Now I don’t know about you folks, but take a look at this fellows set up for taking a shower, saving electricity and not having to do much physical work turning the light on.   I would have to say it is a pretty good idea other than  the safety factor here.   I also would like to mention, which I am sure you are aware of, right? That not to try it yourself, for numerous reasons.  But hey it takes all kinds to make this old world and this picture does show you that.  At any rate, a little humour for a Saturday morning.. Click On Picture To Enlarge.

Here is a real good article pertaining to our Internet here in Canada.  Take a look.

Just click the link below.

CBC News – Technology & Science – Canadian broadband blasted by Harvard study

Here is a pretty good look at how far we have come using the Internet. Unbeliveable how far we have come in, well lets say fifty years. Is this a good thing?? Well I would have to say it has its place. Just click the link below.

Scientists hail a thoughtful future with ‘brain-to-brain …

And some folks think it will be cheaper.  Not Really!!

Weekdays
7 am to 11 am 8.8¢/kWh
11 am to 5 pm 7.2¢/kWh
5 pm to 8 pm 8.8¢/kWh
8 pm to 10 pm 7.2¢/kWh
10 pm to 7 am 4.0¢/kWh
Weekends 4.0¢/kWh

Homeowners with smart meters (i.e. meters that track how much electricity is used and when) will pay different rates throughout the day. The rates are set and regularly adjusted by the OEB to reflect pricing trends in the wholesale electricity market – when demand is higher, prices tend to be higher and vice-versa.

Kind of think this is the way to go.

A successful test has been carried out of a new prototype solar dish that concentrates solar rays by 1,000 times, creating what inventor Doug Wood has called “the most efficient solar collector in existence.”

The device is a 12-foot-wide dish made from thin, mirrored aluminum tubing and strips of mirrored glass. Water runs through the center of the dish in a coil of tubing, which is painted black for maximum heat absorption.

The collector is so effective at focusing light that when it is pointed directly at the sun, the water in the middle instantly vaporizes into steam. The prototype has also been used to set a plank of wood on fire, and researchers believe that it should be able to generate enough heat to melt steel.

Wood has signed over the rights to the device’s design to a team of MIT students, who built the prototype and have launched a company to mass produce the devices. The company, Raw Solar, hopes to use heat generated by the collector to produce steam for electricity generation, industrial processing, or heating or cooling buildings.

Wood spoke approvingly of the changes that the students had made to his design

“They really have simplified this and made it user-friendly, so anybody can build it,” he said.

Unlike with many alternative energy sources, large-scale production is not required to make the solar dishes cost-efficient, Wood said. Because the materials to make the device are so cheap and because larger dishes require a larger, more expensive support structure, small dishes actually costs only one-third as much as large ones for every unit of collecting area.

“I’ve looked for years at a variety of solar approaches, and this is the cheapest I’ve seen,” said David Pelly of MIT. “And the key thing in scaling it globally is that all of the materials are inexpensive and accessible anywhere in the world.”

Boy things are sure changing in this old world.

The computers of the future might be nothing more than display screens if the full potential of multi-touch interfaces is realized.

As demonstrated by New York University consulting research scientist and Perceptive Pixel founder Jeff Han at the 2006 Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference, multi-touch technology allows a user (or users) to affect the screen with as many fingers as possible at the same time. This makes typing, magnification of pictures, windows and text, as well as shaping images on the screen, possible with intuitive hand movements. For example, one application Han demonstrated allowed him to quickly finger-draw crude puppets onto a large touch screen and then animate them with finger movements.

Previous touch screens have used technology such as resistive metal coatings that register changes in electrical current at the point of contact or spring mounted strain gauges, but those only allowed the software to process a single touch at a time. On the Perceptive Pixel touch screen, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) line the edges of a 6-millimeter-thick piece of clear acrylic, reflecting infrared light along predictable paths on the screen’s surface, a phenomenon known as total internal reflection. When something touches the screen, the light disperses outside of the surface from the contact point. A camera behind the acrylic captures the light diffused from any and all contact points, and image-processing software interprets the touches in real time.

In the future, Han said, he hopes that the technology will pave the way for large interactive white boards and touch-screen tables and walls that multiple users can interface with. Han said that this is the most interesting application of the technology, since a group of users could all collaborate on one project, on one screen, at the same time.

The first wall-sized version of Perceptive Pixel’s multi-touch screen is set to go to an undisclosed U.S. military customer within the month.

Kind Of Intersting.

A team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has created a new optical coating that enables greater control over the basic properties of light. The world’s first material that reflects virtually no light can eliminate unwanted reflections, and has been an active technological goal of scientists for years.

Jump directly to: conventional view | bottom line

What you need to know – Conventional View
• Most surfaces, from a puddle of water to a mirror, reflect some light.

• One type of optical coating is an anti-reflection coating, which reduces unwanted reflections from surfaces, and is commonly used on spectacles and photographic lenses.

• Conventional anti-reflection coatings, although widely used, work only at a single wavelength and only when the light source is positioned directly perpendicular to the material.

• A technique called oblique angle deposition strongly reduces or eliminates reflection at all wavelengths and incoming angles of light.

• The oblique angle evaporation technique is already widely used in the industry, and the design can be applied to any type of substrate — not just an expensive semiconductor such as aluminum nitride.

• This is material with a refractive index of 1.05, which is extremely close to the refractive index of air and the lowest ever reported. Window glass, in comparison, has a refractive index of about 1.45.

• The refractive index is a fundamental property that governs the amount of light a material reflects, as well as other optical properties such as diffraction, refraction, and the speed of light inside the material.

• The new optical coating could find use in just about any application where light travels into or out of a material, such as more efficient solar cells, brighter LEDs, “smart” lighting, high-reflectance mirrors, and black body radiation.