Mankind doesn’t really evolve. Not as a people. We copy, mimic, and integrate, all standing on the shoulders of the great men that came before. It’s an inherently unsteady system, and especially tragic where we can peer back through history and spot one of the rare and special truly great men who was, in his time or the generations thereafter, disregarded.
One such man was Hero of Alexandria. One of the Greek inventors of the first century AD, his geometric proof “Hero’s formula” was embraced and lived beyond him, he put automatic supermarketesqe doors on the temple, made a coin-operated vending machine for holy water, and built a fully automatic machine gun for arrows; but the one invention that really should have earned him notoriety was completely missed by the men of the era.
Hero created a steam engine, but they called it a aeolipile. Basically, a sealed boiler pot with a pipe running up to a sphere that would spin with the release of steam. The invention was likely dismissed because that’s all it did; it was a sight, but not practical at that time.
In 1600 years, when the steam engine was reinvented in France, ideas for its use came fast and frequent, but it hasn’t been until near the 21st Century that the first inventor of the world’s most used engine type has gotten any credit.
Wikipedia Aeolipile
Ghost stories abound, but most are unbelievable yarns of the dead maintaining a post mortem grudge against those of us with pulses and describe events that none of us can believe.
If you drive a car that was built in the last couple of years, there’s a very good chance that it’s got a little black box tucked away somewhere, keeping an electronic eye on you. These devices are called Electronic Data Recorders (EDRs), and according to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, up to 90% of cars built in 2004 included an EDR of some kind. The idea of an EDR is to store information about the vehicle’s status and the driver’s actions in the last few seconds before an accident.
Only a handful of decades ago, a group of very smart scientists figured that if they crammed a giant metal barrel full of explosive chemicals and bolted on a little compartment for people or cargo, they could light the fuse and use the resulting explosion to propel the stuff into outer space. They called this assembly a “space rocket,” and aside from a few dozen catastrophic failures, the idea has been working swimmingly ever since. Unfortunately, moving stuff into space with rockets isn’t particularly economical, costing about $10,000 per pound even when the assembly doesn’t blow up. A single launch of the reusable US space shuttle costs roughly $500 million in total.
On the Fourth of July 2005, NASA successfully executed what may be their coolest mission ever: to shoot the comet 9P/Tempel 1 with a camera-equipped cannonball. The aptly-named “Deep Impact” mission was far neater than the movie, because it was real.
The Praying Mantis was named for its pious stance, its raptorial graspers held aloft beseechingly as is pleading forgiveness for its many, many kills. Even the word “mantis” is divined from the Greek word for prophet.
The decadence of the American public is a perpetual source of tragic amusement, and the pinnacle of it seems to be “Brûlée Desserts” in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
Can your privacy be protected with the implementation of RFID chips in your passport? I spawn this question based on a decision made today (well over the months anyway) to have RFID chip implants on all U.S. Passports starting in October 2006. The RFID chips with their 64KB of storage have the capability of storing your name, address, SSN, birth date, etc. all of which can be retrieved wirelessly with the right equipment. It has been well demonstrated that the ability to receive this information is possible with a “high powered” antenna and receiver.