Jason Kottke’s weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998
A group of three students at Purdue University have shattered the world record for the fastest Rubik’s Cube solve by robot — their bot solved the cube in just 0.103 seconds (103 milliseconds). As a comparison, the former record was 305 milliseconds and “a human blink takes about 200 to 300 milliseconds”. As one of the students said, “So, before you even realize it’s moving, we’ve solved it.”
The world record for a human solve is 3.13 seconds by Max Park in 2023. (via we’re here
Tags: robots · Rubik’s Cube · video
“The bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema — and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong.” (I was slack-jawed by the end of this.)
A series of videos by Toby Hendy where she explains the PhD theses of Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, and others.
“British researchers have discovered that a ‘copy’ of Magna Carta owned by Harvard Law School is in fact an extraordinarily rare original from 1300.” Harvard bought it for $27.50 — it’s likely worth $10s of millions.
The NY Times has a nice feature on NASA astronaut Don Pettit’s photography from his latest stay in space, a 220-day mission aboard the ISS.
Now, you know I like a good astronomical image (like the one above of an ISS sunrise), but the thing that really caught my eye was the video of Pettit’s experiment involving charged water droplets and a teflon needle:
I could watch that allllll day long.
More Pettit: Swirling Green Aurora Captured From the ISS.
Tags: astronomy · Don Pettit · photography · science · space · video