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The Math Behind the Music of the 80s
Although there might have been other music produced or recorded in the 1980s, we may never know of its existence due to the cacophony of all of the various keytars, drum machines, and other synthesized...
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Amateur Radio Operators Detect Signals from Voyager 1
At the time of its construction in the 1950s, the Dwingeloo Radio Observatory was the largest rotatable telescope in the world with a dish diameter of 25 meters. It was quickly overtaken in the...
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Chaotic System Cooks Meat Evenly
For better or worse, a lot of human technology is confined to fewer dimensions than the three we can theoretically move about in. Cars and trains only travel two dimensionally with limited exceptions,...
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Apple Newton Gets Rebuilt Battery Pack
We all carry touch screen computers around in our pockets these days, but before the smartphone revolution, there was the personal digital assistant (PDA). While it wasn’t a commercial success, one of...
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A Portable Chainsaw Sawmill
Unless you’re running a commercial logging operation, with specialized saws, log grapples, mills, transportation for the timber, and the skilled workers needed to run everything, it’s generally easier...
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An iPhone Case Study
Way back in 2008, Apple unveiled the first unibody Macbook with a chassis milled out of a single block of aluminum. Before that, essentially all laptops, including those from Apple, were flimsy plastic...
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Rainwater From the Road to the Garden
Most small-scale, residential rainwater harvesting systems we’ve seen rely on using an existing roof and downspout to collect water that would otherwise be diverted out into the environment. These are...
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A Compass That Looks to the Stars
Although a lot of tools have been digitized and consolidated into our smartphones, from cameras, music players, calendars, alarm clocks, flashlights, and of course phones, perhaps none are as useful as...
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Training a Self-Driving Kart
There are certain tasks that humans perform every day that are notoriously difficult for computers to figure out. Identifying objects in pictures, for example, was something that seems fairly...
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