Interesting
Touch screens are now everywhere
The Samsung Omnia smartphone uses a touch screen
The technology for touch screens comes in a variety of different forms. There is resistive, surface acoustic wave, capacitive which includes surface capacitance and projected capacitance touch (PCT), infrared, strain gauge, optical imaging, dispersive signal technology, and acoustic pulse recognition. PCT touchscreen technology is used in a wide range of applications including smart phones, kiosk, and point-of-sale systems.
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Toshiba to start selling portable hard drives
Toshiba 200GB Portable HDD
Toshiba is going to start selling portable hard drives in addition to laptops and DVD players. The USB 2.0 external hard disk will be available in capacities ranging from 100 GB to 200 GB – the largest capacity yet available in a portable, compact form factor.
The device itself is less than 2.5 cm thick and smaller than a 10×15cm photo. It is designed to be used as a back up for computer documents, photos, videos, and music files. With its size, it is also rugged enough to be able to carry on business or leisure trips.
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Will The World End In 2012? According To The Mayan Calendar, Yes
2012 Doomsday, coming soon.
There is a somewhat wideheld belief that the end of the Mayan Calendar – December 21, 2012 – will be the end of the world as well. Sure, it could be just another “doomsday” prophesy tossed out there, but there are quite a few interesting coincidences.
First, December 21, 2012 is the winter solstice. It is well known that the Mayans were advanced mathematicians and astronmers, so this might not be quite so coincidental. It should also be noted that there is an eclipse of the sun scheduled for November of 2012 – while not matching up exactly, the timing of celestial events with the ending of the calendar can be considered interesting. Some scientists also believe that when the Mayan Calendar finishes, it will simply start again for its second cycle with no apocalyptic ending to the world.
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Has Mathematics Discovered The Fundamentals Of The Cosmos?
Mathematics and the fundamentals of the Cosmos
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Google Developing Its Own Phone?
Google Phone
In what is sure to affect their stock ratings, Google has admitted to having a “phone project” in the works. Now, in typical google fashion, they are rather tight lipped about the details, and speculation has people guessing that they’re introducing their own phone to compete with Apple’s upcoming iPhone. However, there is a pretty good chance that the phone project has nothing to do with hardware, and will instead focus on what has already made Google billions – advertising.
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Sumarian Inventions – Bull Lyre
Bull Lyre invented by Ancient Sumarians of Iraq
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Aztec Inventions – Chewing Gum
Chances are, at some point in your life, you’ve chewed gum. But, did you know that the Aztecs and Mayans were among the first to use it?
When the conquistadores invaded in 1518, they ran across Aztec prostitutes chewing gum on the corners.
The actual discovery of chewing gum came a few hundred years earlier, however, by the Mayans. They found that chicle, a thick milky liquid that oozes out of cuts made in the wild sapodilla tree and then hardens into gum, was extremely tasty when chewed. As with many other popular pastimes, the importance of chicle to the Maya is clearly from their mythology: The culture hero Kukulkan (”the Feathered Serpent”), who conquered the Maya and changed their way of life to such an extent that he became worshiped as a god, was a great chewer of gum.
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Amazing Inventions – Samuel Morse and the History of the Telegraph
The invention of the Telegraph was not an isolated idea in history – rather, it was the eventual outcome of a number of scientific developments. To see where it began, we have to go back to 1825.
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Mayan Inventions
Amazing architecture of a Mayan Temple
Mayan inventions include a calander and a complex heiroglyphics system. While it cannot be said that they were the sole inventors of such advancements, they did invent them independently in the Western Hemisphere, and their calendar and wrintings differed from that of the Egyptions and Chinese.
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Ben Franklins Inventions – Bifocals
Bifocal Lens
As most people know, Benjamin Franklin had numerous inventions that ranged from small convienences to incredible things that changed how people lived. The bifocals didn’t necassarily change how people lived, but they were more than a small improvement for anyone who had multiple sets of glasses to wear.
He is credited with the invention somewhere in the 1960’s, with the first evidence of them coming in a 1964 political cartoon. His first reference to his double spectacles came in a letter in 1984, quite a few years after the original invention.
His original design had the more convex lens placed on the bottom of the glasses (close viewing), while the lesser convex lens was placed on the upper half. Originally the lens’s were actually 2 seperate ones put into the same frame – it wasn’t until the 20th century that lenses were fused together to create bifocals.
While the bifocals are a great convienence for many, they are known to cause dizziness and headaches because of the differing perspectives. This is similar to how you may feel after wearing glasses that aren’t your prescription for an extended period of time.
By their very nature, bifocals offer a limited field of vision for the differeing distances. This can cause wearers to move reading material instead of their heads when reading, to make sure that what they are reading stays in the correct perspective.
This is just one of the examples of how Ben Franklin took a problem that people had, and found a solution.
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