No Pity for the Masses

If this is legit it’s just too cool.

The notion that you can build your own x-ray machine with adhesive tape, a vacuum environment, and a spooler to pull the tape at a constant rate is kinda cool. Just think, in a few months cancer rates will more than triple but we’ll all know what our fingers look like.

Next up we have Buckypaper. Buckypaper is basically comprised of a series of carbon nanotubes. “The nanotubes are approximately 50,000 times thinner than a human hair.” (Wikipedia) Supposedly buckypaper, or any object constructed of layered carbon nanotubes, is 500 times stronger than steal. If true this could lead to a new generation of construction materials both for vehicles and for workstations.

That topic segues nicely in to my last post, the space elevator. The idea here is that carbon nanotubes provide us with a material strong enough to handle building an elevator in to space. What you would do with said elevator is beyond me…. maybe dumping trash. Give a hoot, outerspace pollute.

Interestingly no one really discusses how you would anchor such a building. Something that tall is going to handle winds in a way no other building has yet seen. On top of that, what happens when it falls. The common line delineating space from atmosphere is te Kármán line. This line is 62 miles from the earths surface at sea level to outer space. The space elevator would need to be built inside of a circle measuring ~ 389 miles around. Longest bisecting line is 124 miles (the diameter obviously.) That’s not too big but still tough.

It’s a good month for science.

Fenrir pic

Since my last post I’ve uploaded the ray tracer I used as an example in my last post to the SVN account. It’s labeled as ‘Fenrir’ (no significance) and there is a small readme attached.

The code works as a library and shouldn’t have any problems, if so let me know so I can fix them. It’s also a bit overzealous with its memory use. Say you have a program that loads mesh Foo.obj and you want to make it collidable. You need to create a copy of that mesh in the Fenrir library. And you have continue this process for every instance of Foo.obj that you want in your ray tracing scene. Eventually I’d like to add in a feature for mesh reuse but until then just be aware of the memory overhead.