The beauty of high-speed cameras

High-speed photography offers an amazing glimpse at what can be produced when you simply slow down the world. Natural motion, such as frogs jumping, can look captivatingly beautiful when shot at thousands of frames per second, and can make nature shows amazing to view. Destruction also looks superb when slowed down, with shows such as Mythbusters frequently making use of ths technique.

Coffee being blown out of a straw as captured by a high-speed camera

The actual technology behind high-speed photography and cameras is quite amazing. A normal everyday-Joe camera usually records at 30 or perhaps 60 frames per second (FPS), meaning that the shutter must activate 30-60 times every second. However with a high-speed camera, the shutter must move much faster to achieve speeds of over 1,000 frames per second; a fairly common frame rate for slow-motion videos.

Cameras don’t stop just at 1,000 frames per second though, they can continue upwards into millions and millions of frames per second at lowered resolutions. In fact, the supposedly “fastest” high-speed camera in the world can record at 200,000,000 (200 million) frames per second, making “even the fastest moving objects look like they are standing still.” Of course the image quality from this camera would not be very good, even though it demanded a $457,000 price tag.

Some facts about BitTorrent

Torrenting is perhaps one of the favorite ways for internet users to download copyrighted material for free. It involves downloading a .torrent file and loading it into a torrent program, which then finds users around the internet (thanks to "trackers") who have the necessary files stored on their computers. These "peers" then serve the files to the downloaders without a middle-man server, hence the term peer-to-peer networking.

While they can be used legitimately, torrents are largely used for piracy. As of the time of writing, popular torrent search engine IsoHunt has indexed 8.25 million torrents with a combined size of 13,635 TB (or 13.6 petabytes). With 33.58 million connected peers, this gives a rough average of 4 peers per torrent. This also means the average size of a torrent indexed on IsoHunt is 1.64 GB.

Note: When talking about torrent file sizes, we're not referring to the actual .torrent file size, which is usually a few kilobytes, but rather to the size of the files the torrent enables you do download from peers.

Here's where it starts to get interesting. Public torrent aggregator Torrentz is currently indexing a larger 11.70 million torrents (without duplicates) across 33 domains, which provides for a good statistical base.

Apple invention misconceptions

For the fourth Trivia Tuesday over at Neowin, this week they are exploring some of the things you might think Apple invented, but actually didn't at all. These invention misconceptions are just a brief collection of what people may generally think Apple have invented, but we're sure there are many more that aren’t covered here.

The capacitive touchscreen: this was a highlight of the original Apple iPhone, which touted its smartphone capabilities by saying you can actually use it with a finger rather than stylus as the norm was at the time. Rather than using two thin films between the user and display to sense a stylus, capacitive touchscreens measure the distortion in the screen’s electrostatic field created when your conductive fingers touch the screen’s special coating.

The original type of touchscreen was, interestingly, a capacitive type invented way back in 1965 by E.A. Johnson at the Royal Radar Establishment in the UK; unfortunately they were quite expensive to produce and so the resistive-type touchscreen was the cheaper and more common occurrence pretty much up until the iPhone. However, the invention of the capacitive touchscreen predates the existence of Apple, so they couldn’t have possibly invented it.

This is the Psion MC 400 with an early touchpad. Note that it's above the keyboard unlike modern touchpads

While we’re on touch technology, Apple also didn’t invent the touchpad. Used as the primary form of mouse-like movement on modern notebook computers, the touchpad was actually invented by Psion for their MC series notebooks in 1989; however the touchpads used in the early Apple PowerBooks were based on early developments in the field.