Missing Mary Road

apple (computers? devices?) these days reminds me more and more of fairy tales and other stories or rather the morals learnt (or lack thereof) from them. it’s funny how the company makes an announcement and the world of media just explodes all over the interwebs. anyway…so i suppose from my previous post you know what my stance on the new device is.

apple is a smart company. their UI’s are usually beautiful and they make sleek and elegant devices. usually in my experience, that’s all they are though, sleek and elegant, and not much else. also they’re flimsy, very, very flimsy. (if you’ve ever bought a first gen apple product, you know what i’m talking about). take the new tablet for example.

they’re aiming for a netbook alternative, but they’re not gonna be  getting much out of it to because to keep their price point low, they’ve had to skimp out on hardware. pretty much no usb ports or SD support. super cool idea for a device that’s being advertised as a media box, don’t you think? and in true apple fashion, they’ll just charge you an arm and two legs for getting those plastic pieces of apple USB and SD adapters. same thing with 3G support. you want 3g on that thing, you may hand over 60% more money for the same thing without, thank you very much. good stuff. oh another thing seriously lacking, a camera. my n900 has two! one for making video calls forward facing, and another for shooting video and taking photos.

now let’s see…what else, oh yeah, wanna see what the web looks like using the ipad. click here and find out. err…get used to the blue logos. you’ll be seeing it a lot if you’re on the ipad. and if you’re interested in reading why Mac OS doesn’t support flash altogether…not well anway…well you can read here more about it and why they won’t be supporting it anytime soon either.

the other reason apple can afford to keep down their hardware costs is by making up most of the money in software, especially since they make huge cuts in the app store, itunes and  ibook sales. so what it boils down to, with apple, no such thing as a free lunch. it will be interesting to see how apple reacts to it’s software content distribution systems and the percentage it takes off it, as it sees the apps move from the stores to the web itself (case in point, google voice).

now giving credit where it’s due. both the ipod and iphone reinvented the future and brought it to us and handed it to us on a silver platter. it changed the way we consumed the technology and  we loved every minute of it. the ipad just took a step back unfortunately. it was designed to consume media. a sort of re-invented television, yet it’s being marketed as a computer which it hardly isn’t. a computer is something that is customizable both in terms of hardware and software, the ipad is neither. a user of a computer has a very intimate relationship with the computer itself. the very design of apple devices these days deny you that privilege. the whole reason why computers are in the shape and form that they are in today is because thirty years ago there were hackers and geeks tinkering away and messing with parts to improve upon and adding on devices and other electronics and fun toys to make their computers better, faster and using them in ways that the original manufacturing neither intended nor imagined. with the whole lock down of software (and now hardware, especially with proprietary hardware), the future is fast looking like a bleak place where there can be no innovation as far as the end users are concerned.

unfortunately without the lack of multiple apps running simultaneously, all the ipad is is something similar to changing channels on tv, good luck trying to watch two things at the same time, or for that matter, even choosing what playing, because the app store really doesn’t give you that choice, Apple does, and they control what gets to play. so you’ve got hundreds of channels, and nothings on. they got away with this business on a phone, i’m not sure how successful it would be on something thats meant to overlap with a computer. yes you can writeup quick emails and browse the app store and text in real fancy manners to other ipad users, but thats not the same thing as reconfiguring an entire computer to do something entirely different.

have a good day ladies and gents.

A physicist carefully examined the way R2D2 flies in Attack of the Clones, and has come to a startling discovery. Examining the thrust of R2’s flight, then adding in gravity and resistance, he discerned that R2 is lighter than styrofoam.

Rhett Alain, a physicist at Southeastern Louisiana University, first turns R2’s flight into a free body diagram, pictured here. Then he solves for F-thrust, assuming Earth gravity and some atmospheric resistance (you can see all his equations here). Then he reaches the fun part, which is figuring out R2’s mass.

Writes Allain, as he solves his equation for mass:
* rho = 1.2 kg/m3
* Area: Wookieepedia says that R2 is 0.96 meters tall. Using tracker video on an image of R2, I am going to approximate it as a rectangle that is 0.42 meters by 0.62 meters for an area of 0.26 m2
* Wikipedia lists the drag coefficient for a smooth sphere as 0.1. It has a smooth brick with a coefficient of 2.1. A skier has a coefficient of 1.0. Wikipedia does not list the drag coefficient for R2, but a value of around 1.0 seems reasonable.
* For the velocity, I took it a little far. I was just going to ballpark guess at his speed, but I didn’t. I used Tracker to look at R2’s motion in Clone Wars where he flies to rescue Padme. From this, I get a speed of 2.3 m/s.
* I already said I would assume Earth-like gravity. So, g will be 9.8 N/kg
* Theta is about 35 degrees (although it could be as high as 45 degrees).
Using these values, the mass of R2 is 0.1 kg. Yes, 100 grams. How do I know I am correct? I know because Wookieepedia doesn’t list R2’s mass or weight. They know it is silly, so they left it off.
If this mass is so low, I think R2 doesn’t even need thrusters. He would just float (which would actually change my calculations above – I left off the buoyancy force). By my estimations, R2 is about .42 meters in diameter. This would put its volume at about 0.1 m3 and R2’s density would be this:

I was originally thinking that maybe R2 was made of styrofoam – but that has a density of about 40 kg/m3. So there.

So basically R2 doesn’t need thrusters, and is made of spiderwebs. Makes perfect sense!

E-mail, IM, Facebook, phones—what if all of these ways to reach you over a network could be condensed into a single, unique number? The ENUM proposal aims to do just that, by giving everyone a single phone number that maps to all of their identifiers. Here’s how it works, and why it isn’t already widely used.

Israel has asked an Indian geneticist to study the link between the Indian Pathans tribe and certain tribes of Israel, the Times of India reported this week.

Geneticist Shahnaz Ali has been asked to study the link between the Afridi Pathans, based in the Lucknow region of India, and certain tribes of Israel who migrated across Asia thousands of years ago.

Ali is based in Haifa where she is working in collaboration with Israel’s prestigious university the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

ever wonder what the population of all the people EVER was? well now you can.

our (new) lords and masters throw a party to open a building.

Excellent commentary from The Register:

As the smoke clears following the case of Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, the failed Christmas Day “underpants bomber” of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 fame, there are just three simple points for us Westerners to take away.

First: It is completely impossible to prevent terrorists from attacking airliners.

Second: This does not matter. There is no need for greater efforts on security.

Third: A terrorist set fire to his own trousers, suffering eyewateringly painful burns to what Australian cricket commentators sometimes refer to as the “groinal area”, and nobody seems to be laughing. What’s wrong with us?

The former New York City mayor who has sometimes been mocked for using “a noun, a verb and 9/11″ in stump speeches appears to have forgotten — or has mentally reclassified — the worst terrorist attack on American soil. “We had no domestic attacks under Bush,” Rudy Giuliani told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos Friday.

Even if Giuliani doesn’t consider the attacks on 9/11 a “domestic” attack then surely he forgot about the anthrax attacks of 2001.

While ABC’s George Stephanopolous let Giuliani get away with his misstatement both during the interview and on his blog, ABC’s Jake Tapper called the former mayor out. “Giuliani’s comments that there were zero terrorist attacks under Bush, 1 under Obama, is false no matter how you slice it,” tweeted Tapper.

The former mayor criticized Obama for opting to handle the alleged bomber’s case in civilian court, essentially saying that the problem with civilian courts is that suspects are given lawyers.
“If you put someone in a civilian court, within a short period of time a lawyer is appointed and the person shuts up,” he remarked. “If you have a person in the military system, you can question him endlessly for as long as you have to to make sure you’ve got the full scope of information.”

Giuliani then praised Obama for using the phrase “war on terror.”

“I’m very hopeful that President Obama turned a corner yesterday,” he said. “He first used the words, thank goodness, ‘War on Terror.’”

The mystery relates to Saturn’s tiny ice moon Enceladus. Until relatively recently, very little had been known about Enceladus, however scientists expected it to be a cold and dead place given its physical characteristics.

We knew from the prior Voyager missions that Enceladus might have a complex geology, but most people thought that was in the past. Yet it turns out this 500km-across ball of ice is one of the most active moons or planets in the solar system.

‘The pent-up heat – enough to melt the interior, and possibly sustain a liquid water ocean under the ice – would be released as one catastrophic event around every billion years or so. Cassini just happened to fly into it,’ O’Neill said.
‘Eventually you reach a critical point, and the whole thing just blows,’ he said.

The ice sheets would flow like glaciers, the heat causing geysers to pop up all over the active surface, he added.

so Avatar was a great piece of filmmaking and everything with super awesome special effects and all that but it was possibly a mediocre storyline at best and the plot has been done before in sci-fi over and over. but apparently, the Americans need psychotherapy after watching a damn movie. it’s unreal how this has become a news story, so i’ll post it here and file it under, “those yankees are nuts”.

James Cameron’s completely immersive spectacle “Avatar” may have been a little too real for some fans who say they have experienced depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora.

so apparently, the norwegians are in for a world of hurt, literally. at least according to the Pakistan Daily (which I had never heard of about until today). and which also conveniently leaves out any sources at ALL.

Russian scientists are reporting to Prime Minister Putin today that the high-energy beam fired into the upper heavens from the United States High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) radar facility in Ramfjordmoen, Norway this past month has resulted in a “catastrophic puncturing” of our Plant’s thermosphere thus allowing into the troposphere an “unimpeded thermal inversion” of the exosphere, which is the outermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere.

To the West’s firing of this ‘quantum’ high-energy beam we had previously reported on in our December 10, 2009 report titled “Attack On Gods ‘Heaven’ Lights Up Norwegian Sky”.

To how catastrophic for our Planet this massive thermal inversion has been Anthony Nunan, an assistant general manager for risk management at Mitsubishi Corporation in Tokyo, is reporting today that the entire Northern Hemisphere is in winter chaos, with the greatest danger from this unprecedented Global event being the destruction of billions of dollars worth of crops in a World already nearing the end of its ability to feed its self.

so i suppose i’ve been neglecting posting here. fair enough. let’s try and catch up. from the previous post, you can tell i’ve been playing with my new toy quite a bit and absolutely loving it and the more i use it, the more it rocks. and just a day or two after that, the google nexus one phone was announced so i’ll post more on that in a bit and try and explain why the n900 still rocks more than any other phone out there right now.

in the mean time, here’s a day in the internet.