scale

Your own personal Richter scale

If you live in Kansas, the Japanese obsession with earthquake-detection devices might seem a bit insane. But we can guarantee they'll be of interest to anyone from California or other parts of the world where fault lines run free.

Usually, the gadgets we've seen claim to give some kind of early warning--and are therefore of dubious value. The unpronounceable "GraGraph," however, seems more realistic: It supposedly indicates the Richter-scale strength of a temblor as it's occurring in real time, according to SCI FI Tech. That's something people might actually buy, as evidenced by … Read more

A scale that does justice to food

Next to dentists, scales are our worst enemies. Not the fish or music variety, but the kind that unfairly make us cut back on our sensible daily diet of Domino's and Krispy Kremes. Worse yet, they're getting more powerful all the time.

But most of them do their work after the fact, happy to just mock us without helping. What we really need is some intervention--such as a scale for the food, before we eat it. The EatSmart Nutritional Scale, for instance, "serves as a food guidance system to regulate calories, nutrients and portion size appropriate." … Read more

Live from Hot Chips 19: Session 3, Multicore II

This is the fourth in a series of posts from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford. The previous installments looked at IBM's Power 6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. This is sort of an experiment for me; I usually prefer to have time to review my work before I publish it. If you see anything wrong, please leave a comment!

The first talk in session 3 is from Advanced Micro Devices, describing the ATI Radeon HD 2900. (I checked, and AMD does still use the ATI brand name for some of its products; this is one of them.)

This is another chip I described briefly in one of my Siggraph 2007 pieces (here). The 2900 has 320 cores (which AMD calls "stream… Read more

Shopping for a private jet

There have been several stories in the news this week about airplanes and spacecraft. I'm an Air Force veteran myself, and I've been an Aviation Week subscriber for over 20 years, but you don't have to be in the industry to keep up with the latest in aerospace technology. Even CNET covers this kind of thing today, and some of the stories I've seen this week have gotten me thinking about buying a private jet.

I think Esther Dyson deserves a lot of credit for bridging the computer and aerospace industries. In 2005, Esther inaugurated her … Read more

MySQL does not scale

Well, not very much. I mean, who wants to only scale to hundreds of millions of page views?

Aside from Oracle, that is? ;-)

As Tim notes, MySQL is in the middle of its "12 Days of Scale-out," which is designed to show how MySQL, that little database that could, is delivering monster-sized performance for some of the biggest names on the planet.

Like Wikipedia, for example, which uses MySQL to service:

More than 154 million annual visitors More than 5 million articles More than 290,000 contributors Nearly half a million edits each day 25,000 SQL … Read more

Hello Kitty's new definition of fat cat

This Hello Kitty business has finally crossed the line. Not only has the fearsome feline invaded everything from the car to the kitchen, but now it's mocking the most sensitive issue of all: our physique.

The "Hello Kitty Body Fat Meter"--the name alone is disturbing, in a Kubrick kind of way--measures how well you've done on the "Thigh Master," right down to the last Oreo calorie, for $50. And because we just can't have enough Kitty products around the house, Gizmodiva says there's even a matching kitchen scale to weigh your … Read more

All the glory of the universe, in a single Flash app

Every few months, I come across something on the Web that completely blows my mind. This morning, a friend of mine sent me a link to Nikon's Universcale Web app. It puts the entire universe into proportion, from the smallest particle to the largest measurements of space.

From the femtometer to the light year, Universcale spans 40 magnitudes of measurement into a single cosmic Web application. It's really amazing when you zoom all the way out into stars and galaxies and then realize that every time you go a magnitude higher, everything you saw before, from the flea … Read more

Smart scale tells how buffed you are

We generally try very hard not to think about exercise equipment when not at the gym (or even when we are at the gym, actually). But this is one fitness item that may be impossible for us to ignore.

If you've ever wondered what, exactly, your workout routine was doing for specific parts of your body, this intelligent scale from Tanita might interest you too. Far more than just indicate poundage, the new BC-545 model delivers "individual body composition readings for five body segments (each arm, each leg and the trunk area)," according to Gizmag. To get … Read more

Working scale model of the Ferrari 312PB

For anyone who has cursed those couple of pieces leftover after putting together a model car, this is enough to make your eyes water. Frenchman Pierre Scerri spent 20,000 hours building a perfect, working replica of the Ferrari 312PB. His design drawing, based on photographs of the original, apparently took three years alone.

After that, he spent another 12 years building a fully functioning replica of the car, including a miniature version of its dry-sump fuel-injected 12-cylinder engine and its five-speed gearbox. Check out the video and listen to what Scerri calls the Ferrari "music."