Does a USB drive get heavier as you store more files on it? Believe it or not, they get lighter. USB drives use Flash memory, which means the the ones and zeros of your data are stored on transistors. When you save data, a binary zero is set by charging the float gate of the transistor, and a binary one is set by removing the charge. To charge it, we add electrons, and the mass of each electron is 0.00000000000000000000000000091 grams. This means that an empty USB drive (which mostly holds zeros) weighs more than a full USB drive (which has ones and zeros). Add data, reduce the weight. However, you would need to weigh more USB drives than exist on the planet together at once before the difference in weight became easily measurable.
All joking aside for once, if there’s one thing I can say about all this Coronavirus “craziness”, “pandemic”, “panic”, “crisis”, “precaution”, “stupidity” (pick the adjective you most relate to), it is this: People are forced to think out of the box for solutions to problems they never thought they’d encounter, and this is NOT A BAD THING! It shakes up the status quo and forces people out of their comfort zone.
People will have to educate themselves on using technology to get work done, instead of forcing mostly unnecessary (and potentially hazardous right now) in-person meetings.
Businesses owners will have to remain agile and adapt their business models on the fly. Especially now, as bars and restaurants are being forced to close. They have to. Otherwise they have no choice to close and layoff all their workers.
Yes, the stock markets are down. If you are on a long-term plan to retirement, it’s going to recover no problem. This is an opportunity, not a crisis. Make the best of the hand you’re dealt now!
Above all, don’t sweat the small stuff. So, you may need to use a fabric cloth instead of a paper towel. So you may have to meet a new neighbor to borrow a couple of eggs. The world survived many centuries without all the modern conveniences we take for granted now. Use it as a way to learn history, and use it as a way to learn something new.
Nearly nobody has framed this event as a positive one. Yet, with a slight change of mind, there can and will be good things that will come out of this that will help us, and will help the country grow stronger. Get ready for a wild ride guys! This is no doubt a story people will be able to tell their grandkids about.
Wise words. If only… If just only… we could all spend time doing work making the world better in small ways. Theorizing about large changes in the world is disillusioning because people don’t think they are that powerful. But in reality, a lot of us doing small meaningful things is what can actually change the world for the better.
Wow! I received a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition from our District’s Representative Jim Hagedorn for the “Hidden Gem” award I received from the Faribault Virtues Project. It was an honor to be recognized for some work I’ve done over the years preserving history in Faribault and Rice County. If we all pitched in and helped our community in one or two small ways, what a wonderful place our world could become!
By ANDREW DEZIEL adeziel@faribault.com Sep 12, 2019
Two Brians from Faribault were honored on Wednesday for selflessly using their spare time to preserve a bit of Faribault’s history.
Community members heading the Faribault Virtues Project Virtues Project seeks to strengthen are hoping to identify unsung heroes in the city with the Hidden Gems initiative.
The surprise event was to honor the men as Hidden Gems, a program spearheaded by the Virtues Project-Faribault, part of an international campaign launched in 1991. The Virtues Project seeks to strengthen communities and help people to live more self-empowered lives. Among the 100 virtues which the project seeks to highlight are creativity, flexibility, and self-discipline.
A hallmark of the Hidden Gems recognition is that the recognition is intended to come as a total surprise to the honoree.
When Brian Schmidt and Brian Klier walked into the Carlander Family Room at the Rice County Historical Society, they were greeted by several dozen friends, family members and co-workers, excited to honor them for their generous donations to the community and the way they exemplify the 100 virtues.
Brian Schmidt
Brian Schmidt currently serves as the president of the Rice County Historical Society. When he’s not working at Malt O’Meal/Post Consumer Brands, the Faribault native loves to share his immense passion for Rice County history with the community.
Schmidt wasn’t much for history in high school, but his interest in local history was piqued when he started to explore the then-abandoned Fleckenstein Brewery and found hundreds of old, unique bottles. Schmidt ultimately donated the bottles and other Fleckenstein artifacts to the Rice County Historical Society and soon became deeply involved as a volunteer.
Schmidt says he’s always eager to see what historical artifacts people bring to the historical society on a daily basis. Schmidt noted that even though many of the Historical Society’s collections are full of simple relics that had meaning to only a small number of people, those artifacts can still give someone a unique sense of what life in Faribault used to be like.
Schmidt is grateful that he can play a role in preserving a little bit of Rice County’s past for future generations to appreciate and gives tremendous credit to the Historical Society’s volunteers and thousands of members, who he says are like family to him.
“It’s easy for a person to be a volunteer because we have such a great group of people,” he said.
Brian Klier
Like Schmidt, Klier is a lifelong Faribault resident who has worked as a computer technician with the Faribault Public Schools for the last 24 years. Also like Schmidt, Klier said he was never much for history class in high school.
Klier’s interest in local history was piqued in part by a more modern piece of history. While at work, Klier learned that photos of Faribault by the Faribault Junior High School’s video and photography club from the 1970s and 1980s were about to be disposed of.
Klier saved the slides and donated them to the Rice County Historical Society, but not before scanning them and uploading them online. He’s posted many of them in the Facebook group he moderates, “You know you grew up in Faribault when…”
An original user of the group, although not the creator, Klier offered to moderate it after he noticed the quality of the group begin to deteriorate, with few active users and an increased number of spam posts.
With Klier as an active moderator and contributing his own unique content, the group has become one of the most popular Faribault-related Facebook groups. Somehow, Klier also finds time to operate the Rice County Skywarn page on Facebook.
Klier encouraged community members to find what they are passionate about, and consider spending what free time they have supporting related groups.
“If each of us shared one or two things that we are passionate about with the community, I think Faribault would be a much better place,” he said.
Reach Reporter Andrew Deziel at 507-333-3129 or follow him on Twitter @FDNandrew.
At 8:32 a.m. on July 16th, 50 years ago, 3 American men, strapped into the seats of their Apollo command module, were propelled into space by the tallest and most powerful rocket ever created, the Saturn V. It would take them 3 days to reach their destination. The mission…to land and walk on the moon.
The computer to take them there operated at a 0.002048 GHz clock speed. It had 0.000002 gigabytes of magnetic-core RAM, and 0.000036 gigabytes of hand-woven core rope ROM. It weighed 70 pounds. Today’s computers have millions of times more memory. Yet, in 1969, it performed flawlessly to navigate the men into lunar orbit.
These videos are the best thing I’ve found to help set the scene in your mind on how big of an event this was, and still is, in all of mankind. I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I did!
Video Credits:
“Apollo 11 liftoff unseen spectators original launch footage”, Youtube, suicidecrew.
The sights and sounds of antique technology. I bought a new ribbon off of Amazon to see if that’s the only thing that was needed to bring this old ImageWriter II to life.
This is a fully operational Apple IIgs with a 5 1/4″ and 3 1/2″ floppy disk drive, color monitor, and ImageWriter II printer. The software running is “The Print Shop” by Broderbund.
For almost a year, I have been assisting as a Subject Matter Expert for the Electronics Technician Association (International)’s Audio/Video Forensics Analyst examination. One of the reasons I’ve been assisting is because it will become increasingly important to have skilled professionals analyze what is “real” and what is “not real” in regards to created video.
As computers get more and more powerful, it becomes easier to generate complete 3D models of a person’s face, and it becomes easier to create a voice model of a person’s speech with only a few minutes of recorded audio. These two combined together can produce very convincing hoaxes, termed as a “deepfake”. Do you think the average Internet user that shares “everything” on Facebook could tell the difference?
Whether they are used for extortion, election manipulation, or blackmail, “deepfakes” could be the biggest threat to modern society in the years ahead. Now, more than ever, it’s very important to use logic instead of emotion, facts instead of opinions, and multiple sources instead of a single news channel, when forming your own opinion about anything.
Be sure to check out this TechRepublic article and video below on deepfakes, and the importance of skilled experts in the future to assist with the detection of these threats.
It’s easy to take for granted modern car navigation systems. After all, the functionality is built into every modern Smartphone. However, back in 1986, before the GPS system even existed, a couple of yachtsman with an idea formed a company called Etak, which made it a goal to make a navigation system with street-level detail that could be installed in an automobile.
They succeeded. Instead of using satellites, they used “dead reckoning” which compares the car’s location to a fixed spot. A modern (at the time) IBM XT computer running at 4.77 MHz with 128 kilobytes of memory got stuffed in the vehicle’s trunk. An oscilloscope-style green CRT display with buttons was mounted up on the dash, a fluxgate compass was mounted on the back windshield to keep track of magnetic north, and a pair of hall-effect sensors were mounted to the non-driven wheels of the car to count off miles, and the difference in rotational speed between the wheels kept track of corners. Map data was loaded on cassette tapes which each held about 3 1/2 megabytes of information. Users switched tapes whenever they roamed into an area not covered by the current cassette.
The system was about $1,500 and could be installed by a company that did radio and speaker installation in cars. They sold about 5,000 of them. The Etak technology lived on to the modern Internet era, where its map data was used by companies such as MapQuest and TomTom. Etak also created the fixed-map viewpoint (you in the center, the map moves around you) which is still used in all modern navigation systems.
This is probably the best layout that the Sandbox/Cedar Lake Arena has had since the inception of the facility. 35 quads in total came out for the private rental today. We all had a terrific time!
I remember Kmart. Those huge circular air vents in the ceiling. The rows of endless florescent lights. The pegboard endcaps. The ancient point-of-sale systems. We’ve made a lot of progress in stores since then! Ummm, wait a second…
Rochester is home to one of the last 3 Kmarts in the state. Its appearance is not much different than how Faribault’s Kmart looked decades ago before it closed. If you’re looking to step into a time capsule back to a time when New Kids on the Block topped Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, I urge you to do it soon. After all, you won’t have too much time left to do it.
