BRL-CAD

U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) computer-aided design (CAD), BRL-CAD was designed for the computer simulation and engineering analysis of combat vehicle systems and environments and is capable of interactively displaying, editing, and interrogating geometric models.

Interestingly, this is free (Open Source) software that you can download and use, and the BRL-CAD source code repository is believed to be the oldest public version-controlled codebase in the world that's still under active development, dating back to 1983.

It is a powerful cross-platform Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) solid modeling system that includes interactive 3D solid geometry editing, high-performance ray-tracing support for rendering and geometric analysis, network-distributed framebuffer support, image and signal-processing tools, path-tracing and photon mapping support for realistic image synthesis, a system performance analysis benchmark suite, an embedded scripting interface, and libraries for robust high-performance geometric representation and analysis.

If you are interested in how it stacks up to other CAD programs, look at this Comparison of CAD Editors for Architecture, Engineering and Construction. Here is the documentation if you want a little more information.

Screenshot

Translucent Bradley Fighting Vehicle
Drawn with BRL-CAD.

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Pete's Pond, Botswana, Africa, Streaming Video

WildCam Africa at Pete's Pond in the Mashatu Game Reserve, Botswana brings you live streaming video of animals in the wild.

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Pete Le Roux used the remnants of an old irrigation system from the area's failed attempts to grow cotton and carved Pete's Pond into the landscape as an alternative watering source—and as his answer to the rampant poaching and senseless killing of Africa's wildlife. The idea worked.

"We have effectively taken an area that was unsuccessful agricultural land and turned it into a viable wildlife preserve," says Le Roux as he gazes out on the pond. "That is the most rewarding thing we've done here, to see the game come back."

There's now a video camera permanently recording the activity along the water's edge and streaming it live to the internet - elephants wallowing and drinking, wildebeest and antelope stretching to sip nervously, guinea fowl scurrying on the banks. This is funded by National Geographic.

The camera is usually operated by volunteers, who will zoom in on the action so you're almost guaranteed of seeing animals and birds "live", particularly in the mornings and late afternoons (see comparative times below).

Botswana	London	Sydney	Tokyo	New York	Los Angeles
10am	9am	6pm	5pm	4am	1am
4pm	3pm	midnight	11pm	10am	7am

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The camera is down at the moment and previously recorded videos are being played. Funding for this project runs out on the 28th of this month (February.) Please check the Facebook page for updates. Lots of information on the pond and animals here.

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This site requires the Realplayer or Realalt plugin.

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World's Record Swiss Army Knives

The world's oldest Swiss Army type knife has been found - made 1,800 years before its modern counterpart. An intricately designed Roman implement, which dates back to 200AD, it is made from silver but has an iron blade. It features a spoon, fork as well as a retractable spike, spatula and small tooth-pick. Experts believe the spike may have been used by the Romans to extract meat from snails.

The Wenger knife above is now listed as the Guinness world's record knife, with 87 tools with over 112 functions. It is available for a mere $999.95 from the Swiss Knife Shop.

In 1992, this was the Guinness record holder with 314 blades.

I guess the difference is that the top knife is a (limited) production item, while the bigger Victorinox knife with the mother of pearl scales was a one-of-a-kind knife hand built by Master Cutler Hans Meister in 1991. He and his employees worked 750 hours to complete this knife with 314 blades and other instruments - for example, a potato peeler. The knife, shown recently in St. Gallen, Switzerland, weighs almost 11 pounds

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SMath: Freeware Mathcad Clone

Mathcad lets you do math like you were sitting at a desk with pencil and paper, but it costs $500. SMath lets you do the same thing and is free, and now it has an integrated math reference book.

Among SMath's capabilities are:

• Solving differential equations
• Graphing functions in two or three dimensions
• Symbolic calculations including solving systems of equations
• matrix operations including determinants
• Finding roots of polynomials and functions
• Symbolic and numeric differentiation of functions
• Numeric integration
• Simple multiline looped programs
• User defined functions

Want to figure 16 to the seventh power? Type 16^ 7 , =, and your answer is 2.6844*10^8. Want to add a column of figures? Type them in with a + between each number, hit =, and you have your answer. Ideal for high school or college math classes.

Simple. Powerful. Free. Unbeatable.

For more information, here is the PDF Introduction to the use of SMath Studio. If you want to try it, the latest version is 0.85, and you can download it here.

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The Flickr Commons

Visit the Commons, if you want to look at uncommon historical photos and perhaps comment on them. Historical photographs that have been preserved in national libraries and archives or photo agencies and news media operations are being displayed here by such diverse institutions as George Eastman House, Library of Congress, Brooklyn Museum, Nationaal Archief, National Archives and Records Administration, State Library of New South Wales, and Smithsonian Institution, the Australian War Memorial, and the National Galleries of Scotland.

These museums and archives post images released under a "no known restrictions" license. The goal of the license is to "firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer."

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For the Birds

The IBC (Internet Bird Collection) is the first place to go to identify an unknown bird or find out more information on the species you do know. It is a non-profit endeavour with the ultimate goal of disseminating knowledge about the world's birds. It is an on-line audiovisual library of the world's birds that is available to the general public free of charge. While the initial aim is to post at least one video or photo per species, the long-term objective is to eventually include material showing a variety of biological aspects (e.g. feeding, breeding, etc.) for every species.

There are photographs of more than 6,000 of the world's 9863 known species, with more being added daily. there are 38883 videos, 17862 photos, and 3676 recordings. There are 6422 species with videos (65.11%), 6486 species with photos (65.76%), 2779 species with sounds (28.18%), 78.7% of all the known species are covered.

The U.S. National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory's Feather Atlas Website is the place to visit when you want to identify a bird by just a wing or tail feather. The contents of the site are designed to assist feather identification by providing high-resolution scans of flight feathers of major groups of North American birds.

The Royal Alberta Museum has the best online collection of wild bird eggs that I have found, but requires you to make an educated guess as to the species -- songbird, woodpecker, owl, etc -- before you get to the data and photos.

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Free Fall Research

The Free Fall Research website has the details to fill in your nightmares of falling out of an airplane or off of a high place like the WTC. It does NOT cover the free fall of all your investments over the last couple of years, a whole different kind of a nightmare.

Free fall describes any motion of a body where gravity is the only or dominant force acting upon it, at least initially. Although strictly the definition excludes motion of an object subjected to other forces such as aerodynamic drag, in nontechnical usage falling through an atmosphere without a deployed parachute or lifting device is also referred to as free fall.

Choose your area of interest for true stories of freefalling, surviving, and the physics behind the events.

| Free Fallers | Wreckage Riders | Unlucky Skydivers | Other Amazing Stories |
| The Unplanned Freefall | Falling Math | Fictional Falls | Record Falls |
| Incident Log | Questions | Recommended Reading |

The disclaimer: The purpose of this page is to gather and confirm the accuracy of these stories. To the best of our knowledge, the stories described on this web page are true. We have gathered newspaper articles, military records, and personal accounts where available.

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February Book Releases

'Lunch in Paris' by Elizabeth Bard	'Worst Case' by James Patterson	'Secrets of Eden' by Chris Bohjalian	'Point Omega' by Don DeLillo
'Shadow Tag' by Louise Erdrich	'Flirt' by Laurell K. Hamilton	'Winter Garden' by Kristin Hannah	'Yalta' by S. M. Plokhy
'Flip the Funnel' by Joseph Jaffe	'A Dark Matter' by Peter Straub	'Big Girl' by Danielle Steel	'Fantasy in Death' by J.D. Robb

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Wired!

Wired.com is a daily technology news website, and carries articles, news & reviews in many fields of tech, from ipads to snowmobiles to weapons to how-to articles.

Today's post is on the high-tech weapons at the SHOT show: Digital Revolvers, Koosh Bullets, Triple Tasers.
Wired is the best place I've found for keeping an eye on the latest buzz, bling and political boo-boos. If you prefer wood-pulp for your reading pleasure, Wired Magazine is also available as a monthly print publication. Wired.com and Wired magazine collaborate on many projects, and the Wired.com site serves as the digital home of Wired magazine.

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Panopticlick: Are You Trackable?

Panopticlick is a research project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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Reposted. Sorry!

Help EFF Research Web Browser Tracking.

What fingerprints does your browser leave behind as you surf the web?

Traditionally, people assume they can prevent a website from identifying them by disabling cookies on their web browser. Unfortunately, this is not the whole story.

When you visit a website, you are allowing that site to access a lot of information about your computer's configuration. Combined, this information can create a kind of fingerprint — a signature that could be used to identify you and your computer. But how effective would this kind of online tracking be?

EFF is running an experiment to find out. Our new website Panopticlick will anonymously log the configuration and version information from your operating system, your browser, and your plug-ins, and compare it to our database of five million other configurations. Then, it will give you a uniqueness score — letting you see how easily identifiable you might be as you surf the web.

Adding your information to our database will help EFF evaluate the capabilities of Internet tracking and advertising companies, who are already using techniques of this sort to record people's online activities. They develop these methods in secret, and don't always tell the world what they've found. But this experiment will give us more insight into the privacy risk posed by browser fingerprinting, and help web users to protect themselves.

To join the experiment: http://panopticlick.eff.org/

Run the test and you will be given a uniqueness score, letting you see how easily identifiable you might be as you surf the web.

Rarity of my configuration: Within our dataset of several hundred thousand visitors, only one in 478 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours.

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