SimSail Land Sailing Simulator Offers Full-Sized Boats For Landlubbing Wannabes [Sailing Simulator]

Philippe Kahn and his ambitious Pacific Cup sailing trip from San Francisco to Hawai’i got me all inspired this week to go sailing, but there’s one problem: I suck at sailing. In fact, the last time I went sailing was in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, where I nearly got smashed on the reef that protects the beach there. So you’ll excuse my excitement this day over the SimSail, a full sized “land yachting” simulator for two. It’s not quite the same thing as sailing on the water, and it’s certainly not even remotely close to what Kahn’s up to these days, but for me, at least, it’s a begin.

SimSail offers custom locations, weather and, yes, those land yachts are full-size. A roughly 7′x5′ screen displays the virtual course for the two “sailors” and the two or three people gathered to watch. [SimSail via Born Rich]

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The MEDUSA crowd control ray gun we reported on earlier this month sounded like some pretty amazing—and downright scary—technology. Using the microwave auditory effect, the beam, in theory, would have put sounds and voice-like noises in your head, thereby driving you away from the area. Crowd control via voices in your head. Sounds cool. However, it turns out that the beam would actually kill you before any of that happy stuff started taking place, most likely by frying or cooking your brain inside your skull. Can you imagine if this thing made it out into the field? Awkward!

“Any kind of exposure you could give to someone that wouldn’t burn them to a crisp would produce a sound too weak to have any effect,” said Kenneth Foster, a bioengineering professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Foster knows what he’s talking about, too. In 1974 he published the first research on the microwave auditory effect.

Fellow scientist and microwave research author Bill Guy agrees, citing some hard facts to support his conclusions:

Guy says that experiments have demonstrated that radiation at 40 microjoules per pulse per square centimeter produces sound at zero decibels, which is just barely in hearing range. To produce sound at 60 decibels, or the sound of normal conversation, requires 40 watts per square centimeter of radiation. “That would kill you pretty fast,” Guy says. Producing an unpleasant sound, at about 120 decibels, would take 40 million W/cm2 of energy. One milliwatt per square centimeter is considered to be the safety threshold.

Both scientists were in agreement about one other thing too: the MEDUSA just morphed from a crowd-control device into a monstrous weapon. We need more of those, right? [IEEE Spectrum On the web]

Via [gizmodo]

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Creepy Plastic Bear Comforts, Educates Kids
Bruno Oro’s creepy bear-shaped Dilus is many things, not least of which is its capability to scare hospital-bound kids. Conceived as a distance learning tool, the Dilus is intended for children who are on an extended hospital stay and cannot…

Bruno Oro’s creepy bear-shaped Dilus is many things, not least of which is its ability to scare hospital-bound children.

Conceived as a distance learning tool, the Dilus is intended for kids who are on an extended hospital stay and cannot attend school. The skin of the bear-thing is a a conducting polymer which can change color and display pretty much anything, from web pages to games to, we guess, schoolwork. Oro calls this display “holographic”, but we’d state that it is more correctly a kind of 3D.

But why a bear? Well, according to Oro, the bear shape will console the poor lonely kids and become a friend. Which, aside from the problem of the pre-mentioned creepiness seems to forget that there is a reason that more computers don’t come with bear-shaped monitors: They’re not efficient. We admire the innovation here, based as it is on actual field research, but we can’t help thinking that it would be superior (and cheaper) to just give the children a real teddy bear and a cheap laptop.

Project page [Coroflot. Thanks, Bruno!]

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