Impressed by Technology?

[Andre]

Let's hear about technological achievements in your lifetime that really impressed you.

For me the one that comes to mind is the repair of the Hubble Space Telescope. The thing went up in 1990 at a cost of several billion dollars, and it was defective to the point of being useless. So they sent a team up in 1993 via the space shuttle to do a few space walks and fix the thing. I though "Well alright!" it's one thing to send up a satellite, it's another thing to go up and fix the thing. We have truly entered the space age in a practical way.

Some of the things Hubble has done since then are truly amazing. Such as detecting galaxies that are over 13 billion light years away. That's quite a number.

Yeah that and the physics leaps too electron microscopes; looking into things as well as looking out at them is amazing stuff.

Makes us look huge and also makes us look tiny.

Blazars and quazars are facinating.

To think that in a blazar (Like a black hole but instead imits energy)there are 20 million suns caught inside one of them out there and the energy that emits from it, is at the force that can propell something the size of Jupiter at our own known light speed was not so long ago beyond our imagination,But is now fact.

Physically and mentally speaking ,we dont even know what the rays are that come out of it,but we have made up names for them, but we dont know exactly what they do ,we only know they are super radioactive or gamma rays etc etc.
From our stand point people would mostly think Oh thats not so good.
But thats only cause it can kill carbon life forms like our bodies.That in itself is a very limited point of view.
It would take all the physical power that we can generate in the world today just to throw a bowling ball at the speed of light! So imagine the natural power of these things out there!
Imagine the balance and infinate distance we have to be from something like that power and all the other balancing factors and more well known but weaker factors down to tides and seasons; so as to be able to experience what we do from this pissy point of view that we have right here.

I love it all.


Blazars, like all AGN, are thought to be ultimately powered by material falling onto a supermassive black hole at the center of the host galaxy. Gas, dust and the occasional star are captured and spiral into this central black hole creating a hot accretion disk which generates enormous amounts of energy in the form of photons, electrons, positrons and other elementary particles. This region is quite small, approximately 10−3 parsecs in size.
There is also a larger opaque torus extending several parsecs from the central black hole, containing a hot gas with embedded regions of higher density. These "clouds" can absorb and then re-emit energy from regions closer to the black hole. On Earth the clouds are detected as emission lines in the blazar spectrum.
Perpendicular to the accretion disk, a pair of relativistic jets carry a highly energetic plasma away from the AGN. The jet is collimated by a combination of intense magnetic fields and powerful winds from the accretion disk and torus. Inside the jet, high energy photons and particles interact with each other and the strong magnetic field. These relativistic jets can extend as far as many tens of kiloparsecs from the central black hole.
All of these regions can produce a variety of observed energy, mostly in the form of a nonthermal spectrum ranging from very low frequency radio to extremely energetic gamma rays, with a high polarization (typically a few percent) at some frequencies. The nonthermal spectrum consists of synchrotron radiation in the radio to X-ray range, and inverse Compton emission in the X-ray to gamma-ray region. A thermal spectrum peaking in the ultraviolet region and faint optical emission lines are also present in OVV quasars, but faint or non-existent in BL Lac objects.

[Von Milash]

The TV remote control. Pure genius. I'm actually easily old enough, along with guys like legion, daxx, al, bilbo, scrap, andre, monkey, TM, etc who remember a time when you had to get off your ass to change the channel. PITA.

The VCR was also pretty cool. I remember the first time we rented one.

And the 10' satellite dish. Didn't get much sleep that summer. So much to watch.

[kingfrnk]

yea like CFH said the Internet. but the most amazing has to be video games. look who far we came from fukin nintendo to xbox live. and the graphics look real as fuk, and u have the ability to talk and play with people all over the world. how better can games get.

[Spicoli]

The TV remote control. Pure genius. I'm actually easily old enough, along with guys like legion, daxx, al, bilbo, scrap, andre, monkey, TM, etc who remember a time when you had to get off your ass to change the channel. PITA.

The VCR was also pretty cool. I remember the first time we rented one.

And the 10' satellite dish. Didn't get much sleep that summer. So much to watch.

Remember thinking Beta was better quality than VHS. That long back....We were the TV remote......."Hey son,flip the knob to 12"

[Youngblood]

nanotechnology. exciting things happening and coming.

[killersheep]

nanotechnology. exciting things happening and coming.

My company does some work with these guys. It's insane the machines they make.

Microfabrica: Dream Big, Invent Small

One of the benefits of the field I work in is that I get to see very highly advanced technology before it becomes public knowledge.

[CGM]

nanotechnology. exciting things happening and coming.

My company does some work with these guys. It's insane the machines they make.

Microfabrica: Dream Big, Invent Small

One of the benefits of the field I work in is that I get to see very highly advanced technology before it becomes public knowledge.

Let me know when they are about to introduce machines that will go in and scoop all the plaque from your arteries, and I'll buy some shares. Remember the movie Fantastic Voyage? It's my understanding that they're really not that far off from stuff like that.

Good call on nanotechnolgy, Youngblood.

[killersheep]

nanotechnology. exciting things happening and coming.

My company does some work with these guys. It's insane the machines they make.

Microfabrica: Dream Big, Invent Small

One of the benefits of the field I work in is that I get to see very highly advanced technology before it becomes public knowledge.

Let me know when they are about to introduce machines that will go in and scoop all the plaque from your arteries, and I'll buy some shares. Remember the movie Fantastic Voyage? It's my understanding that they're really not that far off from stuff like that.

Good call on nanotechnolgy, Youngblood.

That company I put the link up for is making machines that they hope will selectively eat cancer cells. The machine itself will actually be injected. Cleaning the arteries can't be that far off from the same technology.

[killersheep]

The TV remote control. Pure genius. I'm actually easily old enough, along with guys like legion, daxx, al, bilbo, scrap, andre, monkey, TM, etc who remember a time when you had to get off your ass to change the channel. PITA.

The VCR was also pretty cool. I remember the first time we rented one.

And the 10' satellite dish. Didn't get much sleep that summer. So much to watch.

Remember thinking Beta was better quality than VHS. That long back....We were the TV remote......."Hey son,flip the knob to 12"

There are a few of us here that can honestly say "back in my day, we had to get up to change the channel"

[Youngblood]

It is awesome, and will likely play a roll in increasing our technology with applications of it in many fields, space exploration, computer science, and most certainly medicine to name just a few.

Some feel it is much adieu about nothing, and alot of it's earlier excitement and expectations will never come to fruition. Then there are the others, already applying it and seeing its seemingly for having almost limitless potential.

Nanotechnology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Spicoli]

The TV remote control. Pure genius. I'm actually easily old enough, along with guys like legion, daxx, al, bilbo, scrap, andre, monkey, TM, etc who remember a time when you had to get off your ass to change the channel. PITA.

The VCR was also pretty cool. I remember the first time we rented one.

And the 10' satellite dish. Didn't get much sleep that summer. So much to watch.

Remember thinking Beta was better quality than VHS. That long back....We were the TV remote......."Hey son,flip the knob to 12"

There are a few of us here that can honestly say "back in my day, we had to get up to change the channel"

Don't remind me ....either that or convince yourself that the show on PBS at that moment......the one about tips & tricks for productive and enjoyable creation of hand spun clay bowls.......was actually very entertaining and a MUST SEE

[killersheep]

Remember thinking Beta was better quality than VHS. That long back....We were the TV remote......."Hey son,flip the knob to 12"

There are a few of us here that can honestly say "back in my day, we had to get up to change the channel"

Don't remind me ....either that or convince yourself that the show on PBS at that moment......the one about tips & tricks for productive and enjoyable creation of hand spun clay bowls.......was actually very entertaining and a MUST SEE

Definately can relate to that, the best was being really tired, when one of the telethons came on.

[CGM]

Computers are kind of interesting.

Probably anyone of us has more power in their desktop than all of Mission Control had when Neil Armstrong first went to the moon.

It wasn't so long ago I was paying $50+ for 1 mb of RAM, now it is probably $50 for 512 mb of RAM.

Foresight is another story. Bill Gates once said that no-one would ever need more than 1mb of RAM (It's true, he said it). Obviously he had no concept of what was coming. You know, if it wasn't for the creativity of a man called Steve Jobs, there might well be no such thing as Microsoft Windows. Jobs and Apple are the real creators in this business, IMO.

[Andre]

There are a few of us here that can honestly say "back in my day, we had to get up to change the channel"

Don't remind me ....either that or convince yourself that the show on PBS at that moment......the one about tips & tricks for productive and enjoyable creation of hand spun clay bowls.......was actually very entertaining and a MUST SEE

Definately can relate to that, the best was being really tired, when one of the telethons came on.

I remember having a stick back then to turn a portable off from my sleeping position.
I really should of cut a slot in the end of that stick for a channel changer .

[Trainer Monkey]

The TV remote control. Pure genius. I'm actually easily old enough, along with guys like legion, daxx, al, bilbo, scrap, andre, monkey, TM, etc who remember a time when you had to get off your ass to change the channel. PITA.

The VCR was also pretty cool. I remember the first time we rented one.

And the 10' satellite dish. Didn't get much sleep that summer. So much to watch.

Hells yes,when I was a kid a remote control was you getting told,"Go change the channel,and dont go too fast or you'll strip the knob"(which sounds wrong on so many different levels) a quick dinner was a Swanson TV Dinner in the oven, cable was non-existent,and when it finally did exist it consisted of Prism HBO and MTV(this was when they still played music),and most of us had rotary phones,it could take you up to a week to dial a number if it had alot of 9's in it.