Okay, as any of you may have guessed by now, I learned a long time ago to embrace my inner geek. So when I came across GE’s Augmented Reality web site, I exclaimed “How incredibly cool is that?!?” Just ask my wife who only looked at me with a worried expression on her face.
GE has historically had some pretty cute marketing ideas. This one is designed to promote their Smart Grid technology, billed as being a more eco-friendly by using alternate energy sources such as wind turbines and solar panels. Further, according to Wikipedia, “a smart grid delivers electricity from suppliers to consumers using digital technology to save energy, reduce cost and increase reliability.” While I don’t know all the ins and outs, pros and cons of Smart Grid Technology (sounds like a good idea, at least), I have to say that GE’s Augmented Reality is pretty cool. Check out the following video demonstration. If you want to try it out for yourself, click here. You’ll need a web cam and be able to print out a sheet of paper from the web site.
(Side note: as was pointed out to me, you have to wonder about the eco-friendliness of a promotional tool that has you print out a piece of paper only to throw it away 5 minutes later. But anyway…)
Alec Garrard, a retired farmer, has spent more than 30 years building an enormous scale model of Herod's temple - and it is still not finished. The picture gallery is definitely worth checking out.
While doing some Googling to show Carlos pictures of Jupiter, I stumbled across what has to be the coolest astronomy program I’ve ever seen. Stellarium is a free open source program that allows the user to see the night sky (or even the day sky) from anywhere on Earth. From their website: “With Stellarium, you really see what you can see with your eyes, binoculars or a small telescope.” The program automatically defaults to the current system time, but has a great feature of being able to go backward or forward in time to see the affects of changing night sky. Ever wanted to learn the constellations? With Stellarium, you can turn on the constellation names and lines, as well as some constellation art. You can pan the sky and look for stars, galaxies, nebulae, planets, etc. Then with your new-found knowledge, go outside and spot the stars and planets you just found. But perhaps the best feature by far is that when you find an object of interest, you can then zoom in to that object as if you were looking through a telescope. I did a search for Saturn (who doesn’t like to look at the rings?!), zoomed in and there it was in all its beauty complete with moons. Searching for and finding nebulae was incredible. Be warned that the program takes up an incredible amount of memory. If you’re into astronomy, have kids that would benefit from learning about it or even just want to fiddle around with an incredibly cool program, check out Stellarium. This is a program I could spend hours on.
Sappy Post: 1st Try at Maple Sap to Syrup
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Despite the grim look, I really had a ball boiling down our first gathering
of maple sap for 2016. We had collected about 8.5 gallons in the day and
half a...
Heading to Somewhere Else
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“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That
depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t
much care wh...
