Many of the things Grand Illusions sells are very hard to find anywhere else, but this ring is not one of those things. I got mine for $AU8.99 delivered from this eBay seller. (Here they are on ebay.com, instead of ebay.com.au.)
They've got a lot of thumb-tips, too. With one of those and a good supply of chicken giblets, you could set yourself up with a nice little psychic surgery business!
The most common limiting factor for makers of powered Lego tanks always used to be tracks.
The simplest Lego tracks were the one-piece rubber "Technic Tread Crawler" tracks that came with the Universal Motor Set. The rubber tracks fit all of those plastic-box pre-Technic motors, and they work well enough, within their limits.
I, like umpteen other kids lucky enough to have two motors, just stuck 'em together side by side with one driving a track on the left and one driving a track on the right and, with two battery boxes, then had myself a skid-steer machine.
(Which would never go quite straight, because the battery voltage and motor performance on either side never quite matched. But it was close enough for government work.)
The little rubber tracks were very limited, though. If you wanted less-power-sapping tracks of arbitrary length, you had to use the Technic Link Tread pieces.
The Link Treads were basically just Technic Link Chains with a broad bar attached to the top. They were small enough to mesh with standard Technic gears, which made them rather delicate. Not to mention a bit fiddly for even small fingers to snap together.
The Technic Link Treads weren't actually the first Lego chain/link pieces. That honour goes to Technic Link Chain Old, which was much sturdier because it meshed with the old big spiky gears. The spiky gears were replaced by the finer-toothed ones around 1980, though, because the old ones didn't mesh terribly well with each other, and couldn't be made small enough for intricate mechanisms. (The biggestones might make a pretty nice scale waterwheel, though.)
The new tracks don't mesh with standard gears, so they need special driving wheels. But apart from that, they seem to be an excellent solution to the problem of making a tracked Lego vehicle that can traverse something more challenging than short-pile carpet.
Yep; that's a tank with treads made out of short, straight Technic "lift arm" pieces. Heck, you could probably make a clunkier version of these tracks out of good old studded beams.
This track design looks to be highly scalable, very strong, and easily repairable with cheap parts. And it doesn't need to crawl like this; you could probably drive these tracks quite fast, if you used a couple of the stronger motors.
I found this picture on Flickr while looking for something quite different. I think it's fair to say that almost anything is quite different from this picture.
I invite you to look at the picture for some time. Feel free to click through to the bigger version on Flickr. Turn it round and round in your head a bit.
Here's another angle:
In a moment, I will tell you how this strange tableau came to be. But you may prefer to read no further. Not because the explanation is as unsettling as the explanation for such a scene honestly ought to be, but merely because the explanation, like an explanation for a magic trick, may leave your perception of the world poorer than it found it.
I'm reminded of the Penn and Teller trick where Penn says that Teller, who just magicked his way out of a box he'd been sealed in, is about to do it again, but this time so that the audience can see how the trick is done.
Penn then commands the audience to make a choice.
They can close their eyes, and thereby preserve the mystery and astonishment of the trick.
Or they can leave their eyes open, and watch a middle-aged man get out of a box.
If you'd prefer to preserve the magic, do not scroll down.
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Greetings, fellow spoilers of jokes.
So far as I could glean from the comments on the Flickr picture pages, the explanation is:
There is something interesting inside the giant pig. Presumably real pigs.
The children have their faces pressed to windows, which allow them to see in.
You are not allowed to look through a window unless you first put on a tail.
The guy in the foreground in the first picture is probably not actually about to start butcherin' young 'uns.
As the all-knowing expert on model war machines (and the receiver of sponsorship from BackyardArtillery if I recall correctly?), I was wondering if you could recommend to me a catapult or trebuchet that is:
- Suitable for a beginner with fairly limited access to tools
- Suitable for someone who lives in a college at university (i.e. must be highly portable)
- Shippable by a method that will have it arrive by the 6th of October (the recipient's birthday)
- Not unreasonably expensive (I was thinking in the range of $80-$120, but if thats too little for something exciting, go higher)
Unfortunately, though, the RLT sites don't offer international shipping any more, on account of the usual credit-card fraud BS.
(Ed didn't specifically say that he's buying a gift for someone in Australia, but I presumed he was, from his .au e-mail address. If the recipient is in the USA, by all means just go straight to trebuchet.com or catapultkits.com and pick whatever you want. And if you follow my affiliate links, I'll get a cut!)
I don't know of any companies in Australia that sell trebuchet kits (if you do, tell us all in the comments!), but fortunately, there are some dealers who'll ship Down Under.
Educational Innovations at teachersource.com, for instance. I've bought from them and I think delivery was pretty snappy; ordinary international air mail should make the cut for you, provided the package doesn't get held for examination by Customs or something (which it shouldn't, but sometimes they just do it at random to packages that don't look suspicious).
Educational Innovations resell one of Ron Toms' kits; that'd probably suit you very nicely, but it's not cheap. Eighty US bucks for the kit, plus $US47.53 for delivery to Australia. Not peanuts, and a bit over your budget, but at least you ought to get it in plenty of time. And teachersource.com have lots of other cool stuff you might like.
You might also like to consider the kits ThinkGeek sell. You want the more expensive "Trebuchet Kit", not the cheaper "Catapult" one, which commits the cardinal sin of throwing from a cup on the end of the arm rather than from a sling.
(As I mentioned in the sidebar of the old trebuchet kit review, the cup-on-the-end "catapult" is the classic image of a medieval siege engine, but it's also mechanically stupid. All proper flingers actually used a sling, which allows the projectile to be hurled much faster than the end of the arm can move.)
ThinkGeek's international shipping fees are not low, either - more than the price of the kit, in this case, though the total is still well within your budget - but the regular DHL Express International delivery option is reliable and fast enough to make the cut for you. And the shipping's not too terrible if you add a few other lightweight items to the big thing you're buying; as with teachersource.com, you can easily build a small Emergency Present Pile out of ThinkGeek gear.
(See also HobbyLink Japan, who have tons of awesome stuff, much of which is not available anything like as cheaply, or at all, outside Japan. But don't see them now, because they don't have any siege engine kits.)
At this point, I started hunting on eBay, and found a couple of sellers with apparently identical treb kits for a reasonable price. Then I found the same thing on at catapultkits.com, which told me that this kit's from Pathfinders Design and Technology in Canada. Their trebuchet is a bit spindly, but that's because it's quite a nice scale model. And it's quite cheap. And Pathfinder even seem to offer international shipping - but when I entered dummy information to see how much the shipping actually cost (I just love how many sites make you do that...), I noticed that the "Country" box on the form is a text box, which doesn't seem to actually be taken into account when you click on through.
The Pathfinders site said shipping to Australia was a lousy nine bucks, for a grand total of $CA41.22. Which is great if it's true, but I'll bet you it's not.
If you're in Canada (or, surely, the USA...), though, Pathfinders look like an excellent source for cheap treb kits. They've got several other neat-looking products, too.
If ordering directly from Pathfinders doesn't work out, here and here are the eBay sellers I found that offerend the Pathfinders kit.
If it comes to that, it's actually not very difficult to make your own trebuchet, if you don't need something that can throw a bowling ball half a mile. Lego is very good for getting the hang of the concepts, and the basic simplicity of the idea - two A-frames, axle, throwing arm with sling at one end and weight at the other - means it's also not hard to knock one together from PVC pipe, or even authentic wood.
But a pile of plumbing and a book about siege engines is, I grant you, probably not the greatest of gifts.
(UPDATE: Murray Hill of 22AD Ancient & Medieval Artillery in New Zealand commented below. He isn't quite in the treb-kit business yet; at the moment he's just sending out free plans to school students, and making catapults himself for schools, now and then. But he just told me that he plans to "come up with a student friendly machine" quite soon. Check out his Web site, particularly the Shop section, for updates!)
The other day, I bought two little laser pointers on eBay, for a grand total of $US3.76 delivered.
I intended to use them as cat toys, since the only red pointer we've got here that doesn't run from those useless button batteries is a bit flaky.
I chose those particular pointers because they were the very cheapest AAA-powered lasers I could find. They were promoted as "Ultra Powerful Red Laser Pointer Pen Beam Light 5mW", but they almost certainly actually had an output of only one or two milliwatts, like almost every other cheap pointer.
This power level presents pretty much zero eye risk, according to the rather complex risk calculations I explained at great length in my review of a much more powerful pointer.
A genuine five-milliwatt laser certainly can damage your retina if you stare into it from close range, and it's theoretically possible for glance exposure to cause eye damage at ten to maybe twenty metres, given the beam characteristics of cheap lasers.
A cheap two-milliwatt laser can't possibly hurt your eyes if you're more than ten metres away - probably closer, actually - and the one-milliwatt output you'll get from the very cheapest lasers and from those ubiquitous button-cell keyring lasers when the batteries have more than a few minutes of use on them will probably not hurt you even if you do stare into them at zero range.
Not that you should do it just to see, but the hazard calculations start looking pretty stupid as you drop below 5mW.
Naturally, Australian Customs chose to protect the Australian people from these terrifying devices, by seizing them under subsection 203B(2) of the Customs Act.
(This only the second time this has happened to me. The other time was when Ron Toms tried to sendme an inexpensive Airsoft gun along with a box of other toys for review. The Customs guys left me the instruction manual, battery and charger, so I presume they really did incinerate the gun itself.)
Should I wish to contest the seizure, it would appear my first step would be to obtain Form B709B from the Firearms Registry of the New South Wales Police, which I could of course not actually do, after which I would be able to lodge a "B710 Application to the Minister for Permission to Import Weapons", which he would of course not grant.
At least I didn't have to go to bloody Clyde to pick up the package, as I've had to a couple of previous times when Customs were doubtful about something I'd bought.
(The second of those times, the item in question was a Gerber multitool. The nice Customs lady went into the back room to make sure it wasn't actually a switchblade or something. Her experience with tools in general may have been somewhat limited, since she came back bleeding. But she was very good-humoured about it, especially after I gave her one of the Band-Aids I keep in my wallet where less practical, or perhaps just more interesting, people keep a condom.)
This foolishness happened, of course, because a couple of geniuses shone green lasers at planes coming in to land here in New South Wales. And, immediately, our sagacious elected protectors made new laws which caused ordinary laser pointers - including low-powered red ones that have almost no ability to dazzle anyone more than a stone's throw away - to be classed as weapons.
Actually, in New South Wales and elsewhere, it would appear that all lasers above one milliwatt output are now Controlled and/or Prohibited Weapons, like military flame throwers and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. The maximum penalty for merely possessing a perfectly normal office laser pointer would, therefore, now appear to be fourteen years in prison.
I'd like to say that I'm sure that a judge would recognise that the assortment of silly ninja weapons and quite inoffensive items - like ordinary handcuffs, for instance, or even a home-made cardboard replica of a Sidewinder missile - that one or another drum-beating politician has added to the list of prohibited weapons, are not the same as an actual working RPG-7. And that of all the ridiculous things on the list, a $2, 2mW, laser pointer may be the most ridiculous.
But you shouldn't be up in front of a judge over just owning a 2mW laser pointer anyway. And, given the way things have been going lately, I don't know how much sanity is left in the system.
You'd think that even the docile betaapes who can be counted on to support frank fascism when presented with the simple stimuli so famously explained by Hermann Goering would, by now, have started to realise that just this once, for the very first time in human history, they are being lied to.
We still do not seem to have reached the point where any electable candidate for public office in Australia - or, of course, in the USA - will come within a hundred miles of saying that making little old ladies take their shoes off is not an essential measure to prevent conquest of the world by radical Islam.
Oh, and do note that while 2mW laser pointers are now super-illegal death rays here in New South Wales - instantly making felons of, what do you reckon, maybe a third of the population? - laser diodes with the same or more power which happen to be part of ultrasonic tape-measures, laser levels, Blu-Ray players, barcode scanners or any of approximately one billion other classes of device are all still perfectly legal, and expected to stay that way. Because we all know that terrorists do not own screwdrivers, or know how to find Instructables.com.
I remind you, at this juncture, that Wicked Lasers and their spin-off TechLasers continue to offer a 100% delivery guarantee for lasers the size of a billy-club that cost a thousand dollars and have at least a few hundred times the output power of the ones Customs seized from me.
Techlasers have a "100% Money Back Guarantee if for ANY reason your product cannot be delivered to your door, no questions asked", while Wicked Lasers will give you your money back plus a hundred dollars if a laser doesn't make it to you.
So I think it's safe to say that Australian Customs isn't perfectly watertight as regards even lasers with which you could beat a man to death.
But they sure confiscated the hell out of those cat toys of mine. Well done, lads!
The only even slightly rational justification for the new laws is that it's now possible for police to confiscate a laser from you if you cannot give a good reason for having it on your person. So the cops don't have to prove that this particular dork they just caught is the same one who was shining a laser at an air ambulance an hour ago, and can at least take his laser away even if they can't charge him with anything.
(Although the 1mW legal limit seems to mean they can charge you with a serious offence just for owning almost any laser pointer. Does anybody know whether this has actually been done yet?)
But even if you feel that this particular security-versus-freedom trade-off is a fair one, it doesn't justify stopping everybody else from even buying a plain old $2 cat-toy laser.
I, for the record, do not believe this to be a fair trade-off. There are similar laws here in New South Wales covering knives; if you cannot give a good reason for having even a tiny Swiss Army knife in your pocket if challenged by a policeman, he can confiscate it. But it is easy to justify having any normal sort of pocket-knife, and I do not strongly object to confiscation of a steak knife from some goon wandering around outside the cinemas on George Street in Sydney on a Saturday night, whether or not he's actually suspected of doing or intending to do something bad with it.
I don't think the knife laws have actually achieved a damn thing, but I also don't think they're a great assault upon our freedom, since all they really do is increase the number of ways a policeman can make your life miserable, if he chooses, from a million to a million and one.
The NSW laser ban, in contrast, is an excellent example of the new wave of arbitrary, fear-based laws to Protect the People from the Movie-Plot Tactics of the Scary Domestic Terrorists who Don't Actually Exist.
The practical results of the ban, despite the outrageous classification of harmless tiny lasers as being like flamethrowers, appear to be mundane and minor; nobody's being hauled off to be tortured in Syria over possession of Laser-Guided Scissors.
But I think the mundanity of the ban is what makes it a particularly good example of the Death by a Thousand (Laser-Guided Scissor!) Cuts that's being suffered by the civil liberties of citizens of Western nations.
One little thing after another's being taken away, none of them a big deal by themselves. Day by day, it further restricts the kind of life that's legally permissible, and makes us more and more accustomed to living in this slowly-tightening straitjacket. The idea is to make us all keep our heads down and do anything and everything we're told, lest we slightly annoy a policeman and then actually be charged with some of the new and ridiculous "crimes" which we cannot avoid committing.
The other day, I concluded that the Medis 24-7 Power Pack fuel-cell gadget-charger wasn't a very interesting product, based on its specifications. The spec sheet didn't make it look as if the fuel cell could do anything you couldn't do with much cheaper conventional batteries.
The results are explained in great detail in Techskeptic's final testing report, replete with the kind of graphs that I only bother to make when I'm testing something completely hilarious.
Techskeptic tested three Medis Power Packs, and found that they actually managed to deliver only about nine to 13 watt-hours into real loads. Medis claim twenty watt-hours in their literature, and it's that figure on which I based my own unimpressed response.
So these things actually appear to be even worse than they seemed.
The lousy real-world performance could be due in part to Medis optimistically listing the amount of energy the fuel cell actually (sorta-kinda) delivers on the sticker, rather than the amount of energy that makes it out of the Power Pack, down the cable and into the device you're charging. There's a DC-to-DC converter, you see, that takes the very low output voltage of the fuel cell (less than one volt) and boosts it to a gadget-charging level. And that converter turned out to be only about 70% efficient at best. Into a one-watt load, it dropped to about 60%.
So Techskeptic concluded that the Medis device didn't even beat a pack of six alkaline AAs. Actually, you'd probably get better results than the fuel cell if you hooked a similar voltage-booster up to a single humble D battery.
(Little kits to make that sort of converter, usually to allow you to replace low-capacity 9V batteries with beefier but lower-voltage cells, have been around for ages. Here's one that'll boost the output of two cells to 9V; I'm sure I've seen single-cell versions as well, but can't find one right now.)
So Medis' numbers would appear to be, at best, sort of like the old gross horsepower measurements that told you how much power a nude engine - no transmission, no air filter, no exhaust system, no alternator, no nothin' - on a test-stand once managed to deliver. This did not have very much to do with the amount of power that would make it to the rear wheels of a car powered by the same model of engine.
I just got an image-use request from the rather interesting NowPublicnews site. They wanted to use one of my pictures of my 85-watt compact fluorescent to illustrate this article, about the dangers of mercury exposure from broken compact fluorescent lamps.
As regularreaders would expect, I said no, and started in on an interminable explanation of why. It got long enough that I turned it into this blog post.
Executive summary: The second you read someone saying that metallic mercury is an incredibly potent neurotoxin, you know you're looking at bullshit.
ORGANIC mercury compounds are indeed ultra-poisonous, but metallic mercury quite simply is not. It ain't good for you; there ain't no Vitamin C in there. But breathing a bit of metallic mercury vapour really is not a big deal.
And the amount of metallic mercury in a domestic CFL is tiny - only a few milligrams. And it's all likely to be in the vapour state. So if you break the bulb anywhere with remotely normal indoor ventilation levels, the vapour will just blow away, in minutes at most. You'd have to smash the bulb and immediately stick your nose into the shards and inhale to get any measurable mercury dose at all.
If there were epidemiological support for the idea then the lack of a plausible mechanism of action wouldn't matter so much, but there isn't, especially after you filter out the unsourced ravings of people who're sure that tiny mercury doses from fillings or vaccinations cause every disease under the sun.
The NowPublic piece does have a source for the idea that tiny non-chronic metallic mercury exposure is bad for humans; it's the "study of workers" mentioned at the top of the article.
That study is not, by the way, the same as the "Maine scientific study" the article mentions next, which in fact concluded that existing cleanup methods were OK.
The "study of workers" is quoted hither and yon, but usually, as in this case, without a footnote saying where and when it was actually published.
It was published in the journal "Environmental Research" in 1993; here's the abstract. The study was done by the Department of Occupational Health at Shanghai Medical University, and it concluded that exposure to 33,000 nanograms of mercury per cubic metre of air seemed to have a measurable effect on people's mental abilities, with only a very small chance that this difference was a mere fluke.
But the average duration of exposure in the Shanghai study was TEN-POINT-FOUR YEARS.
The Maine study, I remind you, considered a "short excursion" of mercury concentration above 25,000 nanograms per cubic metre, as a result of a broken CFL, to be large. It found contamination briefly reaching more than 100,000 nanograms per cubic metre was "possible", but presumably didn't actually manage to measure it, on account of the very brief duration of such contamination as the trace of mercury vapour swirled away.
Mercury vapour exposure times from a broken CFL are likely to be measured in minutes, at most. There just isn't enough mercury in a domestic fluorescent lamp to keep a significant volume of air at the Shanghai study's dosage - far above the 300ng/m^3 Maine Ambient Air Guideline - for more than a few minutes.
I mean, even if you've got five milligrams of mercury in your CFL - you probably don't, but let's say you do - then that's five million nanograms, so it can contaminate 151.5 cubic metres of air to 33,000 ng/m3. Open a window or two and a lot more air than that is likely to blow through the room in an hour (the heavy mercury vapour can also just leak out through the floorboards of a "sealed" room). I cannot imagine how someone in a normal domestic or commercial setting could manage to keep the contamination level of a room in the tens of thousands of nanograms per cubic metre level for more than a few minutes, if they've only got a few milligrams of mercury vapour to do it with.
Given that there are more than half a million minutes in a year, I think it's clear that the exposure times in the Shanghai and Maine studies are not even remotely comparable. The NowPublic article puts the results of these two studies right next to each other as if they're both talking about the same thing, and doesn't even tell readers where to find information about the studies so they can discover the imposture.
And, on top of that, the Environmental Research study was just that one study, done by Shanghai Medical University fifteen years ago. There've been many other studies of chronic low-level mercury exposure, and it's easy to find ones that conclude that it has little to no effect, even after many years. And, I repeat, years of exposure comprise hundred of thousands, and quite possibly millions, of times the mercury exposure you can get by breaking a CFL.
So right now, there does not appear to be any reason to be particularly concerned about breaking even large fluorescent tubes indoors, let alone little CFLs. And the Maine study in fact supports this conclusion, because it found that breaking CFLs cannot create the chronic exposure which the subjects of the Shanghai study had suffered.
. It should be the logo for a New York rave, or something.
