Month: June 2015

With any luck, you’ll never see a police badge up close. And even if one is flashed in your face, afterwards as you’re sitting on the curb wearing zip-ties you probably won’t be thinking "Gee, I wonder how those badges are made."

But for those who are curious, a Brooklyn-based company called United Insignia has a video up showing the process. We always assumed the NYPD’s "shields" just came out of a stamping machine, but there’s actually a fair bit of handwork involved:

According to the NYPD quoted here, the current design dates back to 1902. Here’s their description of the production process:

Our modern shield is made of nickel silver. It is first die-struck in a drop hammer which gives it impression and then is pounded until the desired height of the characters is reached. The perimeter is then blanked and embossed and the numbers and lugs are hard soldered. The badge is then dipped, cleaned, nickel-plated and polished to a high gloss.

If you want to see what some other cities’ cop badges look like, check out our older post on the subject.

Via Herman Yung

via Core77
How NYPD Badges are Made

Most people will probably remember the times tables from primary school quizzes. There might be patterns in some of them (the simple doubling of the 2 times table) but others you just learnt by rote. And it was never quite clear just why it was necessary to know what 7 x 9 is off the top of your head.

Well, have no fear, there will be no number quizzes here. Instead, I want to show you a way to build numbers that gives them some structure, and how multiplication uses that structure.

Understanding multiplication

Multiplication simply gives you the area of a rectangle, if you know the lengths of the sides. Pick any square in the grid, (for example, let’s pick the 7th entry in the 5th row) and colour a rectangle from that square to the top left corner.

A rectangle of size 5 × 7 in the multiplication table.

This rectangle has length 7 and height 5, and the area (the number of green squares) is found in the blue circle in the bottom right corner! This is true no matter which pair of numbers in the grid you pick.

Now let’s take this rectangle and flip it around the main diagonal (the red dotted line).

The length and height of the rectangle have swapped, but the area hasn’t changed. So from this we can see that 5 × 7 is the same as 7 × 5. This holds true for any pair of numbers — in mathematics we say that multiplication is commutative.

But this fact means that there is a symmetry in the multiplication table. The numbers above the diagonal line are like a mirror image of the numbers below the line.

So if your aim is to memorise the table, you really only need to memorise about half of it.

The building blocks of numbers

To go further with multiplication we first need to do some dividing. Remember that dividing a number just means breaking it into pieces of equal size.

12 ÷ 3 = 4

This means 12 can be broken into 3 pieces, each of size 4.

Since 3 and 4 are both whole numbers, they are called factors of 12, and 12 is said to be divisible by 3 and by 4. If a number is only divisible by itself and 1, it is called a prime number.

But there’s more than one way to write 12 as a product of two numbers:

12 × 1

6 × 2

4 × 3

3 × 4

2 × 6

1 × 12

In fact, we can see this if we look at the multiplication table.

The occurrences of 12 in the multiplication table.

The number of coloured squares in this picture tells you there are six ways you can make a rectangle of area 12 with whole number side lengths. So it’s also the number of ways you can write 12 as a product of two numbers.

Incidentally, you might have noticed that the coloured squares seem to form a smooth curve — they do! The curve joining the squares is known as a hyperbola, given by the equation a × b = 12, where ‘a’ and ‘b’ are not necessarily whole numbers.

Let’s look again at the list of products above that are equal to 12. Every number listed there is a factor of 12. What if we look at factors of factors? Any factor that is not prime (except for 1) can be split into further factors, for example

12 = 6 × 2 = (2 × 3) × 2

12 = 4 × 3 = (2 × 2) × 3

No matter how we do it, when we split the factors until we’re left only with primes, we always end up with two 2’s and one 3.

This product

2 × 2 × 3

is called the prime decomposition of 12 and is unique to that number. There is only one way to write a number as a product of primes, and each product of primes gives a different number. In mathematics this is known as the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic.

The prime decomposition tells us important things about a number, in a very condensed way.

For example, from the prime decomposition 12 = 2 × 2 × 3, we can see immediately that 12 is divisible by 2 and 3, and not by any other prime (such as 5 or 7). We can also see that it’s divisible by the product of any choice of two 2’s and one 3 that you want to pick.

Furthermore, any multiple of 12 will also be divisible by the same numbers. Consider 11 x 12 = 132. This result is also divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12, just like 12. Multiplying each of these with the factor of 11, we find that 132 is also divisible by 11, 22, 33, 44, 66 and 132.

It’s also easy to see if a number is the square of another number: In that case there must be an even number of each prime factor. For example, 36 = 2 × 2 × 3 × 3, so it’s the square of 2 × 3 = 6.

The prime decomposition can also make multiplication easier. If you don’t know the answer to 11 × 12, then knowing the prime decomposition of 12 means you can work through the multiplication step by step.

11 x 12

= 11 x 2 × 2 × 3

= ((11 x 2) × 2) × 3

= (22 × 2) × 3

= 44 × 3

= 132

If the primes of the decomposition are small enough (say 2, 3 or 5), multiplication is nice and easy, if a bit paper-consuming. Thus multiplying by 4 (= 2 x 2), 6 (= 2 x 3), 8 (= 2 x 2 x 2), or 9 (= 3 x 3) doesn’t need to be a daunting task!

For example, if you can’t remember the 9 times table, it doesn’t matter as long as you can multiply by 3 twice. (However this method doesn’t help with multiplying by larger primes, here new methods are required – if you haven’t seen the trick for the 11 times tables watch this video).

So the ability to break numbers into their prime factors can make complicated multiplications much simpler, and it’s even more useful for bigger numbers.

For example, the prime decomposition of 756 is 2 x 2 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 7, so multiplying by 756 simply means multiplying by each of these relatively small primes. (Of course, finding the prime decomposition of a large number is usually very difficult, so it’s only useful if you already know what the decomposition is.)

But more than this, prime decompositions give fundamental information about numbers. This information is widely useful in mathematics and other fields such as cryptography and internet security. It also leads to some surprising patterns – to see this, try colouring all multiples of 12 in the times table and see what happens. I’ll leave that for homework.

Anita Ponsaing is Research Associate in Mathematics at University of Melbourne.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Image by Tiger Pixel under Creative Commons license.

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These Math Secrets Will Make You Love Times Tables

Grab your s’mores fixin’s because a professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University believes he figured out how to build and engineer the perfect fire that burns with the maximum amount of heat as possible.

But here’s the real interesting part: it turns out that humans have already known the ideal shape for a fire—a pyramid that’s roughly as wide at its base as it is tall—and have actually been using it for thousands of years.

Professor Adrian Bejan is best known for his Constructal law that basically states that nature will prioritize the creation of structures, patterns, or geometry that makes it easiest for things to flow—be it nerve signals traveling through the human body, or raindrops forming tiny streams and rivers on the ground. And it was his research into Constructal law that led him to conclude that a perfect pyramid-shaped fire is the way to go.

And that explains why man has been building the same fires since we first learned to harvest a flame. It’s not that we didn’t know better. In fact, it was just the opposite. Through trial, error, and experimentation we actually stumbled across the ideal fire shape well before science came along and confirmed that what we’ve been doing was right all along.

[Duke – Pratt School of Engineering via Science Daily]

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Scientists Have Figured Out the Perfect Way To Build a Fire

There’s a time and a place for serious mad scientist mac and cheese, but sometimes you just want a no-brainer method for making the stuff without giving it too much thought.

Enter Food52’s method. With this method, demonstrated by Food52 founders Merrill Stubbs and Amanda Hesser, you can customize mac and cheese using whatever short pasta you like, your favorite cheese (or cheeses…in my case, ALL OF THEM,) desired meat and vegetable mix-ins, and toppings.

The play-by-play goes something like this:

1. Boil macaroni or short pasta of your choice in salted water.
2. Make a roux with equal parts butter and flour, plus eight times the amount of hot milk. (In this case, they use a stick of butter and half a cup of flour.) Whisk until roux is smooth, barely simmering, and coats the back of a spoon.
3. Season roux with salt and any other flavorings (nutmeg, mustard, paprika, etc.) and add grated cheese to your liking.
4. Add any other meat or vegetables at this point (greens, shredded meat, other vegetables, etc.)
5. It’s ready to eat. Or, for a baked style, transfer to a casserole dish, top with desired bread topping (bread chunks, panko, Italian breadcrumbs, etc.), and bake at 375F for 30 minutes until browned on top.

Catch the video for more detailed explanations and some flavor ideas and inspiration. Buffalo chicken mac and cheese, anyone?

Making Mac and Cheese Without a Recipe | The New York Times With Food52

Photo by Food52.

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Make Any Type of Mac and Cheese with This Simple Formula

  The Backyard Scientist (who you may remember pouring molten aluminum into a watermelon) has a very cool how-to for burning Lichtenberg fractal patterns into pieces of plywood using electricity. Not only is the process mesmerizing (as you can see above), but the resulting patterns are beautiful. Two microwave oven […]

Read more on MAKE

The post Burn Fractal Patterns into Plywood appeared first on Make: electronics, crafts, DIY projects and how-tos for makers.

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Burn Fractal Patterns into Plywood

Production design is one of the most underrated aspects of filmmaking and fictional consoles and interfaces can have an actual impact on those we’re sitting in front of in the real world.

Over the last decade or so, Minority Report’s gesture-based virtual swiping screens have been credited with having the biggest impact on what we think a good interface should be. Two years ago, WIRED magazine declared the age of Minority Report to be over and decided that the future of design would be more like the cuddly girlfriend gadgets of Her.

The digital age moves fast and there are many beautiful consoles from the “analog” era that probably won’t be influencing your smart watch anytime soon. For your perusal, we break down some of the coolest consoles and control panels from film history.

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Star Wars

RELEASE DATE: 1977 DIRECTOR: George Lucas BUDGET: $13 million

Like many computer panel displays in the 1980s, the most prominent features of the X-wing’s interior are its simple computer graphics. We get a really good look at this aiming display in A New Hope when the rebel squadron is engaged in its climactic assault against the Death Star.

While there are many people to credit for the look of Star Wars (especially Ralph Mcquarrie’s early concept art) the fact is real world circumstances and compromises were one of the biggest factors involved. The film had a relatively small budget and these were the days before CGI, so the legendary aesthetics were dependent on the set dresser, Roger Christian, being able to improvise.

Christian told Esquire that while working on the film he discovered that “if I bought airplane scrap and broke it down, I could stick it in the sets in specific ways — because there’s an order to doing it, it’s not just random. And that’s the art of it. I understood how to do that — engineering and all that stuff. So George said, ‘Yes, go do it.’ And airplane scrap at that time, nobody wanted it. There were junkyards full of it, because they sold it by weight. I could buy almost an entire plane for 50 pounds.”

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Star Trek

RELEASE DATE: 1966 DIRECTORS: Various BUDGET: Varies

The bridge of Star Trek’s U.S.S. Enterprise is probably the most recognizable control room for any spacecraft in the history of cinema. The control panels in the original television series are especially memorable for their variety of black decks filled with colorful, illuminated buttons and switches. They had that Day-Glo pop that only the 1960’s could really get away with.

The Enterprise’s designer Matt Jefferies was a skilled aviator who flew B-17s in World War II. That experience influenced his decision to use real aircraft switches and lights on many of the Enterprise’s control panels. Another key decision by Jefferies was to place the crew in a circle around Captain Kirk, which allowed the film crew to have greater maneuverability when getting dramatic shots. That circular layout was reportedly studied by defense and aerospace organizations a model for more efficient control rooms. But as io9 pointed out earlier this year, the ship has some serious design flaws. Case in point, all the control panels seem to randomly explode whenever the Enterprise is hit by an enemy’s weapon.

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Alien

RELEASE DATE: 1979 DIRECTOR: Ridley Scott BUDGET: $11 million

The Nostromo ship from the original Alien is basically the space version of an oil rig. It travels to different planets for excavation and mining. While its design is very much beholden to 80s computer technology, it’s less than futuristic control panels don’t necessarily feel dated. They feel advanced, yet used up and dirty. The look old for their era without feeling obsolete or anachronistic.

All the control panels in Alien are part of a single enclosed set rather than the traditional film production method of breaking it up and having movable walls. If an actor was on one end of the set, they would have to walk all the way through it to get out. Of all our control panel selections, Alien might have the most functional looking one. That’s because the production designer, Ron Cobb, constantly worked from the idea that everything should have a legitimate purpose. Cobb went as far as making legitimate real world safety signs for fixtures and airlocks.

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Back to the Future

RELEASE DATE: 1985 DIRECTOR: Robert Zemekis BUDGET: $19 million

The time machine panel looks like something built out of a garage emphasizing the film’s premise that it was, in fact, built out of a garage by Doc Brown. It’s janky and funky-looking and not totally professional, as if someone who knows how to build this kind of thing had very limited resources and used whatever he could get his hands on.

The original time machines built by the production team only had numeric time circuit displays. But the director, Robert Zemeckis, decided to change them to alpha-numeric displays in the middle of filming. Due to the time and expense involved, only one of the three Deloreans actually had the alpha-numeric modification. Reportedly, there are shots in the film that got by the editors in which you can see the displays with only numbers.

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Predator

RELEASE DATE: 1987 DIRECTOR: John McTiernan BUDGET: $18 million

Predator’s arm panel is basically his toolbox. It controls all of his weapons, makes him invisible and even self-destructs when he has been defeated. The design has an impenetrable, alien language touchscreen display encased in a bulky metal box fixed to the Predator’s arm.

While most of the team working on Predator were part of the macho man action world of the eighties that Schwarzenegger typifies, there was at least one certifiable genius involved: Stan Winston. The man that built the Terminator. He brought Edward Scissorhands to life and made dinosaurs walk the earth in Jurassic Park. He also designed the Predator and it remains one of his most iconic creations.

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eXisTenZ

RELEASE DATE: 1999 DIRECTOR: David Cronenberg BUDGET: $31 million

The controllers in eXisTenZ are pure Cronenberg: fleshy, organic and sexual in design but entirely mechanical. It’s basically an X-box controller made up of human flesh with an umbilical cord wire.

For the film’s production design, Cronenberg worked with his longtime collaborator Carol Spier. When asked about the design of the game pod, shegave all credit to Cronenberg himself, saying that he personally worked with the effects team to realize the entirely unique controller/body mod. But Spier is such as standout in the field of production design that it’s difficult to say she had no influence on the visionary director. She was essential to Cronenberg’s films. (There’s a fascinating hour-long documentary about her and her collaborations with the director.)

Biotech is growing, so as far as “analog” interfaces go, this one has the most potential for coming back up in the future.

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Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

RELEASE DATE: 2005 DIRECTOR: Garth Jennings BUDGET: $50 million

The humorous design of the Heart of Gold spaceship would be more at home as the interior of a sports car. It combines the familiar with the futuristic and the result is something that looks like less a spacecraft.

While the film divided fans of the original novel, one thing that it got right was its visual design. Director Garth Jennings came from the music video world and brought on some great talent including fellow music video veterans Shynola to handle special animated sequences. All around, the film took sci-fi conventions and made them their own.

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WarGames

RELEASE DATE: 1983 DIRECTOR: John Badham BUDGET: $12 million

In WarGames, a teenage hacker played by Matthew Broderick finds himself at the government facility NORAD trying to prevent World War III. The giant set filled with computers has become as iconic as the war room in Dr. Strangelove. The control panels that used to square off against the computer at the end of the movie are an actual computer from the real world. These are known as SAGE panels and they appeared in many film that required big, room-sized computers. NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) is also a real command center located in a nuclear bunker in Cheyenne Mountain. The director, John Badham, has said that the film’s set (the most expensive ever built at the time) looked nothing like the actual military complex and was more like “NORAD’s wet dream of itself.”

WarGames was released in 1983, the year that Apple introduced Lisa (the first personal computer with a GUI) as well as the year that the New York Times acquired its first newsroom computer. While the design of the gadgets in WarGames may seem quaint or silly to us today, its vision of computing and the internet had a huge impact on the geeky culture that runs the world today. In 2008, Google held a 25th-anniversary screening at its headquarters with the founder Sergey Brin handling introduction duties. Brin called the film, “a key movie of a generation, especially for those of us who got into computing.”

WarGames computer graphics consultant Colin Cantwell also worked as a model designer for the original Star Wars, so he gets the Hopes&Fears award for control panel Jedi of the century.

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Batman Returns

RELEASE DATE: 1992 DIRECTOR: Tim Burton BUDGET: $80 million

In Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, the Batmobile is remotely controlled by the Penguin in a scheme by Oswald Cobblepot aimed to make Batman seem like a destructive criminal. The Penguin’s face shows up on a screen in the command center as he directs the vehicle to wreak havoc on the streets of Gotham. The interior of looks more like the cockpit of an aircraft than the interior of a car and its gizmo-laden dashboard is maximal in the best way.

During the production of Batman Returns, Burton kept the production design by Bo Welch secretive. It was primarily inspired by fascist architecture and the World’s Fair. Security guards kept a tight watch on who was let on set and required cast and crew to have photo ID badges with the movie’s original working title, Dictel. Art directors were asked to keep the blinds in their offices pulled down.

The Batmobile, designed by Anton Furst for the 1989 Batman, was inspired by the designs of the 1930s Salt Flat Racers and the Sting Ray’s of the 1950s. All gadgets on the Batmobile on both Batman and Batman Returns were fully functional, thought the exhaust after-burner consumed so much fuel it could only run for 15 seconds at a time. Originally the car’s roof was a few inches lower but had to be raised to accommodate for Batman’s ears.

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Blade Runner

RELEASE DATE: 1982 DIRECTOR: Ridley Scott BUDGET: $28 million

The controls in the hovercraft in Blade Runner are a series of multiple screens distributed throughout the length of the cockpit. There are two screens: a sort of a keyboard and one specifically for navigation.

The sets of Ridley Scott’s futuristic opus were inspired, in part, by the aesthetics of the French Comic, Métal Hurlant (Screaming Metal). In theBlade Runner version of the future, cars called Spinners can hover and accelerate through the air using jet propulsion, and computer consoles control them. The cars, mostly used by police as surveillance over the public, were designed by Syd Mead and have been replicated in films like The Fifth Element and Star Wars prequel trilogy. A repainted spinner can be seen parked in a driveway in Back to the Future Part II as an homage to the car.

To create the cars, the auto fabricator Gene Winfield had 50 people in three shops working 18 hours a day, seven days a week for 5 1/2 months to complete the 27 vehicles for the film. Luckily for Winfield and the art department, an actor’s strike extended pre-production by nine months, giving them the extra time they needed to complete the futuristic set and props.

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This post originally appeared on Hopes&Fears. Additional reporting by Rhett Jones and Loney Abrams.

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The Ultimate Guide to Analog Control Panels in Scifi Movies

What attending your first SQL PASS Summit is really like. (HT @SQLsoldier)

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What attending your first SQL PASS Summit is really like. (HT…

House Democrats will introduce a bill on Tuesday to require that all firearms include at least one metal component that is integral to the design of the gun, says The Hill. The bill is a knee-jerk response to the … Read More

The post Democrats Propose Ban on Plastic Guns appeared first on The Truth About Guns.

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Democrats Propose Ban on Plastic Guns

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The Fallen of World War II