Yes, you read that right, and it’s no typo. I have just one word: cool.
The car is powered by a 325bhp two stage Curtis turbine, fed via 4 LPG fired boilers. The current official steam powered land speed record was set in 1906 by Fred Marriott at 121.57mph. In 1984 Bob Barber attempted with a one way run of 145.607mph, a fire prevented the return run, therefore it is not recognized as a record. The Inspiration Team expect to get 200mph+ from their streamliner. Like I said, cool.
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Archive for June, 2007
You better frickin’ like your full-price iPhone because if you don’t, AT&T plans on charging you the full $175 early termination fee, even though the phone’s cost isn’t at all subsidized under a long-term-agreement.
read more | digg story
Great little experiment with 9 different hosting companies to figure out which ones can withstand the traffic surges caused by web 2.0
read more | digg story
Apple will require iPhone customers to have an active iTunes Store account, in order to set-up their device, the company has revealed.
read more | digg story
The first liquid camera lens with no moving parts, and that can switch between two levels of magnification, has been designed by a German research team. The work is an important step towards liquid zoom lenses that can sweep through a range of magnifications.
read more | digg story
I started a new job last week, I’ve been running a Haas VF7 while building a jig. Fortunately the machine is tooled with a touch probe and a tool setter. These are awesome tools. The probe will automatically set work coordinates, and verify part dimensions, and make adjustments as required. The tool setter will measure length and diameter offsets automatically. It is even possible to measure single point tooling such as a boring tool or a thread mill, as the machine will turn the tool anti-clockwise while measuring such a tool. Some decent parametric programming drive these functions, and the tools aren’t cheap, but the cost of set-up would pay for itself in no time, if you do a lot of low volume jobs. Here is the option on Haas’ site.
A short cameraphone video of the probe setting the X,Y and Z coordinates of a block that I was about to machine:
I found this on Signal vs. Noise; “Most copywriting on the web sucks because it’s written for the writer, not for the reader. Write for the reader. That is all.” I like it.
A friend of mine wrote an excellent blog post on synthetic biology, take the time to read it, if you have even the slightest interest in science.
