NVIDIA Tesla

Seeing these two words together is like witnessing some form of holy high-tech union. The NVIDIA Tesla line of uber-performance GPUs is a truly a delight to behold. The concept is wicked, a portable, plug-in style box featuring some serious graphics hardware, taking any regular computer and turning it into a rendering dynamo. Or any other high-res task that would normally take something like a farm or grid of machines working day and night to process.

It also comes in server-mountable and desktop-installable flavours, and while tasty, these aren't quite as delicious-sounding as the

Tesla D870 Deskside Supercomputer

Imagine some hardware hacker figures out how to mod an LCD into the side and hauls this baby over to a LAN party... bound to happen sooner or later.

Tesla's Heritage Subject of Edit War

Whenever I'm explaining who Tesla is, which seems to be frequently, it's always a bit unclear where exactly he's actually from. I usually go with Croatian or Serbian. I was amused to find the matter had evolved into a full-scale edit war on Wikipedia's Tesla Article, and has made it onto the Lamest Edit Wars page. The latest seems to be "an ethnic Serb of the Austrian Empire."

Tesla Cooling Technology

While reading a link from hackedgadgets.com about a DIY-Laser etcher setup, I got sidetracked onto the Wicked Lasers site and began admiring their new Blu-ray offerings. I know a few laser hobbyists and as far as quality is concerned these are considered the best.

Imagine my surprise to find the Spyder II GX and BX series lasers have a cool logo advertising their Tesla high-efficiency thermoelectric cooling system. Tempting, to say the least.

The Prestige

So I finally saw The Prestige on Saturday. I had forgotten that it was directed by Christopher Nolan, of Batman Begins and Memento fame, both of which were excellent. Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, who in my opinion played an excellent Batman, are competing magicians. The Prestige refers to the third and final stage of a good illusion. The kicker, if you will.

David Bowie does an excellent job playing Nikola Tesla, who instead of having a brief cameo like I was expecting, was actually fairly central to the plot. Apparently he has developed teleportation technology, except instead it turns out to be duplication technology. The illusionists are interested, of course, because it makes for impossible feats, and begin to understand the implications of having clones running around.

The Tesla Technology looks excellent. In the trailers for the movie you only ever really see this wooden cabinet that is the receiving end of the tele-duplicator, but the initation pad is under a huge steel ball pulsating with huge streams of electricity. There is a kind of Tesla stage-show indoors with more impressive streamers.

Michael Caine plays kind of a backstage engineer and I like how he made a clear distinction between the two prestidigitators, and Tesla, the actual wizard. Let's refer to Arthur C. Clarke's 3 laws of prediction, care of Wikipedia:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is
   possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is
   impossible, he is very probably wrong.
   
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a
   little way past them into the impossible.
   
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Goodbye Wires

Generally, if MIT's doing it, it must be good. In an earlier post I mentioned Powercast, a new technology where a coin-sized receiver in a laptop or phone could charge itself when within range of a base station. Today I happened upon this article at physorg.com that describes the technology, coupling resonance.

Basically instead of sending the electricity wastefully radiating out in all directions, they make a small magnetic field of frequencies in the MHz range, which allows the electricity to pass through it. The first obvious application is for cellphones, and the inventor Soljacic credits a dying cellphone for his inspiration.

The author of the article does go on to wonder why no one thought of this before, it seeming like such a simple and good idea. I wonder why there is no mention of Tesla or any of his work. While I think he did try the radiation method instead, he was instrumental in developing our understanding of the science of resonance. No offense to the author of course, maybe he's a huge Tesla fan, and the site seems to have some other good stuff about him.

I guess what I'm getting at is that Tesla seems almost forgotten from the ivy-league technical schools and smithsonian type institutes while Edison is like a national hero. Maybe we're only now realizing how many things Tesla really did invent a hundred years ago. I think it will take several hundred years before we really understand all his work completely. It just seems that after Tesla's death, with the whole FBI intervention, and all his files and patents getting pretty much appropriated, there was also an effort to effectively scrub his name from the history books.

With sheer number of inventions, Tesla surpasses pretty much any inventor you can name. But it's the all derivative inventions and discoveries that wouldn't have happened without Tesla's experimental tinkering that really set him apart. Where would modern science be without alternating current, electron microscopes and flourescent lights?

Occult Ether Physics by William R. Lyne

Before the first real page of this book, it has already explained the UFO phenomenon pretty much entirely as well as how Tesla's work is both directly involved and obscured through hoaxes and misinformation. The description refers to flying saucers as "exclusively man-made" and based on 19th century technology by Nikola Tesla. It also outrightly accuses the government of a conspiracy to conceal these facts, by creating an entire industry of psuedo-science to throw people off the trail. Naturally I was interested in giving it a closer look.

Indeed, matters of the paranormal and supernatural have been a major cash grab for big media in recent years. I don't know how many bad UFO documentaries I've watched that start out expecting to find absolute proof of extra-terrestrials and then are surprised and disappointed when they come up empty-handed. But indeed, productions like this are nothing but a distraction from the real story.

William Lyne sets out to demonstrate that Tesla's space propulsion system eventually evolved into what we know as the Flying Saucer, by way of underground Nazi engineering. Legends of foo-fighters and other unidentified flying objects started coming from Allied airmen and it was pretty clear the Germans were up to something in the later years of WW2. Where the story blurs is post-war, with UFOs popping up over Roswell, New Mexico, it seems like the Germans aren't the only ones with the experimental craft.

In actual fact, a number of highly talented German scientists were brought into America somewhat under-the-radar. This is generally known as Operation Paperclip and several influential scientists like Werner Von Braun became instrumental in the American space program, not to mention intelligence. Taking into consideration the location of facilities like Area 51, and the time it took to resume research after dismantling the Nazi regime, it provides a perfect explanation as to why flying saucers started popping up in US airspace.

The capabilities of these craft did not match anything in the known arsenal of the US Air Force. The ability to reach speeds in excess of 5000mph, often in just a few seconds from a stand-still start, is probably what started rumours of advanced Alien technology. Whether the government started it or just chose not to deny it is almost irrelevant. Ascribing the technology to other-worldly visitors means not having to share it with other nations, or using it or related technology to overcome the energy demands of our time.

Photos from the Tesla Exhibit

Here are my photos from the aforementioned Tesla Museum of Belgrade's visit to Vancouver, BC. 2006 marks 150 years since Tesla's birth, and I had seen the ad for the exhibit in the Georgia Straight (great local newspaper) nearly a month ahead of time, so I was definitely looking forward to it. There was also a symposium at Simon Fraser University, but it was on a work day and some of it sounded way over my head.

The exhibit though was excellent, BC Hydro kindly lent the space in the lobby of their HQ downtown. I think one of the Hydro spokespeople joked it was the least they could do, seeing as how they practically owe their entire business model to him. Tesla, who had been experimenting with bladeless waterwheels and turbines since he was a boy, eventually conceived and devised the Niagra Falls power system, singlehandedly starting a hydroelectric revolution.


There was a working Tesla Coil that every few minutes would let off a loud zap as it discharged into a flourescent tube, another Tesla invention. He equipped his labratory with tubes that would light up if they were installed on the wall overhead, or even while being carried by hand from room to room.

Here is the full apparatus, it was about four feet tall. There were some other working models there but this was by far the most impressive. The real meat of the exhibit though were more than a hundred panels with a complete biography of Tesla with his major inventions and contributions along the way. A companion book was available for $7 and it was worth it as most of the exhibit's rare photos and tidbits are packaged in a light volume.

Some of that content includes honorary degrees awarded to Tesla, letters of his to family and friends, and newspaper articles about the inventor and his life. While underappreciated in his own time, he was a celebrity in New York City, and enjoyed the company of folks like Mark Twain, JP Morgan, George Westinghouse, John Jacob Astor, and several members of various royal families. While there were wealthy women after him all the time, he never married.

Tesla's "Apparatus for Aerial Transportation," or verticle take-off flying machine, was modeled in detail. Kind of a combination helicopter-plane, Tesla patented this in 1928. There was also a miniature model of his lab at Wardenclyffe. The plane though I think is a perfect example for one of the many inventions of his that went on to become succesful products for someone else. X-Rays also come to mind, Tesla having announced his discovery of "Special Rays" a couple of years before Roentgen.