Hi guys. My student organization is holding an alternative class room learning experience on August 18. If you’re a UP student be sure to come!
You’ve probably heard of them in the news, Nissan Leaf, Tesla Roadster, BMW i8. Electric cars once the domain of technological speculation are flooding the market and poised to distrupt the way we transport ourselves.
This Alternative Classroom Learning Experience from the Philippine Society of Mechanical Engineers UP Student Unit aims to introduce everyone to the budding and fast-paced world of the electric vehicle. We’ll be showing a complete historical perspective on the electric car, from its murder in the early 2000’s to the Silicon Valley revival it is experiencing today.
Plus we’ll be treating everyone to a screening of Disney-Pixar’s automotive masterpiece, Cars 1.
Apparently the magnitude of the Death Star’s gravitational acceleration is saved as a constant in the Android SDK.
Guess that means the Death Star can be a level in Angry Birds.
(Source: developer.android.com)
Flow
“Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”
-Thomas Jefferson on Patents.
You can read Jefferson’s full quotation here.
He wasn’t exactly against patents but believed that a society can still be innovative even with lax or no patent laws. I’m posting this quotation in light of recent developments in the mobile space like the Lodsys patent trolling of small iOS developers, the threat of an import ban on HTC phones, and the danger Google faces in the acquisition of Nortel patents by rivals.
The way I see it these events are sending a chilling message on the future of innovation. Historically patent (and even copyright) laws have been pretty lax. Now however the draconian system in which they’re enforced and the fact that a lot of patents tend to be vague/general are leading us into the Dark Ages of creativity, what Lawrence Lessig calls the permission culture.
I’m not totally against patents but as an aspiring engineering student I feel that we as a society should review and revise current patent laws in order to protect inventors and developers without voiding the chance of the many to build upon the works of others. Ideas are and should be free to flow.
All in all this is just my humble opinion.
"I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and in many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here, and what the question might mean. I might think about a little, but if I can’t figure it out, then I go to something else. But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me."
—
-Richard Feynman
Even for an engineering student like me, there’s no doubt Feynman is not just a clever scientist but also an amazing philosopher.
First post for this school year.
Although Airbus says that such an airplane is going to grace humanity somewhere in the distant 2050’s, I’m a little bit skeptical of such a prediction. Technology advances faster and faster each day and the speed of innovation that characterized electronics and computers is starting to trickle to other industries. So I won’t be surprised if something similar to what Airbus is showing crops up earlier than 2050. Even more exciting, we may never have such an aircraft. We might develop something unexpected and better.
Not exactly dead.
Hey guys, sorry I haven’t posted much stuff lately. Summer vacation started here a few months ago and I decided to take a break from posting and just relax (read: playing video games all day).
But I can’t be like that today. School has just recently started and I gotta shift to back to geek gear. And since I’ll be taking a lot of interesting engineering subjects, I’ll try to make a tech post that isn’t a reblog.
So welcome back to a revived I Love Mechanics.
ZeroTouch is an interface that can be best described as the offspring between a touch screen and a Kinect. It’s a frame lined with LED’s and sensors. It works by can detecting any movement that goes through and around the inside of the frame. Aside from movement, it can also detect the size of the object passing through (whether it’s just a finger or an entire arm). The technology was developed by a team from Texas A&M University.
(Source: popsci.com)
Either way, this hasn’t stopped Australian researchers from pushing supercomputers to the limit by calculating the sixty-trillionth binary digit of Pi-squared
