Lost Season 4 Finale Episodes Guide - MythBuster Adam Savage on Explosions in Season Four Finale of Lost - Popular Mechanics

Lost Season 4 Finale Episodes Guide - MythBuster Adam Savage on Explosions in Season Four Finale of Lost - Popular Mechanics

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More fun with Avatars

A site that lets you interactively view lingerie - from Dvorak's wacky blog (which I suspect he has hired help to put it together all day long - there are at least 10 updates a day, it seems like).


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McClellan: Plame leak case was turning point - TODAY: People - MSNBC.com

McClellan: Plame leak case was turning point - TODAY: People - MSNBC.com: "“Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House,” press secretary Dana Perino said in a statement. “For those of us who fully supported him, before, during and after he was press secretary, we are puzzled. It is sad — this is not the Scott we knew.”"

Damn straight he was disgruntled - do you blame him?

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HP discovers new type of electronic component

HP finds 'Missing link' in Electronics

PORTLAND, Ore. — The long-sought after memristor--the "missing link" in electronic circuit theory--has been invented by Hewlett Packard Senior Fellow R. Stanley Williams at HP Labs (Palo Alto, Calif.) Memristors--the fourth passive component type after resistors, capacitors and inductors--were postulated in a seminal 1971 paper in the IEEE Transactions on Circuit Theory by professor Leon Chua at the University of California (Berkeley), but their first realization was just announced today by HP. According to Williams and Chua, now virtually every electronics textbook will have to be revised to include the memristor and the new paradigm it represents for electronic circuit theory.

"My situation was similar to that of the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev who invented the periodic table in 1869," said Chua. "Mendeleev postulated that there were elements missing from the table, and now all those elements have been found. Likewise, Stanley Williams at HP Labs has now found the first example of the missing memristor circuit element."

When Chua wrote his seminal paper, he used mathematics to deduce the existence of a fourth circuit element type after resistors, capacitors and inductors, which he called a memristor, because it "remembers" changes in the current passing through it by changing its resistance. Now HP claims to have discovered the first instance of a memristor, which it created with a bi-level titanium dioxide thin-film that changes its resistance when current passes through it.

"This new circuit element solves many problems with circuitry today--since it improves in performance as you scale it down to smaller and smaller sizes," said Chua. "Memristors will enable very small nanoscale devices to be made without generating all the excess heat that scaling down transistors is causing today."

HP has already tested the material in its ultra-high-density crossbar switches, which use nanowires to pack a record 100 Gbits onto a single die--compared with 16 Gbits for the highest density flash memory chips extant.

"We have been looking for years for the best material to use in our ultra-dense nanowire crossbar switches, which can fit 100 billion crossbars into a square centimeter. What we have finally realized is that the ideal material is a memristor," said Williams, primary inventor of the memristor's titanium-dioxide-based material and founding director of HP's 12-year-old Information and Quantum Systems Lab, where his team perfected its formulation.

The hold-up over the last 37 years, according to professor Chua, has been a misconception that has pervaded electronic circuit theory. That misconception is that the fundamental relationship in passive circuitry is between voltage and charge. What the researchers contend is that the fundamental relationship is actually between changes-in-voltage, or flux, and charge. Such is the insight that enabled HP to invent the memristor, according to Chua and Williams.

"Electronic theorists have been using the wrong pair of variables all these years--voltage and charge. The missing part of electronic theory was that the fundamental pair of variables is flux and charge," said Chua. "The situation is analogous to what is called "Aristotle's Law of Motion, which was wrong, because he said that force must be proportional to velocity. That misled people for 2000 years until Newton came along and pointed out that Aristotle was using the wrong variables. Newton said that force is proportional to acceleration--the change in velocity. This is exactly the situation with electronic circuit theory today. All electronic textbooks have been teaching using the wrong variables--voltage and charge--explaining away inaccuracies as anomalies. What they should have been teaching is the relationship between changes in voltage, or flux, and charge."

HP invited Chua to speak about his theory a few years ago, but at that time the lab did not tell Chua that they were actively seeking the memristor. Only two weeks ago did Williams tell Chua that he had used the proper variables--flux and charge--to invent the world's first working memristor.

A memristor works by virtue of hysteresis, whereby its rate of change accelerates as it moves from one state to the other--"on" to "off," or vice versa. Hysteresis has been explained away by current circuit theory as an anomaly, according to Chua and Williams, whereas its existence is, in fact, a fundamental property of passive circuitry.

I'm reminded of something my son Thomas said when he was about nine. "Dad, why doesn't light accelerate? Everything else does." I had to admit I did not know the answer. Maybe answering that question will help figure out some of the missing pieces in unified field theory. After all, Einstein was inspired to think about relativity by watching the trains just outside his window at the patent office. Light certainly changes speed as it enters and exits different materials ... but in a vacuum - why doesn't light have an acceleration component?

Please hand your papers in by next Friday.


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Weezer video deconstructed

Weezer understands how to work YouTube: allude to these 24 viral videos

Everything you need to know about the most common internet memes summed up on one big page.
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Japanese Subway Pushers

I've heard of this before but never seen it (it never happened around me when I was in Japan for a week):



(I found this on Dvorak Uncensored.)

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American Idol - I called it on April 12, 2008

I called it back in April when I saw that David Cook was significantly more popular on iTunes than anyone else. Interestingly, I listed the next two highest as David Archuleta and Jason Castro. In actuality these two came in #2 and #4 instead of #2 and #3. But I also said it was pretty much a crapshoot as to who would be voted out each week. With four left, Ryan Seacrest announced that the bottom three were all very close to each other.

So what does that all mean? It means that the people who voted with their $1.00 for an iTunes download were correct and it correlated very well with the final results.

Which means it's time for them to integrate iTunes into the voting process. Wouldn't that be sweet?

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The Greatest Player Piano in the World!

When I was a wee-lad (16 years old actually) my Mom and I bought an old 1910 Aeolian Grand Upright Piano for $450.00 at a garage sale. It barely worked. Over a two year period I rebuilt the insides with the help of my neighbor Ken Woodworth who owned a piano store in Santa Ana, CA. He bought all of the supplies for me!

I taught myself to play ragtime on that piano by slowing down the playback and studying the keys. (I also went to Disneyland each weekend to watch Rod Miller play. In that case, I was watching his fingering but upside down and backwards, since I was looking over the top of the piano.)

The outside of the piano had been painted puke green/yellow. When I moved out from my parents house I sold the Piano to my friend Jeff Rhoads. He stripped off the puke-paint and refinished the piano. He later sold it to a friend of his in Oregon, where it lives today.

Ahh.... that piano had a really smooth action.

Jeff found a picture of the piano for me - the only picture I have:




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Amazon's Secret Customer Service Number

Amazon's secret price guarantee! - By Timothy Noah - Slate Magazine:

Of the many responsibilities shouldered by this column, none is more solemn than its mandate to compel Web-based retailers to take phone calls from the public. But suppose you finally get one of these reclusive customer-service reps on the horn and become so flustered that you forget what it is you wanted to say? If the retailer is Amazon.com—customer-service number: 1-800-201-7575; to get a human right away, dial extension 7—ask him about that 30-day price guarantee.

Big Disney Park Update

Welcome to the Humongous Weekend Update for May 10, 2008 - MiceChat

The link is to a really big photo update from the Disney parks. Lots of Toy Story Mania photos and a large number of really beautiful Disney/Art/Architecture/Nature shots. The page is /really big/ and will take a long time to load even on a fast connection.
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History of transitor density

A History of Transitor Density

Amazing stuff.

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Deadliest Catch - Now a Game

Hey! I know this guy! Laurent Coulon worked with me at Amaze.



I knew he was working on this game, and I'd heard the water effect was "awesome". This video is the first time I've seen it ... and it looks really good!

Good work Laurent and team!

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