Cosmos Computed

Some people pay hundreds to be able to photograph tiny subjects such as snowflakes, but now you can do it for $5. Taken with a jeweler's loupe and a digital camera I recently read an article about a man who took photos of snowflakes by taping an extra lens on the front of his camera. Naturally, I was interested. I had always enjoyed taking close-up photos of things, but I hadn't been able to take very many high-quality photos of anything as small as a snowflake. After reading the details of his method, I had an idea: instead of using an expensive lens like he was using, I could use one of the cheap plastic jeweler's loupes I already have ( available on Amazon for about $5). I had tried using loupes to take close-up images before, but without much success. After reading the article, though, I realized that there was a trick I had been missing: after taping the lens on the front of the camera, I should have zoomed in all the way before taking the photo. At first, it seems to

Glass cellphones... brilliant About a month and a half ago, an Orbital Sciences rocket exploded during liftoff. Although nobody was injured from the explosion, hundreds of millions of dollars of supplies and equipment were destroyed in a matter of seconds. The fireball, which could be seen for miles, stunned observers; many hadn't even seen a lift-off before, much less an exploding one. Only three days later, another space-related accident occurred: during a test flight of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo spacecraft, a premature wing rotation due to pilot error resulted in the destruction of the spacecraft, killing one of the two occupants and severely injuring the other. These technological accidents may seem out of the ordinary, but they are actually quite common. All throughout history, humans have suffered accident after accident related to their own technology. Even if they do not make the news, small accidents happen every day: a car breaks down, somebody drops a light bulb

Here's a program I wrote earlier this year in July. It's a two-player pong game that involves communicating over the internet using Firebase. As I wrote this program, I also wrote a JavaScript library to take care of graphics and data communication over the internet. The library took the most work; the pong program just required some math and some creativity to help solve the problems I ran into... such as how the two computers would figure out who gets the top paddle and who gets the bottom paddle. To play the game, you'll need to send the URL to one of your friends (otherwise you won't have an opponent). Move your paddle (the white one) using the arrow keys, and click "Reset" to start over. The ball will bounce to the left or to the right depending on where it hits the paddle – you can use this to your advantage. And forgive the glitches; the computers are communicating over the internet, so it's not going to be perfect. Have fun! New posts every month