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The US Pentagon has created a type of defensive material that can be used in new vehicular armour protection. This is news because it’s a form of modified transparent aluminium.

Aluminum Oxynitride (ALON) transparent armor has been demonstrated to provide nearly equivalent ballistic protection as conventional armor at approximately half the weight and thickness. Performance testing of different thickness and laminate armor is being conducted to determine the best design for use in large size multi-hit samples. The selected design will be evaluated for use in a vehicle application to assess the mechanical properties and robustness in this type of application.

from the Technical Support Working Group Combating Terrorism webpage

The only problem at the moment is pricing. Right now production costs around $10-15 per square inch while traditional armour costs $4-5. Economies of scale will bring this high down to more reasonable levels, but right now, you’d have to just bite the bullet to protect yourself.

In a test this summer, the product held up to a .50-caliber sniper’s rifle with amor-piercing bullets. Traditional glass armor did not survive the test. Officials hope the product will prove even more useful when considering more severe threats, such as explosives.

“The higher the threat, the more savings you’re going to get,” La Monica said. “With glass, to get the protection against higher threats, you have to keep building layers upon layers. But with [the new product], the material only needs to be increased a few millimeters.”

“Achieving protection at lighter weights will allow the armor to be more easily integrated into vehicles,” said Ron Hoffman, a researcher at University of Dayton Research Institute.

Livescience.com

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I’ve been told off over the last couple of days for not updating my site so I thought I’d share a thought I’ve been considering, rolling around my head for a while now. It’s not something that I know would work, something that’s confirmed but the plus side is that it’s something that I’ve never seen anywhere before.

My thought is concerning developments in electronic paper and how it could be used to help in teaching and more importantly, make learning more enjoyable. The issue came to light as I sat in a tedious and slow lecture on Political Philosophy. The room, filled with eager young students (!), had curtains drawn over the windows, air conditioning running, fluorescent lights running and an overhead projector beaming the slides onto the wall display above my Professor. The scene is replicated in thousands of rooms across the world where students slave away and teachers swelter. In thinking about this I realised what a waste of energy we were: why not just open the curtains? The answer is of course because the sun would be too bright to see the display properly and so we close the curtains so we can closely regulate the amount of light blinding the great Prof.
I think electronic paper could help us in this situation. Currently these new displays are paper thin screens that appear to act in a way similar to TFTs. What they in fact do is that, instead of lighting up like an Liquid Crystal Display would do, when a current is applied they rotate a molecule which has differing colours/hues in different parts of it. This means that they give off no light of their own and they need to consume less energy because they aren’t spitting out light but just reflecting it. What’s even more interesting is that they only use energy when they change the image: when the display is static the image holds. Like an Etch A Sketch, they keep whatever was applied to them until you shake them all around and begin again. This all applies to the classroom because of the simple fact that Powerpoint is boring. It’s that simple. People very rarely use video or beautiful images with their lecture slides and so a electronic-paper style device would be perfect because the slides don’t have to change constantly. At the moment electronic paper is having difficulty in moving images and with colour, although this is being improved constantly and colour is coming soon.

The major plus of all of this is that electronic paper displays are incredibly easy to read from a distance, from side angles and in direct sunlight and in dim light. This all amounts to their being perfect for replacing projector displays as a perfect display medium for lectures. The room could be properly lit, have lower power consumption and air conditioning needs because you wouldn’t have to use as much artificial lighting within a deliberately darkened room! Of course there’s the problem that the displays aren’t even in large scale production and it hasn’t been shown that they can be made in large sizes, but if they could, I’d propose this as a perfect application.
The future though, could be so great. A class where you can see through a window, where the screen doesn’t have to be rated in thousands of lumens just to be read properly, where you can hear a lecturer over the hum of speaker noise, air conditioning fans and associated paraphernalia, a future where we don’t have to darken a room just to light it.
Fingers crossed!

ScienCentral: Electronic Paper

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[23:18] tysiscoe: im still hot
[23:18] tysiscoe: people still like me
[23:18] ocellnuri: I just can’t change what I like
[23:18] tysiscoe: i could have any contact i wanted
[23:18] ocellnuri: we grow, and we need different things
[23:18] ocellnuri: it’s not your pictures, it’s mine
[23:18] tysiscoe: lol
[23:18] tysiscoe: good one
[23:18] ocellnuri: : – )
[23:19] tysiscoe: would you like me better if i had a gear upgrade??
[23:19] tysiscoe: bigger camera
[23:19] ocellnuri: well… sometimes I just need a shot tighter than 300mm
[23:20] tysiscoe: you couldnt handle a real 300mm
[23:20] ocellnuri: I have before

AND IT GOES ON…

Fubuki on Flickr: you know youve been on flickr too long when…

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The New York Times reports on a new trend in early years childcare: teaching newborns to use a toilet properly before their first birthday. A practice widespread across the rest of the world, according to Contemporary Pediatrics magazine: more than 50% of the world’s infants are toilet trained by their first birthday. Although we in the west consider babies unable to control bowel movements until much later than this report suggests, perhaps practices are in for a change. One theory is that by delaying potty training for infants we encourage bad toilet behavior and make it harder for children to learn to use the toilet when it is later deemed appropriate.

For many parents in the United States, the idea of potty training before a baby is able to walk, or even before age 2, is not just horrifying but reprehensible – a sure nightmare for parents and baby, not to mention a direct route from the crib to the psychiatrist’s couch. But a growing number of parents are experimenting with infant potty training, seeing it as more sanitary, ecologically correct and likely to strengthen bonds between parent and child.

Ingrid Bauer, author of “Diaper Free! The Gentle Wisdom of Natural Infant Hygiene” (Natural Wisdom Press, 2001), believes it is easiest to begin toilet training in the first six months. To start, parents are taught to hold the baby by the thighs in a seated position against their stomachs and to make an encouraging hiss or grunt. With practice, parents learn their child’s rhythms; some parents sleep next to their children and keep a potty at arm’s reach, or diaper their babies overnight.

NYTimes: A Fast Track to Toilet Training for Those at the Crawling Stage

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Newly appointed Most Reverend Dr John Tucker, Archbishop of York spoke to the public on his ordination:

Why should my baggage as a heterosexual be more acceptable than the baggage of a gay person? The Church of England has to reconnect with England. There is such a wealth of tradition, the relationship between Christianity and social order, we are all part of the same society

I couldn’t agree more with his assessment for the current state of the Church. I don’t think the Church will find its spiritual ground by following what public commentators are directly telling it to do, by being led by the extreme wings of taste. In reading a piece by Andy Kershaw in The Indepedent titled ‘Peel the unpredictable’, I came across a lesson that I think could be well applied to religions around the world. In his career with the BBC, radio disc jockey John Peel exposed millions to new music and news sounds with a philosophy that hadn’t really been seen before:

We’re not here to give people what they want but what they didn’t know they wanted.

Churches aren’t there to satisfy an individuals’ desire for a particular ethos, for a brand of society, but to give spiritual guidance. You may not want the world to be different, but you might just like it when it is.

The Guardian: From Uganda with love … Church of England’s new No 2 spells out his creed

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I joined a kind of military corps a couple of weeks ago. As part of preparations for coming wars, around one hundred years ago the British Government set up a series of clubs in affiliation with the major Universities around the country with an aim to training young men and women in leadership skills that could be of use in the event that a large scale conflict required a draft, and this is one of them. The training teaches recruits those skills in three months that would normally span a whole year. There’s much that I can write about with regards to what we do because it’s pretty open, things like teambuilding exercises, public speaking, fitness training and so forth. There are also many things I can’t write about because the army, as it ought, takes security incredibly seriously. Part of this is requiring all members to swear an Oath of Allegiance (otherwise known as an Attestation) to Queen and Country, as well as becoming subject to the Official Secrets Act.

In detailing this to us new recruits a couple of days ago, the CO mentioned base and general security and one of his remarks stuck in my mind. His statement was this, and I paraphrase:

If we know that there’s a bomb in the viscinity, and we know where it is, we’ll tell you. We don’t tell you so that you can do something brave or heroic. We tell you so that when you hear, you can get out of the way. You’re not to do so calmly or with reasonable haste: you RUN as fast as you can away from where the bomb is! That’s all.

I don’t think I’m revealing anything dangerous there. We’re told, as the bottom of the rung, to peg is out of the way as fast as we possibly can. There was a wave of low chuckle across the group as he said this. I don’t think anyone had expected him to be quite so honest!

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The bad thing is that you are almost promoting what you are trying to protect against. You are upsetting the fan that went out and purchased the record.

Jason Brown, president of Philadelphonic, a management company that represents Tristan Prettyman, whose album in among those trialing ‘copy-protection’ with EMI.

Fans get annoyed with having newly purchased CDs marred by the implementation of Digital Rights Management (DRM) software which controls what can be done with the content. By restriction consumer choice, the record companies are driving away their most needed customers, the ones who are tech savvy enough to rip their music to a computer. If they can’t do that, surely the response will simply to download if illegally? What’s new is that now the artists themselves are joining in the protest by aiding listeners in breaking the DRM. The software normally allows users to burn at least one ’standard’ copy of the music on an unprotected CD. That CD can then be ripped back onto a computer as with any unrestricted CD.

Columbia Records act Switchfoot, whose latest album, “Nothing Is Sound,” is copy-protected — and debuted at No. 3 on The Billboard 200 last week — recently took copy-protection defiance one step further. Band guitarist Tim Foreman posted on a Sony Music-hosted fan site a link to the software program CDEX, which disables the technology. The post has since been removed.

CNN.com: Musicians tell how to beat the system

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You’d have thought they were, but they’re not.

Army press-ups involve putting your hands right under your shoulders and only using arms to lift the body off the ground. There’s no involvement of pectoral muscles at all. This comes, when doing them for the first time, as a bit of a shock.

My arms, they hurt!

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