So, it’s actually a thing – called ALON. It’s not so much a metal as an aluminum-based ceramic called aluminum oxynitride, but the point is, it’s aluminum, and it’s transparent:
there be no whales here
and this stuff is strong – 1.6″ is enough to stop a .50 AP bullet that easily passes through twice that thickness of laminated glass armor:
aye, ol’ Scott woulda been proud. And just for old times’ sake:
Let’s take this opportunity to correct a misconception: they did NOT use transparent aluminum for the whale tank. They traded the “matrix” for it to the engineer at the large plate glass manufacturing place in exchange for enough conventional plate to build the tank. Which was a lot.
This is an astonishing statistic: Youtube users now upload one hour of video every second:
The video (and accompanying website) is actually rather ineffective at really conveying why this number is so astounding. Here’s my take on it:
* assume that the rate of video uploads is constant from here on out. (obviously over-conservative)
* the ratio of “Youtube time” to real time is 1/3600 (there are 3600 seconds in an hour)
* so how long would it take to upload 2,012 years worth of video to Youtube?
Answer: 2012 / 3600 = 0.56 years = 6.7 months = 204 days
Let’s play with this further. Let’s assume civilization is 10,000 years old. it would take 10,000 / 3600 = 33 months to document all of recorded human history on YouTube.
Let’s go further with this: Let’s assume that everyone has an average lifespan of 70 years (note: not life expectancy! human lifespan has been constant for millenia). Let’s also assume that people sleep for roughly one-third of their lives, and that of the remaining two-thirds, only half is “worth documenting”. That’s (70 / 6) / 3600 years = 28.4 hours of data per human being uploaded to YouTube to fully document an average life in extreme detail.
Obviously that number will shrink, as the rate of upload increases. Right now it takes YouTube 28 hours to upload teh equivalent of a single human lifespan; eventually it will be down to 1 hour. And from there, it wil shrink to minutes and even seconds.
If YouTube ever hits, say, the 1 sec = 1 year mark, then that means that the lifespan of all of the 7 billion people alive as of Jan 1st 2012 would require only 37 years of data upload. No, I am not using the word “only” in a sarcastic sense… I assume YT will get to the 1sec/1yr mark in less than ten years, especially if data storage continues to follow it’s own cost curve (we are at 10c per gigabyte for data stored on Amazon’s cloud now).
Another way to think of this is, in 50 years, YouTube will have collected as many hours of video as have passed in human history since the Industrial Revolution. (I’m not going to run the numbers, but that’s my gut feel of the data). These are 1:1 hours, after all – just because one hour of video is uploaded every second, doesn’t mean that the video only took one second to produce – someone, somewhere had to actually record that hour of video in real time).
Think about how much data is in video. Imagine if you could search a video for images, for faces, for sounds, for music, for locations, for weather, the way we search books for text today. And then consider how much of that data is just sitting there in YT’s and Google’s cloud.
It looks like VLC media player will soon support encrypted Blu-rayplayback. This seems relevant to the discussion started by Pete and continued by J (hardware) and Steven (software). I’d just like to add that AnyDVD HD should be legal to own in the US as far as I know, since it allows you to backup [...]
anyone else see any irony in this? Google.com, Wikipedia.org, WordPress.org, and hundreds of other websites large and small are going all-out against SOPA. Google has the logo censored by a black bar, and Wikipedia is actually offline. Lots of other sites and blogs are following their example. The idea is to symbolically register dissent against [...]
I’ll freely admit that I am comprehending only about 10% of the argument, but this is still a magnificent post about why string theory is right and why loop quantum gravity is wrong. And incidentally also reveals that the science writers on Big Bang Theory really are on top of the game. Sheldon’s snort of [...]
UPDATE: I think the anti-SOPA blackouts at Google, Wikipedia etc are a gigantic wasted opportunity to educate people about DRM. And I’m skeptical of Google putting money where their mouth is. I get it, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is bad because it doesn’t actually do anything to stop piracy. There are various screeds [...]
Buried at the end of this tidbit about Sherlock’s Benedict Cumberbatch being cast as principal villain in the next Star Trek movie, is this awesome news: Cumberbatch will be the voice, and the body (based on motion-capture) of the mighty Smaug in The Hobbit! Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch has been cast as the principal villain [...]
I’ve been getting my money’s worth on my Hulu Plus subscription by watching Terra Nova and Grimm – and I was surprised to see that the former is not getting any critics’ accolades the way the latter is. Let’s get this straight: TN is a high-cincept show, and as such has to walk a more [...]
Why SOPA might kill commenting, and is that such a bad thing?
January 9, 2012UPDATE: I think the anti-SOPA blackouts at Google, Wikipedia etc are a gigantic wasted opportunity to educate people about DRM. And I’m skeptical of Google putting money where their mouth is. I get it, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is bad because it doesn’t actually do anything to stop piracy. There are various screeds [...]