Times they are a-changin’

How times have changed, if you think of people protesting against a power station, it’s more likely to occur to you that it would be a nuclear power station with all the controversy they entail.

Saurabh Kundu on Pluto

Saurabh Kundu

Originally uploaded by asuma.

Saurabh has a new paper describing his recent work. I think it involves looking at many pictures of Pluto, putting sheets of graph paper over them and drawing lines. I presume his paper will tell us if Pluto should be regarded as a planet or not.

As usual you can find his paper and read the interview: here. I didn’t conduct the interview so I don’t know much about this work.

Bainite Sword

For a while I have known about this bainite Katana, I found a video about it on youtube that you can see here here; Bainite Katana.

I can only assume that Edgar Bain would approve since he once wrote an article about the metallurgy of Japanese swords.

Read more about bainite.
See other posts tagged bainite

Light cars

Heavy cars may be good for the owners but worse for the environment. Roel Boesenkool of Corus presented a the SMEA conference. He noted that new cars are heavier despite technology being developed that could easilty make them lighter. I wrote about this in the previous post about light cars.

The light ineffiecient car is the Ferrari.

I guess fuel doesn’t cost enough yet.

Roel Boesenkool presented this graph at SMEA conference in sheffield

New improved solar system

After the meeting of the International Astronomical Union, the solar system has been streamlined to a sleak 8 planets, with the repurposing of Pluto to the new classification of ‘dwarf planet’. The move follows an earlier move which increased the number of planets in the solar system to 12.

Mixed Up Microstructure

Mixed Up Microstructure

Originally uploaded by asuma.

I think this micrograph is pretty. Optical microscopy is useful to see what is really happening, it’s no use just going straight to high resolution without seeing what is happening on the millimeter and micrometer scale.

A mixed microstructure of martensite and bainite. Red needles are bainite in this micrograph, larger brown plates are martensite, the white bits are the untrasformed austenite. The contrast is from viewing the etched surface (nital) using differential interference contrast.

Magneto redux

In my first post about Magneto I forgot to mention the inventive way he escaped from his plastic prison. His accomplace seduced the prison gaurd, sedated him, and gave him an injection of some metallic liquid. Magneto then ripped out the metal from the gaurd and used it to burst out of his jail.

Dragons’s Den

Watch how to, and how not to make business presentations. A new series of BBC Two’s show Dragons’ Den is available to watch online. Inventors and potential Entrepreneurs (this word doesn’t exist in french) pitch their ideas to five potential investors to win the investment they need to make their ideas a reality.

Spam

I receive an increasing amount of spam email. Following the advice from computer services I never reply to the SPAM. This makes sense because at-least it stops spammers from launching a denile of service attack on someone by sending out a lot of mails in their name. In the arms war against spammers I use only a filter on my university account. This filters around 95 % of the spam emails I receive, and about 5 % of my real email into a directory. It’s usually possible for me to tell what is spam by the email title so it isn’t a big problem, just annoying.

It won’t be possible to stop the spammers until it becomes more difficult to send someone unsolicited email, or it becomes more expensive. Email tax (will just mean all spam is from large corporates?) or increase the cost of email in another way (increased popularity of encryption).

But one way to decrease the sucess of spammers would surely be for everyone to reply, that way it would surely be harder at least for the Nigerian 419ers? This could be done by a automatic program, they don’t seem to be very good at english so surely they could have a nice converstation with something like Eliza or ALICE.

Wembley Stadium still not finished

Wembley Stadium may not now be ready to until June 2007, although it should have been ready in August 2005. It seems likely the F.A. Cup will be held in the Millenium Stadium in Cardiff again this year.

I discussed the delay of Wembley when it was first announced that the 2005 FA cup final would be held at the Millenium Stadium in Cardiff. The millenium stadium cost 126 Million pounds and was finished in time for the 1999 Rugby World Cup.

A statement made to the Australian stock exchange by builders Multiplex comes a day after the £757m London venue’s owners, Wembley National Stadium Ltd (WNSL), said it should be finished by the end of this year.

The pitch is laid and the goalposts erected. However builders still have to finish the roof, fix the drainage network and install seats and safety systems. Safety needs to be tested with a series of smaller events before a full capacity crowd can attend an event.