Search suggestion contest!

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Search suggestions

In our post on Monday, we noted that when you search at ask.com, you can get inappropriate and even frightening suggestions about what you might want to search for. What we have realized since then is that this is hardly an isolated example– In the comments we have even seen a few examples (like the one pictured above) that were arguably more frightening than the one (“how do you”) than the first one that we found.
This seems like an as-yet untapped resource of sarcastic humor. And we want to tap it. So, what bizarre search suggestions can you tickle out of that web site? It’s contest for one week, starting today.

How to enter: Upload your screen shot to the Evil Mad Science Auxiliary pool on flickr (free registration required, etc.) on or by November 13. Your entries must be reproducible. We will be judging in five categories: most ironic, most insightful, most depressing, worst grammar, and the funniest. Please tag your entry for the category or categories that you think it qualifies for. (Tags: ironic, insightful, depressing, grammar, and/or funny)

Up to five winners will be picked by November 17. Each winner will receive the glory of their name being listed as a winner and the corresponding scorn of programmers at Ask.com. Each winner will also get something that could actually be construed as a prize: a permanent forwarding e-mail address with your choice of name @evilmadscientist.com!
One hint: While the search results (at first glance) appear remarkably unfiltered, they are in fact filtered– but only on a conservative definition of “naughty” keywords, not on content in general. If you play with the search terms you’ll see that pretty quickly.

Update: It looks like uk.ask.com gives a different set of suggestions. We are ruling that these are fair game as well!

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Frighten yourself with ask.com!

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Ask.com suggested search terms

I saw that ask.com displays a list of search suggestions if you have trouble completing your thought. Since we do a lot of “how to” articles, I thought that I should see what people are searching for and… and… I am now officially frightened.

(Yes, it actually suggested that. I only added the arrow.)

Update: We’re having a contest now.

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Weekend Projects with Bre Pettis: Make a Joule Thief

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Weekend Projects Podcast!
In this week’s Weekend Projects video podcast, Make Magazine’s Bre Pettis and I show you how to make a Joule Thief. The PDF file that goes with the podcast is here (450 kB PDF file).

So whatsa Joule Thief? It’s a little wisp of a circuit that allows you to drive a blue or white LED from a low voltage. Normally, if you want to light up a blue or white LED you need to provide it with 3 – 3.5 V, like from a 3 V lithium coin cell. But a 1.5 V battery like a AA cell simply will not work. But using the Joule Thief, it works like a charm. Not only does it work with a brand new battery, but it works until the battery is nearly dead– down to 0.3 V. That’s well below the point where your other toys will tell you the battery is dead, so it can steal every last joule of energy from the battery (hence the name). To learn how to make one, watch the video, which is available in a variety of formats.

The original site where we learned about the Joule thief shows you how to make a miniature version of this circuit, such that you can fit it in a tiny flashlight. However, in the video we show you how to make it big, large enough (1) to make with clumsy hands and (2) that you can see what we’re doing.

After the jump, some detailed photos of how the coil is wound in case you need more detail than in the video.

Continue reading Weekend Projects with Bre Pettis: Make a Joule Thief →

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Proposal: Distributed seismometry

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This evening Silicon Valley did a little dance with a 5.6 magnitude earthquake. While there wasn’t much damage here in the land of quake-resistant building codes, it was, as
ValleyWag notes, this was “the largest quake to hit the Bay Area since Loma Prieta in October ’89.”

After the house stopped shaking, and then swaying, the first thing we did was to get on the USGS web site and try and find out what we could about the quake. From the main information page, we quickly found the “Did you feel it?” questionnaire for the event, which we filled out. The DYFI program collates the data from responses like ours and uses them to create a map of the earthquake intensity by geographic region, as well as some additional data. The map shown above represents the intensity felt by 60,000 respondents in the first few hours after the quake. It is by far the finest example that I have ever seen of “citizen science” in action– apparently objective data collected over a wide area in a short period of time with (in many cases) good statistics.

Of course, it could be better. Much better. Like other Mac laptops (and many others), my computer contains a “sudden motion sensor” to protect the hard drive in case the computer is dropped. Fundamentally this is just an accelerometer and can be used for any arbitrary purpose besides just waiting for the computer to fall. A program called SeisMac has already been developed that can turn a Mac laptop into a makeshift seismometer. (SeisMac is freeware and based is on open source libraries for the sensor.)

Continue reading Proposal: Distributed seismometry →

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Halloween link roundup

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A Traveling Exhibition of Modern Art (the Halloween Costume)

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In the daylight

For halloween this year, we put together a “group” costume: a traveling exhibition of modern art. Each person wears a painting in the style of a modern artist.
One of the cool things about this costume is that it is a fully extensible and scalable design: it will look better the more artists that are represented. Having a real crowd would let you include some less well known artists, while still being recognized as a modern art exhibition.

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Make a Robotic Snap-O-Lantern!

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Snapper - 02.jpg

Snapper - 06.jpg Snapper - 07.jpg Snapper - 09.jpg Snapper - 06.jpg

The Snap-O-Lantern is a robotic mini-pumpkin. Normally, it just sits there, in disguise as a boring old pumpkin. But, every twenty seconds he comes to life. His LED eyes turn on, his jaw slowly opens, and then SNAPS shut– and he goes back into stealth mode.

What’s inside? A small hobby servo motor, driven by an AVR microcontroller. This is a minimal microcontroller project, and is very straightforward if you happen to already have a setup for programming one. We’ll walk through the carving, setup, programming, and electronics. This is an open-source project, one of the world’s first “gpl-o-lanterns”; source code is provided.

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Easy halloween project: 8-bit gourds!

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Gourds

A quick, low-tech halloween project: we hollowed out a couple of miniature decorative gourds. You can get these by the bagful at the grocery store, next to the mini-pumpkins. The one on the left had a kind of wrinkly base that adapted itself well to this shape, and the one on the right had more of a conical tip that we cut off to make a flat base.

Gourds like these have a hard shell, about 3 mm thick, that is rather hard to cut through. We used a loose drill bit (turned by hand) to make the initial cut. From there, a regular hobby knife (e.g., x-acto) works well. Once the soft flesh and seeds are scooped out, the hard shell can dry to make a semi-permanent display.

It’s unreasonably fun to walk around with one of these in each hand, reenacting the age-old chase drama. Especially when the little yellow dude chomps a big white dot. Now who’s chasing who?!?!

You can find more pumpkin projects in our Halloween Project Archive.

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