Earlier this year [Skyhawkson] got ahold of an Apollo-era printed circuit board which he believes was used in a NASA test stand. He took high quality photos of both sides of the board and superimposed them atop each other. After digging into a few obsolete parts from the 1960s, he was able to trace out the connections. I ran across the project just after making schematics for the Supercon badge and petal matrix. Being on a roll, I decided to take [Skyhawkson]’s work as a starting point and create KiCad schematics. Hopefully we can figure out what this circuit board does along the way.
The SR-71 with its blended wing body design. (Photo by Tech. Sgt. Michael Haggerty, US Air Force, 1988)
Ask someone to picture an airplane and they’re likely to think of what is essentially a tube with wings and a stabilizing tail tacked onto one end of said tube. Yet it is also no secret that the lift produced by such a tube is rather poor, even if they’re straightforward for loading cargo (static and self-loading) into them and for deciding where to put in windows. Over the decades a number of alternative airplane designs have been developed, with some of them also ending up being produced. Here most people are probably quite familiar with the US Air Force’s B-2 Spirit bomber and its characteristic flying wing design, while blended wing body (BWB) maintains a somewhat distinctive fuselage, as with for example the B-1 Lancer.
Outside of military airplanes BWBs are a pretty rare sight. Within the world of passenger airplanes the tube-with-wings pattern that the first ever passenger airplanes adopted has persisted with the newest designs, making it often tricky to distinguish one airplane from another. This could soon change, however, with a strong interest within the industry for passenger-oriented BWBs. The reason for this are the significant boosts in efficiency, quieter performance and more internal (useful) volume, which makes airline operators very happy, but which may also benefit passengers.
With that said, how close are we truly to the first BWB passenger airplane delivery to an airline?
Yesterday, Prusa Research officially unveiled their next printer, the Core ONE. Going over the features and capabilities of this new machine, it’s clear that Prusa has kept a close eye on the rapidly changing desktop 3D printer market and designed a machine to better position themselves within a field of increasingly capable machines from other manufacturers.
While some saw the incremental upgrades of the i3 MK4 as being too conservative, the Core ONE ticks all the boxes of what today’s consumer is looking for — namely high-speed CoreXY movement with a fully enclosed chamber — while still offering the build quality, upgradability, and support that the company has built its reputation on. Put simply it’s one of the most exciting products they’ve introduced in a long time, and exactly the kind of machine that many Prusa fans have been waiting for.
Unfortunately, there’s one feature that’s ominously absent from the Core ONE announcement post. It’s easy to overlook, and indeed, most consumers probably won’t even know it’s missing. But for those of us who are concerned with such matters, it’s an unspoken confirmation that an era has finally come to an end.
With the Core ONE, Prusa Research is no longer in the business of making open source 3D printer hardware, but that doesn’t mean that the printer isn’t hackable. It’s complicated, so read on.
Some lovely orange calthemite flowstone colored so by iron oxide from rusting steel reinforcing. Image via Wikipedia
At this point, we’ve learned about man-made byproducts and nature-made byproducts. But how about one that’s a little of both? I’m talking about calthemites, which are secondary deposits that form in those man-made caves such as parking garages, mines, and tunnels.
Calthemites grow both on and under these structures in forms that mimic natural cave speleothems like stalactites, stalagmites, flowstone, and so on. They are often the result of an hyperalkalinic solution of pH 9-14 seeping through a concrete structure to the point of coming into contact with the air on the underside. Here, carbon dioxide in the air facilitates the necessary reactions to secondarily deposit calcium carbonate.
These calcium carbonate deposits are usually white, but can be colored red, orange, or yellow thanks to iron oxide. If copper pipes are around, copper oxide can cause calthemites to be blue or green. As pretty as all that sounds, I didn’t find any evidence of these parking garage growths having been turned into jewelry. So there’s your million-dollar idea.
Remember Redbox? Those bright red DVD vending machines that dotted every strip mall and supermarket in America, offering cheap rentals when Netflix was still stuffing discs into paper envelopes? After streaming finally delivered the killing blow to physical rentals, Redbox threw in the towel in June 2024, leaving around 34,000 kiosks standing as silent monuments to yet another dead media format.
Last month, we reported that these machines were still out there, barely functional and clinging to life. Now, a company called The Junkluggers has been tasked with the massive undertaking of clearing these mechanical movie dispensers from the American retail landscape, and they’re doing it in a surprisingly thoughtful way. I chatted to them to find out how it’s going.
According to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, our language influences how we think and experience the world. That’s easy to imagine. Certainly our symbolism of mathematics influences how we calculate. Can you imagine doing moderately complex math with Roman numerals or without zero or negative numbers? But recently I was reminded that technological media also influences our perception of reality, and I have a Hackaday post to thank for it.
The post in question was about color TV. When I was a kid, most people had black and white TVs, although there were color sets. Even if you had a color set, many shows and movies were in black and white. Back then, many people still shot black and white film in their cameras, too, for many reasons. To make matters worse, I grew up in a small town, reading books from the local library that were ten or twenty years behind the times.
At some point, I read a statistic that said that most people dream in black and white. You may find this surprising, as I’ll bet you dream in color. It turns out, how people dream may have changed over the years and still and motion photography may be the reason.
The Post
In the post, I posed a question I’ve thought about many times: Did people dream in black and white before the advent of photography? It was kind of an off-hand remark to open the post, but many people reacted to it in the comments. They seemed surprised that I would ask that because, of course, everyone dreams in color.
I asked a few people I knew who also seemed very surprised that I would assume anyone ever dreams in color. But I was sure I had been told that sometime in the past. Time to hit the Internet and find out if that was incorrect or a false memory or something else. Turns out, it was indeed something else.
A scientific paper from 2008 held the answer. It turns out that science started asking questions like this in the early 1900s. Up through the 1940s, people overwhelmingly reported dreaming in black and white, at least most of the time. Color dreams were in the minority, although not unheard of.
Then something changed. Studies that occurred in the 1960s and later, show exactly the opposite. People almost always dream in color and rarely in black and white. Of course, that correlates well with the rise of color photos, movies, and television. What’s more is, while there is no scientific evidence gathering about earlier times, there is a suspicious lack of, for example, a Shakespeare quote about “The gray world of slumber…” or anything else that would hint that the writer was dreaming in black and white.
Interpretation
Judging from the paper, it seems clear that most people agree that color media played a role in this surprising finding. What they can’t agree on is why. It does seem unlikely that your dreams really change based on your media consumption. But it is possible that your recollection changes. This is particularly true since the way researchers acquired data changed over that time period, too. But even if the data doesn’t show that you dreamed in black and white, it did show that you remembered dreaming in black and white.
For that matter, it isn’t clear that anyone understands how you experience dreams visually, anyway. It isn’t like the back of your eyelids are little movie screens. You don’t actually see anything in a dream, you only remember seeing it.
The Question
If something as simple as black-and-white movies and TV can change how we perceive dreams, you have to wonder how much tech is changing our reality experience in other ways. Do we live differently because we have cell phones? Or the Internet? Will virtual reality alter our dream lives? It would be interesting to fast-forward a century and see what historians say about our time and how strangely we perceive reality today.
In the iconic 1990s TV series The X Files, David Duchovny’s FBI agent-paranormal investigator Fox Mulder has a poster on his office wall. It shows a flying saucer in flight, with the slogan “I Want To Believe”. It perfectly sums up the dilemma the character faces. And while I’m guessing that only a few Hackaday readers have gone down the full lizard-people rabbit hole, wanting to believe is probably something that a lot of us who love sci-fi understand. It would be a fascinating event for science if a real extraterrestrial craft would show up, so of course we want to believe to some extent, even if we’re not seriously expecting it to appear in a Midwestern cornfield and break out the probes any time soon.
Outside the realm of TV drama and science fiction it’s a sentiment that also applies in more credible situations. Back at the end of the 1980s for example when so-called cold fusion became a global story it seemed as though we might be on the verge of the Holy Grail of clean energy breakthroughs. Sadly we never got our Mr. Fusion to power our DeLorean, and the scientific proof was revealed to be on very weak foundations. The careers of the two researchers involved were irreparably damaged, and the entire field became a byword for junk science. A more recently story in a similar vein is the EM drive, a theoretical reactionless force generator that was promising enough at one point that even NASA performed some research on it. Sadly there were no magic engines forthcoming, so while it was worth reporting on the initial excitement, we’re guessing the story won’t come back.
When evaluating a scientific or technical breakthrough that seems as miraculous as it is unexpected then, of course we all want to believe. We evaluate based on the information we have in front of us though, and we all have a credibility pyramid. There’s nothing wrong with having an interest in fields that are more hope than delivery, indeed almost every technology that powers our world will at some time have to overcome skepticism in its gestation period. Perhaps it’s best to say that it’s okay to have hope, but hope shouldn’t override our scrutiny of the proof. Of course I want a perpetual motion machine, who wouldn’t, but as a fictional engineer once allegedly said, “Ye cannae change the laws of physics”. Continue reading “I Want To Believe: How To Make Technology Value Judgements”→
