fake IDs.

Comment: Re:Radio telescope - not exactly "skywatching" (Score 1) 201

by NixieBunny (#46045981) Attached to: Best skywatching equipment at my disposal:
We only use one receiver at a time, so it's not a problem. A poster written by one of our grad students that gives an idea of the telescope's capabilities is here.

The temperature scale on the graphs (temperature = signal strength) gives you an idea of the absurdly high sensitivity of the system. Some of those graphs are in milliKelvin!


by NixieBunny (#46036155) Attached to: Best skywatching equipment at my disposal:
The beam size (it's a Gaussian beam, so it's fuzzy) is about 20-50 arc seconds, narrower at higher frequency. Basic pointing accuracy is about 5 arc seconds, but we improve that with pointing observations that measure the Gaussian beam dropoff on the sides of a bright object, so we can optimize pointing to within an arc second or two. More black magic.

Comment: Re: Radio telescope - not exactly "skywatching" (Score 1) 201

by NixieBunny (#46025831) Attached to: Best skywatching equipment at my disposal:
It should be. We work halfway between radio and light. The signal passes through Teflon lenses, is mixed by a superconducting mixer diode in a receiver cooled to 4K with a helium refrigerator, down-converted to an intermediate frequency range of 4-8 GHz, then into a spectrometer. Many types of black magic involved.

Comment: Radio telescope - not exactly "skywatching" (Score 5, Interesting) 201

by NixieBunny (#46020773) Attached to: Best skywatching equipment at my disposal:
I work on the Submillimeter Telescope on Mt Graham in Arizona. It's a 10 meter dish with several receivers in the ridiculously high frequency range of 200-800 GHz. We mostly do molecular spectroscopy, finding interesting molecules in faraway places. The 'images' that come out of my spectrometer are spectrum graphs, not photos.

Comment: Re:Comparison to conventional prosthetics? (Score 2) 86

by NixieBunny (#45893677) Attached to: The $100 3D-Printed Artificial Limb
My wife has a high-tech wooden leg, so I'm familiar with how long they last, about five years. I also have a 3D printer, but I've never considered printing a leg socket. I'd expect the fingers in this hand to eventually break, as the wearer tests the limits. Fortunately, printing a single component is not expensive at all.

The idea of using the 3D printer to make the fiddly bits is excellent. It's also possible to use regular materials to make limb pieces. PVC pipe has been used in India.

In the long run, a local prosthetics cottage industry that relies on commonly available components and supplies should be self-sustaining, if the cost of materials is borne by humanitarian agencies.
