Crystal Trees and Dendritic Salt Whiskers

As winter slowly ends, road salt is now on sale.  This is an opportunity to gather crystal-making materials cheaply and easily. Examples of materials available (at roughly $5 / 10 pounds): Sodium Chloride  - table salt Potassium Chloride – Known as “No salt” in the grocery store Calcium Chloride  - What remains after you take [...]

Chroma Hash for Passwords

Here is a clever idea: show 3 bands of color near a password field. The colors change based on the hash of the password so you know if you mistyped. It also seems to add color saturation as the password gets longer, or maybe stronger.

http://mattt.github.com/Chroma-Hash

The catch: It makes the password subject to visual cracking if the screen can be recorded. If somehow the color bar sequence can be recorded, it might compromise the password.

Here’s how…

Millimeter-wave T-Shirts

At the airport, the new scanners are getting a bit personal. It’s too bad one can’t wear a faraday…..t-shirt.

Can gold foil on a printed t-shirt conduct THz rays? Can it affect backscatter x-rays? If so, there’s many possibilities for entertaining shirt designs. This includes metamaterial shirts.

WiFi via Office lights

Clever: A startup called LVX in St Cloud is using LED lighting as a carrier for internet access. Since LED’s are essentially the same technology used in the fiber-optic lines that carry the internet across the country, there is a potential to provide very high bandwidth. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101227/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_internet_via_lighting

Confocal Microscopy with interferometry

While playing with a laser, I thought it would be interesting to use the laser to see inside the body without the need for X-rays or ultrasound. But how to extract depth information from a blurry spot?

Prodigy and Lichtenstein?

I wonder, does the song ‘Spitfire’ by Prodigy refer to the prints of Roy Lichtenstein? Specifically, Lichtenstein’s “Whaam!”…

Sign of the Telco

I just saw a woman with an interesting tatoo.  She had the area code “612″ tatooed on the back of her neck. And I thought my cellphone contract was bad.

NetSol vs GoDaddy et al

Network Solutions may have lost their advantage. The domain registration industry is filled with sketchy vendors, aggressive sales tactics, and contracts that you’d better read twice. I kept some domains at NetSol because they seemed different. It didn’t feel like haggling at a bazaar. I didn’t need to have my guard up while checking out….

Replacing the Candela, the Optical “Furlong/Fortnight”

“My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that’s the way I likes it.”
– Grandpa Simpson

The SI system of units is very useful because of its simplicity. Every ‘complex’ unit can be derived from MKS or CGS, and often the scalar values are chosen to be handy quanties: e.g. One cubic centimeter of water weighs 1 gram, and raising it’s temperature by 1 degree Celsius requires 1 joule, which is 1 watt for 1 second.

However, that doesn’t apply to all SI units. One example is the Candela. …