Paul Jay's Ponderings

I was bored and came up with an idea for using NERF-style foam in an air powered equivalent to a standard firearm rifle. And thus call it a compressed air foam sabot (CAFS) rifle. Basically you get the equivalent of a Nerf bullet, cut in half along its length, and put something nasty and metal inside the two halves. Then you load that into a 4ft long rifle with a 100+ PSI pressure tank and triggered by a poppet valve. The foam would do a nice job of maintaining an airtight and snug seal needed to accelerate an air-driven projectile, and would be plenty light to easily separate from the projectile after it clears the barrel. I think the thing could be as dangerous as a regular gun if designed just right, and the materials needed would be really cheap and fairly low-tech. Makes me wonder if anyone has built something like that already. Sounds like a project for some bubba with acres to goof around on and some beer bottles, cinderblocks, old car parts, and watermelons to destroy.

Labels: crazy, idea, stupid

Franky if I'm paying for a phone service when I answer, the last thing I want is dead air or some stupid advert call. And apparently the FCC is unwilling to do squat about dead air calls. (I've done one complaint already)...

So, what I'd like is at least one provider stepping up to the plate to institute a technical fix. A phone that only rings on white-listed numbers.

Here's how I propose that it works:

• Primary white-list: Numbers specified by the user such that they ring through no matter what. It shouldn't be hard to tag phone numbers entered into the phone's memory for this.


• Temporary white-list: Store about a dozen or so recently dialed numbers, this way the phone can accept call-backs.

Then on top of the white-list incoming call features, you would have two ways of handling non-whitelisted numbers.

• Grey list mode: Numbers not on the white-list go to voice mail unless they correctly dial an additional PIN in order to ring your handset. This might be good for somebody doing a bit of business or other short term relationships that might not be appropriate for white-listing.


• Blacklist mode: Anything dialed not on the whitelist, GTFO. This time you need to be on the whitelist when a call doesn't go through to leave voicemail. Or you need the PIN to leave a message. Otherwise, calls to the cell phone are dropped plain and simple.

I don't think such a service would be all that hard to implement either. But I do think cell phone users would really like to have something like this. How about it?

Labels: cell phone, feature, idea, nice to have, wanted

t (x, y, z) , t_j (x, y, z) _j

The way stuff in space as we know it should be defined.

t = time
x, y, z = spatial dimensions or positions
j = physical version of the imaginary number, where j^2 = -1.

So by tallying up these components of space, you get 8 dimensions.

Might have some uses if someone can figure it out. The neat thing is that if you produce a product via the j-dimensional interactions, you get a negative value standard dimension result. Combine this with applied vector products, and it might be possible to use this to produce negative values in various applications where negative values are "naturally" impossible. If this could pan out, one might be able to do some really neat things with electricity or optics. (If you figure out how to make a negative modifier for gravitational attraction, things would get really interesting.)

The j-space stuff also would tie in pretty well to older work in scalar research. Scalar nodes are pretty much like the product results of electromagnetic waves (more or less radio) propagating through j-space. The product should then appear in standard space as a negative value of the two j-space factors.

The other thing is that if something propagates or exists in j-space with out a product producing reaction, it's pretty much non-interactive with standard space. So you either have to put in a j-space emitter to interact with a j-space EM transmission and be upon the vector necessary to intercept it, or be sitting on the node point of two separate j-space EM beams. This particular aspect could be useful for communications applications.

Crazy, huh?

*note: I'm wondering if this j-space thing is what sci-fi meant by hyperspace or subspace? Applications arising from understanding how to interact with a normally unobservable dimensional set defining space would be quite profound.

Labels: crazy, dimensions, idea, physics, space, timetravel, weird

Bored and pondering something... Some article about eight dimensional space possibly giving a clue to the theory of everything. So what eight dimensional sets could possibly be used to define anything thought of...

Spatial dimensions:
1. up-down (height)
2. in-out (depth)
3. left-right (width)
4. past-future (time)
Reaction dimensions:
5. light-heavy (mass)
6. attractive-repulsive (charge?)
7. inert-energetic (heat, relative velocities, spin, etc.)
8. nonresponsive - responsive (degree of being alive or conscious?)

The thing is that these dimensions can be thought of as nodes. Each node would contain a long array of potential values. Each value could then set drive relationships affecting all values in each node. And of course each node would respond in kind to what information is coming from the other nodes. Some other qualities we think of as unique might be a combination of nodes interacting such as inertia (mass + energy), gravity (mass + charge).

Also note that some dimensions could cancel out due to interactions with other nodes (maybe there's no anti-gravity because of an energetic relationship between mass and charge that zeros it?), and in other cases initially having a dimension of 0 could make just as much sense. (Ideas or memes can occupy time and energy, but no real space.) Likewise an idea that defines something could be made tangible by applying mass towards it. (Someone may think of a car, but there's no car until someone builds it.) But that's some of the craziness that makes up this universe. Who knows?

Labels: bored, idea, universe, whatever, who knows?

Just something I've made a while back when bored. I dub this construction the field effect tri-coil. What it does, who knows? But I think that running current throught the wires causing magnetic fields to bend in "unnatural" ways would have interesting effects. The funny thing is, the device is ridiculously simple to construct. (Nothing beyond anything Tesla could have done in half a day.) It consists of 3 interleaved wires. First one is the power wire. It's heavier guage and wound into a flattened and layered spiral ring as shown in the diagram. This wire provides the primary field and should carry the heavier current if is introduced into experimentation. The second wire is the compression or intensity wire. It's wrapped in a unique way (clearly illustrated in the diagram), presumably to break up induction in itself while compressing the field of the primary coil. The third coil (in this case it's a simple 5-point star configuration, although there may be better wrappings) is the torsion or vortex coil. The idea is to induce a rotational tension in the field.


Now for feeding power to the thing... The controls should be pretty simple/stupid, although the resulting effects might be chaotic or interesting. Each coil gets 3 input dials of its own for the power supply. First one is level. This should be a simple voltage control that influences the peak amplitude of the waveform. Second one is beat, or frequency. A beat of 0 would be a constant voltage based on level, and then it's an adjustable sinewave from there. The third one would be phase. So you can shift the waveform and alter the interaction of the harmonic beat frequency of each coil independently. Available current should be fixed at some level, because the other parameters should be plenty enough to observe for magnetic tension effects.



Here's a schematic diagram. Ultimately, if the device was useful, this schematic would be used in a manner much like the ReacTable video synthezier interface and be operated by a smart touch screen. What's neat is that you could add modifiers, and link arrays if a more complicated system used multiple tri-coils. It would allow quick flexibility and great variety of waveform mode operation in a quick to read visual format. Data could be displayed as a graphic associated with the component or as a numerical readout.

As for what it does? Untested. But it might make a really unique induction coil. It might provide some secondary field effects. Or it might not do much other than make wires hot. But hey, it's really cheap. And wouldn't it be great if it actually did something useful?

Labels: crazy, dumb, electrical, experiment, idea, nifty