Let’s start by understanding how an air conditioner works:

A heat pump is an air conditioner that is reversible. When you want heat inside the house, you take the air conditioner’s hot coils and put them inside rather than outside.

Most air conditioners and heat pumps use the outside air to blow over the coils. In the summer that means you are using 90 or 100 degree F air to cool the outside coils. In the winter you are using 20 or 30 degree F air to heat the outside coils.

With a geothermal heat pump, you are using water that has been running through the ground to heat or cool the outsde coil. Since the ground maintains a constant temperature of about 55 degrees (in the U.S.), it makes the heat pump far more efficient in both summer and winter, and especially in the summer.

See also: How Refrigerators Work

Halloween History Quiz

For more info see: How Halloween Works

Maybe:

Low Buzz May Give Mice Better Bones and Less Fat

From the article: “All he does is put mice on a platform that buzzes at such a low frequency that some people cannot even feel it. The mice stand there for 15 minutes a day, five days a week. Afterward, they have 27 percent less fat than mice that did not stand on the platform — and correspondingly more bone.”

As the article points out, this is a “seems to be too good to be true” moment, but we will see…

For more info see: How Muscles Work

[See previous]

The Aerial Atom 3 is out - these videos will help you learn more:

Three other supercars:

- 2008 Dodge Viper

- The Audi R8

- The Nissan GT-R

The product is bizarrely simple. It is called Eye-fi and it adds a Wifi connection to any digital camera that uses an SD memory card:

Eye-fi

From the Website:

Around Halloween of 2004, Yuval Koren attended a friend’s wedding. Countless digital photos were taken, which everyone promised to share afterwards. After all, those pictures represent the memories of a very special event. But, you know the story: it never happened. Who has the time? Who wants the hassle?

But, sometimes frustration leads to inspiration.

Soon, Yuval and a group of friends were dreaming up ways to fix this. This crew — Yuval, Berend Ozceri, Eugene Feinberg and Ziv Gillat — saw that wireless was the way to eliminate the aggravation and time requited for photo sharing.

These soon-to-be-co-founders began weekly dinner sessions, working on the right ways to take advantage of home Wi-Fi networks, figuring out how to then get photos to all the places they might be shared or printed or saved. Over the coming months, one after another they resigned from their day jobs, and Eye-Fi was born.

Now it’s Halloween 2007, three years after that friend’s wedding, and the Eye-Fi Card has launched to change the way people share and keep their memories.

Basically it works like this. You have to plug the card into your computer one time to set it up. Then, whenever you are in a wi-fi area and the card can connect, it will upload your photos to: a) your favorite photo site, b) your PC, or c) both. It is completely automatic.

You can buy Eye-fi at Amazon for $100.

[Go to idea #11]

Several of these ads are quite funny. Use the scroll bar in the center pane to see them all:

35 Most Clever Marketing Ads

[Go to previous Funny]

[Go to previous on advertising]

The “One Laptop Per Child” initiative, or OLPC, champions the idea of creating inexpensive, simple laptop computers for children all over the world. These PCs are now shipping:

Uruguay buys first ‘$100 laptops’

OLPC has a great website here:

One Laptop Per Child

OLPC created so much media interest that it attracted the attention of the big fish, who did not want to lose out on the sales (and brand awareness) of millions of laptops. So Microsoft and Intel created their own cheap laptop called Classmate and it is now shipping as well:

Intel, Microsoft sell 150,000 laptops to Libya

You can learn more about the Classmate PC here:

Classmate PC Portal

And now ASUS has a simplified PC called the Eee. It is more expensive, but shares many of the attributes of the other two. For example, it runs a simplified user interface on top of Linux, it replaces the hard drive with a 4GB flash drive to make the laptop more rugged, etc.

You can learn more about the Eee PC here:

Eee PC 4GB

You can buy one here:

ASUS Eee PC 4G

For more info see: How Laptops Work

The makers of Roomba - iRobot - also sell a kit called “iRobot Create”, which lets you create your own robots. This year there was a contest with a $5,000 prize to see who could create the best robot using iRobot Create:

Personal Home Robot Wins iRobot’s Create Challenge

The winner has described his entry and provided videos of it in action on this page:

iRobot Create Personal Home Robot

Here are the contest rules from May 2007:

How to enter the iRobot Create Challenge

Here is more info on iRobot Create: Get Serious with iRobot Create

Here is the world’s smallest production car, getting 100 MPG:

Here is its modern equivalent, coming soon in a hybrid version at 100 MPG:

A friend sends in this video just in time for Halloween:

You have to give the video about a minute before you can see anything. Here is a description of the haunted swing: ‘Haunted’ swing keeps rocking

For more info see: How Ghosts Work

See also: 15 Famous Freaky Ghost Pictures

Not 16 MEGApixels - 16 GIGApixels, or 2,000 time more pixels than today’s commonly available digital cameras. If you had a 16 gigpixel camera, then it could take images like this:

The Last Supper in Detail

Given that no one has such a camera today, how did they create the image? There is a video on the site that explains.

If you know where to look, there are all kinds of strange things in the painting to look for:

This page shows a number of others.

Why don’t people in France get fat? The answer can be found in this article:

Eating French

Here is the basic observation made in the article:

“Only 11 percent of the French population qualifies as obese, while we almost triple that percentage mark here in the land of plenty. Furthermore, the French eat three times as much saturated animal fat as Americans do and only a third as many die of heart attacks.”

According to the author (who spent a month in France), the French are eating all kinds of crazy pastries and cheeses, and they aren’t spending much time on exercise (besides walking around). Yet they are thin.

Why is that? Because of this very odd (to Americans) statement: “If we want to lose weight, we need to make a choice to enjoy life more.” Enjoy life more??? Read the article to understand what that sentence really means.

[Go to previous]

This article looks at a number of predictions that were wrong:

Top 87 Bad Predictions about the Future

Some of the predictions are staggering in their incorrectness. This one is interesting in light of Amazon, Ebay and QVC: “Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop - because women like to get out of the house, like to handle merchandise, like to be able to change their minds.” - TIME, 1966

The list omits one of my favorites: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” — Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

The list also omits the predictions of the 1960s of ecological collapse and world famine. Books like “Silent Spring” and “The Hungry Planet” in the 60s painted a bleak picture, and things did look bad. But it seems like things got better rather than worse since then.

Did they really get better, or did they simply slow down to the point where they were no longer a “crisis”? Have they actually remained on simmer for several decades, and are we now about to see the full reality of a dire situation? The UN and Scientific American suggest that we are:

The World Is Not Enough for Humans

Here are some of the article’s predictions:

1) Mass extinctions are on the way. “The planet is in the grips of the sixth great extinction in its 4.5-billion-year history, this one largely man-made. Species are becoming extinct 100 times faster than the average rate in the fossil record.”

2) A climate catastrophe. “Average temperatures have climbed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.76 degree Celsius) over the past century and could increase as much as 8.1 degrees F (4.5 degrees C) over the next unless “drastic” steps are taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from, primarily, burning fossil fuels.” Some believe that it is already too late to do anything about climate changes, as we have already passed the tipping point.

3) World famine. “Continuing population growth paired with a shift toward eating more meat leads the UNEP to predict that food demand may more than triple.”

4) Massive water shortages. “One in 10 of the world’s major rivers, including the Colorado and the Rio Grande in the U.S., fail to reach the sea for at least part of the year, due to demand for water. And that demand is rising; by 2025, the report predicts, demand for fresh water will rise by 50 percent in the developing world and 18 percent in industrialized countries.”

5) The end of fish? “global fishing yields have declined by 10.6 million metric tons.”

This video talks about the fishing problem by examining tuna, which could be “commercially extinct in three years”:

It doesn’t look good at all. So, are these scientists right, or will we look back in 2050 and see that they were wrong?

A friend of mine is really excited about this technology:

It comes from a company called GFS Projects Limited:

GFS Projects Limited

From the website:

Our UAV is capable of vertical take off, fully controlled flight, hovering and landing on a specified point. By using the Coanda principle to create lift, it has very little downwash and is aerodynamically stable. To date all prototypes have been battery powered, but the design is scalable and the larger versions will have internal combustion engines.

The craft will be most useful in urban environments, where its ability to hover and fly close to and within buildings will enable close quarter surveillance and intelligence gathering. Having no exposed rotating parts, brushes with walls etc., do not compromise the craft’s flight.

The main advantage compared to helicopters is the fact that it does not tear itself apart if it bumps into something like a helicopter would.

For more info on the Coanda effect see: How airplanes work

The newest high-end processor from Intel is the Core 2 Extreme QX9650. It is a quad-core chip running at 3 GHz produced on a 45 nanometer assembly line. It has a total of 12 megabytes of cache on the chip. Here is a complete review, including a summary of the 45 nm production process:

Penryn Arrives: Core 2 Extreme QX9650 Review

In this article they were able to boost the memory speed to 1600 MHz and overclock the chip to 3.6 GHz (a 20% increase) without any trouble, which bodes well for the speed of future chips.

Here are two other announcements:
- Intel’s 45nm Penryn/Yorkfield architecture packs serious punch
- Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 - Penryn Ticks Ahead

The Anandtech article talks about the future: “The other important item to note on the roadmap going forward is that top line in the table - yep, the one that says Bloomfield. Bloomfield is none other than Nehalem, the 45nm successor to Penryn. It’s a brand new architecture complete with an on-die memory controller, SMT (Symmetric Multi-Threading - 2 threads per core) and 8MB of shared cache (probably L3 shared among all four cores). While it’s still a year away, it’s very nice to see it on an Intel roadmap this far in advance of its launch.” That chip will probably crack the billion transistor barrier.

For more info see How Microprocessors Work

This is the name of the article:

10 Awe-Inspiring Interactive Websites

Are they awe-inspiring? I don’t know, but they are interesting because they are so different. From a HowStuffWorks perspective, the last one (Turbochef) is probably the most interetsing.

How Gmail Blocks Spam

From the article:

“Many Google teams provide pieces of the spam-protection puzzle, from distributed computing to language detection. For example, we use optical character recognition (OCR) developed by the Google Book Search team to protect Gmail users from image spam. And machine-learning algorithms developed to merge and rank large sets of Google search results allow us to combine hundreds of factors to classify spam,” explains Google. “Gmail supports multiple authentication systems, including SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DomainKeys, and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), so we can be more certain that your mail is from who it says it’s from. Also, unlike many other providers that automatically let through all mail from certain senders, making it possible for their messages to bypass spam filters, Gmail puts all senders through the same rigorous checks.”

For more info see: How Spam Works

Here is a nice animation that lets you construct the space station one step at a time:

International Space Station construction

This week they will make it to step 19 (out of 28) by installing the Harmony module.

For more info see: How space stations work

Mammoth wind farm slated for South Dakota

Important stats:
- 2,000 turbines
- 6,000 megawatts
- $6 billion

The price is interesting because it reaches the $1 per watt threshold. Assume the wind is blowing at the correct speed, on average, for 12 hours a day. Assume a hypothetical wind turbine that costs $1 and generates 1 watt for 12 hours a day. In a day it generates 12 watt-hours. In 83 days it generates approximately 1 kilowatt-hour. If electricity is going for 11 cents per kilowatt-hour, then it takes about 2 years for the wind turbine to pay for itself. Two years later you achieve 100% return on invesment.

From the article: “Clipper makes 2.5 megawatt turbines, and it would take 2,400 of them to produce 6,000 megawatts of electricity. However, the firm continues to develop more efficient turbines and is part of a project to build 7.5 megawatt turbines for an oceanic wind farm off the coast of Britain.”

Learn about the 2.5 megawatt turbine here: The Liberty 2.5 MW Wind Turbine

Learn about the 7.5 megawatt turbine here: Clipper to Develop 7.5 MW Wind Turbine

More of wind turbines here: How Wind Turbines Work

Here’s a quick summary of what is happening with Hulu:

Hulu Debuts to Meet Foes and Find Friends

The basic idea behind Hulu is simple: streaming video paid for by ads (as opposed to the pay-for-download model on iTunes and the free model on YouTube). And the streaming video on Hulu is special in that it consists of real TV shows and real movies. From the article:

The long-awaited and much-derided NBC (GE) and News Corp (NWS) joint venture Hulu will make a somewhat public debut this week, opening up a private beta tonight of its web video service and initiating distribution of its movies, TV shows, and mashups on AOL (TWX), Comcast (CMCSA), MSN (MSFT), MySpace, and Yahoo (YHOO). And while it may not live up to its billing as a “YouTube killer,” Hulu is as different as a web video service could possibly be from the market leader…

See also: First Look: Hulu Combines Ease of Use, Content, Advertising

According to this page, here is a simple way to find out if you are famous:

“Try making an entry on Wikipedia for yourself today. If you are famous enough to be on Wikipedia, you’d already be there. More likely, your entry will be immediately deleted for being not notable, etc. In fact, this happened to Wikinomics, the first time it was posted. Results of the trial is shown below…”

For more info see: How wikis works

USB 3.0 will be ten times faster that USB 2.0:

Faster USB 3.0 Is Coming

From the article: “The third-generation Universal Serial Bus interconnect will transfer data at speeds up to 4.8Gbit/s, ten times faster than USB 2.0’s 480MBit/s. It will be backwards-compatible with USB 2.0, which is backwards-compatible with the first USB 1.1 definition.”

What does this mean in practical terms? It means that the 2 gigabyte memory card from your digital camera should be able to download to your hard disk in 5 seconds. The only problem is that your hard disk is probably taking 45 to 60 seconds to write a gigabyte of data on its spinning platter, so in reality it will take two minutes. We have got to find a solution to the hard-disks-are-incredibly-slow problem in order to really take advantage of USB 3.0…

Also: “There is also a Wireless USB (WUSB) transfer format and this operates at 480Mbit/s, the same as USB 2.0, in its 1.0 incarnation. Intel also revealed a WUSB 1.1 interconnect format, operating at a speed of up to 1Gbit/s.”

For more info see: How USB Works

This article has a nice explanation:

The Chemistry of Autumn Colors

From the article

The shortening days and cool nights of autumn trigger changes in the tree. One of these changes is the growth of a corky membrane between the branch and the leaf stem. This membrane interferes with the flow of nutrients into the leaf. Because the nutrient flow is interrupted, the production of chlorophyll in the leaf declines, and the green color of the leaf fades. If the leaf contains carotene, as do the leaves of birch and hickory, it will change from green to bright yellow as the chlorophyll disappears. In some trees, as the concentration of sugar in the leaf increases, the sugar reacts to form anthocyanins. These pigments cause the yellowing leaves to turn red. Red maples, red oaks, and sumac produce anthocyanins in abundance and display the brightest reds and purples in the autumn landscape.

Where do red leaves come from?

Why Do Autumn Leaves Bother to Turn Red?

What does it cost to make a Hollywood movie? How much money comes in? Here is a fascinating page:

Movie Budget Records

This page shows, for example, that it cost $258 million to make Spiderman 3. It also shows the movie grossing close to a billion dollars worldwide.

Where does the money go?

The Tinseltown money trail

A typical quote from the article: “The $70.2 million budget for “Signs” was dominated by the whopping $25 million Mel Gibson was paid for his role as “Graham Ness,” a widowed ex-minister bedeviled by crop circles and an alien. In addition, the actor’s entourage expenses totaled nearly $1 million, with $300,000 of that figure earmarked for the star’s “jet allowance” and another $57,000 for a “chiropractor/masseuse.” Gibson also received in excess of $1000 a day in per diem payments (the average daily “walking around” money provided for other on-location employees was $65).”

Here’s something else about Spiderman 3. The run time for the movie is 140 minutes. The movie has 24 frames per second, so that means 201,600 frames for the whole movie. That works out to $1,280 per frame. So if you paid a group of artists $50/hour ($100,000/year), each artist could spend 25 hours drawing each frame of the movie.

For more info see: The Howstuffworks movie channel

A friend sent a note about this weather map:

http://chir.ag/w/30203

You can replace the zip code at the end of the URL with your own zip code. The map shows a satellite view of the area combined with cloud and radar images.

In the upper left corner you can swap the satellite image with a road view, and you can also zoom in and out. In the bottom right corner you can play a 6-hour animation loop, which will take several seconds to load and then play smoothly. Zooming out to where you can see the whole U.S. while playing the animation is impressive. Then you can drag to center a new location and zoom in.

For more info see: How the Earth Works

For more info see: How football works

[Go to previous Funny]

Anyone who has been on a tour of NCSU’s campus in Raleigh knows that there is a small nuclear reactor a stone’s throw from the library and right in the middle of campus. It’s small - only one magawatt - compared to a commercial reactor that produces 900 megawatts. But by adding some extra equipment to the reactor it can now produce positrons:

Scientists create most powerful antimatter beam

The most interesting part is the possible uses of the beam. From the article: “Since this project has now created a successful, powerful antimatter beam, physicsts are looking to turn their attention to practical applications. Dr. Ayman Hawari, associate professor of nuclear engineering and director of the Nuclear Reactor Program at NC State, said “The idea here is that if we create this intense beam of antimatter electrons … we can then use them in investigating and understanding the new types of materials being used in many applications.” These include antimatter spectrometers and the long theorized antimatter microscope, a device which is theoretically capable of digging much deeper into the atomic world than those based on matter. It would reveal data not possible to collect with matter emissions alone.”

For more info see: How Nuclear Power Works

Here’s a mini radio-controlled airplane that you can fly indoors. Just keep it away from the cat, or it will be eaten:

Palm Z Silverlit Mini RC Indoor Airplane

Video of the airplane in action:

[Go to idea #10]

Since Leigh and I have twin boys, I am interested in twin stories, and this one is fascinating:

Identical twins reunited after 35 years

From the article: “Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein lived very similar lives. They were both born in New York, edited their high school newspapers and studied film at university. And both were adopted in 1968. It was only at the age of 35 that they discovered each other and just how similar they were: identical twins who had been separated as infants in a bizarre social experiment.”

The twins were separated and sent to separate families by an adoption agency as part of an experiment in nature vs. nurture. Having reunited at age 35 and shared their experiences, Paula says, “Twins really do force us to question what is it that makes each of us who we are. Since meeting Elyse, it is undeniable that genetics play a huge role — probably more than 50 per cent.” It seems as though, if everyone had a twin and they were raised separately, chances are their lives would follow very similar paths regardless of upbringing. Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein have written a book together on their experiences.

Video from ABC News: Twins Separated at Birth, Reunite

For more info see: How Twins Work

Military VR Simulator Is Closest Thing Ever to Real-Life Halo 3

For more info see: How Projection Television Works