Please Reload Webpage In 31.69 Years To See Results
Big universes. Big numbers. How do we make sense of billions? Our brains just aren’t wired to do it, although we’ve seen some pretty amazing ways that we measure stuff on those largest scales.
A weatherman in Belgium has set up the Billion Second Clock. It will count up to 1,000,000,000 in seconds. Which will take 31.69 years. That’s a big number.
You can send a message to the future, too! I said “I hope you’re all being nice to each other. Have we put a guy on Mars yet?”
(↬ Let’s count to one billion seconds, unfortunate use of Comic Sans at the link)
By now you are probably well familiar with the concept of the urban heat island effect, even if you can’t quite pinpoint the physics at play when your sneaker sole melts a little on a hot black street in July. Asphalt is an awesome material for storing the sun’s heat. On a steamy summer day, the surface of a road may be as hot as 140 degrees Fahrenheit. And it’ll stay that miserable long after the sun sets, pushing up the temperature of whole neighborhoods covered in this blacktop.
A lot of work has gone into figuring out how to combat the effect. We could plant more tree cover. We couldpaint black surfaces white. We could construct… artificial glaciers. But this idea might top them all: Why don’t we use that heat instead of fighting it?
“The bottom line is that roads get hot in summertime, even springtime,” says Rajib Mallick, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. “They have a large surface area, which is collecting solar energy. Why not use that solar energy for something? It’s free energy, and if you use it, at the same time you can lower the temperature of the pavement.”
Mallick and other researchers have been developing a model that would harness the heat contained in asphalt and put it to productive uses. Asphalt, for instance, could heat water coursing through a series of pipes embedded in the road. And that process would both cool street surfaces and send their heat somewhere useful.
Very cool. Cheesy pun intended.
(Source: lackofbelief)
Clearly, the upper part is darker than the bottom one.
Or is it? Cover the borderline/center of the figure with your finger to find out.
The photo above was taken by Google VP Sebastian Thrun while wearing Google Glass. What’s so remarkable about this photo is that he took it while spinning his son as seen in the picture, and wearing Glass at the same time. This perspective would not have been captured without this technology, which leads us to think what amazing photos and video may we capture in the future from a perspective such as this?
You can read a bit more about the technology and the changes it could make to our future over at io9.com.
Zelda Fireplace Art
Custom sizes to fit your non-working/decorative fireplace available at James Bit.
Sell me something, and now, you can get paid with a nerd check! Not only do they feature polyhedral images I made using the software at www.software3d.com/stella.php, they also say “What Would Darwin Do?” under the long amount line. Artistic Checks is the company that does this “design-your-own” check thing I used. =)
