I hope this was machine translated:

"In Department of a criminal investigation department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, located in Moscow in street Zhitnoj, the safe with operatively-investigatory documents was gone. On the given fact check, and, predictably, is spent guilty will incur corresponding punishment.
Two safes with confidential operatively-investigatory documents of department of a criminal investigation department have thrown out by mistake during carrying out of repair. The safes temporarily exposed in a corridor, stirred to the workers doing repair of a building. They have lowered them in a court yard, and therefrom, having accepted for written off, military men of internal armies who bore unnecessary property from a building, have carried them on item of gathering of scrap metal directly together with classified documents stored them. When documents it were necessary, found out, that boxes are not present. "
Many (most?) modern cars have an idiotic status LED flashing just inside their windshield to indicate that they are powered down and parked exactly where they were left.
This is a wasted opportunity. If the LED's were configured as a tiny projector, corporate logos could be projected onto car hoods, walls, and nearby bystanders.
Tag the parking lot!

...It could lead to an arms race between companies, however, with ever increasing slogans, animations, and projectors.
I'm not a believer in Dark Matter.

Shhh. Thats a secret. The evidence still isn't convincing for its existence.
Works well to complicate theories, however.

The simplest test I can think of would be this:

Dark matter interferes with the baryonic matter via gravitic coupling.
This should affect local 'speed of sound' measurements, including angle of shockwaves from transsonic objects.
So measure the shockwaves from a test mass moving through local space at a considerable velocity. It would be trivial to calculate shockwave angle from the known velocity and from the observed particle density.
There should be a considerable discrepancy.
This would be an experiment in local space. After all, if there is Dark Matter anywhere, it should be here as well.
If it isn't here, then where did it go?

Also, gravity measurements of 'known mass' volumes of space would show excess mass of around +75%.
Problem is, I haven't heard of a way to measure the gravitational field of say a few cubic kilometers of interplanetary real estate.

...RenegadeMime would like to point out that this post officially enters me into the ranks of Internet Nuts, and would like me to feel free to experiment with different fonts and colours.
Alice was beginning to write out a history of all flesh...

The Revelations Of Alice
I like to eat grapefruit.
I prefer to peel them like oranges and eat them like apples.
I dislike the way the juice runs.
Now before someone says: "Thats why they are cut in half and eaten with specific spoons" ,
I would like to emphasize that that idea takes a bowl, concentration, and two free hands.
So what I want with my grapefruit is a soft hemisphere of plastic, silicone preferably, which allows me to hold the grapefruit. Like a catchers mitt for juice. It would work for other fruit as well, of course - ( peaches, anyone?), and would be quick and easy to use and clean.
Adding a small stiff curved tab to one edge - about the size of a teaspoon's blade - would
facilitate the peeling process as well.

Anyone want to run with this idea?
Calling it the Fruit Cuddler might attract the wrong customers, though.



Would it be possible to grow a human embryo inside an ostrich egg?
If the egg was fertilized, but the blastoderm excised, replaced with a human egg cell?
I'm wondering that if because of a common Terran heritage, if the molecular hooks and cues would be the same, so that the placenta would form attached to the egg yolk, and feeding from it.
At a first guess, oxygen demands would become a problem. Now if the egg was carefully decanted into a beaker, kept at human incubation temperatures,and a oxygen perfusion rig attached...
As the yolk is consumed, fresh supplies could be added via injection.

This would approach the egg as a development machine which could be hacked to grow other things. Its already done with virii and bacteria, after all.

This could be tested with chicken eggs.
Hmmm.

The experiment was interesting . I got one comment on a blog post, and one on the experiment.
Same person? Possible - they happened on the same day...
Congratulations, 'Rubberkak' ...you're my first official reader.
Do to circumstances beyond our control,
RadioPsychedelica is going off the air for the next few months.
In order to combine 'dead air' with 'social experiment',
I'd like to find out how many people actually read this
notice. Comments will be enabled, and I'd like everyone
who has read this far to leave a brief note, if only just a single letter : 'Q' for instance, or 'M'.
Thanks.



I've probably mentioned it berfore, but I really like the idea of wind-propelled, walking robots. Sort of Solarollers with a timber-and-heavy-iron feel. They would walk slowly, but really, how much of a hurry wopuld you be if you were living inside one? At ten kilometers a day, it would take ten months to cross the continent...



And of course, the lances would come in handy for jousting , for jockeying into the best windstreams...
The idea that self-consciousness is unique to humans is one of the greatest lies of Philosophy.
I like this quote:
" (... ) But, as amateurs, the only thing we have going for us is our brazen willingness to try."
---Mister Jalopy


I've been experimenting with cranks to avoid slides and/or linear bearings.


The first one looked promising. The key is the ratio between crank lengths. While Lego only allows integer spacing, I was still able to find a arrangement that gave me five inches of travel with less than 0.5mm eccentricity. 14 base : 8 head : 20 arm or 1 : 0.5714287 :1.42857.
I honestly don't know if the repeating decimals are significant or co-incidental.

Mounting two of these assemblies would give an X-Y arm.

Rigid, simple, and not needing accurately straight edged material.
I was pretty pleased.
I played with for a while before I realized the problem: while the arm's tip stayed in plane, its attitude changed. So my attitude changed as well.

The simplest way to keep the printhead oriented vertically would be to use gravity and a damn heavy plumb bob - which would stress the mechanism and play hob with dynamic forces.
A servo could be equipped - or another crankarm - to keep the printhead vertical, but that just seems to add complexity, and destroy the elegance.

On to system two:


This one also looked pretty good until it didn't.
It was'nt until I was fitting the leadscrews that I discovered the problem: that to traverse X requires a Y servo change as well, and vis versa. this leads into the same kind of annoying inverse kinematic problems I'd rather avoid.


Because if I'm going to use inverse kinematics to any extent, I might as well just build a reasonably DOF robot arm, and use it to hold a printhead in its hand.
Lets digress.
I figured a small 3d printer would be a good place to experiment - after all, the print volume is expandable without significant change in the electronics or software. And smaller things - to a certain scale - are easier to build than large things.
So I picked 36 cubic inches as a arbitrary figure and started designing.
I don't like the idea of a z-axis table. What if I had, say, a T-Rex skull, and I was struck with the desire to print a doily atop it? Z-axis tables impose limits of volume and weight to the things that you want to print upon. Arguably, most printers are interested in the creation of separate parts that are later assembled into interesting objects, but I come from a device-modification background, and think the ability to append is what raises the 3d printer several notches above more traditional forms of material manipulation.
So z-axis controls the printhead height directly. Leadscrews - ala Darwin, et al. are an excellent method of lineal actuation - in use for probably two hundred years to control machine tools.
That being said, I am being seduced by the idea of hydraulic cylinders. Small, low pressure cylinders are quite easy to build and plumb.
But I'm not seduced yet, so leadscrews it is.
At first I was planning to have the y and x axes raised by a set of z-axis legs, but this meant a number of leadscrews running at once for vertical translation. There is a lovely design involoving ballchain that the Darwin uses, but I don't like having to use that many jackscrews.
So I decided to have the z-axis raise the printhead itself, and started cutting out parts on that theory.
While tinkering together a mockup this week, I realized that structurally it makes more sence to have the z-axis raise the y-axis.
This allows an 'overhanging beam' style of printer, which gives a lot more access to the area underneath the printhead.
Essentially a bastard combination of a hammerhead and a kangaroo crane. With the ability to translate along the x-axis, although as I've pointed out before, polar coordinates could be used with a rotation along the x-axis.
At first glance, this looks unstable, but seeing as the printhead mass is known, its really a simple job to adequately counterweight and brace this arm.
A 3d printer is a machine tool, and as when constructing all machine tools, solidness and rigidity need to be our watchwords. Luckily, the framework nesscary to control a kilogram printhead to accurate placement of a tenth of a millimeter is a lot easier than controlling a cutterhead with forces of hundreds of pounds and accuracy of a hundreth of a millimeter or better.


'kangahead crane?'
RenegadeMime's latest folly:



He's promised it in teeshirt form, but I doubt.
And as promised, prototyped in the system I love to hate:

The upper red bar is attached to the heartbeat generator, swinging the sense arm back and forth.
The long black bar is the actual feeler. If it should brush against something, the impact retards the feeler in relation to the sense arm. This applies a load to the thread running through the sense arm's pivot, drawing the lower red arm up.
Originally, I wanted a co-axial shaft for the pivot, Lego doesn't offer any useful part in that category.
So 'necessity being the mother ... ' lead to the thread and a simpler mechanism.
Occasionally I get a bee in my bonnet about a certain mechanism.
Today's case in point: I wanted the cogwheel driven robot to have a pair of long flexible feelers that it swung before itself, feeling for obstacles. In other words, I want a trigger that rotates through ~180 degrees and is only triggered if the feeler fetchs up against an obstacle.
The trick seems to be to rotate the entire pawl and ratchet assembly, and take the activation motion off the spindle by pushing upwards.
A picture will be worth a thousand words, if I can get the scanner running.
What would comprise an important scene in the Coolest Movie Ever?
Robotic T. Rexs fighting skeletons. Skeletons that are on fire.
Too bad the reflective metal film in CDROMs is so thin, because than a stack of CDs could be turned into a dandy capacitor by grinding away the plastic and affixing bus wires.
Layering foil between the disks just does not seem as elegant.
"If your comments are excessively inappropriate or you question why a comment was removed, YOU WILL BE BANNED. "

Ah, the sweet taste of power.
I especially like 'excessively inappropriate'. I always considered 'appropriatity' to be a binary state.

Weirdly, the phrase shows up on more than one comment enabled site, providing the answer to the riddle:
"What do 'concreteloop.com' , 'hollywoodteen.net' and 'thesuperficial.com' have in common?"

Also dailybubble.com,wesmirch.com, iwatchstuff.com, allegra.myblue.cc, isohunt.com, boyfuckgay.com, and benfolds.org

blog.peta.org.uk is a little more polite:
"If your comment is excessively inappropriate, or if you question why a comment was removed, you may be banned."

One of thesuperficial.com's commenters do say:
"hey, will somebody please post a comment that is excessively inappropriate and then ask why your comment was removed.. i want to see what happens"

Nothing seems to happen beyond casual yakkity about sodomizing Hasselhoff and sending him to space (two separate posts) : except the comment posting rules for that page do not contain the phrase in question. Retroactive edit?

Google claims 'about 2720' hits for "excessively inappropriate"
Yahoo claims ' 32,400'

Thats quite a spread.

Stepper motors seem tidy because they seem controllable. Pulse it once, see the shaft move x degrees. To move any distance, rinse and repeat. However, in a 3d printer, it seems that most of the time - all of the time is being spent on the R & R.
The problem - from a junkyard point of view - is that stepper motors are not as readily available as ordinary motors. And they need a much more complicated interface than a simple H-bridge or relay.
For a sophisticated mechanism, this is not a big problem. Steppers can be bought online with almost any combination of resolution and power. Stepper control circuit designs and boards are also widely available.
But the point of RepStrapping is to build a 3d printer out of ordianry and simple components.

So why not have a mechanism with a continuous motor that scans the entire print area, and just fire material at the right spots? Slaving the X and Y axes together would produce a slightly slanted scan pattern, but probably not enough to be significant. But slaving X Y and Z together would produce a nasty tilt. Unless of course, the frame was pre-tilted to accommodate the slant.

The biggest difference would be the need for accurate position measurements. With a stepper, you can be lazy and count steps from a starting position. The position's value will drift of course, but only by a small amount, and probably comparably along each scan line.

It seems to me that rather than screwing around with the usual poistion sensors, we should just take a look at the optical mouse. Mount a mouse in a poistion where it can scan a rail as the head moves. The mouse I use now cost $14.95 and claims a 2000 dots per inch sensativity.
being a USB device, to does not require any seperate interface to be used with the host PC, either.

This would also mean that the gcode would have to be compiled into a 'bitmap' format.

The Tuned Pipes of Silence

There is also no wikipedia page for Lucy Hosking. (!)
We're talking tuned pipes here, people!

EDIT: 13-10-2015....Still nothing, even though Google doth provide:
EDIT: 30-01-2020....Still nothing, but now she is mentioned on the 'List of Keytars' page. (Photo of her playing a 'Royalex Probe') This is at 6,006,671 English Language Pages. I actually look forward to updating this again in 5 years.


Walnuts - Juglans regia - are dicotyledons. They have two seed-leaves, and the nut reflects this in its shape, being bilaterally symmetrical. So I was surprised when eating my way through a bag of walnuts to find one that was trilaterally symmetrical.

Does this mean that this mutation would be a tricotyledon? It wasn't just shell features: the interior nutmeat followed the three-lobed plan.
So how common is this mutation?