Power Thirst

Another very funny video that was going around at work is the Power Thirst series that makes fun of all the random energy drinks out there. It is some what worrying that today energy drinks seem to be advertised as the solution to all your problems, which is what this parody plays off of, making some ridiculous claims such as giving you the ability to have 400 babies that will run as fast a kenyans! Check out the video below, warning there is one part that uses a bit of strong language but it is short..



There is a sequel to this that is also very funny, but it also contains some strong language as well as a few inappropriate jokes, but is still worth viewing at least once.

Laser + Moon = Fake

While on vacation a relative of mine was some what excited about a certain beer company and their viral advertising. Apparently they claim that on the 21 (Full Moon) they will be shooting a laser projector at the moon and displaying their logo. I am not very convinced. Also I will not mention the company, because I do not drink beer, nor am I going to support their fake sounding viral advertising campaign.

First of all I had not even heard of this stunt, which most of the gadget blogs that I read would have had this covered. The shooting down of the satellite is a good example. Also there where some other things that just did not add up, after doing some research I came up with some interesting facts that seem to say that this is fake.

It is not unheard of to shoot a laser at the moon, it is how we get a actuate distance, however...
"They beam the laser out through a large (5 meter class) telescope, and look for the reflection in that same telescope. By sending the beam out through the telescope, you get a much tighter beam than you would from just the raw laser, and the large telescope gathers 700 thousand times as much light as your eyeball would, making it much easier to see the reflection. (5 m vs. 6 mm squared = 700,000. A fully dilated human pupil is about 6 mm IIRC.) <-Full Page" That alone makes this impossible, however what makes it worse is that they chose a full moon. Looks great, but the laser would not be nearly powerful enough to be visible over the raw sunlight bouncing off. A new moon would be much more realistic.

Oh well, I will be looking up to see if there is something on the moon, but I highly doubt that I will see anything. I guess they could still try, at least then it would not be fake, just an example of poorly thought out design,

UPDATE: After seeing nothing last night, and looking online it looks like this was indeed fake. "The Boston Globe assures us this is a hoax. From the short article: To repeat: This is viral advertising; the company isn't actually going to project a laser beam 237,000 miles into space."

There you have it, a good example of poor and arguably FALSE advertising.

Tesla Coils are awesome

After building a vandergraph generator, which worked rather well, I have looked at making one of the many other high voltage static generators out there. I really want to build a wimhurst, and eventually will, however I really want a Tesla Coil, because they are amazing. They are so powerful the intense electric field around them can light up fluorescent bulbs from a few inches to a few feet away depending on the size. The one big drawback to Tesla coil is they need an outside power-source, usually a high-voltage transformer of some kind, as well as other electronic components, so in reality it is not quite a static generator, but still amazing machines! If I ever find plans for a simple low power one I will definitely start building it.

I love the video above because it demonstrates a simple Tesla coil very well, plus I can not stop laughing every time it starts up, creates a static buz, and then BOOM (At 00:24). This is the first one I have heard do this.

Other people have done amazing things with Tesla coils, such as adjusting the frequency to play music on them!