Tech Today w/ Ken May

A shower of worms fell on a class of kids playing football at Scotland’s Galashiels Academy. (For more on weird “animal falls,” check out Charles Fort’s 1919 classic The Book of the Damned. Above, a 1555 engraving of a “fish fall.”) From Scotsman.com:

(Teacher David) Crichton said the children had just completed their warm-up when they began to hear “soft thudding” on the ground.

The class then looked to the cloudless sky – and saw worms falling on to them.
The incident in Galashiels is believed to have been caused by freak weather over a nearby river lifting water and worms and dumping it over the road…

Similar events were recorded in 1872 in Somerville, Massachusetts, in 1877 in Christiana, Norway, and in 1924 in Halmstad, Sweden.

In July 2007 a woman was crossing a road in Louisiana when large clumps of tangled worms dropped from above.

“Never mind cats and dogs – school hit by worm rain” (via Fortean Times)

See more here:
Raining worms in Scotland

For those of you who have jailbroken iDevices and prefer a browser other than the default Safari, Browser Changer is an extension you can find in Cydia that will let you set a new default so links open in your browser of preference. More

Back at CES, Toshiba unveiled a batch of low-cost Satellite L Series laptops in the US, and now it’s taking its show on the road, with new models on tap for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. These include the 13.3-inch L730 and L735, the 15.6-inch L750 and L755, and, if you’re hankering for a desktop replacement, the hulking 17.3-inch L770 and L775. This latest spin on the L Series boasts 3D support, connecting to 3DTVs over HDMI and, in some cases, converting 2D content to 3D. As in the States, shoppers abroad can add up to 8GB of RAM, and will get their choice of Intel Core i3 and Core i5 processors and various AMD CPUs, including triple- and quad-core options. Also look for multitouch trackpads, 5,400RPM hard drives as large as 750GB, 1.3 megapixel webcams, a mix of USB 3.0 and sleep-and-charge USB 2.0 ports, and a choice of integrated Intel HD graphics or a discrete NVIDIA GeForce 315M card with up to 1GB of video memory. No word yet on when they’ll go on sale or how much they’ll cost, but those curious for more can hit the source link for the full spill.

Toshiba’s Satellite L Series continues its world tour, adds 2D-to-3D conversion originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 Apr 2011 16:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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At 5:00 PM Eastern, Fermilab scientists will announce a major discovery. The early word is that this is not the Higgs boson, but instead something completely unexpected. Tune into Fermilab’s livestream here, and we’ll have full coverage after the announcement. More

A 75-year old lady from Georgia (the country, not the state) has perpetrated an impressive feat of international sabotage in what seems to have been an accident of extremely bad luck. While foraging for copper wire near her home in the village of Ksani, the unnamed septuagenarian managed to come across a critical fiber optic cable, one responsible for serving internet connectivity to “90 percent of private and corporate internet users in Armenia” and some in her own country as well. Her swift strike at the heart of said bit-transferring pipeline resulted in all those folks being thrown offline for a solid 12 hours, while the Georgian Railway Telecom worked to find and correct the fault. In spite of her relatively benign motivations, the lady now faces three years in prison for the damage she caused. We’d say all’s well that ends well, but this doesn’t actually seem like a very happy ending at all.

Elderly Georgian lady disconnects Armenian internet for half a day… by accident originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 Apr 2011 15:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Clearly Epic Games knows there’s a number of people out there who are angry at the fact that icky consoles are have held back the development of high-end graphics technology. (See: Crysis 2. Looks fine if all you’re dealing with is the five-year-old Xbox 360, but doesn’t really seem to take advantage of the raw power that’s available on the PC side of thing.) Here we have a slick trailer showing off some of the advanced features offered by Unreal Engine 3.

The one thing I didn’t like was “enhanced bloom.” If there were ever an overused technology it’s bloom. How many things in real life give off more bloom than a super nova?

Read the original post:
Video: Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3 Contines To Impress

UC Berkeley postdoc Aaron M Hoover combined math and imagination to solve the problem of building a one-sided “Möbius gear.” He rendered it and then output molds for it on a 3D printer, cast them, and assembled his freaky, mind-melting beast.

While searching for a suitable project for CS 285 (Procedural Solid Modeling) I was introduced to the Möbius gear by Professor Sequin. I was immediately intrigued by the curious combination of the Möbius mathematical surface popularized by M.C. Escher and functional mechanical gear elements. After some time staring at and puzzling over this image, I convinced myself that this mechanism is indeed possible and that with right tools, a functional prototype could be built. (The entire mechanism essentially boils down to an oddly configured set of planetary gears. One can think of the black portion in the image as the ring with a fixed zero input velocity. A single blue gear is a planet, and the white strip is the sun. Output can be taken either from the sun or the planets (with no regard for practicality!). In practice, however, it’s easiest to actuate the Möbius strip (the white portion).

The Möbius Gear

(via Neatorama)