• Hmmmm. It’s illegal to steal power by putting coils on your roof if you live underneath a high voltage power line, right? So why exactly wouldn’t this be illegal as well?

    —

    Because the rooftop coil uses magnetic induction to lower the voltage in the powerline while increasing it in the coil. The WiFi harvester absorbs a tiny part the omni-direction signal from the wifi hotspot, preventing it from very slightly heating up whatever it would have fallen on otherwise. This doesn’t “steal power” from the hotspot anymore than a solar panel “steals power” from the Sun.

    Interesting question from a Consumerist commenter on the Wifi harvester.

    Airnergy Charger Generates Electricity From WiFi Signals - The Consumerist

    (via heyitsnoah)

  • I am currently 1) reading Dune again 2) downloading a “fan edit” of the movie 3) trolling Tumblr for anything Dune related 4) Christmas Eve-level excited about watching the movie tonight.

    (via snail62)

  • The Duke glanced down to the left at the broken landscape of the Shield Wall—chasms of tortured rock, patches of yellow-brown crossed by black lines of fault shattering. It was as through someone had dropped this ground from space and left it where it smashed.

    Dune, Frank Herbert, pp 111

    (via lineara)

  • Combat in orbit would be very different from combat in “deep space,” which is what you probably think of as how space combat should be – where a spacecraft thrusts one way, and then keeps going that way forever. No, around a planet, the tactical advantage in a battle would be determined by orbit dynamics: which ship is in a lower (and faster) orbit than which; who has a circular orbit and who has gone for an ellipse; relative rendezvous trajectories that look like winding spirals rather than straight lines.

    —The Physics of Space Battles - Space battle - Gizmodo

  • There is only one spot on the planet where grains will grow despite sub-arctic sunlight. It is where the warm waters of the Gulf Stream wash ashore. The Baltic is the only place on earth where ocean currents keep it warm enough to grow grain despite dim sunlight. When the inhabitants of this region switched to grain about 6 KYA, they suddenly got insufficient vitamin D to survive. They had stopped eating mostly meat and fish in a place where sunlight was too dim to produce vitamin D in normally pigmented skin. And so they adapted by retaining into adulthood the infantile trait of extreme paleness. Blonde hair and blue eyes were other infantile traits that were just swept along accidentally. (via Why Are Europeans White? (E1) - a knol by Frank W Sweet)