Wednesday, May 21, 2003

Serious Lego. 9:47:05 AM     Greg offers two great links on mechanical devices. One of my fondest memories as a child was watching the collection of gears and levers demonstrations at the Chicago Museum of Science. It seemed like hundreds of gears- squares turning squares- all rotating in unison. Its no longer very popular, and shunted off to a corner, but here are two on-line examples: A Digital LIbrary of Kinematics (click on digital library of kinematics) gears and devices from a 1933 Borg-Warner exhibit beautiful stuff - thanks Greg! 5:59:25 AM     Steve Cisler noted some work on training labs in Uganda. An item that immediately pops out is the high cost of electricity. He notes several ways to deal with this (home computers vary by about an order of magnitude in energy consumption), the issue of unreliable and expensive power is common - I have seen it in rural Montana. While it is probably wrong to use people to generate power in third world areas, some people have done work on the subject. David Gordon Wilson of MIT (well known for his gas turbines and recumbent bicycles) has a note on pedal power aimed at developing countries. 5:59:08 AM     David Ahmed's music instrument encyclopedia for OS X continues to improve. It isn't deep by any measure, but it is fun. 5:58:54 AM

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