Reality tunnels » science

Necker cube

jmbr — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 08:02:36 +0000

I recently learnt about the Necker cube and thought it would be interesting to mention it because it’s a very good way to explain the concept of a reality tunnel. Here’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry:

The Necker Cube is an ambiguous line drawing. It is a wire-frame drawing of a cube in isometric perspective, which means that parallel edges of the cube are drawn as parallel lines in the picture. When two lines cross, the picture does not show which is in front and which is behind. This makes the picture ambiguous; it can be interpreted two different ways.

Colossus rebuilt

jmbr — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 08:02:35 +0000

Colossus, the world’s first working computer, was used at Bletchley Park during
World War II to break enemy codes. A replica has been rebuilt by veterans
according to this article.

Home made HERF guns

jmbr — Mon, 24 May 2004 08:02:36 +0000

A blog article reflecting on HERF guns has just been published on John Robbs’ Global Guerrillas web log.

For those of you who don’t know what a HERF gun is here I reproduce an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry:

HERF or High Energy Radio Frequency weapons, also known as HPRF or High Power Radio Frequency weapons are weapons designed to use high intensity radio waves to disrupt electronics. They operate in a similar way to EMP devices, by inducing destructive voltage within the electronic wiring. They are usually directional and can be focused on a specific target.

One of the links from previous posts on this matter leads to an example of a home made HERF gun. The video clips demonstrating the use of the gun against a PC from a distance of 4.5 meters are specially entertaining.

Computational linguistics help uncover government secrets

jmbr — Tue, 11 May 2004 08:02:35 +0000

This article from yesterday’s news talks about a program for revealing blacked-out words in documents. They used it against a memorandum from the USA Dept. of Defense yielding interesting results:

They said that although the name of a country had been blacked out in that memorandum, their software showed that it was highly likely the document named South Korea as having helped the Iraqis.