Today in study hall I had the wondrous opportunity to crunch some numbers in order to evade utter boredom. Below you can see the fruits of my labor, in which I have used the relativistic time dilation equation to find the velocity needed in order for 60 seconds to be the equivalent of two minutes. As you can see, it's a very high velocity, and at the bottom you can compare the centripetal forces experienced by an average human if he were to be stationary or in constant-velocity motion at 6.75 x 10¹⁶ meters per second. Note it's not a particularly large number, only 1.55 Newtons, because the only acceleration is that resulting from the change in angular displacement. The velocity itself however remains constant. Also, the learnèd physics student will note the presence of the famed Lorentz factor (a.k.a. the Lorentz transformation to some), a modification to Aristotle's original equation made by Einstein to account for the fact that the speed of light c is constant regardless of the frame of reference. Isn't special relativity fun?

Well, it's been almost a year since I've had my MacBook, and already I've started my OS X Leopard fund to purchase the new version of the Mac OS when it's released this October (unless of course Apple decides to pull a Bill Gates and push the release date back a few years).

I've already visited the Apple website numerous times to salivate over the cutting edge features promised in the new operating system. Among the most exciting to me is the Time Machine feature, which provides the user with a graphical means of going back in the computer's timeline to retrieve files backed up on an external hard drive. And the Time Machine feature also allows for wirelessly backing up to a hard disk connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station.

What confuses me the most is the Spaces feature, which creates separate virtual workspaces on which the user can better organize windows. What's confusing is why this wasn't available on previous versions of the Mac OS. Every distro of Linux I've used has had a feature like Spaces, and being a Unix-based OS it seems odd that this was never available before on Macs.

Among these are other minor GUI innovations, such as a revamped 3D dock with little indicator lights replacing the black triangles under active applications, and a translucent menu bar. The new dock allows for the creation of stacks which are, well, stacks of documents and applications created by the user. Simply click on a stack and the files spring open into an icon list for easy navigation.

You can see all the new Leopard features in action with demo videos and screenshots at apple.com/macosx/leopard. 

Yes, after much waiting, you can now subscribe to the rants you read here at Crunching Numbers...in monotone!

Visit the new podcast page to subscribe or download the latest episode.

Have you ever wondered how that spam mail you forwarded from your Gmail inbox actually got to your boss? Well Google wants to learn your take on the email sending process through the wonderful medium of video. The result will be a compilation of the best of the clips sent to Google depicting one of the many steps involved in sending an email. To get you started, Google even provides a PDF of the renowned M-velope which must be printed out and used in the video. All clips are sent to Google through YouTube and must be under 10 seconds in length.

Here's what people have sent in so far...