This is Bill Jones, a master scientific glassware maker who has been working at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, N.Y., for 33 years. Jones and his team are responsible for creating bespoke glass labware for scientists conducting experiments and developing high-tech materials.
Here, Jones is heating a tube of almost pure quartz to its softening point of around 1,700 degrees Celsius using hydrogen- and oxygen-burning torches. He then shapes the material, which is spinning on a modified lathe, according to the needs of the experiment it will be used in.
UH-MAZING!
(via laboratoryequipment)
Big event, tiny condiments! #NJGCA #NJ #GeneralCounsel #Attorneys #Events #NewJersey (at The Palace at Somerset Park)
I took a few photos this morning at the NJBIZ General Counsel of the Year Awards, but I had to share this one here because it includes tiny Tabasco sauce.
Tiny. Tabasco. Sauce.
Perhaps I’m easily amused, but I love it!
An interesting model of our solar system’s path as it travels through space in the Milky Way.
Certainly a departure from usual models that show the Sun as a static object, which it certainly isn’t
(via parislemon)
Now-NJ Governor Chris Christie, second from left, and Jeff Chiesa, first from the right, who was NJ Attorney General until Christie appointed him to the NJ Senate seat vacated by the death of late Senator Frank Lautenberg.
Politics aside, yellow furniture and green curtains? I’m no thought-leader when it comes to home decor, but that is not okay.
Video: Brent Spiner tries Google Glass (via GeekWire)
The NJBIZ General Counsel of the Year Awards is tomorrow! If you’re interested in attending, you can still register at the door. Find out more at NJBIZ.com.
My new employer is having a General Counsel awards breakfast tomorrow, less than a month after I got my JD. I was meant to work here.
A Handyman’s Toolbox
ninjasandrobots.comTwelve years ago I began creating my first software product to sell: TinyDBA, a mobile app to help database administrators. I went to a networking event hoping to find my first customers. I had business cards (really crappy ones). But I didn’t hav…
This is the best non-answer answer I’ve ever read, hands-down. So many of us spend so much time reading about how others stay productive that we fail to truly implement anything ourselves. Who cares what someone uses? If it’s is that amazing, they’ll eventually mention it without being asked. For now, get out what works for you and get to work.
Tip: Users of the iOS app Ink can open the app and place their iOS device face up for a brief “night light” that will be automatically extinguished when your phone’s display times out. Of course, this will work with any other bright white app screen, as well.
‘Lumigrids’ is a handlebar mounted LED bicycle light that projects a square grid onto the ground.
Upon encountering potholes or other variations in surface, the projected grid will break and distort, allowing the cyclist to identify upcoming obstructions.
[@designtaxi]
This is the best kind of design: beautiful, practical and unique.
Tumblr, Yahoo, and Ads That Don’t Suck
Dear Marissa and David,
Joe here. I’ve used all of Tumblr’s competitors extensively and I settled on Tumblr because it’s mindfully-designed, community-focused, and dead simple. The lack of ads helped, but more important to me than services with no ads are services that do have ads at least respecting their users enough to have decent ads.
So.
Keep ads for The Bachelorette out of my dashboard feed. Please consider presenting users with relevant ads. Scan my blog, the tags i use, the words I like, the stuff I link to. After all, you own it. So look at it. Run it through an algorithm and spit out some sort of value which you can key to a set of sponsored posts that, based on their weighted relevance to my interests and the things I cover on my blog, may actually be interesting to me. This is more palatable to users and more valuable to advertisers than showing me some random woman running around on the beach.
Over and over again.
Despite my never clicking it or reblogging it or seeing it without making an angry face and swearing never to watch that goddamn show. This dashboard spam does not bode well for Tumblr’s future at Yahoo, and that makes me sad, because I like Tumblr, and I rather like both of your styles, to the extent I can know anything about them from reading things on the Internet or watching you do interviews.
You said you wouldn’t fuck this up, but the glut of sponsored posts in my feed tonight about something I’ve never given any corner of the web any reason to think I care about suggests otherwise. Turn it around while you still can.
Change Yahoo, change Tumblr a bit if you must, but why not change advertising and the typically adversarial relationship between advertisers and target audiences while you’re at it?
in other words, don’t shove bad ads in our faces. If we wanted that we would turn on the TV or some other medium that can only collect data in really clumsy inaccurate old ways.
You’ve disrupted plenty of things, why not this?
If you ever want more advice, get in touch. I’ve got lots of ideas.
Sincerely
Joe Ross
Italians put ‘disco ball’ into orbit
Italian physicists have put a test particle into space to attempt to measure an effect predicted by general relativity.
The object, which is about the size of a football, made of tungsten and covered with 92 reflectors, is supposedly the “most perfect” test particle ever put into space. It’s entirely passive, weighs 400kg, and will be tracked by lasers from Earth.
It was launched on 13 February, 2012, and is known as Lares, or the “Laser Relativity Satellite”. Its objective is to provide data that will allow physicists to measure a phenomenon known as rotational frame-dragging.
This is a tiny, subtle effect predicted by general relativity where massive spinning bodies, like planets, drag space-time with them as they turn, changing the angle at which small particles close by rotate.
Nasa’s Gravity Probe B, launched in 2004, contained four small, spherical gyroscopes to try and measure this effect, but problems with the spacecraft reduced their accuracy to only about 20 percent. The Italians believe their approach is a much cheaper way of achieving the same goal.
It’s hoped that by tracing the angle of Lares’ rotation, along with a pair of other less-perfect balls already in orbit - Lageos 1 & 2 - the frame-dragging effect will finally be able to be observed.
I love this stuff. Italians competing with Americans to test general relativity via weird probes and strange particles. Experiments like these are why I remain so fascinated by physics.
(via tumblrradararchive)
(via scinerds)
Chicago Sun-Times fires its entire photo staff
By Dan Mitchell, contributor, cnn.comThe Sun-Times explains that jettisoning its professional photographers and having reporters take pictures with their iPhones will help the newspaper appeal to its “digitally savvy customers.”
FORTUNE — The decision by Sun-Times…
No training can replace equipment and talent. On a human level, imagine how some might feel being replaced by a company iPhone and a short lecture on how to frame shots, handed to the technophobe or, worse yet, someone too confident in their ability to replace a real photographer. Sickening.
