Technology

From the “Why Didn’t I Think of This?” files comes the Levytator,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC_se2zrmLM

The Levytator is a more efficient and flexible take on the escalator.  It runs in a circuit, instead of conveyor-belt style, so you don’t lose half your steps to the useless, upside-down underground path, like in a traditional escalator.  Thus, you get more transportation per square foot of step.

In addition, the interlocking steps are curved and not rectangular, meaning that not only can the Levytator turn around corners, but essentially it can be designed to follow any kind of path a planner might need.

Be sure to check out the video for some cool demonstrations (which remind me a lot of closed-loop integrals).

After reading a post about 3-D printers, I found out about this assemble-it-yourself 3-D Printer!

http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page

Not only is the RepRap cheap to build (people claim it can be done for around $400), but all the software and hardware designs are open-source and free.

But it doesn’t stop there.  If you already have a RepRap, you can use it to build some of the parts you to build another RepRap! In other words, this is a self-replicating machine!  Well, partially at least.

I’m sure there are plenty of people out there with the skills to build one of these themselves.  I’m not sure I’m one of them–after all, building a table that was almost level was a huge success for me.  But this is such a cool idea it might just be worth a shot!

A computer scientist at Yahoo has used “cloud computing” to find the most distant digits yet of pi’s decimal expansion.

This new approach to networking machines and processors, allowing them to act as one super-computer rather than, say, 100 individuals, allowed this record-setting calculation to be in 23 days when, under normal circumstances, it would have taken nearly 500 years.

Apparently a similar approach at Google resulted in verifying that every configuration of the Rubik’s cube can be solved in 20 moves or less.