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The monetary density of things It's a common figure of speech to say that x is worth its weight in y, where y is usually (but not always) gold. But most of us don't buy and weigh gold very often, so how do you connect that to real life? Does "worth its weight" in pennies or $100 bills make any more sense? We have collected here a bunch of examples for different things that represent a wide range of monetary value per unit weight, in what might make a usefulcalibration chart for your future idiomatic usage. Let's start this off with a down-to-earth question. Which has a higher monetary density: dimes or quarters? In other words, if you had to carry around $1000 worth of either dimes or quarters, which should you ask for? And... surprisingly enough, dimes and quarters have the same density, about $4.50 $20 per pound, so you can pick either. (But as you can see, nickels are mighty inefficient. Avoid carrying them in your pockets whenever possible. ) On a related topic, paper bills weigh about 1 gram each. The monetary density of paper currency makes much more sense-- just look at that beautiful curve. Clearly, bigger bills are better. Alongside US coins we have such staples as all-purpose flour and base metals. Interesting that copper is worth so much more than pennies are-- but pennies these days are only 2.5% copper, the rest is cheap zinc. (In fact, pennies haven't been made of plain copper since 1837.) [Aside: The commodity prices that we cite here are all rough estimates, believed to be more-or-less correct as of August 2008. See the table at the end for references.] Kopi Luwak coffee costs approximately the same amount per pound as human blood. (Knowing where it comes from, I think I'd rather drink the blood. It's been pointed out before that printer ink is also up there, but I'd rather not drink that either.) Would you have guessed that peacock feathers can be worth more than their weight in dollar bills? Or that a fancy steak costs twice as much as its weight in dollar coins? People have been saying that the new industrial grade swimsuits like the LZR Racer are worth their weight in gold. As you can see, this is clearly inaccurate. But such a suit is worth its weight in marijuana or industrial diamonds. At the high end of this graph is gold (the only thing worth exactly its own weight in gold!), right next to the cost of launching a pound of stuff to low earth orbit on the ISS. Putting that into perspective here: You might as well build your whole spaceship out of $20 bills-- it still would cost less than putting it up there. It could almost be made of solid gold for that price. Of course, gold isn't the only precious metal, or even the most expensive. That "honor" belongs to rhodium, whose price far exceeds that of its weight in $100 bills. There's an interesting coincidence in this price range: Cocaine is about $50/gram, while a fifty dollar bill weighs about a gram. Even exchange? Platinum is also in the same price range, so you could say that $50 bills are worth their weight in platinum. If we look at good-quality 1 carat diamonds, we find that they are quite expensive compared to the industrial diamonds we saw earlier. Now,the diamond monopoly hasn't kept prices quite as high as LSD, however they are doing a very impressive job of trying. LSD doses measure in the micrograms, which makes the per-pound "street value" of the stuff astronomically high. In the table that follows, we list our data with references, organized from cheapest to most expensive. A few of the items in the table didn't make it into our graphs, including the last (and most expensive) item. Antimatter -- presently made one subatomic particle at a time-- would be unfathomably expensive in the bulk, some $26 Quadrillion per pound. Item Price per pound All purpose flour $0.52 Zinc $0.80 Lead $0.85 Bottled water $1.00 Pennies $1.81 Copper $3.50 Nickels $4.54 Nickel $9.00 Bulk hemp fiber $12 Dimes $20 Quarters $20 Turkey feathers $26 Maine Coon Cat (Pet quality ~20 lbs) $50 Dollar coins $56 Uranium (as U3O8) $65 Kobe Beef Filet Mignon $112 Kopi Luwak $160 Human Blood $181 Silver $197 Printer Ink $322 Peacock feathers $410 One Dollar Bills $454 Two Dollar Bills $907 Lottery Tickets (California $1 scratch-offs) $907 Saffron $1,000 Marijuana $2,000 Five Dollar Bills $2,268 Industrial diamonds $2,300 LZR Swimsuit $2,495 Palladium $4,287 Ambergris $4,500 Ten Dollar Bills $4,536 Twenty Dollar Bills $9,072 Any object brought to ISS At least $10,000 Gold $12,000 Platinum $20,679 Fifty Dollar Bills $22,680 Cocaine $22,680 Hundred Dollar Bills $45,359 Rhodium $77,292 Good-quality, one-carat diamonds $11.4 M LSD $55 M Antimatter $26 Quadrillion MetaBlog links for this story: [ del.icio.us | technorati ] Technorati tags: density, economics, gold, fun, fsm, education   Quick, easy, temporary, and beautiful LED garden lights For a late night summer party, we wanted to deploy an array of maybe 20 or so little LED garden lights along the periphery of our back yard. And since it was for a one-time event, there wasn't much sense in buying (or building) a set of nice looking permanent solar lights. So here is an alternative: make your own ultra-low cost temporary garden lights using LEDs, lithium coin cells, and mason jars. To start with, we need LEDs and CR2032 lithium coin cells. One each per jar. The best kind of LED for this design is an ultrabright LED with a diffused lens so that the light cast by the LED chip goes in *every direction,* not just in the direction that the LED points (which is what you get with LEDs that have clear lenses). Having easy access, we opted for the 10 mm diffused white LEDs from here, but you can get similar LEDs elsewhere as well. For batteries, a very good option is Digi-Key. You *may* be able to do better from various eBay sellers and so forth, but we've gotten burned (figuratively, not literally) by bad sets of lithium coin cells, so beware! One thing to keep in mind: there are strict restrictions on shipping lithium coin cells by air, so if at all possible, allow time for ground shipment of batteries. (And, if you have leftover coin cells, you can always use them to make BristleBots!) Next, you'll need some jars. Mason jars are available by the dozen in your local supermarket, in the canning/pickling section (which seems to actually still exist!), but are also available online of course. The "other" way is to start with a set of recycled jars, of course. If you eat a lot of pasta sauce from jars, you can build up a collection pretty quickly. And even if you don't eat food that comes in jars, you can usually find good jars at thrift stores-- so you really don't need to spend a lot on this. But even if you're buying brand new jars, you should be able to get all of your parts for a grand total of about $1-$1.50 per light jar. (If you want to get a bit fancier, there is also plenty of room for that. I like this set of instructions for making frosted glass jars for LEDs-- those would work well for this project too.) Now we hook up the LED to the battery as though we were making LED Throwies. * Connect an LED directly across the terminals of the lithium coin cell. The long lead goes to the '+' side of the battery. Wrap it once with tape-- just about any kind-- to keep the LED leads touching the battery cell. (We had blue masking tape handy so we used that-- it seemed to work just fine.) *Important safety tip: do not throw the completed LED jar lights. Now the tricky step: Bend the LED 90 degrees from the battery cell using a half-twist, so that (1) it can bend that that way and (2) you don't touch the two leads of the LED to each other. Place the LED assembly inside one of your jar lids and tape it down in place. (Optionally, you can do a better job of centering the LED than shown here!) Finally, screw the jar onto the lid, and it's done. With a little practice, you can make a few of these per minute. And, after dark, they start to come alive. We think that these could be potentially interesting for a number of different types of outdoor events-- making quick cheap lighting when and where it's needed. They are relatively scaleable, in the sense that hundreds of them are much more affordable than regular solar garden lights. The difference is that like traditional luminarias, these jar lights are temporary. However unlike luminarias, LED jar lights are waterproof, won't blow out or catch on fire, and will stay safely lit-- unattended-- for several days up to a week. And, if you don't need them for a week at a time, you can always easily disassemble them and save the batteries for next time. Linkdump: August 2008 Eclipse Pies concept Explain that (party game idea?) Internet Pinball Database Miles to km... an interesting coincidence. A short sample of music played on the African Kora (Thanks Blaise!) Fantastic Fire Bowls Musée Patamécanique The Exhibition (Thanks Bobby!) Sunnyvale Walls Orbit Runner (Thanks Patti!)   Chair Reupholstery with Used Denim A broken-in pair of jeans is one of the comfiest things in the world (denim is to humans as cardboard is to cats, right?). Unfortunately, they do eventually wear out. Luckily, they leave behind the best upholstery material: soft, comfy, durable denim. Chair seats wear out, too, especially kitchen table chairs, which can take a lot of abuse. Here we'll show you how to combine the two, reusing your old jeans and improving the chair. Reupholstering chair seats is straightforward. The seat bottom usually unscrews from the frame fairly easily. The next disassembly step is removing the fabric covering. In most modern chairs, it is stapled on. You can usually pull most of the staples out just by gripping the fabric close to the staple and pulling upwards. Robo-grips are good for this, although other pliers will probably work, too. I find that end nippers are effective for prying up particularly stubborn staples that I can't get with the robo-grips. Continue prying up the staples until the fabric comes off. Remove any remaining staples that might get in the way of the staples you'll want to put in later. The foam padding is likely to be glued to the base. A little pulling and a little coercion with a razor blade can convince it to come off. You'll need a new piece of foam. Pieces from the craft store tend to be priced rather high, but you can use an inexpensive mattress topper, which is likely to be cost-effective, especially if you have more than one chair or other projects you can use it for. Two layers of egg-carton style foam can mesh together to form a solid block. Place your seat platform on your foam pad and trace around it with a marker. It is preferable to be a little generous in the pad size. If it is too small, you could end up with a hard edge on your chair. The last layer in your seat is the denim. Split the leg of a worn-out pair of jeans down the outside seam. You'll end up with a nice wide piece of fabric with the familiar flat felled seam in the center. Cut of a piece long enough to leave a few inches in all directions. Stack up your fabric, pad, and seat platform and get your staple gun ready. Start by pulling the denim tight on one end and tack a couple of 1/4" staples in. Then pull the other end tight and tack there as well. Move on to the other two sides and pull tight and staple them down, too. Gradually work around the edges pulling tight for each staple. Be careful to avoid putting staples in where the screws attach the bottom to the chair. Fill in all the way around except for any corners. Dealing with the corners is a lot like wrapping a present. You can fold in the sides and then fold over the front, or you can fold the corner over diagonally and tuck the excess material under. After the corner is down, cut away any excess fabric and add staples to fill in any remaining gaps. Flip it over to admire it, and then screw it back onto the chair frame. That wraps it up. You can now enjoy your comfier chair. This technique will work for pretty much any shape, including round cafe-style chairs such as the one below. A simple persistence of vision approach to Lissajous figures Lissajous figures are interesting curves that occur in systems where oscillation happens in more than one direction, for example when a pendulum hanging from a string moves in its plane.The "standard" way to play with Lissajous figures is on an oscilloscope, and the easy way is of course in a web app, but there is also something to be said for a demo that you can hold in your hands. In what follows, we build a simple apparatus that takes a persistence of vision approach to displaying Lissajous figures. Okay, here's the big idea: To make the display, we need two axes of motion. The first axis consists of a row of LEDs where the light moves back and forth (more on that in a minute). For the second axis we take that 1-D LED display and rock it back and forth like a pendulum on a simple bearing. To hold the pendulum up, we used a hanging file folder frame, made less slippery with some electrical tape, and a wooden dowel. The LED display hangs down below this wooden dowel on a couple of skinny bamboo skewers. One thing to note immediately is that the pendulum frequency is finely tunable by moving the mass (i.e., the LED display) up and down along the skewers. For the LED display, we used an ATmega168 AVR microcontroller on a little board with 12 blue LEDs. You could very well do the same thing with a genuine MiniPOV instead, but we wanted a few more LEDs (12 instead of 8) and pointing at the edge. Much like in our tennis for two project, we built this up on one of our business card printed circuit boards. The circuit simple enough that even that board is overkill unless you happen to have a pile of them lying around; it's just our version of the minimal target board. We took 12 regular blue LEDs and sanded them to give a nice diffuse surface visible from any angle. We hooked their anodes (+ sides) to pins C4, D0-D7, and B0,B6, and B7 of the ATmega168. Getting them in a neat row is the biggest challenge here. On the back side, we wired up the cathodes (- sides) together and then through a 50 ohm resistor to ground. Power for this little board was from a 3xAA battery box that we stuck to the back side with foam tape. (That heavy battery box is actually good for this design because it provides a nice weight for the pendulum!) Our little LED board is attached by a the wooden skewers to the wooden dowel now. Everything is held together with cable ties which makes it easy to slide the board and adjust the effective length of the pendulum, tuning the frequency. The final step is to program and test microcontroller. The firmware for the AVR is released under the GPL. You can download it here (11 kB .ZIP file) and install it through your favorite interface. (If you're brand new to AVR microcontrollers, back up a step and start here.) If it works correctly, it should move the "lit" LED back and forth in a true sine wave (true but very low resolution!) about twice a second. You can test this by moving it during a long exposure on the camera: And, with that working, you're ready to put it on the hanging file folder frame and try it out. There are two ways to adjust the two frequencies. For one axis you can reprogram it, changing the frequency, and for the other, you adjust the position of the skewers. (There's plenty of room for improvement-- one useful upgrade from our basic design would be to add a couple of buttons that would allow on-the-fly frequency adjustments.) The images that follow are from a few different settings of both frequencies-- just some of the interesting patterns that we found in a few minutes of playing around with it. Finally, we mentioned that it was nice to have something that you can hold in your hands. This actually works very well (except for photography!) if you ditch the hanging file folder frame and just rock it back and forth in your hands on the dowel: With a little practice, you can resonantly rock the pendulum back and forth, tune the length, and really hold that Lissajous figure in the space between your hands. Your turn?   A Visit to Sturgeon's Mill, a Steam-powered Lumber Mill Sturgeon's Mill is a steam-powered sawmill in northern California. I had the privilege of seeing it running recently. The next demonstration dates are Sept 20 & 21 and Oct 18 & 19. If you have any cause to be near Sebastopol, California on those dates, I highly recommend a visit. The first thing they did was pull the logs in with a winch. They were then rolled onto a trolley cart and then wedged in place against a ratcheting brace. The whole cart is rolled in front of the massive saw blades to square it up. Once they were trimmed of their bark, they headed into another lovely set of blades to be cut into boards, but my camera batteries died before I could get any more pictures. There is much more to see, like a vintage forklift, a log carrier, and lots and lots of awesome hand tools. The smell of the place was an absolutely wonderful mixture of oil and sawdust. Definitely worth a trip! Cardboard Cat Chaise Although we don't claim to understand it, a cat that has installed itself in a cardboard box is a happy cat. You can exploit this mysterious fact to make a your own simple corrugated cardboard cat bed like this one, designed as a kitty-sized chaise lounge. Since it's just cardboard, it's also easy to modify this basic design to suit your own (or your cat's) taste. There are already a bunch of high-end cardboard cat be setups out there (example 1,examples 2-4), as well as other designs and even chaise lounges. So why bother? We are again motivated by the fact that cats like cardboard boxes. This chaise lounge is arguably a big step up from a plain old cardboard box, while remaining much simpler to build (and much much less expensive) than those other cardboard examples. To do this project, you'll need (surprise!) some big sheets of cardboard, a hot glue gun, markers, scissors and/or a hobby knife, and a cutting mat or other surface where you can safely cut. You might want to start by downloading the 2-page PDF pattern: The pattern has two pages. The first page has an actual size drawing of the foot of the cat bed, and a corresponding "tab" that will keep it in place. The second page has drawings of all of the parts at 25% scale, mainly for reference. If you happen to have a ginormous printer, you are welcome to print out the second page (at 400% scale) and trace the drawings directly onto the cardboard for a head start. (Or if you're making it for your dollhouse, scale down!) For the rest of us, we'll start by printing out the first page and cutting out a traceable pattern the size of the foot and the size of the tab. To make a more durable pattern for the foot, you can also trace the pattern directly onto cardboard to cut out a cardboard foot template (and one for the tab too). For the base you'll need a sheet of cardboard at least 20x26". (Folks outside the US: 1" = 1 inch, which is defined as exactly 2.54 cm.) Begin by drawing a rectangle 12x18" in the center of the sheet. Try to make the corners right angles. :) Next, use the foot pattern, eight times, to trace where the feet will go on the outside of your rectangle. Connect the lines between the two feet on the long side to make one continuous foot/side panel. Next, add the tabs. Trace the tab pattern in four places as shown (the dashed lines): stuck to the middle part of the four feet on the long sides of the base. ... And cut it out. Caution: Be careful not to stall at this stage of the construction, or your clients may start to get impatient. Use a straightedge to bend the cardboard at the lines and see how it fits together. The tabs should fit neatly underneath the feet on the short sides. One corner at a time, apply hot glue to the tabs and use them to attach the two feet together. Be sure that you make a clean right-angle joint here so that the finished base is nice and strong. If your cardboard is weak or your cat is heavy, the base may not yet be strong enough. Our design includes an optional bottom brace that can make the base much stiffer and stronger. The brace consists of two pieces each of two shapes of cardboard. Each piece is essentially a long rectangle with two folds. (See the PDF pattern for dimensions) The first fold is a 1" flap that glues to the inside corner of the box. The second fold helps to form an inner rectangle shape, where each piece has a large area where it can be glued to the next one. The shapes are not actually rectangles-- they are only full height at the edges. Towards the center, the braces can optionally have less height (sinking by 1/4" - 1/2") so that the top cardboard surface can gradually stretch and deform to make a nice concave surface for the cats. If possible cut out these braces with the grain of the cardboard (the corrugation) pointing perpendicular to the long direction. You can start the back panel by tracing the long side of the base onto a sheet of cardboard and improvising from there. This is your chance to be very creative with the design. (There are certainly a lot of designs to draw inspiration from!) After tracing where it meets the base, we just freehand drew the rest with a marker and added a flap on the left hand side to attach to the headboard. Again, we used the hot glue to attach bottom part of this panel to the base. The headboard is also a good place to improvise. Start by tracing the narrow side of the base onto a new sheet of cardboard. For ours, we crinkled the top of the cardboard so we could make it curve, and added several tabs to the side so that it could be glued to the matching curved part of the back panel. Garnish with catnip and you're done! Serves one cat (at a time).   Peggy Fail Whale! Sean O'Steen of The Fail Whale Fan Club (failwhale.com) and part time tinkerer captured the essence of the Twitter Fail Whale on his Peggy. Check out how Sean planned his peggy here. Sweet! Thanks to Scott Beale / Laughing Squid for the photo. See also: a Fail Whale Kinetic Sculpture and cameo appearance on Laugh-Out-Loud Cats. (Peggy 1.0 kits are available from our web store or at the Maker Shed.) Generations of Video Games Last weekend we went to California Extreme and took along Tennis for Two, which got to sit right next to a PlayStation 3. Video games have come a long way in fifty years, but as one Tennis for Two player commented, good game play doesn't have to have fancy graphics.   "That's no melon!" One cantaloupe, a knife, and five minutes. Your very own (and very tasty) planet-killing superweapon. Hint 1: Center the "crater" around where the stem was connected so that the darker fibers under the skin point towards the center of it. Hint 2: Stretch a string around the melon to help guide your equatorial trench. (Also: you don't really need that exhaust port. It's a weakness.)

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