In the UH-1 Iroquois helicopter, a hexagonal nut holds the main rotor to the mast. If it were to fail in flight, the helicopter’s body would separate from its rotor.
Engineers call it the “Jesus nut.”
Technology
A Spaceborne Time Capsule
You can write a message to future generations at the KEO project. It’ll be launched on a satellite that won’t return to Earth for 50,000 years.
Even more ambitious is the LAGEOS satellite, which will re-enter our atmosphere in 8.4 million years bearing a plaque that shows the arrangement of the continents. Let’s hope our descendants still have catcher’s mitts.
High PageRanks
Web sites with a Google PageRank of 10:
- adobe.com – Adobe software
- apple.com – Apple Computer (including iTunes Music Store)
- energy.gov – U.S. Department of Energy
- firstgov.gov – U.S. government portal
- keio.ac.jp – Keio University, Tokyo
- harvard.edu – Harvard University
- macromedia.com – Macromedia software
- nasa.gov – U.S. space agency
- nsf.gov – U.S. National Science Foundation
- nytimes.com – The New York Times
- real.com – RealPlayer software
- statcounter.com – web traffic tracking service
- w3.org – World Wide Web Consortium
- webstandards.org – Web standards project
And, of course, Google itself.
Luddite by Degrees
Douglas Adams’ “rules that describe our reactions to technologies”:
- Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
- Anything that’s invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
- Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.
Watch Your Step
Vaucanson’s Shitting Duck was one of the more unsavory products of the French Enlightenment.
When it was unveiled by Jacques de Vaucanson in 1739, thousands watched the “canard digérateur” stretch its neck to eat grain from a hand. The food then dissolved, “the matter digested in the stomach being conducted by tubes, as in an animal by its bowels, into the anus, where there is a sphincter which permits it to be released.” These inner workings were all proudly displayed, “though some ladies preferred to see them decently covered.”
Why make fake duck shit when the world is so well supplied with the real thing? It was part of the Enlightenment’s transition from a naturalistic to a mechanical worldview. Suddenly a duck was not a God-given miracle but a machine made of meat, and complex automatons carried the promise of mechanized labor, stirring a cultural revolution.
Goethe mentioned Vaucanson’s automata in his diary, and Sir David Brewster called the duck “perhaps the most wonderful piece of mechanism ever made.” Sadly, the whole thing was a fake: The droppings were prefabricated and hidden in a separate compartment. Back to the drawing board.
Why Is a Manhole Cover Round?
Actual questions asked in Microsoft job interviews:
- How are M&Ms made?
- Suppose you had eight billiard balls, and one of them was slightly heavier, but the only way to tell was by putting it on a scale against another. What’s the fewest number of times you’d have to use the scale to find the heavier ball?
- Why do you want to work at Microsoft?
- One train leaves Los Angeles at 15 mph heading for New York. Another train leaves from New York at 20 mph heading for Los Angeles on the same track. If a bird, flying at 25 mph, leaves from Los Angeles at the same time as the train and flies back and forth between the two trains until they collide, how far will the bird have traveled?
- How many gas stations are there in the USA?
- You’ve got someone working for you for seven days and a gold bar to pay them. The gold bar is segmented into seven connected pieces. You must give them a piece of gold at the end of every day. If you are only allowed to make two breaks in the gold bar, how do you pay your worker?
- The interviewer hands you a black pen and says nothing but “This pen is red.”
- Pairs of primes separated by a single number are called prime pairs. Examples are 17 and 19. Prove that the number between a prime pair is always divisible by 6 (assuming both numbers in the pair are greater than 6). Now prove that there are no “prime triples.”
At the end they ask, “What was the hardest question asked of you today?” My answer: “Why do you want to work at Microsoft?”
Oldest Domains
The 10 oldest currently registered dot-com domains:
- symbolics.com (registered 3/15/85)
- bbn.com (4/24/85)
- think.com (5/24/85)
- mcc.com (7/11/85)
- dec.com (9/30/85 )
- northrop.com (11/7/85)
- xerox.com (1/9/86)
- sri.com (1/17/86)
- hp.com (3/3/86)
- bellcore.com (3/5/86)
Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness
From the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness:
“Wear a bad sweater dress, suffer the consequences.”
Dear Prudence
At Future Me you can send e-mail to your future self — and read what others have sent:
I hope you’re happy now. I hope you have a Valentine this year. I know you didn’t last year. I hope you’ve done something positive with your life, but that’s unlikely. You’re ugly. Everyone hates ugly people. You’ll never get laid. You’ll never have another girlfriend. Girls hate ugly people. (written Sun Feb 13, 2005, to be delivered Tue Feb 14, 2006)
165 University Avenue
It’s just an ordinary office in Palo Alto, but it’s going to need some extra space for plaques. This one building, 165 University Avenue, has served as the incubator for Logitech, Google, PayPal, and Danger Research, makers of the Danger Hiptop handheld device.
That’s even more surprising given the building’s small size. The first floor is occupied by storefronts, and the upper story is only 5,000 square feet, usually divided among three companies. The tenants are almost stepping on each other: Google left behind a sign with its logo, which Paypal then left in place for the next tenant, Danger.
What accounts for so many huge successes in such a small space? It’s probably mostly due to the proximity to Stanford, but don’t rule out owner Rahim Amidi, who runs a small company that provides early funding to tech companies. Apparently Amidi has a good eye: Of the 20 companies in which he’s invested, two have gone public and only two have failed. “If you know someone who is the next Danger or Google or PayPal,” he says, “let me know.”